THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO
DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO
THE HEROINE IN
BRONZE
OR
A PORTRAIT OF A GIRL
A Pastoral of the City
BY
JAMES LANE ALLEN
AUTHOR OF
' THE KENTUCKY CARDINAL,' ' THE CHOIR INVISIBLE,' ETC.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET. LONDON
i 9 1 2
COPYRIGHT
9?? •
A+37
X
TO
I. F. M.
There is no other healing for love, O Nicias, either as an
ointment or as a plaster, except the Muses. But agreeable and
desirable though this remedy be in the lives of men, it is not
easy to procure. — Theocritus.
I loved you, damsel, the first time you came ... to pluck
hyacinths on the mountain with me as your guide. I could
not leave off loving you the first time I beheld you. I could
not leave off loving you afterwards. And I cannot leave off
loving you now. — Theocritus.
Dedication
TO YOUTH— ITS KINGDOM AND IDEALS
CONTENTS
FIRST PART
The Parting .
SECOND PART
The Waiting .
PAGE
I
99
THIRD PART
The Getting Home
FIRST PART
THE PARTING
35 i b
CHAPTER I
A few years ago, in the budding month of
June, one morning as the east began to flush
rose-coloured with the dawn, I awoke ; and
upon awaking, discovered that I had an original
story to give to the world — a perfect love-story
of a youthful pair.
Now a gift is often a galling load : alike
to him who carries it and to him on whose
shoulders it is laid and left. But the gift of a
good story burdens neither and lightens both.
It is perhaps the only kindness that may always
be safely offered to an enemy and to a stranger
and to a friend ; it is surely the only traveller
that, starting anywhere, can journey everywhere
without cost or risk ; invigorating all minds
without losing its vigour ; emptying laughter
and tears round the whole earth, yet keeping
3
4 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
them unwasted like a cloud. The world never
has too many good stories ; it is perpetually
impatient for one more ; it would be ready —
and grateful — to listen to mine.
This reflection encouraged me. The several
pulplike romances on which I had first persuaded
myself that I should help to nourish mankind
had not sustained that favourable estimate of
their importance ; mankind had not shared my
view that those works held any of the nutriment
of its delight. It had nibbled, but had decided
not to partake,. and had even left it to me to
express the necessary regrets : I duly expressed
them.
I was pleased, moreover, that my story had
come to me in the early hours of the morning
while as yet the day had not a footstep on it,
not a finger-print, not a breath that might be a
stain. For the work itself, as I have intimated,
was about youth — life's dawn ; the white dews of
nature still lay over it, over that land of youth.
And then, finally, the story was so wholly
mine and of myself. I had not had the ill-luck
to find my treasure in the neighbourhood of
some other man's treasure, just outside the
THE PARTING 5
covers of his book, just beyond the range of his
conversation. I had not been racked with the
need of a story, had not been hunting for one
through the forest of my brain as the beast
must find within his jungle some quarry to keep
him from starving. I had not done anything.
It came as our best things, greatest things,
always come, not by outside compulsion, but
by growth within and as the silent rewards of
what we ourselves are, the inevitable rewards of
what we are. The sculptor sometimes quietly
awakens with his most human statue ; the musician
with greater music ; the poet with a finer song ;
the painter with a fairer country ; the scientist
with some vaster law of the earth or of the air
or of the stars — all as the rewards of what they
themselves are. I, an unknown writer of a few
unsuccessful tales, a vouth two seasons out of
college and dowered as to fortune with one dry
rectangle of university parchment and twenty-
two green years, I, by name Donald Clough,
and by nature an optimist and by hope a
philosopher of the heart, — fired with the wish
to create a work which might by its shape and
substance touch the unchangingly sound heart of
6 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
mankind and thus become a classic, — I, after
failures and disappointments, awoke triumphantly
with a little masterpiece. If any masterpiece
may be called little, if so great a matter as
perfection can have aught to do with so small a
thing as size.
The immediate resolve was to carry the
tidings of this good fortune to her whose
approval of my work, whose approval of me,
meant my happiness. The masterpiece as soon
as finished would itself go to her as yet another
offering. I myself had been but an offering
from the first day I beheld her, that perfect day
of the June previous, with its balmy airs and
blue sky, on her crowded, sunny college campus,
on the day of her distinguished graduation,
when she, mounting with her elect sisterhood,
all in white, a rose-twined platform, had read
to a delirious audience her finishing essay (the
essay that finished me) ; when afterwards, de-
scending from the platform and standing with
bowed head — that exquisite head with the gold
of dawn on it — she, Muriel Dunstan, had re-
ceived from an impersonal president the diploma
of her dismissal in honour and peace ; and then
THE PARTING 7
had been turned sorrowfully out of doors by
all her old professors in a body, to enter alone
the rougher pathways of young men. Most
sorrowfully by the professor of English whose
favourite brilliant pupil she had been : though
this was not the reason why he was in love
with her, after the masklike antique manner of
professors sometimes. I charge him here that
salaries are paid to professors for staid ideas,
not wayward emotions ; for their felicitous
learning, not their unhappy leaning. Yet I
salute him, too, with grovelling respect that it
he leaned perilously toward her, he leaned like
the Tower of Pisa — without falling : a human
classic, rigid with his years.
Turned out of doors to enter alone the
rougher pathways of young men ! The young
men were already there with their rougher
pathways ; for a throng of them had quickly
gathered about her, that sure and favourable
sign. As one of that contesting group I was
from that day forth none too gentle in trying
to push the others out of the way ; you may
rest satisfied that they greatly rejoiced to push
me. In vain for all of us ! As to myself, with
8 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
my rustic gifts of nature, she had, as time went
on, not been disdainful exactly ; to the con-
trary, she had distantly scrutinized these as
though she might so far be rather well pleased.
But beyond that point she had demeaned her-
self as one who, looking you solemnly, search-
ingly, in the eyes, shakes her head with a
baffling smile and demands more, far more,
immeasurably more. Thus between her and me
life had for some time been at a standstill, —
at least love had, — all because I had not the
needful gifts to scatter at her feet ; and when
love stands still and life goes on, the two
perforce soon get too far apart.
Please do not admonish me that love is not
to be won by gifts. Love is not to be won
with anything else. There is never any ques-
tion between any two but the same question :
whether one must needs surrender one's self
to another in exchange for what one's desire
cannot do without. The barter may be
very low, the barter may be very high; but
it is always barter, barter, barter. All our
sublimities even have to go to the highest
bidder in the market-place of ideals ; we trade
THE PARTING 9
in our souls as we sell apples for laces and
wines for shoes.
This was the exact ground for my present
hope that the story might bring me nearer the
end of my toilsome, wearisome journey toward
her heart. It was the best gift I had yet been
able to carry to her, for it was the best proof of
what I myself was that very morning ; and of
course what I was that morning was proof in
its turn of what I had been all the mornings of
my life. I hoped, therefore, that she would
accept it as the first real token of what, with
added years, I might become in my profession
— I, aged enough for a full-grown lover, but
not mature enough for a full-grown author.
In truth, of late, after some tenderer partings
I had left her, persuaded that at heart she had
already accepted me as a lover and was holding
back only because the lover of some twenty-two
years could furnish her no assurance of what
he might be accomplishing as a man at thirty-
five. She, planning prudently and proudly far
ahead, was considering whether by that time
or at some earlier or later time she might not
find herself bound for life to a man who was
io THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
neither a lover nor anything else. Alas, those
women : can there be many of them !
I exulted in this challenge of hers : I desired
that I be challenged to nothing less. But my
difficulty was that I could not outstrip time, I
could not advance more rapidly than nature
herself. The proof of what I could do in my
profession must be unfolded little by little —
piece by piece — with sweat and toil — through
defeat often — through patience and consecration
always. I could no more drive my mind
through the wall of future years, and drag from
beyond them the deeds that belonged there,
than a man, standing at the eastern base of a
mountain, could thrust his arm through the
mountain and gather gold on its western slope.
She knew this ; and there was some beauti-
ful justice in her ; and I think as she pondered
her perfectly natural caution and my perfectly
natural helplessness to satisfy it, I think that
under the leading of her heart — though she had
spoken no word about this — she had given way
far enough to narrow her demand to a single
requirement : I must at least show one sign, one
valid, solid, sweeping sign, that I would carry
THE PARTING n
off in my profession some due share of its
honours and not soon after marriage begin to
drain toward a wife the long dark sewer of a
husband's failures.
Let me put this matter in yet another way.
It is very important and I wish it to be made
perfectly clear. Therefore I shall employ a
kind of parable of the fields because I like their
language best, the simple honest forthright
speech of the fields. She did not require, then,
that at this outset of my career I should lead
her as to some mountain-top from which she
could descry the distant gold of my autumn
harvest ; she did not even ask for the sight of
the full -stalked summer green. But she did
demand that I reach down where I stood on my
mountain of hope and pluck for her a handful
of vigorous young wheat-blades as they show in
early spring the promise of the ended season.
Then perhaps she would be ready to let me
know whether upon this evidence she would
wed April — and risk September.
This morning I believed that I had in my
hand April's promise — my new story, my first
masterwork. The thought robed the world
12 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
with joy. This day might bring about my
betrothal. At once it became solemn and
beautiful beyond all my days.
As I sprang out of bed with the belief that
happy things were just ahead and that I might
prepare myself for them, I was not even content
to take my bath in one of those scant allowances
of porcelain which are sometimes assigned to
the less important tenants in a sumptuous New
York apartment building. Too poor myself to
keep a valet, I was rich enough to retain some-
thing better — my faithful servitor Imagination :
ever at my elbow to do for me what I could
not do for myself; its duty being to better my
lot in the world as often as I wished and as
much as I might crave. I now invoked Imagin-
ation ; and then I took my bath as one who,
with an eager start, leaps at the surf's edge from
some high rock, soft to his bare feet with living
moss and fragrant to him with wild rose and
pine — as one who with strong young limbs
leaps from such a rock, clear-bodied in the
morning light, and dives deep into blue ocean.
From this imaginary bath rather than the
actual one, this boundless primeval bath, I
THE PARTING 13
emerged dripping and aglow with its cold
purity.
When I descended to the street, ten floors
down, I found that my earlier fancied union
with the sea was succeeded by a kind of reality.
With the deep breathing which is instinctive as
we step into the open air, the smell of fresh
brine swept into my nostrils ; its moisture began
to settle on my moustache and face ; the ripple
of it seemed to pass into the full- running
channels of my blood. For during the night
a vast vapour from the bay had overspread the
city ; and now this vapour hung suspended like
some finest dew- cloth spun far out on silver
and azure sea : a vast dew- cloth, floating, drift-
ing, invisible in a crystal ether. And falling
through this cool, clear, dew-wet air came the
splendours of the morning sun.
I could but stand still in the street for a
moment to drink it all in, to acknowledge the
glory of it with my adoring soul, my thrilled
body. What a masterpiece of a day ! And it
was the birthday of what I hoped would be a
masterwork in my hand. I made good omen
for myself out of the benign aspects of the
i 4 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
universe ; I let my mind dwell waveringly upon
man's old fond belief that his fairer deed finds
a fairer day.
Then, thus assured that all within and with-
out was auspicious, I started eagerly across the
city in a south-easterly direction toward her
home.
CHAPTER II
She lived within less than half a block of Fifth
Avenue, that long, hard, stately, palace-crowded,
diamond-bedusted, world-weary road — the Via
Dolorosa of great cities. And her residence was
not far southward from Central Park — that
Arcady of Nature in town : slopes of green-
sward for dances of the children of the earth ;
thickets for the nests and songs of the children of
the air ; turf scattered plenteously over with dews
and rains — jewels that do not fret the fingers or
the mind ; trees with wild thorns which pierce
no brow, such thorns as may strike through the
down of pillows ; quiet waters into which the
stars flash— surer lights to go by than any that
mirrors can reflect from chandeliers ; paths that
lead to shade for young lovers who grow faint
in the sun ; and many a resting-place for the
15
16 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
worker and for the old who are past their
work.
Thus Fifth Avenue and Central Park were
the figurative boundaries of her existence, the
frontiers of the two worlds of her spirit — society
and nature. She dwelt near both worlds ; and
she entered both ; she entered both freely and
returned from both — free ; too free for my
peace !
From this description you will understand
that her home — that is, her father's residence,
over which she presided, her famous mother
being dead many years, — you will understand
that her home stood in perhaps the most
beautiful, the most celebrated, and the most
fashionable quarter of the city. A house that
can stand where it stood has to be a strong
house.
It showed its strength still further by the
prominence it took in a street of more modern
houses whose partition walls conjoined. In the
long block of these to the east and to the west,
it, much the oldest of them, stood apart in its
own yard. And it stood there with authority.
The others wore the air of having won a shallow
THE PARTING 17
foothold by rude and hasty force ; they sug-
gested that they were achievements in worldly
competition. Here and there a doorstep seemed
ready to fawn at the right footstep or to insult
the wrong one ; here and there windows looked
out at the world, prepared to smirk or to
frown ; and plainly certain chimney-tops were
too rigid to bow or too obsequious to do so —
like hats quickly jerked off when the mightier
pass. But her home reigned amid these with
the quietness of unconcern, as if knowing that
its foundations were built below the crumbling
reefs of old and new, below the passing and
repassing tides of New York names and fashions
and fortunes. It did not so much appear to
stand in the city as to grow in the soil, on one
of the last visible vestiges of lower Manhattan
Island ; and you responded to it as you might
to an unrulable oak which knows itself to be
legal heir to its share of the forest and demands
space for the freedom of its boughs.
It affected me powerfully because it did stand
aloof. The rows of buildings soldered together,
wall by wall, annoyed me, a green country boy,
much as if I had seen a neighbourhood of
1 8 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
farmers pinioned together by their shoulders. I
could no more have wished my home, when I
should have one, to be welded to any other
man's home than I could have planned that mv
ribs should be nailed to his ribs. Often, as I
looked at solid blocks of houses, I twisted and
writhed to get loose with sun and air and space
for life, growth, independence. This house
satisfied my craving : it flourished unsupported ;
nothing else held it up ; it seemed to say to the
others : I stand on my foundation, stand on
yours. If you cannot stand alone, fall alone.
And its humanized countenance ! Have you
in remembrance at the moment some strong,
middle-aged, vanished face, in the wrinkles of
which lurked gentle humours and moods of
fun, but over which had settled one expression
of mellowed dignity before the world ? This,
for me, was quite the hallowed eloquence of its
look. By some train of suggestion, possibly by
some resemblance it bore to another house now
dim and distant, and lost to me with those v/ho
once dwelt there, the first sight of it brought
back the memory of a middle-aged face — the
most loved face in the world — strong, but with
THE PARTING 19
innocent humours peeping from behind the
ravages of the years, and resting over it one
expression of brooding tenderness, a kind of
indestructible peace.
Into this mystery of remembrance and re-
semblance I cannot go deeper here. I only
know that from the first I liked the house
because of earlier things in my own heart ;
because she had been born there and had passed
her life there, with absences for sessions at col-
lege and for summers of travel ; because it still
moulded her as its pliant mistress ; and because,
in fine, I was making love to her in it and trying
to entice her out of it. Beyond question this
was why I loved it most : that I was trying to
induce her to leave it.
Please give some attention to details. A
broad strip of yard extended along the eastern
and the western side, and there was a broader
strip at the rear. The stone steps in front
descended to the street, but even on each side
of the steps there was a narrow strip of yard.
At one boundary of the enclosure there was a
driveway entrance to the stables, and a servants'
gate ; and here also around the feet of the
20 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
horses and the dogs, of the coachman and the
footman, cf the butler and the valet, of the
maids and the cook, even around the issuing
feet of these, there were little plots of priceless
green. Each of those tiny expanses of grass, if
valued in terms of the Wall Street Mint, would
have been as a small field of the cloth of gold.
Here was a family that held on to the common
grass and let the commoner gold go.
This grass, too, ensnared my affections. For
it here becomes intrusive to inform you that
New York City is not my birthplace. I came
from a rich, wide-rolling, pastoral region several
hundred miles away ; and I had dwelt on a farm
until I was grown, getting my education from
a small college town a few miles distant. It
was only two years before this that I had made
mv solitary wav to the vast city, — America's
London — a vouth, a stranger, almost without
money, without acquaintances, without in-
fluence, but with the determination to succeed
in one of the most difficult of professions with-
out any man's aid. I had not succeeded
amazingly, and I was yet homesick. As I
walked about the city — there being little else
THE PARTING 21
to do — I carried with me a pair of eyes which
alighted gladly upon any verdure. Any mere
florist's window in spring decorated with boughs
brought up torturing memories of native woods
far away, beginning to bud and blossom. Any
solitary tree on a sidewalk invited me, a summer
day, to throw myself down under its round
shade, look up at the infinite blue, and try to
dream again the things that once were so easy
when they were distant, but were now so diffi-
cult, being near.
A more noteworthy feature still of this
much-studied home of hers.
With my habit of keeping eyes wide open on
human life, I had made a small discovery in my
limited travels ; and I always go in for my own
discoveries. In some cities, as Washington and
Boston and Baltimore, where the early influence
of English architecture was decisive, a high
stone wall, after the old English custom of
aristocratic town houses, separates the family
from the world. I had been much used to such
walls, even in my little pastoral Southern town
with its pure English tradition. But in New
York City, where the Dutch did most of the
22 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
building and the British chiefly camped — and
decamped, — this Anglo-Saxon stone wall does
not stand. Aristocratic usage has adopted the
iron fence barbed at the top — an array of
black spears in front of the enclosure. If
further seclusion is desired for the grounds, a
hedge is planted inside this fence : of privet or
of arbor-vitas or of hemlock or of rhododendron.
There was such a fence, such a hedge, in
front of her residence. The passer could not
see the ground premises. But over the top of
this hedge he might have noticed that one entire
wall of the house was covered with a mighty
vine which made its way upward, in masses of
foliage thickly looped, about the windows. On
an October day I have seen that wall of the
house glow dark red like an oak in the autumn
woods. And late one afternoon, when there
was a blue haze in the city air and a grey sky
and a chilliness, as I walked past with my eyes
dubiously turned in that direction, I caught
sight of her at one of her windows, standing
quite still there, framed in the dark red autumn
picture and looking down into the yard. That
vision of her head and face with its gold and its
THE PARTING 23
fairness was as an April glimpse of daffodils and
lilies — brought forward to the winter's edge.
" At this moment," I mused, ill at ease about
my own case, " she may be settling the fate of
some one of us ! Let her be thanked, at least,
for being thoughtful about it ! "
A more curious person, glancing over the
hedge and fence, could further have seen the
tops of evergreens and the roof of a vine-
covered arbour. He might have thought such
a grotto a concession to the artificial, with no
more natural right to be there than a Swiss
chalet for Marie Antoinette had artistic warrant
to be transplanted to the forest of Versailles.
It to him may have stood for the same species
of mock rusticity that one finds in a landscape
of Aubusson tapestry or in the lawn of a
Watteau fan. But I am sure that it was a very
simple and sincere place to her, because the
yard had been her mother's plan, she told me ;
and her mother had- been reared in the country
and had never been weaned from it. I am sure
there was naught artificial in it to her, but a
double tenderness for this reason ; and I cer-
tainly know that I myself found out something
24 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
very sincere in her nature from that very arbour.
For after I had established my acquaintanceship
well enough to be taken out of doors, one day
she and I were walking there. It was sober
twilight, and low overhead I suddenly heard
the notes of a grackle alighting in the foliage.
A few minutes before I had recognized the call
of a starling as it descended out of the darkening
air. I turned toward her : —
" Birds must drop in here for the night," I
said. " As they migrate in spring and migrate
in autumn and make a great encampment of
Central Park, sometimes the thin edge of a
flying squadron must drop down here to tent
for a night and a day."
" They do stop here," she replied, evidently
glad. " Sometimes from my window I hear
them as they flutter in after dark ; and some-
times I hear them utter their farewells as they
leave at dawn. Sometimes one may linger for
a few days."
Then with a change of tone quite natural to
her she added, with her eyes on the ground : —
" We are all birds of passage — we human
beings. From somewhere — to somewhere.
THE PARTING 25
Either flying from dawn and spring toward
winter and night ; or from night and winter
toward spring and dawn. I think, toward
Perpetual Spring."
There sounded the grave note in her. I
had heard it first in her Commencement essay,
and I shall never forget how it startled me.
She there that June morning, in the great audi-
ence hall of her college, before that audience of
old age so reverential to youth on such days,
with that bold note of the immortal in her
girlhood most musically, fearlessly, uttered it
as from the hilltops of life's morning. Shall I
ever forget, either, how that night, when I was
at my own prayers, this spiritual flight of hers
already toward eternity drew her mystically
beside me, as though some day we should be
together — we two — Donald Clough, Muriel
Dunstan ?
But do not misunderstand about her serious-
ness ; It was not gloominess. Across the bright
field of her consciousness lay that one slender
dark bar — just that one. Perhaps a refrain
of pathos caught from her mother whom she
vividly remembered and whose life had ended
26 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
almost before girlhood itself. All the rest of
her was luminous with joy and humour. And
woe to you if you ever ran your head rashly
into the general blaze of that humour ! The
uncertainty of when it might make its appear-
ance, and the certainty that it was always there
ready to appear ! It got to be a kind of terror
to every man of us ! Not one of us in love
with her but felt tremors for this reason. No
man need be afraid of anything he can fight ;
but how can a man attack a girl's laughter at
him ! It bowls him over, once and for all.
He may rise again, smiling, to face death ; not
to face her.
As further bearing on this subject of her
humour — and also as still harping on the
house !
After the yard-turf had stretched rearward a
space it suddenly turned uncontrollably gay and
burst into a garden. Not quite an Italian
garden, not quite an American garden, not
quite anything but itself. There were flower-
beds, evergreens, and honeysuckles ; and through
these went a little ramble lined with dwarf-box.
It was a dwarf ramble. But then there are
THE PARTING 27
short rambles that can be long and long rambles
that can be short : there is no criterion for
rambles — it depends upon the ramblers. This
ramble led to the remotest corner of the en-
closure, where there was an iron filigree seat
painted grey — an iron seat, cold and grey, very
iron, very cold, very grey. The world calls
such a contrivance a settee ; I called this one a
seat-two. To my limited knowledge it always
did seat two ; and there could have been no
calculable motive for any one to sit there alone :
unless to enjoy self-misery, as people sometimes
do. But why bother about self-misery when
you are free to enjoy other people's? I repeat
that no one would have chosen to sit there
alone. For in addition to the attractive qualities
already enumerated, there arose from the four
legs of this settee four iron grape-vines that
trailed themselves across the bottom and up the
back, profusely laden with bunches of very
uncrushable, unbacchanalian grapes. They
prodded a man in the back and ribs like mailed
iists ; and they administered the peace of
cobblestones to him in other directions.
This wanton piece of outdoor machinery was
28 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
arranged behind shrubs and vines — not art-
fully. I When one of her suitors sat there with
her, he may not have been arranged artfully,
but he made that impression ; he conveyed that
idea to the hostile beholder. I suspect that he
made that impression upon her.
For though still a youth, I have long been a
student of human nature, particularly of the
human nature of the sex that possesses nearly
all of it. Very old ladies and middle-aged
ladies are beyond me — in time and in depth :
what they are up to I shall never know. But
the result of my study of the unaccountable
beings of my own age is the belief that each of
them puts her suitors to some same test. The
suitors may never perceive what the test is : the
investigatress knows admirably. And so far, I
am sure, every girl is for weavings by day and
unweavings by night, as the original Penelope.
Of course you do not fall into the error of
thinking there was never but one Penelope, and
she a Greek and a married woman. The
United States to-day is well peopled with young
Penelopes who have never been to Greece and
have never heard of the Ulysses : but they
THE PARTING 29
expect to hear of husbands ! The middle-aged
classic Penelope unwove for a return ; the
youthful classic American weaves for an arrival.
I am sure that this settee was her test : one
of her weavings — or castings. The caldron of
the open sky there stewed the suitor to sim-
plicity ; that misshapen crucible of torture
grilled him to the bones of candour. I know
that one afternoon when I called on her and
was invited to go out into the garden, as I
drew near that farthest corner, I met one of the
suitors hurrying away ; he looked shrivelled,
juiceless, drawn. There was iron to the rear of
him — but he had the iron in him — the spear of
her last word. I could almost see where it had
gone through. I stepped quite to one side of
the ramble that he might have the whole road
of suffering to himself and wished him joy in
his ruin. Thenceforth I called the bench the
purgatory of the Last Judgment.
For me it possessed fewer terrors than any
other spot of her domain, because I belong out
of doors and speak best in the open. The worst
impressions I had ever made upon her had been
attributable to the house. Never have I feared
30 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
my species ; but I, a country boy, long could
be awed by New York furniture. And there
was furniture in her parlours that for a time
nearly deprived me of the natural use of my
limbs and my intelligence. The first wretched,
clogged, futile, lying words of love I ever spoke
to her were mumbled at her as I sat in a gilt
chair with an embroidered fox at my back in
full chase of an embroidered goose. She faced
me on a gilt sofa with what at her back I know
not — certainly not Sour Grapes ; and she sat
under a large picture known as Botticelli's
Spring — so she had informed me upon my
anxious inquiry. But if that was the best that
Botticelli ever knew of spring, he must have had
a queer four seasons in his native country ; and
he must have been used to see queer people : it
is not remarkable that he should have painted
them wandering about unemployed, puzzled,
and low-spirited ; and tempered in their un-
mannerly garments neither to the wind, the
Lord, nor the tailor. Ah, no ! Had she and
I only been out in the real spring — on some
warm, grassy slope of sun and shade ; near some
wild grape whose blossoms scented the golden
THE PARTING 31
air ; with a brook faintly heard running through
banks of mint and violets ; and with the silken
rustling of doves' wings audible amid the white
blossoms of wild plum trees.
One last most important thing to tell you
about this interminable yard ! But feel yourself
honoured by being taken even into her yard if it
brings you closer to her. Perhaps you would
prefer that I should begin to say less and she
begin to say more. But I speak while I may.
When she appears upon the scene and begins
to speak for herself, I shall vanish and speak
for nobody.
A wall shut the yard in from the neighbour
yard on one side, and v/here this wall met the
front fence of iron spears there was formed a
shaded nook. Perhaps in the whole city there
was not an outdoor cranny where one who
wished to read alone could be so undisturbed.
Within a few yards of the passing world of
realities, New York realities, you could ensconce
yourself there, forget your surroundings, and
make your journey to the ideal. If you had
read in a story up to some point where you
must stop to think, there was not a more
32 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
favourable spot in which to indulge that mood
of dreaming and longing which it is the duty of
every right kind of book to bring on.
The wall forming that nook of the yard is
heavily covered with old ivy — not the Gray's
Elegy kind of ivy, none of that ; that does well
enough for bards. In this nook there was a
marble seat 'after the manner of the ancient
Greeks and Alma Tadema. Within arm's reach
of the seat, at one end, flourished one of her
mother's rose-bushes, which puts forth in the
month of June. Never shall I forget that rose-
bush or a quiet twilight when it flowered there
and when Destiny stood behind it and touched
a blossom.
Here, then, in this strong, proud, gentle, old
mansion, in this yard with its seclusion and
ramble and vines and seats, she lived with a
household of four members. Her father, whom
she playfully called the Commodore, was a banker,
a clubman, and a patriot prominent in yachting
circles. He had had something to do with the
international challenges — not by way of wind
and wave, but of mast and sail ; and he was
THE PARTING 33
more concerned over the hardy adventurous
Britisher who might some day lift The America s
cup than over the hardy adventurous American
who might sooner lift his daughter. There were
two younger brothers off at their New England
college, but at home for riotous intervals. There
was an aunt, the Commodore's sister, a divorced
dowager, who declared dividends on her alimony.
She declared a great many more things than
dividends. At my first dinner there, being her
alimentary attache, for the occasion, I received
some kind of notion that she consisted chiefly
of diamonds, opinions, and a succession of
silver forks. Her opinions were to be classed
rather with forks than with diamonds. They
did not flash ; but they were solid and heavy ;
and she took them up and laid them down, one
by one, during the routine of courses, and made
them generally useful to herself while feeding.
I am sure that her ideas were forks. She, like
the Commodore, was of aquatic habits ; but she
went all the way across and inhabited the marshy
watering-places of the Old World. I called her
the Paludal Aunt ; and I still suspect that she
was web-footed, and that if she had flapped her
D
34 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
arms briskly enough, she could have walked
across a good-sized pond without wetting her
ankles.
O Tempora ! O Mores / Nuptice Americana ! O Paludes !
And thus with all that perfection of wordly
estate, family ties scarcely existed in the house-
hold — a breakdown of the home-life in the too
common New York way. The Commodore
was absorbed in his banking, his clubs, his
yachts, the traditions of The America. I was
not unaware, however, that he kept a landward
eye on me : as I kept a weather eye on him.
The brothers were given over to their athletics,
their studies, their fraternities ; to their getting
tapped and to doing some tapping for them-
selves. The aunt diverted herself with waters
and foods and dividends and declarations. And
thus she, daughter, sister, niece, and youthful
mistress of them all, was left much to herself.
Not like any of them, somewhat of a stranger
among them.
Society, with its quick perception of what is
fresh and charming, had advanced hungrily upon
her from all directions during that first year of
THE PARTING 3S
her appearance in it. It encircled her to absorb
her. In her social set were mothers who had
known her mother ; in her father's set were
men with sons dangerous to me as rivals. Life
spread out around her in every direction for her
to walk a rose path across it whither she would ;
and always at the boundary waited the world's
best. Sometimes at night the whole street
would be blocked with the splendid motor cars
and older - fashioned carriages of those who
within the house rendered tribute to her. She
bore her honours gladly. Yet I am sure that
the deepest' call of life did not reach her either
from her family or from her social world.
And she managed her responsibilities so well
that she contrived to reserve days when the
house and the yard were left to quietness.
These were the days for which I watched and
waited. Then I found her alone, and more
nearly reached her deepest hidden self. Now
as to the manner in which these reserve days
became known to me, you will be left to puzzle
that out for yourself. But cherish the observa-
tion that whenever a pleasant thing is a secret
to one young person, it becomes a secret to
36 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
another young person : only the old must have
learned to keep their secrets.
An occurrence took place the spring of that
same year a few weeks before the time of which
I write.
It was about eleven o'clock, a brilliant
morning in May : a day when youth is ready
to drop work and laugh and dally. The red
blood in it belongs to the blue sky and the
golden sun ; it would willingly throw itself
down beside the first wayside temptation and
give a hard life-time for an hour of vagrant joy.
Being in that quarter of the city, I could not
resist the temptation to turn my steps into her
street ; I had gone thither determined not to
resist. As I reached the fence with its hedge
inside I stopped. The fragrance of the garden
was wafted out to me on the sidewalk : the
smell of privet blossoms, the aroma of box-
boughs and pine-buds ; and rising from under
the hedge, the odour of the strong moist earth.
Recollection overcame me of spring days in
my country. As though I were one cup of
memory I filled this cup to the brim with draughts
from her hedge and garden. Then the cup of
THE PARTING 37
memory plotted a little for its future. The
street was quiet, no one near ; my audacious
behaviour could not scandalize social conven-
tions. Placing my face against the hedge, in a
voice pitched not to be heard through the
public atmosphere, but in a sheltered corner, I
took the chance and murmured : —
" How do you do ? "
I heard a book close quickly, and I heard
laughter, surprised, amused laughter (though
she did not know I heard). Then she replied
as though she had not laughed and in a voice
unconsciously lowered to go through hedges
only : —
" Do you imagine I am going to talk to you
there in the street ? "
" At least, that is one remark ! A non-com-
mittal remark, but still a remark."
" Why don't you come in ? "
"Another remark ! I await still others."
"There will not be any others. Only the
one remark — why don't you come ? '
" Well, then, I do not wish to come in."
" At least that is frank and civil."
<c But there is a reason."
38 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
".Is the reason frank and civil — in the same
way r
" The reason is I would rather talk to you
through a hedge — this one time ! "
" Why through the hedge ? "
" It reminds me of old pleasant days in my
country and of a happy scene, when I was young,
before I felt the weight of my years."
"The weight of your years must be very
crushing ! What had the hedge to do with the
happy scene ? "
" It was a calm summer day in my sweet-
breathed land. There was a hedge of black-
berry bushes growing along the fence. The
berries hung soft like velvet ; shining like jet ;
cooled by the thick shade. They melted on
the tongue in purple juice — the iron of the
vine. I was one side of the fence, he on the
other. We were picking the berries for the jam
of our mothers, but our mothers knew that
Nature's buckets would be filled before theirs.
That is all. We were picking them and eating
them, and we were talking through the hedge ;
we were boys ; we had no care ; it was a happy
time."
THE PARTING 39
She did not reply at once, and when her
voice reached me, it came freighted with what I
believed to be the deep call of life to her ; from
a world older yet younger than the city : —
" I wish I were away out in the country and
it were a sweet day and I were picking and
eating blackberries along a fence and some one
I loved were talking to me ! "
" That can be arranged for you. T can
arrange it this summer."
" Now that is very kind of you ! Very con-
siderate ! But don't you think I should rather
arrange it for myself? Perhaps it might be
wiser not to be passive in such a matter. But
you said he ; why not she ? n
" When it was she, I stayed on the same side
of the fence ! "
u Indeed ! Oh, indeed ! Did she get
scratched by the briers ? "
" Not intentionally."
" A New York brier might have scratched
her intentionally. But all this is something
new. Why did I never hear of this before ?
Did you — love her ? "
11 1 thought I did."
4 o THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
" Don't you think so now ? "
"Not now!"
" When did you begin to think you didn't,
please ? "
" The first time I saw — some one else."
" The first time ! You seem to be very
observing. How do you happen to be so
observing ? "
" An author has to be observing."
" Are you an author ? "
" Well, an acorn is not an oak. And yet an
acorn is an oak. I am the unstoppable acorn
with the untoppable oak-like future."
" It must be very nice to be sure of yourself
so far in advance. It must be very flattering
to one's vanity to be an acorn and foresee itself
an oak."
" It does help."
" So : as an author you are sure of yourself
and sure of the future. But when it comes
to being in love with a girl in a brier patch,
you don't seem to be so positive. You can
be one thing at one time and another thing
at another time : life is all present and no
future."
THE PARTING 41
I thought the moment opportune to insert a
question : —
" Are you sorry I changed ? Do you regret
that I do not love her now ? "
" That is not a fit question to ask ! And it
is not fit to answer ! And it is not the question
at all ! The point is that you are — changeable."
" I was only a little fellow ! "
cc Can't a big fellow change ? "
" Not if a girl knows herself ! M
" Indeed ! And so I suppose girls have it as
their destiny to lie awake of nights, trying to
know themselves. Meanwhile the heroes who
cause all the anxiety sleep. When they are so
disposed, they call on us. If they are no longer
held by us, but feel like wandering, it is proof
that we have not attained the necessary self-
knowledge. Is that what you tried to say? '
" That is what I said without trying. Still,
you express my meaning far better than I could
— with the carefulness of one who means to
profit by experience ! "
I think there was more laughter. Then
came an inquiry.
This talk — the time and place and manner
42 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
of it — had its comic phase. She being where
she was and I being where I was, it had its
absurdity. Her inquiry showed that it was the
absurdity she wished to have openly recognized
between us : —
" Does any one hear ? Is any one passing ? ,:
" No one — but I require no witnesses. On
Fifth Avenue I see a stage passing, and motor-
cars and people in carriages ; on Sixth Avenue
I behold a surface car and an elevated train and
delivery wagons and more pedestrians ; let them
pedester."
" Then we will go back for a moment to
those wonderful August days : to the girl who
ate the blackberries — on the same side of the
fence. I did not wish any one to hear me speak
of such a person ! Was she a little fellow too ? "
" About my height. A quarter of an inch
lower."
<c A quarter of an inch ! Very observing
again ! You must have stood very close to her
to observe that quarter of an inch ! "
« I did."
" And the relative position did not annoy
you r
THE PARTING 43
" Not in the least ! "
" You speak as though it might have done
the reverse, as though it might have pleased
you surprisingly."
« It did ! "
" It is fortunate for the world that you were
not old enough to — to — kiss her ! '
" I was ! "
" Still, it is not to be supposed that you were
swept off your feet by the impetuosity of your
age !
" Hundreds of times ! "
" Now, that is strange ! Hundreds of times !
I wonder what hundreds could mean in such a
case. I hear that once is supposed to mean
everything. Hundreds! No; I don't think
hundreds would mean anything at all. And
how long did this obsession for hundreds last ? '
" One summer."
" Hundreds of times in one summer ! You
seem to have been a capable little fellow!
Hard-working at something that did not mean
anything! It leads me to recall the Infant
Hercules ! And you were not tired out ? '
" I had just begun."
44 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
" Mercy ! What kept you from continuing
on into thousands in the autumn ?"
" She was sent away to school."
" It served her right ! She should have been
made a public example of in her community.
But it could not have been a kissing-school —
unless she was entered as a post-graduate —
or perhaps as a teacher. No ! most likely a
school of correction. And where were you sent
to be corrected ? "
" I wasn't sent anywhere/
" The man never is, I have heard. But
what became of her in the institution that
received her as an inmate ? She reformed ?
Where is she now ? "
" She is living at her home."
" And so she never married — of course not !
Not after such a record ! "
" She has hardly had time to marry ; she
graduated only last June."
" Graduated ! Is she a college girl ? There
seems to be somewhat too much of the College
Girl ! "
" She is said to be very beautiful — a bud-
ding Juno : the country girls there often are."
THE PARTING 45
" Really ! To fit them, I suppose, to go
with the budding Jupiters. If it were only
vouchsafed to me to see one of the Jupiters ! "
" This edge of sod on which I press my foot
outside your yard fence — she has two thousand
acres of it like one lawn set with forest trees."
" What interesting grass ! I should think
you would go back to it ! Doesn't she en-
courage you to return — to pasture ? "
" I haven't been back for three years. I
have not seen her for six years."
" But I notice that you evade the question :
does she not encourage you ? "
" Not to my knowledge."
" But she does not discourage you ! "
" Not to my knowledge ! I have no know-
ledge on the subject favourable or unfavourable."
" Well, I have ! I think she encourages
you. I feel that she does. I can feel it all
through me. And that is why she does not
marry. She is waiting for you to come back.
And if you have not heard from her, you soon
will hear. Oh, she will write ! asking whether
it is not time for you to be coming home ; at
least for old time's sake, to let her hear from
46 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
you ! While I think of it, her being a Juno
probably comes from eating blackberries : Junos
always do make you think they have been fed
on blackberries. But I do not like Junos,
whether produced by blackberries or by any
other berries whatsoever. I do not like them :
they frighten me. And under all the circum-
stances I think it safer for me to be in the
house."
After which the nook became silent.
I walked away light-hearted. I trod on air.
I had strengthened my position, and I thanked
the day and the deed and the hedge — all
hedges. But had she supposed that she was
the only enchantress ? Had I slept all my life
to the sex until I woke to her ? Had I arrived
at being the right kind of youth without having
travelled the road of being the right kind of
urchin ?
How easy it is to form a pleasant habit !
The next day at about the same hour I did not
resist the temptation again to bury my face in
the fragrant hedge and take a second chance
and murmur : —
" How do you do/'
THE PARTING 47
This time I heard no laughter. And there
was no answer — at first. When finally she did
speak, her voice was repellent. It denoted
displeasure at being intruded upon ; resentment
at privacy violated. For me to stop there one
day — that was an impulse, a jest. To come
again — that was an intention — my policy.
Thus at least I explained the rebuke in her
tone and question : —
" How did you know I was here ? "
" Do you think a hedge could hide you ? I
see you through these thick boughs as through
your veil."
Her reply descended over the fence on my
head like a pikestaff : —
" Isn't that — sentimental ? "
" You will call it by another name some day
— a stronger name."
<c More sentimental."
" Have it your capricious way now : the
years will have it their steady way ! "
" Most sentimental ! "
Some moments of silence passed : I intended
they should pass. I waited motionless by the
hedge. I made not a sound. Then from out
48 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
her bower of ivy came a query — barely audible,
timidly searching : —
" Have you gone ? "
The little sentence made its way through
leaves and thorns like the tendril of a plant
which reaches out to take hold of what it
cannot see but would entwine.
I did not stir and I did not answer.
" Have you gone ?"
This time the query became louder, and it
was poignant. There was disappointment in it
— a little shock — a little wound. If she could
have seen the calculated triumph on the counte-
nance outside the hedge, I do not know what
would have become of the little green tendril,
but I think I know what would have happened
to the whole blooming bush : it would have
frozen stiff and remained frozen stiff — through
the whole winter probably. The lowest tempera-
ture in New York the following February would
have been found there.
I tapped on one of the iron spears till it
rang musically : —
" Did you hear that tap ? "
There was a secret laughter again — most
THE PARTING 49
quickly checked ; and then a voice reached me,
amazingly indifferent : —
« I did."
" Well, you may have thought it a tap on
the fence, but it was not. It was the politest,
gentlest rap at the classic portal of a mind to
make an inquiry : what were you thinking of
when I stopped and spoke to you ? '
" A very prying question ! Very bold, very
prying ! I was thinking of you."
" I supposed so. Did you exhaust the
subject ? Because the subject as it stands here
feels a little exhausted ! "
" I was not thinking of you in the way you
are pleased to imagine — not in connection with
myself. I was thinking of you in connection
with your books : that is very different ! '
" Well," I said, " there is a connection
between me and my books. I wish the world
thought so. But my publisher tells me it does
not. He tells me that the world has never
thought of my books in connection with me or
in connection with anything else on this earth.
That's the publisher's view. I am sorry. I
may not have created the literature of ages, but
5 o THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
I fear I have created the literature of one useful
man's premature old age. And they say no
one has ever invented perpetual motion. Well,
at least, I am the genius that in the literature of
this nation has invented eternal rest. Circu-
late ! As well expect the law of gravitation to
circulate ! No ; there are three things on this
windy globe that stay where they are : lost
cannon-balls, my first editions, and gravity."
" Sometimes I have wished that there wasn't
any connection between you and some of your
books. Sometimes. With some of them."
" Well, at times I have wished that there
wasn't any connection, too : at times — at hard
times. I am ready to be disconnected now if
there were any agency to bring about the dis-
connection. But there isn't. Death won't do
it. When I am dead, my books will settle over
me like iron immortelles ; heavy and lifeless —
but lasting."
" Don't speak of being dead ! It fills the sky
with clouds — clouds that weep through years
for loss and remembrance. Don't ! And I
said that there have been times when I wished
you had not written some of your books. But
THE PARTING 51
there are no such times now. And take back
what you have just said against your stories ! ,:
The amount of fight there was in that one
breath of hers so quietly breathed out of her
green nook ! The Seventh Regiment moving
down Fifth Avenue may look warlike to you ;
the West Point Cadets as they sweep by arc a
sign of future Spartan fields. By comparison
with the spirit of combat in her at that moment
these warriors are as wraiths of imaginary
carnage.
It was a stupendous revelation. Within a
day, since that talk of the day previous, there
had been a change in her. Never before had
she espoused the championship of my books ;
now she had interposed her girlish figure — the
woman's heroic world -figure — between the
crowd and the man she would defend.
While this was passing joyously in my mind,
I did not delay my reply an instant. And I
hid my happiness at the change I had noticed
in her : —
" I had already taken my words back/' I
said quietly. " They were meant to be taken
back after they had served their purpose to jest
52 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
with. I have nothing against my books except
youth and inexperience. Youth soon goes.
Experience must come in time. May it not
come to me too late for me to win what my
youth waits for ! "
Well she knew what it was my youth waited
for ; and she was silent. She was always silent
when I spoke of my love, as though each time
she must pause to weigh it once more. Then
she replied more quickly, as resolved to make
her thought clear : —
" I was not thinking of that, either. Not of
the books you have written, but of the stories
you have not written ; I was wondering why
you have not written them."
I was impetuous with my reply, for the
trouble was an old trouble ; I had lived with
it from the time I had begun to write. I was
ready with my reply : —
" I, too, have wondered. I suppose we all
do, whether we write stories or do not write
stories. We all wonder about the stories we
do not write. There are stories that flash upon
the screens of our consciousness, remain an
instant, then disappear again in the unknown.
THE PARTING 53
Stories sometimes follow us for days as closely
as our shadows and then halt as if with weari-
ness and are lost behind us on the road. Stories
hover in front of us like winged messengers,
beckoning us on toward new worlds. Man is
the story- telling animal. About all of us
crowd mute things that ask at our hands the
touch to awaken them, that plead with us for
the gift of life. It is as if one common univer-
sal dust bespoke for itself evermore' the miracle
of creation and demanded that man give to it
the cast of man. I, too, have wondered at the
stories I have not written. Why out of so
many I have written so few, and none of them
among the great ones."
There was stillness beyond the hedge, and
this grew more intense. My ear then caught the
sounds of movements : a book was laid down ;
there were soft slippings of her silken draperies
as she changed her position ; I heard her fingers
— these wonderful fingers — suddenly brush with
an impetuous rippling movement across the leaves
of the ivy as one might in a sweep of passion
strike the strings of a harp. When she spoke,
her voice had deepened, and it trembled.
54 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
" I was not quite thinking of that, either.
Not of the stories you have never chosen to
write, but of the stories you have attempted to
wr ite — but have never wholly written. You
know that sometimes as we look at a rainbow
our eyes wander from it to a fainter, higher
rainbow spanning the lower glaring one. Both
rainbows are parts of the same event of cloud
and sun, of falling drops and falling light.
And sometimes as I read one of your stories,
I look from it to a story that seems to bend
above it — to the fainter, higher story you
almost wrote in writing the other. I see a
rainbow nearer the dome ; I see an unwritten
story nearer greatness. Your actual stories
always suggest greater stories ; and I have more
faith in you than I have in what you have done."
Thus the truth in her must come out ; she
was as a child for very truth-telling. I was
even quicker in my reply this time because this
problem too was a familiar problem, the trouble
of troubles, the woe of woes. I was quicker
with my rejoinder and defence :—
<c It is because I am young, because I lack
experience. Youth, inexperience — that is the
THE PARTING 55
trouble ! I too know that each of my stories
is a broken, unfinished arch. I know that the
colours spread over that arch are not the colours
of Nature : they are false and they are con-
fused. No story that I have written is either
the arch of form or the prism of light : I realize
all this more deeply than any one else could."
There I stopped : I could not bear to tell
her that youth and inexperience were not the
only obstacles ; that life otherwise had never
given me my chance. I let it go at youth and
inexperience and kept hindrances and struggles
to myself.
Her reply came eagerly back to me, as
though she had scarcely waited for mine, as
though nothing could now keep her from going
to the limit of her purpose : —
" Youth soon goes, as you say. And experi-
ence may come, as you say. But how long may
experience be in coming ? To how many has it
come too late — too late for life to have what
makes life full and sweet. May not experience
be hastened ? If it can be hastened, ought it
not to be hastened ?"
I answered with ready scorn : —
56 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
" Tell how to hasten it ! "
For a while she did not answer. When she
did, there was a fine withdrawal in her nature ;
it had shrunk from touching the personal in
this way. Yet, despite this, she would speak
out : —
"Have you no help, no advice, no guid-
ance r
I answered proudly : —
" My help, my advice, my guidance are the
great models — the great masters.''
She answered persuasively : —
" The great masters are dead. You can
study the great models, the great models cannot
study you. You can find out their faults, they
cannot point out your faults. A living
counsellor — why have you none, to do that ? "
I answered with my stiff- necked confi-
dence : —
" No living counsellor have I ; nor will I
have."
For a long time — what seemed to me an end-
less time — she deliberated. I could barely hear
what she said at length, so timid was it, so
shrinking with delicacy — yet so resolute : —
THE PARTING 57
" May I be your counsellor ? "
« Ton ! "
" They used to say in college that I had
some small gift of that sort, to judge things.
The Professors told me this during the years
that I studied under them. The Professor of
English especially ; he would sometimes set
before us the work of finding out where a
great master was wrong — where he nodded.
My room-mate would tell me this when we
sometimes exchanged our exercises to see which
could better the other. It may have been
kindness in them all. It may not have been
true that I have any such gift — to find fault.
But if I have "
I answered her as at last meeting her alone in
Life's road : —
" I can have but one counsellor : the woman
I love, the woman who loves me : only to her
could I throw open the gates that are shut
against the world and say : See of what I am
made. Here I am ; here is all there is of me.
These shapes, forms, images — they are my
ideals. These are my emotions, those are my
enthusiasms. Here are my gifts, there are my
5 8 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
hopes. As all these are mine and as you are
mine, they are yours. Learn to be at home
with them ; then you will be at home with me.
And help me ! So that I may perhaps leave
one piece of work — if but one — that will long
stand, drawing to itself the eyes of the world
as an arch of eternal form and as the hues of
Nature's light. I have asked you many times
to marry me. I ask you now — -will you ? And
will you be that counsellor ? "
The silence of the garden ! The emptiness
of the beautiful day ! The paling brilliance of
the sun ! That shadow and chill of noon ! She
was gone !
Heart-sore and with heavy feet I walked
away. But I was right. From her, of all
persons in the world, I could accept no aid. If
I must win her by what I was and what I could
do, she must not help. If she required of me
that I scale an all but unscalable wall to reach
her, she must not open a gate through the wall
that I might enter easily, slothfully.
But well I knew, perhaps a little grudgingly,
what a counsellor she could have been. And
as I walked away, once more there rose
THE PARTING 59
before me the whole scene when I first beheld
her : —
A slender figure on the edge of the platform
in the great audience hall of her college, with a
vast audience of young and old attentive and
reverent to her. She standing there with the
reluctance of girlhood and shrinking modesty of
nature where she had never stood and would
never again stand — to speak to the world once
and then retire : yet resolved to make the
moment worth while if possible by uttering
something true within herself.
She had won the honours in Literature, and
it was for Literature she had chosen to speak.
And she spoke so simply, without display of
scholarship which would have been easier than
simplicity. In the most natural manner, and
as though she could not help saying it, she
drew attention to an ideal within the human
spirit as to what no man hath done. That was
the title of her essay, What No Man hath Done ;
and she unfolded her theme around one instinct
of man which forever sends him onward along
his road — unsatisfied. No matter what book
we read, she said, something within us lifts us
60 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
above that book, leads us beyond that book :
we must press on. No masterpiece in any art
is a measure of what there is in any one of us.
We are forever asking for pictures that have
never been painted. We see statues unquarried,
yet in the marble of Paros. Our ears listen for
music that has never reached human instru-
ments. Our eyes vaguely make out temples
that have never been built. In our hands lie
the books that have never been written. It
is thus with the human spirit in the arts. It
cannot long fold its wings upon its own master-
piece ; it rests there awhile, then must fly on.
Thus all achievement is but small part of what
man strives to achieve ; and thus the old always
leave the young something to do. Forever the
young ! The eyes of the world, fixed on the
Road of Time, see the weary and broken figures
of the old pass down it and disappear ; and
looking up the road, it always expects to see,
coming to replace these, some youth, some
stranger, some young unknown. Always a
youth — the young stranger — who will do what
no man hath done.
The conversation through the blossom-sweet
THE PARTING 61
hedge, where our hearts one time almost met
like birds in May, had taken place a few weeks
before the morning of which I write. And
now on that June morning I was on my way,
swinging along across the city, to tell her of
my first masterwork.
I, a young stranger on the road of time.
CHAPTER III
I rang the door-bell as one on whose shoulders
had fallen the Mantle of the Succession — that
Mantle of Beautiful Work which has descended
through the ages from one youth to another
youth, always to a youth.
From impatience to enter I seemed to be
made to wait too long. When at last the door
was opened by the butler, who was not the one
formally to open it, he looked flurried as though
this duty had called him from other duties.
Yet he was prepared to receive me ; and plainly
acting under orders, he invited me to come out
into the garden ; whereupon he led the way
through the hall to the rear veranda, from
which the garden could be seen.
As I followed, wondering at his unusual
manner and also at this unaccountable reception
62
THE PARTING 63
of me, further evidence offered itself that the
household was at this early hour not ready for
visitors. Shawls and top-coats lay on the hat-
rack ; a maid flitted past me apologetically
with wraps on her arm ; the doors of the
breakfast-room were opened, the breakfast
service had not yet been removed, on the floor
stood a hamper heaped with fruits and bonbons
and bottles of wine ; and when at the end of
the hall the butler with another bow withdrew
and I stepped out upon the veranda, there
likewise was disorder. The veranda formed
the southern exposure of that older New York
mansion ; it was already fitted up for early
summer with fresh awnings, and I could but
notice that the chairs were still grouped as
guests of the evening before had drawn them
together. But in another instant I had caught
sight of her and lost thought of everything
else.
She was walking along the path at the rear
of the garden : slowly as though she waited for
some one to seek her there by arrangement.
At that vision of her I halted, as I remember
still, with a downward step half taken ; T think
64 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
my breath almost stopped. For it was as
though the curtains of the ideal had been un-
expectedly drawn apart, allowing me to see
there in nature the heroine of my romance.
There before my very eyes was the essence and
fable of life's morning — there in that slender,
full-moulded form moving through the cool
limpid air ; with dew-drops on the verdure
about her feet ; with fragrant buds opening
on the boughs around her hands and eyes. She
looked all white and silver as though the mists
of night had just unrolled themselves from her
shape — all white and silver except for the
lustrous gold of her hair. The sun, beginning
to fall into the garden above the roofs of the
houses, sometimes touched her face, sometimes
was shut off from it as she moved along. The
Old Greek said that divine things go on light
feet : she went on light feet.
At a bend of the path she turned to retrace
her steps, and as she did so cast a glance toward
the house and discovered me, looking at her.
With a quick gesture of grace she waved a
white scarf she carried, so thin, so diaphanous
that it floated on the air like a banner of
THE PARTING 65
morning frost. I do not know why, but it
brought to mind Isolde's scarf shaken beckon-
ingly at that ill-timed hunting hour with Tristan.
Then as I hurried down toward her she advanced
responsively toward me with steps of eagerness,
her countenance marvellously lighted up.
When we met, she laid her hands intimately
in mine and came closer to me than she had
ever stood and searched my face with emotions
she had never revealed. There was some won-
derful change in her, some latent excitement ;
she might have welcomed me thus if actual
tidings of my happiness had outstripped my
haste and apprised her of my coming. I lost
not a moment to give her the explanation of my
hurried visit ; and I endeavoured with my first
words to link it with something dear and sacred
in her own memory.
" Do you remember," I asked, smiling,
" that last year on a June day like this, in a
great college and before a great audience, one of
the graduating class read an essay in which she
had something to say about stories that no one
has ever written and that the world waits for ? '
When I began to speak, her eyes were resting
F
66 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
on mine with lights and shadows in them as
though she were happy, yet not happy. Before
I finished, their expression changed ; only dis-
appointment darkened them, simple wonder-
ment at me for saying what I had said. And
she replied reluctantly, as though not pleased to
be forced to recall what had been her day of
triumph. It was her triumph in it that always
made her averse to mention it.
" I remember, of course," she said. " But
why do you bring that up now ? "
" Do you remember that a certain young
stranger sat in the audience, listening to every
word, as he told you soon afterwards ? "
" Of course," she replied again, still more
against her will, as though those distant matters
had no place in these intense moments. " But
why do you go back to that — at this time ? '
" Because," I said, " I have brought you one
of those stories. This morning when I awoke,
it awoke with me : it begins my better work :
all that I have so far done — let that go ! With
this I enter upon my real life-work. And I
have hurried here to tell you — to tell you first!"
The light and warmth of her welcome died
THE PARTING 67
out of her face. Without a word she turned
and walked away from me.
I stood stricken in my tracks. She came
back, and with a kind of sacred indignation
reproached me : —
"Is that what brought you? Did you
come to speak to me about one of your
stories ? "
It was as though she whom I had thought
the spirit of all gentleness, the incarnation of
the exquisite, had put out her hand and with
inconceivable brutality struck me a blow in the
face. The glory of the day died out of the
world ; the gorgeous dream of the morning
burst on the air like a roseate bubble and was
gone ; buoyancy of spirit tumbled headlong to
the ground with a broken wing ; enthusiasm
was murdered. My silence seemed all the
more to arouse her as she, in evident pain,
reiterated her incredible words : —
" Did you come to tell me about a story ? '
I stepped back from her : —
" It was a mistake."
She followed me closely up in the stress of
her emotion : —
68 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
" Was my note to you a. mistake ? ' she
asked. " Was it of no consequence that you
pass it over in this way to speak of other things ?
Was it not worth a thought, a word ? "
" Your note ! " I cried, bewildered, but catch-
ing at a clue. " What note ? "
She in turn looked bewildered, and she also
grasped at a clue : —
" I sent you a note after breakfast. Did you
not receive a note from me by messenger ? "
" I have received no note ; I must have left
my apartment before he reached there. "
"And you did not come in reply to my
note ? ' she insisted with some calmness, as
though light were now breaking in upon her.
" I have told you why I came."
" Then you do not know what I wrote you.
I wrote asking you to come and tell me good-
bye this morning ; we are going to Europe this
afternoon."
Since the first day of our acquaintance I had
never been separated from her for any long
time, a few weeks at farthest. Now this vast
chasm of separation ! I seemed to stand on the
edge of an abyss, gazing into vacancy.
THE PARTING 69
" How long will you be gone ? "
" Until some time in October."
I counted the months ; they made nearly
half a year.
" Are you going — alone ? '
" My father and I are the only members of
the family to start ; my brothers do not think
that a summer in Europe promises as much
pleasure as a summer in the United States.
My aunt is to join us in Paris."
She went on, at once taking me into full
confidence. She made it her first point that I
should have details. In the party to sail would
be some old friends : father and mother and
daughter. The daughter had been her college
confidante and still was her most intimate friend.
There lay peril for me : her brother was one of
my rivals. It was enough that he could press
his suit through his own worth. She continued:
during part of the summer other friends would
join them — a mother and her son. The mother
had been the friend of her mother's ; the son
was a University honour-man, and he was now
pursuing post-graduate studies in Germany.
I knew him well also — another rival to be
70 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
dreaded on his own account. Her father and
aunt, she concluded, were to motor through
France : she did not like to motor ; while they
were away, her chaperon would be this mother
— the friend of her mother's.
As she outlined these plans and pleasures,
old savage instincts welled up within me,
jealousy, rage, with their wretchedness. I
wheeled upon her in the garden path : —
" And you arranged to be gone half a year
with those you care for most and without a
word to me — until the last moment?' 1
I put into my voice the sense of a wrong ;
the sense of a right ; my disappointment in
her character ; my arraignment of the standards
of her conduct. She stood silent and I repeated
my words : —
' 'You did this\ Is that what you thought
of me ? "
She drew herself up in a quivering moral
growth as though no such touch of censure had
ever been laid upon her in life.
" Was there any obligation that I should
make you acquainted with our plans of summer
travel ? "
THE PARTING 71
" No," I cried. " There was no obligation !
More than an obligation or nothing. But the
last moment is too late for any good-bye to you
from me."
I lifted my hat and turned away from her
toward the house. After I had gone several
steps her voice overtook me. It was half
amused, half plaintive : —
" Will you wait ? Will you listen ? "
I would neither wait nor listen. As I strode
on, my eyes seemed blinded to the ground
before me. She suddenly laid a light touch on
my arm: —
" I could not tell you sooner ! I myself did
not know ! '
I stopped. She had regained composure
now, she was smiling again ; and she looked
into my eyes as though she had discovered there
was nothing wrong between us, only the comedy
of a misunderstanding. Then she explained : —
" There was no chance to tell you. My
father came home late last night from a dinner
with some friends at the Club. It was while
there he learned that some of them were to sail
to-day ; and he at once decided that we should
72 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
sail with them. You may not know that a
day's notice is usually all the time that my
father gives us : sailing anywhere seems to him
so easy. He did not reach home until after
midnight, and it was then too late for word to
reach you. But I wrote immediately after
breakfast, asking you to come and say good-bye
to me, and as the servants would be packing
up and the house would be in disorder, I
arranged to tell you good-bye here."
And then she added, after allowing time
for this explanation to have due weight with
me : —
" I thought this was a good deal for me to
do. And when you came and paid no attention
— to our sailing — to my note — to a good-bye —
and began to speak of your work — as though
my going* away meant nothing — why, then,
very naturally " She broke off and looked
away from me.
Our misunderstanding was over. We were
walking slowly along the garden path in silence.
Silence at such moments reunites more quickly
than words. And as we walked, I am sure
THE PARTING 73
that our thoughts met once more on the few
moments we were to be together and on all
that must be said.
As we passed the marble seat, she, with
sudden notice of it and a slight gesture, led the
way thither. There she seated herself, facing
me. She linked her hands in her lap and bent
slightly over toward me as though she were
now impatiently coming back to something too
long pushed aside. She spoke with a rush of
eagerness : —
" And now — the story ! What beautiful
tidings to sail with and to keep by me all
summer ! "
I barely heard her, for my thoughts were on
the picture she made.
The old wall of the garden darkly shadowed
with ivy rose behind her ; some of the topmost
branches, falling outward and downward, almost
overhung with leaves of tender green her
golden head. Near her stood the rose-bush
thickly crowded with the brief procession of its
buds. She sat there under the blue sky of the
summer morning with the freshness of the blue
and silver sea in the air about her ; an American
74 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
vestal of the college in her land and race and
time. Yet like a Greek vestal on the Greek-
like seat; Greek-like in the softness of snowy
vestments which we in our day touch only as
the hardness of marble ; Greek-like in symmetry,
grace, health. Not an ornament ; not the
simplest band of linked gold around her neck
bared low ; not a gem in the ear, nor bracelet
on the arms bared to the elbows — arms the
chisellings of which were as of alabaster and
the flesh tones of which were as alabaster
shadowed by rose leaves. A comb of palest
amber out of an old Greek sea caught up
the soft gleaming gold of her hair : across
the top of the comb lay a little garland of
shaken windflowers. In her eyes the one
blue of the sky and of the sea for the gladness
of that day.
" And now," she had said, bending over
toward me with sympathy and eagerness, " the
story ! "
I slowly shook my head : —
"When I was ready to tell you, you were
not ready to listen. Now you are ready to
listen, and I cannot tell you."
THE PARTING 75
She looked at me with swift disappointment
and waited for some explanation.
" Do you remember Othello's words," I said,
finding his mournful ones better than any of
my own at that moment. u Do you remember
Othello's words on that last night ? When
he took up the candle which was to light his
way as he walked toward Desdemona in her
sleep, he mused that if he put out the candle, he
could light it again, but that if he put out the
light of her life, no power could it relume.
When I awoke this morning, I had within me
a new flame, the light of something beautiful
that was like a flame. I hurried here to you
with it : and like a torch in the hand of one
who runs through the air, with every step I
took it flamed larger and more bright. But
when I met you, as with one gust of black
wet night you blew it out. It is not out
like a life, I know, never to flame within
me again. After you are gone, perhaps when
I set to work to-night, I shall expect to
rekindle it. But for this day at least it is
out — out like a candle. The thought of
your going away fills me like darkness and
j6 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
rain ; the story is like a candle out in a rain
at night."
My sad words were as new life to her. I
think she would not have had me suffer less at
the thought of her going. But that she was
not to hear the story only fed her desire to
hear it. Her whole nature had quickly turned
toward it as bringing me before her in new
light, with a larger importance. She did not
hesitate to voice her protest.
" But I cannot go away without knowing !
Give me some little picture of it to take with
me." And then she added, with a smile of
archness and of warning : —
"You know it is all of yours I have to
take ! "
" What of yours have I to keep ? ' I said,
glad of a demurrer on such grounds.
With a quick impulse she lifted the scarf
from her lap and lightly shook out its folds : —
" I will leave you this," she said. " Only, it
has been around my neck."
" Let it be around your neck once more that
I may see the picture : then it will not be
something apart from you."
THE PARTING 77
Laughing, she shook out the film of scarf and
threw it as a band of white mist over her hair
and let it slip down about her neck. Then
taking an end of it in each hand she drew these
down transversely across her breast and so sat
looking at me — as a portrait — for remem-
brance.
But as in a portrait the sitter may, unaware,
let come into his eyes some look that will be
full of meaning long after he has vanished, she
unconsciously gave some revelation of herself to
last while she was away. After which, with the
careless air of one who is not unmindful that
what is bestowed is worthless, she, smiling,
folded the scarf and handed it to me — that
grave portrait light slowly vanishing in her
eyes.
For a third time she now made her request
as one who has kept her part of a compact and
has justice on her side. She leaned back
against the marble seat so that she was a little
shadowed under the tender green of the ivy
boughs.
" Now I will have what is coming to me,"
she said, laughing and eager.
78 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
I turned half round to shut out the torment-
in or picture of her — to put away the thoughts
and emotions of the instant. It was as if some
young worker in silver, one day, far from the
surroundings of his craft and sitting beside her
who was everything to him but his art, should
be asked by her to forget love and life, and
thinking of his art only, describe for her some
work in silver of which he had as yet only
dreamed in his distant shop.
I could not do this at once, and I sat looking
across the garden spread out under its blue sky,
in its mesh of silver light, filled with morning
freshness from the laughing sea, strewn with its
dews, sweet with its opening buds. Then
slowly I began, in order to give each word its
full weight : —
She must imagine as the locale of the story
the buildings and grounds of a Young Ladies'
Seminary — an old-established American school
especially liked by American families of culture
and wealth. The opening would be the great
day of the college year, Commencement Day.
The actual scene would be the chapel of the
college. The moment would be that when the
THE PARTING 79
heroine of the story, one of the graduates, would
rise from her seat on the platform and come
forward to read her essay. In the vast audience
of old and young were strangers, and among
these was a stranger youth. As she stood with
every eye turned in beautiful reverence toward
her while she read, he, too, looked and listened,
and the first love of his life came to him.
Afterwards, out on the sunny, crowded college
campus, he singled her out and sought her
acquaintance. She was standing in the shade of
one of the old trees on the lawn, not alone. A
professor of the college was talking with her.
He had long loved her, but the relation of
teacher and pupil had constrained him to silence.
Within an hour that relation of constraint had
ceased ; and he was there in the open of
nature and with all the rights of man. When
the youth came up, it was the end of the
professor's love-story ; the two young people
loved each other at sight and irrevocably : as
irrevocably as Hero and Leander. The story
would then take them through the two or three
years of his courtship, with their misunder-
standings and quarrels. It would bring
80 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
them to her confession of her love and to
their marriage. After marriage it would lead
them on through the experiences of manhood
and womanhood, of two lives deepening,
broadening, being slowly harmonized.
To that faint outline of the bare story I
added a few words to show what its setting
would be in the life of our country : —
" It may surprise you to discover what I have
discovered — that the field in which this story is
laid has never been entered. If any American
writer has ever found his way to it, his presence
there was too unimportant to be noticed ; if
he worked in it, the traces of his work were too
slight to be memorable. For more than a
hundred years the American College Girl has
been the triumphant figure in the womanhood
of our civilization. She was that in the genera-
tion of our grandmothers. She was that in our
o
mothers' time. She is more than ever that in
the civilization of the country now. The whole
nation has always been at work to bring her to
perfect flower. It is she whom the nation has
always regarded its typical bride, its fittest mate
for the fireside, the safest, strongest mother of
THE PARTING 81
its men. Yet no American writer has lastingly
touched this mighty truth. In a virgin field of
the nation has stood, overlooked and unnoticed,
the most exquisite figure of its girlhood — the
vestal of the American College. So that while
the bare love-theme of my story is as simple
and old as the tale of Hero and Leander, in our
literature it has never, with its full meaning,
found a place. My work will be something
that no man has done."
Then as the young worker in silver, having
imparted to her whom he loved his dream of a
masterpiece, might close the door of his distant
shop with his thought now returned wholly to
her, I added : —
" It is a faint, poor picture. But take it with
you ! Take it ! Keep it ! All summer let it
speak to you of me and make me best remem-
bered! Do not forget that it is from me to
you !
Thus I finished with my love-confession once
more on my lips ; it was the union of my love
and my life-work.
Instantly I became aware of what all along
I had been barely conscious. No sooner had
G
82 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
I begun to speak than the little movements
which were spontaneous with her, movements
of her head and neck, of the hands and arms, of
the feet, of the whole body vibrant with health
and joy, all these had ceased, and there had
come on one intense stillness — the stillness of
an entire nature when it forgets itself in
attention.
Now this stillness lasted. I waited for some
word of pleasure, praise, sympathy. None
reached me. Until with amazement and pain
and incredulity I turned to her for the meaning
of such a mystery. As I did so, one cloud of
faint red, the first I had ever seen there, surged
outward and covered her from brow to throat.
It was Nature's cloud to enwrap her for protec-
tion and concealment. And she did not speak
because Nature spoke for her, and in speaking
went back to a language more ancient and in-
stinctive and powerful than words. By that
changing hue of the skin, by that intense still-
ness of the body, by the lips that could not
open, by the eyes which flashed on me their
startled and swiftly changing lights, by the
alarm of the whole countenance and its hostility
THE PARTING 83
and abhorrence — by all these signs Nature spoke
for her.
The reading was too plain to miss, and I had
to read it, and this was what I read : she had
drawn the inference that it was my design to
make use of her College and of her College life
and of one of the College Professors and of
myself in a piece of fiction that was to be given
to the world. That was the shock. That was
why she now sat, voicing through every avenue
of her being except articulate speech the outcry
of her astonishment and displeasure and pain.
It was possible for me to imagine some of
the pictures that were passing before her mind :
the terrifying announcement of such a book by
the publishers ; the crying of it by newsboys
on trains : the stacks of it in shop windows, on
the counters of department stores ; the reviews
of it in the press with dissections of it — of her-
self — as a character in fiction where her words,
thoughtless acts, innocent motives, little playful-
nesses, had all been caught up and set down for
the reading world to amuse itself with, then toss
aside : and sooner or later the casting of the
book into the swift, sad wastage of things with a
84 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
rejected image of herself. I had to look upon
still other pictures of her imagination which
must so have startled and wounded her in those
moments : the finding of its way back by such
a book to her College : the recognition of her-
self as a character in it by her Professors and
old schoolmates and younger girls : the dubious
delight with which they would read of a love
affair between herself and a member of the
faculty : the appearance of myself as the trium-
phant hero : the carrying of our lives onward
to the point of an engagement : the bad breed-
ing of it, the bad manners, the bad taste, the
bad everything ; the stupidity of it, the liberty,
the audacity, the crudeness, the brutality, the
ingratitude, the treachery, the hideousness of
the mercenary.
I sat there, seeing all this and saying nothing.
She could not stoop to w T ords about it ; neither
could I stoop to words about it. When a man
is wounded by a woman, what is he to do but
let the wound bleed under his coat ; least of all
throw his coat open and point to the gash and
laceration. I sat waiting for her to act — to
end her silence as she would ; and by that
THE PARTING 85
curious feat of the mind which lets it escape to
some little quiet thing far away, when great
things are falling in upon it with crushing
weight, there arose in my memory the dim
story of another youth — a Greek : How one
summer day he, young hunter, with his pack of
high-lineaged hounds, having wearied of the
chase and fain to seek shade against the noon-
day heat, drew near a forest, and innocently
entering it, approached a grove with pointed
cypresses and a running stream, where, unpro-
faned by human eye, Dian rested in noon-day
seclusion ; and how for this offence of having
come too near, she had him torn to pieces by
his own pack. I was in my way another Actason :
the chosen hounds of my imagination, as I was
in the very act of joyously cheering them on to
capture an immortal loveliness, had been set on
me as the common dogs of my own destruction.
And this terrifying doubt of me which had
overwhelmed her from the direction of the
story was not alone. No doubt ever travels
alone ; it is always followed by a flock of
doubts ; and during these moments of silence
and suspense between us, when the old was
86 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
gone and the new not yet come, the rest of a
flock of suspicions and distrusts reached her and
settled one by one in her mind. When they
were all arrived, she was done with me.
She rose, and with her native courtesy not
lessened but more guarded she said : —
" Shall we walk ? "
In that instant she had discarded me.
Now it is only the mind that can thus
instantly dismiss. The mind takes hold as the
hand takes hold, and it can let go as the hand
lets go. The mind can for a moment, an hour,
a year, a life-time, hold to an idea, a cause, a
man, a woman ; and in an instant it can drop
idea or cause or man or woman. The mind
can do this. But there is another power within
us which does not thus take hold and cannot
thus let go — that greater power which grasps
the reins of our sympathies, emotions, affection,
attachments. Man, because he is unable to
name this power which so rules him, poorly
calls it the heart. The heart does not take
hold as the hand takes hold, as the mind takes
hold ; it cannot let go as the hand lets go, as
the mind lets go. The heart takes hold as the
THE PARTING 87
flesh of one part of the hand seizes the flesh of
the other part of the hand. And from what it
has once grown to, the heart, if it must be
separated, has to be torn. It is for the heart to
have its fibres rent, to be wounded and to bleed,
to suffer piteously and to be healed slowly if it
is to be healed ever. The commonest tragedy
of our everyday lives is the clinging of the
heart to those whom the mind, long years
before, may have rejected and condemned.
She, as an act of her judgment, had discarded
me in a moment's brevity. But she had still
to take leave of me in the name of those other
things that were not thus to be dismissed.
And that was why, perhaps, in rising she did
not at once return to the house. In her
decision she had already returned to the house,
but her heart lingered in the garden.
And now as she started, with me walking
beside her in silence, there came out what was
so fine in her nature, so inbred, so strong.
Her excitement and emotion increased every
instant ; and against these she had to draw more
and more upon her self-control : there must be
no disorder about anything so grave and sad
88 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
as this — no ungentleness — no outbreak — no
disturbance of the right values of herself. Out
of this struggle to come victorious, she had to
gain time ; and to gain time she began to break
off a flower here and there along the garden
ramble and to employ her words on these.
" This is a nosegay to me from the garden
— for the steamer," she said tremblingly. Thus
she plucked her flowers, and thus we passed
along, I awkward and wretched and angry and
wronged beyond endurance. She spoke trifles
about this flower and that flower ; I replied
with trifles. She laughed at nothing, I laughed
at nothing. She sought calmness, I sought
calmness. I had offered her my best, and she
had made the worst of it ; and as we faced our
tragedy, we laughed and spoke of blossoms
broken from the bushes.
We reached the end of the ramble, and there
before us was the iron seat. Once in the case of
another man's misfortune I had amused myself
by giving it a name. I had chosen to think
that there she discarded her not quite worthy
suitors. Now I confronted it ; now it was my
turn.
THE PARTING 89
She hesitated, standing beside a shrub and
nervously twisting a spray of it for a bit of
green ; not looking at me in the meantime ;
until with a voice which could not control itself
she broke through all reserve with one warning
and commanding question : —
" Are you going to write that story ? '
She was giving me a last chance. I had
clearly seen how intense was her hostility, how
surely it would bring the end of everything
between us. Therefore my better judgment
might have come to my rescue ; and with better
judgment a change of purpose. She afforded
me this opportunity — but the question had cost
her a great effort.
With all the deference I could express, with
all regret, I replied : — ■
" I am going to write the story."
She twisted off the tough stem and turned
to the seat, and there, seating herself at one end,
she scattered her flowers in her lap and began
to put them together.
Before I attempt to set down here the rest
of our conversation, it should be borne in mind
9 o THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
that this is done only as memory brings back
the words, and memory in such a case is a poor
historian. We were both deeply moved ; we
were greatly excited : within an hour I could
not have recalled our exact words. Instead of
an hour, years have passed since then. Great
changes have taken place in life. Other feelings
have replaced those of that morning ; quietude
has settled on that scene : and a light falls on
it now that did not rest there then.
Our words were quick, living words, torn
from us, not well ordered and well wrought
together, little by little, like the links of a
finished chain which has grown cold. Doubtless
not one thing about her belonging to those
years could I now set down as it actually was :
I know the truth, but I cannot recall the little
things that made up the truth. So that when
I attempt to write down what she said, you
must believe that time and memory and
emotion have all been at work, covering her
actual words as with mosses, shedding on
them softened shadows and lights, and throwing
around them that tender veil of atmosphere
which is distance.
THE PARTING 91
As for myself, as for what I said to her,
short shrift will be made of that.
She had taken her seat then, and having
scattered her flowers in her lap, sought for one
with which to start her nosegay. And keeping
her eyes always on her work she inquired
with the courtesy of a stranger to another
stranger : —
" Will you go home this summer r '
I, watching the movements of her fingers
and the shifting shadows on her face, made my
quiet reply : —
" I expect to stay in New York."
" But if you should go home, you might not
return ? ' '
" If I went, I would return."
" You expect to live on in New York, then? '
" I expect to live on in New York."
She dropped the flowers she had started with
and began over again the making of the
nosegay.
"A summer brings so many changes.
People go away, leaving people ; when they
return, everything has changed for them all.
92 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
They may still be near, but they do not meet
any more : the changes of a summer that come
to us ! "
" It is an old saying, it is an old truth."
"New York is so vast a place. Even if
people do not go away, they are thrown to-
gether for a while, and then they are thrown
apart. Acquaintanceships begin in New York
we do not quite know how ; and they come to
an end, we do not quite know how."
I made no comment.
" And then the United States is so vast.
Strangers who come to New York from distant
parts of the country to live — I am afraid that
we who have always lived here never quite get
over thinking of them as — strangers. So
often they do not look at life as we look at life.
They do things that we may not do. As we
may do things that they do not do. There are
differences. For a while we get along together,
then after a while we do not get along any
more. We do not understand just how. The
differences have come up meantime ; I suppose
that is the reason. And that means that we
were never together from the first."
THE PARTING 93
" Not every stranger who comes to New
York from a distance feels that way. There is
not a different New York nature, but the same
human nature."
After a longer search among her flowers for
the right one which seemed always harder to
find now as the bouquet approached completion,
she went on with her own thought, not replying
to my thought : —
" Perhaps that was the reason my acquaint-
ance with you from the first was so different.
It was something apart because you were apart ;
you were not like New York people ; not quite
like any one I had known "
Then something happened which lingers
most vividly in my memory : it will be the last
thing in life, I know, that I shall forget : —
She dropped her nosegay in her lap, holding
it with both hands ; and in entire forgetfulness
of it she sat looking across her garden — looking
into distance — with eyes of mystical sincerity.
And after a little she began to speak, less to me
than as if reckoning up life with herself : —
" All my life one thing has haunted me : on
the horizon of my thought — at a dim distance
94 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
there has always been a kind of beautiful sacred
country : a land I have often looked to when I
did not wish to see anything else. I suppose it
began to be built up in me when a child. My
mother was from the country and always pined
for the country and liked country life and
country people and country ways. Perhaps it
was her talks that first built up in me the visions
of an ideal land — my country. I cannot quite
describe what it was. Except that I believed in
it. The right things were there, the true things,
and things most dear. As I grew to girlhood,
I began to think that out of it sometime some
one would come to me. When I met you, I
do not know why, but you came from your
distant country and began to tell me how
beautiful it was ; and I, looking within myself,
saw my land. My land was like your land ;
and in coming to me out of yours, you seemed
to come to me out of mine."
She took up her flowers again and went on
arranging them : —
" I suppose it was a girl's dream. I walked
too far and too fast toward my dream."
" I not far enough toward mine."
THE PARTING 95
She put the last flower into her nosegay and
turned it round and round, looking at it in
silence ; then in silence she touched it to her
eyes, one after the other, as mute balm for
their threatened pain.
Until with one ungovernable impulse she
broke through restraint and asked with cruel
sternness : —
" How did you ever happen to come to New
York in the first place ? "
" I wanted to do great things. I meant
to do great things. And I mean to do
them."
" You mean your — work ? "
" I mean my work."
We had come back to the subject that
divided us : as though the mention of it dealt
her a second indignity, she rose and started
toward the house.
And thus it was all over between us. Per-
haps it is a woman's nature to pour out some
little tenderness on what it is sending away.
What matters it, since she has saved herself, if
she threw her charity to the discarded. As we
walked along she said : — ■
96 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
" I hope you will be happy."
" I intend to be happy," I quickly retorted,
but with no faith in my words.
She glanced surprisedly at me as though my
boast had done her a wrong. A moment later
what seemed a difficult concession was wrung
from her : —
" Almost you persuade one to believe in you
as you believe in yourself."
I answered in wrath : —
" I do not care for people who almost do
things ; for people who almost love or almost
hate ; for people who almost succeed or almost
fail ; for people who almost believe or do not
believe."
She drew herself up : —
" A woman can feel that way about a man.
I feel that way. I could not marry a man who
was almost something : almost a lawyer, almost
a soldier, almost a painter, almost a writer."
" You are right."
We were near the house. She spoke with a
kinder note the next time. It was more of
her charity : —
" If a girl loved you, love would be every-
THE PARTING 97
thing to her. She would throw everything else
away — her judgment, cautions, reasons. Some
day you may find a girl who would give her life
for a summer with you away from the world :
only herself and yourself in some spot. Some
time a girl may love you well enough to do
that."
" I hope so."
Again she glanced at me as though my
words had hurt her.
We went up the steps of the veranda, and
she turned toward the garden. As her glance
rested on the marble seat under the ivy, she
passed one hand quickly across her eyes as if to
brush away the mournful sight of it.
In the hall some of the trunks had been
brought down. She stopped at them. In each
of us there must have been at the same moment
that vague swell of uneasiness which fills those
who are about to separate at the sea. The mis-
understandings of life ! The thoughtless, rash,
cruel words may be the last ! She stood looking
down at the trunks, and she left her flowers on
one with some thought perhaps of coming back
there when I was gone.
H
98 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
We reached the front door, and I held out
my hand : —
" Good-bye ! "
She clasped her hands behind her head and
pressed her head back against them. Then she
turned her face sidewise as on a pillow : —
" Good-bye ! "
As I went down the steps blindly I turned.
She had come to the door and was standing
in the doorway with her hands still clasped
behind her head, and she was pressing her
head back against them in bitter effort. With
the sad blue of the sea in her eyes she
asked : —
" If anything really were to happen, would
you — would you — understand '?"
Her eyes suddenly closed, and tears rushed
out and hung on the lashes.
I sprang back to her.
"No, no, no!" she murmured to herself,
stepping back and closing the door quickly.
SECOND PART
THE WAITING
99
CHAPTER I
Thus we parted : she to her summer amid the
green valleys, around the blue lakes, beneath the
snow-peaks of the Alps ; I to my summer in a
pygmy apartment with an outlook on tin roofs
and kitchen chimneys, and around the horizon
— as my mountains against the sky-line — the
far - separated towers of the city, its torrid
pinnacles of steel and stone. She to leisure
and pleasure and to her wooing by my rivals ;
I to work and loneliness, waiting and doubt.
She with a nature torn between casting me off
and drawing me nearer ; I with a nature welded
into one sorer want of her and into the will to
win her yet.
When she closed the door against me and
against the temptation of her heart to yield, I
did not return to my apartment. And that day
IOI
102 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
I did not work. The stillness, the concentra-
tion, of work was impossible ; the mere thought
of confinement within the paltry walls, which
were the material measure of my importance in
the world, brought rebellion to both mind and
body. I was swept on toward the lives of men,
the storm within me moving toward the storm
without — to the vast mortal plains where the
tempests of millions are never quieted. All that
day I wandered over the city, an unobserved
spectator in the ancient open-air theatre of the
great passions. As into many lands I entered ;
I passed as through many races ; traversed many
an age, met many a story.
I beheld Abraham as he dwelt troubled of
old on the Plains of Shinar. I saw Job crouched
faithful amid the ashes of Uz. In an open
square I encountered Rebecca with her pitcher ;
and away from me once Ruth went, not walking
bare-footed amid the cleanness of alien corn, but
slouching foul-shod amid the squalor of alien
alleys. I heard Shylock demanding across a
counter the due and forfeit of his bond. In
the Italian quarter, behind a scarlet rag which
curtained a doorway, I came upon Tarquin
THE WAITING 103
leering at chaste Virginia. Along the city
shores of the Greeks, leaning against a door-post
of a tenement, as once she leaned against the
golden splendours of her proud father's hall, I
discovered Nausicaa ; and I heard fall from her
lips the words which the world has never ceased
hearing in memory — stricken Nausicaa who
loved and was not loved in return : " Farewell,
stranger ! See that thou remember me in thy
country on a day." Where the Sicilians throng
I met young Daphnis, tunefullest of herdsmen,
without his crook and pipe and goatskin mantle,
but not without his thick locks and tawny skin
and resistless smile, as centuries ago Theocritus
found him idling, comely, shapely, on the slopes
of woody iEtna — home of fires and snows.
Down at the pier of a German steamship
company on the seaward edge of a waiting
crowd I saw Elsa with her rapt gaze turned
down the bay ; and as the mighty steamer
approached, I saw a warm Lohengrin just come
from the valley of the Scheldt— yellow-bearded,
yellow-haired, blue-eyed, arrived never to leave
her for the whiteness of Montsalvat. Through
the windows of a French pastry shop I saw
io 4 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
Pierrot flour-sprinkled ; and darting into the
shop from a rear room I saw Columbine fly at
him, take his pasty cheeks between her thumbs
and forefingers, and administer to his proper
feature things well understood by them ; then
disappear again into the mysteries of her work
and her joy. Once I thought I had a glimpse
of Highland Mary. Once a street Ophelia of
some unprincely Hamlet passed me with eyes
too eager for the water's brink. Once I almost
brushed against rouged Carmen as she wound in
and out amid bold-eyed men, smoking and
drinking under an awning on the side-walk ; I
caught the fragrance of her crimson rose as it
drooped over the passion-flower of her withered
heart. And once, near a church, I beheld,
moving slowly toward it in spiritual revery,
saintly Elizabeth — going to the shrine for
Tannhauser whom Venus held fettered to the
mountain, while her own prayers for him took
flight for Heaven.
As I wandered that summer day these stories
I saw and many others in imagination and re-
membrance. I matched my own story with
many of them, understanding it more clearly in
THE WAITING 105
their distant lights, finding it overcast by their
kindred shadows. Far back I tracked the
drama of the heart of men, for ever changing,
never changed.
Toward sundown, miles away, as twilight
began to sift down upon the streets and the
sidewalks to become thronged with people
hurrying to many points, I noticed how on
every face, in whatsoever direction turned, there
rested the same expression — the common human
look of going home ; and suddenly I shared in
this universal instinct and grew homesick for my
shelter. In the morning I had rebelled against
it ; it had repelled me, irked me ; now the idea
of being in it again brought a kind of familiar
peace. Otherwise, too, the tragic mood of the
day had ebbed ; its pain and sadness had left
me ; buoyancy and joy fulness had come in as an
evening tide from a tranquil sea. Soon returning
by the quickest route, I stood at the door of my
apartment with the key ready to insert in the
lock ; and by that time I had regained the high
spirits which are the rock of my birthright.
Please, if you care to enter my legal domicile
with me, be in high spirits yourself. Nothing
106 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
despondent ever gets across my threshold ;
though it may be that I shall not escape the lot
of man and in years to come open a Doorway to
Sorrows ; there to sit, long looking out upon the
Fields of Sadness. Enter cheerfully, and do not
let your cheerfulness be made to run away at the
sight of cheerless things, of poor, mean, worthless
things. For what you shall see will be most
unlike all that you have by this time associated
with her luxury. No rose-garden nor marble
seat nor inestimable grass nor verandas and
salons for me ; but res aiigusta donii, which is
very good Latin for the American day of small
things.
And that small day was my meridian day : I
dwelt in the cloudless noontide splendour of
want.
With the key in the lock I stooped to pick
up the evening newspaper — the six cents a week
chronicle of the world ; and I drew from under
the door-sill a few letters, the corners of which
protruded. Business letters were always my
first concern, though there was not a business
for any human being to write to me about.
Entering, I threw up the window-sashes to
THE WAITING 107
replace with fresh air the stale heated atmosphere
which had been in the rooms since morning,
when the chambermaid had fastened the foul
air carefully in. One of my much-perforated,
sand-coloured window-shades had a worn-out
catch ; and a careless touch set it off like a fly-
wheel out of gear. This was one of the days
when the shade wound itself at the top of the
window, tangling with it the end of the cord ;
I must therefore mount a chair and draw it
down into place. When I have become an
author great and grey, I shall, like Goethe and
Jean Jacques, write my autobiography and trace
for the good of my lesser fellow-men the road
of my exceptional career. Among the little
things that had the honour to train me, some
space shall be devoted to this window-shade ; I
duly setting it down that an impatient youth was
by it disciplined to patience — or to impatience
— it is yet uncertain which.
Having descended from the chair, I sat down
in it and looked over my letters. Always in
those lean years I hoped that one might be from
my publisher with some kind of miraculous good
tidings. It is incomprehensible to me still whv
io8 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
my self-importance was always increased even
by a letter from him of no consequence what-
soever. I think at that stage of my career I
should have been puffed up by his condescension
if he had notified me by post that he expected
me to starve — and would help. To-day there
was no letter from him. Those in my hand
represented New York romances.
In such typical apartment buildings the
poorer tenants are, intermingled with people of
wealth and social and professional awfulness ;
but there is no partiality in the attentions which
all receive from advertisers of their wares. Thus
it came about that I, of no consequence to any
one in a commercial way, was enabled vicariously
to enter into the sensations of the rich and
powerful. A famished spider, I was permitted
to sit at the centre of a golden web ; and hun-
dreds of firms in the course of a season agitated
the web and warned me to run out and seize
my easy prey — on my own terms.
That day five letters were dropped into the
glittering net. A real estate agent, having
complimented me upon being a gentleman of
such luxurious tastes that I could not possibly
THE WAITING 109
do without a residence in both town and
country, felt sure that I should like to purchase
on alluring terms a fine old estate on Long
Island. I concurred in this sentiment of the
agent. A wine merchant begged the privilege
of reminding me that I had not yet enjoyed at
my dinner table some of his finest grades of
wines ; otherwise I would have opened an
account with him which he now insisted that I
do ; and on the list of his vintages he had made
his personal little pencil mark opposite Mouton
Rothschild. I upheld this contention of the
wine dealer. And even a pencil mark which
connected me with anything called Rothschild
was a stimulant. Even though it were but a
wine called mutton. Even had it been mutton
called wine. A third letter was from a general
agency which stated that it was prepared to do
everything. But I thought that an agency pre-
pared to do everything was prepared to do too
much. A fourth letter was addressed to my
wife. It conveyed to her the intelligence that
her name had been placed on a favoured list of
charge-persons ; and that upon " visiting the
emporium " she would merely be put to the
no THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
trouble of mentioning her name to the sales-
lady and of buying whatever she liked. I
bowed myself to the dust before this distinction
accorded my spouse. Still it was rather dis-
quieting to have even a manufactured wife thus
publicly designated as a charge - person ; it
almost suggested that a real wife might become
a charge. The last letter was signed with the
formidable name of Lucile. The writer stated
that having held various positions of a secretarial
character, she had now opened an office of her
own and was prepared to put the manuscript
of inexperienced young authors into shape to
secure their acceptance from the leading pub-
lishers at the highest rates of royalty : she gave
these manuscripts, she announced, an unpreju-
diced reading and supplied ideas to strengthen
and embellish. I acknowledged with humble-
ness the amazing wisdom and goodness of
Lucile.
These gallantries sometimes led me to wonder
what would have become of the remnant of
Don Ouixote's brain, had he armed himself and
ridden forth toward the chivalries of New
York trade. What might have been the fate
THE WAITING in
of a tradesman now and then as the Don ran
him through with the spear that knew no
shams ?
May I now proceed to say that I leased what
is called a bachelor apartment, though why
bachelor is not quite clear. On what ground
should a tenant be required to pay for an objec-
tionable epithet affixed to his abode? If his
legal domicile must be defined with reference to
the nuptial bond, why not unmarried apart-
ment ? Better unmarried than bachelor even
for an apartment. A bachelor is a mere act of
Providence ; being unmarried is a state of grace.
My apartment was at the rear of a magnifi-
cent structure, all the family apartments of which
were at the front ; so that the aggregation could
have been regarded as the house of lords and
the house of commons : the lords to the front
and the commons to the rear. I was then a
very junior member of the house of commons.
My apartment consisted of a front door, a
hallway, a cranny dubbed kitchenette, an in-
quisitorial bath, and two rooms, in one of which
I was expected to sleep and in the other not to
sleep. If I had taken a position midway of my
ii2 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
hall, extended my right arm toward the front
door, my left arm toward the bath, my right
leg toward the room in which I remained con-
scious, and my left leg toward the room in
which I remained unconscious, I might accurately
have been described as occupying my apartment.
The whole space had the size of one room in
the old Southern farm-house which was my
birthplace. As a child, I had been accustomed
to partition that : in one corner was a stable, in
another a garden, in a third a battlefield, and
in the fourth a creek, where I sat on the foot of
the bed and fished.
I now turned on the water for my bath. It
trickled through the pipes slowly and was too
warm to refresh ; so that in the kitchenette I
chipped off a piece of ice from my daily costly
lump and dropped it in. One extravagance I
could not deny myself — to bathe in my own
melted ice. No torture of thirst within could
deter me from this cutaneous magnificence out-
side. While the tub filled, I slipped off the
clothes of the day and got into my bathrobe
and laid out fresh linen on my bed. Then I
threw myself into an easy-chair— easy as to the
THE WAITING 113
manufacturer's model, but uneasy as to giving
way under the sitter's weight — and with my
eyes shut I listened to that satirical trickle from
the watershed of the Adirondack^. It was my
nearest approach to the forest melody of swift
water, to some cold stream surrounded by
moisture and greenness over which ferns leaned,
and near which a wood-thrush breathed softly
on his wood-viol.
I had my bath and put on my fresh clothes,
and then laid out the things for my dinner ; for
I was my own butler and set my own dinner-
table. This was a card -table covered with
green baize and upheld by four folding legs.
In the case of any four things in this world,
one of them would be somehow wrong ; and
one of my four folding legs had a permanent
fold — the growing incurable ailment of a leg.
The baize was not all greenness either, as of
yore, but had its yellows and browns of upsets
and downfalls.
The business of setting my table brings into
notice the richest furnishings of my establish-
ment. This was the family plate, I being the
family ; and you must know about my dishes.
1 1 4 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
Though a book lover, I collect no costly
books nor ever shall, whatever wealth the future
may have in store. Books to me are souls.
Souls in this world must have bodies, and books
must be bound. But my affection for a human
soul goes out most freely to it when it is most
simply dressed. Can any one love a monarch
glittering on his throne ? Let a king be uni-
formed as a common soldier ; and if he is ever
to win the love of human hearts, he will win it
then — as fighting man and human equal. So a
great book to me is no longer approachable,
lovable, when swaddled in another man's tinsel.
Why should a pilgrim, reverently on his way
toward the soul of a book, be bidden to stop
and worship its coat and pantaloons, designed
by a nobody ? Why set such antiquarian store
on the vanities of any book-tailor ? What was
Aldus but a book-tailor ? What was Elzevir
but a costumier, to be ranked no higher than
other designers of fashion plates ? Who wants
his Socrates tricked out like an actor strutting
the stage or incrusted like an archbishop over-
lording it at the altar ? Who cares to have his
light of the Gospels illuminated by dark fingers ?
THE WAITING 115
Let Horace be garbed in his poems for all time
as what he was on his Sabine farm in his own
day — a soul of unaffected gentlemanliness and
fastidious simplicity.
But glass and china ! Here is no question
of souls, but of bodies only. Your finest piece
of glass has no spirit ; your richest dish lies
below the level of emotion ; and so you may
starve even your own spirit to buy these objects
of mere fragile bodily beauty. That is why I
often went without a meal for the sake of buying
a dish.
This buying habit had begun very naturally.
I had arrived in New York with one treasure,
a massive old silver tankard which was all that
fell to me out of the wreck of family fortunes.
That tankard once symbolized the manners and
customs of whole people and period, it being
the huge hearty cup which was freshly filled
and offered first to the arrived guest and was
then passed from lip to lip among the members
of the household in which his life, his comfort,
his character had become sacred.
Around this cup of good-will and good cheer
and of simpler faith in simpler men I had built
u6 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
my scant collection. In one of the famous
establishments on Fifth Avenue, on the second
floor, I found a rack on which were exposed
for sale odd pieces, remnants from breakage of
glass and china. And here, waiting for me, I
discovered my morning coffee cup — deep, man-
satisfying, hero-nurturing. If Wotan had drunk
coffee instead of mead, this should have been
his cup. Such curvature of the rim there was
to fit a big eager immortal mouth ; such a true
Walhalla handle through which to push an
immortal forefinger until it met an immortal
thumb. This cup that same day attached to its
service a well-set-up cream-pitcher — an elf of a
pitcher cut of Nibelung — a gold-digging imp
who must henceforth bring to me on his back
every morning a jug of golden cream.
I pass over luncheon with the mere mention
of one magnificent plate (the only one I had),
no doubt patterned and glazed for an English
duke : it being of the finest English china and
designed to hold the juiciest of Southdown
chops : the duke got the chops, but I got the
china.
As to dinner I had a truly royal plate for
THE WAITING 117
game. In the bottom was painted a scene of
the autumn fields — a patch of brown grass, and
half-hidden in the grass a quail. I might explain
that the painted quail was the only game that
ever appeared in the bottom of my plate. I
had established in the basement ten floors down
a precarious cooking arrangement with the
janitor ; and many fuliginous things rose to me
from the smoky pit.
But I had always shrunk from the spectacle
of blithe Bob White's arriving at my window
lattice by means of so solemn and stately a
catafalque. Instead of devouring him, I felt
that I would have been converted into a mourner
at his obsequies. As for other game, any bird
smaller than a quail I was too large to eat ; and
any bird larger than a quail I was too small to
buy. At my present rate of gunning I had
made a calculation that I might, as a literary
marksman, begin to bring down grouse at
forty-five and possibly report turkey at sixty
years of age.
For after-dinner hours I had two German
drinking-cups, each of which represented a gold
stag in the act of executing a high jump under
n8 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
the boughs of a golden pine-tree in a golden
German forest. It was a very short jump, but
it was all gold while it lasted.
For midnight my collection embraced some
dishes and mugs, very jolly, very cheap, for a
rarebit with friends. There was no beauty
here, but something better than beauty —
ugliness ; to remind all guests that beauty in
glass and china, as beauty in life, can only go
so far : that it never reaches any final goal.
Always there is a station on every road where
beauty comes to the end of its journey : beyond
it begins a better world, where good-looking
and bad-looking are of no consequence in the
presence of the great ultimate realities — kindness,
loyalty, good humour, good sense, and good
principles.
One last piece — prized next to the silver
tankard heirloom. It, too, was a plate — and
here beauty came back again. A scene was
painted in the bottom of the plate, a summer
day with a soft light resting on high grassy
meadows. Beyond the meadows ravines sank
darkly into abysses. Beyond the ravines blue,
misty mountains soared upward to snow-peaks
THE WAITING 119
lost in the clouds. In the foreground of the
scene a brook ; and sitting on the grass with
her eyes on the brook a maid : sweet breathed,
I know, sweet faced, sweet hearted. She was
bare-headed, bare-necked, and her heavy braids
fell down her back. On her bare feet, which
were stretched out straight before her on the
grass, were peasant shoes ; her hands dropped
forgotten in her lap ; her bodice was blue like
a blue morning-glory and her skirt of soft rose-
colour like her cheeks. She sat there, tender
and alone in her high Alpine valley. Was she
waiting for her lover — waiting to answer him
that day ? Or had he just left her, had she
already answered ? And as she now watched
the swift stream rushing down toward her from
the glaciers above, was she thinking that her
girlhood would go by yet more swift ? That
plate I never put to base uses ; it was more
than china.
When I had set my table, I took up the
paper and began to look for reviews of books
and notes about authors. Through those dry
pastures I browsed with a hunger that was
i2o THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
beyond all pang of flesh — the fierce hunger for
fame. Then came an interruption. It was
occasioned by the back-elevator boy with my
usual evening loaf: the long brown loaf of
bread in the short brown paper bag. He always
held the loaf by the bread-end and handed me
the bag-end. That was the end I ate, the pure-
food end ; and often 1 wished that he might
have had less politeness, that I might have had
more loaf.
A few minutes later I heard sounds ap-
proaching from the cooking pit. They sug-
gested that a rampant animal was steadily on
his way to me, and that steel and concrete could
not check the fury of his advance. The noises
grew louder until they reached the window of
my kitchenette ; there was a violent struggle to
enter, and then a cessation of effort : the danger
had arrived, but could not get in : may it be so
with all my dangers !
It was the dumb-waiter with my dinner.
And hail here to the memory of that dumb-
waiter, the only perfect one ! He came when
he was summoned ; he went when he was dis-
missed ; he did not listen while he waited ; he
THE WAITING 121
had no grasping but ungrateful palm ; he spoke
no language impolite ; he belonged to no
union ; he could not strike ; and he was a
good smoker. Hail to him !
Dumb as he was he contrived to bring me a
dinner that surpassed him in dumbness. The
individual dish -covers, as I lifted them off,
revealed substances which wore no dietary ex-
pression. And they arrived at the appropriate
hour, inasmuch as twilight is held to be the
mildest hour of the day. My meal shared the
placidity of the dusk : it was the hushed vespers
of the appetite.
Ravenous as always, I ate and craved more.
Afterwards, placing the empty dishes in the
dumb-waiter, I jerked the rope for it to descend;
and then in glorious freedom of mind and body
I lighted my pipe and drew my easiest chair to
the windows.
The true luxury, richness, splendour of my
apartment, far beyond my family plate, con-
sisted in views from windows. One, quite small,
opened on a street and disclosed a church
opposite. The spire was on a level with my
eyes. There was a little tower where the
122 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
church bell hung and where a small ex-congre-
gation of pigeons met, my prayerless, sermonless
pigeons. How joyously they scattered when
the bell pealed for prayers ! And how they
disappeared entirely at the call to the sermon !
But my best windows opened to south-west.
There the fresh breezes of summer entered.
From there I could look across the city into
the twilight sky and greet the Evening Star and
watch the new moon come out and go down
behind the city's jagged sky-line. That sky-line
sometimes made me think of it as the Wolf of
the World lying on his back with his mouth
open and his fangs showing. A long path of
silvery haze far below showed me where Broad-
way ran through its demoniac fires ; and farther
southward — high up in the air as though it
belonged neither to earth nor heaven — was the
great clock towards which millions turned their
eyes : countenance of their pleasures, dial of
their sorrows, slipping chain of their mortality.
Many a time, sitting at one of these windows
with the evening light in the sky, I would
remember how in years gone, when I was a
boy, it fell on the farm ; this same evening light
THE WAITING 123
fell on the darkening fields and woods ; on
members of the family as they came in one by
one for the night. Such memories ! That was
always the hour when I grew lonesomest ; and
then it was that I thought most solemnly of
how strangely it had come about that I, instead
of being on the farm still to move round and
round its small boundaries all my years and
measure my length at last there with my fore-
fathers of the soil — how strangely it had come
about that I should be at a window in New
York, remembering it as a place not meant for
me : my purpose being set to climb those
human heights which long had beckoned to me
in the distance, and ever as I travelled toward
them beckoned as far off still.
I smoked that night until it grew night, and
around the horizon a million lights of the city
were set to twinkle. I had no thought of how
the light of the evening sky fell on the green
land, but on the grey stretches of the sea and
on an ocean steamer rushing away through the
waves. In the wake of that steamer my spirit
followed like a gull, asking for but a crumb on
the waters. I pictured with agony details : the
i2 4 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
gorgeous dining-saloon ; the gay diners ; their
tables loaded with flowers of last remembrance
from the land : the dimly lighted decks ; the
long row of steamer-chairs, each with its shawl,
and on the shawl some book — perhaps the
work of some happy, prosperous author — him-
self on board.
This, then, was the downfall of the day, its
overthrow, its demolition. At sunrise I had
said that a man's fairer deed finds a fairer day.
It had not turned out thus for me : the fair
day had been most unfair. Instead of bringing
my betrothal it had brought alienation ; for
closer companionship with her it had given
absence ; her faith in me had been turned into
doubt ; I had offered her my best and she had
made it the worst ; all that at daybreak I had,
by night I had lost.
One thing only I had gained : in the wrench
of parting, in the grief of casting me off, some
kind of confession had been torn from her : she
loved me — of that I felt sure now — she had
loved me !
I got up at last and went to my writing-desk
THE WAITING 125
and kindled my light, and for a while sat look-
ing at the top of that poor bare table. A
soldier standing at its edge might thus have
looked over his battle-field of the morrow : on
it he must either go down to defeat or the forces
opposed to him go down to theirs. On that desk,
now more than ever, it was for me to win her.
I surveyed it as never before — it and the
little things that hung about it as its whole
equipment : these were five. Tacked to the
wall with an iron tack was a five-cent calendar :
that stood for Time. Hanging beside this on
an iron nail was a small stone face of a heathen
god with bandaged eyes : he stood for the
sightless, pitiless Power of the Eternal in the
universe. Next hung a photograph of Balzac
— a monstrous extravagance to my pocket —
Louis Boulanger's portrait of him in his snow-
white working robe : that stood for Toil and
Poverty and Genius. Near by lay a penholder
which some friends had brought me one summer
from England, made of sweet stout cedar : that
stood for the land of English classics, the home
of the Anglo-Saxon masterpiece.
These, then, were my standards, my colours,
126 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
set up about my battle-fields ; these the aged
Sentinels holding around me their grim Bivouac :
Time — Destiny — Toil and Poverty — Genius —
Art!
There was one object more : out in front of
the others, standing solitary on a projection of
my desk, as on some little promontory beside
that unknown troubled sea, was a small bronze
figure of a girl. Her figure was bent slightly
forward so that her eyes, being downcast, rested
on my writing-paper. High above her head in
one hand she held a lamp. The rays of it also
shone full on the spot where her eyes rested —
on my paper.
She stood for Love bearing a Light.
This statuette had come into my possession
that spring. I eked out the means to livelihood
by taking private pupils ; and one day I had
gone to two of them for lessons. They were
brothers from my country who had come to
New York to make their way ; and they had
night positions at some kind of work and slept
the first half of the day and studied the other
half. They had regarded me with special favour
as their tutor, inasmuch as they were not always
THE WAITING 127
supplied with funds ; and I, not being supplied
either, but being from their part of the world,
could patriotically afford to wait. Patriotically
or not, I often waited.
That day they were prepared to give me my
due, and rich with earnings in my pocket I set
out on my return. My course lay through a
residential quarter of the city where, in the
northward sweep of trade, homes are giving
way to shops ; and near the middle of the
block I saw, waving far out across the side-walk,
the New York tricolour of financial ruin — the
red and white and black flag of the auctioneer.
It announced a furniture sale in a dismantled
house where perhaps a family had managed to
hold together through one last winter — then
could hold together no longer.
Now, ordinarily the only justification of my
presence in an auction room would have been
to put myself up to the highest bidder in order
that I might reap the benefit at once of whatso-
ever small sum I might bring. But that day,
feeling the power and spirit of adventure which
comes from earnings in one's pocket, I followed
the flag and entered.
128 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
At one end of the suite of parlours, on a
platform, sat the auctioneer, and below him
the apathetic and discouraging bidders. As I
entered he interrupted himself to announce that
if any one wished to bid on any object, it would
be put up at once. For a while I loitered to
study the human nature of the scene and then
turned to walk out ; but at the front door the
attendant, looking a little mortified, offered a
final inducement : there were things upstairs.
Loath to hurt any man's feelings by refusing
even to look at furniture which I could not buy,
upstairs I went ; and there in a rear room,
under thick dust, abandoned to its fate, I found
this statuette of the finest French bronze.
Her lamp was empty that day, but with up-
stretched arm she still held it high. Her eyes
looked out upon defeat, but their expression
remained pledged to victory. Old ties had come
to an end there, humanity itself had failed ;
but she lived on — fresh, charming, irresistible,
victorious, supreme — an immortal ideal amid a
mortal ruin.
She still waited there to serve, but with none
to require her service. The sight touched me.
THE WAITING 129
I thought of her as a young traveller of old,
wandering into some slave market, might have
found a beautiful young slave whom misfortune
had bereft of her master and whom the hardened
buyers, sated with slaves of their own, did not
care to purchase.
The attendant, quick to read my face, asked
whether I should like to have the piece put up
at once. I said I should, and downstairs we
went with it. There it made no appeal to any
one else and passed into my possession ; and
that night it found its place on my desk as my
lamp. At once I, amid the battling realities of
daily life, forgot it, forgot even the mood which
had led me to buy.
But we may dwell amid our lifeless surround-
ings indefinitely, without realizing all that they
can mean to us : this depends upon changes in
ourselves. Long we dwell even with the living,
never knowing what they mean : only after we
need them will we understand them : when we
need to the uttermost, they will be understood
to their uttermost. This experience now befell
me. I sat there that evening, as I have said,
taking account as never before of my desk and
130 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
the poor appointments : on the eve of a greater
conflict than I had ever waged. And that day
there had come into my life a new loneliness :
all that living woman could mean to me had
gone away — in anger and distrust of me. Now
as I struck a match and kindled the lamp,
a new significance flashed upon me from that
guardian torch.
I was like the prisoner who, on the first day
of walking through the few rays of sunlight his
prison afforded, saw springing up through the
bricks a flower : which thenceforth took root in
his soul, nourishing the soul it was rooted in.
I was like another prisoner who, as his hand one
day groped along the dark wall of his cell, found
there — what he had never found before — a
crucifix left by some one who had poured faith
out over it until prayer ceased.
I now sat with my heart leaping up into that
flame above my desk. It was as if on the day
she went away changed toward me there had
come in her place an image that stood for what
she had been of old and that was changeless.
Here before my eyes was her grace, her slender-
ness ; the bared neck, the half-bared arm ; the
THE WAITING 131
masses of hair gleaming with the dawn ; the
gaiety, the sweetness, the purity.
I sat there looking at it. It brought into my
love of her a new element — that emotion which
haunts those lonely shores where worship is
born and must ever dwell. With this image of
her before me I almost came face to face with
the tenderness, the splendour, of Religion.
She stood there waiting — alive, conscious,
impatient. Her eyes rested on my writing-
paper ; there she cast the rays of her light —
waiting.
I stretched out my hand for the pen and
began the story.
CHAPTER II
The very opening of the story swept away all
ground for the distress which she had caused
herself and had caused me through belief that I
had meant to make use of her life as material
for my fiction ; that I, as the gay young Judas
of American Novelists, meant to sell her to the
world in the market-place of literature for so
many pieces of silver — perhaps for very few.
The scene of the story did not lie in the
North, but in the South, in my own country
where she had never been. The period of the
story did not fall within her own lifetime, but
lay three generations back, before even her
father and mother had been born. She might
have as reasonably been offended with Chateau-
briand for writing Paul and Virginia ; as well
have taken alarm lest living Americans should
132
THE WAITING 133
mistakenly identify her as Scheherazade in The
Arabian Nights.
Certainly she could not have felt aggrieved
that I should have had my own grandmother.
I had to have a grandmother. Nor could she
have been so ungenerous as to object to my
grandmother's having gone to my grandmother's
own school. Yet it was solely to my grand-
mother and to her having been educated — of
course, very badly educated — that I owed the
origin of my romance. In this wise : — ■
Among my earliest recollections was that of
travelling from country to town and home again
in the family carriage with a negro driver and
a negro footman out on the box-seat. I envied
the footman and ached to push him off his
cushions : I desired to sit outside beside the
driver, between the lamps, and occasionally to
handle the reins ; and especially in wet weather
to jump over the wheel into the mud to open
gates. It had not escaped me that the jumping
into the mud in his best clothes always amused
the footman, and I did not see why jumping
into the mud with my best clothes would not
amuse me ; and I wished to be amused. This
i 3 4 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
kind of energy being denied me, I was forced to
ride inside, where my greatest activity consisted
of trying to grind the wool off a sheepskin rug
in the bottom of the carriage as I stood at the
window, questioning my grandmother about
every object on the roadside that could possibly
be investigated. The more numerous the ques-
tions, the better pleased my grandmother, whose
chief interest in life lay in answering all ques-
tions propounded by everybody. At home in
the family circle if every one grew worn out and
refused to entertain my grandmother with more
questions, she would herself begin to propound
them to the company and continue her enter-
tainment. My mother had too many young
children to heed their questions. They might
clamour at her apron strings for hours without
disturbing her tranquil thoughts ; nevertheless
if any one of us asked a question worth answer-
ing, no doubt she never failed to answer it —
and wisely.
One day, I being in the carriage with my
grandmother, as we drew near the little rustic
town which was our great city, and the fine old
woodlands through which the turnpike ran
THE WAITING 135
became lawns and residences, I observed at the
very edge of town that my grandmother leaned
forward in her seat and looked out of the window
on her side of the carriage : she always sat on
that side. I suddenly remembered that I had
repeatedly seen her do this before. She bent
over that day and looked out at a large build-
ing, the largest I had ever beheld. As I now
think of it, it stood there, a kind of Gothic
castle with battlemented turrets and diamond-
paned windows ; with ivy clambering over its
walls, brown as with the mould of centuries ;
with honeysuckle massed about the lower
windows. The whole place seemed to harbour
the scholarly seclusion of a dim mediaeval cloister.
Venerable forest trees were grouped about it ;
silken bluegrass flowed deep over the lawn ; it
was a paradise for birds. Noble it stood there
that day, unlike the ignoble things springing
up around it ; for the lawn was being cut into
building lots, and ugly modern houses began
to vulgarize it on the right and the left.
Perhaps that was the reason why, as my
grandmother looked at it that day, a mist of
tears gathered in her merry old eyes. I followed
136 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
her glance and noted emotion as a child quickly
does : —
"What is that place, grandmother ?"
" It is a boarding-house. That is where I
went to school."
" O grandmother ! ,: I cried, looking up at
her incredulously, " did you go to school in a
boarding-house ? "
" When I went to school there, it was not
a boarding-house. It was a boarding-school, a
female seminary. That is where I graduated."
li O grandmother ! " I cried, " did you ever
graduate ? "
Graduation, I thought, was tribulation re-
served for hardened, mischievous boys. Now
I saw the world was going to turn out to be
a hard place for everybody, both girls and
boys being able to scrape through by the
hardest.
"Of course I graduated," replied my grand-
mother, a little indignant even at me.
" What did you graduate in ? "
I had already made up my mind that I
would graduate in as little as possible ; I might
tread in my grandmother's steps. In the family
THE WAITING 137
she was reputed to be very saving, and she
might have been economic about graduating.
"I graduated in arithmetic — just barely.
And there was a little algebra, but that was
dreadful — they hushed it up about my algebra.
And in natural philosophy — very easily : I flew
through natural philosophy. And in rhetoric,
of course. And in penmanship. And in French.
And in botany. And in painting. And in
music. And in deportment. And in my
petticoats ! " added my grandmother, laughing.
' c I was a highly accomplished young lady ! '
" O grandmother ! " I cried, " did you
graduate in petticoats ? How funny ! '
" I graduated in as many as I could put on,
and in those days we could put on a good many
when we did our best," said my grandmother,
brushing tears of merriment out of her eyes.
<c I had on sky-blue kid boots laced up my
ankles and a dotted Swiss muslin flounced to
the waist ; and a lace bertha and a hoop-skirt
and a broad blue sash fastened with a rosette
on my left shoulder and sweeping across my
breast "
" Didn't it sweep across your back? '
1 38 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
My grandmother laid her hand on mine to
suggest no more interruptions : —
" My hair was curled in ringlets with a
heated poker ; I had artificial pink roses spark-
ling with glass dew-drops pinned behind my
ear on one side and three bands of pink satin
ribbon running through my hair in front. I
carried a hemstitched handkerchief and a white
ivory fan."
" O grandmother ! How did you look ? ,!
" I looked perfectly beautiful ! " said my
grandmother, triumphantly. " Don't you still
see that I looked perfectly beautiful ? ,!
I studied my grandmother's face carefully.
" Grandmother," I said, " I do not. Far
from it ! "
"Well, perhaps there have been some
changes," said my grandmother, laughing in-
dulgently. " And perhaps your taste is not
fully formed either — like the rest of you." My
grandmother had a power of vigorous speech
which she handled on people with wonderful
enjoyment — to herself.
" What did you do when you graduated ? '
" I stood by the piano on the chapel stage
THE WAITING 139
and sans a beautiful song called ' I'd offer thee
this hand of mine.' Then I read my com-
position. Then I received my diploma. And
in the midst of all these honours I never failed
to use my handkerchief and my fan," said my
grandmother, tickled at her own candour.
" What was the subject of your composi-
tion ? "
I fear there was impoliteness in my voice.
My own compositions at school were a great
source of pride to me : I thought them fine.
And I was not edified now that my grand-
mother had exercised the family gift long before
I appeared upon the scene to exercise it myself.
My grandmother opened her beaded reticule
and nibbled a nutmeg. To this day I do not
know which brings up her presence more
vividly : her own daguerreotype or the scent
of ground nutmeg. She was immensely enter-
tained : —
u My composition was on the Pleasures of
Old Age."
I clapped my hands : —
" Then you were old, weren't you ? I knew
you must have been old ! '
i 4 o THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
" When I had finished reading my composi-
tion, a shower of bouquets descended on me.
One of them was thrown by a young farmer.
He had thick chestnut curls and a beautiful
moustache, and he was scented with bergamot :
I know ! After we had gone out on the lawn
for refreshments under the trees, he was intro-
duced to me, and we fell in love with each
other as soon as we touched each other's hands.
My, but he was handsome and eager and
ardent ! And how I loved him ! How I
loved him ! "
" What became of him, I wonder ! '
c< He is your grandfather," replied my grand-
mother, catching me to her heart.
" O grandmother ! ' I cried, " grandfather
threw a bouquet at you ? What a funny thing
for him to do ! I knew he threw other things
at people, but I never knew he threw flowers.
I thought he didn't like flowers."
" His bouquet had a note tucked in it."
" How funny of grandfather ! "
" It was not in the least funny, you will
understand some day."
" I want to understand now."
THE WAITING 141
My grandmother's eyes twinkled : —
" You cant understand now."
I thought I'd teach my grandmother a
lesson : —
" And so grandfather was the only sweet-
heart you ever had," I remarked sagely.
In reward for which sagacity, my grand-
mother promptly boxed my ears. Though not
concealing her amusement : —
" You are too young to talk about such
things," she commanded. Then she relapsed
into silence and then broke it : —
cc There was a sweetheart before your grand-
father — the music teacher of the seminary. He
was the only man in the seminary, and I had
to be in love with somebody ! When he gave
me singing lessons he chewed mace, and I
suppose that is why I eat nutmegs."
This talk set up a rapid fermentation in my
brain. After some moments, during which a
yeast-like growth overflowed the juvenile basin,
I offered my grandmother the result : —
cc Grandmother, when I am grown, I am
going to put you, and grandfather, and the
seminary, and the music teacher in a book."
1 42 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
" Your grandfather's name and my name are
already written in one Book, I hope," replied
my grandmother, softly and gravely. " I hope
they are written in the Good Book : that is
enough ! Leave us out of yours ! One Book
— and the Day of Judgment — will do for us ! '
she laughed a little prudently.
" Mine wouldn't be a bad book."
" Still I think there would be a difference ;
some slight difference."
" But I can't write a book if I don't have
people to put in it."
" Well," said my grandmother, thumping
my forehead affectionately, as though to im-
press upon it a reminder for all time, tc when
you think up your book, think up your
people."
That was the origin of my story. The idea
of it had been dropped as a seed into the mind
of a child. It had sprouted and afterwards
been nourished by other things. Through
years the stem of it had been growing toward
the surface of consciousness ; and that morning
when I awoke, there, at last, the flower of it
THE WAITING 143
lay open and perfect like a lotus at sunrise on
the bosom of its lake.
A story not of my grandmother, but of my
grandmother's time ; not of my grandfather,
but of my grandfather's time. With him would
go the picture of farm -life in his beautiful
country, the like of which was not to be seen
elsewhere in the world. "With her would go the
picture of girl-life in one of those romantic
Boarding-Schools of the South — those Female
Seminaries — those Daughters' Colleges — through
the windows and portals of which streamed the
best light one half of the nation then had for
its picked girlhood. No such bewildering
effulgence as radiates from the great colleges
of the republic in our time ; yet a true light
leading onward, guiding upward — the best there
was : and not without its sublime reward. l
For the sentimental schoolgirls of those
romantic seminaries became the mighty women
of the Civil War, fierce Tyrtaean mothers of
the South — those fighting, praying, starving,
broken, dying, never - conquered, infuriated
women, whose husbands, sons, lovers, brothers
dyed with their blood the battle trenches of
i 4 4 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
their land and the battle trenches of the sea.
Tender, romantic schoolgirls at first, poorly
educated, scarcely educated at all ; then Spartan
women ; now most revered, most majestical
figures on the landscape of the nation's history.
Time that breaks all moulds has broken theirs
and will never use it again — one of the world's
heroic moulds of womanhood.
That was my story — the time, the setting.
And toward midnight there the opening of it
lay before me on my desk. And through it I
came back at midnight to where I had been at
daybreak — with the light of something beautiful
blazing in me once more. Here was something
that could not misunderstand, and could not
wrong me ; upon it I could pour out my best
and be unfettered and free. Love may wrong,
Art never. The arrow of its ideal, if shot into
the air, will never afterwards be found sticking
in one's heart.
So in peace, but a sad peace, I slept that
night — as regarded my work, but heart-broken
for her. Our quarrel had been so needless :
a sentence would have set it right. But
we, being sensible, were foolish. Alas for the
THE WAITING 145
hardships of a world in which the fools can
never be sensible and the sensible can ever be
fools.
Summer now set in. There was a sign of
this the morning after her departure : my
electric bell was touched and it responded. If
you can imagine a steel grouse very much
frightened and trying to get away as soon as
possible on a pair of steel wings, you will form
some idea of the trepidation of sound that now
quivered on the silence.
It was the houseman : would I have my
awnings put up ? My draperies taken down ?
My rugs dusted and laid away from moths r
I welcomed the awnings ; they would shade my
southern windows against the tropical glare of
noons soon to come. But that courtesy as to
my draperies and rugs ! A creature that could
have bitten into any rug of mine must have been
equipped by nature with a higher order of jaws
and a lower order of intelligence than any pos-
sessed by moths. A New York moth would
not have accepted my rugs as a free gift. All
the more it became the houseman's duty to
L
146 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
make his inquiry. It was not his prerogative
to discriminate among tenants as to whose rugs
were valuable and whose not. All of us are
rubbed most sore where the coarsest things of
life touch us ; and he understood human nature
too well in his position not to be aware that
tenants may be rubbed sore by their own coarse
rugs.
Other signs of summer followed rapidly.
Some of my friends began to go away for their
vacations for months, as they were graded in
prosperity by stretch of absence. These went :
and there were left those other friends who
could get away to seashore or mountains only at
week-ends. Now week-ends are the lonesome
ones in a New York summer, and thus these
other friends now disappeared when they were
most needed. No one of them ever thought
of staying in the city to spend a week-end with
me who could not leave at all. But it was
better thus : had any one of them remained to
bear me company, I should have been too awed
by the spectacle of his heroism to have sat at
ease in his presence. I was glad they were all
normally selfish men, so that my peace of mind
THE WAITING 147
might not be disturbed by them as enclosures
of too many virtues.
It being the order of things to go, one day
the dumb-waiter took its leave. I received
word from the basement that for me cooking
would be suspended until October : and that
after October a restaurant would be opened —
thus ending my attempts to be self-sustaining ;
but in the meantime I was thus turned out of
doors to look for city tables cChbte.
As everything was taking its departure, the
back-elevator boy joined in this recessive move-
ment : he himself did not depart, but his
draperies began to leave him. As the days
grew warmer his woollens were shed as a furred
animal drops its winter shag. He thus sartori-
ally betook himself back toward the artlessness
of primitive man. And when in August he
attained his midsummer metamorphosis, he
regularly appeared with the evening loaf as his
own blend of the Baker and the Bone age.
One day the final mournful seal of summer
was set for me. Passing through the street
where she lived, I saw the house closed, the
front door barred, the shutters drawn — empti-
148 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
ness and silence. As I walked away, most I
thought of her rose-bush near the marble seat ;
with dews on it at dawn, with dews on it again
at twilight ; its buds opening one by one — and
she not there.
Not everything was going ; some things
were coming. July was coming, and with the
first week of July my royalties arrived — sixteen
dollars and forty cents.
I took the cheque down to the greedy canons
of the gold miners of lower Manhattan, to the
palace of a trust company. The paying teller
stood at his wicket of bevelled glass and Cir-
cassian walnut — in his market-stall of avarice.
Bank-notes tied in bunches of various sizes
were piled about him as though they were the
season's radishes and asparagus on sale ; it was
early, and there were few buyers as yet that day.
Before that man in his wicket thousands of
his fellow-creatures filed, and he asked each of
them but one question : How little, how much ?
That was his only measure of mankind year
after year — how little gold — how much gold ?
He had learned to know me as the author of
some unsuccessful books through the publisher's
THE WAITING 149
cheques, not through the books ; and even be-
fore I had reached his window that morning, he
was ready with the question — how little ? And
it is possible that while he was looking at my
cheque and pushing out to me what it called for,
he had worked out a problem : if the interest
for six months was sixteen dollars and forty
cents and if the principal was ninety millions of
Americans, what was the per cent levied by me
on my countrymen ? How much did my books
cost the nation per suffering head ?
When we parted at his window, he and I
lost sight of each other, but I think we never
parted without a final shot. As a bank official
he was forbidden to speculate : still I think he
speculated as to what became of me when I
disappeared into private life. Did I by night
hang myself up by my toes from the rafters of
some unoccupied building and sleep economi-
cally like a bat? Many a time I would have
been glad to do so. In turn, I took the liberty
of taking his measure when he disappeared out
of his palace : to what proportions did he
shrink ? Once I fancied I saw him emptying
oil on the mosquito trenches which spread their
150 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
lacustrine scenery around his box on the flats
of New Jersey. And once I fancied I caught
sight of him on a rocky hillside of the Bronx,
on his knees in the evening light, draining with
his moneyed fingers the bankrupt udders of the
family goat.
But that day, as I left the bank with my pit-
tance, never before had I come so near meeting
that dread Shape which walks the streets of
New York always in search of the young who
have come in from the country ; for the light-
hearted, the too-trustful, too-hopeful youths of
each sex : the appalling Shape of Failure. She
wishes but to link her arm within that of a
youth — girl or boy — and whisper : —
" I am Failure. You are a failure. You do
not belong in these streets ; they are for success.
Come out of them with me ; drop out of sight
with me down this alley."
Never had I so nearly met her as that day
with that proof of my value. So that I came
up town to the establishment on Fifth Avenue,
where my salesman of the odd pieces always
waited with a smile for an odd youth ; and I
bought with the sixteen dollars a gold card-
THE WAITING 151
plate, a piece looking like solid gold. I said I
should lay that plate away against the time
when the publisher would not mail me his check
for my royalties, but would send them to me
by his office boy. My butler would meet his
office boy at my front-door ; and my gold card-
plate would receive his gold-bearing document.
In the teeth of failure that day I made this
ofTer-ing to Victory.
This plate completed my family collection,
and with it I closed the china closet for the rest
of the summer — it being necessary that I go
out to dine. Nothing is too small to have con-
sequences, and even that trivial matter brought
its own. For one evening it befell me to find
my table cThbte in the rear yard of a little place
down in the neighbourhood of the Washington
Arch.
A great deal of human life lies scattered
around the Arch, a wonderful commingling of
lives and races ; there are French, there are
Italians, there are Swiss, there are many others.
The proprietor of this hostelry which I found
had tried to turn his rear yard into an al fresco
summer-evening dining ground. There were
152 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
little tables ; with a light on each that glimmered
out of grape-vines. It mattered not that the
grape-vines were artificial. As you looked
upward, you did not see walls hung with old
Flemish tapestries, but fire-escapes hung with
other things that would have frightened Flanders.
And if you looked on past these, you could see
the infinitude of night and the cool stars : and
after all, it is not what the eye must traverse,
but what it finally rests on at the end of its
vision that counts.
I began to go there and so made the acquaint-
ance of the proprietor and found that he was
Swiss and had been a hotel clerk in many parts
of Switzerland.
Thus in after-dinner talks with him I too
could spend much of my summer in Switzerland,
where most I wished to be. He made it possible
for me, by his descriptions, to follow her from
place to place. I saw as with my own eyes the
blue of Lake Leman — she was to be there ; I
read under old chestnut-trees on the slopes of
Haute Savoie ; now and then lifting my eyes to
look across the lake at Lausanne, where also
she was to be ; where Gibbon finished his De-
THE WAITING 153
cline and Fall — and where, perhaps, I would
complete mine. My host was a Savoyard, and he
was always homesick for the vineyards in which
he had worked as a boy, had played as a youth,
had begun to dream of life as a man. It was
homesickness for native vineyards that explained
the artificial grape-vines clambering around his
dinner-tables.
Thus as the summer rose to its zenith of
power, life descended to its nadir of nothingness.
Now it was August, and the Solstice raged.
An August noon in New York ! As you
look down Fifth Avenue, long and straight,
ablaze with light and aquiver with heat, a
solitary distant figure starts to cross it, a shining
figure. It is the snow-white Moslem of the
city, the street-sweeper — moving not to his
minaret of prayer, but to his mound of dust.
Out at the Zoological Garden, in a stagnant
pool, the rose-coloured heron, with head hidden
under its wing, stands on one leg, like a plant
in the ooze of Indian marshes, flowering
magnificently. In their cages, the tigers of
Siberia lie flat against opposite walls as if to be
removed as far as possible from each other's
i 5 4 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
bodies : blood-heat within them, blood-heat
outside. A grey squirrel, that master of
nimbleness, lies stretched on a shaded rock in
the reservoir wall as still as a newt, pressing its
hot stomach against the cool stone. Far out in
the middle of the reservoir, the surface of
which is a sheet of still azure, matching the
azure of the sky, a tiny boat is being pushed
hither and thither as the skipper with his dip-
net collects out of the blue the white feathers
of gulls that have moulted. My Swiss hotel-
keeper described for me the flocks of white
gulls which in August float on Lake Leman.
Had I been a gull that summer I think I would
have moulted no feather in the reservoir of
Central Park — not if I had had wings for ocean
travel. On the parched slope of Riverside
Drive, under a sun-smitten oak, a nurse with a
closed fan drowses beside the carriage of a
sleeping infant ; and at her feet, curled on its
back with its paws in the air, a dreaming bull-
terrier snarls through his muzzle at the brazen
sky. Below the group, at the foot of the
slope, the great Hudson sleeps or moves toward
the Bay as in a dream ; and looking northward
THE WAITING 155
to the hills through which it has come dreaming,
you see the horizon muffled in amethyst. On
the green in Central Park, on that western
edge of it where stands a scant grove of oaks
and maples, the Park sheep lie suffering, even
in their half-grown fleeces. The gaunt old
shepherd, sitting on the ground with his back
against a tree where the shadow falls, keeps his
eyes on them from force of habit. Beside him
his young collie lies with his nose between his
paws, watching also. In the eyes of the young
dog is the steadiness of instinct ; in the eyes of
the old man lies the stillness of memories.
August twilight in New York ! An orbless,
flameless fury more deadly than sun-heat. As
you stagger homeward, out on the steps of
some unoccupied apartment building you are
just able to see through the darkness there, on
a stone abutment, the caretaker ; a man from
the tropics, a newcomer from the West Indies
— black ; motionless there as an Arab in the
furnace of arid sands. Further on, another
black man from the tropics — further on,
another black man from the tropics : Lybian
figures in the desert of the city night. Thus
156 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
centuries ago their race may have crouched
around the marble entrances of palaces in
ancient Carthage under the rule of the Cassars.
August nights in New York !
And every night like a low star above the
burning sands of life, my lamp — with its beam
on my work. My only companion — that
cool figure of radiant girlhood. That fragrant
maid of life's dawn. That unwilted image of
constancy. That flower of trust, shedding on
me in my sweat and toil and discouragement
and despair the freshness of an April dew-bent
Narcissus.
CHAPTER III
All that summer no letter. Not a message
to me from her mountains, at the foot of which
grew the flower of a day and on the summits
of which lay the snows of ages. Could she be
touched neither by the pathos of the brief nor
by the desolation of the lasting ? Would she be
warned neither by the glacier nor by the rose ?
To confront this studied silence of hers I
marshalled one hope : that clearer thought
would dawn on her ; that her heart would then
hold out against an erring judgment ; that
until she had returned she would not decide
irrevocably. If she would but return un-
pledged ! All summer my heart cried to her :
wait, wait, wait ! Come back unpromised, come
back free !
And all that summer I built and built and
i57
158 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
built for her ; all the forces within me were
called upon to work for her. For it must now
be divulged that while I had no thought of
putting her into one book, I was secretly putting
her into another.
When I arrived in New York, I was carried
away by the daily spectacles of the streets.
Especially at night there passed before me the
procession of things seen. If you are thought-
ful, you must have become aware that this is
your own experience : that wherever you live,
as the last thing each night your mind casts up
the account of the sun. There is some saving
power within you which would lay hold of that
worthiest to live — the trait of strength — the
act of leadership — the quality of mercy —
every best thing in the world. When the
members of a family come together at night
around the fire, speak, and then lapse into
common silence, some one will break the
silence with a narrative of the day which held
the wit, the gaiety, the v/isdom, the justice
of life.
But after I had come to know her, every
night I thought of her also ; and thus between
THE WAITING 159
thinking of her and thinking of the most per-
fect little story of the day, the two became
naturally acquainted : she drew the story to
herself, the story drew her to itself : they be-
longed to each other, they grew together.
On the night of the first of January of that
year I had, then, begun a book, the plan of
which was that on every night throughout the
year I should write down the one occurrence of
the day that asserted its right to abide as the
best the world had offered : and at the end of
the year to make of these a sheaf of the days
to send to her.
This is the story I found and wrote down
the very day she sailed : —
As I wandered over the city, toward noon, it
chanced that I was walking down the long
avenue of elms which shade the Mall in Central
Park. Near the entrance to this avenue there
stands, as you may know, a bronze figure of
Shakespeare. One day in the spring of 1864,
when the people of this nation were at war with
one another and that tragedy saddened every
life, some citizens of the city yet had the breadth
of nature, the long historic prospective, to meet
160 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
under the young leaves of April in the ancient
sunlight and dedicate this monument of peace
on the three hundredth anniversary of the birth
of the poet of humanity.
The poet stands there on his pedestal. As
the years go by, one of the elm trees behind
him stretches out, nearer and nearer, one of its
boughs as if, like a human hand, to touch his
shoulder — the touch of nature. He stands there
with an open book in his hand, his eyes fixed
not on the book, but on the earth before him —
on that dust out of which he evoked the vast
throng of his human, his immortal, children.
As I drew near that day I observed, quite
motionless before the statue of the poet, the
figure of an elderly gentleman with a profile
as keen and sharp as any on a Greek coin. He
had on a soft black hat and a well-worn black
lounge suit ; his linen was emphatically respect-
able and his shoes well cared for. His whole
demeanour suggested some threadbare recluse of
one of the libraries who might have come forth
for a breath of fresh air from some dim alcove.
He stood looking up into Shakespeare's face,
unconcerned about my approach, a sensitive but
THE WAITING 161
resolute friend. As I drew nearer, his revery
reached its close, and he turned away ; but
having gone a few steps, he stopped, as one
who remembers the very purpose that brought
him thither ; with a smile at his own absent-
mindedness he thrust his hand in his coat
pocket and jerked out a white flower ; and
coming back close under the statue, tossed it up
so that it lodged on Shakespeare's arm. For a
moment he lingered, smiling at his deed, and
then happier went his way. He perhaps one of
the lonely in the city of millions — perhaps with-
out a single living tie. But his heart must find
something on which to lavish its affection, and
so he had walked back along the high-road of
history three hundred years till he reached
that other heart which had understood.
That ni^ht I wrote the scene down. " It is
o
what she would have done," I said. And forth-
with I removed the scholarly recluse from the
story and put her in his place : I saw her as
tossing a white flower of remembrance towards
Shakespeare's eyes.
The climax of the whole summer occurred
one Saturday in the last week of August.
M
162 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
The night had been too hot for sleep. Dawn
brought no breeze. The sun as it rose flashed
on no dew. My sheep in the Park, if they
cropped the grass, found it warm and dry as
their wool. As I got out of bed to lower the
window awnings the cloth felt as though a hot
iron had just been passed over it.
Human nature in me came to an end that
day, work would be impossible, there stretched
out a strange prospect of idleness, of a holiday
— my one holiday during those scorching
months. As I resolved to take one, instantly
all that was in me turned toward the sea — my
arms, my face, my breast, my feet longed for
the cold sea. I was twenty years old, a dweller
in a pasture land, before I had ever seen the great
mother of mankind. Only in stories, in history,
had I heard the Ocean. It was a year or
two before this that one summer twilight, awe-
stricken and breathless, I had first drawn near the
edge of the rolling wonder of the rolling
planet, the cradle of our race, — the story of our
wanderings — the symbol of our hope.
Idle for a while that morning, I stood at my
windows, looking out on the roofs. A skylight
THE WAITING 163
was pushed open, and a scullery-maid climbed
out and crept over to a little wooden stool
near a smoking chimney- top. She carried
a bottle of cleansing fluid and some scraps
of cloth in one hand and in the other a
pair of pink ball slippers ; and seating herself,
she began merrily to clean the toe of one of the
slippers : the universe that morning was reduced
to a point — to the soiled toe of that slipper.
After a while she drew out a letter, her eyes
devoured it. The hot kitchen smoke issued a
few feet away and drifted across her face ; she
was unaware. The sun poured down its flame
on her head ; it was unnoticed. Hard work,
coarse work, meant nothing. Her ugliness
meant nothing. She may not have asked of life
very much, but the little she asked she got :
that night on the deck of a steamer on the
moonlit Hudson or in some pavilion at the edge
of the Atlantic she would be dancing with the
writer of that letter. Frowsy, ragged, glorious
little scullion — with her slippers and her lover.
She had noticed me standing at my windows
with a proprietor's full right to enjoy the view :
what did she care ? Every housetop might
1 64 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
have been crowded with observers, and she
would have sat there undisturbed, cleansing her
slipper toes and dreaming of her waltz.
Turning away with a pang at the contrast
between the story there and the one within
me, I went across to the north side of my
apartment, where a small window disclosed
a glimpse of a street and a church. In
the belfry of a church my flock of pigeons
sat listless ; they scarce preened their feathers ;
and some sat out on the mouths of the gargoyles
as if to be as near as possible to the gushing
shower whenever it should arrive. Presently a
huge pouter pigeon, which did not belong to
the flock of my meek ones, alighted, and
strutting officiously about began to push them
over the precipices. Then he flew out to the
gargoyles and pushed those off. I said he was
a parson pigeon — thinking himself entitled to
strut and tyrannize because Nature with a sense
of humour had made him a pouter. Never do I
see the gargoyles of the church without suspecting
it is not the church only that needs gargoyles :
the church members should have gargoyles also
— to wash them off — to drain away their soot.
THE WAITING 165
Something occurred to end my fancies about
the pigeons. The rattle of a wagon was heard,
the whistle of a youth ; the wagon stopped
opposite, the youth jumped down from the
driver's seat, and hurrying to the rear of his
wagon began to pile loaves of bread into a
basket. His cap was set on the back of his
head to display to advantage his thick-curled
foretop ; his clean shirt-sleeves were rolled half-
way back, revealing his goodly arms. As he
grasped his basket and turned toward the
house, his whistle was checked, he stood still.
Moving slowly down the street, with one hand
sliding along the church fence and with the
other grasping a cane which tapped the side-
walk, came a stranger smitten with eyes of
perpetual night ; before the church doors he
paused and groped.
The lad softly put down his basket and with
slow, reverential footsteps went over and took
him by the arm : he needed no introduction ex-
cept that of humanity. Removing his own cap,
he led him into the church. A moment later
he reappeared, sprang for his basket, delivered
his loaves, jumped to his seat, and was gone.
1 66 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
It was early that morning, yet I wrote
this story down as the pastel of the day,
persuaded I should see nothing more fit.
Besides, when night fell, I should be far away.
When she read it, mayhap it would help her
to remember a blind youth who dwelt opposite
the church — blinded by Love : and mayhap she
might decide to come to him and guide him to
the altar.
In the afternoon, under the steel roof of the
vast station where the detonations of engines as
they pulled in and drew out shattered the drum
of the ear, I sat at the window of an overcrowded
train — on my way to the ocean. Men with
hats off, coats off ; shopgirls with wilted waists,
wilted faces. At last the train drew out and
shot across the reedy marshes and hot sands ;
sometimes along a road-bed with sun-baked vines
crawling as over an earth furnace ; at spots
scrub-oak blasted by fires, and low pine withered
by smoke and flame. Then hours later the low
level moors and the first cool breath of air
through the coaches ; and then from my window
far off I saw the evening sky fretted with still
clouds of green and gold ; and under them the
THE WAITING 167
level shoreward billows of the cold sea — the
blue and silver sea.
At a small hotel I engaged for the night one
of the smallest of the rooms, and as I opened it
paused to survey its luxury : a cheap wash-
stand, on the rack of which hung two little pink-
bordered ragged towels ; a pitcher with a broken
handle suggested a one-winged penguin sitting
upright and disconsolate on its eggless nest ;
on the floor a small quadrilateral oilcloth, at the
edges of which only the eye could trace a pat-
tern ; on an iron bedstead a white counterpane
— not white ; across one wall a drapery of faded
chintz under which no doubt were nails where
clothing might be hung ; here and there over
the carpet the huge discolorations of orgies. As
quickly as possible and with great gladness of
heart I locked the room in and locked myself
out.
I had my dinner in a restaurant on a side
street and then walked out to the promenade
which stretches for miles between the city and
the sea. I was one of a hundred thousand souls
in the place that August Saturday night ; and
two currents of souls, one passing southward
1 68 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
and the other passing northward, met and
mingled. I turned southward and began the
long walk — very slowly and observantly — along
that thoroughfare of the invitations : past the
long sea- invading piers flashing with their
myriad electric lights — past the shops offering
the wares of the world — past the music-stands
and past music where there was no stand — past
the little dens of the credulities — past the bowl-
ing-alleys — past the candy shops and the fish
shops — past all the tests of strength that one
saw and past all the tests of strength that one
did not see.
I walked alone, yet I think not alone, for I
prayed that she walk with me.
At last I reached the end of the promenade,
and descending the steps, reached the wide,
hard, sloping floor of the sea and went on —
till the last cottage had been passed — the open-
air hospital for children— the summer resting-
place for tired mothers. Farther and farther
along that hard, clean floor of the sea, on one
side the breaking billows, on the other the land.
The country along there is sand-dunes rising
in hillocks. There is scrub oak, scrub evergreen,
' THE WAITING 169
creepers that can stand salt spray, dwarfed bushes
with leaves as pungent as brine, even blackberry
bushes. Where the dunes front the surf, they
are highest, having been piled up by winds and
tides and drifting sands and held in place by the
fastnesses of vegetation.
Under one of these, the edge of which was
overhung by a bramble of blackberries, where
the sand was clean with only a black tuft of
seaweed here and there and white shells, I
stopped and looked back : far behind me lay
the city, its lights barely visible, all its noises
lost.
I had around me the ancient open of Nature.
And I threw myself at ease down on the sand.
The moon was rising : the rim of the disc
looked like some dull red mountain top at infinite
distance ; then slowly the entire orb disengaged
itself from the tossing waters. Its path of light
began to strike across the tops of the spray and
I began to see, breaking before me on the sand,
the fragile laces of the waves. One behind
another, one behind another, one behind
another, ever the same, ever the same, before
me, a youth, as they were before some youth
i 7 o THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
who watched them unknown thousands of years
before. Higher rose the moon, the sky where the
stars flashed thick became violet-dark. All the
sand turned to silver, the sea took on a blacker
violet, its laces formed and dissolved like snow. I
there, watching it all ; sometimes turning my
face to the bushes overhead through which I
found now and then some fainter star.
The vast, solemn, lonely beauty of the night !
Slowly I walked toward the edge, little by
little delaying the luxury ; deeper I waded in
until one breaker leaped against me with its
foam. Then with out-thrown arms of impatient
joy I plunged forward and swam.
Long I revelled in my strength in that wild
energy. Then far out where the surface was
more still I turned and crossed my arms under
my head and crossed my feet and gave myself
up to that bosom of all tenderness and all
storm — letting the tide bear me landward.
The moonlit drops flashed and broke over the
swimmer. The ocean became as a golden
couch — a tenderness of the old mother to him :
no other golden bed had he.
THE WAITING 171
I did not return to my hotel, not to that
room, not to the bed there. I made me a
pillow of my coat and with the green boughs
of the brier as my roof and the waves breaking
a few feet away and the night wind cool upon
me, I lay down.
So few things I had with me there : stars
and moon, the sea and the sound of it, the wind,
the sand, the green thorn, summer and dark-
ness. All the rest I put away from me — the
city up the beach and what the city plenteously,
too plenteously, offered to its hundred thousand
revellers. That I might be alone and into
my solitude draw her nearer to me across the
distance.
I there with solemn beauty of the summer
night : calling to her, calling, calling, calling.
Before me the ceaseless wash of the ocean ;
within me the ceaseless breaking, breaking,
breaking of all my nature shoreward to her out
of the deeps.
Calling, breaking — calling, breaking. Until
worn out to weariness I slept.
1 72 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
Long afterwards, I awoke, or half-awoke,
and with open, or half-open, eyes I saw not the
moon, now high in the heavens shining down
on the Atlantic, but that sea of dreams — that
older sea of love between Sestos and Abydos
— the Hellespont — the sea of Leander and
Hero.
At summer twilight I saw Leander come
down to the edge of the Hellespont and gaze
across the strait. Then winding his mantle
about his head to keep it dry above the waves,
for a while he looked for the signal of the star
that was to flash out from Hero's isolated tower
beset with rocks and noises of the sea. Even
while he waited the light flashed and he knew
that Hero watched.
As I sank back into slumber I thought how
all that summer no beam had reached me from
a dark shore. Only the bronze statuette on
my desk set the star of night to shine on the
troubled sea of my romance.
She was the Hero of that summer — and the
heroine.
When I awoke again, the east was rosy,
the level billows of the sea broke grey at
THE WAITING 173
my feet, the moon was gone, the lights of
the city were out, above it stood the Morning
Star.
I swam again as the sun sent its first golden
light across the grey waves.
THIRD PART
THE GETTING HOME
175
CHAPTER I
One day a wall of a rare old house in a beauti-
ful quarter of the city glowed dark-red. The
vine of mighty muscles twisted about her
windows was burning its cool forest fires : the
year at wane had come at last to October.
I had not endured to see the place since that
mournful day of early summer when it stood
closed, darkened, empty. But a wistful after-
noon it was no longer possible to resist wander-
ing by ; and what first drew the eye in the
distance down the street was that vine with its
autumn promise. And the house now waited :
the front doors had been unbarred ; the front
steps were fleckless ; the brass of knob and
knocker shone with the distinction between
brass and brassiness ; the window-panes had a
diamond-like brilliancy ; the curtains inside hung
177 N
178 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
fresh. Almost her hands parted them, her face
almost looked out. Even the tall vases, one
on each side of the steps, had had their soil
renewed and were brimming with forget-me-
nots — the most impatient of flower faces. As
she got out of her carriage (she kept her
carriage and would not use a motor car), she
would pause to touch them — a little custom of
hers sometimes after a longer absence.
I went home wild with joy and with one
troubled thought : what would be her greeting ?
For it was certain that she would arrange in
some non-committal way to see me at least
once : there were things she would wish to
know. Her reception of me would definitely
depend upon whether she returned free or
pledged. I thought I should know instantly.
The first expression of her eye, the first word,
tone, touch, would divulge the truth.
It is easier to wait by the month than by
the hour ; and with the certainty that she might
arrive any hour there was yet an interminable
week to drag by. Too restless to work, I
began to wander over the city, proving to
myself by this sign and by that sign that
THE GETTING HOME 179
October really had come, already was going,
and how needlessly she mocked the season by
her absence. I made me a little Pilgrim Scrip
of changes of earth and sky and city by which
daily to refresh my discouraged feet.
One day in the Park, I saw many sparrows
on the grass, stripping the stems of seed : all
feeding together. They had only appetites
now, no emotions — the law of the twain having
become the law of the flock. The wings of
some wore white patches, as if prophetically
flecked for future snows : had it only been
actual snow instead of snowlike feathers ! One
day out on Riverside Drive, at a bathing place
between a beef-packing establishment and a
dock where the city's ashes are emptied, little
boys of the poor ceased to dive into the
Hudson, having been gloomily gathered from
buckboards to blackboards, from a living river
of nature to the dry rivers of maps. One day
a florist's window was blazoned with mountain
oak boughs, which glowed like coals in a grate,
forerunners of hoar frosts ; and how gladly
many times would I have given a year's royalties
for a black frost. One day ripe pumpkins
180 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
appeared on the greengrocers' variegated em-
bankments around their shop-doors. My heart
warmed to one with his ruddy countenance
and clean linens as he picked up a pumpkin
while talking to a customer and with an upward
and downward movement of his arms fondled
it as though he were about to pitch it into a
wagon. From those motions, I knew that he
had been a country boy, had followed the
wagon into the fields, had helped to load it
with pumpkins when silver spangled their gold.
One day the transitory summer life of the city,
which had ascended to roofs and housetops,
began to move downward. Washing rains,
chilly winds, flapping awnings sent clarionet
and cornet, viol and mandoline under cover.
One night the last dinner was eaten with my
Swiss host in his little back yard with its
artificial grape-vines in memory of his beloved
Savoy. Even as he and I lingered over our
cigars, clouds rushed across the stars above our
heads, drops fell on our faces, and a gust of
wind blew our napkins indoors after us. I
complained : —
" Surely by this time enough snow must
THE GETTING HOME 181
have fallen in the Alps to drive people
home ! "
At last one evening upon my return to my
apartment a letter protruded beneath the hall
door. I snatched it, tore it open.
They were at home, she wrote. Could I
come the next afternoon for some tea ?
That was all — an invitation to see them, for
some tea, and not sent straight by messenger,
but with deliberation by common post.
I saw — them ! They were all plainly visible
the following afternoon on the veranda. There
was not only tea to be drunk bodily, there
was a tea-party of some fifteen guests to be
assimilated by the rebellious faculties. I was
purposely the last guest to arrive, being of a
mind to emulate her example in deliberateness ;
and instead of going straight, I would gladly
have had myself sent by parcels-post, had it
been possible to take advantage of such indirec-
tion of the Government.
Remembering how we had parted, I did not
hold out my hand ; but the moment she saw
me she extended hers at arm's-length. She was
pouring tea for some one and asking how many
1 82 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
lumps of sugar were desired ; and she poised
the sugar-tongs with a lump in them, as I went
forward, and kept her hold on the sugar-tongs
with two fingers, and gave me the three others.
But the three others did not tell me anything :
Nature for ages has developed the thumb and
the forefinger for the higher needs of civiliza-
tion : the three others are millions of years
behind and remain what they were at the start
— one's tongs ; taking hold of a piece of wood
or of a piece of humanity with the same deadly
precision and impartiality. She gave me her
tongs : my preference would have been that she
shake hands with the sugar-tongs. Thus I
found out nothing from her hand-clasp. She
had been smiling before I v/as announced, and
the smile continued with no difference. And
she looked me in the eyes as though I were
not there, and indeed I felt myself but a roving
phantom of other days. Then bending very
graciously to one side, so that she might
communicate with some one behind me, by
this gesture and with a nod to me, she
intimated that if I would retire to a certain
table and chair and tea-cup, I would find a
THE GETTING HOME 183
companion who would meet all my social
requirements.
The guests were seated for their veranda tea-
party in the form of a crescent. She flashed
at the top of the crescent — its star. The seat
designated to me was at one tip of the crescent
— at the point where the new moon ceased : on
all sides of me but one reigned nonentity.
Unimportant as my arrival was, it seemed by
general understanding to complete the after-
noon social orchestra, which, thereupon, entered
upon the rendition of a stated programme.
Whether I was to be fife or drum, piccolo or
bassoon, yet remained to be discovered by me ;
but it would be the part that none of the other
performers had cared for, they having plainly
monopolized the leading roles of the score.
As I approached my tea-table it appeared
that I was duetted with what seemed an able-
bodied violoncello which had evidently been a
good deal played upon at public entertainments.
She was completely fitted out with a requisite
set of screws — they were plainly visible in and
about her head ; but she instantly conveyed
the impression that some of the strings were
1 84 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
gone, had snapped. No sooner, however, had
she with admirable technique drawn her bow,
than it became clear that the strings which held
good were accustomed to do duty likewise for
those missing. Had but one string been left,
she would have played that to the world with
unabated vigour, and even greater skill, for the
whole instrument. And that made her one of
Life's master musicians : people who can do
that are the master musicians of the world.
The other members of the tea orchestra should
have risen and lifted their cups to her.
From where I sat — at the uttermost extremity
of Cape Horn — an up-ocean view of the other
guests was to be had if any one cared to have
it. My companion soon let me know that this
was a farewell tea-party, the breaking up of the
band of summer tourists and ocean travellers,
who have such insatiable ways of holding on to
each other after they land : they had chosen
thus to drown their melancholy.
The sons of the house were absent ; they
had gone down in a tug, I learned, to meet the
steamer, at quarantine ; had shouted their greet-
ings from the deck of the tug to the deck of
THE GETTING HOME 185
the steamer and then had hurried back up the
bay and back to their college.
Next to the hostess on one side sat the
mother and son, of whom early in this narrative
fearful mention has been made : next to her, on
the other side, sat the sister and the brother, also
of previous fearful mention. I thanked Pro-
vidence that at least they were both there, those
rivals : it was proof that she had not yet decided
between them. Halfway down the crescent on
one side I saw the Paludal Aunt. Opposite on
the other side of the crescent sat the Commo-
dore, and with him — what troubled me — was
the family physician. The two spoke earnestly
together with eyes often turned toward the
hostess. Yet still oftener the Commodore's
glance — which would have made the Byronic
reputation of a Corsair — wandered down to
my companion ; whereupon, unfailingly, the
violoncello rendered back for him a movement
that could not be misunderstood, even by a
spectator : it was a plain capricioso, a palpable
non troppo tar do.
This, then, was the way she greeted me !
There was time and quiet for thinking it all
1 86 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
over that night. It was a beautiful party. They
made up a scene of such irrepressible high
spirits. They were permeated by the luxurious
tranquillity of mind, the buoyancy of tempera-
ment, which is the last hall-mark of the well-
born and the well-to-do. They radiated that
versatility of New York people whose lives
consist in changes from one set of pleasures to
another set of pleasures, the sole regret and
hardship being that they cannot enjoy both at
once. It really was an orchestra. Their whole
conversation was melodious and harmonious
with refined little exclamations and outcries and
reminiscences of the homeward voyage, of things
seen in other lands. They seemed to illustrate
a society given up to musical migrations.
I felt a little betrayed — misused. I had
been drawn into a situation that I could not
adorn, for I had never travelled. Somehow
the experience left me with the comic feeling
of a guest who might have been invited to a
Spanish dinner because he had never been to
Spain — who had been asked to dress as a torea-
dor ^ because he had never seen a bull-fight.
Only when I was leaving did she speak with
THE GETTING HOME 187
me, and she was then claimed by those crowded
about to sever the tourist ties. Quite without
any special interest she asked : — ■
" Did you go home this summer ? '
I said I had not gone home. With the
same smiling inadvertence she asked : —
" Did you write the story ? "
I said I was still writing it ; it had grown
into a book.
That was the voluminousness of her con-
versation. But there was one other thing.
Once I surprised her eyes searching me : with a
look in them as though the tea-party did not
exist, as though she sat there alone among
them — thus I one swift instant surprised her,
trying to read me.
What troubled me most was the presence
of the family physician with a countenance
sympathetic and serious, and the long talk with
the father. The weight of it could not be
thrown off. It pointed like a finger to another
barely discoverable fact — that there was a
change in her : as little as I saw of her, I
saw that. Something grave had occurred. Eut
I could ask no questions, I could do nothing.
188 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
The seating of my rivals on each side of herself
and the placing of me at the greatest possible
distance reaffirmed upon her return what she
had declared on her departure — that the old
tie between us had been snapped.
I did not go to the house again.
One forenoon as I worked there was a touch
on my bell and a messenger delivered a note : —
" Was the tea so bad that afternoon ? You
did not drink yours. You tasted it twice and
then were sure. It might be better another
time. Could you come to-morrow and see?
And if you are writing the story, why not
bring it and read it to me ? I wish you would
do this, for I desire very much to hear it."
The hour of my reckoning with her had
come at last !
The house was very quiet as I walked
through the hall. I had been received at the
door with the guarded air that the visitor was
to be no one else. When I stepped out on
the veranda, at one end of it she had already
risen to greet me — alone.
She stood quite still, statuelike. The veranda
might have been some beautifully draped salon
THE GETTING HOME 189
of sculpture and she the only figure in the
salon. Still, statuelike, she stood. About her
fell vestments of the softness and tint of woven
ivory. There were bands of purest white.
There were other bands of blue — the blue of
summer dawn : at her belt were white violets.
Her exquisite head with its banded gold had
a little unconscious forward droop toward me
— as of questioning welcome : and as if there
rested on it also the weight of chastened noble-
ness. There was a change : a new dignity, a
new gravity ; a little of the girlishness gone,
more of the woman unfolded. She gave me
her hand with no more self-consciousness than
if she had placed in mine the hand of another
woman. And she exclaimed with quiet, quick
relief as her eves rested on it : —
ft You have brought the story. I am so glad ! "
I replied dryly : —
" The opening of it. The opening will be
enough."
We had our tea on another part of the
veranda, conversing yet saying nothing : and
then we returned to where she had been before.
A chair had been placed for her in that
i 9 o THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
corner, not the chair of an invalid, yet restful
and as designed to give aesthetic peace to one
who might need peace of every kind, and need
it at once. A little bookstand with books
scattered over stood beside it. For me a table
had been brought suitable to a reader's con-
venience, and beside it stood a chair in which
John Milton might have sat to dictate Paradise
Lost ; it suggested to me my lost one.
Both of our seats faced toward the open.
Ready to listen, she leaned forward in her
chair and placed her elbows on her table ; the
face propped between the palms, the eyes turned
from me toward the garden. It was the posture
of a self-shielded listener who wishes to listen
with her whole being.
Without prefatory word I began : —
A June morning long years ago — three-
quarters of a century ago. A little town of
rich proud people in a land of deep pasture.
On the edge of it an old building of Gothic
architecture with castle ivy on its brown walls ;
a lawn of flower-beds and forest trees. One of
the romantic sentimental boarding-schools of
the South for young ladies of that mid-
THE GETTING HOME 191
Victorian period in the United States. Old
times, old manners, old customs, old actors and
actresses of the human comedy, long since
fallen back to dust.
The characters of the story : the three
maiden sisters who were at the head of the
Seminary ; a young music teacher — the only
man in the institution ; a young farmer whose
estate was several miles distant ; a young
Southern banker and planter from New Orleans ;
and the heroine — one of the graduates. A
chapel scene with the heroine reading her essay ;
another scene under the trees of the lawn where
the lovers meet : they love at sight.
I finished. I had read, not as one who reads
a story, but a verdict, a vindication, his own
acquittal. I laid the sheets aside and waited.
If plainness had been needed, there was inevit-
able, inescapable plainness : now she knew that
her wound had not been dealt by me : she had
inflicted it herself. It was she who had brought
on the storm that burst over her head ; I had
stayed under clear skies. She had conjured up
the destructive hurricane ; I had wended my
way across a landscape of still fruit.
1 92 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
For a long time she did not stir. Then with
her face still at rest on the palm of one hand
she withdrew the other and extended it toward
me sidewise : —
" I understand now. It is all only too
plain."
Her voice took up life where it had been
broken off between us, and she clasped my
hand with long close strength. There in the
hand, not on the lips, lay all her regret for the
wound she had dealt me : for the injustice of
which she was guilty. Both voice and hand
sought to bring back unclouded happy days and
to throw open again the gates of the future.
Alas ! the first unclouded days — they were
gone ! The happy gates, the first gates — they
were closed and never now would we pass
through them !
In an instant all that I had held against her
— and this was nearly everything that a man
can hold against a woman — was blotted out.
Not a word was to be wasted on it, and gather-
ing up the sheets of the story, I said to her as
one who but too willingly begins everything
once more : —
THE GETTING HOME 193
" Tell me about your summer."
She leaned back in her chair, seeking its
restfulness ; the strain of all this had left her
trembling ; almost her face was as a white
violet. With her head at rest, and with her
hands in her lap she said to me with a smile : —
" I have not had any summer."
She studied my face incredulously, for it
must have worn a look of mystification : —
" Have you not heard ? Did no one tell
you ? I am just getting well. There are little
breakdowns and weaknesses all through me yet
because my strength has not come back. And
that is why they put this chair here for me.
And that is why- — " her smile was plaintive —
" that is why I need it."
Her story must evidently be told before
relief could come to her — as it had come to
me. She placed herself at ease in her chair until
she faced me, and then she began : —
" You have thought I had a happy summer.
We went straight to Switzerland, and by the
time we reached Switzerland I had developed
typhoid fever. I was ill a long time — so ill
that I came very nearly not being ill any more.
i 94 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
Another long time I was getting well enough to
be moved. And then for another long time
they were taking me from place to place ; from
the mountains where I fell ill to the seashore ;
from the seashore to the lakes ; from the lakes
back to the valleys ; and then from the valleys
up the mountains again, — with a nurse and
physician, and with every one doing all that
could be done. ,,
She paused to give me a look — almost
aggressive in its self-defence : —
" It was not what happened between us that
brought on typhoid. After they had studied
my case the physicians told my father that it
was probably nature's settlement for my last
year at college and first year in society. There
was a great deal of hard work, that last year in
college ; there was a great deal besides that was
not hard work. There was ambition, a struggle,
to get honours. And from this year of over-
work I passed at once into society. And then
hard work of another kind began there — and
more things that were not work, and ambition to
win honours again. I suppose I never paused
to consider that there could be an end of my
THE GETTING HOME 195
strength, and that nature is made of things
that can only stand so much. The physicians
thought this : that typhoid had marked me as
a desirable subject for punishment — at least for
a warning as to my future ; I suppose the moral
is that if I am ever again a schoolgirl, I must
not strive for honours ; and that if I am ever
again a debutante, I must go to the wall and
flourish against the wall."
The old faint gleams of humour were be-
ginning to return : —
11 But then you see : after I had typhoid
what had taken place between us made the
typhoid worse. Shock and worry made the
typhoid worse ; and then the typhoid made
the worry worse ; and so I had to contend
with both ; and that is why I did not have any
summer."
The current of her thought was seeking the
easiest channel : it were better left to run as it
would with no words from me set up as stones
for it to dash against.
" It was a shock — what you said that morn-
ing. You may not know that a girl's school-
days are sometimes the most beautiful, the most
196 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
sacred. My college life was that — the most
beautiful part of my memory, the most sacred
thing in my past. As it drifts away, it becomes
dearer, a closed experience of my girlhood, a
rounded-out shape of something that I once
was. The shock was that you were going to
destroy this — it was to be invaded, beclouded,
ruined. And that brings me to the other shock.
This I think you can understand. I believe all
young people can understand it : it is the dis-
covery that the older world is going to make
use of us — of us girls and boys, us young people,
if it can ; and it nearly always can. During
my first year in society I had intimations that
people there would use me if they could ; but
you can protect yourself from such people if
you have the courage to do it, and those things
have made no impression. But that morning !
You stood for the world that would use me : by
you I was to be offered to the public for sale —
in trade. By you ! And the most beautiful part
of my life — my girlhood — was to be at auction !
That was when the shock came to me which we
who are young, I suppose, find to be our bitterest
lesson of distrust. It is the old cup of anguish
THE GETTING HOME 197
to the young ; I know it was my first cup of
anguish."
The deepest of all silence had fallen upon us
and lasted. She had leaned forward once more
and with her arms on the book-stand and her
face buried in her palms : —
" I could not believe it of you ! I could not !
Yet I did not know what else to believe. The
time was so short that morning ! And as you
described the story you were going to write, it
was all myself — my college, my commencement
day — my essay — myself — and — you ! '
Her strength showed that it v/as taxed ; and
yet new strength began to come and it brought
new peace. I waited for her to go on and she
asked for nothing but that I should wait : —
" That was one way I looked at it. Then
another way opened up, and all through the
typhoid I never could take my eyes from that.
You came to me that morning, as you had said,
with something beautiful flaming in you. There
really was a light on your face — an unforgettable
light. Then I saw that light go out. I put it
out. I shall never forget the look in your eyes
as you saw me extinguish it. It was as if
198 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
I had murdered in you something immortal
just beginning to live. When I began to think
of that — I got worse. If you really had come
to me in the first great moment of your career,
I had thrown myself across your path ; I had
thwarted you, had tried to end at once your
dream of greatness ; and I think I understood
what a dream that was. Those were the two
troubles all summer ; I was wretched and ill
with the thought that you might go on with
this work ; and I was wretched and ill with the
thought that you might not go on with it. It
was kind of choice between your destroying my
happiness and my destroying your happiness.
It was not easy — that decision."
Thus she shrived her soul of its error, not its
sin ; and that power of pardon in nature which
is so patient with our mistakes when these
grow out of our ideals, that spirit of peace
which never withholds its presence from our
sincerity, must have descended upon her and
granted its absolution.
She turned toward me : —
" Can I say anything more ? "
THE GETTING HOME 199
At the very end she brought out what must
have been in her consciousness from the begin-
ning, and had been held back for that very
reason : it was the crux of the whole truth : —
11 1 suppose all the trouble came about
because I am a woman and because a woman
takes things to herself that are not meant for
her. That must have caused a great deal of
trouble in the world ! But a woman has to
have some faults ! And that is among her
useful ones. Have you thought of a woman's
other peril, the fault just the reverse : not to
take to herself the things that are meant for
her ? Have you the least idea what other
women think of such a woman, what they say
of such a woman ? I wonder what you men
think ? So between taking to herself the things
that are not meant for her and not taking to
herself the things that are meant for her, she
has to walk a very — straight — and — narrow
— road."
She leaned back and smiled resignedly at the
hardships of her sex. For the first time the
old gaiety, the old tide of humour overflowed.
The black cloud which had hung so long over-
200 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
head began to break up and to show white edges
with sunlight rushing through to the earth. She
betrayed signs of fatigue, and I sought to dismiss
the whole subject by making it ridiculous : —
" There must be a kind of woman who for her
own peace of mind should never take a walk out
of doors on a clear night : if she saw a shooting
star, she would say it was being shot at her and
that she knew who did the shooting."
She retorted in kind : —
" When a woman of that kind goes out with
you, you should take the precaution to see that
it is cloudy."
Then with grave sympathetic impulse she
turned to me : —
" Tell me about your summer."
I answered summarily : —
" Oh, I have not had any summer. It was
one morning early in June — now it is an after-
noon in the middle of October : that has been
my summer ! "
As I was about to take my leave, she gave a
little outcry of humorous recollection : —
" Oh, wait ! Do not go ! I had nearly
forgotten. There was something to tell you.
THE GETTING HOME 201
Did you know that you had the seat of honour
at the tea-party the other afternoon ? M
That had not been my opinion, but I took
refuge in conventions : —
" I had supposed all the seats were seats of
honour."
" But did you realize who your companion
was? And why you were not more formally
introduced ? She is to be the new member of
the family : the Commodore is going to be
married."
I thought of the strings that still held good.
She now took up this little story and she
blazed with the spirit of mischief : —
" That was another thing that resulted from
the typhoid ! I became ill in a hotel, where
she had just made our acquaintance. She was
not allowed to nurse me, there were so many
others. But make things for me she did. And
while she showered attentions on me with one
hand, she made nice things for the Commodore
with the other. Sometimes the hands got
crossed and the things that were meant for me
went to him. That showed she really liked
him — her sending him the things meant for me :
202 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
she made an exposure — a Southern exposure. I
liked her for it — for the warm side. It meant
that she really cared for him to the point of
forgetting herself. Otherwise she would not
have had him, for of course I could have
prevented it all if I had wished. After I began
to get well, she and I arranged it — that the
Commodore must be married. We had no
understanding between ourselves. Two of us
women accomplish so much more when we
work without one. An understanding makes
us responsible, and we do not like to be
responsible. So she and I have planned that
there shall be one wedding in the family. It
will be an alliance between the yacht and the
— tug. Which will sail away with the other I
do not know. It will depend upon the weather :
each of them will have the better of it in its own
weather."
We were walking through the hall toward
the front door : she glanced from side to side : —
" And so these dear ancestral halls will soon
not be mine any longer — to rule in them. I
have ruled in them a long time. And now
just when I am beginning to understand the
THE GETTING HOME 203
beauty of being a real tyrant in them, I abdi-
cate the throne and become — a stepdaughter.
What the tug will by and by do with me — that
is a hazard of deep ocean ! M
Just inside the door she threw all this
pleasantry aside and said with soberness : —
" Now will you bring the rest of the story r
I am intensely interested," and for an instant
her eyes questioned mine : then the thick lashes
veiled them. Thus she had released her hold
on the past and grappled the future.
As I walked away I felt much as though I
had been experiencing not in the realm of music,
but in the reality of life a great Symphony of
Beethoven — the Pastoral Symphony : —
A traveller has in his journey reached a region
of country of such charm that he stops there.
But hardly has he entered upon full enjoyment
of its pleasures before a storm suddenly bursts
over the landscape. You feel the darkness,
the chill ; you dread the disturbance and the
destruction ; you shudder most at peril of the
bolt which strikes so blindly and so fatally.
Then as suddenly as it came the storm has gone,
the sun is out again, birds take up their songs,
2o 4 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
the peasant's hymn of praise and thanksgiving
is heard ; and upon the black mass of the
retreating thunder clouds is thrown the music
of immortal safety.
Our quarrel had come as quickly : and now it
had dissolved in rain and light — and in spiritual
music above the dying storm. Still I could but
recall a note of Beethoven's about his whole
Symphony : that the spectator was left to solve
the situation for himself! This was now the
case as regarded my symphony !
There was much to ponder that night, chiefly
the change in her, the growth of nature. This
had showed itself in the filial sacrifice of her
supremacy in the household that her father
might enjoy a second, an autumnal, happiness.
Her displacement as the social leader of the
family pushed to a further stage her aloofness
from its other members : this had always made
her a slightly isolated figure in the domestic
group. I wondered whether that power which
had early taken the place of another parent to
her were not partly responsible — the strong old
house-mother herself — who stood alone among
the other houses. Birthplaces lay upon their
THE GETTING HOME 205
children their traits — their littleness or their
largeness, their weakness or their strength. It
was certain that no other member of her family
would ever be involved in her nuptials. She
had planned her father's ; her father could never
plan hers. The groom would wed all there was
of her.
And it had not escaped me how disciplined tor
matrimony she had further been by brothers —
those big, sturdy, ungovernable, hardy, riotous
college lads. Had I not received of late a sug-
gestive letter from a week-end friend, a dealer in
rubber, who during his vacation had availed
himself of its travels to journey on to wedlock.
In the letter he had reviewed his conjugal
disadvantages on this point.
" Dear Old Comrade of Many Talks about
our Future — Be advised by one who has out-
stripped you on the road to his. When you
marry, let it be a girl who has spent her life
with brothers. Thus you may reap the harvest
of that training which only brothers can bestow.
In the family of my wife there were no sons,
and all the difficulties which she should have
battled through with the brothers who never
206 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
were, are being fought to a finish with the
husband who is. They are not my fights ; my
fights are a husband's fights ; and Heaven be
my witness that there are as many of these as
I can stand up to. So, friend, be warned, be
wise ; and be assured that the distinction
between a woman who has been reared with
brothers and the woman who has not is as the
difference between manufactured rubber and
crude gum. My wife as to her general know-
ledge of masculine nature is virgin gum. She
is still in the Congo ; and I fear there will be
many an outcry about man's atrocities before
I ever get her to Belgium."
Thus I dwelt on her perfections : but what
did her perfections profit me — unless it were
thus to dwell on them ?
Now followed weeks when the world was
without a shadow, the lute without a rift. The
story entered upon better days ; for her happi-
ness passed into me, my happiness flowed into
my work, and happy work is work with breath
and wings. All because there was faith restored
between us and an attachment now sending
deeper roots down into our strength.
THE GETTING HOME 207
She had entered with delight upon the story
itself and upon the study of an old Southern
Female Seminary with its pupils of long ago.
In gathering my materials I had gone to the
attic to ransack musty trunks filled with letters
and books and articles of dress of the period.
Here I had found, yellowed, tattered, moth-
eaten, my grandmother's music -book. The
loose sheets almost fell open at a much-used
place, and there I found a song : "I'd offer
thee this hand of mine." Under it in my
grandmother's handwriting was this memorial :
My Graduating Song.
Much delight she had with this old music-
book.
Meantime the story had begun to move
toward its depths : the heroine began to be
revealed. One day after a reading I received
no praise. Turning to see why, I found her
regarding me with the most curious expression.
As nearly as it could be interpreted it expressed
an amused toleration of what she had just heard
— and of me : she had the air of having dis-
covered what she had been expecting to discover ;
but that I was helpless in the matter, and that
208 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
it was something that she must endure : she was
prepared to endure it, wished to endure it.
This disconcerted me, and I exclaimed :
" What an expression ! That is a new one ! '
Whereupon the expression fled, and she
laughed outright : —
" Is it ? Am I expected to have no more
new expressions ? Do you mean that my face
has already used up its permissible expres-
sions r
Thus with a jest she hid the truth, but did
not remove it. I had been silent once before ;
this time I determined to speak at once : —
" What is the trouble now ? "
Her face grew thoughtful : —
" Do not let it make any difference with the
story. I beg you not to let it make any
difference."
And there came back to her face the same
look, — that the story had laid upon her a
burden which she was resolved to bear — wished
to bear.
<c But tell me what the trouble is ! " I cried.
" I will not talk about it," she replied,
rising to terminate the interview.
THE GETTING HOME 209
This was intolerable to me. I went home at
the end of my patience and sat down to study
the meaning of the mystery. The first trouble
I had understood at once ; she had done every-
thing to make it understood. Here was trouble
that she tried to conceal, and when unable to
hide it, had refused to declare its nature.
But the idea that the story should cast a
burden upon her was unendurable. I withdrew
myself and my work. I stopped the readings,
stopped going to the house. I could have
wished that my apartment might have been
some iron citadel with iron walls, iron doors,
iron windows, iron floors, that nothing could
escape from me and my work to her.
One day as I worked there was a touch on
my bell : a servant stood at the door bringing
something delicately. I received it, and closing
the door, bore it to my writing-table. Lifting
the napkin, I found a card : —
" Blanc-mange for the heroine."
I sat staring at the blanc-mange. It was as
if Judith, instead of taking off the head of
Holofernes for his misdeeds, had walked up to
p
210 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
him and mollified him with a saucer of sugar
and starch.
I returned no acknowledgment. A few days
later a tray arrived with a card :
" Calf 's-foot jelly and lady-fingers — for the
heroine, who is not very well now and begins
to need delicacies. From one who knows the
value of delicacies at the right moment."
I returned no acknowledgment.
Then the iron citadel began to be bombarded.
Things appeared to come through the door,
through the windows, through the floor. A
basket of orchids seemed to arrive through the
ceiling. One day a note entered : —
" Dear Sir — Pardon my addressing you,
being a total stranger. But I am making a
collection of autographs ; and being a great
admirer of your work, I feel that my collection
would be sadly incomplete without something
from your pen. A stamped envelope with my
address is enclosed. If with the autograph you
could send a sentiment, it would be much
appreciated. If you cannot give both the
THE GETTING HOME 211
autograph and a sentiment, a sentiment is
preferred. Do oblige me with a sentiment."
I made no acknowledgment.
Some days later an envelope arrived contain-
ing a small sheet of paper, rose-hued and rose-
scented. On it I found written two stanzas of
my grandmother's graduation song : —
I'd offer thee this hand of mine,
If I could love thee less.
But hearts as warm and pure a3 thine
Should never know distress.
My fortune is too hard for thee,
'Twould chill thy dearest joy ;
I'd rather weep to see thee free,
Than win thee to destroy.
I leave thee in thy happiness,
As one too dear to love,
As one I think of but to bless,
As desolate I rove.
But O, when sorrow's cup I drink,
All bitter though it be,
How sweet 'twill be for me to think
It holds no drop for thee.
1 made no acknowledgment : I thought I
would absent me from felicity yet a while.
The bombardment continued. One day a
note struck me on the breast : —
212 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
"Dear Sir — May I offer a suggestion? It
might be of service. If at any time the heroine
should need outdoor air, you might think of
taking her to the Park ; but there are so many
heroines in the Park ! I am writing to say that
my father has a yard, that the yard has a ramble,
and that the ramble leads to some seats. The
seats are, one of iron and the other of marble.
It is all very quiet and private, and you would
be quite alone there with her. In the stillness
of the autumn sunshine you could be very
thoughtful, and she could be. I myself will see
that you and she are not disturbed. I give you
the word of one who is very much interested
in her welfare and in your welfare and in the
future of you both."
Then I could absent me from felicity no
longer.
It was the middle of one afternoon of Indian
summer. The sunlight fell faint and silvery.
The air was so mild that one could sit out
of doors in a yard with a book: drifting
leaves of the book, leaves drifting from the
trees.
THE GETTING HOME 213
An afternoon of stillness, the stillness of
Indian summer. The dweller in the city knew
that out in the country .over fields and woods
and water that stillness rested : that in the
motionless air hung a faint haze as of vanished
camp-fires, as the burning of many-coloured
leaves in the mountains. Indian summer !
Spirit of yearning for things to be, pain of the
unattainable in things near, regret for things
o-one. In spring the beauty of the world
was sharply defined and embodied ; it had
passed into the myriad forms of nature to
inhabit them. Now all those forms have
perished and before they perished they cast
it out again, leaving it disembodied and a
wanderer.
But all homeless things touch us. And this
beauty of the world without an abode, this
breath we breathe which is the essence of a
thousand things that have passed away, this
threat of the final goal of the universe which
will know the finite no more, subdues us, chas-
tens us, stirs within us our outcry against the
brevity of our joy.
It is so old — this silence and stillness of the
2i 4 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
atmosphere. As it approaches from all sides
and encamps about the city, so once on the
Campagna it beleaguered the walls of Rome ;
it beleaguered the walls of Troy before the
Argives camped there ; it beleaguered Babylon.
All the noise of New York is less to it than the
chirp of a grasshopper on a blade of brown
grass. The noises soon die away ; it lasts —
that stillness and silence of the atmosphere
on which all things perish and leave not a
trace.
I turned into her street and stopped beside
the hedge : it was turning sere ; leaves rustled
under my feet. But I buried my face in it
once more as twice in spring when it was snow-
white with bloom and fragrance. I murmured
in an undertone : —
" How do you do ? "
The reply came at length as from a reverie
half broken : —
" I do not know how I do."
" You are not unhappy ? "
" No, not unhappy."
" But you are not happy ! "
" No, not happy."
THE GETTING HOME 215
" Not unhappy, not happy. Grey-blue like
the day."
"Yes, grey-blue like the day."
Our words scarce reached one another ; a
spell weighed us down. We spoke as though
we were side by side and yet too far from one
another.
After a silence, her voice reached me like
some echo of itself : —
" Did you know that you look like Indian
summer ?
" Is it so bad ? "
" Listen to this out of a story — an unwritten
story : His hair was dark oak-leaf brown like
autumn oak leaves after they have fallen and
lie thick and crisp and curled. The Old
Greeks often spoke of hyacinthine hair — hair
that curls like hyacinths. His was hyacinthine.
Sometimes there was a dry blue mist in it as of
Indian summer. It was not peaceful, but tur-
bulent, as on the heads of young Greek athletes
when they came from contests in the games.
On his hands and face — on his neck — faint
brown woodland shadows lay. Sometimes the
brown shadow on his face had such still depths.
216 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
Oh, such still depths ! His moustache was oak-
leaf brown, no blue haze in it but a tinge of
oak-leaf red under the brown. His eyes were
Indian-summer blue-grey ; sometimes there was
in them a look of such stillness and silence :
then perhaps he was thinking of his own
country. Did you ever read that description in
any story ? '
"No."
"/have read it in a story. Often I wonder
how the story will end."
Her voice seemed to die away upon the air.
Softly I called to her : —
" Tell me ! Is there much Indian summer
in your garden ? "
" Not much. There is never much in any
garden, is there ? Only a little blue pool of
the blue ocean."
c< Does the Indian summer in your garden
cause you to think of things that have dis-
appeared there ? "
" Sometimes."
" Then sometimes do you think how in
spring many things in it acted as though the
garden existed for them, belonged to them :
THE GETTING HOME 217
soil, air, sun, rain, dew, darkness, — all belonged
to them ? "
" Why should I tell you ? "
" Now the garden is there and they are gone.
They passed over the surface of it as a cloud
passes over the sky. And that other flower —
the flower of our spring — the flower of our
youth. It too believes that earth and air and
rain and dew and sun and darkness are for it.
It is as brief as the others : by and by the
garden is there ; youth is gone."
"Well?"
" Why do you keep me waiting ? "
There was a long silence : —
" If I kept you waiting, it would be cruel, it
would be foolish. It is unkind to ask me such
a question. Suppose I should ask you a
question : why do you keep me waiting ? '
" Then it comes back once more to the same
thing — the book. You are waiting to know
me better through the book : is that the
truth ? "
" Would it not be wise ? '
" Then the book is to be the final test : '
"It will be a test."
218 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
" Tell me this : how can it be a fair test,
how can I do my best work on it, if it throws a
shadow on you ? "
" It does not throw a shadow on me : it
sheds a light."
CHAPTER II
Winter in New York.
Low leaden cloud beyond which the eye
cannot trace the disc of the sun. Whirling,
twisting, rebounding winds that sting the cheek
as freezing water bites the hand. The mud of
the streets solidified as rock. Roofs, verandas,
fences, door-steps ; the poles of the telegraph,
the posts of gas light and of electric light — all
ice-cased, snow-thatched. Along the city's
great avenue by night palaces buried deep in
warmth with frosted window-panes ; through
curtains of damask and of lace dim moonlike
radiance glimmers. Waiting chauffeurs with
flapping arms buried deep in their furs like
Esquimaux. The wide river alongside the city
with rhythmic ebb and flow between the sweet
tide of the mountains and the salt tide of the
219
220 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
sea now quieted under the rigour of the frost,
each bank far out toward mid-stream covered
with the fixed ermine and silver of the frost.
In the narrow mid-channel the grinding and
crushing of loosened blocks of ice by the careful
ferry-boats as they barely force their way to
the grey-bearded piers. Out on the ocean great
mystical steamers coming into port as if bring-
ing tidings from the Ice Age of the earth :
their masts and decks spectral with the death of
the North, their ice-plated prows tossing aside
waters as white as breast feathers of Arctic
swans. In the Park under a sky where the
sharp-rimmed moon rides full and thick stars
glisten in diamond ether, all nature snow-hung ;
nights as still, brilliant, dead, as those on Lap-
land wastes.
Winter in New York.
Bleaker, darker than the winter in the city
was the winter within me. The book had
begun to fail. It had opened well, it had gone
incredibly well through the simpler stages.
During those autumn days after her return,
especially, it had moved as on a high pre-
destined road to an inevitable goal. Then
THE GETTING HOME 221
without warning of its collapse it had begun to
totter, to go to pieces, to fall. There was no
failure, no dimming of the first vision of the
work ; in imagination it was a masterpiece yet.
My trouble was the difference between imagining
a masterpiece and writing a masterpiece. The
tragedy of youth and inexperience was within
me still. When the action of the story called
upon the scene the great powers of the mind,
the great passions of the heart, it lay beyond
me, I was no longer ruler over my work.
There were times when I put to myself the
question : Was it youth ? was it inexperience?
Or was I one of those who can imagine but not
create ? Did I swell the vast, pitiful, ever-mov-
ing army of the young who all over the nation,
from cities, villages, farms, when glowing
visions ot the imagination begin to rise within
them, throw down their duties, quit their places,
desert their people, and enter upon the pil-
grimage to New York with faith that visions
will there become achievements ? In me as in
them was it but youth's blind belief in itself,
which mistakes the desire to sing for the gift
of song, the desire to act for the art of the
222 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
stage, the desire to paint for the mastery of
colour, the desire of sculpture for supremacy over
line ? And was it to be my bitter lot that I
asked only to dedicate myself to the highest,
but the highest would not have me, thrusting
me back with the rebuke : you are numbered
among the millions who must work for bread ;
who for all their work will never have bread
enough ?
Now with each reading it became plainer
to us that the story would be no master-work :
this was settled in advance of the end. She
tried to conceal her disappointment — it was
wellnigh overwhelming : I was lowered in her
eyes fatally. But by one of those mysterious
compensations with which Nature so often
equalizes her own inequalities, as this hope
went out in her, a sympathetic and protective
tenderness came forth — perhaps woman's best,
sublimest gift to a failing struggler. And there
became manifest in her at the same time the
practical, all but ungovernable, impulse to inter-
pose, to seize hold and direct.
One dark December afternoon I read the
worst yet. I finished without comment, she
THE GETTING HOME 223
had listened without comment. Finally, at
sacrifice of herself and under stress, she spoke
out with unsparing candour : —
c< Why do you not let me make suggestions ?
Point out any mistakes I may possibly have
seen ? One who looks on so often has an advan-
tage over one who is in action. Why will you
not let me do this? "
With sternness toward myself, I answered : —
" Not one word will I hear ! Not a sugges-
tion must you make ! M
She studied my face curiously : if there was
no room for such thing as a masterpiece within
me, to her there was space for magnificent folly.
She laughed with humorous exasperation : —
" Do you expect to be able to see everything
in the world that / see ? "
c ' I expect to be able to see everything in my
work that you see. It is my office to be able
to discover every mistake in it that any one
could discover. And that 1 will do ! If I can-
not, I am not fitted for my work."
She said good-bye at the door ; it was snow-
ing heavily, and as I stood on the step she
watched, as with a kind of whimsical enjoyment,
224 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
the flakes of snow as they fell on me. I do
not know what enraged countenance I wore,
but something brought out uttermost tenderness
in her : —
" Will you come for a walk to-morrow after-
noon ? The paths through the Park ought to
be cleared by then."
Never before had she invited me to walk.
I went to the Opera that night, and close under
the golden roof of the Opera House I hung far
over and watched Siegfried : watched his youth
— his wild, untamed, singing, shouting, Mime-
beating, bear-capturing, sword-forging, dragon-
slaying, spear-shattering, fire-invading, maid-
awakening youth. Most intensely I studied
him when in the depths of the forest over his
couch fell the forest music, dropping down upon
him from waving boughs and young quivering
leaves luted as by zephyrs. I watched him
jerk his sword from its scabbard, and, striding
to the pool, slash for himself a wild reed, and
with the breath of youth undertake to give back
to the forest its high inimitable melodies.
Naught did he deem necessary but breath and
reed and will — to reproduce those myriad-
THE GETTING HOME 225
linked harmonics of the winds. Again he
slashed the reed and breathed on it ; a third
time he shortened it and blew again. Ever
above him rolled the multitudinous billows of
that weightless sea of ecstatic sound — the forest
D
music : not a note of it on his pipe or within
his power.
I, a youth, was vastly amused at him, another
youth : what would he have thought of me had
he watched me at my desk — with my breath,
my reed, my will, trying to produce offhand the
music of humanity. He made me ridiculous ;
and seeing myself ridiculous I felt encouraged.
The next afternoon I went for the walk. A
heavy snow had fallen, no wind had followed,
and it still lay on the trees as left by the clouds.
It was my first snow-walk with her, and I could
but marvel once more how she always triumphed
over Nature. Out in the depths of winter she
seemed a figure of such unassailable safety. The
exuberance of health rebounded in her against
everything rigorous without — waiting there
ready and impatient for happiness. The long
sweeping ostrich plumes above her exquisite
head were the blue messengers of bright skies.
Q
226 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
Richest dark sealskin enveloped her from throat
to feet, and from under it there came out upon
the winter air the faint odour of some most
delicate flower. The mere playfulness of her
feet in walking was a language — the warm white
feet in a kind of onward dance just above the
snow.
We had walked, and then we were returning
slowly in the twilight. It was the hour of the
great Nocturne of the City.
Before us, as we threaded our way along the
winding snow paths, stretched the evening land-
scape — south and west : the white earth now in
half shadow, the leafless trees snow-laden, the
darker evergreens bearing the heavier burdens
of their kind. Through these a yellow gleam
flashed here and there as the lamps were
lighted. Along the edge of the Park towered
the great black buildings beginning to be fretted
with long vertical and horizontal lines of lights ;
and infinitely behind in the background the
far-spread crimson of the sky. We stopped
to enjoy the scene ; there it all was before
us in one picture : Nature — Man — Dusk —
Eternity.
THE GETTING HOME 227
As we reached the low brow of one hill there
advanced toward us a little pageant of humility
— the procession of Park donkeys on their way
to their stables, to their feed and their sleep.
No doubt glad enough to be on their way
thither, rough -coated, shaggy -legged, under-
sized cavalry of the thoughtless. All day
their backs had been as so many top fence-
rails for gleeful children to straddle and bounce
up and down on : the monotone of their lives
an incessant downhill and uphill, with ever-
changing burdens, but with no change of
burden.
We stood aside in the narrow path to let
the half- drowsy procession pass, and she
stretched out her hand to stroke each beast ;
but when the one who brought up in the rear,
the meekest and forlornest and most imposed
upon of them all, was tripping by, she suddenly
caught him round the neck and drew his head
against her heart and held him until with one
hand she had pulled from under her cloak her
flower and fastened it in his bridle under one
long wintry ear. Emotion in her must overflow,
and it overflowed on the donkey.
228 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
Well I knew who the real donkey in the
case was.
As for the four-legged image of myself there
in the snow path, while this was going on, he
threw one ear forward toward the stable — for
disappointment ; and one ear rearward to his
back — for submission : experience had taught
him that whenever people were nice to him,
they meant to use him ; and as an asinine
psychologist he made out that she now meant
to get up and was but decorating him that he
might look the finer while she rode.
We finished our walk in silence.
After dinner late I was walking up the
Avenue on the way home. The thoroughfare
was brilliant that night : the sky clear, the
moon out, snow on the street, with lights from
lamp-post and doorways and hotel entrances
and shop windows. It was possible to see
what was going on and that was why something
arrested my attention at one of the hotels ahead
of me. A white marble balustrade ran in front
of it, and on this at intervals stood tubs in each
of which grew a dwarfed evergreen. Each of
the little trees was well snowed under. A
THE GETTING HOME 229
woman had paused with her face turned up-
ward toward the balustrade and a tiny ever-
green. As I approached she put up one hand
and patted it as though it were a human head.
Her face glowed with splendid health and
happiness. She wore a hood and a long dark
cloak, rather coarse but comfortable ; and as
she threw it back from one shoulder to stretch
out her arm, I noticed under it the garb of
a trained nurse. In the city of millions that
winter night, she perhaps out on the street
for short relief from hospital and sick, with
warm fresh young blood coursing through her
— she there before the little frozen evergreen
with her womanly impulse to nurse, to caress.
Did it bring up memories, tell a story ? Or in
her, was it absence of memories, a void in her
heart ?
As the pastel of the day I wrote the scene
down that night : I dedicated the little story
of the unknown woman who caressed the frozen
pine to the unknown woman who caressed the
half-frozen donkey.
And that night a further question rose within
me. Here once more I had come upon that
230 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
strange dependence of the human heart upon
some image that is not human ; there was my
threadbare scholar that summer day, tossing his
white flower toward the face of Shakespeare ;
there down by the Washington Arch was my
Savoyard host, cultivating about his dinner-
tables artificial grape-vines in memory of the
shores of Lake Leman ; here was a woman on
a winter night with thousands around her
reaching out to the frozen tree. All one
and the same thing — the human heart trying
to reach other human hearts through images
not human.
Now the question forced my mind further
on : do we in turn use the human as an image
through which we must try to reach things
above humanity ?
What is any man's friend but an image to
him through which he reaches things more to
him than his friend is — that were before his
friend was, and that will be after his friend is
gone ? What is a man's love for a woman but
of an image through which he holds steadfast
and true to what is more to him than she her-
self ? If my friend fail in strength, in loyalty,
THE GETTING HOME 231
in honour, do I love strength and loyalty and
honour less because his image has crumbled and
holds them no more ? If the woman loved
prove faithless or too faulty, does not the lover
turn toward another woman not thus marred ?
And this was the reason why she must wait
until she could be sure that in me she would
find an image through which her nature might
be released in its flight toward more than I
could ever be ?
The year now drew near its close, and my
book of the little pageants of the streets drew
near its end also. On the night of the thirtieth
of December I finished it. I gathered them
together into a bundle of the days and sat
down and wrote to her : —
" The Old Year goes out to-morrow. To-
night I bring to a close a work which was begun
when it came in. The plan was that every
day as I walked in this City of all life I should
watch what was done before my eyes. At
night I was to run over the scenes which stayed
in memory as worthiest to be remembered and
out of these to choose one — the best.
" This plan has been carried out. Not with-
232 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
out effort. The days of the year have not all
been spent at ease. Some have been troubled,
some burdened, some have drawn my eyes from
the deeds of others to the needs of myself. The
nights have not always descended softly under
their tranquil lights. Some have had shadows
deeper than the shadow of the earth ; some have
known storms that raged beyond the tempest of
the air. But through trouble and burden, through
shadow and through storm, I have held on to
my appointed course : that each day I should
look out upon the world about me for some-
thing actual and beautiful, and each night write
this down and carry the strength of it into
my sleep.
" The work is done. I send it to you, it
was meant for you. As I from the end look
back to the start, I see how all the paths of
the days have run into the one road of the year.
The paths met in the road ; the road leads
to you, ends in you.
" It is my way of telling you that you have
been part of everything that I have found best
in the world. Not one of these stories but I
have claimed for you. I have observed no
THE GETTING HOME 233
actor in any scene without displacing him and
saying that you would thus have acted.
" It may be that I shall never accomplish
anything great ; and being found out to be a
commonplace person, I shall soon now be re-
minded to withdraw and leave you to look for
greater things in some other man. If it must
be, it will be. And I shall think you were
right : that being what you are, you could not
ask less of the man you are to love than that
he do more in the world than I have thus far
proved myself able to do.
" Even with the loss of you I shall take with
me one thing that I can never lose : the memory
of what you were.
" You will see that for one day of the year
there is no story. Something is left out. That
lack you will have to fill with your fancy ; you
may sit and wonder what little lost perfection
of the City was not found to tell you in one
more way what I feel. To-morrow that little
perfection will be born — doomed to wander
forever lost because there was no one to guide
it to your door."
The next day I waited for some word ; I did
234 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
not even leave my rooms, lest a message might
come in the meantime. Often standing at my
windows I looked out on the City — the far-
spread vista of roofs : snow slowly drifted down,
they were all white, so that the landscape of
them suggested a frozen sea with ridges and
pinnacles, vast crumpled fields of ice piled in
heaps. The day ended, twilight darkened
over the vast scene, the lamps of New Year's
Eve began to glimmer. Still not a word from
her.
Toward eleven o'clock there was a touch on
my bell ; a messenger boy, his cap and the
edges of his hair snow-sprinkled, his cheeks
ruddy, his eyes dancing with the merriment of
the night, handed me a letter : —
" When the parcel arrived last night, we had
guests. Not until they were gone, not until
the rest of the house was quiet, not even until
the others were far away in dreams or dream-
lessness would I dare begin to read. All to-day
I was needed for things that no one else could
do. But early to-night I had myself excused to
the outside world, I made my excuses to those
at home ; I have been reading ever since and
THE GETTING HOME 235
have just read to the end, and I am writing at
once and I do not know what to say.
11 This I do say first : that having written
this book, you need have no doubt of your
future. To me henceforth your faith in your-
self is warranted, more than justified ; you will
live your dream, you will do great things, you
will go far up the heights. And if, as I write
these words, my tears blot them, they are tears
of joy, a woman's joy in the triumph of a man
for whom she has planned leadership, rank in
his work. Here in this book is the proof of a
thing you have hoped to achieve in the other
book ; here is the touch upon life, the handling
of life, the ideals of life, that face toward
immortality.
" You tell me that you wrote this book for
me. I am unworthy of it ; no one could be
worthy of it ; it is a vision of things that are
perfect ; it is the earthly flame of each day's
deathless sun. It is not for me. I am not
perfect, my imperfections are very many and
very real. You must long since have found
out that I am exacting, possibly you have
thought that in some things I am without
236 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
mercy and without pity. Let me only hope
that if I am exacting, I never exact of any one
that he be mean, that he be petty, that he be
inferior, that he be weak, that he be false. If I
were disappointed by any one in these require-
ments, I suppose I should never forgive. If a
man should awaken in me a great love in him, so
that through him my spirit could pass outward
to life's greater things — if he could not after-
wards meet this need in me, I think I should be
heart-broken.
" No ; this book is not drawn from what I
am, but from what you are. It throws no light
upon my nature, but upon yours. I know you
now as I have never known you and could never
have known you in any other way. By means
of these little stories of every day of the year I
have gone back and followed your road through
it. I have tracked the footsteps of your thought.
I have followed you every night into your
dreams. And often I have recalled with each
story what I on that day was doing. Particu-
larly I have hunted out the story you set down
the day I sailed. I have gone through most
carefully all those written during the summer
THE GETTING HOME 237
while I was ill in Europe. And thus I have
lived over your life throughout the year : I
know how my path ran through it ; I now know
how your path ran alongside mine ; and how
every day from your path you threw something
over into my path.
" But though this book is not for me, it is
the call of a great silver trumpet to me from
the heights. Your faith in me turns my face
upward. It must be true that love sees best,
truest, most ; it is not blind. And if your love
of me has seen these things in me, I can but
hope that not all is a mistake. You may smile;
but if hereafter you should ever come to believe
that any one of these things was not true of me,
I fear I should think that you had grown unjust.
"Thus your offering makes me new to myself.
I see the city in which I have lived all my life
as never before : the streets are new streets, the
pageants are new pageants, my eyes are opened
to what is going on around me. Never hereafter
shall I walk in it without trying to find stories.
A new year, a new city, a new life, a new book
of life.
" Once I told you that you gave me the
238 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
greatest shock of my experience — that the world
would use me if it could. That is the shock of
girlhood. And that was less than a year ago.
But changes have taken place in me very
rapidly : and now I am already enough a
woman to understand the great shock to a
woman — that the world will not have her. The
tragedy to a woman — that the world, looking
for all that it may use, looks at her and looks
away. I begin to feel something of that tragedy
— that possibly I may live unused. If I can
ever be a help to you in your work, may I ?
Do not tell the woman who cares for you that
she can be of no service.
" And one thing I ask — even beyond the
book you have sent me. Perfect as I think it,
I yet leave it to go in search of the imperfect
one which you fear will be a failure. From
what is safe my heart goes out to what is in
peril. My faith in you now is such that I
expect you to do more than succeed ; you will
wrest victory out of failure, and that is the
noblest success a man can win. Now more
impatiently than ever I shall watch for the end
of the other book/*
THE GETTING HOME 239
I stood at my windows looking out on the
crumpled sea of white roofs. Far southward
through the snow-misty air I saw the pale gold
of the great clock dial : the hands were point-
ing toward twelve. And now all around the
horizon, from East River and North River,
from the shores beyond, from the Bay, from
every point within the city, faint and far and
softened by the snow came the melodies of
chimes and of horns — the music of the New
Year Morn. Voices of all nations blent in one
greeting to the city. All the tongues of men
in one tongue of humanity
I a new creature with them — made new by
her ! Her voice was the first that reached me
from the human race with faith in what I could
do. And with her faith now won for my work,
closer about me I felt the approach of her love.
CHAPTER III
Winter, rough - booted, grey -haired, grey-
cloaked, and snarlish Shepherd, had gone north-
ward beating sullenly down before him his bars
of icicles and driving onward his disorderly flock
of dark-fleeced clouds. Spring, barefoot amid
young grass, and young dews, had tripped by,
trailing her fingers across sad boughs and
bringing forth from them the quick merriment
of blossoms. And now Summer of the sweet
breath and the sweet breast and quiet sandals
had come to revisit her matured and gorgeous
realm.
June, the fateful month to me, had already
sent one of its bright weeks away into the past ;
and on a fateful night of the second week I was
to write to the end of the story and terminate
240
THE GETTING HOME 241
the uncertainties of its young pair of lovers.
And the end also would bring to a conclusion,
either tragical or happy, the misgivings of its
author toward her who, for some mysterious
reason known only to herself, had decreed that
upon the finished work she would base her
decision to wed or not to wed him. There had
long been a tacit understanding between us now
that when I read her the final pages, she was to
make known her acceptance or her rejection of
me. And whether at the last moment she
would be prepared to do this, my own will was
fixed. I meant to say to her : —
"You have all along declared that this story
would somehow furnish you with the key to
my character. Has it done so ? Whether or
not this be true, I have waited long and I will
wait no longer."
I could have wished that the end of the story
were otherwise. Books without intention judge
their readers ; they are for them or against
them ; they uphold them or condemn them.
And this story at its finish would almost have
the force and directness of an arraignment of
her for her treatment of me, an assault upon
R
242 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
certain traits of her character which she regarded
as the bulwarks of her safety. The heroine of
the book at the very end revealed herself as all
that she, Muriel Dunstan, was not. When
love came to her in her girlhood, she welcomed
it as something she must not question ; to her
nature if love could not be trusted, nothing
could be trusted ; and in simple faith she had
quickly yielded herself without a plan for the
future or doubt of him she loved. Thus when
I came to read the final chapter, it would be
invested with the brutality of an indictment.
Now, if love be anything that can be named,
it is gentleness. Almost it is enough for any
one to say to any one else : "I love you
because I believe that your love will always
make you gentle with me." And I know that
my whole nature toward her was one worship
of gentleness. Yet I was thus forced by my
work into a position of antagonism, most
ill - timed, most unfortunate, perhaps most
disastrous. It would almost be requiring too
much of her that she should not be wounded at
such a moment — that I should ask from her
the confession of her love of me at the very
THE GETTING HOME 243
instant in which I was stamping my disapproval
upon the elements of her being. And thus at
the end of the book came the greatest battle of
all its many battles. Surely the work ought to
have been of life since it had been as turbulent
as reality itself. With a kind of grim humour
as I looked back over its progress, I marvelled
that so many different kinds of trouble could
arise from the same thing.
It is right that we should wring from our
purses the uttermost farthing for life's greatest
occasions. A thousand inconsiderable hours
are but the servants of the few masterful ones
which give to a career and character its whole
higher meaning. Perhaps with this in mind I
had ordered for myself that evening a most rich
and lavish dinner ; when placed before me, it
was pushed away uneaten. Coming home, I
had thought to find solace through another
sense and had drawn upon some very rare and
fragrant tobacco. Filling my pipe, I took my
seat for the usual quiet hour before beginning
work. And by this time you must be well
aware that the seat in question was at my
windows opening toward the west and south,
244 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
with the vast scene of the city below and the
vaster scene of the twilight sky arched above.
But whether the Evening Star and the New Moon
were together in the clear welkin or were shut
away from mortal ken by cloud I do not know.
Nor how long I sat there do I know. When
consciousness of time and place and circum-
stance returned to me, my rooms were in
darkness and my pipe cold in my hand. It
may have gone out quickly ; it may never have
been lighted.
I got up, and groping my way to my writing-
desk, lighted my lamp. And for a while I sat
there with a certain overwhelming realization of
the mystery and power of the uttered word.
There before me were a few drops of ink and a
pen point and a sheet of white paper, and with
a few movements of the fingers one — some of
the earth's great ones — could trace backward
and forward ,a few simple markings that would
bow many a head in tears, send laughter into
a million hearts, and in a moment's writing
leave his name writ for ages. That was not for
me ; but what was for me was the certainty
that my words would go straight to one heart
THE GETTING HOME 245
and there be poisoned arrows or the wings of
faith.
How serene and clear the lamplight fell on
my paper ! I glanced up at the little statue of
bronze. To my imagination her whole figure
seemed conscious of the battle about to begin ;
it quivered with eagerness ; all the features
were tense with excitement ; but the smile
could not conceal lines of anxiety ; under the
eyes were shadows of solicitude.
My mind ranged backward to old ages when
on the eve of great events images took part ;
statues gave a sign ; marble dripped with the
sweat of agony ; bronze oozed with the blood
of suffering ; on some altar the figure of a saint
beckoned or waved off; at some shrine the
eyes of a divinity were seen to move to the
right or to the left.
I asked for no miracle in my realistic
lodgings. Always I had felt that were I a
taker of snuff, I should take snuff to make me
honestly sneeze, and not snuff that would lead
me to wink even at miracles. On the eve of
my battle my statue gave no sign that was
superhuman. Only the signs that were human.
246 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
And I asked of it nothing more heavenly than
innocence, more angelic than trust, more
immortal than constancy.
I set to work. It must have been toward
midnight that I was impelled to lay down my
pen and look at my own hand in wonderment
that it could write words so brutal — so brutally
true. I got up and walked the floor. Could
not the end be softened, be changed ? Must
I go to her on a mission of life's concord,
bearing a missile of life's war ? How could it
be that a mere creature of my own imagination
— a girl in a book — should have such authority
that I myself had no right to change her?
Must a mere fancy mar life's greatest plan ?
Long I walked the floor ; then coming back to
my work I wrote it down as it had to be, as a
mason hews his block to the straight line, as
the stonecutter drives his chisel into granite.
It was done. I leaned back in my chair.
The hour must have been long past midnight.
I suddenly became aware that the light around
me and before me was gradually dying out.
I looked up at the little figure of bronze. Her
lamp was empty ; the last drops of oil in the
THE GETTING HOME 247
bowl had already passed into the wick and were
being drawn toward the flame. Lower and
lower sank the final radiance. I bent quickly
forward and fixed my eyes on the shadowy
features of that patient keeper of my light.
The marks of the struggle through which she
had passed told on her ; she looked weary ;
she asked to be released. In the words of
Renan when his own end drew near she seemed
to say : —
" I have earned my rest."
" Then you shall rest ! " I murmured within
myself. " Never again shall your light be
kindled for any other labour."
The bluish ghost of flame on the wick went
out, leaving the room in darkness. Groping
my way to my bedside, I lighted my candle,
and returning with it to the desk, set it on one
side near the darkened statuette. Then I went
to a drawer and took out the white scarf she
had left with me that morning of farewell.
Shaking this softly out, I returned with it and
seated myself at the desk, with my eyes on the
bronze : —
" Spirit of my Lamp, your vigils are over !
248 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
Guest of constancy and sweetness, of grace and
light, you did your part ! And now, protectress
of my thoughts, nymph of the heart's clear
run, warrior maid of the spirit's battle, steady
beacon beside imagination's uncharted sea,
narcissus flower that never drooped for drought,
farewell ! If the elements of which thou art
wrought allow thee any share in the balm of
sleep, then sleep thou thus, wrapt in the snows
of purity."
I lifted the statue from her pedestal and
began softly to wind the scarf about her. I
began at the feet and wound upward around
the waist, up to the shoulders, about the neck,
across the lips until only the eyes were visible
Bending over and looking into these, I said : —
" Farewell ! "
I drew the mists of oblivion across her eyes
and wove the frost of forgetfulness about her
head till she was seen no more.
I awoke next morning as the east was
beginning to flush rose colour with the dawn,
and as the light streamed into my room I
remembered how upon such a morning about
a year before I had awakened with my first
THE GETTING HOME 249
thought of the story ; how I had hurried across
the city to announce it to her. Now on the
afternoon of this day I was to go to her and
read the end.
It was another masterpiece of a day — nature
is prodigal of masterworks. Out on the ocean
blue waves were dancing ; inland from the
ocean ran the clean Hudson toward its
mountains, capped with blue waves. That
day steamers would be leaving for Europe,
yachts would spread their snowy sail on the
river.
June ! — the month of the colleges, the month
of the nation's youth ! all over the land between
its two oceans, from palmetto to pine, the
colleges were making ready for their closing
exercises. Wherever in city or town or in
rural seclusion there was one, eager preparations
were going forward for Commencement Day —
that day when the army of the young would
be turned out into the vaster army of the old,
to mingle with them, to work with them, to
fight against them ; to find out each other, to
combine to make a new world, a new nation.
And from thousands and thousands and thou-
250 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
sands of homes all over the Republic how many
thoughts turned toward these colleges ! with
what hopes, prayers, solicitudes, prides ! All
the future would on that day centre about one
figure — the vestal of the college. Somehow
the destinies of the land, its strength, its might,
its power, announced themselves as dependent
upon her with all her frailty : what she was,
the nation was ; what she would be, the nation
would be. Unless she were high, it would
never be high ; it could never rise beyond her
elevation.
It was the Nation's Month of the Vestal and
the Rose.
All day I remained in my rooms, touching
and retouching the last pages. As the day
waned I left my apartments, descended to the
street, and started across the city. As I moved
among thousands, an ordinary unnoticeable
passer, giving no sign of the tragedy within
me, I could but think that brushing against my
shoulder perhaps were others as ordinary, as
unnoticeable, who as successfully hid their
tragedies. From beside me another youth's
story may have started on a journey that led
THE GETTING HOME 251
him to blue-based, purple-aired Capri ; another's
may have journeyed to the Cedars of Lebanon ;
another's may have found its perfume in the
Desert of Arabia.
The sun was low when I reached the house.
The house was very quiet. I was received
with the air that no one else was to be
admitted. I went through the hall to the
veranda, and stepping out saw her across the
garden. The yard was already in half shadow.
As if instinctively, she had taken refuge in that
nook of the wall where the marble seat was
and the ivy and the rose bush now in full
bloom. There it was that I had announced to
her tidings from my masterwork ; it was no
masterwork now.
As I walked toward her, she rose and awaited
me with I know not what marvellous blending
of her girlhood and her womanliness. Both
were speaking in her eves, both were speaking
to me, both said : —
" Be gentle with me ! "
But we greeted each other, I think, without
a word. Of that I am not positive. I do not
know what took place, what we said, how we
252 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
acted. I do remember that before I began to
read some effort was made to warn her : —
c< There are things here you will not like.
They will hurt you, they may offend you. I
am sorry they had to be thus."
She bent her head in acquiescence as though
she already knew what to expect.
No sooner had I begun to read than I grew
calm. Trepidation is for life's lesser things.
Facing the inevitable, the final, it is easy to be
calm. But I think this very quietness in me
increased her emotion. There was little out-
ward sign. The stillness of the marble was
scarcely more absolute than hers. Emotion
expressed itself only in her hands, the dumb
tragedy of the hands.
I finished. She sat in silence, I waited in
silence. Then I turned to her : —
" That is the end of it all. And now I have
waited long. I will wait no longer. You must
decide."
She did not reply, and I turned from her.
Her light touch was on my arm. With a long,
quivering breath she bent away from me toward
the rose bush and began to search it over, look-
THE GETTING HOME 253
ing among its blossoms for one that responded
to her mood and meaning. Her eyes at last
found one, and with a sign in them to me she
drew my attention to it ; it was half opened,
flawless. At sunrise it had been a bud, to-
morrow it would be a full rose. With her
whole attention turned to it she said : —
" Break it ! "
Thinking that she wished to avoid the
thorns, I got up and broke it off, and returning
to my seat, handed it to her. With her eyes
fixed on it she shook her head, declining to
receive it : —
c< Tear it to pieces ! '
I looked at her, at a loss to understand a
request so idle, whimsical, grotesque. It was
too small a thing for me to do. She repeated
her words with sad intensity : —
" Tear it to pieces ! "
I now discovered that there was that in her
mood and meaning which was grave and sacred
to her ; and awkwardly, unwillingly I acted the
part she imposed upon me ; the petals lay
strewn on the ground before us. She leaned
over and looked down at them with that same
254 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
expression of mystical sincerity which often
came to her face : —
" Grind them back into the dust ! r
I would not. She repeated her words almost
as a prayer : —
" Crush them back into the earth ! '
I did so. I had come to realize that her
nature at that moment had need to face life's
possible cruelty, swift pathos, irretrievable ruin.
For a while she looked down upon the ruin.
Then as if withdrawing herself from such a
scene, as if the symbol had sufficed, and she
could now turn from it to safety, she said in a
voice that seemed to put an end to a long
uncertain story : —
" Put your hands together."
I placed palm against palm.
She pressed together her own palms and laid
them between mine — surrendered. And the
whole stem of her delicate life now too
storm -shaken to stand alone, her head sank
lower until it touched my shoulder — there to
rest : there her eyes were hidden.
" Muriel!"
"Donald!"
THE GETTING HOME 255
A low, long-famished cry to her and locked
embraced.
But what to her signified the destruction of
the rose has always been her secret. Many
mysteries in herself I have never sought to
probe. Sometimes I thought that it was her
comment on the fate of the heroine of the
story ; that she, too trustful, had been broken
from the parent stem, torn to pieces by life's
violence and scattered by storm. Sometimes it
has rather seemed that she was thinking not of
the heroine of the story, but of girlhood itself —
girlhood that is radiant for its brief day and
ends with marriage. The sun goes down, and
it surrenders itself to love as the only guide, to
enter darkness with it in search of happiness
and in hope of a morning light.
This, then, is a plodding narrative of how
an imagined masterwork by a youth turned out
to be no masterwork at all, and how its author
passed from a state of grace to a state of
graciousness.
256 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
The book was brought out that autumn
under the title of In Tears Gone By. More
appropriately the title might have been In Ears
Gone By ; for while it came into existence, the
main fact in the life of its author was the
possession of a pair of terrified ears : terrified
by what she said and much more terrified by
what she refused to say ; so that when finally
he ceased to hear the one and began to hear the
other, it was as though his own ears also were
by-gone and a new set of aunculars had
emerged to equip his domelike and much-
relieved laboratory.
However this may be, the book was brought
out, and the publishers, by the practice of those
black arts of which they are such masters, per-
suaded the world to try me again, and the
world having tried me again, decided that while
the story was not just what it wanted, neither
was it just what it did not want. But already
it had become a hope of mine some day to
write a book which, by day while not reading
it, would so bedevil a man with the delusion
that it was interesting, and by night when he
was reading it so deaden him with the certainty
THE GETTING HOME 257
of its being dull, that it would thus serve two
useful ends : to hurry its reader into slumber
when he should be asleep and help him to
stay awake when he must keep his eyes open.
I seemed to have succeeded sooner than I
had hoped. But however that may be again,
out of a widespread uncertainty of mind in
the reading public I reaped my harvest from
a field where all those who bought were wheat
and all those who did not buy were tares : and
how I did lament the tares ! They were so
needlessly numerous.
And thus to the amazement of both my
publisher and myself each of us did well in
point of avarice, though I still think the world
did better in the matter of generosity. And all
this was so astounding to my friends likewise
that they could scarcely credit their own con-
gratulations ; whereupon one midwinter night,
when there was snow on all roofs, my ugly
mugs and dishes came down from the shelf
with a clatter and a rattle ; and a Welsh
rabbit party was uproariously given by way
of demonstration that the host was himself
no literary rabbit. But my friends are like
2 5 8 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
every other man's friends : if you succeed,
they come and declare that it was what they
always foresaw ; and if you fail, they go to
one another and whisper that it was what
they long expected.
The first week in January, one day an office
boy appeared at my door — actually ! — with
the publisher's note of felicitation, and with his
cheque which ran toward many thousands and
really ran past a few of them. When the boy
was gone and the cheque had been judiciously
scrutinized, forthwith I got out my gold-plated
card receiver and with great pompous show of
being both myself and my own butler, I bore
it toward the author seated at his desk as though
it were a peacock roasted in its feathers of blue
and green and gold : blue for the heaven and
green for the earth and gold for treasure. Then
I clapped on my hat and hurried down town and
thrust the cheque under the grating of that little
wicket where the paying teller, my old financial
foe, stood cynical and adverse. He received
it with his prearranged scorn and scanned it
with contumely ; but then glanced up and bade
me a civil, commercial good morning — the
THE GETTING HOME 259
only morning as respects me that had ever
seemed good to him.
I returned to my apartment, and summoning
the superintendent, I leased one of the large
marriageable apartments at the front of the
building ; and thus by a process of both con-
tracting and expanding, I passed from the house
of commons to the house of lords.
In June we were married.
For the wedding journey she said she would
like to go to my country, and thither we went
and saw it when it is loveliest. She insisted
upon seeing the place where I was born, where
I had been " a little fellow " ; and she must be
driven to a certain spot where once had been a
fence and blackberry bushes. It was all changed
now : no fence, no bushes, no little fellow, only
the same sunlight. No inducements availed
with her to be driven to that great lawn and
forest where the other " little fellow M lived
still — though not there now and actually at
that time in Europe on her own wedding jour-
ney. " I do not wish to see it," she said, " not
her nor anything that is hers." As we started
northward again and had reached the boundary,
260 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
she looked from the car window a long time at
the disappearing landscape : —
" Never again ! I wish it to be always on the
dim border of my thoughts. After all, you
did come out of my land of dreams."
In the autumn she came to live with me in
the married apartment, and I turned over to
her my family plate, whereat she greatly
marvelled.
And soon thereafter I set about the writing
— of my first masterpiece ! With her as my
counsellor I place no bounds to what that work
may become. If I did well without her and
despite her, surely with her aid I shall work
some of those wonders which sometimes strangely
emanate from authors who have wives. So
that she seems likely to be one of the most
celebrated of uncelebrated women — the spouse
of a genius : if Nature had only made him one.
Our lives were united, aside from literary
masterpieces, as compactly as half a splendid
red winter apple is joined to the other half of
the apple.
And now before the Shears of Silence clip the
THE GETTING HOME 261
threads which have woven this piece of life's
tapestry and are near the margin of the canvas,
let the shuttle be cast to and fro a little longer
to depict one final scene — that the last radiance
of the whole picture may be left to rest on her.
One cool twilight of last summer we walked
out on the veranda and down into the yard.
The heir of the house — and heir of my royalties
— was already out there in the twilight. His
nurse occupied the marble seat — nurses sooner
or later always get the best seats out of doors, —
and she was slowly pushing to and fro the small
white silken barge on which the heir slept ;
he being still at the head-waters of the River
of Time. I feel some hesitancy in thus refer-
ring to him as heir to my royalties, for the
reason that the servants of that narrow-minded,
bigoted household uniformly speak of him and
rejoice in him as the Commodore's grandson.
To them I am that strange being they call The
Writer ; and as to what this may comprise they
are most uncertain, the butler once on the eve
of an election having asked me whether I had
a vote. As for my paternal activities I am to
them merely the negligible means in the hands
262 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
of Providence by which the progeny of the
Commodore are to be made to appear on the
earth and celebrate the existence of their grand-
father.
As we drew near, the nurse yielded the nook
to us and started across the yard, the little
white silken barge beginning to flutter softly
like some enormous moth. We halted it and
stood one on each side. I do not know what
was in his mother's mind, what his father was
thinking how perilously near he several times
had come to never being born ; how a word
more than once had nearly pushed him back
from the created universe ; how one of his
mother's zephyrlike sighs or one of his father's
groans audible in any adjoining apartment was
wellnigh a veto on his existence.
How many after a few years of marriage
still cherish against each other some grievance
which belonged to the quarrels of their court-
ship, who secretly revolve some mystery in the
character of each other which later acquaint-
anceship has not cleared away. In too many
cases possibly such grievances, such mysteries,
create their later tragedies. Certainly it must
THE GETTING HOME 263
be true that such grievances dislike to come out,
but, then, they dislike to stay in ; and so there is
irritation because they cannot do both and are
of a mind to do neither : until some unexpected
moment arrives and then — the exposure, the
explosion.
We sat awhile in silence : I smoked, she did
nothing — that last test of the perfect happi-
ness of two people with one another. Young
wife, young mother, maturing woman, she sat
there enthroned in peace, draped in the security
of her life. And once as I glanced at her, I
craved for myself that absolute rest of mind
also : and then all at once an old grievance rolled
out : —
cc What was the mystery about the book ?
You said repeatedly that it would be a test ;
that when it was finished, you would know me
better. How was it a test ? How through it
did you know me better ? "
A smile such as I had never seen came out
upon her face. It was as though something
long awaited had arrived at last : —
" You have kept that to yourself a long time.
How can a woman answer a question that has
264 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
never been asked ? If you had inquired sooner,
you might have understood sooner. And then
how can one force the attention of a man upon
himself ; and all this will compel you to employ
your thoughts upon yourself."
While I waited for her to begin her story
I could but notice with how deep a pleasure it
was going to be told ; whenever anything filled
her with pleasure she seemed to glow as though
lighted from within — a lamp of alabaster trans-
lucent with white spiritual flame : —
" One morning you came to me and told me
a wonderful story of your first masterwork.
The subject offended me. As far as you could
foresee, if you wrote it I would give you up.
Virtually I told you at once to choose between
me and the story. You stood by the story.
If you had given up the story for me, I might
have been gratified at the moment, but after-
wards I would never have had anything more
to do with you. A man's work — not work that
is forced on him, but the work that he deliber-
ately chooses to do — must be first with him
because his chosen work is his character. A
man's love of a woman is not his character.
THE GETTING HOME 265
Love of women comes to men of all characters ;
but a man's ideal work is himself, and if a man
be false to that, then he can be false to anything.
Falseness is falseness ; if you are false at all,
you may be false all through. That was the
test at the outset. If you had sacrificed your
work for me, then afterwards you might have
sacrificed me for something else. If you had
sacrificed your work, you would have sacrificed
yourself; and if you could sacrifice yourself,
then I did not want you. You let me go and
stood to your work, stood true to yourself;
and though it hurt me at the time more than
you can ever know, this was the turning-point :
from that moment you drew me to you."
She was telling her story quite as though
I were not listening, quite as though she were
going over in memory her own past : —
" Later, another trouble came up about the
book. This time it was something that I kept
to myself : I did not wish you to understand the
nature of it ; I had my reason and the reason
seemed to me absolutely good. I would not
explain. This offended you and you sought
to withdraw yourself and your work. You
266 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
believed you were right and that I was wrong,
and again you stood to your right and left me
to the consequences of my error. You would not
stop for what you could not understand ; and
that to me is one of life's greatest tests : to live
in the light of all that you see and to let the
unseen take care of itself. I suppose people go
to pieces many a time over things in others
that they cannot understand. Then once more
the book began to fail, and I knew I could help
you and you would not permit me to help.
You threw it back upon yourself to know your
work as well as I knew it, as well as any one
could know it. You would not receive from me
a single suggestion, even to save the book from
being a failure. That was another test, — a
man's mastery of what he sets out to do : it is
perfectly true that if he cannot do his work, no
one else can do it for him. And then the last
test of all ! The end of the book was like an
arraignment of me ; it was like a judgment
passed on me for my own traits of character ;
and you came to read it to me at a moment when
you most desired to inflict no wound, to make me
happy and to win me. But you adhered to the
THE GETTING HOME 267
true course of your story : you stood by the
heroine there and not by the heroine here. And
I liked you best of all for that. If you had
changed your work at its finish with any thought
of me, you would have lowered yourself at the
very instant when I wanted to see you highest."
A long silence fell on us. She broke it with
one of those humorous transitions which mark
the equipoise of her character, its breadth, its
balance : —
" Of course I should not speak of these
things were it not about a piece of my own
property. I am merely discussing my own
property ; and it is a misfortune that the piece
of property happens to be conscious and is
obliged to overhear what is said."
The piece of property did not object to
being conscious, even though wooden. Still, to
him the mystery had not wholly disappeared ;
one darkest spot yet remained : —
" All this is very well as far as it goes. But
the very heart of the trouble has not yet been
reached : everything is now clear enough as
regards me. But as to yourself : what ivas the
unknown trouble ? What was it that you refused
268 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
to explain ? I have always believed that it
related to the heroine of the story."
" It did relate to her."
c< But in what way ? "
" I objected to the presence of such a heroine
in a story."
" But why ? "
c< Because 7 was the heroine."
I turned to her with blank stupefaction : —
" How could you possibly be the heroine of
a story laid in the time of my grandmother —
three-quarters of a century ago — in an old
Southern seminary, nearly a thousand miles
away r
"You transported me in time and place —
that is all."
I pondered this new difficulty : —
" If I had written a story about Helen of
Troy, would you have supposed yourself the
heroine of that ? "
" It would have been my only chance to be
Helen of Troy."
" Do you possibly think yourself the heroine
of the next book I am going to write — of the
one that I have not yet imagined ? ''
THE GETTING HOME 269
" There is not a doubt of it."
" Do you expect to be the heroine of all the
rest of them that I am to write ? "
« I do."
"You mean that I have not only married
you, but I am actually the husband of all my
own heroines ? ,1
" What a lucky husband ! "
cc But you seem to glory in it, to demand it
as a right."
" I should not wonder."
" And so you began by being offended at the
idea of being the first heroine and you conclude
by exacting that you be all the heroines."
" Let any other woman dare ! '
" And so whatever I may write, it will always
be of you ? "
" Did you not yourself once send me a Book
of the Year made up of daily stories ; and did
you not then say that I was in every story, that
you always displaced the actor in each and put
me in the actor's place ? Alas for the vows of
the young lover when they are translated into
the deeds of a young husband ! You have
already forgotten ! "
270 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
I went back over this whole troublous field
and uttered my protest : —
c< But this leaves me at my wit's end. The
inconsistency of it all ! What are you going
to do about the inconsistency ? "
She was radiant with enjoyment of the situa-
tion. There was almost the taunt of coquetry
in her, for though as a girl she had revealed no
touch of coquetry, as a young wife she was full
of it. She now appeared to have brought the
issue to a quarter of the battlefield where she
was sure of victory : —
" I am not going to do anything about the
inconsistency ! That is the beauty of incon-
sistency — that if you try to change it, you
destroy it. What would life be without it ?
We might as well be bees, doomed to make
only wax and fill it for ever with honey. But
only bees can abide with wax and honey. True,
they fight, but then it must be when one con-
sistency runs against another consistency : it
is a fight between two consistencies, each bent
upon being consistent. In human life we make
room for inconsistency ! "
" That is a very fine theory of cloying sweet-
THE GETTING HOME 271
ness for wives," I said, " but I wonder how it
would work out in practice for husbands.
Would this scheme allow room for husbands? '
" Ample room ! Ample or not, it is the
only scheme for us to work with."
She was laughing at me. She reigned abso-
lute on the throne of woman's inconsistency,
and even struck me on the head with her sceptre.
After a few moments of reflection I wondered
whether I might cast an instantaneous shadow
on that luminous nature for the sake of with-
drawing the shadow and showing a steady light
shining behind ; might I be unkind for a
moment, to demonstrate the nature of kindness ?
Slowly, as though the words were torn from me
with reluctance, I said : —
" What you have told me now brushes the
mystery away : it is all clear light in whatso-
ever direction I look. That is your side. On
my side there is something that you have never
suspected. With you it has been an explana-
tion, with me it will have to be — a confession."
That word fell as a chill on the twilight of
the garden. It seemed to come out of dark-
ness, to be a messenger of night, of things not
272 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
seen. I said nothing more. I gave the evil
charm time to work. The silence grew more
intense, and I would not break it. At last I
heard her voice at a greater distance from my
ear — for she had moved away from me : —
" What is — the confession ? "
I made no reply. I could feel fear taking
possession of her. She said again in such
a voice as I could not have believed to be
hers : —
" I am waiting to hear."
But I kept silent and turned away from her
on the seat. She sprang up and came around
on the other side of me and sat close that her
eyes might read my features through the gloom.
And again her tones, now tremulous, broken
with dread and anguish : —
" I will know ! "
I began, moving away from her and turning
my face off: —
<{ Then you shall know. The day you left
me to go to Europe, you remember that you
left me rejected, dismissed — without reason.
And I am human. It was more than I could
endure. And I found another. And it was
THE GETTING HOME 273
she who that long summer shared my loneli-
ness. It was she who smiled, she who cheered
me when I was discouraged and rested me when
I was worn out. You have insisted that there
was a heroine in that story. There was none
in the sense you mean. There was one in the
sense I mean : and you were not that heroine,
she was the heroine. When I married you, I
was false enough to forget her. Now, I begin
to remember her again. That is my confession."
I leaned over and looked into her face : it
was white with terror. For a while she sat
quite still, gazing simply out into the night.
An incredible transformation had taken place
in her : her face became the face of her girl-
hood : marriage had dropped away from her ;
she had repudiated it and me and her child ;
she was back in her girlhood, having fled from
the present to the safety of her past.
Then without a word she suddenly started
up and slipped swiftly away through the twi-
light and her white figure disappeared across
the yard : unconsciously she took the direction
that led her out of her father's home through
the servants* gate : the difference between
274 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE
servant and mistress had been blotted out to
her in her stricken humanity.
I followed and found her at home, lying
face downward on her couch — it had been the
couch of her girlhood — wounded beyond her
strength to bear, cold and shuddering.
I lifted her, and, supporting her, led her
into another room where I had stored some
bachelor belongings.
And there, taking down that image of her-
self from which all her mistakes and weaknesses
had been refined away, leaving only those traits
of her nature which I had always held to and
which I believed would never fail me, I un-
veiled for her, hidden in the white mists of her
scarf, the heroine in bronze.
THE END
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