Part 1

Chapter 14,213 wordsPublic domain

My Friend Annabel Lee

[Photograph: Author’s portrait] [Signature: Mary MacLane]

MY FRIEND ANNABEL LEE

BY Mary MacLane

Chicago Herbert S. Stone and Company MCMIII

TO LUCY GRAY, IN CHICAGO THIS BOOK AND ONE PALE LAVENDER FLOWER OF AMARANTH

MONTREAL JULY, 1903

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE I. The Coming of Annabel Lee 1 II. The Flat Surfaces of Things 7 III. My Friend Annabel Lee 13 IV. Boston 15 V. A Small House in the Country 29 VI. The Half-Conscious Soul 35 VII. The Young-Books of Trowbridge 43 VIII. “Give Me Three Grains of Corn, Mother” 55 IX. Relative 61 X. Minnie Maddern Fiske 69 XI. Like a Stone Wall 81 XII. To Fall in Love 89 XIII. When I Went to the Butte High School 97 XIV. “And Mary MacLane and Me” 113 XV. A Story of Spoon-Bills 131 XVI. A Measure of Sorrow 153 XVII. A Lute with no Strings 163 XVIII. Another Vision of my Friend Annabel Lee 173 XIX. The Art of Contemplation 183 XX. Concerning Little Willy Kaatenstein 193 XXI. A Bond of Sympathy 225 XXII. The Message of a Tender Soul 233 XXIII. Me to My Friend Annabel Lee 241 XXIV. My Friend Annabel Lee to Me 255 XXV. The Golden Ripple 257

My Friend Annabel Lee

THE COMING OF ANNABEL LEE

But the only person in Boston town who has given me of the treasure of her heart, and the treasure of her mind, and the touch of her fair hand in friendship, is Annabel Lee.

Since I looked for no friendship whatsoever in Boston town, this friendship comes to me with the gentleness of sunshowers mingled with cherry-blossoms, and there is a human quality in the air that rises from the bitter salt sea.

Years ago there was one who wrote a poem about Annabel Lee--a different lady from this lady, it may be, or perhaps it is the same--and so now this poem and this lady are never far from me.

If indeed Poe did not mean this Annabel Lee when he wrote so enchanting a heart-cry, I at any rate shall always mean this Annabel Lee when Poe’s enchanting heart-cry runs in my mind.

Forsooth Poe’s Annabel Lee was not so enchanting as this Annabel Lee.

I think this as I gaze up at her graceful little figure standing on my shelf; her wonderful expressive little face; her strange white hands; her hair bound and twisted into glittering black ropes and wound tightly around her head.

Were you to see her you would say that Annabel Lee is only a very pretty little black and terra-cotta and white statue of a Japanese woman. And forthwith you would be greatly mistaken.

It is true that she had stood in extremely dusty durance vile, in a Japanese shop in Boylston street, for months before I found her. It is also true that I fell instantly in love with her, and that on payment of a few strange dollars to the shop-keeper, I rescued her from her surroundings and bore her out to where I live by the sea--the sea where these wonderful, wide, green waves are rolling, rolling, rolling always. Annabel Lee hears these waves, and I hear them, at times holding our breath and listening until our eyes are strained with listening and with some haunting terror, and the low rushing goes to our two pale souls.

For though my friend Annabel Lee lived dumbly and dustily for months in the shop in Boylston street, as if she were indeed but a porcelain statue, and though she was purchased with a price, still my friend Annabel Lee is exquisitely human.

There are days when she fills my life with herself.

She gives rise to manifold emotions which do not bring rest.

It was not I who named her Annabel Lee. That was always her name--that is who she is. It is not a Japanese name, to be sure--and she is certainly a native of Japan. But among the myriad names that are, that alone is the one which suits her; and she alone of the myriad maidens in the world is the one to wear it.

She wears it matchlessly.

I have the friendship of Annabel Lee; but for her love, that is different.

Annabel Lee is like no one you have known. She is quite unlike them all. Times I almost can feel a subtle, conscious love coming from her finger-tips to my forehead. And I, at one-and-twenty, am thrilled with thrills.

Forsooth, at one-and-twenty, in spite of Boston and all, there are moments when one can yet thrill.

But other times I look up and perchance her eyes will meet mine with a look that is cold and penetrating and contemptuous and confounding.

Other times I look up and see her eyes full of indifference, full of tranquillity, full of dull deadly quiet.

Came Annabel Lee from out of Boylston street in Boston. And lo, she was so adorable, so fascinating, so lovable, that straightway I adored her; I was fascinated by her; I loved her.

I love her tenderly. For why, I know not. How can there be accounting for the places one’s loves will rest?

Sometimes my friend Annabel Lee is negative and sometimes she is positive.

Sometimes when my mind seems to have wandered infinitely far from her I realize suddenly that ’tis she who holds it enthralled. Whatsoever I see in Boston or in the vision of the wide world my judgment of it is prejudiced in ways by the existence of my friend Annabel Lee--the more so that it’s mostly unconscious prejudice.

Annabel Lee’s is an intense personality--one meets with intense personalities now and again, in children or in bull-dogs or in persons like my friend Annabel Lee.

And I never tire of looking at Annabel Lee, and I never tire of listening to her, and I never tire of thinking about her.

And thinking of her, my mind grows wistful.

THE FLAT SURFACES OF THINGS

“There are moments,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “when, willy nilly, they must all come out upon the flat surfaces of things.

“They look deep into the green water as the sun goes down, and their mood is heavy. Their heart aches, and they shed no tears. They look out over the brilliant waves as the sun comes up, and their mood is light-hearted and they enjoy the moment. Or else their heart aches at the rising and their mood is light-hearted at the setting. But let it be one or the other, there are bland moments when they see nothing but flat surfaces. If they find all at once, by a little accident, that their best-loved is a traitor friend, and they go at the sun’s setting and gaze deep into the green water, and all is dark and dead as only a traitor best-beloved can make it, and their mood is very heavy--still there is a bland moment when their stomach tells them they are hungry, and they listen to it. It is the flat surface. After weeks, or it may be days, according to who they are, their mood will not be heavy--yet still their stomach will tell them they are hungry, and they will listen. If their best-loved cease to be, suddenly--that is bad for them, oh, exceeding bad; they suffer, and it takes weeks for them to recover, and the mark of the wound never wears away. But with time’s encouraging help they do recover. But if,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “their stomach should cease to be, not only would they suffer--they would die--and whither away? That is a flat surface and a very truth. And when they consider it--for one bland moment--they laugh gently and cease to have a best-loved, entirely; they cease to fill their veins with red, red life; they become like unto mice--mice with long slim tails.

“For one bland moment.

“And, too, the bland moment is long enough for them to feel restfully, deliciously, but unconsciously, thankful that there are these flat surfaces to things and that they can thus roll at times out upon them.

“They roll upon the flat surfaces much as a horse rolls upon the flat prairie where the wind is.

“And when for the first time they fall in love, if their belt is too tight there will come a bland moment when they will be aware that their belt is thus tight--and they will not be aware of much else.

“During that bland moment they will loosen their belt.

“When they were eight or nine years old and found a fine, ripe, juicy-plum patch, and while they were picking plums a balloon suddenly appeared over their heads, their first delirious impulse was to leave all and follow the balloon over hill and dale to the very earth’s end.

“But even though a real live balloon went sailing over their heads, they considered this: that _some other kids would get our plums that we had found_. A balloon was glorious--a balloon was divine--but even so, there was a bland moment in which the thought of some vicious, tow-headed Swede children from over the hill, who would rush in on the plums, came just in time to make the balloon pall on them.

“But,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “by the same token, in talking over the balloon after it had vanished down the sky, there would come another bland moment when the plums would pall upon them--pall completely, and would appear hateful in their eyes for having kept from them the joy of following the divine balloon. That is another aspect of the flat surfaces of things. And they must all come out upon the flat surfaces, willy-nilly.

“And,” said Annabel Lee, glancing at me as my mind was dimly wistful; “not only must they come out upon the flat surfaces of things, but also you and I must come, willy-nilly.

“And since we _must_ come, willy-nilly,” added the lady, “then why not stay out upon the flat surfaces? Certainly ’twill save the trouble of coming next time. Perhaps, however, it’s all in the coming.”

III

MY FRIEND ANNABEL LEE

My friend Annabel Lee never fails to fascinate and confound me.

Much as she gives, there is in her infinitely more to get.

My relation with her never goes on, and it never goes back. It leads nowhere. She and I stop together in the midst of our situation and look about us. And what we see in the looking about is all and enough to consider.

And considering, I write of it.

BOSTON

Yesterday the lady was in her most amiable mood, and we talked together--about Boston, it so happened.

“Do you like Boston?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I replied; “I am fond of Boston. It fascinates me.”

“But not fonder of it than of Butte, in Montana?”

“Oh, no,” said I, hastily. “Butte in Montana is my first love. There are barren mountains there--they are with me always. Boston doesn’t go to my heart in the least, but I like it much. I like to live here.”

“I am fond of Boston--sometimes,” Annabel Lee observed. “Here by the sea it is not quite Boston. It is everything. This sea washes down by enchanted purple islands and touches at the coast of Spain. But if one can but turn one’s eyes from it for a moment, Boston is a fine and good thing, and interesting.”

“I think it is--from several points of view,” I agreed.

“Tell me what you find that interests you in Boston,” said my friend Annabel Lee.

“There are many things,” I replied. “I have found a little corner down by the East Boston wharf where often I sit on cold days. The sun shines bright and warm on a narrow wooden platform between two great barrels, and I can be hidden there, but I can watch the madding crowd as it goes. The crowd is very madding down around East Boston. And I do not lack company--sometimes brave, sharp-toothed rats venture out on the ground below me. They can not see the madding crowd, but they can enjoy the sunshine and hunt mice among the rubbish.

“The dwellers in East Boston--they are the poor we have always with us. They are not the meek, the worthy, the deserving poor. They are the devilish, the ill-conditioned--one with the wharf rats that hunt for mice. Except that the rats do occasionally try to clean their soft, gray coats by licking them with their little red tongues; whereas, the poor--But why should the poor wash? Are they not the poor?

“As I rest me between my two great barrels and watch this grewsome pageant, I think: It seems a quite desperate thing to be poor in Boston, for Boston is said to be of the best-seasoned knowledge and to carry a lump of ice in its heart. From between my two barrels in East Boston I have seen humanity, oh, so brutal, oh, so barbarous as ever it could have been in merrie England in the reign of good old Harry the Eighth.----

“And so then that is very interesting.”

“In truth it is so,” said my friend Annabel Lee.

“Boston is fair, and very fair.--Tell me more.”

“And times,” I said, “I sit in one of the window-seats on the stairway of the Public Library. And I look at the walls. A Frenchman with a marvelous fancy and great skill in his finger-ends has worked on those walls. He painted there the emblems of all the world’s great material things of all ages. And over them he painted a thin gray veil of those things that are not material, that come from no age, that are with us, around us, above us--as they were with the children of Israel, with the dwellers in Pompeii, with the fair cities of Greece and the inhabitants thereof.

“I have looked at the paintings and I have been dazzled and transported. What is there not upon those walls!

“I have seen, in truth, ‘the vision of the world and all the wonder that shall be.’

“I have seen the struggling of the chrysalis-soul and its bursting into light; I have seen the divinity that doth sometime hedge the earth; I have looked at a conception of Poetry and I have heard the thin, rhythmic sounds of shawms and stringed instruments; and I have heard low, voluptuous music from within the temple--human voices like sweet jessamine; I have seen the fascinating idolatry of pagans--and I have seen, pale in the evening by the light of a star, the wooden figure of the Cross; I have leaned over the edge of a chasm and beheld the things of old--the army of Hannibal before Carthage--the Norsemen going down to the sea in ships--the futile, savage fighting of Goths and Vandals; I have seen science and art within the walled cities, and I have seen frail little lambs gamboling by the side of the brook; I have seen night-shades lowering over occult works, and I have seen bees flying heavy-laden to their hives on a fine summer’s morning; I have heard a lute played where a tiny cataract leaps, and the pipes of Pan mingled with the bubbling notes of a robin in mint meadows; I have seen pages and pages of printed lines that reach from world’s end to world’s end; I have seen profound words written centuries ago in inks of many colors; I have seen and been overwhelmed by the marvels of scientific things bristling with the accurate kind of knowledge that I shall never know; withal, I have seen the complete serenity of the world’s face, as shown by the brush of the Frenchman Chavannes.

“And over all, the nebulous conception of the long, ignorant silence.

“What is there not upon those wonderful walls!

“I sit in semi-consciousness in the little window-seat and these things swim before my two gray eyes. My mind is full of the vision of murmuring, throbbing life.

“But what a thing is life, truly--for marvelous as are these pictures, those that I have seen, times, down where the rats forage among the rubbish, are more marvelous still.”

“Truly,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “there is much, much, in Boston. Tell me more.”

“Well, and there is the South Station,” I went on. “Oh, not until one has ambled and idled away a thousand hours in that place of trains and varied peoples can one know all of what is really to be found within its waiting-rooms.

“I have found Massachusetts there--not any Massachusetts that I had ever read about, but the Massachusetts that comes in from Braintree and Plymouth and Middleboro carrying a Boston shopping-bag; the Massachusetts that is intellectual and thrusts its forefinger through the handle of its tea-cup; the Massachusetts that eats soup from the end of its spoon; the Massachusetts that is good-hearted but walks funny; the Massachusetts that takes all the children and goes down to Providence for a day--each of the children with a thick, yellow banana in its hand; the Massachusetts that has its being because the world wears shoes--for it is intellectual and can make shoes.

“And in the South Station, furthermore, there are people from the wide world around. Actors and authors and artists are to be seen coming in and going out and sitting waiting in the waiting-rooms. Some mightily fine and curious persons have sat waiting in those waiting-rooms, as well as dingy Italians with strings of beads around their necks.

“And in the South Station there are so many, many people, that, once in a long while, one can meet with some of those tiny things that one has waited for for centuries. In among a multitude of faces there may be a young face with lines of worn and vivid life in it, and with alert and much-used eyes, and with soft dull hair above it. In a flash one recognizes it, and in a flash it is gone. It is a face that means beautiful things and one has known it and its divineness a long, long time. And here in the South Station in Boston came the one gold glimpse of it.

“And I have seen in the South Station a strange scene: that of a mild Jew man bearing the brunt of caring for his large family of small children, while their child-weary mother was allowed for once in her life to rest completely, sitting with her eyes closed and her hands folded. She might well rest tranquil in the thought that in giving birth to that small Hebraic army she had done her share of this dubious world’s penance.

“And in the South Station, as much as anywhere, one feels the air of Boston.

“The air of Boston, too, is wonderful--and ’tis not free for all to breathe. ’Tis for the anointed--the others must content them with the untinted, unscented air that blows wild from mountain-tops and north seas. But for me, I have eyes wherewith to see--and since the air of Boston has color, I can see it. And I have ears wherewith to hear--and since the air of Boston has musical vibrations, I can hear it. And I have sensibility--wherefore all that is pungent in the air of Boston, and all that is fine, and all that is art, and all that is beautiful, and all that is true, and all that is benign, and particularly all that is very cool and all that is bitterly contemptuous--are not wholly lost upon me.

“If all the persons who go to and fro at the South Station were heroes and breathed the air there and left their dim shadows behind them--as they do--I presume the South Station would be hallowed ground. They all are not heroes, but they breathe the air and leave their dim shadows, whatever they may be, and ever after the air of the South Station is tinctured. And since more than a half of these people are of Boston, the air is tinctured therewith.

“If you are civilized and conventional you may know and breathe this air. If you are not--well, at least you may stand and contemplate it. And always one can bide one’s time.

“My contemplation of it has interested me.

“The air of Boston is a mingling of very ancient and very modern things and ways of thinking that are picturesque and at times lead to something. The ancient things date back to Confucius and others of his ilk--and the modern ones are tinted with Lilian Whiting and newspapers and the theater.

“One is half-conscious of this as one contemplates, and one’s thought is, ‘Woe is me that I have my habitation among the tents of Kedar!’ One exclaims this not so much that one considers oneself benighted, but that one is very sure that the air of Boston considers one so. To be sure, it ought to know, but, somehow, as yet one is content to bide one’s time.

“But yes. There is a beatified quality in the air of Boston. It is tinted with rose and blue. It sounds, remotely, of chimes and flutes. You feel it, perchance, when you sit within the subdued, brilliant stillness of Trinity church--when you walk among the green and gold fields about Brookline and Cambridge, where orchids are lifting up their pale, soft lips--when you are in the Museum of Fine Arts and see, hanging on the wall, a small dull-toned picture that is old--so old!

“Music is in the air of Boston. It pours into the heart like fire and flood--it awakens the soul from its dreaming--it sends the human being out into the many-colored pathways to see, to suffer, it may be--yes, surely to suffer--but to live, oh, to live!

“One can see in the mists the slender, gray figure of one’s own soul rising and going to mingle with all these. In spite of the clouds about it, one knows its going and that it is well. It was long since said: ‘My beloved has gone down into her garden to the bed of spices, to feed in the gardens and to gather lilies.’ And now again is the beloved in the garden, and in those moments, oh, life is fair”----

My friend Annabel Lee opened her lips--her lips like damp, red quince-blooms in the spring-time--and told me that there were times when I interested her, times when I amused her mightily, and times when in me she made some rare discoveries.

But which of the three this time was, she has not told.

A SMALL HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY

But Boston--or even Butte in Montana--is not to be compared to a lodging-place far down in the country: a tiny house by the side of a fishy, mossy pond, in summer-time, with the hot sun shining on the door-step, and a clump of willows and an oak-tree growing near; on the side of the house where the sun is bright in the morning, some small square beds of radishes, and pale-green heads of lettuce, and straight, neat rows of young onions, with the moist earth showing black between the rows; and a few green peas growing by a small fence; and on the other side of the little house grass will grow--tall rank grass and some hardy weeds, and perhaps a tiger-lily or two will come up unawares. The fishy pond will not be too near the house, nor too far away--but near enough so that the singing of the frogs in the night will sound clear and loud.

Rolling hills will be lying fair and green at a distance, and cattle will wander and graze upon them in the shade of low-hanging branches. On still afternoons a quail or a pheasant will be heard calling in the woods.

The air that will blow down the long gentle uplands will be very sweet. The message that it brings, as it touches my cheeks and my lips and my forehead, will be one of exceeding deep peace.

I would live in the little house with a friend of my heart--a friend in the shadows and half-lights and brilliances. For if the hearts of two are tuned in accord the harmony may be of exquisite tenor.

In the very early morning I would sit on the doorstep where the sun shines, and my eyes would look off at the prospect. Life would throb in my veins.

In the middle of the forenoon I would be kneeling in the beds of radishes and slim young onions and lettuce, pulling the weeds from among them and staining my two hands with black roots.

In the middle of the day I would sit in the shade, but where I could see the sunshine touching the brilliant greenness, near the house and afar. And I could see the pond glaring with beams and motes.

In the late afternoon I, with the friend of my heart, would walk down among the green valleys and wooded hills, by fences and crumbling stone walls, until we reached a point of vantage where we could see the sea.