Part 2
In the night, when the sun had gone and the earth had cooled and the dark, dark gray had fallen over all, we would sit again on the doorstep. It would be lonesome there, with the sound of the frogs and of night-birds--and there would be a cricket chirping. We would speak to each other with one or two words through long stillnesses.
Presently would come the dead midnight, and we would be in heavy sleep beneath the low, hot roof of the little house.
Mingled with the dead midnight would be memories of the day that had just gone. In my sleep I would seem to walk again in the meadows, and the green of the countless grass-blades would affect me with a strange delirium--as if now for the first time I saw them. Each little grass-blade would have a voice and would shout: _Mary MacLane, oh, we are the grass-blades and we are here! We are the grass-blades, we are the grass-blades, and we are here!_
And yes. That would be the marvelous thing--that they were _here_. And would not the leaves be upon the trees?--and would not tiny pale flowers be growing in the ground?--and would not the sky be over all? Oh, the unspeakable sky!
In the dead midnight sleep would leave me and I would wake in a vision of beauty and of horror, with fear at my heart, with horrible fear at my heart.
Then frantically I would think of the little radish-beds outside the window--how common and how satisfying they were. Thus thinking, I would sleep again and wake to the sun’s shining.
“You would not,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “stay long in such a place.”
I looked at her.
“Its simplicity and truth,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “would deal you deep wounds and scourge you and drive you forth as if you were indeed a money-changer in the temple.”
VI
THE HALF-CONSCIOUS SOUL
Annabel Lee leaned her two elbows on the back of a tiny sandalwood chair and looked down at me.
We regarded each other coldly, as friends do, times.
“You,” said Annabel Lee, “have a half-conscious soul. Such a soul that when it hears a strain of music can hear away to the music’s depths but can understand only one-half of its meaning; but because it is half-conscious it knows that it understands only the half, and must need weep for the other half; such a soul that when it wanders into the deep green and meets there a shadow-woman, with long, dark hair and an enchanting voice, it feels to its depths the spirit of the green and the voice of the shadow-woman, but can understand only one-half of what they tell: but because it is half-conscious it knows that it understands only the half, and must need weep for the other half; such a soul that when it is bound and fettered heavily, it knows since it is half-conscious, that it is bound and fettered, but knows not why nor wherefore nor whether it is well, which is the other half--and it must need weep for it; such a soul that when it hears thunderings in the wild sky will awaken from sleep and listen--listen, but since it is half-conscious it can only hear, not know--and it sounds like an unknown voice in an unknown language, telling the dying speech of its best-loved--it is frantic to know the translation which is the other half; such a soul that when life gathers itself up from around it and stands before it and says, Now, contemplate life, it contemplates, since it is half-conscious, but it for that same reason strains its eyes to look over life’s shoulders into the dimness--which is an impossible thing, and the other half; such a soul that when it finds itself mingling in love for its friend, and all, it enjoys, oh, vividly in all moments but the crucial moments, when it aches in torment and doubt--for it is half-conscious and so knows its lacking.
“Desolate is the way of the half-conscious soul,” said Annabel Lee.
“The wholly conscious soul receives into itself things in their entirety without question or wonder: the half-conscious soul receives the half of things, and knowing that there is another half, it wonders and questions till all’s black.
“The wholly conscious soul is different from the wholly unconscious soul in that the former is positive whilst the latter is negative--and they both in their nature can find rest: but the half-conscious soul knows that it is half-conscious, still it knows not at what points it is conscious and at what points unconscious--for when it thinks itself conscious, lo, it is unconscious, and when it thinks itself unconscious it is heavily, bitterly conscious--and nowhere can it find rest.
“The wholly conscious soul holds up before its eyes a mirror and gazes at itself, its color, its texture, its quality, its desires and motives, without flinching, in the strong light of day; the wholly unconscious soul knows not that it is a soul, and never uses a mirror: but the half-conscious soul looks into its glass in the gray light of dusk--it sees its color, its texture, its quality, its desires--but its motives are hidden. Its eyes are wide in the gray light to learn what those, its own motives, are. It can not know, but it can never rest for trying to know.
“The wholly conscious soul knows its love, its sorrow, its bitterness, its remorse.
“The half-conscious soul knows its love--and wonders why it loves, and wonders if it really can love any but itself, and wonders that it cares for love; the half-conscious soul knows its sorrow--and marvels that it should have sorrow since it can grasp not truth; the half-conscious soul knows its bitterness, and realizes at once its right to and its reason for bitterness--but, thinking of it, the arrow is turned in the wound; the half-conscious soul knows its remorse, but it is convinced that it has no right to remorse, since it does its unworthy acts with infinite forethought.
“The wholly conscious soul is a chastened spirit and so has its measure of happiness; the wholly unconscious soul is an unchastened spirit, for it deserves no chastisement--neither has it any happiness, for it knows not whether it is happy or otherwise: but the half-conscious soul is chastised where it is not deserving of it, and goes unchastised where it is richly deserving of it--and so has no happiness, but instead, unhappiness.
“Woe to the half-conscious soul,” said Annabel Lee.
“How brilliantly does the emerald sea flash in the sunshine before the eyes of the half-conscious soul!--but burns it with mad-fire.
“How melting-sweet is the perfume of the blue anemone to the sense of the half-conscious soul!--but burns it with mad-fire.
“How beautiful are the bronze lights in the eyes of its friend to the half-conscious soul!--that burn it with mad-fire.
“How joyous is the half-conscious soul at the sounds of singing voices on water!--that burn it with mad-fire.
“How surely come the wild, sweet meanings of the outer air into the depths of the half-conscious soul!--but burn it with mad-fire.
“How madly happy is the half-conscious soul in still hours at sight of a solitary pine-tree upon the mountain-top!--that burns it with mad-fire.
“How tenderly comes Truth to the half-conscious soul in the dead watches of the night!--but burns it with mad-fire.
“Life is vivid, alert, telling to the half-conscious soul,” said Annabel Lee.
“You,” said Annabel Lee, “with your half-conscious soul, when you sit where the gray waves wash the sea-wall at high-tide, when you sit listening with your head bent and your hands dead cold, you think you realize your life--you think you know its hardness--you think you have measured the cruelty they will give you; but you do not know. You know but half--you weep for the other half, though it be horror.
“Still, though you are but half-conscious, though you weep for the other half, when you sit listening with your head bent and your hands dead cold, where the gray waves wash the sea-wall at high-tide--yet you know some of each one of the things that are around you.
“Wonderful in conception is the half-conscious soul,” said Annabel Lee.----
I looked hard at my friend Annabel Lee. Was she teasing me? Was she laughing at me? For she does tease me and she does laugh at me. And was she at either of these pastimes, with all this about a half-conscious soul?
But here again she left me ignorant of her thought, and there is no way of knowing.
VII
THE YOUNG-BOOKS OF TROWBRIDGE
There are two writers, among them all, to whom I owe thanks for countless hours of complete pleasure. Not the pleasure that stirs and fires one, but the pleasure which enters into the entire personality, and rests and satisfies a common, unstrained mind. ’Tis the same pleasure that comes with eating all by myself--eating peaches and a fine, tiny lamb chop in the middle of the day.
One of these two writers is J. T. Trowbridge who has written young-books.
Often I have thought, Life would be different, and duller colored, and less thickly sprinkled with marigolds-and-cream, had I never known my Trowbridge.
Often I have thanked the happy fate that put into my hands my first young-book of Trowbridge. ’Twas when I was fourteen--one day in October, when I lived in a flat, windy town that was named Great Falls, in Montana. Since that time I have never been without the young-books of J. T. Trowbridge. There have but seven years passed since then, but when seven years more, and seven years again, up to threescore, have gone, I still shall spend one-half my rest-hours, my pleasure-hours, my loosely-comfortable, unstrained hours with the young-books of Trowbridge.
When I go to a theater I enjoy it thoroughly. A theater is a good thing, and the actor is a stunning person--but how eagerly and gladly I come back into my own room where there is a faithful, little, tan deer standing waiting, all so pathetic and sweet, upon the desk.
When I go out into two crowded rooms among some fascinating persons that I have heard of before--women with fine-wrought gowns--I like that, too, and I wouldn’t have missed it--but how utterly restful and adorable it is to come back to my own room where there is my comfortable quiet friend in a rusty black flannel frock, sitting waiting--and her hands so soft and good to feel.
When I read gold treasures of literature--Vergil, it may be, or a Browning, or Kipling--I am enchanted and enthralled. I marvel at these people and how they can write. I think how marvelous is writing, at last--but how gladly and thankfully, after two hours or three, I return back to these my young-books of Trowbridge.
They are about people living on farms, and they are written so that you know that red-root grows among wheat-spears, and must be weeded out, and that the farmer’s boys have to milk the cows mornings before breakfast and evenings after supper. For they have supper in the Trowbridge books--and it is even attractive and tastes good.
When the lads go to gather kelp to spread on the land, and are gone for the day by the seashore, they eat roasted ears of corn, and cold-boiled eggs, and bread-and-butter, and three bottles of spruce beer--and if you really know the Trowbridge books you can eat of these with them, and with a wonderful appetite.
When a slim boy of sixteen goes to hunt for his uncle’s horse that had been stolen in the night (because the boy left the stable door unlocked), along pleasant country roads and smiling farms in Massachusetts--if you really know the Trowbridge books--the slim boy of sixteen is not more anxious to find the horse than you are. When the boy and the reader first start after the horse they are far too wretched and anxious to eat--for the crabbed uncle told them they needn’t come back to the farm without that horse. But long before noon they are glad enough that they have a few doubled slices of buttered bread to eat as they go. When at last they come upon the horse calmly feeding under a cattle-shed at a county fair twenty miles away, they are quite hungry, and in their joy they purchase a wedge of pie and some oyster crackers, so that they needn’t be out of sight of the horse while they eat. And the reader--if he really knows the Trowbridge books--would fain stop here, for there is trouble ahead of him. He would fain--but he can not. He must go on--he must even come in crucial contact with Eli Badger’s hickory club--he must go with the boy until he sees him and the horse at last safely back at Uncle Gray’s farm, the horse placidly munching oats in his own stall, and the boy eating supper once more with appetite unimpaired, and the crabbed uncle once more serene. And--if you know Trowbridge’s books--you can eat, too, tranquilly.
When a boy is left alone in the world by the death of his aunt and starts out to find his uncle in Cincinnati--if you know Trowbridge’s books--you prepare for hardship and weariness, but still occasional sandwiches and doughnuts (but not the greasy kind). And always you know there must be a haven in the house of the uncle in Cincinnati. Only--if you know the Trowbridge books--you are fearful when you get to the uncle’s door, and you would a little rather the boy went in to meet him while you waited outside. Trowbridge’s uncles are apt to be so sour as to heart, and so bitter as to tongue, and so sarcastic in their remarks relating to boys who come in from the country to the city in order that they--the uncles--may have the privilege of supporting them. Though you know--if you know the Trowbridge books--that Trowbridge’s boys never come into the city for that purpose. The heavy-tempered uncles, too, are made aware of this before long, and change the tenor of their remarks accordingly--and after some just pride on the part of the nephews, all goes well. Whereupon your feeling of satisfaction is more than that of the boy, of the uncle, of Trowbridge himself.
But these roasted ears of corn and cold-boiled eggs are among the lesser delights of the young-books of Trowbridge. The most fascinating things in them are the conversations. They are so real that you hear the voices and see the expressions of the faces.
Trowbridge is one of the kind that listens twice and thrice to persons talking, so that he hears the key-note and the detail, and his pen is of the kind that can write what he hears. It is never too much, never too little; it is not noticeable at all, because it is all harmony.
It is entirely and utterly common.
And it is real.
In the young-books of Trowbridge, and nowhere else, I have heard boys talking together so that I knew how their faces looked, and how carelessly and loosely their various collars were worn, and their dubious hats. I have heard a grasping, grouty old man pound on the kitchen floor with his horn-headed cane--he had come over while the family were at breakfast to inform them that their dog had killed five of his sheep, and to demand the dog’s life. I have heard the lessons and other things they said in a country school-room sixty years ago, where boys were sometimes obliged, for punishment, to sit on nothing against the door. I have heard the extreme discontent in the voice of another grouty, grasping farmer when it became evident to him that he would be obliged to give up a horse that had been stolen before he bought him. But here I must quote, as nearly correctly as I can without the book:
“‘And sold him to this Mr. Badger’ (said Kit) ‘for seventy dollars.’
“‘Seventy gim-cracks!’ exclaimed Uncle Gray, aghast. ‘I should think any fool might know he’s worth more than that.’
“He was thinking of Brunlow, but Eli applied the remark to himself.
“‘I did know it,’ he growled. ‘That’s why I bought him. And mighty glad I am now I didn’t pay more.’
“‘Sartin!’ replied Uncle Gray; ‘but didn’t it occur to you ’t no honest man would want to sell an honest hoss like that for any such sum?’
“‘I didn’t know it,’ said Eli, groutily. ‘He told a pooty straight story. I got took in, that’s all.’
“‘Took in!’ repeated Uncle Gray. ‘I should say, took in! I know the rogue and I’m amazed that any man with common sense and eyes in his head shouldn’t ’a’ seen through him at once.’
“‘Maybe I ain’t got common sense, and maybe I ain’t got eyes in my head,’ said Eli, with a dull fire in the place where eyes should have been if he had had any. ‘But I didn’t expect this.’
“Kit hastened to interpose between the two men.”
Always I have been sorry that the boy interposed just there.
I have read the book surely seven-and-seventy times. Each time this talk over the horse comes exceeding pungent to my ears. How impossible it is to weary of Trowbridge, because there is no effort in the writing, and no effort in the reading, and because of a deep-reaching, never-failing sense of humor.----
How flat seem these words!
The young-books of Trowbridge can not be set down in words. What with the simplicity, what with the quality of naturalness, what with a delicate tenderness for all human things, what with the rare, rare quality of commonness that is satisfying and quieting as the vision of a little green radish-bed, what with an inner sympathy between Trowbridge and his characters and, above all, an inner sympathy with his readers, what with Truth itself and the sweet gift of portraying the sunshiny days as they are--why talk of Trowbridge?
Is it not all there written?
Can one not read and rest in it?
VIII
“GIVE ME THREE GRAINS OF CORN, MOTHER!”
“No,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “I can’t really say that I care for Trowbridge. All that you have said is true enough, but he fails to interest me.”
“What do you like in literature?” I asked, regarding her with interest, for I had never heard her say. It must need be something characteristic of herself.
“I like strength, and I like simplicity, and I like emotion, and I like vital things always. And I like poetry rather than prose. Just now,” said Annabel Lee, “I am thinking of an old-fashioned bit of verse that to me is all that a poem need be. To have written it is to have done enough in the way of writing, because it’s real--like your Trowbridge.”
“Oh, will you repeat it for me!” I said.
“It is called, ‘Give Me Three Grains of Corn, Mother.’ It is of a famine in Ireland a great many years ago--a lad and his mother starving.”
And then she went on:
“‘Give me three grains of corn, mother, Give me three grains of corn, ’Twill keep the little life I have Till the coming of the morn. I am dying of hunger and cold, mother, Dying of hunger and cold, And half the agony of such a death My lips have never told.
“‘It has gnawed like a wolf at my heart, mother, A wolf that is fierce for blood, All the livelong day and the night, beside-- Gnawing for lack of food. I dreamed of bread in my sleep, mother, And the sight was heaven to see-- I awoke with an eager, famishing lip, But you had no bread for me.
“‘How could I look to you, mother, How could I look to you For bread to give to your starving boy, When you were starving, too? For I read the famine in your cheek And in your eye so wild, And I felt it in your bony hand, As you laid it on your child.
“‘The queen has lands and gold, mother, The queen has lands and gold, While you are forced to your empty breast A skeleton babe to hold-- A babe that is dying of want, mother, As I am dying now, With a ghastly look in its sunken eye And the famine upon its brow.
“‘What has poor Ireland done, mother, What has poor Ireland done, That the world looks on and sees us die, Perishing one by one? Do the men of England care not, mother, The great men and the high, For the suffering sons of Erin’s isle,-- Whether they live or die?
“‘There’s many a brave heart here, mother, Dying of want and cold, While only across the channel, mother, Are many that roll in gold. There are great and proud men there, mother, With wondrous wealth to view, And the bread they fling to their dogs to-night Would bring life to me and you.
“‘Come nearer to my side, mother, Come nearer to my side, And hold me fondly, as you held My father when he died. Quick, for I can not see you, mother, My breath is almost gone. Mother, dear mother, ere I die, Give me three grains of corn!’
“What do you think,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “is it not full of power and poetry and pathos?”
“Yes, it could not in itself be better,” I replied. “And it has the simplicity.”
“And pretends nothing,” said Annabel Lee.
“And who wrote it?” I asked.
“Oh, some forgotten Englishwoman,” said Annabel Lee. “I believe her name was Edwards. She perhaps wrote a poem, now and then, and died.”
“And are the poems forgotten, also?” I inquired.
“Yes, forgotten, except by a few. But when they remember them, they remember them long.”
“Then which is better, to be remembered, and remembered shortly, by the multitudes; or to be forgot by the multitudes and remembered long by the one or two?”
“It is incomparably better to be remembered long by the one or two,” said Annabel Lee. “To be forgotten by any one or anything that once remembered you is sorely bitter to the heart.”
IX
RELATIVE
“Do you think, Annabel Lee,” I said to her on a day that I felt depressed, “that all things must really be relative, and that those which are not now properly relative will eventually become so, though it gives them acute anguish?”
The face of Annabel Lee was placid, and also the sea. The one glanced down upon me from the shelf, and the other spread away into the distance.
Were that face and that sea relative? Surely they could not be, since those two things in their very nature might go ungoverned. Do not universal laws, in extreme moments, give way?
“Relative!” said Annabel Lee. “Nothing is relative. I tell you nothing is relative. I am come out of Japan. In Japan, when I was very new to everything, there was an ugly frog-eyed woman who washed me and anointed me and dressed me in silk, the while she pinched my little white arms cruelly, so that my little red mouth writhed with the pain. Also the frog-eyed woman looked into my suffering young eyes with her ugly frog-eyes so that my tiny young soul was prodded as with brad-nails. The frog-eyed woman did these things to hurt me--she hated me for being one of the very lovely creatures in Japan. She was a vile, ugly wretch.
“That was not relative. I tell you that was not relative,” said Annabel Lee.
“If I had been an awkward, overgrown, bloodless animal and that frog-eyed woman had pinched my little white arms--still _she_ would have been a vile, ugly wretch.
“If I had been a vicious spirit and that frog-eyed woman had looked into my vicious eyes with her ugly frog-eyes--still _she_ would have been a vile, ugly wretch.
“If I had been a hateful little thing, instead of a gently-bred, gently-living, pitiful-to-the-poor maiden, and that frog-eyed woman had hated me with all her frog-heart--still _she_ would have been a vile, ugly wretch.
“If that frog-eyed woman had stood alone in Japan with no human being to compare her to--still the frog-eyed woman would have been a vile, ugly wretch.
“She has left her horrid frog-mark on my fair soul. Not anything beneath the worshiped sun can ever blot out the horrid frog-mark from my fair soul. A thousand curses on the ugly, frog-eyed woman,” said Annabel Lee, tranquilly.
“Then that, for one thing, is not relative,” I said. “But perhaps that is because of the power and the depth of your eyes and your fair soul. Where there are no eyes and no fair souls--at least where the eyes and the fair souls can not be considered as themselves, but only as things without feeling for life--then are not things relative?”