Part 2

Certainly I meant every word I said. The moment I saw what you had written for that stupid game, I knew you had a marvelous facility of expression. No doubt your father has nourished it by making you write so many reams of criticism; but it is evident that you had a gift in the beginning, the golden gift in the hand. And so, as I am one who thinks no fortune happier than that of the artisan trained to hammer out a phrase, what is more natural than that I should long for you to ascend from prentice to workman? Therefore write me,--"every day i' the hour," if you will,--and by all means drop the letters in the hollow tree. Here in this forest is the happy reverse of the world-shield; let conventions also be turned topsy-turvy, and letter-carriers be eschewed for a box of living oak and a cushion of crumbling mould. I will be your playmate, your comrade; not your friend. I hate the word between men and women. It is a mantle for mawkish sentiment, the kind that stalks about solemnly like a Puritan at a play, seeing all and affecting his own superiority. But, an you will, be my comrade only; let the Forest of Arden spring up again greenly, and let us play at simplicity and outspoken joy; all for the sake of developing your style! But, first of all, I do not like your reason for asking me to write to you; you cannot see me alone, forsooth! and you have a thousand questions which the others give us no time to ask and answer. Nonsense, doubled and trebled! You know enough of me. Be content to take me as I seem, and not as I am in the world's eyes and in my own; then you will the longer think me worthy to walk your Arden Forest. Not that I have anything to conceal. I am no more very bad than very good; but it is the tragic consequence of living in this world that (especially if we be men! you, sir, I mean you!) we idealize and then weigh--admire, laud to the skies, and then shove under the lens--only to find that all flesh is dust, and differeth not, except so much as sea-sand and mountain-loam. So be content to know this only about me: that I am five years your senior (a quarter-century, ye gods!), that I am poor and once was ambitious; that I earned my bread, as governess and intermittent literary hack, until a year ago, when a tiny fortune was left me by a relative whom the immortals loved not, since he lived so long; that I have written three novels, moderately successful, and am burning to find out whether I can write a play; and, last of all, that my aunt invited me down here to spend this summer in what she calls communion with nature. There! the chapter is closed. Be egotistical, you; but suffer me to talk about things seen and heard, not of those pertaining to the particle Me. Tell me everything you will, and without restraint. I may not criticise your style, though I shall watch to see it develop into something fine.

[Sidenote: _Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose_]

Your letter! no, mine, as nothing has ever been mine since I was born, for it was conceived for me and moulded for my eyes only. The words you have said to me, even in those long hours on the lake, under the rose of sunset, are tantalizingly lost, though I try to recall them as I lie at night looking at the sky from my bed; I know their sense, their sound, yet something sweetly personal is gone, like a fragrance escaped. This is mine: transcript of your beautiful soul upon a page less white. But though we talk all day on the lake and half the night by camp-fires under the moon, what can I say to you on this cold paper and with this dull pen? Ah, but the thoughts I send you! The winged invisible messengers that go speeding between us in those silent hours when my father sleeps, and I lie in my tent watching the solemn top of the great pine, and over it the stars! Those messages will never be told; earth has no speech for them. They are beyond the scope of music. Yet there must be speech for them somewhere. They are like the overtones we cannot hear unless our ears are delicately attuned; and if you, in your tent, were lying in an ecstasy of waiting for them as I in a rapture of sending, then would you not hear? But the thought is too great, too terrible. That would be as if we were gods, to taste no more of earthly chills and languors. Do you know what has happened to me since I saw you first? I have grown blind to the rest of this little world. My father's voice sounds far-off and hollow; even his face is strange, as if half hidden by a mist. I do not see the others at your camp, even though they and all their ways ought to be deliciously new to me, like another language. Only when some one touches your hand, or gives you a flower, or treats you familiarly! Then a sudden passion of hatred for the whole world shakes me to the centre, and I long to seize you in my arms, and speed away with you, along the lake and over the hills. I am, in my own eyes, what I have always supposed savages to be; perhaps I am a savage. But there is one agony you might spare me: the story of your life before you came here. Twenty wasted years, and I did not know you! Spring after spring and snow upon snow, when, like an earth-born beast, I was living here in content, rowing, skating, talking with the birds, and you, not fifty miles away, had risen like a star and were gleaming there in that inaccessible heaven. That this should be so, that I must accept it, is terrible to me; but to hear the story of it is like a foretaste of death. It fascinates, it draws me, and yet it kills. That you should say "we" over and over again, when you talk of the music you have heard, the books you have read, is more than I can bear. But I would not have you cease. I must know all, all; and yet it tortures.

[Sidenote: _Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume_]

Frankly, I don't at all like the tone of your letter. I like it as little as I approve your fashion of treating me "before folks." You glower upon me; half as if I were daughter of the sun and you his priest, and half Circassian slave. I don't like it! I came here to these solitudes for rest and mental peace. My mind is lying fallow. Should it waken to any immediate fertility, I don't want to expend it on you, either in antiphonal sentiment or in staving off heroics. To speak brutally, I want it for the publisher and mine own after-glory. If this plain statement of the case doesn't blight the peach-blossoms of your fancy, I don't know what will. Write me about your life here, the life of the woods and lake. You know enough bird-lore never learned from books to write a thousand St. Francis sermons. Even the fish have told you secrets. I fancy they think you some strange, fresh-water whale not to be accounted for. Tell me about them; and drop this mawkish sentiment caught from books.

[Sidenote: _Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose_]

I have read your last letter, but I only half understand you, and I must wholly disobey. For I have learned the meaning of all things created, the sky and the earth, the stars that are the habitations of loving angels, and the worm who seeks his mate. I love you! It is that for which I have lived my twenty years. At last, without warning, my life has flowered, and the fragrance of the blossom intoxicates me, its color blinds. At first I only knew the earth was changed, and that I could never be the same; but I did not translate the knowledge. All the poets had not told me enough; Shakespeare had not prepared me. But last night--do I ever sleep now?--when I lay thinking, thinking, and always of you, my soul spoke and said to me, "So great a thing must be eternal. This longing is like a Beethoven Sonata; it will live and live, growing in glory and color, through the ages, even if it live in your soul alone." And I woke to the sense of it all, and spoke aloud: "It is love!" It is like having a treasure given me to be all my own; for now I have a word for happy use, and I can say over and over, "I love you," and so tell you all. I can whisper "Beloved" in the brief pauses when the others are with us and I have only the chance of a word in your ear. But let me see you next alone. Let me look into your eyes, and demand whether your soul also has had revelation of the truth.

[Sidenote: _Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume_]

I ask myself whether this had to come to you so soon, and whether I could have prevented it. I am afraid not. You were bound to fancy the first woman you met, and that woman chanced to be Zoe Montrose. I know exactly how it was. I have yellow hair, and the sun shone on it. There is always a reason, if one could follow it far enough. It might have been Clara. She was with me in the boat, if you remember; only the sun struck her hair at a different angle, and you never discovered how red it is in the hollows, how like leaf mould without. _Bismillah!_ the gods have selected me for your enlightenment, and their will be done. I am glad for you in one particular only. I am a worldly woman, filled from the crown to the toe topful of earthly wisdom; but I am not of those sentimental sirens who, in the strictest good-breeding, turn men into beasts by dallying with their worship, and then leaving them high and dry on the rock of disillusionment. I am honest, and I will sweep away your cobwebs in the beginning. My dear, there is no such thing as love as you conceive it. What you and the other poets have seen is a will-o'-the-wisp, created, heaven knows why, save that we may learn hard lessons and that the world may be peopled. You feel for me an ecstasy of devotion. You think it will be eternal; that you were made for me and I for you, and that our two souls will sail forever on in each other's company, chanting pretty trifles by the way. God bless and save you! this is the very hyperbole of the poets, and of poets under forty at that. What dominates you is a fever of the blood, an attendant delirium or the mind solely depending on your youth and my passable prettiness. I wish you might have been saved; but it had to happen. I wish, too, that the attack might leave you lightly; but that, also, owing to your unfortunate temperament, is impossible. I can only show my real liking for you by acting sedately, and sitting by your bedside until you rise up sane again and put your hand to the world's work. Do you want this emotion you call love translated to you by a woman who has studied her kind as you study the birds? You say it is, it must be (O, most pitiful cry of the finite after infinity!) eternal. It is nothing of the sort. It is prosaically and sordidly of this earth, especially in the case of men. I grant you that many women do subordinate their lives to what they call a great passion (poor Amelia crying over George's picture! O sad, true travesty of the worship we so exalt!), but it is because they have fewer interests, and because tradition has glorified feminine faithfulness and society built its temples on woman's chastity. But men! I know them. Do not expect me to own, for a moment, that any man is going to worship any woman all his life long with the fervor he shows in pursuing the game. Many are kind, some are tender, even to gray hairs and the grave; but that particular form of idolatry which you offer me like a jewel in a case,--it turns to paste in less than ten years, and I will have none of it. But why, you ask, set myself outside the pale of human kind? It is a joy, though fleeting, and if others prize it, even briefly, why not I? I know myself too well. I am, in many ways, a hard woman. My heart is bedded in a crust of flint, and no daw shall peck at it. But if that armor were worn away, if I did sink my traditions to become all-womanly, if I pinned life and soul and faith and breath to a man--O, I shudder to think of seeing that morning-glow fade into the light of common day. It is such women as I who break their hearts; not your sentimental miss who goes puling about, prating love and religion, and confiding in her pastor. I have laughed long at what I call sentiment, but I am more sentimental than the sentimentalist. I own the awful power of one soul over its opposite; but it is a power to which I will not give way. Now, in plain words, what should be the outcome of love? Marriage. And marriage; what of that? It is a welding of two souls, say you, before an altar where a sacred fire is ever after to be kept burning. According to my idea, gathered from observation, it is a business partnership gilded by certain pretty fictions which no one pretends to observe. For six months, a year, five years, the husband worships his wife with an ideality which ought to turn beggar-maids to queens and queens to angels. Then, plainly, he gets used to her. She is a very good woman, but her like has been seen before, and may be again. His nature has a dozen sides to be satisfied; he is ambitious, he loves art, or money, or his dirty fellow-men. All very well, you say; without such bent, souls would be cramped and torpid. Ah, but meantime the altar-fire dies down! If she loves him truly,--

"And if, ah woe! she loves alone,"

she tends it with her poor, weak hands; but no longer are the ministrants two. The little observances of love are forgotten, or they degenerate into a meaningless form more pitiful than silence. You grant, I suppose, that there is a higher life to be sought, one of aspiration, or holy companionship in great deeds and truer speech,--but as I live by bread, I doubt whether husbands and wives can keep that track together. You are a young Galahad with Lancelot's heart. I believe in you, I care mightily for you in a certain way; but you are a man, and none of the weaknesses of mankind are foreign to you. I am a woman, and, hard as my heart may be, it is made to be broken. Therefore say no more to me about this foolish fever of your youth. Believe me, it is a malady incident to the time. It will pass, in this present form, sometime to be renewed. You will love other women, and one day the unexpressive she will appear who has never once peeped into these worldly text-books. Hand in hand, she and you will learn the lesson together. It may be bitter, it may not. There are those, I believe, whom the gods forget; but I have no faith in myself escaping their thrusts.

[Sidenote: _Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose_]

Why would you not let me talk to you yesterday, without waiting to depend on this poverty-stricken expedient? I have not had an instant alone with you. But I love you! I love you! Who shall prevent me from saying that! You may refuse to hear it, you may leave my letters unread; yet all the trees of the forest shall whisper it with gossiping tongues. But no more of this now. Your letter has made me feel imperatively that a demand has been made upon me: the demand of proving myself a man, and worthy, if any man can be, of the inestimable treasure of your heart. So it becomes me to be calm, and reply to what you say, not with mad protest, but with just consideration. I am a man, and no weakness of mankind is foreign to me. I grant it. (Though my heart throbs within me to swear such fealty as you have never yet dreamed. But let that pass. My life shall show.) Well, and suppose the first glow of new acquaintanceship does fade. Let it go. Might not something finer usurp its place, as the flower is more than leaf or bud? If it be possible that this great rapture should vanish (O, I know better than you, with all your worldly lore! It is perennial, ever-returning like the spring, though snows may intervene), do you think my tenderness would allow one sweet observance to fade? What infinite loving must grow of a daily life together, what fine consideration, what pride in each other's achievement, what mutual joy! I have talked long enough on paper. Take me, and let me serve you all my life, guard you, cherish you, and prove the truth.

[Sidenote: _Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume_]

Tenderness and constancy! that, my child, is friendship--it is not love. And I can gather a very good article of friendship from many a wayside bush without going over hot ploughshares to seek it. Listen, and I will tell you exactly how I learned to interpret the later course of passion. I lived and breathed it side by side and heart to heart with a woman once. I will not tell you her name; she is living, and some time you may know her. I had a friend, and I loved her. She married a man who worshiped her, who was intoxicated by her as you are by me. He was her slave, if I may say that of one who took more than he bestowed; but though he absorbed her life and narrowed it in certain ways, he made her divinely happy. So it went on for years, until suddenly, through some new combination of circumstances, they were separated for a time, and he woke up. O telltale phrase in the life of a man! You don't know how much it means now, but you will know. She was dazed, confounded. Not that he was unkind to her; he was a gentleman, though a gentleman grown indifferent. About that time he drifted into friendship with another woman, led thereto, he would have said, by their kindred tastes. Nothing vicious here, nothing to distress the taste of law-abiding citizens; but a tragedy of the soul. I wonder if I can paint it for you. Here was a passionately devoted wife, taught by every act and word and look of years to depend for happiness on one living creature: to turn to him, as to the sun, for life and nourishment. Suddenly the sun was withdrawn, the light went out; she was expected to see by candle. Do not imagine that she betrayed him to me; we are not like that. I knew because she was so dear to me, and I had lived beside her and learned her thoughts. I felt the tragedy as it was enacted, day by day. I saw her poor face sodden with weeping. I suppose she reproached him at first, wildly, in woman's way. I suppose that because I knew him to be angry and bored. But when she saw little winning attentions which had once been hers given to another, I think it began to dawn upon her that they had never meant anything from the first. They were subjective, if I may put it so: a part of the man's nature, the trophy of any one who knew the password. Then the whole woman hardened. She reproached him no more. If he showered on her some of the unspent coin of his affection, she took it graciously, not treasuring it even in thought; because she dared not build again a house upon the sand. Her individuality grew mightily meantime. She became a creature of a wonderful strength and depth of thought; but her heart is dead within her. Sometimes I can see that she is even amused, in a pathetic way, at finding how lightly his indifference can pass over her. Now this was a good man, as men go. He would have scorned a sin larger than this romantic peccadillo,--but he was a man! He had waked up and found himself bored. And so would you! So far as I have been able to unravel it, what we call love is only a compound of selfishness and vanity. The lover gives so long as the return amuses him. He buys with his devotion a counter-devotion calculated to make him supremely happy; but when the story grows old, he yawns and goes elsewhere, either to smoke, run for office, write a book, or worship another woman. Never imagine that I decry men and exalt my own poor kind. Woman is the more constant only because she has been taught, through nature and inheritance, to give once and forever; and God made man to be gregarious.

I have told you my friend's secret. Now I will tell you mine. There is a man in the world--not you--who holds for me the fascination we are accustomed to call love. God knows, it is an earth-born attraction, for he is one who loves himself far more than he even professes to love me, and there is not one higher aspiration of my soul to which he would minister. He would tire of me, and he would break my heart. Therefore I will have none of him, though a mighty hand seems ever dragging me toward him, and though that part of me which is in love with the intoxications of life bids me make one throw for happiness and then die in despair. And neither will I have aught of you, though you seem to me a young St. Michael with lance of honor and shield of strength.

[Sidenote: _Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose_]