Oldport Days
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson >> Oldport Days
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"No," I said half untruthfully.
"I can hardly wonder," she continued, more sadly, "for it is only
what I have said to myself a thousand times. Sometimes I think
that I have lived in a dream, and one that few share with me. I
have questioned others, and never yet found a woman who did not
admit that her child was more to her, in her secret soul, than
her husband. What can they mean? Such a thought is foreign to my
very nature."
"Why separate the two?" I asked.
"I must separate them in thought," she answered, with the air of
one driven to bay by her own self-reproaching. "I had, like other
young girls, my dream of love and marriage. Unlike all the rest,
I believe, I found my visions fulfilled. The reality was more
than the imagination; and I thought it would be so with my love
for my child. The first cry of that baby told the difference to
my ear. I knew it all from that moment; the bliss which had been
mine as a wife would never be mine as a mother. If I had not
known what it was to adore my husband, I might have been content
with my love for Marian. But look at that exquisite creature as
she lies there asleep, and then think that I, her mother, should
desert her if she were dying, for aught I know, at one word from
him!"
"Your feeling does not seem natural," I said, hardly knowing what
to answer.
"What good does it serve to know that?" she said, defiantly. "I
say it to myself every day. Once when she was ill, and was given
back to me in all the precious helplessness of babyhood, there
was such a strange sweetness in it, I thought the charm might
remain; but it vanished when she could run about once more. And
she is such a healthy, self-reliant little thing," added Laura,
glancing toward the bed with a momentary look of motherly pride
that seemed strangely out of place amid these self-denunciations.
"I wish her to be so," she added. "The best service I can do for
her is to teach her to stand alone. And at some day," continued
the beautiful woman, her whole face lighting up with happiness,
"she may love as I have loved."
"And your husband," I said, after a pause,--"does your feeling
represent his?"
"My husband," she said, "lives for his genius, as he should. You
that know him, why do you ask?"
"And his heart?" I said, half frightened at my own temerity.
"Heart?" she answered. "He loves me."
Her color mounted higher yet; she had a look of pride, almost of
haughtiness. All else seemed forgotten; she had turned away from
the child's little bed, as if it had no existence. It flashed
upon me that something of the poison of her artificial atmosphere
was reaching her already.
Kenmure's step was heard in the hall, and, with fire in her eyes,
she hastened to meet him. I found myself actually breathing more
freely after the departure of that enchanting woman, in danger of
perishing inwardly, I said to myself, in an air too lavishly
perfumed. Bending over Marian, I wondered if it were indeed
possible that a perfectly healthy life had sprung from that union
too intense and too absorbed. Yet I had often noticed that the
child seemed to wear the temperaments of both her parents as a
kind of playful disguise, and to peep at you, now out of the one,
now from the other, showing that she had her own individual life
behind.
As if by some infantine instinct, the darling turned in her
sleep, and came unconsciously nearer me. With a half-feeling of
self-reproach, I drew around my neck, inch by inch, the little
arms that tightened with a delicious thrill; and so I half
reclined there till I myself dozed, and the watchful Janet,
looking in, warned me away. Crossing the entry to my own chamber,
I heard Kenmure and Laura down stairs, but I knew that I should
be superfluous, and felt that I was sleepy.
I had now, indeed, become always superfluous when they were
together, though never when they were apart. Even they must be
separated sometimes, and then each sought me, in order to
discourse about the other. Kenmure showed me every sketch he had
ever made of Laura. There she was, through all the range of her
beauty,--there she was in clay, in cameo, in pencil, in
water-color, in oils. He showed me also his poems, and, at last,
a longer one, for which pencil and graver had alike been laid
aside. All these he kept in a great cabinet she had brought with
her to their housekeeping; and it seemed to me that he also
treasured every flower she had dropped, every slender glove she
had worn, every ribbon from her hair. I could not wonder, seeing
his passion as it was. Who would not thrill at the touch of some
such slight memorial of Mary of Scotland, or of Heloise? and what
was all the regal beauty of the past to him? He found every room
adorned when she was in it, empty when she had gone,--save that
the trace of her was still left on everything, and all appeared
but as a garment she had worn. It seemed that even her great
mirror must retain, film over film, each reflection of her least
movement, the turning of her head, the ungloving of her hand.
Strange! that, with all this intoxicating presence, she yet led a
life so free from self, so simple, so absorbed, that all trace of
consciousness was excluded, and she was as free from vanity as
her own child.
As we were once thus employed in the studio, I asked Kenmure,
abruptly, if he never shrank from the publicity he was thus
giving Laura. "Madame Recamier was not quite pleased," I said,
"that Canova had modelled her bust, even from imagination. Do you
never shrink from permitting irreverent eyes to look on Laura's
beauty? Think of men as you know them. Would you give each of
them her miniature, perhaps to go with them into scenes of riot
and shame?"
"Would to Heaven I could!" said he, passionately. "What else
could save them, if that did not? God lets his sun shine on the
evil and on the good, but the evil need it most."
There was a pause; and then I ventured to ask him a question that
had been many times upon my lips unspoken.
"Does it never occur to you," I said, "that Laura cannot live on
earth forever?"
"You cannot disturb me about that," he answered, not sadly, but
with a set, stern look, as if fencing for the hundredth time
against an antagonist who was foredoomed to be his master in the
end. "Laura will outlive me; she must outlive me. I am so sure of
it that, every time I come near her, I pray that I may not be
paralyzed, and die outside her arms. Yet, in any event, what can
I do but what I am doing,--devote my whole soul to the
perpetuation of her beauty? It is my only dream,--to re-create
her through art. What else is worth doing? It is for this I have
tried-through sculpture, through painting, through verse--to
depict her as she is. Thus far I have failed. Why have I failed?
Is it because I have not lived a life sufficiently absorbed in
her? or is it that there is no permitted way by which, after God
has reclaimed her, the tradition of her perfect loveliness may be
retained on earth?"
The blinds of the piazza doorway opened, the sweet sea-air came
in, the low and level rays of yellow sunset entered as softly as
if the breeze were their chariot; and softer and stiller and
sweeter than light or air, little Marian stood on the threshold.
She had been in the fields with Janet, who had woven for her
breeze-blown hair a wreath of the wild gerardia blossoms, whose
purple beauty had reminded the good Scotchwoman of her own native
heather. In her arms the child bore, like a little gleaner, a
great sheaf of graceful golden-rod, as large as her grasp could
bear. In all the artist's visions he had seen nothing so aerial,
so lovely; in all his passionate portraitures of his idol, he had
delineated nothing so like to her. Marian's cheeks mantled with
rich and wine-like tints, her hair took a halo from the sunbeams,
her lips parted over the little, milk-white teeth; she looked at
us with her mother's eyes. I turned to Kenmure to see if he could
resist the influence.
He scarcely gave her a glance. "Go, Marian," he said, not
impatiently,--for he was too thoroughly courteous ever to be
ungracious, even to a child,--but with a steady indifference that
cut me with more pain than if he had struck her.
The sun dropped behind the horizon, the halo faded from the
shining hair and every ray of light from the childish face. There
came in its place that deep, wondering sadness which is more
touching than any maturer sorrow,--just as a child's illness
melts our hearts more than that of man or woman, it seems so
premature and so plaintive. She turned away; it was the very
first time I had ever seen the little face drawn down, or the
tears gathering in the eyes. By some kind providence, the mother,
coming in flushed and beautiful with walking, met Marian on the
piazza, and caught the little thing in her arms with unwonted
tenderness. It was enough for the elastic child. After one moment
of such bliss she could go to Janet, go anywhere; and when the
same graceful presence came in to us in the studio, we also could
ask no more.
We had music and moonlight, and were happy. The atmosphere seemed
more human, less unreal. Going up stairs at last, I looked in at
the nursery, and found my pet rather flushed, and I fancied that
she stirred uneasily. It passed, whatever it was; for next
morning she came in to wake me, looking, as usual, as if a new
heaven and earth had been coined purposely for her since she went
to sleep. We had our usual long and important discourse,--this
time tending to protracted narrative, of the Mother-Goose
description,--until, if it had been possible for any human being
to be late for breakfast in that house, we should have been the
offenders. But she ultimately went downstairs on my shoulder,
and, as Kenmure and Laura were already out rowing, the baby put
me in her own place, sat in her mother's chair, and ruled me with
a rod of iron. How wonderful was the instinct by which this
little creature, who so seldom heard one word of parental
severity or parental fondness, knew so thoroughly the language of
both! Had I been the most depraved of children, or the most
angelic, I could not have been more sternly excluded from the
sugar-bowl, or more overwhelmed with compensating kisses.
Later on that day, while little Marian was taking the very
profoundest nap that ever a baby was blessed with, (she had a
pretty way of dropping asleep in unexpected corners of the house,
like a kitten,) I somehow strayed into a confidential talk with
Janet about her mistress. I was rather troubled to find that all
her loyalty was for Laura, with nothing left for Kenmure, whom,
indeed, she seemed to regard as a sort of objectionable altar, on
which her darlings were being sacrificed. When she came to
particulars, certain stray fears of my own were confirmed. It
seemed that Laura's constitution was not fit, Janet averred, to
bear these irregular hours, early and late; and she plaintively
dwelt on the untasted oatmeal in the morning, the insufficient
luncheon, the precarious dinner, the excessive walking and
boating, the evening damps. There was coming to be a look about
Laura such as her mother had, who died at thirty. As for
Marian,--but here the complaint suddenly stopped; it would have
required far stronger provocation to extract from the faithful
soul one word that might seem to reflect on Marian's mother.
Another year, and her forebodings had come true. It is needless
to dwell on the interval. Since then I have sometimes felt a
regret almost insatiable in the thought that I should have been
absent while all that gracious loveliness was fading and
dissolving like a cloud; and yet at other times it has appeared a
relief to think that Laura would ever remain to me in the fulness
of her beauty, not a tint faded, not a lineament changed. With
all my efforts, I arrived only in time to accompany Kenmure home
at night, after the funeral service. We paused at the door of the
empty house,--how empty! I hesitated, but Kenmure motioned to me
to follow him in.
We passed through the hall and went up stairs. Janet met us at
the head of the stairway, and asked me if I would go in to look
at little Marian, who was sleeping. I begged Kenmure to go also
but he refused, almost savagely, and went on with heavy step into
Laura's deserted room.
Almost the moment I entered the child's chamber, she waked up
suddenly, looked at me, and said, "I know you, you are my
friend." She never would call me her cousin, I was always her
friend. Then she sat up in bed, with her eyes wide open, and
said, as if stating a problem which had been put by for my
solution, "I should like to see my mother."
How our hearts are rent by the unquestioning faith of children,
when they come to test the love that has so often worked what
seemed to them miracles,--and ask of it miracles indeed! I tried
to explain to her the continued existence of her mother, and she
listened to it as if her eyes drank in all that I could say, and
more. But the apparent distance between earth and heaven baffled
her baby mind, as it so often and so sadly baffles the thoughts
of us elders. I wondered what precise change seemed to her to
have taken place. This all-fascinating Laura, whom she adored,
and who had yet never been to her what other women are to their
darlings,--did heaven seem to put her farther off, or bring her
more near? I could never know. The healthy child had no morbid
questionings; and as she had come into the world to be a sunbeam,
she must not fail of that mission. She was kicking about the bed,
by this time, in her nightgown, and holding her pink little toes
in all sorts of difficult attitudes, when she suddenly said,
looking me full in the face: "If my mother was so high up that
she had her feet upon a star, do you think that I could see her?"
This astronomical apotheosis startled me for a moment, but I said
unhesitatingly, "Yes," feeling sure that the lustrous eyes that
looked in mine could certainly see as far as Dante's, when
Beatrice was transferred from his side to the highest realm of
Paradise. I put my head beside hers upon the pillow, and stayed
till I thought she was asleep.
I then followed Kenmure into Laura's chamber. It was dusk, but
the after-sunset glow still bathed the room with imperfect light,
and he lay upon the bed, his hands clenched over his eyes.
There was a deep bow-window where Laura used to sit and watch us,
sometimes, when we put off in the boat. Her æolian harp was
in the casement, breaking its heart in music. A delicate
handkerchief was lodged between the cushions of the
window-seat,--the very handkerchief she used to wave, in summer
days long gone. The white boats went sailing beneath the evening
light, children shouted and splashed in the water, a song came
from a yacht, a steam-whistle shrilled from the receding steamer;
but she for whom alone those little signs of life had been dear
and precious would henceforth be as invisible to our eyes as if
time and space had never held her; and the young moon and the
evening star seemed but empty things unless they could pilot us
to some world where the splendor of her loveliness could match
their own.
Twilight faded, evening darkened, and still Kenmure lay
motionless, until his strong form grew in my moody fancy to be
like some carving of Michel Angelo's, more than like a living
man. And when he at last startled me by speaking, it was with a
voice so far off and so strange, it might almost have come
wandering down from the century when Michel Angelo lived.
"You are right," he said. "I have been living in a fruitless
dream. It has all vanished. The absurdity of speaking of creative
art! With all my life-long devotion, I have created nothing. I
have kept no memorial of her presence, nothing to perpetuate the
most beautiful of lives."
Before I could answer, the door came softly open, and there stood
in the doorway a small white figure, holding aloft a lighted
taper of pure alabaster. It was Marian in her little night-dress,
with the loose blue wrapper trailing behind her, let go in the
effort to hold carefully the doll, Susan Halliday, robed also for
the night.
"May I come in?" said the child.
Kenmure was motionless at first: then, looking over his shoulder,
said merely, "What?"
"Janet said," continued Marian, in her clear and methodical way,
"that my mother was up in heaven, and would help God hear my
prayers at any rate; but if I pleased, I could come and say them
by you."
A shudder passed over Kenmure; then he turned away, and put his
hands over his eyes. She waited for no answer, but, putting down
the candlestick, in her wonted careful manner, upon a chair, she
began to climb upon the bed, lifting laboriously one little rosy
foot, then another, still dragging after her, with great effort,
the doll. Nestling at her father's breast, I saw her kneel.
"Once my mother put her arm round me, when I said my prayers."
She made this remark, under her breath, less as a suggestion, it
seemed, than as the simple statement of a fact.
Instantly I saw Kenmure's arm move, and grasp her with that
strong and gentle touch of his which I had so often noticed in
the studio,--a touch that seemed quiet as the approach of fate,
and equally resistless. I knew him well enough to understand that
iron adoption.
He drew her toward him, her soft hair was on his breast, she
looked fearlessly into his eyes, and I could hear the little
prayer proceeding, yet in so low a whisper that I could not catch
one word. She was infinitely solemn at such times, the darling;
and there was always something in her low, clear tone, through
all her prayings and philosophizings, which was strangely like
her mother's voice. Sometimes she paused, as if to ask a
question, and at every answer I could see her father's arm
tighten.
The moments passed, the voices grew lower yet, the candle
flickered and went out, the doll slid to the ground. Marian had
drifted away upon. a vaster ocean than that whose music lulled
her from without,--upon that sea whose waves are dreams. The
night was wearing on, the lights gleamed from the anchored
vessels, the water rippled serenely against the low sea-wall, the
breeze blew gently in. Marian's baby breathing grew deeper and
more tranquil; and as all the sorrows of the weary earth might be
imagined to exhale themselves in spring through the breath of
violets, so I prayed that it might be with Kenmure's burdened
heart, through hers. By degrees the strong man's deeper
respirations mingled with those of the child, and their two
separate beings seemed merged and solved into identity, as they
slumbered, breast to breast, beneath the golden and quiet stars.
I passed by without awaking them, and I knew that the artist had
attained his dream.
IN A WHERRY.
We have a phrase in Oldport, "What New-Yorkers call poverty: to
be reduced to a pony phaeton." In consequence of a November gale,
I am reduced To a similar state of destitution, from a sail-boat
to a wherry; and, like others of the deserving poor, I have found
many compensations in my humbler condition. Which is the more
enjoyable, rowing or sailing? If you sail before the wind, there
is the glorious vigor of the breeze that fills your sails; you
get all of it you have room for, and a ship of the line could do
no more; indeed, your very nearness to the water increases the
excitement, since the water swirls and boils up, as it unites in
your wake, and seems to clutch at the low stern of your
sail-boat, and to menace the hand that guides the helm. Or if you
beat to windward, it is as if your boat climbed a liquid hill,
but did it with bounding and dancing, like a child; there is the
plash of the lighter ripples against the bow, and the thud of the
heavier waves, while the same blue water is now transformed to a
cool jet of white foam over your face, and now to a dark
whirlpool in your lee. Sailing gives a sense of prompt command,
since by a single movement of the tiller you effect so great a
change of direction or transform motion into rest; there is,
therefore, a certain magic in it: but, on the other hand, there
is in rowing a more direct appeal to your physical powers; you do
not evade or cajole the elements by a cunning device of keel and
canvas, you meet them man-fashion and subdue them. The motion of
the oars is like the strong motion of a bird's wings; to sail a
boat is to ride upon an eagle, but to row is to be an eagle. I
prefer rowing,--at least till I can afford another sail-boat.
What is a good day for rowing? Almost any day that is good for
living. Living is not quite agreeable in the midst of a tornado
or an equinoctial storm, neither is rowing. There are days when
rowing is as toilsome and exhausting a process as is Bunyan's
idea of virtue; while there are other days, like the present,
when it seems a mere Oriental passiveness and the forsaking of
works,--just an excuse to Nature for being out among her busy
things. For even at this stillest of hours there is far less
repose in Nature than we imagine. What created thing can seem
more patient than yonder kingfisher on the sea-wall? Yet, as we
glide near him, we shall see that no creature can be more full of
concentrated life; all his nervous system seems on edge, every
instant he is rising or lowering on his feet, the tail vibrates,
the neck protrudes or shrinks again, the feathers ruffle, the
crest dilates; he talks to himself with an impatient chirr, then
presently hovers and dives for a fish, then flies back
disappointed. We say "free as birds," but their lives are given
over to arduous labors. And so, when our condition seems most
dreamy, our observing faculties are sometimes desperately on the
alert, and we find afterwards, to our surprise, that we have
missed nothing. The best observer in the end is not he who works
at the microscope or telescope most unceasingly, but he whose
whole nature becomes sensitive and receptive, drinking in
everything, like a sponge that saturates itself with all floating
vapors and odors, though it seems inert and unsuspicious until
you press it and it tells the tale.
Most men do their work out of doors and their dreaming at home;
and those whose work is done at home need something like a wherry
in which to dream out of doors. On a squally day, with the wind
northwest, it is a dream of action, and to round yonder point
against an ebbing tide makes you feel as if you were Grant before
Richmond; when you put about, you gallop like Sheridan, and the
winds and waves become a cavalry escort. On other days all
elements are hushed into a dream of peace, and you look out upon
those once stormy distances as Landseer's sheep look into the
mouth of the empty cannon on a dismantled fort. These are the
days for revery, and your thoughts fly forth, gliding without
friction over this smooth expanse; or, rather, they are like
yonder pair of white butterflies that will flutter for an hour
just above the glassy surface, traversing miles of distance
before they alight again.
By a happy trait of our midsummer, these various phases of wind
and water may often be included in a single day. On three
mornings out of four the wind blows northwest down our bay, then
dies to a calm before noon. After an hour or two of perfect
stillness, you see the line of blue ripple coming up from the
ocean till it conquers all the paler water, and the southwest
breeze sets in. This middle zone of calm is like the noonday of
the Romans, when they feared to speak, lest the great god Pan
should be awakened. While it lasts, a thin, aerial veil drops
over the distant hills of Conanicut, then draws nearer and nearer
till it seems to touch your boat, the very nearest section of
space being filled with a faint disembodied blueness, like that
which fills on winter days, in colder regions, the hollows of the
snow. Sky and sea show but gradations of the same color, and
afford but modifications of the same element. In this quietness,
yonder schooner seems not so much to lie at anchor in the water
as to anchor the water, so that both cease to move; and though
faint ripples may come and go elsewhere on the surface, the
vessel rests in this liquid island of absolute calm. For there
certainly is elsewhere a sort of motionless movement, as Keats
speaks of "a little noiseless noise among the leaves," or as the
summer clouds form and disappear without apparent wind and
without prejudice to the stillness. A man may lie in the
profoundest trance and still be breathing, and the very
pulsations of the life of nature, in these calm hours, are to be
read in these changing tints and shadows and ripples, and in the
mirage-bewildered outlines of the islands in the bay. It is this
incessant shifting of relations, this perpetual substitution of
fantastic for real values, this inability to trust your own eye
or ear unless the mind makes its own corrections,--that gives
such an inexhaustible attraction to life beside the ocean. The
sea-change comes to you without your waiting to be drowned. You
must recognize the working of your own imagination and allow for
it. When, for instance, the sea-fog settles down around us at
nightfall, it sometimes grows denser and denser till it
apparently becomes more solid than the pavements of the town, or
than the great globe itself; and when the fog-whistles go wailing
on through all the darkened hours, they seem to be signalling not
so much for a lost ship as for a lost island.
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