The Jessica Letters Part 10

Yet in the end I think he will learn to trust me and will give me the one jewel he treasures in this world. Shall a man do more than this? It is hard to remain in this uncertainty, but our love at least is all our own.

x.x.xVIII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

I have just received your letter, dear lover, and as I read it, all my lilies changed once more to roses--as they did, you remember how often, while you were here. This is your miracle, my Philip, for in the South you know we do not have the brilliant colour so noticeable in your Northern women. But now I have only to think of you, to whisper your name, to recall something you said or did, and immediately I feel the red rose of love burn out on cheek and brow. Indeed, I think it was this magic of colour that made the difference in my appearance which seems to have mystified you.

And will it please you to learn that at the end of each day, as the shadows begin to crowd down upon the world, I keep a tryst with you beneath the old Merlin oak where you first clasped me breathless and terrified in your arms? (Be sure, dear Heart, on this account, he will be the first sage in the forest to wear a green beard of bloom next spring!) And each time the memory of that moment, which began in such fright for me, and ended in such rapture for us both, rushes over me, I wonder that I could ever have feared the man whom I love. But you must not infer from this that I can be prodigal of my kisses. Only, in the future, I shall have a saner reason for withholding them,--that of economy. For if frugality is ever wise, and extravagance forever foolish, it must be true in love as in the less romantic experiences of life.

And now I have a sensation for you, Mr. Towers. Now that love has finished me, I have found my real self once more. I am no longer the bewildered woman, embarra.s.sed by a thousand new sensations, lost in the maze of your illusions, but I am Jessica again, as remote from you, by moods, as the little green buds that swing high upon the boughs of these trees, wrapped yet in their brown winter furs. I mean that now I am able even to detach my thoughts from you at will and to live with the sort of personal emphasis I had before I knew you. I think it is because at last I am so sure of you that I can afford to forget you! How do you like that?

Besides, are we not now a part of the natural order, and does not everything there hint of a divine progression? The trees will be covered soon with the fairy mist of a new foliage, and our earth sanctified with many a little pageant of flowers. Goodness and happiness are foreordained.

No real harm can befall us, now that we belong to this heavenly procession. All our days will come to pa.s.s, like the seasons of the year, inevitably. There is no longer any escape from our dear destiny. And as for me, dear Philip, I think there are already hopes enough in my heart to grow a green wreath about my head by next spring!

Jack is very well, but still a little foreigner in this land where there is so much s.p.a.ce between things, so many wide sweeps of brown meadow for him to stretch his narrow street faculties across. He is silent but acquisitive, so I do not tease him with too many explanations. He will be happier for learning all these mysteries of nature herself, as he watches the miracle of new life now about to begin on the earth. Occasionally, however, when an unbidden thought of you makes it imperative that some one should be kissed, I sweep him up into my arms rapturously, and bestow my alms upon his brow. But if you could see the nonchalance, the prosaic indifference with which he endures these caresses, you _could_ not be jealous!

x.x.xIX

PHILIP TO JESSICA

I have always known, dear Love, that the first gentleman was a gardener and that all men hanker after that blissful state of Adam whose only toil was to care for the world's early-blooming flowers. But what was our first great parent to me?

There is a garden in her face, Where roses and white lilies show--

and I, even I, by some magic skill of commutation, am able to change the one bloom into the other. Was it not the rising colour on Cynthia's cheek that the poet described as "rose leaves floating in the purest milk"? And was it not Keats (or who was it?) who vowed he could "die of a rose in aromatic pain"? I could write an anthology on Jessica Blus.h.i.+ng; indeed I could hardly otherwise be so pleasantly and virtuously employed as in going through the poets and bringing together all that they have said in prophecy of your many divine properties.

Meanwhile you have turned me into a poet myself--think of that!--me, for these dozen years a musty, cobwebbed groper in philosophies and religions!

I have been sitting here by my fire for hours, smoking and dreaming and rhyming, rhyming and dreaming and smoking; and pretty soon the rumble of the first milk-waggons will come up from the street, and with that prosaic summons I shall go to bed when thrifty folk are beginning to yawn under the covers and think of the day's work.

I wonder sometimes if my inveterate pedantries do not amuse or, worse yet, bore you. I am grown so used to books and the language of books. I believe when Gabriel blows his trump I shall start up from my long slumber with a Latin quotation on my lips--_At tuba terribili_, like as not. (Query: Does Gabriel understand Latin, or is Hebrew your only celestial speech?)

I am trying to be facetious, but really the matter worries me a little.

Have you been laughing at me because I scolded you for neglecting your Latin, and because I took a copy of Catullus in my pocket when we made our Sunday excursion into the woods? Yet it was all so sweet to me. In the air hovered the first premonitions of spring, and the sunlight poured down upon the earth like an intoxicating wine that has been chilled in the cellar but is golden yellow with the glow of an inner fire. And some day I must set up an inscription on that Merlin oak over the nook where we sat together and talked and read, and ceased from words when sweeter language was required. As you leaned back against the warm, dry leaves I had piled up, with your great cloak twisted about your body--all except your feet, that would creep out into the sun, tantalising me with a thousand forbidden thoughts--I understood how the old Greeks dreamed of dryads, fairer than mortal women, who haunted the forests. It pains me almost to think of that hour; I cannot fathom the meaning of so much beauty; a dumb fear comes upon me lest you should fade from my life like an aerial vision and leave me unsatisfied. Yet you seemed very real that day, and your lips had all the fragrance of humanity.

Was it not characteristic of me that I could not revel in that present bliss without seeking some warrant for my joy in ancient poetry? To read of Catullus and his pa.s.sion while your heart throbbed against my hand seemed to lend a profounder reality to my own love. Dear dryad of the groves, yet womanly warm, because inevitably I connect my emotions with the hopes and fears of many poets who have trod the paths of Paradise before me, because I translate my thoughts into their pa.s.sionate words, you must not therefore suppose that something fantastic and inhuman clings to my love for you. The deeper my feelings, the more certainly do they clothe themselves in all that my reading has garnered of rare and beautiful. Other men woo with flowers; I would adorn you also with every image and comparison of grace that the mind of man has conceived. The more fully my love invades every faculty of my soul and body, the more certain is it to a.s.sume for its own uses the labour and learning of my brain. You see I am welded more than I could believe into a feminine unity by your mystic touch, and that masculine duality of which I spoke is pa.s.sing away.

With some trepidation I write out for you these half-borrowed verses:

VIVAMUS ATQUE AMEMUS

Dear Heart, the solitary glen we found, The moss-grown rock, the pines around!

And there we read, with sweet-entangled arms, Catullus and his love's alarms.

_Da basia mille_, so the poem ran; And, lip to lip, our hearts began With ne'er a word translate the words complete:-- Did Lesbia find them half so sweet?

A hundred kisses, said he?--hundreds more, And then confound the telltale score!

So may we live and love, till life be out, And let the greybeards wag and flout.

Yon failing sun shall rise another morn, And the thin moon round out her horn; But we, when once we lose our waning light,-- Ah, Love, the long unbroken night!

XL

JESSICA TO PHILIP

A letter from my lover, so like him that it is the dearest message I have ever had from him. In this mood you are nearest akin to my heart. For if love fills my mind with a thousand woodland images, it sends you back to the cla.s.sic groves of the ancients, where the wings of a bird might measure off destiny to a lover in an hexameter of light across his morning, and where the whole world was full of sweet oracles. The truth is we have need of an old Latin deity now. There was a romantic sympathy between the Olympian dynasty of G.o.ds and common men, more vital than our ascetic piety. And there are some experiences so essentially pagan that no other G.o.ds can afford to bless them!

Indeed, since your departure I have found a sort of occult companions.h.i.+p with you in reading once more some of the old Latin poets. Father is gratified, for he thinks that after all I may sober into a Christian scholars.h.i.+p with the old Roman monks, and to this end he will tolerate even Catullus. But really the wisdom of love has given me a keener appreciation of these sweet cla.s.sics. Did you ever think how wonderful is the youth, the simplicity, the morning freshness of all their thoughts. It is we moderns who have grown old, pedantic; and when some lyrical experience, such as love, suddenly rejuvenates us, drawing us back into the primal poetic consciousness, then we turn instinctively to these ancients for an interpretation of our hearts,--also because their definition of beauty, which is always the garment Love wears, is better than we can make now. With us "The Beautiful" is often mere cant, or a form of sentimentality, but with them it was a principle, a spirtual faculty that determined all proportions. Thus their very philosophies show a beautiful formality, a Parthenon entrance to life. And from first to last they never left the gay amorous G.o.ds of nature out of their thoughts.

This is a relief, a tender companions.h.i.+p, that we have lost from our prosaic world. You see Jessica grows "pedantic" also! The poem you sent has awakened in me these reflections. The words of it slipped into my heart as warm as kisses.

But I have anxieties to tell you of. I fear trouble is brewing for us in father's prayer-closet. You remember the little volume you gave me, _The Forest Philosophers of India_? Well, he found it last night in the library, where I had inadvertently left it; and recognising the author as the same dragon who threatens the peace and piety of his household, he settled himself vindictively to reading it. The result exceeded my worst fears. If his daughter were about to become the hypnotised victim of an Indian juggler he would not be more alarmed. He holds that all truth is based upon the G.o.d idea. And he vows that you have attempted to dissolve truth by detaching it from this divine origin. You speak the truth in other words, but you are accused of blasphemously ignoring its sublime authors.h.i.+p. Nor is that all. Your philosophy must have gripped him hard, for he declares that you have an abnormally clairvoyant mind, and that "no female intelligence" can long withstand the diabolical influence of your heathen suggestions. Really it made my flesh creep! You might have thought he was warning me against a snake charmer. And when I declined to be alarmed, he locked himself up in his closet to fast and pray. This is the worst possible symptom in his case, for he will work himself into a frenzy, and before ever he eats or drinks he will get "called" to take some radical stand against us.

Meanwhile, besides a growing affection for Jack, I take a fact.i.tious interest in him because he was your daily companion for several months. I am tempted to ask him many questions that are neither fair nor modest, particularly as he is devoted to you, and quite willing to talk of "Misther Towers."

"Does he ever sing, Jack?" I began last evening, as we sat alone before the library fire.

"Nope,"--Jack is laconic, but wise far beyond his years in silent sympathy.

"Did he often talk to you?"

"Yes, when we went for a walk."

"Tell me what about, Jackie."

"I don't know!" was the ungrateful revelation.

"You mean you have forgotten!" I insinuated.

"Never did know. He talks queer!"--I t.i.ttered and Jack wrinkled up his face into a funny little grimace. We both knew the joke was on you.

"Did he ever mention any of his friends," I persevered.

"Nope. Once he give me your love and some things you sent,"--the little scamp knew the direction of my curiosity!

"But did he never tell you anything about me, Jackie?"

"Never did!"--I was wounded.

"What does he like best?"--for I had made up my mind to know the worst.

"His pipe," he affirmed without hesitation.