Chapter VI: Part 6

Now I cannot conscientiously recommend the Green Chalybeate against your next vacation. Once very long ago, it was frequented equally for the sake of gaiety and of health. In the summer that was Marian's the resort was a beautiful and tumble-down place where invalids congregated for the sake of the nauseous waters,--which infallibly demolish a solid column of strange maladies I never read quite through, although it bordered every page of the writing-paper you got there from the desk-clerk,--and a scanty leaven of persons who came thither, apparently, in order to spend a week or two in lamenting "how very dull the season is this year, and how abominable the fare is."

But for one I praise the place, and I believe that Marian Winwood also bears it no ill-will. For we two were very happy there. We took part in the "subscription euchres" whenever we could not in time devise an excuse which would pass muster with the haggard "entertainer." We danced conscientiously beneath the pink and green icing of the ball-room's ceiling, with all three of the band playing _Hearts and Flowers_; and with a dozen "chaperones"--whom I always suspected of taking in washing during the winter months,--lined up as closely as was possible to the door, as if in preparation for the hotel's catching fire any moment, to give us pessimistic observal. And having thus discharged our duty to society at large, we enjoyed ourselves tremendously.

For instance, we would talk over the book I was going to write in the autumn. That was the main thing. Then one could golf, or drive, or--I blush to write it even now--croquet. Croquet, though, is a much maligned game, as you will immediately discover if you ever play it on the rambling lawn of the Chalybeate, about six in the afternoon, say, when the grass is greener than it is by ordinary, and the shadows are long, and the sun is well beneath the tree-tops of the Iron Bank, and your opponent makes a face at you occasionally, and on each side the old, one-storied cottages are builded of unusually red bricks and are quite ineffably asleep.

Or again there is always the creek to divert yourself in. Once I caught five crawfishes there, while Marian waited on the bank; and afterward we found an old tomato-can and boiled them in it, and they came out a really gorgeous crimson. This was the afternoon that we were Spanish Inquisitors.... Oh, believe me, you can have quite a good time at the Chalybeate, if you set about it in the proper way.

2

Only it is true that sometimes, when it rained, say, with that hopeless insistency which, I protest, is unknown anywhere else in the world; and when Marian was not immediately accessible, and cigarettes were not quite satisfactory, because the entire universe was so sodden that matches had to be judiciously coaxed before they would strike; and when if you happened to be writing a fervid letter to Rosalind Jemmett, let us say, the ink would not dry for ever so long:--why, it is true that in these circumstances you would feel a shade too like the wicked Lord So-and-So of a melodrama to be comfortable.

Yet even in these circumstances, reason told me that the Book was the main thing, that the girl would be thoroughly over the affair by November at latest, and that at the cost of a few inconsequent tears, she would have meanwhile immeasurably obliged posterity. And I knew that no man may ever write in perdurable fashion save by ruthlessly converting his own life into "copy," since of other persons' lives he can, at most, reproduce but the blurred and misinterpreted by-ends, by reason of almost any author's deplorable lack of omniscience. Yes, the Book was the main thing; and yet the girl--knowingly to dip my pen into her heart as into an inkstand was not, at best, chivalric....

"But the Book!" said I. "Why, I must be quite idiotically in love to think of letting that Book perish!" And I viciously added: "Confound the pretty simpleton!"...

3

So the book was builded, after all, a little by a little. Hardly an evening came when after leaving Marian I had not at least one excellent and pregnant jotting to record in my note-book. Now it would be just an odd turn of language, or a description of some gesture she had made, or of a gown she had worn that day; and now a simile or some other rather good figure of speech which had popped into my mind when I was making love to her.

Nor had I any difficulty in preserving nearly all she said to me, for Marian was never a chatterbox; yet her responses had, somehow, that long-sought tang it wasn't in me to invent for any imaginary young woman who must be, for the sake of my new novel, quite heels over head in love.

And I began to see that Bettie was right, as usual. I had portrayed Gillian Hardress pretty well in _Afield_; but by and large, I had always written about women as though they were "pterodactyls or some other extinct animal, which you had never seen, but had read a lot about."

And now, in looking over my notes, I knew, and my heart glowed to know, that I was not about to repeat the error.

So the Book was builded, after all, a little by a little. And a little by a little the summer wore on; and in the lobby of the Main Hotel was hung the beautiful Spirit of the Falls poster of the Buffalo Exposition; and we talked of Oom Paul Krueger, and Shamrock II, and the Nicaragua Canal, and lanky Bob Fitzsimmons, and the Boxer outrages; and we read _To Have and To Hold_ and _The Cardinal's Snuff Box_, and thought it droll that the King of England was not going to call himself King Albert, after all.

And then came the news of how the President had been shot, "with a poisoned bullet," and a week of contradictory bulletins from the Milburn House in Buffalo. And there were panicky surmises raised everywhere as to "what these anarchists may do next," so that Maggio was mobbed in Columbus, and Emma Goldman in Chicago; and Colonel Roosevelt was found, after days of search, on Mt. Marcy in the Adirondacks, and was told in the heart of a forest that to-morrow he would be at the head of a nation. And the country's guidance was entrusted to a mere lad of forty-three, with general uneasiness as to what might come of it; and the dramatic tale of Colonel Roosevelt's taking of the oath of office was in that morning's paper; and Marian and I were about to part.

4

"It will be dreadful," sighed she; "for we have to stay a whole week longer, and I shall come here every afternoon. And there will be only ghosts in the woods, and I shall be very lonely."

"Dear," said I, "is it not something to have been happy? It has been such a wonderful summer; and come what may, nothing can rob us now of its least golden moment. And it is only for a little."

"You will come back?" said she, half-doubtingly.

"Yes," I said. "You wonderful, elfin creature, I shall undoubtedly come back--to your real home, and claim you there. Only I don't believe you do live in Aberlin,--you probably live in some great, gnarled oak hereabouts; and at night its bark uncloses to set you free, and you and your sisters dance out the satyrs' hearts in the moonlight. Oh, I know, Marian! I simply _know_ you are a dryad,--a wonderful, laughing, clear-eyed dryad strayed out of the golden age."

"What a boy it is!" she said. "No, I am only a really and truly girl, dear,--a rather frightened girl, with very little disposition to laughter, just now. For you are going away--Oh, my dear, you have meant so much to me! The world is so different since you have come, and I am so happy and so miserable that--that I am afraid." An infinitesimal handkerchief went upward to two great, sparkling eyes, and dabbed at them.

"Dear!" said I. And this remark appeared to meet the requirements of the situation.

There was a silence now. We sat in the same spot where I had first encountered Marian Winwood. Only this was an autumnal forest that glowed with many gem-like hues about us; and already the damp odour of decaying leaves was heavy in the air. It was like the Tosti thing translated out of marine terms into a woodland analogue. The summer was ended; but _As the Coming of Dawn_ was practically complete.

It was not the book that I had planned, but a far greater one which was scarcely mine. There was no word written as yet. But for two months I had viewed life through Marian Winwood's eyes; day by day, my half-formed, tentative ideas had been laid before her with elaborate fortuitousness, to be approved, or altered, or rejected, just as she decreed; until at last they had been welded into a perfect whole that was a Book, bit by bit, we had planned it, I and she; and, as I dreamed of it as it would be in print, my brain was fired with exultation, and I defied my doubt and I swore that the Book, for which I had pawned a certain portion of my self-respect, was worth--and triply worth--the price which had been paid.... This was in Marian's absence.

"Dear!" said she....

Her eyes were filled with a tender and unutterable confidence that thrilled me like physical cold. "Marian," said I, simply, "I shall never come back."

The eyes widened a trifle, but she did not seem to comprehend.

"Have you not wondered," said I, "that I have never kissed you, except as if you were a very holy relic or a cousin or something of that sort?"

"Yes," she answered. Her voice was quite emotionless.

"And yet--yet--" I sprang to my feet. "Dear God, how I have longed! Yesterday, only yesterday, as I read to you from the verses I had made to other women, those women that are colourless shadows by the side of your vivid beauty,--and you listened wonderingly and said the proper things and then lapsed into dainty boredom,--_how_ I longed to take you in my arms, and to quicken your calm blood a little with another sort of kissing. You knew--you must have known! Last night, for instance--"

"Last night," she said, very simply, "I thought--And I hoped you would."

"What a confession for a nicely brought up girl! Well! I didn't. And afterward, all night, I tossed in sick, fevered dreams of you. I am mad for love of you. And so, once in a while I kiss your hand. Dear God, your hand!" My voice quavered, effectively.

"Yes," said she; "still, I remember--"

"I have struggled; and I have conquered this madness,--for a madness it is. We can laugh together and be excellent friends; and we can never, never be anything more. Well! we have laughed, have we not, dear, a whole summer through? Now comes the ending. Ah, I have seen you puzzling over my meaning before this. You never understood me thoroughly; but it is always safe to laugh."

She smiled; and I remember now it was rather as Mona Lisa smiles.

"For we can laugh together,--that is all. We are not mates. You were born to be the wife of a strong man and the mother of his sturdy children; and you and your sort will inherit the earth and make the laws for us weaklings who dream and scribble and paint. We are not mates. But you have been very kind to me, Marian dear. So I thank you and say good-bye; and I pray that I may never see you after to-day."

There was a sub-tang of veracity in my deprecation of an unasked-for artistic temperament; the thing is very often a nuisance, and was just then a barrier which I perceived plainly; and with equal plainness I perceived the pettier motives that now caused me to point it out as a barrier to Marian. My lips curled half in mockery of myself, as I framed the bitter smile I felt the situation demanded; but I was fired with the part I was playing; and half-belief had crept into my mind that Marian Winwood was created, chiefly, for the purpose which she had already served.

I regarded her, in fine, as through the eyes of future readers of my biography. She would represent an episode in my life, as others do in that of Byron or of Goethe. I pitied her sincerely; and, under all, what moralists would call my lower nature, held in leash for two months past, chuckled, and grinned, and leaped, at the thought of a holiday.

She rose to her feet. "Good-bye," said she.

"You--you understand, dear?" I queried, tenderly.

"Yes," she answered; "I understand--not what you have just told me, for in that, of course, you have lied. That Jemmett girl and her money is at the bottom of it all, of course. You didn't want to lose her, and still you wanted to play with me. So you were pulled two ways, poor dear."

"Oh, well, if that is what you think of me--!"

"You see, you are not an uncommon type,--a type not strong enough to live life healthily, just strong enough to dabble in life, to trifle with emotions, to experiment with other people's lives. Indeed, I am not angry, dear; I am only--sorry; for you have played with me very nicely indeed, and very boyishly, and the summer has been very happy."

5

I returned to Lichfield and wrote _As the Coming of Dawn_.

I spent six months in this. My work at first was mere copying of the book that already existed in my brain; but when it was transcribed therefrom, I wrote and rewrote, shifted and polished and adorned until it seemed I would never have done; and indeed I was not anxious to have done with any labour so delightful.

Particularly did I rejoice in the character for which Marian Winwood had posed. Last summer's note-book here came into play; and now, for once, my heroine was in no need of either shoving or prompting. She did things of her own accord, and I was merely her scribe...

I would vain-gloriously protest, just to myself, that the love scenes in this story were the most exquisite and, with all that, the most genuine love scenes I knew of anywhere. "By God!" I would occasionally say with Thackeray; "I _am_ a genius!"

Besides, the story of the book, I knew, was novel and astutely wrought; its progress caught at once and teased your interest always, so that having begun it, most people would read to the end, if only to discover "how it all came out." I knew the book, in fine, could hardly fail to please and interest a number of people by reason of its plot alone.

I ought to have been content with this. But I had somehow contracted an insane notion that a novel is the more enjoyable when it is adroitly written. In point of fact, of course, no man who writes with care is ever read with pleasure; you may toil through a page or two perhaps, but presently you are noting how precisely every word is fitted to the thought, and later you are noting nothing else. You are insensibly beguiled into a fidgety-footed analysis of every clause, which fatigues in the outcome, and by the tenth page you are yawning.

But I did not comprehend this then. And so I fashioned my apt phrases, and weighed my synonyms, and echoed this or that vowel very skilfully, I thought, and alliterated my consonants with discretion. In fine, I did not overlook the most meticulous device of the stylist; and I enjoyed it. It was a sort of game; and they taught me at least, those six delightful months, that a man writes admirable prose not at all for the sake of having it read, but for the more sensible reason that he enjoys playing solitaire.

I led a hermit's life that winter; and I enjoyed that too. Night, after all, is the one time for writing, particularly when you are inane enough to hanker after perfected speech, and so misguided as to be the slave of the "right word." You sit alone in a bright, comfortable room; the clock ticks companionably; there is no other sound in the world except the constant scratching of your pen, and the occasional far-off puffing of a freight-train coming into Lichfield; there is snow outside, but before your eyes someone, that is not you exactly, arranges and redrills the scrawls which will bring back the sweet and languid summer and remarshal all its pleasant trivialities for anyone that chooses to read through the printed page, although he read two centuries hence, in Nova Zembla....

Then you dip into an Unabridged, and change every word that has been written, for a better one, and do it leisurely, rolling in the mouth, as it were, the flavour of every possible synonym, before decision. Then you reread, with a corrective pen in hand the while, and you venture upon the whole to agree with Merimee that it is preferable to write one's own books, since those of others are not, after all, particularly worth reading in comparison.

And by this time the windows are pale blue, like the blue of a dying flame, and you peep out and see the sparrows moving like rather poorly made mechanical toys about the middle of the deserted street, where there is neither light nor shade. The colour of everything is perfectly discernible, but there is no lustre in the world as yet, though yonder the bloat sun is already visible in the blue and red east, which is like a cosmic bruise; and upon a sudden you find it just possible to stay awake long enough to get safely into bed....

6

Thus I dandled the child of my brain for a long while, and arrayed it in beautiful and curious garments, adorning each beloved notion with far-sought words that had a taste in the mouth, and would one day lend an aroma to the printed page; and I rejoiced shamelessly in that which I had done. Then it befell that I went forth and sought the luxury of a Turkish bath, and in the morning, after a rub-down and an ammonia cocktail, awoke to the fact that the world had been going on much as usual, that winter.

Young Colonel Roosevelt seemed not to have wrecked civilization, after all, according to the morning _Courier-Herald_, despite that Democratic paper's colorful prophecies last autumn in the vein of Jeremiah. To the contrary, Major-General McArthur was testifying before the Senate as to the abysmal unfitness of the Filipinos for self-government; the Women's Clubs were holding a convention in Los Angeles; there had been terrible hailstorms this year to induce the annual ruining of the peach-crop, and the submarine Fulton had exploded; the California Limited had been derailed in Iowa, and in Memphis there was some sort of celebration in honor of Admiral Schley; and the Boer War seemed over; and Mr. Havemeyer also was before the Senate, to whom he was making it clear that his companies were in no wise responsible for sugar having reached the unprecedentedly high price of four and a half cents a pound.

The world, in short, in spite of my six months' retiring therefrom, seemed to be getting on pleasantly enough, as I turned from the paper to face the six months' accumulation of mail.

7

A few weeks later, I sent for Mr. George Bulmer, and informed him of his avuncular connection with a genius; and waved certain typewritten pages to establish his title.

Subsequently I read aloud divers portions of _As the Coming of Dawn_, and Mr. Bulmer sipped Chianti, and listened.

"Look here!" he said, suddenly; "have you seen _The Imperial Votaress?_"

I frowned. It is always annoying to be interrupted in the middle of a particularly well-balanced sentence. "Don't know the lady," said I.

"She is advertised on half the posters in town," said Mr. Bulmer. "And it is the book of the year. And it is your book."

At this moment I laid down my manuscript. '"I _beg_ your pardon?" said I.

"Your book!" Uncle George repeated firmly; "and scarcely a hair's difference between them, except in the names."

"H'm!" I observed, in a careful voice. "Who wrote it?"

"Some female woman out west," said Mr. Bulmer. "She's a George Something-or-other when she publishes, of course, like all those authorines when they want to say about mankind at large what less gifted women only dare say about their sisters-in-law. I wish to heaven they would pick out some other Christian name when they want to cut up like pagans. Anyhow, I saw her real name somewhere, and I remember it began with an S--Why, to be sure! it's Marian Winwood."

"Amaimon sounds well," I observed; "Lucifer, well; Larbason, well; yet they are devils' additions, the names of fiends: but--Marian Winwood!"

"Dear me!" he remonstrated. "Why, she wrote _A Bright Particular Star_, you know, and _The Acolytes_, and lots of others."

The author of _As the Coming of Dawn_ swallowed a whole glass of Chianti at a gulp.

"Of course," I said, slowly, "I cannot, in my rather peculiar position, run the risk of being charged with plagiarism--by a Chinese-eyed mental sneak-thief...."

Thereupon I threw the manuscript into the open fire, which my preference for the picturesque rendered necessary, even in May.

"Oh, look here!" my uncle cried, and caught up the papers. "It is infernally good, you know! Can't you--can't you fix it,--and--er-- change it a bit? Typewriting is so expensive these days that it seems a pity to waste all this."

I took the manuscript and replaced it firmly among the embers. "As you justly observe," said I, "it is infernally good. It is probably a deal better than anything else I shall ever write."

"Why, then--" said Uncle George.

"Why, then," said I, "the only thing that remains to do is to read _The Imperial Votaress._"

8

And I read it with an augmenting irritation. Here was my great and comely idea transmuted by "George Glock"--which was the woman's foolish pen-name,--into a rather clever melodrama, and set forth anyhow, in a hit or miss style that fairly made me squirm. I would cheerfully have strangled Marian Winwood just then, and not upon the count of larceny, but of butchery.

"And to cap it all, she has assigned her hero every pretty speech I ever made to her! I honestly believe the rogue took shorthand jottings on her cuffs. 'There is a land where lovers may meet face to face, and heart to heart, and mouth to mouth'--why, that's the note I wrote her on the day she wasn't feeling well!"

Presently, however, I began to laugh, and presently sitting there alone, I began to applaud as if I were witnessing a play that took my fancy.

"Oh, the adorable jade!" I said; and then: "George Glock, forsooth! _George Dandin, tu l' as voulu._"

9

Naturally I put the entire affair into a short story. And--though even to myself it seems incredible,--Miss Winwood wrote me within three days of the tale's appearance, a very indignant letter.

For she was furious, to the last exclamation point and underlining, about my little magazine tale.... "Why don't you stop writing, and try plumbing or butchering or traveling for scented soap? _You can't write!_ If you had the light of creation you wouldn't be using my material"....

--Which caused me to reflect forlornly that I had wasted a great deal of correct behavior upon Marian, since any of the more intimately amorous advances which I might have made, and had scrupulously refrained from making, would very probably have been regarded as raw "material," to be developed rather than shocked by....

18.

_He Spends an Afternoon in Arden_

I had, in a general way, intended to marry Rosalind Jemmett so soon as I had completed _As the Coming of Dawn_; but in the fervour of writing that unfortunate volume, I had at first put off a little, and then a little longer, the answering of her last letter, because I was interested just then in writing well and not particularly interested in anything else; and I had finally approximated to forgetfulness of the young lady's existence.

Now, however, my thoughts harked back to her; and I found, upon inquiry, that Rosalind had spent all of May and a good half of April in Lichfield, in the same town with myself, and was now engaged to Alfred Chaytor,--an estimable person, but popularly known as "Sissy" Chaytor.

2

And this gave an additional whet to my intentions. So I called upon the girl, and she, to my chagrin, received me with an air of having danced with me some five or six times the night before; our conversation was at first trivial and, on her part, dishearteningly cordial; and, in fine, she completely baffled me by not appearing to expect any least explanation of my discourteous neglect. This, look you, when I had been at pains to prepare a perfectly convincing one.

It must be conceded I completely lost my temper; shortly afterward neither of us was speaking with excessive forethought; and each of us languidly advanced a variety of observations which were more dexterous than truthful. But I followed the intractable heiress to the Moncrieffs that spring, in spite of this rebuff, being insufferably provoked by her unshakable assumptions of my friendship and of nothing more.

3

It was perhaps a week later she told me: "This, beyond any reasonable doubt, is the Forest of Arden."

"But where Rosalind is is always Arden," I said, politely. Yet I made a mental reservation as to a glimpse of the golf-links, which this particular nook of the forest afforded, and of a red-headed caddy in search of a lost ball.

But beyond these things the sun was dying out in a riot of colour, and its level rays fell kindlily upon the gaunt pines that were thick about us two, converting them into endless aisles of vaporous gold.

There was primeval peace about; an evening wind stirred lazily above, and the leaves whispered drowsily to one another over the waters of what my companion said was a "brawling loch," though I had previously heard it reviled as a particularly treacherous and vexatious hazard. Altogether, I had little doubt that we had reached, in any event, the outskirts of Arden.

"And now," quoth she, seating herself on a fallen log, "what would you do if I were your very, very Rosalind?"

"Don't!" I cried in horror. "It wouldn't be proper! For as a decent self-respecting heroine, you would owe it to Orlando not to listen."

"H'umph!" said Rosalind. The exclamation does not look impressive, written out; but, spoken, it placed Orlando in his proper niche.

"Oh, well," said I, and stretched myself at her feet, full length,--which is supposed to be a picturesque attitude,--"why quarrel over a name? It ought to be Gamelyn, anyhow; and, moreover, by the kindness of fate, Orlando is golfing."

Rosalind frowned, dubiously.

"But golf is a very ancient game," I reassured her. Then I bit a pine-needle in two and sighed. "Foolish fellow, when he might be--"

"Admiring the beauties of nature," she suggested.

Just then an impudent breeze lifted a tendril of honey-coloured hair and toyed with it, over a low, white brow,--and I noted that Rosalind's hair had a curious coppery glow at the roots, a nameless colour that I have never observed anywhere else....

"Yes," said I, "of nature."

"Then," queried she, after a pause, "who are you? And what do you in this forest?"

"You see," I explained, "there were conceivably other men in Arden--"

"I suppose so," she sighed, with exemplary resignation.

"--For you were," I reminded her, "universally admired at your uncle's court,--and equally so in the forest. And while Alfred--or, strictly speaking, Gamelyn, or, if you prefer it, Orlando,--is the great love of your life, still--"

"Men are so foolish!" said Rosalind, irrelevantly.

"--it did not prevent you--"

"Me!" cried she, indignant.

"You had such a tender heart," I suggested, "and suffering was abhorrent to your gentle nature."

"I don't like cynicism, sir," said she; "and inasmuch as tobacco is not yet discovered--"

"It is clearly impossible that I am smoking," I finished; "quite true."

"I don't like cheap wit, either," said Rosalind. "You," she went on, with no apparent connection, "are a forester, with a good cross-bow and an unrequited attachment,--say, for me. You groan and hang verses and things about on the trees."

"But I don't write verses--any longer," I amended. "Still how would this do,--for an oak, say,--

"I found a lovely centre-piece Upon the supper-table, But when I looked at it again I saw I wasn't able, And so I took my mother home And locked her in the stable."

She considered that the plot of this epic was not sufficiently inevitable. It hadn't, she lamented, a quite logical ending; and the plot of it, in fine, was not, somehow, convincing.

"Well, in any event," I optimistically reflected, "I am a nickel in. If your dicta had emanated from a person in Peoria or Seattle, who hadn't bothered to read my masterpiece, they would have sounded exactly the same, and the clipping-bureau would have charged me five cents. Maybe I can't write verses, then. But I am quite sure I can groan." And I did so.

"It sounds rather like a fog-horn," said Rosalind, still in the critic's vein; "but I suppose it is the proper thing. Now," she continued, and quite visibly brightening, "you can pretend to have an unrequited attachment for me."

"But I can't--" I decisively said.

"Can't," she echoed. It has not been mentioned previously that Rosalind was pretty. She was especially so just now, in pouting. And, therefore, "--pretend," I added.

She preserved a discreet silence.

"Nor," I continued, with firmness, "am I a shambling, nameless, unshaven denizen of Arden, who hasn't anything to do except to carry a spear and fall over it occasionally. I will no longer conceal the secret of my identity. I am Jaques."

"You can't be Jaques," she dissented; "you are too stout."

"I am well-built," I admitted, modestly; "as in an elder case, sighing and grief have blown me up like a bladder; yet proper pride, if nothing else, demands that my name should appear on the programme."

"But would Jaques be the sort of person who'd--?"

"Who wouldn't be?" I asked, with appropriate ardour. "No, depend upon it, Jaques was not any more impervious to temptation than the rest of us; and, indeed, in the French version, as you will find, he eventually married Celia."

"Minx!" said she; and it seemed to me quite possible that she referred to Celia Reindan, and my heart glowed.

"And how," queried Rosalind, presently, "came you to the Forest of Arden, good Jaques?"

I groaned once more. "It was a girl," I darkly said.

"Of course," assented Rosalind, beaming as to the eyes. Then she went on, and more sympathetically: "Now, Jaques, you can tell me the whole story."

"Is it necessary?" I asked.

"Surely," said she, with sudden interest in the structure of pine-cones; "since for a long while I have wanted to know all about Jaques. You see Mr. Shakespeare is a bit hazy about him."

"_So_!" I thought, triumphantly.

And aloud, "It is an old story," I warned her, "perhaps the oldest of all old stories. It is the story of a man and a girl. It began with a chance meeting and developed into a packet of old letters, which is the usual ending of this story."

Rosalind's brows protested.

"Sometimes," I conceded, "it culminates in matrimony; but the ending is not necessarily tragic."

I dodged exactly in time; and the pine-cone splashed into the hazard.

"It happened," I continued, "that, on account of the man's health, they were separated for a whole year's time before--before things had progressed to any extent. When they did progress, it was largely by letters. That is why this story ended in such a large package.

"Letters," Rosalind confided, to one of the pines, "are so unsatisfactory. They mean so little."

"To the man," I said, firmly, "they meant a great deal. They brought him everything that he most wished for,--comprehension, sympathy, and, at last, comfort and strength when they were sore needed. So the man, who was at first but half in earnest, announced to himself that he had made a discovery. 'I have found,' said he, 'the great white love which poets have dreamed of. I love this woman greatly, and she, I think, loves me. God has made us for each other, and by the aid of her love I will be pure and clean and worthy even of her.' You have doubtless discovered by this stage in my narrative," I added, as in parenthesis, "that the man was a fool."

"Don't!" said Rosalind.

"Oh, he discovered it himself in due time--but not until after he had written a book about her. _As the Coming of Dawn_ the title was to have been. It was--oh, just about her. It tried to tell how greatly he loved her. It tried--well, it failed of course, because it isn't within the power of any writer to express what the man felt for that girl. Why, his love was so great--to him, poor fool!--that it made him at times forget the girl herself, apparently. He didn't want to write her trivial letters. He just wanted to write that great book in her honour, which would _make_ her understand, even against her will, and then to die, if need be, as Geoffrey Rudel did. For that was the one thing which counted--to make her understand--" I paused, and anyone could see that I was greatly moved. In fact, I was believing every word of it by this time.

"Oh, but who wants a man to _die_ for her?" wailed Rosalind.

"It is quite true that one infinitely prefers to see him make a fool of himself. So the man discovered when he came again to bring his foolish book to her,--the book that was to make her understand. And so he burned it--in a certain June. For the girl had merely liked him, and had been amused by him. So she had added him to her collection of men, --quite a large one, by the way,--and was, I believe, a little proud of him. It was, she said, rather a rare variety, and much prized by collectors."

"And how was _she_ to know?" said Rosalind; and then, remorsefully: "Was it a very horrid girl?"

"It was not exactly repulsive," said I, as dreamily, and looking up into the sky.

There was a pause. Then someone in the distance--a forester, probably, --called "Fore!" and Rosalind awoke from her reverie.

"Then--?" said she.

"Then came the customary Orlando--oh, well! Alfred, if you like. The name isn't altogether inappropriate, for he does encounter existence with much the same abandon which I have previously noticed in a muffin. For the rest, he was a nicely washed fellow, with a sufficiency of the mediaeval equivalents for bonds and rubber-tired buggies and country places. Oh, yes! I forgot to say that the man was poor,--also that the girl had a great deal of common-sense and no less than three longheaded aunts. And so the girl talked to the man in a common-sense fashion--and after that she was never at home."

"Never?" said Rosalind.

"Only that time they talked about the weather," said I. "So the man fell out of bed just about then, and woke up and came to his sober senses."

"He did it very easily," said Rosalind, almost as if in resentment.

"The novelty of the process attracted him," I pleaded. "So he said--in a perfectly sensible way--that he had known all along it was only a game they were playing,--a game in which there were no stakes. That was a lie. He had put his whole soul into the game, playing as he knew for his life's happiness; and the verses, had they been worthy of the love which caused them to be written, would have been among the great songs of the world. But while the man knew at last that he had been a fool, he was swayed by a man-like reluctance against admitting it. So he laughed--and lied--and broke away, hurt, but still laughing."

"You hadn't mentioned any verses before," said Rosalind.

"I told you he was a fool," said I. "And, after all, that is the entire story."

Then I spent several minutes in wondering what would happen next. During this time I lost none of my interest in the sky. I believed everything I had said: my emotions would have done credit to a Romeo or an Amadis.

"The first time that the girl was not at home," Rosalind observed, impersonally, "the man had on a tan coat and a brown derby. He put on his gloves as he walked down the street. His shoulders were the most indignant--and hurt things she had ever seen. Then the girl wrote to him,--a strangely sincere letter,--and tore it up."

"Historical research," I murmured, "surely affords no warrant for such attire among the rural denizens of tranquil Arden."

"You see," continued Rosalind, oblivious to interruption, "I know all about the girl,--which is more than you do."

"That," I conceded, "is disastrously probable."

"When she realised that she was to see the man again--_Did_ you ever feel as if something had lifted you suddenly hundreds of feet above rainy days and cold mutton for luncheon, and the possibility of other girls' wearing black evening dresses, when you wanted yours to be the only one in the room? Well, that is the way she felt at first, when she read his note. At first, she realised nothing beyond the fact that he was nearing her, and that she would presently see him. She didn't even plan what she would wear, or what she would say to him. In an indefinite way, she was happier than she had ever been before--or has been since--until the doubts and fears and knowledge that give children and fools a wide berth came to her,--and _then_ she saw it all against her will, and thought it all out, and came to a conclusion."

I sat up. There was really nothing of interest occurring overhead.

"They had played at loving--lightly, it is true, but they had gone so far in their letter writing that they could not go backward,--only forward, or not at all. She had known all along that the man was but half in earnest--believe me, a girl always knows that, even though she may not admit it to herself,--and she had known that a love affair meant to him material for a sonnet or so, and a well-turned letter or two, and nothing more. For he was the kind of man that never quite grows up. He was coming to her, pleased, interested, and a little eager--in love with the idea of loving her,--willing to meet her half-way, and very willing to follow her the rest of the way--if she could draw him. And what was she to do? Could she accept his gracefully insulting semblance of a love she knew he did not feel? Could they see each other a dozen times, swearing not to mention the possibility of loving,--so that she might have a chance to reimpress him with her blondined hair--it _is_ touched up, you know--and small talk? And--and _besides_--"

"It is the duty of every young woman to consider what she owes to her family," said I, absentmindedly. Rosalind Jemmett's family consists of three aunts, and the chief of these is Aunt Marcia, who lives in Lichfield. Aunt Marcia is a portly, acidulous and discomposing person, with eyes like shoe-buttons and a Savonarolan nose. She is also a well-advertised philanthropist, speaks neatly from the platform, and has wide experience as a patroness, and extreme views as to ineligibles.

Rosalind flushed somewhat. "And so," said she, "the girl exercised her common-sense, and was nervous, and said foolish things about new plays, and the probability of rain--to keep from saying still more foolish things about herself; and refused to talk personalities; and let him go, with the knowledge that he would not come back. Then she went to her room, and had a good cry. Now," she added, after a pause, "you understand."

"I do not," I said, very firmly, "understand a lot of things."

"Yet a woman would," she murmured.

This being a statement I was not prepared to contest, I waved it aside. "And so," said I, "they laughed; and agreed it was a boy-and-girl affair; and were friends."

"It was the best thing--" said she.

"Yes," I assented,--"for Orlando."

"--and it was the most sensible thing."

"Oh, eminently!"

This seemed to exhaust the subject, and I lay down once more among the pine-needles.

"And that," said Rosalind, "was the reason Jaques came to Arden?"

"Yes," said I.

"And found it--?"

"Shall we say--Hades?"

"Oh!" she murmured, scandalised.

"It happened," I continued, "that he was cursed with a good memory. And the zest was gone from his little successes and failures, now there was no one to share them; and nothing seemed to matter very much. Oh, he really was the sort of man that never grows up! And it was dreary to live among memories of the past, and his life was now somewhat perturbed by disapproval of his own folly and by hunger for a woman who was out of his reach."

"And Rosalind--I mean the girl--?"

"She married Orlando--or Gamelyn, or Alfred, or Athelstane, or Ethelred, or somebody,--and, whoever it was, they lived happily ever afterward," I said, morosely.

Rosalind pondered over this denouement for a moment.

"Do you know," said she, "I think--"

"It's a rather dangerous practice," I warned her.

Rosalind sighed, wearily; but in her cheek at about this time occurred a dimple.

"--I think that Rosalind must have thought the play very badly named."

"_As You Like It_?" I queried, obtusely.

"Yes--since it wasn't, for her."

It is unwholesome to lie on the ground after sunset.

4

"I had rather a scene with Alfred yesterday morning. He said you drank, and gambled, and were always running after--people, and weren't in fine, a desirable person for me to know. He insinuated, in fact, that you were a villain of the very deepest and non-crocking dye. He told me of instances. His performance would have done credit to Ananias. I was _mad_! So I gave him his old ring back, and told him things I can't tell _you_,--no, not just yet, dear. He is rather like a muffin, isn't he?" she said, with the lightest possible little laugh--"particularly like one that isn't quite done."

"Oh, Rosalind," I babbled, "I mean to prove that you were right. And I _will_ prove it, too!"

And indeed I meant all that I said--just then.

Rosalind said: "Oh, Jaques, Jaques! what a child you are!"

19.

_He Plays the Improvident Fool_

Now was I come near to the summit of my desires, and advantageously betrothed to a girl with whom I was, in any event, almost in love; but I presently ascertained, to my dismay, that sophisticated, "proper" little Rosalind was thoroughly in love with me, and always in the back of my mind this knowledge worried me.

Imprimis, she persisted in calling me Jaques, which was uncomfortably reminiscent of that time wherein I was called Jack. Yet my objection to this silly nickname was a mischancy matter to explain. There was no way of telling her that I disliked anything which reminded me of Gillian Hardress, without telling more about Gillian than would be pleasant to tell. So Rosalind went on calling me Jaques; and I was compelled to put up with a trivial and unpremeditated, but for all that a daily, annoyance; and I fretted under it.

Item, she insisted on presenting me with all sorts of expensive knick-knacks, and being childishly grieved when I remonstrated.

"But I have the money," Rosalind would say, "and you haven't. So why shouldn't I? And besides, it's really only selfishness on my part, because I like doing things for you, and _if_ you liked doing things for me, Jaques, you'd understand."

So I would eventually have to swear that I did like "doing things" for her; and it followed--somehow--that in consequence she had a perfect right to give me anything she wanted to.

And this too fretted me, mildly, all the summer I spent at Birnam Beach with Rosalind and with the opulent friends of Rosalind's aunt from St. Louis.... They were a queer lot. They all looked so unspeakably new; their clothes were spick and span, and as expensive as possible, but that was not it; even in their bathing suits these middle-aged people--they were mostly middle-aged--seemed to have been very recently finished, like animated waxworks of middle-aged people just come from the factory. And they spent money in a continuous careless way that frightened me.

But I was on my very best, most dignified behavior; and when Aunt Lora presented me as "one of the Lichfield Townsends, you know," these brewers and breweresses appeared to be properly impressed. One of them--actually--"supposed that I had a coat-of-arms"; which in Lichfield would be equivalent to "supposing" that a gentleman possessed a pair of trousers. But they were really very thoughtful about never letting me pay for anything; in this regard there seemed afoot a sort of friendly conspiracy.

So the summer passed pleasantly enough; and we bathed, and held hands in the moonlight, and danced at the Casino, and rode the merry-go-round, and played ping-pong, and read _Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall_,--which was much better, I told everybody, than that idiotic George Clock book, _The Imperial Votaress_. And we drank interminable suissesses, and it was all very pleasant.

Yet always in the rear of my mind was stirring restively the instinct to get back to my writing; and these sedately frolicsome benevolent people--even Rosalind--plainly thought that "writing things" was just the unimportant foible of an otherwise fine young fellow.

2

And in September Rosalind came to visit her Aunt Marcia in Lichfield, to get clothes and all other matters ready for our wedding in November; and Lichfield, as always, made much of Rosalind, and she had the honor of "leading" the first Lichfield German with Colonel Rudolph Musgrave. My partner at that dance was the Marquise d'Arlanges....

I was seeing a deal of the Marquise d'Arlanges. She was Stella's only sister, as you may remember, and was that autumn paying a perfunctory visit to her parents--the second since her marriage.

I shall not expatiate, however, concerning Madame la Marquise. You have doubtless heard of her. For Lizzie has not, even yet, found a time wherein to be idle; she has been busied since the hour of her birth in acquiring first, plain publicity, and then social power, and every other amenity of life in turn. I had not the least doubt even then of her ending where she is now....

She was at this time still well upon the preferable side o! thirty, and had no weaknesses save a liking for gossip, cigarettes, and admiration. Lizzie was never the woman to marry a Peter Blagden. Once Stella was settled, Lizzie Musgrave had sailed for Europe, and eventually had arrived at Monaco with an apologetic mother, several letters of introduction, and a Scotch terrier; and had established herself at the Hotel de la Paix, to look over the "available" supply of noblemen in reduced circumstances. Before the end of a month Miss Musgrave had reached a decision, had purchased her Marquis, much as she would have done any other trifle that took her fancy, and had shipped her mother back to America. Lizzie retained the terrier, however, as she was honestly attached to it.

Her marriage had been happy, and she found her husband on further acquaintance, as she told me, a mild-mannered and eminently suitable person, who was unaccountably addicted to playing dominoes, and who spent a great deal of money, and dined with her occasionally. In a sentence, the marquise was handsome, "had a tongue in her head," and, to utilise yet another ancient phrase, was as hard as nails.

And yet there was a family resemblance. Indeed, in voice and feature she was strangely like an older Stella; and always I was cheating myself into a half-belief that this woman I was talking with was Stella; and Lizzie would at least enable me to forget, for a whole half-hour sometimes, that Stella was dead....

* * * * *

"I must thank you," I said, one afternoon, when I arose to go, "for a most pleasant dream of--what we'll call the Heart's Desire. I suppose I have been rather stupid, Lizzie; and I apologise for it; but people are never exceedingly hilarious in dreams, you know."

She said, very gently: "I understand. For I loved Stella too. And that is why the room is never really lighted when you come. Oh, you stupid man, how could I have _helped_ knowing it--that all the love you have made to me was because you have been playing I was Stella? That knowledge has preserved me, more than once, my child, from succumbing to your illicit advances in this dead Lichfield."

And I was really astonished, for she was not by ordinary the sort of woman who consents to be a makeshift.

I said as much, "And it _has_ been a comfort, Lizzie, because she doesn't come as often now, for some reason--"

"Why--what do you mean?"

The room was very dark, lit only by the steady, comfortable glow of a soft-coal fire. For it was a little after sunset, and outside, carriages were already rumbling down Regis Avenue, and people were returning from the afternoon drive. I could not see anything distinctly, excepting my own hands, which were like gold in the firelight; and so I told her all about _The Indulgences of Ole-Luk-Ole_.

"She came, that first time, over the crest of a tiny upland that lay in some great forest,--Brocheliaunde, I think. I knew it must be autumn, for the grass was brown and every leaf upon the trees was brown. And she too was all in brown, and her big hat, too, was of brown felt, and about it curled a long ostrich feather dyed brown; and my first thought, as I now remember, was how in the dickens could any mediaeval lady have come by such a garb, for I knew, somehow, that this was a woman of the Middle Ages.

"Only her features were those of Stella, and the eyes of this woman were filled with an unutterable happiness and fear, as she came toward me,--just as the haunting eyes of Stella were upon the night she married Peter Blagden, and I babbled nonsense to the moon.

"'Oh, I have wanted you,--I have wanted you!' she said; and afterward, unarithmeticably dimpling, just as she used to do, you may remember: _'Depardieux,_ messire! have you then forgotten that upon this forenoon we hunt the great boar?"

"'Stella!' I said, 'O dear, dear Stella! what does it mean?'

"'You silly! it means, of course, that Ole-Luk-Oie is kind, and has put us both into the glaze of the mustard-jar--only I wonder which one we have gotten into?' Stella said. 'Don't you remember them, dear--the blue mustard-jar and the red one your Mammy had that summer at the Green Chalybeate, with men on them hunting a boar?'

"'They stood, one on each corner of the mantelpiece,' I said; 'and in the blue one she kept matches, and in the other--'

"'She kept buttons in the red one,' said Stella,--'big, shiny white buttons, with four holes in them, that had come off your underclothes, and were to be sewed on again. One day you swallowed one of 'em, I remember, because you _would_ keep it in your mouth while you swung in the hammock. And you thought it would surely kill you, so you knelt down in the dry leaves and prayed God He wouldn't let it kill you.'

"'But you weren't there,' I protested; 'nobody was there. So nobody ever knew anything about it, though may be you--' For I had just remembered that Stella was dead, only I knew it was against some rule to mention it.

"'Well, at any rate I'm _here_,' said Stella, 'and Ole-Luk-Oie is kind; and we had better go and hunt the great boar at once, I suppose, since that is what the people on the mustard-jars always do.'

"'But how did you come hither, O my dear--?'

"'Why, through your wanting me so much,' she said. 'How else?'

"And I understood....