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Literary Love Letters and Other Stories

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LITERARY LOVE-LETTERS

AND OTHER STORIES

by

ROBERT HERRICK



TO

G. H. P.



LITERARY LOVE-LETTERS:

A MODERN ACCOUNT

NO. I. INTRODUCTORY AND EXPLANATORY.

(_Eastlake has renewed an episode of his past life. The formalities have
been satisfied at a chance meeting, and he continues_.)

... So your carnations lie over there, a bit beyond this page, in a
confusion of manuscripts. Sweet source of this idle letter and gentle
memento of the house on Grant Street and of you! I fancy I catch their
odor before it escapes generously into the vague darkness beyond my
window. They whisper: "Be tender, be frank; recall to her mind what is
precious in the past. For departed delights are rosy with deceitful hopes,
and a woman's heart becomes heavy with living. We are the woman you once
knew, but we are much more. We have learned new secrets, new emotions, new
ambitions, in love--we are fuller than before." So--for to-morrow they
will be shrivelled and lifeless--I take up their message to-night.

I see you now as this afternoon at the Goodriches', when you came in
triumphantly to essay that hot room of empty, passive folk. Someone was
singing somewhere, and we were staring at one another. There you stood at
the door, placing us; the roses, scattered in plutocratic profusion, had
drooped their heads to our hot faces. We turned from the music to _you_.
You knew it, and you were glad of it. You knew that they were busy about
you, that you and your amiable hostess made an effective group at the head
of the room. You scented their possible disapproval with zest, for you had
so often mocked their good-will with impunity that you were serenely
confident of getting what you wanted. Did you want a lover? Not that I
mean to offer myself in flesh and blood: God forbid that I should join the
imploring procession, even at a respectful distance! My pen is at your
service. I prefer to be your historian, your literary maid--half slave,
half confidant; for then you will always welcome me. If I were a lover, I
might some day be inopportune. That would not be pleasant.

Yes, they were chattering about you, especially around the table where
some solid ladies of Chicago served iced drinks. I was sipping it all in
with the punch, and looking at the pinks above the dark hair, and
wondering if you found having your own way as good fun as when you were
eighteen. You have gained, my dear lady, while I have been knocking about
the world. You are now more than "sweet": you are almost handsome. I
suppose it is a question of lights and the time of day whether or not you
are really brilliant. And you carry surety in your face. There is nothing
in Chicago to startle you, perhaps not in the world.

She at the punch remarked, casually, to her of the sherbet: "I wonder when
Miss Armstrong will settle matters with Lane? It is the best she can do
now, though he isn't as well worth while as the men she threw over." And
her neighbor replied: "She might do worse than Lane. She could get more
from him than the showy ones." So Lane is the name of the day. They have
gauged you and put you down at Lane. I took an ice and waited--but you
will have to supply the details.

Meantime, you sailed on, with that same everlasting enthusiasm upon your
face that I knew six years ago, until you spied me. How extremely natural
you made your greeting! I confess I believed that I had lived for that
smile six years, and suffered a bad noise for the sound of your voice. It
seemed but a minute until we found ourselves almost alone with the solid
women at the ices. One swift phrase from you, and we had slipped back
through the meaningless years till we stood _there_ in the parlor at Grant
Street, mere boy and girl. The babbling room vanished for a few golden
moments. Then you rustled off, and I believe I told Mrs. Goodrich that
musicales were very nice, for they gave you a chance to talk. And I went
to the dressing-room, wondering what rare chance had brought me again
within the bondage of that voice.

Then, then, dear pinks, you came sailing over the stairs, peeping out from
that bunch of lace. I loitered and spoke. Were the eyes green, or blue, or
gray; ambition, or love, or indifference to the world? I was at my old
puzzle again, while you unfastened the pinks, and, before the butler, who
acquiesced at your frivolity in impertinent silence, you held them out to
me. Only you know the preciousness of unsought-for favors. "Write me," you
said; and I write.

What should man write about to you but of love and yourself? My pen, I
see, has not lost its personal gait in running over the mill books.
Perhaps it politely anticipates what is expected! So much the better, say,
for you expect what all men give--love and devotion. You would not know
a man who could not love you. Your little world is a circle of
possibilities. Let me explain. Each lover is a possible conception of life
placed at a slightly different angle from his predecessor or successor.
Within this circle you have turned and turned, until your head is a bit
weary. But I stand outside and observe the whirligig. Shall I be drawn in?
No, for I should become only a conventional interest. "If the salt," etc.
I remember you once taught in a mission school.

The flowers will tell me no more! Next time give me a rose--a huge,
hybrid, opulent rose, the product of a dozen forcing processes--and
I will love you a new way. As the flowers say good-by, I will say
goodnight. Shall I burn them? No, for they would smoulder. And if I left
them here alone, to-morrow they would be wan. There! I have thrown them
out wide into that gulf of a street twelve stories below. They will
flutter down in the smoky darkness, and fall, like a message from the land
of the lotus-eaters, upon a prosy wayfarer. And safe in my heart there
lives that gracious picture of my lady as she stands above me and gives
them to me. That is eternal: you and the pinks are but phantoms. Farewell!



NO. II. ACQUIESCENT AND ENCOURAGING.

(_Miss Armstrong replies on a dull blue, canvas-textured page, over which
her stub-pen wanders in fashionable negligence. She arrives on the third
page at the matter in hand_.)

Ah, it was very sweet, your literary love-letter. Considerable style, as
you would say, but too palpably artificial. If you want to deceive this
woman, my dear sir trifler, you must disguise your mockery more artfully.

Why didn't I find you at the Stanwoods'? I had Nettie send you a card. I
had promised you to a dozen delightful women, "our choicest lot," who were
all agog to see my supercilious and dainty sir.... Why will you always
play with things? Perhaps you will say because I am not worth serious
moments. You play with everything, I believe, and that is banal. Ever
sincerely,

EDITH ARMSTRONG.



NO. III. EXPLANATORY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIC.

(_Eastlake has the masculine fondness for seeing himself in the right_.)

I turned the Stanwoods' card down, and for your sake, or rather for the
sake of your memory. I preferred to sit here and dream about you in the
midst of my chimney-pots and the dull March mists rather than to run the
risk of another, and perhaps fatal, impression. And so far as you are
concerned your reproach is just. Do I "play with everything"? Perhaps I
am afraid that it might play with me. Imagine frolicking with tigers, who
might take you seriously some day, as a tidbit for afternoon tea--if you
should confess that you were serious! That's the way I think of the world,
or, rather, your part of it. Surely, it is a magnificent game, whose rules
we learn completely just as our blood runs too slowly for active exercise.
I like to break off a piece of its cake (or its rank cheese at times) and
lug it away with me to my den up here for further examination. I think
about it, I dream over it; yes, in a reflective fashion, I _feel_. It is a
charming, experimental way of living.

Then, after the echo becomes faint and lifeless, or, if you prefer, the
cheese too musty, I sally out once more to refresh my larder. You play
also in your way, but not so intelligently (pardon me), for you deceive
yourself from day to day that your particular object, your temporary mood,
is the one eternal thing in life. After all, you have mastered but one
trick--the trick of being loved. With that trick you expect to take the
world; but, alas! you capture only an old man's purse or a young man's
passion.

Artificial, my letters--yes, if you wish. I should say, not crude--
matured, considered. I discuss the love you long to experience. I dangle
it before your eyes as a bit of the drapery that goes to the ball of life.
But when dawn almost comes and the ball is over, you mustn't expect the
paper roses to smell. This mystifies you a little, for you are a plain,
downright siren. Your lovers' songs have been in simple measures. Well,
the moral is this: take my love-letters as real (in their way) as the
play, or rather, the opera; infinitely true for the moment, unreal for the
hour, eternal as the dead passions of the ages. Further, it is better to
feel the aromatic attributes of love than the dangerous or unlovely
reality. You can flirt with number nine or marry number ten, but I shall
be stored away in your drawer for a life.

You have carried me far afield, away from men and things. So, for a
moment, I have stopped to listen to the hum of this chaotic city as it
rises from Dearborn and State in the full blast of a commercial noon. You
wonder why an unprofitable person like myself lives here, and not in an
up-town club with my fellows. Ah, my dear lady, I wish to see the game
always going on in its liveliest fashion. So I have made a den for myself,
not under the eaves of a hotel, but on the roof, among the ventilators.
Here I can see the clouds of steam and the perpetual pall of smoke below
me. I can revel in gorgeous sunsets when the fiery light threads the smoke
and the mists and the sodden clouds eastward over the lake. And at night I
take my steamer chair to the battlements and peer over into a sea of
lights below. As I sit writing to you, outside go the click and rattle of
the elevator gates and other distant noises of humanity. My echo comes
directly enough, but it does not deafen me. Below there exists my barber,
and farther down that black pit of an elevator lies lunch, or a cigar, or
a possible cocktail, if the mental combination should prove unpleasant.
Across the hall is Aladdin's lamp, otherwise my banker; and above all is
Haroun al Raschid. Am I not wise? In the morning, if it is fair, I take a
walk among the bulkheads on the roof, and watch the blue deception of the
lake. Perhaps, if the wind comes booming in, I hear the awakening roar in
the streets and think of work. Perhaps the clear emptiness of a Sunday
hovers over the shore; then I wonder what you will say to this letter.
Will you feel with me that you should live on a housetop and eat cheese?
Do you long for a cool stream without flies, and a carpet of golden sand?
Do you want a coal fire and a husband home at six-thirty, or a third-class
ticket to the realms of nonsense? Are you thinking of Lane's income, or
Smith's cleverness, or the ennui of too many dinners?

I know: you are thinking of love while you read this, and are happy. If I
might send you a new sensation in every line, I should be happy, too, for
your prodigal nature demands novelty. I should then be master for a
moment. And love is mastery and submission, the two poles of a strong
magnet. Adieu.



NO. IV. FURTHER AUTOBIOGRAPHIC.

(_Eastlake continues apropos of a chance meeting_.)

So you rather like the curious flavor of this new dish, but it puzzles
you. You ask for facts? What a stamp Chicago has put on your soul! You
will continue to regard as facts the feeble fancies that God has allowed
to petrify. I warn you that facts kill, but you shall have them. I had
meditated a delightful sheet of love that has been disdainfully shoved
into the waste-basket. A grave moral there for you, my lady!

Do you remember when I was very young and _gauche_? Doubtless, for women
never forget first impressions of that sort. You dressed very badly, and
were quite ceremonious. I was the bantling son of one of your father's
provincial correspondents, to adopt the suave term of the foreigners. I
had been sent to Chicago to fit for a technical school, where I was to
learn to be very clever about mill machinery. Perhaps you remember my
father--a sweet-natured, wiry, active man, incapable of conceiving an
interest in life that was divorced from respectability. I think he had
some imagination, for now and then he was troubled about my becoming a
loafer. However, he certainly kept it in control: I was to become a great
mill owner.

It was all luck at first: you were luck, and the Tech. was luck. Then I
found my voice and saw my problem: to cross my father's aspirations, to be
other than the Wabash mill owner, would have been cruel. You see his
desires were more passionate than mine. I worried through the mechanical,
deadening routine of the Tech. somehow, and finally got courage enough to
tell him that I could not accept Wabash quite yet. I had the audacity to
propose two years abroad. We compromised on one, but I understood that I
must not finally disappoint him. He cared so much that it would have been
wicked. A few people in this world have positive and masterful
convictions. An explosion or insanity comes if their wills smoulder in
ineffectual silence. Most of us have no more than inclinations. It seems
wise and best that those of mere inclinations should waive their
prejudices in favor of those who feel intensely. So much for the great
questions of individuality and personality that set the modern world
a-shrieking. This is a commonplace solution of the great family problem
Turgénieff propounded in "Fathers and Sons." Perchance you have heard of
Turgénieff?

So I prepared to follow my father's will, for I loved him exceedingly. His
life had not been happy, and his nature, as I have said, was a more
exacting one than mine. The price of submission, however, was not plain to
me until I was launched that year in Paris in a strange, cosmopolitan
world. I was supposed to attend courses at the École Polytechnique, but I
became mad with the longings that are wafted about Europe from capital to
capital. I went to Italy--to Venice and Florence and Rome--to Athens and
Constantinople and Vienna. In a word, I unfitted myself for Wabash as
completely as I could, and troubled my spirit with vain attempts after art
and feeling.

You women do not know the intoxication of five-and-twenty--a few hundred
francs in one's pockets, the centuries behind, creation ahead. You do not
know what it is to hunger after the power of understanding and the power
of expression; to see the world as divine one minute and a mechanic hell
the next; to feel the convictions of the vagabond; to grudge each sunbeam
that falls unseen by you on some mouldering gate in some neglected city,
each face of the living wherein possible life looks out untried by you,
each picture that means a new curiosity. No, for, after all, you are
material souls; you need a Bradshaw and a Baedeker, even in the land of
dreams. All men, I like to think, for one short breath in their lives,
believe this narrow world to be shoreless. They feel that they should die
in discontent if they could not experience, test, this wonderful
conglomerate of existence. It is an old, old matter I am writing you
about. We have classified it nicely, these days; we call it the "romantic
spirit," and we say that it is made three parts of youth and two of
discontent--a perpetual expression of the world's pessimism.

I look back, and I think that I have done you wrong. Women like you have
something nearly akin to this mood. Some time in your lives you would all
be romantic lovers. The commonest of you anticipate a masculine soul that
shall harmonize your discontent into happiness. Most of you are not very
nice about it; you make your hero out of the most obvious man. Yet it is
pathetic, that longing for something beyond yourselves. That passionate
desire for a complete illusion in love is the one permanent note you women
have attained in literature. In your heart of hearts you would all (until
you become stiff in the arms of an unlovely life) follow a cabman, if he
could make the world dance for you in this joyous fashion. Some are hard
to satisfy--for example, you, my lady--and you go your restless, brilliant
little way, flirting with this man, coquetting with that, examining a
third, until your heart grows weary or until you are at peace. You may
marry for money or for love, and in twenty years you will teach your
daughters that love doesn't pay at less than ten thousand a year. But you
don't expect them to believe you, and they don't.

I am not sneering at you. I would not have it otherwise, for the world
would be one half cheaper if women like you did not follow the perpetual
instinct. True, civilization tends to curb this romantic desire, but when
civilization runs against a passionate nature we have a tragedy. The world
is sweeter, deeper, for that. Live and love, if you can, and give the lie
to facts. Be restless, be insatiable, be wicked, but believe that your
body and soul were meant for more than food and raiment; that somewhere,
somehow, some day, you will meet the dream made real, and that _he_ will
unlock the secrets of this life.

It is late. I am tired. The noises of the city begin, far down in the
darkness. This carries love.



NO. V. AROUSED.

(_Miss Armstrong protests and invites_.)

It is real, real, _real_. If I can say so, after going on all these years
with but one idea (according to my good friends) of settling myself
comfortably in some large home, shouldn't you believe it? You have lived
more interestingly than I, and you are not dependent, as most of us are.
You really mock me through it all. You think I am worthy of only a kind of
candy that you carry about for agreeable children, which you call love. To
me, sir, it reads like an insult--your message of love tucked in concisely
at the close.

No, keep to facts, for they are your _metier_. You make them interesting.
Tell me more about your idle, contemplative self. And let me see you
to-morrow at the Thorntons'. Leave your sombre eyes at home, and don't
expect infinities in tea-gabble. I saw you at the opera last night. For
some moments, while Melba was singing, I wanted you and your confectioner's
love. That Melba might always sing, and the tide always flood the marshes!
On the whole, I like candy. Send me a page of it.

E. A.



NO. VI. AUTOBIOGRAPHIC.

(_Eastlake, disregarding her comments, continues._)

Dear lady, did you ever read some stately bit of prose, which caught in
its glamour of splendid words the vital, throbbing world of affairs and
passions, some crystallization of a rich experience, and then by chance
turn to the "newsy" column of an American newspaper? (Forsooth, these must
be literary letters!) Well, that tells the sensations of going from Europe
to Wabash. I had caught the sound of the greater harmony, or struggle, and
I must accept the squeak of the melodeon. I did not think highly of
myself; had started too far back in the race, and I knew that laborious
years of intense zeal would place me only third class, or even lower, in
any pursuit of the arts. Perhaps if I had felt that I could have made a
good third class, I should have fought it out in Europe. There are some
things man cannot accomplish, however, our optimistic national creed to
the contrary. And there would have been something low in disappointing my
father for such ignoble results, such imperfect satisfaction.

So to Wabash I went. I resolved to adapt myself to the billiards and
whiskey of the Commercial Club, and to the desk in the inner office behind
the glass partitions. And I like to think that I satisfied my father those
two years in the mills. After a time I achieved a lazy content. At first I
tried to deceive myself; to think that the newsy column of Wabash was as
significant as the grand page of London or Paris. That simple yarn didn't
satisfy me many months.

Then my father died. I hung on at the mills for a time, until the strikes
and the general depression gave me valid reasons for withdrawing. To skip
details, I sold out my interests, and with my little capital came to
Chicago. My income, still dependent in some part upon those Wabash mills,
trembles back and forth in unstable equilibrium.

Chicago was too much like Wabash just then. I went to Florence to join a
man, half German Jew, half American, wholly cosmopolite, whom I had known
in Paris. His life was very thin: it consisted wholly of interests--a
tenuous sort of existence. I can thank him for two things: that I did not
remain forever in Italy, trying to say something new, and that I began a
definite task. I should send you my book (now that it is out and people
are talking about it), but it would bore you, and you would feel that you
must chatter about it. It is a good piece of journeyman work. I gathered
enough notes for another volume, and then I grew restless. Business called
me home for a few months, so I came back to Chicago. Of all places! you
say. Yes, to Chicago, to see this brutal whirlpool as it spins and spins.
It has fascinated me, I admit, and I stay on--to live up among the
chimneys, hanging out over the cornice of a twelve-story building; to soak
myself in the steam and smoke of the prairie and in the noises of a city's
commerce.

Am I content? Yes, when I am writing to you; or when the pile of
manuscripts at my side grows painfully page by page; or when, peering out
of the fort-like embrasure, I can see the sun drenched in smoke and mist
and the "sky-scrapers" gleam like the walls of a Colorado canon. I have
enough to buy me existence, and at thirty I still find peepholes into
hopes.

Are these enough facts for you? Shall I send you an inventory of my room,
of my days, of my mental furniture? Some long afternoon I will spirit you
up here in that little steel cage, and you shall peer out of my window,
tapping your restless feet, while you sniff at the squalor below. You will
move softly about, questioning the watercolors, the bits of bric-à-brac,
the dusty manuscripts, the dull red hangings, not quite understanding the
fox in his hole. You will gratefully catch the sounds from the mound below
our feet, and when you say good-by and drop swiftly down those long
stories you will gasp a little sigh of relief. You will pull down your
veil and drive off to an afternoon tea, feeling that things as they are
are very nice, and that a little Chicago mud is worth all the clay of the
studios. And I? I shall take the roses out of the vase and throw them
away. I shall say, "Enough!" But somehow you will have left a suggestion
of love about the place. I shall fancy that I still hear your voice, which
will be so far away dealing out banalities. I shall treasure the words you
let wander heedlessly out of the window. I shall open my book and write,
"To-day she came--_beatissima hora_."



NO. VII. OF THE NATURE OF A CONFESSION.

(_Miss Armstrong is nearing the close of her fifth season. Prospect and
retrospect are equally uninviting. She wills to escape_.)

I shall probably be thinking about the rents in your block, and wondering
if the family had best put up a sky-scraper, instead of doing all the
pretty little things you mention in your letter. At five-and-twenty one
becomes practical, if one is a woman whose father has left barely enough
to go around among two women who like luxury, and two greedy boys at
college with expensive "careers" ahead. This letter finds me in the trough
of the wave. I wonder if it's what you call "the ennui of many dinners?"
More likely it's because we can't keep our cottage at Sorrento. Well-a-
day! it's gray this morning, and I will write off a fit of the blues.

I think it's about time to marry number nine. It would relieve the family
immensely. I suspect they think I have had my share of fun. Probably you
will take this as an exquisite joke, but 'tis the truth, alas!

Last night I was at the Hoffmeyers' at dinner. It was slow. All such
dinners are slow. The good Fraus don't know how to mix the sheep and the
goats. For a passing moment they talked about you and about your book in a
puzzled way. They think you so clever and so odd. But I know how hollow he
is, and how thin his fame! I got some points on the new L from the
Hoffmeyers and young Mr. Knowlton. That was interesting and exciting. We
dealt in millions as if they were checkers. These practical men have a
better grip on life than the cynics and dreamers like you. You call them
plebeian and _bourgeois_ and Philistine and limited--all the bad names in
your select vocabulary. But they know how to feel in the good, old,
common-sense way. You've lost that. I like plebeian earnestness and push.
I like success at something, and hearty enjoyment, and good dinners, and
big men who talk about a million as if it were a ten-spot in the game.

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