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Literary Love Letters and Other Stories

R >> Robert Herrick >> Literary Love Letters and Other Stories




Her eyes filled with tears at this sign of humanity. "Next time, perhaps."

"So you think that's the beginning of a fortune. I have failed--failed if
you get ten thousand dollars for every canvas in this shop. You will never
know why. Perhaps I don't myself." And then he went to work. Some weeks
later he came to her again. This time she tried to enlist the sympathy of
the one successful artist Clayton knew, and through his influence she
succeeded in selling a number of pictures and placed others upon sale. She
was so happy, so sure that the prophetic instinct in her soul was
justified, that she told Clayton of her previous fraud. He listened
carefully; his face twitched, as if his mind were adjusting itself to new
ideas. First he took twenty-five dollars from the money she had just
brought him and handed it to her. Then putting his arms about her, he
looked inquisitively down into her face, only a bit more tenderly than he
squinted at his canvases.

"Jane!" She allowed him to kiss her once or twice, and then she pushed him
away, making a pathetic bow.

"Thanks for your sense of gratitude. You're becoming more civilized. Only
I wish it had been something more than money you had been thankful for. Is
money the only sacrifice you understand?"

"You can take your dues in taunts if you like. I never pretended to be
anything but a huge, and possibly productive polypus. I am honest enough,
anyway, not to fool with lovers' wash. You ought to know how I feel toward
you--you're the best woman I ever knew."

"Kindest to you, you mean? No, Jack," she continued, tenderly; "you can
have me, body and soul. I am yours fast enough now, what there is left of
me. I have given you my reputation, and that sort of thing long ago--no,
you needn't protest. I know you despise people who talk like that, and I
don't reproach you. But don't deceive yourself. You feel a little moved
just now. If I had any charms, like a pretty model, you might acquire some
kind of attachment for me, but love--you never dreamed of it. And," she
continued, after a moment, "I begin to think, after watching you these two
years, never will. So I am safe in saying that I am yours to do with what
you will. I am fuel. Only, oh, Jack, if you break my heart, your last fuel
will be gone. You can't do without me!"

It seemed very absurd to talk about breaking hearts--a tired, silent man; a
woman unlovely from sordid surroundings, from age, and from care. Clayton
pulled back the heavy curtain to admit the morning light, for they had
talked for hours before coming to the money question. The terrible,
passionate glare of a summer sun in the city burst in from the neighboring
housetops.

"Why don't you curse _Him_?" muttered Clayton.

"Why?"

"Because He gave you a heart to love, and made you lonely, and then wasted
your love!"

"Jack, the worst hasn't come. It's not all wasted."



V

Clayton gradually became conscious of a new feeling about his work. He was
master of his tools, for one thing, and he derived exquisite pleasure from
the exercise of execution. The surety of his touch, the knowledge of the
exact effect he was after, made his working hours an absorbing pleasure
rather than an exasperating penance. And through his secluded life, with
its singleness of purpose, its absence of the social ambitions of his
youth, and the complexity of life in the world, the restlessness and
agitation of his earlier devotion to his art disappeared. He was content
to forget the expression of himself--that youthful longing--in
contemplating and enjoying the created matter. In other words, the art of
creation was attended with less friction. He worked unconsciously, and he
did not, hen-like, call the attention of the entire barnyard to each new-
laid egg. He felt also that human, comfortable weariness after labor when
self sinks out of sight in the universal wants of mankind--food and sleep.
Perhaps the fact that he could now earn enough to relieve him from actual
want, that to some extent he had wrestled with the world and wrung from it
the conditions of subsistence, relieved the strain under which he had been
laboring. He sold his pictures rarely, however, and only when absolutely
compelled to get money. Miss Marston could not comprehend his feeling
about the inadequacy of his work, and he gave up attempting to make her
understand where he failed.

The bond between them had become closer. This one woman filled many human
relationships for him--mother, sister, friend, lover, and wife in one. The
boarding-house had come to be an affair of transients and young clerks, so
that all her time that could be spared from the drudgery of housekeeping
was spent in the studio. Slowly he became amenable to her ever-present
devotion, and even, in his way, thoughtful for her. And she was almost
happy.

The end came in this way. One day Clayton was discovered on the street by
an intimate college friend. They had run upon each other abruptly, and
Clayton, finding that escape was decently impossible, submitted without
much urging to be taken to one of his old clubs for a quiet luncheon. As a
result he did not return that night, but sent a note to Miss Marston
saying that he had gone to Lenox with a college chum. That note chilled
her heart. She felt that this was the beginning of the end, and the
following week she spent in loneliness in the little studio, sleeping upon
the neglected lounge. And yet she divined that the movement and stimulus
of this vacation was what Clayton needed most. She feared he was becoming
stale, and she knew that in a week, or a fortnight, or perhaps a month, he
would return and plunge again into his work.

He came back. He hardly spoke to her; he seemed absorbed in the conception
of a new work. And when she brought him his usual luncheon she found the
door locked, the first time in many months. She sat down on the stairs and
waited--how long she did not know--waited, staring down the dreary hall
and at the faded carpet and at herself, faded to suit the surroundings. At
length she knocked, and Clayton came, only to take her lunch and say
absently that he was much absorbed by a new picture and should not be
disturbed. Would she bring his meals? He seemed to refuse tacitly an
entrance to the studio. So a week passed, and then one day Clayton
disappeared again, saying that he was going into the country for another
rest. He went out as he had come in, absorbed in some dream or plan of
great work. Pride kept her from entering his rooms during that week.

One day, however, he came back as before and plunged again into his work.
This time she found the door ajar and entered noiselessly, as she had
learned to move. He was hard at work; she admired his swift movements that
seemed premeditated, the ease with which the picture before him was
rowing. Surely he had a man's power, now, to execute what his spirit
conceived! And the mechanical effort gave him evidently great pleasure.
His complete absorption indicated the most intense though unconscious
pleasure.

The picture stunned her. She knew that she was totally ignorant of art,
but she knew that the picture before her was the greatest thing Clayton
had accomplished. It seemed to breathe power. And she saw without surprise
that the subject was a young woman. Clayton's form hid the face, but she
could see the outline of a woman beside a dory, on a beach, in the early
morning. So it had come.

When she was very close to Clayton, he felt her presence, and they both
stood still, looking at the picture. It was almost finished--all was
planned. Miss Marston saw only the woman. She was youthful, just between
girlhood and womanhood--unconscious, strong, and active as the first; with
the troubled mystery of the second. The artist had divined an exquisite
moment in life, and into the immature figure, the face of perfect repose,
the supple limbs, he had thrown the tender mystery that met the morning
light. It was the new birth--that ancient, solemn, joyous beginning of
things in woman and in day.

Clayton approached his picture as if lovingly to hide it. "Isn't it
immense?" he murmured. "It's come at last. I don't daub any more, but I
can see, I can paint! God, it's worth the hell I have been through--"

He paused, for he felt that his companion had left him.

"Jane," he said, curiously examining her face. "Jane, what's the matter?"

"Don't you know?" she replied, looking steadily at him. He looked first at
her and then at the picture, and then back again. Suddenly the facts in
the case seemed to get hold of him. "Jane," he cried, impetuously, "it's
all yours--you gave me the power, and made me human, too--or a little more
so than I was. But I am killing you by living in this fashion. Why don't
you end it?"

She smiled feebly at his earnestness. "There is only one end," she
whispered, and pointed to his picture. Clayton comprehended, and seizing a
paint-rag would have ruined it, but the woman caught his hand.

"Don't let us be melodramatic. Would you ruin what we have been living for
all these years? Don't be silly--you would always regret it."

"It's your life against a little fame."

"No, against your life." They stood, nervelessly eying the picture.

"Oh, Jack, Jack," she cried, at last, "why did God make men like you? You
take it all, everything that life gives, sunshine and love and hope and
opportunity. Your roots seem to suck out what you want from the whole
earth, and you leave the soil exhausted. My time has gone; I know it, I
know it, and I knew it would go. Now some other life will be sacrificed.
For you'll break her heart whether she's alive now or you're dreaming of
someone to come. You'll treat her as you have everything. It isn't any
fault--you don't understand." The words ended with a moan. Clayton sat
doggedly looking at his picture. But his heart refused to be sad.

LITTLE CRANBERRY, ME.,

August, 1893.



MARE MARTO

I

The narrow slant of water that could be seen between the posts of the
felza was rippling with little steely waves. The line of the heavy beak
cut the opening between the tapering point of the Lido and the misty
outline of Tre Porti. Inside the white lighthouse tower a burnished man-
of-war lay at anchor, a sluggish mass like a marble wharf placed squarely
in the water. From the lee came a slight swell of a harbor-boat puffing
its devious course to the Lido landing. The sea-breeze had touched the
locust groves of San Niccolò da Lido, and caught up the fragrance of the
June blossoms, filling the air with the soft scent of a feminine city.

When the scrap of the island Sant' Elena came enough into the angle to
detach itself from the green mass of the Giardino Pubblico, the prow swung
softly about, flapping the little waves, and pointed in shore where a
bridge crossed an inlet into the locust trees.

"You can see the Italian Alps," Miss Barton remarked, pulling aside the
felza curtains and pointing lazily to the snow masses on the blue north
horizon. "That purplish other sea is the Trevisan plain, and back of it is
Castelfranco--Giorgione's Castelfranco--and higher up where the blue
begins to break into the first steps of the Alps is perched
Asolo--Browning's Asolo. Oh! It is so sweet! a little hill town! And
beyond are Bassano and Belluno, and somewhere in the mist before you get
to those snow-heads is Pieve da Cadore." Her voice dropped caressingly
over the last vowels. The mere, procession of names was a lyric sent
across sea to the main.

"They came over them, then, the curious ones," the younger man of the two
who lounged on cushions underneath the felza remarked, as if to prolong
the theme. "To the gates of Paradise," he continued, while his companion
motioned to the gondolier. "And they broke them open, but they could never
take the swag after all."

He laughed at her puzzled look. He seemed to mock her, and his face became
young in spite of the bald-looking temples and forehead, and the copperish
skin that indicated years of artificial heat.

"They got some things," the older man put in, "and they have been living
off 'em ever since."

"But they never got _it_," persisted his companion, argumentatively.
"Perhaps they were afraid."

The gondola was gliding under the stone bridge, skilfully following the
line of the key-stones in the arch. It passed out into a black pool at the
feet of the Church of San Niccolò. The marble bishop propped up over the
pediment of the door lay silently above the pool. The grove of blossoming
locusts dropped white-laden branches over a decaying barca chained to the
shore.

"What is _'it'_?" the girl asked, slowly turning her face from the
northern mountains. She seemed to carry a suggestion of abundance, of
opulence; of beauty made of emphasis. "You," the young man laughed back,
enigmatically.

"They came again and again, and they longed for you, and would have
carried you away by force. But their greedy arms snatched only a few
jewels, a dress or two, and _you_ they left."

The girl caught at a cluster of locust blossoms that floated near.

"It is an allegory."

"I'll leave Niel to untie his riddles." Their companion lit his pipe and
strode ashore. "I am off for an hour with the Adriatic. Don't bother about
me if you get tired of waiting."

He disappeared in the direction of the Lido bathing stablimento. The two
gathered up cushions and rugs, and wandered into the grove. The shade was
dark and cool. Beyond were the empty acres of a great fort grown up in a
tangle of long grass like an abandoned pasture. Across the pool they could
see the mitred bishop sleeping aloft in the sun, and near him the lesser
folk in their graves beside the convent wall.

"No, I am not all that," Miss Barton said, thoughtfully, her face bending,
as if some rich, half-open rose were pondering.

"_He_ says that I am a fragment, a bit of detritus that has been washed
around the world--"

"And finally lodged and crystallized in Italy."

This mystified her again, as if she were compelled to use a medium of
expression that was unfamiliar.

"Papa was consul-general, you know, first at Madrid, then in the East, and
lastly merely a consul at Milan." She fell back in relief upon a statement
of fact.

"Yes, I know."

"And mamma--she was from the South but he married her in Paris. They
called me the polyglot bébé at the convent." She confided this as lazily
interesting, like the clouds, or the locusts, or the faint chatter of the
Adriatic waves around the breakwater of the Lido.

"Nevertheless you are Venice, you are Italy, you are Pagan"--the young man
iterated almost solemnly, as if a Puritan ancestry demanded this reproach.
Then he rolled his body half over and straightened himself to look at her
rigidly. "How did you come about? How could Council Bluffs make it?" His
voice showed amusement at its own intensity. She shook her head.

"I don't know," she said, softly.

"It doesn't seem real. They tell me so, just as they say that the marble
over there comes from that blue mountain. But why bother about it? I am
here----"

They drifted on in personal chat until the sunlight came in parallel lines
between the leaves.

"Where is Caspar?" he said at last, reluctantly. "It's too late to get
back to the Britannia for dinner." He jumped up as if conscious of a
fault.

"Oh, we'll dine here. Caspar has found some one at the stablimento and has
gone off. Ask Bastian--there must be some place where we can get enough to
eat."

Lawrence hesitated as if not quite sure of the outcome of such
unpremeditation. But Miss Barton questioned the gondolier. "The
Buon Pesche--that will be lovely; Bastian will paddle over and order the
supper. We can walk around."

So Lawrence, as if yielding against his judgment, knelt down and picked up
her wrap. "Bastian will take care of the rest," she said, gleefully,
walking on ahead through the long grass of the abandoned fort. "Be a bit
of detritus, too, and enjoy the few half-hours," she added, coaxingly,
over her shoulder.

When they were seated at the table under the laurel-trees before the Buon
Pesche, Lawrence threw himself into the situation, with all the robustness
of a moral resolve to do the delightful and sinful thing. Just why it
should be sinful to dine there out-doors in an evening light of luminous
gold, with the scent of locusts eddying about, and the mirage-like show of
Venice sleeping softly over beyond--was not quite clear. Perhaps because
his companion seemed so careless and unfamiliar with the monitions of
strenuous living; perhaps because her face was brilliant and naïve--some
spontaneous thing of nature, unmarked by any lines of consciousness.

Under a neighboring tree a couple were already eating, or quarrelling in
staccato phrases. Lawrence thought that the man was an artist.

Miss Barton smiled at his seriousness, crossing her hands placidly on the
table and leaning forward. To her companion she gleamed, as if a wood-
thing, a hamadryad, had slipped out from the laurel-tree and come to dine
with him in the dusk.

The woman of the inn brought a flask of thin yellow wine and placed it
between them. Lawrence mutely decanted it into the glasses.

"Well?" she said, questioningly.

Her companion turned his head away to the solemn, imperial mountains, that
were preparing with purple and gold for a night's oblivion.

"You are thinking of Nassau Street, New York, of the rooms divided by
glass partitions, and typewriters and the bundles of documents--bah!
Chained!" She sipped scornfully a drop or two from the glass.

The man flushed.

"No, not that exactly. I am thinking of the police courts, of the squalor,
of taking a deposition in a cell with the filthy breathing all about. The
daily jostle." He threw his head back.

"Don't try it again," she whispered.

"I am only over for six weeks, you know, health--"

"Yes? and there is a girl in Lowell,"--she read his mind impudently.

"Was," he emended, with an uneasy blush.

"Poor, starved one! Here is our fish and spaghetti. To-night is a night of
feast."

The dusk grew grayer, more powderish; the mountains faded away, and the
long Lido banks disappeared into lines pointed by the lights of Torcello
and Murano. Sant' Elena became sea, and the evening wind from the
Adriatic started in toward the city. A few sailors who had come for a
glass were sitting under the arbor of the Buon Pesche smoking, with an
occasional stinging word dropped nonchalantly into the dusk. Their hostess
was working in the garden patch behind the house. At last the artist moved
off with his companion through the grove of laurel between the great well-
heads. Bastian loitered suggestively near.

So they gathered their thoughts and followed the gondolier to the bank.
Miss Barton lingered by one of the well-heads to peer at the pitchy
bottom.

"Here they came for fresh water, the last gift of Venice before they took
sail. And sometimes a man never went farther--it was a safe kind of a
grave." She laughed unconcernedly.

"Perhaps you came out of the locusts and took a hand in pitching the
bodies in."

The woman shivered.

"No! no! I only brought them here."

Bastian turned the prow into the current, heading to weather Sant' Elena.
Lawrence took an oar silently. He liked the rush on the forward stroke,
the lingering recovery. The evening puffs were cool. They slid on past a
ghostly full-rigged ship from the north, abandoned at the point of Sant'
Elena, until the black mass of trees in the Giardino Pubblico loomed up. A
little off the other quarter the lights from the island of San Lazzaro
gleamed and faded. It was so very silent on the waste of waters!

"Come."

Lawrence looked back at his companion; she was holding her hat idly,
huddled limply on the cushions.

"Come," she said again, adding mockingly----

"If you are so ferocious, we shall get there too soon."

Lawrence gave up his oar and lay down at her feet. Bastian's sweep dipped
daintily in and out; the good current was doing his work. They drifted
silently on near Venice. The halo of light above the squares grew
brighter. San Giorgio Maggiore appeared suddenly off the quarter.

Miss Barton signed to the gondolier to wait. They were outside the city
wash; the notes of the band in San Marco came at intervals; the water
slipped noiselessly around the channels, and fire-fly lights from the
gondolas twinkled on the Grand Canal. San Giorgio was asleep.

Miss Barton's head was leaning forward, her eyes brooding over the black
outlines, her ears sensuously absorbing the gurgle of the currents. A big
market boat from Palestrina winged past them, sliding over the oily water.
Several silent figures were standing in the stern.

Lawrence looked up; her eyes seemed lit with little candles placed behind.
Her face gleamed, and one arm slipped from her wrap to the cushion by his
side.

"Bella Venezia," he murmured.

She smiled, enveloping him, mastering him, taking him as a child with her
ample powers.

"You will never go back to 'that'!"

Her arm by his side filled out the thought.

"Never," he heard himself say as on a stage, and the dusky lights from
that radiant face seemed very near.

"Because----"

"Because I am----"

"Sh," she laid her fingers lightly on his forehead. "There is no thine and
mine."

Bastian dipped his sweep once more. San Giorgio's austere façade went out
into the black night. One cold ripple of Adriatic wind stirred the felza
curtains.



II

The garden on the Giudecca was a long narrow strip on the seaward side,
blossoming profusely with flowers. A low vine-covered villino slanted
along the canal; beyond, there was a cow-house where a boy was feeding
some glossy cows. The garden was full of the morning sun.

Lawrence could see her from the open door, a white figure, loitering in a
bed of purple tulips. Her dark hair was loosely knotted up; stray wisps
fell about her ears.

Lawrence closed the door that opened from the canal and walked softly
through the plats of lilies and tulips. Miss Barton glanced up.

"Ecco! il cavaliere!"

"Didn't you expect me!" he asked, clumsily, revealing one potent reason
for his appearance.

She smiled for an answer.

"Last night," he began again, explanatorily. Her eyes followed his lips
and interrupted him.

"What do you think of our place?" She had turned away as if to direct his
speech into indifferent channels.

He looked about bewildered.

"I can't think anything; I _feel_ it; it's one mass of sense."

"Exactly. We found it, papa and I, one day two years ago when we were
paddling around the Giudecca. One is so much at home here. At night you
can see the lights along the Lido, and all the campaniles over there in
Venice. Then the Redentore sweeps up so grandly--"

Lawrence slapped a bending tulip.

"Yes, the world lies far away."

"And you are afraid to lose sight of it," she turned on him swiftly. And
she added, before he could find defence, "You have come to redeem your
words, to tell me that you love me desperately; that you want to make an
engagement; and some day marry me and go over there to live?"

She laughed.

"Well?"

"Caspar would do that."

"And Severance has something to offer," Lawrence remarked, bluntly.

"Half a million."

She began to walk slowly across the little grass-plot over to the Lido
side. Here the oily swell was gurgling in the stone embankment.

She was like a plant flowering in the garden--a plant, part lily, part
hyacinth.

"And you do not want me," she began, softly, less to him than to herself.
"I don't fit in. You cannot take me up and put me aside, at your will. You
would be _mine_."

"Good!"

"It should have been different. We should never have met. They should have
made you a saint, or a priest, or a pastor for the bleeding world. You are
a trifle late; half a century ago, you could have given your soul to God,
quite easily, and not bothered about one woman."

"Yes, I agree, but that was settled by the way the world has ground," the
young man sighed. "Why should it bother you, my fooling with the forlorn
and wretched--the others? Any more than I mind your dealings with men?"

They turned about and crossed the dozen paces to the Redentore wall where
lay a blade of dark shade.

"You could flirt with the multitude? Yes, I should object," she looked at
him slowly, "I couldn't understand it."

He threw his head back as if to look beyond Venice.

"The maimed in body and spirit," he muttered.

"They call you; I call you; you----"

"I was starved," he pleaded, "I love flesh and glory, too."

She laughed unconcernedly.

"Oh, no. I think not. You are trying to very hard. You think you are
enjoying your wine and your figs and the sun; but you say a prayer."

Her words taunted him. The vines on the villino swayed in the sun.

"Come, we will go out to the water, and I will master your doubt."

They stood silent, looking at each other, half curiously. At length she
uttered what was common to their minds.

"Marry the world; it woos you. Love me and leave me; love another and
leave her. The world, that is your mistress."

"And the world incarnate, that is you. The world, breathing, living,
loving, the world a passion of delight."

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