Anna Alice Chapin

“ Suddenly the light seemed to die out from the world. All grew dark. From a black chasm in-28- the rocks rose a woman’s figure in a strange halo of blue light. Her face was pale, with a look of deepest mystery upon it. Lifting her hand, she spoke in low, solemn tones to Wotan:
“Hear my warning! Avoid the Ring, with its terrible spell! Heed me, O Wotan!”
“Who are you who warn me?” asked the god.
“I understand all things; wisest in all the world am I. The witch-wife Erda, men call me, Mother of the Norns. Listen, listen, listen! A day of dusk and gloom is coming for the gods. Beware of the Ring!” ”

“ These obsessions of the spirit—is it not paradoxical and strange that it is given to such women as Pippa, and to such alone, to understand them? It seems that to comprehend truly the passionless in its most exquisite depths, one must have plumbed and exhausted the abysses of passion.
It is certain that Philippa Carpenter understood to the last breath and pulse Charles Stuart's sentiment for her, and that she found a tender rest in the poetry of it—an ineffable relief from the throb of that violent emotion which, is, in its very essence, without end or solace. ”

“ Pippa had felt as if she were passing through some strange troll country in a German fairy tale. Surely in such a world as this were the terrible kobold women, and the werewolves that hunt in the dark of the moon,
Then, in the dawning, she had lifted the shade in her stateroom and looked out upon rolling mountain reaches and shifting miles of mist, and a sort of uplift had come to her. For she was of those who receive impressions with almost magical speed and certainty. In all her travels she was forever rocked by the mood of the place. Perhaps that was why she had kept young so long. ”

“ Most of us, if we make mistakes, must live and die with them, or go on struggling, and drifting, and choking, in the whirlpools, and the tidal waves, finding no islands, no shoal places—nothing except fresh mistakes! But you've the one big chance that can be given to any one—a new beginning. By and by, when you walk out of here, walk out a free woman, with the past blotted out. And don't repent! That way madness lies—not the madness of the brain, but the madness of the heart, the madness of the soul——” She checked herself, and laughed a little, very softly, and very sadly. ”

“ The signora loved them, and served them herself, commenting with easy Italian effrontery on the good looks of the men and the unacknowledged romance that surrounded the comradeship of Carla and Fancini like a fragrance.
“Va bene!” she said, bringing two straw-covered flasks, and setting them on the table between a dish of olives and a saucer of Parmesan cheese. “Give him not too much of the good wine, signorina. He will tell you before us all how adorable he finds you!” And she smiled her impudent, disarming smile into Fancini's blue eyes. “Eh! He is good to see, il bambino!” ”

“ He still stared into the fire, and Philippa still stared at him.
A wild burst of wind shook the little hut, sending flurries of snow under the rattling door, but neither of them noticed it. A silence was poised fast between them, and hung so, growing more and more tense every moment.
The night seemed full of voices. Were they warning, menacing, mocking—or all three? The strings of Pippa's life had been tautly strung, and she recognized an urgency that pervaded the atmosphere. She was not in the least afraid of the man. She was never afraid of anything. ”

“ Very quietly, and in the sort of voice that comes from too deep a spring within us to be heard often, Philippa talked of the ghosts that haunt humanity.
“Don't you know,” she said, looking deeply into the dark eyes, “that half our lives we are making ghosts? Ghosts that will walk and walk, till the very end?”
Evelyn stared at her as though hypnotized. They had both forgotten the faces and the lights. The tea grew cold between them.
“Some of them,” said Pippa Carpenter, “are quite little, the ghosts we make—goblin ghosts that one would never believe had the power to truly hurt us. ”

“ The dead come back, the dead come back. She shuddered in darkest memory, thanking what powers might be that her own dead could not come back.
And then——
She heard a dragging, stealthy, shuffling step coming up toward her from the sea. The drip, drip of sea water came to her, as if some ocean monster were creeping in from the far deeps. Mrs. Darrell did not move; a queer spell was on her. What was it that was coming? She knew that it was danger, but she never thought of the escaped criminal poor Hawkins feared so much. ”

“ The Indians, the Dutch, the English, the Colonials, the Revolutionists, the New Americans, the shining lights of art, science, fashion and the state, have all passed through it, confidently and at home. The dead have slept there; wicked men have died there and great ones been honoured. Belles and beaux have minced on their way beneath the thick green branches,—branches that have also quivered to the sound of artillery fire saluting a mighty nation newborn. Nothing that a city can feel or suffer or delight in has escaped Washington Square. ”

“ With a pounding heart and a dizzy brain, Monty realized that she was not angry with him for his effrontery. Then she withdrew the cool, tense fingers, and, rising quickly, walked to the open window.
“Listen, you, boy,” she said. “You are a child, standing at the edge of the wilderness. There is Paris outside; that is the wilderness, for it stands for the world—the wild, mad world of joy and pain and life. It is not peaceful and happy and gentle; it is swept by storms and haunted by beasts of prey. ”

“ Dainty simple clothes, such comforts and luxuries as his wealth and her position as his ward would demand, a limited amount of spending money, but—no gifts.
The library, with its warm-hued walls, rich with those mellowest of all color notes, beautifully bound hooks, its soft lights further blurred by blue cigar smoke, its heavy chairs covered with the sort of leather that all but defies time, its darkly-glowing Persian rugs—suddenly struck the girl who had been familiar with it for fifteen years as a new place. Intuition, premonition, something of that elfin quality of hers was at work. ”

“ Already the fog that she had come to watch for was forming, soft as smoke, above the freshening, ruffled waves.
“I think I must travel with my own caravan,” she said. “I have some ghosts in my retinue that I cannot lay.”
“And why,” asked the wanderer, “do you want to lay them?”
“Because,” said Pippa, and her mind flashed back to the day when she had talked to a foolish girl of the ways in which ghosts are made, “because they are not, for the most part, happy ghosts. They represent everything that has made me what I am.” ”

“ The women murmured "Hail Marys" and were more than ever inclined to flee when a tiny blue gleam, the merest pinpoint of light, appeared playing about the disk, a delicate, mysterious spirit thing, dancing almost on the very face of death.
Judson was counting slowly and regularly, though in a very weak and tremulous voice. The room was in utter darkness, save for that pricking, glinting speck of light. But there were sounds. Sounds other than that of the tiny dynamo—strange, scarcely audible sounds—footfalls, and then a queer, harsh voice—the voice of Adam Norton, who lay dead—crying, "Cyril!" ”

“ It angered him terribly, too, that Siegfried, more by instinct than anything else, knew how wicked his heart was, and how full of bad, cruel thoughts. The little, dark Nibelung could not understand how the boy, beautiful as the sun, golden-haired and keen-eyed, strong of limb and true of heart, loved to roam in the wide forests all the day, merrily blowing his silver horn and making friends with the woodland creatures, only returning to Mime’s cave at night. He could not realize the pleasure that the soft forest voices gave to the youth just growing into manhood ”

“ The meadow grass was heavy with dew, and the birds were chattering together in every tree at the edge of the field. Whoever thinks that a summer dawning is a time of peace should get up and go out into the wet, warm, sweet, talkative world for an hour—then he would know better.
Some one beside the small girl was abroad that delicious morning of the very first day in June—a woman, tall and graceful, dressed in filmy white, and carrying a rose-red parasol, against the menace of the coming sun. ”

“ She knew him, and she knew that Wanda was right. Kindly and generous in most of the relations of life, he would have no mercy on dishonesty. He would never marry a girl whom he knew to have been a thief, even if he loved her. And it was more than probable that the knowledge of the fact would kill his love outright. Lois knew that things like that do kill love in a man. Not, in a woman—in fact, as she reflected without bitterness, there are few things that will kill love in women—except, occasionally, starvation! ”

“ She had never outgrown the fleeting moods wherein the joy of life pulses unreasoningly. To-day the past and its dark places were lost—-charmed away by the smell of the orange trees and the rapturous blue sky of California.
They were halted just on the edge of the valley, which is veritably all one great garden. The big orange groves and important ranches were farther down, below San Bernardino, but already there were small farms and tiny clusters of orange trees. Pippa gasped with the wonder of that scent which assails one's senses like the fumes of a divine anesthetic. ”

“ When she could quiet herself again, the priest was speaking:
“To lead a man into sin is a very grave thing; to hurt a man's ideals a great wrong; to kill a man's spiritual future is, perhaps, the deepest crime of all. But you do not know in truth that you have done this. There are things stronger than all sin. I do not speak of God, but of the power in ourselves. This man—suppose—suppose that from that deep bitterness, that cruel pain ——”
“Ah, father, you do understand!” murmured Pippa.
For the priest's voice was troubled by a very human roughness. ”

“ Theo Farnham, with his curious double nature, shuddered at the sucking back rush of the water even at the moment that he could not resist plunging into it.
A fresh wind had sprung up—not wild enough to trouble the ocean, but strong enough to whip a sting of recklessness into the heart. It seemed to Pippa that she had never enjoyed a dip half so much. Every splash of spray in her mouth made her drunk with exhilaration; every tingling wave against her body thrilled her like an electric shock. ”

“ Pippa Carpenter, with her instant instinct to shield love and lovers, shrank toward the wall and averted her eyes. But even in that moment, the door from the music room opened once more, less gently, and the big frame of Jack Rivers loomed there.
The broad bar of light streamed sharply on to the two figures on the bench. The clean-cut features of young Ralph Morrill flashed into view; the woman, with a smothered cry, hid her face against his shoulder. There was nothing to be seen of her but a wave of silver-gray chiffon. ”

“ Greenwich was at all times a resort for those who could afford it, an exclusive and beautiful country region where anyone with a full purse could go to court health and rest among the trees and fields and river breezes. It was destined to become the most popular, flourishing and prosperous little village that ever grew up over night. Those marvellously healthy qualities as to location and air, that fine, sandy soil, made it a haven, indeed, to people who were afraid of sickness. ”

“ The passion or craze or whatever it is for jewels! The madness to get them somehow—to——” She stopped short, staring at Joan's face.
The girl answered as if the words were dragged out of her: “I love them better than anything in the world—or could, if I had them!”
“Oh, just Heaven!” gasped her mother, staring at her. “Then, child, child, never have them! They are such cruel things to love! Isn't there some human being——”
“I think I love you,” said her daughter shyly.
The woman shook her head with that tragic smile. “Don't love me! I, too, am a cruel thing to love. ”

“ As afternoon darkened into evening Brünnhilde sat on her high rock looking at the Ring on her finger with loving eyes, and thinking tenderly of the hero who had placed it there, and who was perhaps, even then, leaving the paths of men to come to her side once more.
Suddenly a flash of lightning appeared across the sky and a clap of thunder sounded far away. Strange sounds broke the stillness, sounds well remembered by her: the hoofs of wind-horses speeding through the clouds, the whistling of rushing blasts, the ring of steel armor. ”

“ I have had no joy of my life. I want to give, and, in giving, to gain the peace that is better and dearer than joy. I can lift you up, and make you a man. It is better than a life of dreams, and regrets, and fretfulness.”
Aloud she said, “Neither of us cares for money, but we both love the big and true things that life has to give to her lovers. Let us, side by side, start out on the highroad. We owe life nothing, and life is not our debtor.”
In her heart she added: “He will have a bitter defeat here and soon, when he finds that his symphony has been declined. ”

“ She was trembling all over.
“Go home,” said the priest, and his voice was more and more altered, more cadenced, richer in inflections. “Go home, and—burn the little brown book.”
“The little brown—— How did you know it was brown?” gasped Philippa, her head whirling under the thought that was taking shape in her.
The priest's voice went on, strongly, and with authority:
“It is not well to live too much in the past, or to grieve unduly over those sins that have been buried—and that, perhaps, have blossomed into good uses. The past is past, do not forget that. ”

“ Fantasies and dreams, they spun themselves into a silken and silver web about the Scotch Embassy; and Pippa loved the dreams and wept over them, because they seemed vaguely suggestive of a requiem—a requiem in which Charles Stuart figured, yet not as one who had died.
In all of us is the need for play acting—for the irresponsible engrossment of games. One may take it out in social fencing, or in those little masquerades one acts with oneself, or one may starve it and grow old betimes—but it is there hidden in us all. ”

“ She thought of what Mohammed Ali had said of ghosts and dreams. She looked at the wanderer, but the tears rushed hotly to her eyes. She could not answer.
“You know,” the man said, as gently as before, “nobody is what they have done—only what they are.”
“Yes.” Philippa knew that; she could not have lived otherwise.
“You do know that? Then why are you so unkindly disposed toward your ghosts? The ghosts that have shaped you, given you life and strength and character and the power to do many things.” ”

“ Who wants to study a city's life through the registries of its civic diseases or cures? We want its romances, its exceptions, its absurdities, its adventures. We not only want them, we must have them. Despite all the wiseacres on earth we care more for the duel that Burr and Hamilton fought than for all their individual achievements, good or bad. It is the theatrical change from the Potter's Field to the centre of fashion that first catches our fancy in the tale of Washington Square. ”

“ Theo Farnham was lean and handsome in an undeveloped, boyish way. He had the soul of a dreamer, and yearned to the open—to the sea, and all free, wind-swept places; yet his was a spiritual rather than a physical love of out-of-door life. There was something sensitive and shrinking—something almost timid about him. Such boys get termed mollycoddles at school; and, doubtless, that is what they are, among other things—yet they have potentialities. Sometimes they go down under a pitiful load of practical burdens with which they are unable to cope; but occasionally they become poets. ”

“ Morrill got up from the bench, and, with his hands in his pockets, turned his back. For a full moment no one spoke or moved.
The two women looked at each other—one of those deep and candid looks that are unusual between women except in moments when unexpected crises tear away their masks. In that moment the reputable and respected wife knew Mrs. Carpenter to be a better woman than herself. And Pippa, seeing the weakness that lay beneath that cool and self-contained exterior, felt a rush of pity that carried away upon its generous flood all thought either of resentment or of blame. ”

“ It is, like themselves, heavy, lumbering, with a slur that is like the stumbling of heavy feet. Clumsy and ungraceful, it and what it represents cross the idyllic beauty of the motifs of Friea, Walhalla, the Ring, the Rhinegold, and the rest, with a harsh and disagreeable sense of an inharmonious element. How different from the majestic gods, and the clever, small-souled Nibelungs, are these great creatures who are all bodies and no brains, and who are so ably represented by the music allotted them in the operas! ”

“ In a mood even more freakish and more intentionally heartless than usual, she brought Pippa Carpenter into Olaf Nilsson's gray life—a life in which the only color came from the paint box of dreams.
Mrs. Carpenter was a woman whom no man could describe ten minutes after he had met her. He would have no idea whether she was short or tall; he would not know how old she was; he could not tell the color of her eyes. The masculine being did not live who could note definitely the way she did her hair, or the kind of clothes she wore. ”

“ It never was much of a hammock. Useful enough to-night, though, on account of the poor ankle, wasn't it, dear?”
She nodded, and stood gazing down. The hammock had disappeared. There was no doubt that in the changing tide it would be loosened, rent, and whatever it held given to the open sea. The waves, when trusted, at high tide, seldom betray secrets.
All at once she had to choke back a shriek, for it seemed to her that she saw a hand, a human hand, floating there in the dusk and rush and clangor of water. She flung her black velvet cloak violently at it, to cover it. ”

“ On the top of a tall black rock in the river Rhine there rested a magical treasure, more wonderful than any of the Nibelung hoards, or the possessions of the gods themselves—a bright, beautiful Gold, the radiance of which was so great that when the sun shone down into the river and-5- touched it the gray-green water was filled with golden light from depth to depth, and the fairies of the Rhine circled about their treasure, singing and laughing with delight. ”

“ For surely the home of so much romance and grandeur and charm and importance must leave something behind it other than a few fleeting memories and a page or two of history. Houses have ghosts as well as people, and if ever there stood a house with a personality, that was sweet, poignant and indestructible, it was the House on Richmond Hill. ”

“ He will find his castle in the air crushed, and his dreams dispelled. Could my wretched and unfinished existence know a higher destiny of fulfillment than to save him in the hour of his failure? And, for the rest, I want nothing more of life myself. I have proved that happiness is not for me. But, hand in hand with this dreaming boy, is it not possible——”
But Olaf Nilsson's eyes were full of pain—haggard and tragic in his young, white face. It dawned slowly and strangely on Pippa that he was less utterly and weakly a boy than she had thought. ”

“ There are fakers in the Village—just as there are fakers everywhere else. Only, of course, the ardour of new ideas which sincerely animates the Village does lend itself to all manner of poses. And because of this a perfectly earnest movement will attract a number of superficial dilettanti who dabble in it until it is in disrepute. And, vice versa, a crassly artificial fad will, by its novelty and picturesqueness, draw some of the real thinking people. Such inconsistencies and discrepancies are bound to occur in any such mental crucible as Greenwich. ”