Corra Harris

“ From your letters I had already learned how near together love and death stood in your consciousness. Each is an exit through which your spirit is ever ready to pass. And for the moment, crowded in with skeleton shadows there, you seemed sensibly near me. I was divided between fear and love. But the blood of life in me always triumphs,—and then it was that I made my first flight in consciousness from you. I kissed my hand to the twilight and ran! I am sure you were there, Philip, a cold-lipped spirit-lover seeking my mortal life. ”

“ Then listen, dear Heart, it was not Philip, but poor Jessica who was vanquished that day as we walked through the lanes and fields around Morningtown. I do not know how to tell you, but of a sudden I am becoming learned in all the joys and griefs of this world. There is a sweetheart reason for them all, lying buried somewhere. For love is nature’s vocation in us, I think. We cannot escape it. Our vision is already love-lit when the prince comes. All he needs do is to step within the radiant circle. ”

“ The young leaves whispered it, the boughs swept low about me, and the winds carried messages of it away into the heavens, so that suddenly the whole night knew of my woe and pitied me.
I know not how long I lay there staring up at the blue abyss of stars through the grizzly shades of night. I only know that my face was wet with tears and that I seemed to tremble upon the brink of a long life’s despair. And oh! Philip I never loved you so,—not only with my heart and lips, but 319 with my soul. And it was my soul that went out in a prayer to you to come. ”

“ But, joking aside, he does not know and you can scarcely guess the full companionship of my pipe these days. As the grey smoke curls up about me in my abandonment, (for I never even read during this sacramental act,) there arises before my eyes in that marvellous cloudland the image of many wind-tossed trees down whose murmuring avenue treads the vision of a dryad, a woman; and as she moves the waving boughs bend down and whisper: “Jessica, sweet Jessica, he loves you; and when our leaves appear and all things awake into life, he will come to gather your sweetness unto himself.” ”

“ The trees will be covered soon with the fairy mist of a new foliage, and our earth sanctified with many a little pageant of flowers. Goodness and happiness are foreordained. No real harm can befall us, now that we belong to this heavenly procession. All our days will come to pass, like the seasons of the year, inevitably. There is no longer any escape from our dear destiny. And as for me, dear Philip, I think there are already hopes enough in my heart to grow a green wreath about my head by next spring! ”

“ There is no tragedy, no separation, for us, but a great wonder of happiness:
All the marvellous words of the poets rush into my brain when I think of this new blessing. Yes, I have acted a robber’s part, sweet Jessica, and he who ravished that great jewel from the Indian idol never carried away so large a draft on the world’s happiness as this that I have stolen. I cannot be repentant while this golden glow is upon me; later I shall begin to question my own worthiness. ”

“ The gift of power is not in me to set foot across the magic line into the dim land of your soul, any more than I could dissolve into a breath of moonlit air, or a 47 wave of the sea. For, in you, I seem to perceive some strange phenomenon of a spirit changed to twilight gloom which covers all your hills and valleys with the mournful shadow of approaching night. Often this conception appalls me, but more frequently I conceive a wild energy from the idea, as of one sent to rim the shadows in close and closer till some star shall shine down and bless them into heroic form and substance. ”

“ Do you reflect that we have seen each other only twice? and both times you were on guard, once as an editor, and once as a lover. Even your face has faded to a mere shadow, and, if you persist in your petulant obstinacy about the picture [3] , is like to vanish clean away into nothing. Only your encompassing eyes peer at me with solemn expostulation out of the shimmering form I conjure up and call my lover. Is it quite fair, Philip? And as for your character, my hope is that, in spite of your mental pose as a sage, you have an unreasonable disposition, a chaotic temper. ”

“ PHILIP TO JESSICA
Dear Jessica:
I will not for any consideration of custom put such a breach between my dreams and reality as to go on addressing you in the old formal way. It will be idle to protest; I have bought the privilege with a great price; nay, I have even bought you, and no outcry of your rebel will shall ever redeem you from this bondage to my hopes. One thing I know: there is no power in all the world equal to love, and he who has this power may win through every opposition. ”

“ One day a knight and a lady came riding up the road. The knight was not very strong, nor was his armour much to look at,—just an ordinary knight, but he was brave, and there was a mighty determination in his heart to slay the false, wicked witch whose deeds he had heard of. And as he rode he turned often to look into his lady’s eyes, and always he seemed to drink new courage from those clear pools, as a thirsty man drinks refreshment from a well of cool water, for the lady was young and passing fair—as fair as Miss Jessica, and she, you know, is the loveliest woman in all the world. ”

“ I cannot tell you what satisfaction and what distress that theory has caused me of late. I would have my own heart free, but I am willing to move my little heaven and earth to prolong your bondage. Selfish?—I know, but consider upon what loneliness and terror such selfishness is based. A man is always sufficient unto himself, particularly if he can abstract and divert himself into a line of thought as you are able to do, but a woman without a lover is a pathetic thing. There is no real reason for her existence; all her little miracles of expression and posing are for naught. ”

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

“ PHILIP TO JESSICA
My dear Miss Doane:
What mental blindness led me to give you such a book? What demon of perversity tempted you to send me such a review of Miss Addams’s Hull-House heresies? You know my abhorrence of our “kind-hearted materialism” (so you call it) , yet you calmly write me a long panegyric on this last outbreak of humanitarian unrighteousness—unrighteousness, I say, vaunting materialism, undisciplined feminism, everything that denotes moral deliquescence. ”

“ What we know is of little consequence, what we feel is written upon the faces of each succeeding generation. But what we do not know constitutes that element of mystery in us that makes us also dual. For we feel and suspect further than we can understand. Thus, your faculty for projecting yourself in spirit further than I can follow, excites in me a terror of loneliness that sharpens into resentment. I am widowed by the loss of the higher half of your entity. Can you not see, Philip, it is not your views I combat, your theory about humanitarianism and all that? ”

“ It would be fruitless too; you have come to the meeting of ways and have chosen. I think you have chosen wrong, for the world belongs to the young and not to the old. Life is ours with all the prophecy and hopes of the future. Ah, what mockery lurked in those words 242 we read together in the shadow of your beloved trees, while your heart lay in my hands fluttering like a captive bird:
And now dear Love, only one phrase of all that poem shall ring in my ears,—that solemn nox perpetua, that long unending night, for every joy you promised. ”

“ Now, a man’s features are only his great-grand somebody’s modified or intensified, and his opinions, as in your case, may not represent him but his mental fallacies. So I invented a test of my own. I tried a man by a jury of my trees, not your peers exactly, but friends of mine who have become to me strong standards of excellence and virtue and repose in human nature. Dear Enemy, I coaxed you into my little heart-shaped forest, which you remember lies like a big lover’s wreath on the Morningtown road beyond my father’s church. ”

“ And I have been amazed to find within my mind a witch’s charm for working rainbow miracles upon your dim sky,—but so it is. There have always been mad moments in my life when I have felt all-powerful, as if I had got hold of the ribbon ends of an incantation! This is another one of my limitations at which you must not laugh. For a juggler must be taken seriously, or he juggles in vain; he must have an opportunity to create the necessary illusion in you to insure the success of his performance. ”

“ Renunciation was practised, not that my neighbour might have a morsel more of bread, but that one hungry soul might turn from the desires of the flesh to its own purer longings. Self-development looked to the purging and making perfect of the bodily faculties, that within the chamber of a man’s own breast might dwell in sweet serenity the eternal spirit of beauty and joy. Even humanism, which by its name would seem to be brother to its present-day parody, perceived an ideal far above the vicious circle in which humanitarianism gyrates. ”

“ When I think of pain, and sorrow, my eyes are holden, I can see only the fair form of love sanctified, and I can hear only your voice calling me to fulfil a destiny which you yourself do not understand. And as all these things approach, beloved, father’s God is more to me than your fine illusion. I wish for guardian angels, I feel the need of a Virgin Mary and of all the lady mothers in heaven to bless me. ”

“ I have tried to show how from one ideal to another mankind has passed to this present sham ideal, or no-ideal, wherein it welters as in a sea of boundless sentimentalism. I have tried to show that because men to-day have no vision beyond material comfort and the science of material things—that for this reason their aims and actions are divided between the sickly sympathies of Hull House and the sordid cruelties of Wall Street. ”

“ We live to conquer our hearts. There is no freedom of mind and spirit till that decisive battle has been fought and won. My heart is a gay vagabond, ready to dance before the door of your tent, but my will is better disciplined. It weighs and counts the costs and rejects this sentimental bargain, because, O Stranger to my soul, I doubt if you can pay the interest love demands upon so large an investment. There is not enough of you; and your capital consists in something less vital,—in wind-cooled philosophies, and the passions of an occult spirit ever ready to escape into mysticism. ”

“ Love, too, breaks open the barriers of our poor personality that the breath of the infinite may blow in upon us. I cannot say how it is with others, but so it is with me: love lays a hand upon me, and instantly the discords 132 of the world are hushed in my ears, the little desires and fears that trouble me are shamed into silence, and I am rapt away into the infinitely great heart that throbs at the centre of all. It is strange, but life itself seems to pass away in the presence of this power that is the creator of life. ”

“ You have betrayed the faith and forgotten your high charge; you have made of religion a mingling for this world’s use of materialism and altruism, while the spirit hungers and is not fed. Like your father of old, that Simon Magus, you have sought to buy the gift of God with a price; like Judas Iscariot you have betrayed the Lord with a kiss of brotherhood! ”