Zona Gale

“ Pelleas went on, “I think we would come to a garden. Who ever heard of a love story without a garden? And it will be a ‘different’ garden from all the rest—the trees will be higher and the shadows will be made differently and instead of echoes there will be music. And there will be fountains—fountains everywhere; and when one has gone in the garden a fountain will spring up at the gate and no one can get out—ever. What do you think of that for a garden?” asked Pelleas.
“I think,” said I, “that the garden we will come to will be Miss Deborah Ware’s.” ”

“ But it is among these things that Pelleas and I live, and we believe that in spite of all the lovers in the world there is yet not enough love to spare one lover’s happiness. So while the moon swelled to the full and swung through the black gulf of each night as if it had been shaped by heaven for that night’s appointment, we moved among the roses of Little Rosemont, biding our golden-wedding day, gradually becoming more and more intent upon the romance and the homely realities of that liveried household. ”

“ I was conscious of this when after breakfast one morning Pelleas and I stood at the drawing-room window watching a shower. It was an unassuming storm of little drops and infrequent gusts and looked hardly of sufficient importance to keep a baby within-doors. But we are obliged to forego our walk if so much as a sprinkling-cart passes. This is so alien to youth that it always leaves us disposed to take exception and to fail to understand and to resort to all the ill-bred devices of well-bred people who are too inventive to be openly unreasonable. ”

“ O, I could not love Pelleas if he was never unreasonable. It seems to me that the privilege of [Pg 338] unreason is one of the gifts of marriage; and when I hear The Married chiding each other for the exercise of this gift I long to cry: Is it not tiresome enough in all conscience to have to keep up a brave show of reason for one’s friends, without wearing a uniform of logic in private? Laugh at each other’s unreason for your pastime, and Heaven bless you.
Pelleas can do more than this: He can laugh at his own unreason. ”

“ In that moment I found, to my misery, that I had forgotten every one of my arguments about young love and the way of the world and the durability of three-ply ingrain carpets, and I did nothing but sit trembling and fluttering for all the world as if it were my own wedding at stake. I looked beseechingly at Pelleas, and he nodded and smiled and rubbed his hands under the tablecloth—O, I could not have loved a man who would look either judicious or doubtful as do too many at the very mention of any one’s marriage but their own. ”

“ There stood Nichola. I have never before seen that grim old woman look astonished, but at sight of the flying figure of Pelleas she seemed ready to run away. It was something to see old Nichola taken aback. Our old servant is a brave woman, afraid of nothing in the world but an artificial bath heater which she would rather die than light, but the spectacle of Pelleas, dancing, seemed actually to frighten her. She stood silent for a full minute—and this in itself was amazing in Nichola, who if she went often to the theater would certainly answer back to the player talk. ”

“ They had brought us a box of Christmas roses and these made sweet the room as if with a secret Spring—a Little Spring, such as comes to us all, now and then, through the year. And it was the enchanted hour, when Christmas eve has just passed and no one is yet awakened by the universal note of Get-Your-Stocking-Before-Breakfast.
“For that matter,” Pelleas said, “every day is a loving cup, only some of us see only one of its handles: Our own.” ”

“ I was lonely when Pelleas was gone. I was sitting by the fire with Semiramis on my knee—an Angora cannot wholly sympathize with you but her aloofness can persuade you into peace of mind—when the telephone bell rang. We are so seldom wanted that the mere ringing of the bell is an event even, as usually happens, if we are called in mistake. This time, however, old Nichola, whose tone over the telephone is like that of all three voices of Cerberus saying “No admission,” came in to announce that I was wanted by Miss Wilhelmina Lillieblade. ”

“ When one is seventy and closes one’s eyes it is wonderful how the whole world grows youthful. And when I had almost dozed that tender rustling brought me back so happily that I could hardly tell which was memory of that other little head upon my arm and which was now. At midnight and twice later when the baby’s food had to be warmed it was I who did this, and the old familiar helplessness of Pelleas in this little presence delighted me beyond measure. ”

“ I cried, past the limit of my patience. “I dare say that very many people who are married would be amazed if they were told that their oath had been meant ‘that way.’ But they would sell their very days to pay a debt at bridge. ‘That way!’ Let me ask you, Hobart Eddy, if ‘I will, by God’s help’ does not mean quite as much at a marriage or a christening as it does in society?”
And at that Enid’s baby, missing the outstretched fingers, suddenly leaned toward him, smiling and eager, uttering the most inane and delicious little cries. A baby without genius would simply have paid no attention. ”

“ I recall saying, “it must be to some one who would understand what the garden means better than we.”
“Yes,” he assented; “some one who walks there all day long. Some one who ‘walks in beauty’ all the time.”
Thereafter we fancied ourselves standing by the shrine and looking in the well, and we saw our dreams take shape in the nebulous fall of the fountain. Of our betrothal week it seems to me that that hour is sweetest to recall when I sat throned in the window-seat in my gown of roses, and Pelleas at my feet talked of our life to be. ”

“ At a little before six o’clock Pelleas set out, I figuratively dancing on the doorstep with excitement.
“Pelleas,” I whispered him in the hall, “don’t you fail! Pelleas, if you fail, attractive as you are, I shall be divorced from you!”
He smiled confidently.
“I feel as if we were eloping ourselves,” he said, “and this is something like.”
Before the clock had gone six Nichola ushered into the drawing-room Cornelia Emmeline Ayres. In one glance I knew that I had not counted on her in vain. To do honour to me she appeared in full regalia of plum colour. ”

“ For one whole forenoon I kept Pelleas in the kitchen, as sentinel to Nichola, driving her nearly mad with his forced excuses for staying while I risked my neck among boxes long undisturbed. But then I love an attic. I have always a sly impulse to attempt framing ours for a wall of our drawing-room. I prefer most attics to some libraries. I have known houses whose libraries do not invite, but gesticulate; whose dining-rooms have an air of awful permanence, like a ship’s dining-room; and whose drawing-rooms are as uninhabitable as the guillotine ”

“ Could this be Little Rosemont, where we were to find Avis and Lawrence and Hobart Eddy and other happy realities of our uneventful lives?
“Oh, Pelleas,” I said in awe, “if only we can get inside before it disappears.”
“Maybe,” murmured Pelleas, “if we can do that we can disappear with it.”
For we have long had a dream—we are too frequently besieged by the ways of the world to call it a hope—that sometime They will come and take us, the Wind or the Day or any of the things that we love, and thus save us this dreary business of dying. ”

“ Presently we all pretended to wake and talk a little; and then we saw Bessie and Henny coming back and at a sign from Pelleas we all shut our eyes again, though Pelleas appeared to awake very crossly and bade them go back and not disturb us unless they wanted to be great nuisances. So they ran back, and we laughed at them in secret, and Little Invalid sat happily holding the mysterious hourglass. And then a band began to play in the pavilion—a dreadful band I thought until I saw the ecstatic delight of Little Invalid, whereupon I discovered that there was a lilt in its clamour. ”

“ I was not long in doubt about Katinka. The very next morning I came upon her in the hall, her arms filled with kindling for the parlour fire. I followed her. Her dear, bright little face and yellow braids reminded me of the kind of doll that they never make any more.
“Katinka,” said I, lingering shamelessly, “do you put the sticks in across or up and down?”
For it may very well be upon this nice question as well as Angora cats that Pelleas and I will have our final disagreement, which let no one suppose that we will really ever have. ”

“ Before the portico the curtain of vines parted to the tremble of the violins. There was the slope, flower-spangled like the slope on which we sat and across which, two nights ago, Pelleas and I had fancied ourselves to be looking on immortal things. And there on the flowers lay Diana asleep, her hair spread on the green, the crescent glittering on her [Pg 262] forehead, her white robe sweeping her sandaled feet. This was Bonnie, dear little maid, and it was her hour; she would never again be so beautiful before the whole world. ”

“ Nichola’s rose, fading in my lace, gave out a fragrance to which some influence in the room was akin; and we both knew.
I said: “Pelleas, I have been remembering that morning long ago at Miss Deborah Ware’s—and our Fountain of Gardens. When we were twenty-something, like Lisa and Eric.”
“But so have I been thinking of that!” Pelleas cried. And we nodded, smiling, for we love to have that happen. Perhaps it makes us momentarily believe that we are each other, and no aid asked of science to bring it about. ”

“ The sorrows, the estrangements, the failures, the ill-health, the little stabs at us, above all the cursed mistakes of my own—do you think we have not had these? Do you think we don’t know, Hobart? Do you think we haven’t paid, to the last farthing? Good God!” said Pelleas. “And yet we are not beaten. And we never shall be beaten, dead or alive. ”

“ Pelleas hastened to open the door for her and we were both fain to gasp with astonishment. For in Nichola came splendid in the newest and bluest of dresses with—wonder of all!—a white cap and apron to which only very stately occasions can persuade her. And when she had set the tray on the table I had much ado to keep from grasping her brown hands. For she had brought the guest-silver, my Royal Sèvres, my prettiest doilies and O, such thin, white, chicken sandwiches, such odorous tea and thick cream, and to crown all a silver dish of bonbons. ”

“ And there sat Bonnie, the little maid whose romance we had openly fostered, and with her that young Karl, the under-gardener, whom we observed in an instant Avis could never call Faint Heart any more.
Pelleas glanced at me merrily as we immediately turned aside pretending to be vastly absorbed in some botanical researches on the spangled evening slope.
“Bless us, Etarre,” he said, smiling, “what a world it is. You cannot possibly hollow out an arbour anywhere without two lovers waiting to occupy it.”
“Ah, yes,” said I, “the only difficulty is that there are more lovers than arbours. ”

“ I hope that there is no one in the world who could not from his soul say that at least once of some hour of Spring and youth. In such a moment, it is my belief, the spirit is very near entering upon its own immortality—for I have always held that immortality must begin at some beautiful moment in this life. Though as for me, at that moment, I confess myself to have been thinking of nothing more immortal than the adorable way that Pelleas had of saying my name. ”