Annabel Lee

“ One is a vision of her as the quiet martyr-sister who comes at my call and retires at my bidding—and in this part my friend Annabel Lee walks with exceeding beauty.
One is a vision of her as a strong elderly friend who stands between me and all icy blasts, who lays out my daily life, who quiets my foolish excitement with her calmness and wisdom.
One is a vision of her as one who knows no law, who leads me in strange highways and byways, and whose mind for me is a labyrinth wherein I walk in piteous confusion. ”

“ Only I'm glad I'm not there now."
"What for?" said my friend Annabel Lee.
"It is rather pitiful and dreadful to think of having been seventeen, and to have gone every day to the Butte High School and imagined how wonderful-beautiful life would be some day," said I, and all at once felt very weary. ”

“ There are times when my friend Annabel Lee is much like a stone wall.
"Yes," said my friend Annabel Lee, "if you ever feel to express proper gratitude for the good things of this life, be sure that you express your gratitude for the right thing. Very likely you will not have a great deal of gratitude, and you must not waste any of it—but what you do have will be of the most excellent quality. For it will accumulate, and the accumulation will all go to quality. And the things for which you are to be grateful are the bitternesses you have known. ”

“ In the Magdalene's face—and in that of an actor of Mrs. Fiske's range—these are a beautifully delicate incongruity.
And my friend Annabel Lee has told me that the strongest things are the delicate incongruities—the strongest in all this wide world. Because they make you consider—and considering, you wait.
With such a pair of round, innocent eyes of some grayish color—who can blame Mary Magdalene?
In the latter acts of the play these eyes go one step farther than innocence: they do hunger and thirst after righteousness. ”

“ To Fall in Love "I LOVED madly," said my friend Annabel Lee. "There came one down out of the north country that was dark and strong and brave and full of life's fire. All my short life had been bathed in summer. I had dreamed my thirteen years beneath cherry-blossoms upon a high hill.
"But at the coming of this man from the north country I opened my two sloe-eyes, and the world turned white—exquisite, rapturous, divine white. ”

“ And whosoever may have it, thus brought to a state of perfection, is a most fortunate possessor and must need go bravely down the world.
"Perhaps, now," said my friend Annabel Lee, "when one is a goose-girl and goes to eat at a deal table under a green yew-tree, one should contemplate only kings in gilded palaces. One should begin at the beginning of a king's life, it may be, and follow it step by step through heaviness and strife until one sees, in one's vivid goose-girl fancy, the king at last tottering and white-haired and forsaken toward his lonely grave. ”

“ It must need be something characteristic of herself.
"I like strength, and I like simplicity, and I like emotion, and I like vital things always. And I like poetry rather than prose. Just now," said Annabel Lee, "I am thinking of an old-fashioned bit of verse that to me is all that a poem need be. To have written it is to have done enough in the way of writing, because it's real—like your Trowbridge." ”

“ My friend Annabel Lee rested the hand she had held out upon my shoulder.
"When we go into the great, broad world, Mary MacLane," she said, "and you have all the apples, and all the ripe-red-raspberry shortcake, and all the cigarettes, then perhaps will you share them with me?" ”

“ A Lute With No Strings THE most astonishing thing about my friend Annabel Lee is that, young as she is, she seems except for some thing in the past to be absolutely in the present. She does not build up for herself things in the future. The future is a thing she looks upon with contempt. ”

“ I said. "But perhaps that is because of the power and the depth of your eyes and your fair soul. Where there are no eyes and no fair souls—at least where the eyes and the fair souls can not be considered as themselves, but only as things without feeling for life—then are not things relative?"
"Nothing is relative," said Annabel Lee. "If your dog's splendid fur coat is full of fleas and you caress your dog with your hands, then presently you may acquire numbers of the fleas. You love the dog, but you do not love the fleas. ”

“ A human being is a quite wonderful thing, truly—and great—there's none greater.
Annabel Lee is a person who always says truth, for, for her, there is nothing else to say.
She has reached that marvelous point where a human being expects nothing. ”

“ On the stage Mary Magdalene stands with her back to her audience—she stands, calm and placid, for three or four minutes before the rising and falling curtain, graciously permitting all to admire and feast their eyes upon the red of her hair.
"She knows," said my friend Annabel Lee, "that she can make her face bewitching—and she knows also that her hair is bewitching without being so made. And she chooses that the world at large shall know it, too." ”

“ The red light at the end of the rear car receded into a dark tunnel.
Annabel caught her breath. “I don’t see why we let her do it!” she said helplessly.
“You couldn’t stop mother!” It was William Archer. He tucked her hand protectingly in his arm. “She’ll be all right!” he said reassuringly.
Annabel shook her head. They had turned away from the blackness of the tunnel and were walking toward the station. The others had scattered a little, and gone on ahead. Annabel’s eyes followed them.
“She isn’t fit to do it!” she said.... “She’s like a child. I feel as if I couldn’t—!” ”

“ Eleanor threaded her needle and drew in the end and twisted it into a skilful knot. “Yes—I think I shall march.” It was quite casual, and she inspected her work.
“Well—!” Annabel turned it in her mind. “You’d better get a short skirt—if you are going to march. You haven’t a thing that clears the mud!”
“Very well.”
So Annabel had out her mother’s wardrobe and turned and planned, and had a woman in to shorten a skirt for her. And all the days before the parade, she watched her solicitously, and waited on her—as if she were an invalid. ”

“ Give us but plenty when we show
That we deserve to have it so!
Mine ode is finished! Tut! It is a slight one,
But blame me not; I do as I am bid.
The editor of Collier's said to write one—
And I did.
[Pg 124] What the Copy Desk Might Have Done to: ("Annabel Lee")
SOUL BRIDE ODDLY DEAD
IN QUEER DEATH PACT High-Born Kinsman Abducts
Girl from Poet-Lover—Flu
Said to Be Cause of Death—Grand
Jury to Probe
Annabel L. Poe, of 1834-1/2 3rd Av., the beautiful young fiancee of Edmund Allyn Poe, a magazine writer from the South, was found dead early this morning on the beach off E. 8th St. ”

“ As Richard More watched Annabel’s progress through life, he thought more than once of the regal gesture with which Annabel’s mother had thrown back the Chinese coat and cast it aside for Annabel’s sake....
And now he saw Annabel! Life was often very puzzling. But Richard More had not time to spend working it out. He was too prosperous to puzzle. Whatever he put his hand to seemed to flourish. Men came to have faith in his ventures, and to watch for his investments as pointers to success. ”

“ I will jump from my window on to the kind granite sooner than marry him!"
Annabel mourned her daughter's folly; she explained how that John Lee had been dismissed at a moment's notice; and then, changing her mood, she talked herself into quite another frame of mind, and began to upbraid the sinner with all her might.
"'Twas a very unmaidenly thing, and that much I stoutly tell you. To have an understanding with a man, and one who is your country's enemy! Your father has destroyed the flag. He thrust it into the red-hot peat and scorched his own hand badly. ”

“ The girl hesitated a minute.
“You are growing pretty, you know!” she replied irrelevantly. “And you’re almost the only woman I know that has wrinkles—nice ones!”
“Silly child!” said Eleanor. But her face flushed a little.
Annabel nodded. “I’ve been puzzling about it—about faces—lots of those suffrage women—I didn’t know what it was—I couldn’t make out! But that’s it—they haven’t any wrinkles!” She said it triumphantly.
“They do keep young,” said Richard More thoughtfully.
She turned on him almost fiercely. “It isn’t young! It’s—massage! ”

“ There have been those that have had happiness that was more than the world, but in the end there was no comfort, for their happiness brought with it tears of joy and emotion that had limitless source. ”

“ She went with them into the car and settled the little pillow in place and stood with her hand on her mother’s shoulder.... Outside, through the window, she could see the others laughing and talking.
Her mother lifted her face quickly. “You will be carried off!” she said hurriedly.
The younger woman smiled down at her—and her face broke in little, helpless lines. She bent and kissed her almost fiercely. “You take care of yourself!... If anything happened to you—!” And she was gone.
Outside, the group moved and laughed and waved inane farewells. Annabel joined it wiping her eyes. ”

“ One is a vision of her as a shadow among shadows. She is not real, I say to myself. One day I shall awake and find her vanished—without pain and without "sadness of farewell," and as if she had not been. ”

“ If for you and me to-day there should come over frozen hills and green meadows from a far country the message of a tender soul, should we shiver when it is dark and should we dread the coming of the years, and should we consider what would bring weariness and what would bring rest, and should we measure and contemplate? ”

“ If you have felt a thousand tender things and have drunk from a thousand cups and then have been about to write it in black lettering that all, all have failed you—if then there came the message of a tender soul, you have written instead that nothing has failed you, and you have turned back your footsteps and have tried it all again. ”

“ For the message of a tender soul is a message from one that has found the quiet and is absolutely at peace, and has gone so far toward the stars and so far and wide over the green earth that she has indeed reached the truth, and her soul gives of its tenderness without thinking, and without knowing, and all in the dark. ”

“ Yesterday my star went down in the deep shadows.
It went tenderly
Like my friend who loves me;
But since it's gone the way shows dark—my two eyes are tired watching:
I know that my star will never rise again. ”

“ And Eleanor More looked up with a quiet smile. “I am one, too,” she replied.
Annabel stared at her a minute. “I didn’t know you were—a suffragist!”
Then she looked at her with slow suspicion.
“You know what a suffragist is, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Eleanor went on with her sewing.
“Oh—I Well.... am going to march—in the procession!” She was watching her mother’s face.
“When is the procession?” There was a little upward twist to Eleanor’s lip that might have been amusement at her position, or dismay. “When did you say the procession is?”
“Next week—Monday.... You going to march?” ”

“ Do you think we can not crush out all the little demons that presume to torture? Do you think we can not conquer everything? Who is there that we have not known? Where is there that we have not been? Are there any still, still shadows that we have cringed before? Are there any brilliant lights upon the sky that we have not faced boldly and put aside? ”

“ When the wind with its flood of rain comes toward us as we crouch by the wall we are beaten and drenched and buffeted and driven hard against that cold, blue surface. And the ragged edges of the rocks make bruises on our foreheads. ”

“ And I have sensibility—wherefore all that is pungent in the air of Boston, and all that is fine, and all that is art, and all that is beautiful, and all that is true, and all that is benign, and particularly all that is very cool and all that is bitterly contemptuous—are not wholly lost upon me. ”

“ But other times I look up and perchance her eyes will meet mine with a look that is cold and penetrating and contemptuous and confounding.
Other times I look up and see her eyes full of indifference, full of tranquillity, full of dull deadly quiet. ”

“ They bring comfort, but also they bring tears into the eyes and pain into the heart. The message of a tender soul—what does it bring but ineffable comfort to the heart? You do not feel that it is a message, you do not feel it to be a divinely beautiful thing. ”