these young girls that live in boarding-houses can do pretty much as they will. the female gendarmes are off guard occasionally. the sitting-room has its solitary moments, when any two boarders who wish to meet may come together accidentally (accidentally, i said, madam, and i had not the slightest intention of italicizing the word) and discuss the social or political questions of the day, or any other subject that may prove interesting. many charming conversations take place at the foot of the stairs, or while one of the parties is holding the latch[48] of a door,——in the shadow of porticos, and especially on those outside balconies which some of our southern neighbors call “stoops,” the most charming places in the world when the moon is just right and the roses and honeysuckles are in full blow,——as we used to think in eighteen hundred and never mention it.
on such a balcony or “stoop,” one evening, i walked with iris. we were on pretty good terms now, and i had coaxed her arm under mine,——my left arm, of course. that leaves one’s right arm free to defend the lovely creature, if the rival——odious wretch!——attempt to ravish her from your side. likewise if one’s heart should happen to beat a little, its mute language will not be without its meaning, as you will perceive when the arm you hold begins to tremble,——a circumstance like to occur, if you happen to be a good-looking young fellow, and you two have the “stoop” to yourselves.
we had it to ourselves that evening. the koh-i-noor, as we called him, was in a corner with our landlady’s daughter. the young fellow john was smoking out in the yard. the gendarme was afraid of the evening air, and kept inside. the young marylander came to the door, looked out and saw us walking together, gave his hat a pull over his forehead and stalked off. i felt a slight spasm, as it were, in the arm i held, and saw the girl’s head turn over her shoulder for a second. what a kind creature this is! she has no special interest in this youth, but she does not like to see a young fellow going off because he feels as if he were not wanted.
she had her locked drawing-book under her arm.——let me take it,——i said.
[49]
she gave it to me to carry.
this is full of caricatures of all of us, i am sure,——said i.
she laughed, and said,——no,——not all of you.
i was there, of course?
why, no,——she had never taken so much pains with me.
then she would let me see the inside of it?
she would think of it.
just as we parted, she took a little key from her pocket and handed it to me.——this unlocks my naughty book,——she said,——you shall see it. i am not afraid of you.
i don’t know whether the last words exactly pleased me. at any rate, i took the book and hurried with it to my room. i opened it, and saw, in a few glances, that i held the heart of iris in my hand.
iris, her book.
i pray thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
by thine own sister’s spirit i implore thee,
deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!
for iris had no mother to infold her,
nor ever leaned upon a sister’s shoulder,
telling the twilight thoughts that nature told her.
she had not learned the mystery of awaking
those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow’s aching,
giving the dumb heart voice, that else were breaking.
yet lived, wrought, suffered. lo, the pictured token!
why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?
[50]
she knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies,——
walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
and talked strange tongues with angels in her trances.
twin-souled she seemed, a twofold nature wearing,——
sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring,
then a poor mateless dove that droops despairing.
questioning all things: why her lord had sent her?
what were these torturing gifts, and wherefore lent her?
scornful as spirit fallen, its own tormentor.
and then all tears and anguish: queen of heaven,
sweet saints, and thou by mortal sorrows riven,
save me! o, save me! shall i die forgiven?
and then——ah, god! but nay, it little matters:
look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters,
the myriad germs that nature shapes and shatters!
if she had——well! she longed, and knew not wherefore
had the world nothing she might live to care for?
no second self to say her evening prayer for?
she knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming,
yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming
showed not unlovely to her simple seeming.
vain? let it be so! nature was her teacher.
what if a lonely and unsistered creature
loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature,
saying, unsaddened,——this shall soon be faded,
and double-hued the shining tresses braided,
and all the sunlight of the morning shaded?
[51]
——this her poor book is full of saddest follies,
of tearful smiles and laughing melancholies,
with summer roses twined and wintry hollies.
in the strange crossing of uncertain chances,
somewhere, beneath some maiden’s tear-dimmed glances
may fall her little book of dreams and fancies.
sweet sister! iris, who shall never name thee,
trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.
spare her, i pray thee! if the maid is sleeping,
peace with her! she has had her hour of weeping.
no more! she leaves her memory in thy keeping.
these verses were written in the first leaves of the locked volume. as i turned the pages, i hesitated for a moment. is it quite fair to take advantage of a generous, trusting impulse to read the unsunned depths of a young girl’s nature, which i can look through, as the balloon-voyagers tell us they see from their hanging-baskets through the translucent waters which the keenest eye of such as sail over them in ships might strive to pierce in vain? why has the child trusted me with such artless confessions,——self-revelations, which might be whispered by trembling lips, under the veil of twilight, in sacred confessionals, but which i cannot look at in the light of day without a feeling of wronging a sacred confidence?
to all this the answer seemed plain enough after a little thought. she did not know how fearfully she had[52] disclosed herself; she was too profoundly innocent. her soul was no more ashamed than the fair shapes that walked in eden without a thought of over-liberal loveliness. having nobody to tell her story to,——having, as she said in her verses, no musical instrument to laugh and cry with her,——nothing, in short, but the language of pen and pencil,——all the veinings of her nature were impressed on these pages, as those of a fresh leaf are transferred to the blank sheets which enclose it. it was the same thing which i remember seeing beautifully shown in a child of some four or five years we had one day at our boarding-house. this child was a deaf-mute. but its soul had the inner sense that answers to hearing, and the shaping capacity which through natural organs realizes itself in words. only it had to talk with its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid alternations of feeling and shifting expressions of thought as flitted over its face, i have never seen in any other human countenance.
i found the soul of iris in the book that lay open before me. sometimes it was a poem that held it, sometimes a drawing,——angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere hieroglyphic symbol of which i could make nothing. a rag of cloud on one page, as i remember, with a streak of red zigzagging out of it across the paper as naturally as a crack runs through a china bowl. on the next page a dead bird,——some little favorite, i suppose; for it was worked out with a special love, and i saw on the leaf that sign with which once or twice in my life i have had a letter sealed,——a round spot where the paper is slightly corrugated, and, if there is writing[53] there, the letters are somewhat faint and blurred. most of the pages were surrounded with emblematic traceries. it was strange to me at first to see how often she introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,——for it seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none too little cared for by nature to be without its beauty for her artist eye and pencil. by the side of the garden-flowers,——of spring’s curled darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds, dear to sketching maidens, of flower-de-luces and morning-glories,——nay, oftener than these, and more tenderly caressed by the colored brush that rendered them,——were those common growths which fling themselves to be crushed under our feet and our wheels, making themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that we forget each of them is a ray of the divine beauty.
yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,——just as we see them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the kindling sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens the fields, to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems fair to loving eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round with milk-white rays; the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale blue flowers aflame, one after another, sparingly, as the lights are kindled in the candelabra of decaying palaces where the heirs of dethroned monarchs are dying out; the red and white clovers; the broad, flat leaves of the plantain,——“the white man’s foot,” as the indians called it,——the wiry, jointed stems of that iron creeping plant which we call “knot-grass,” and which loves its life so dearly that it is next to[54] impossible to murder it with a hoe, as it clings to the cracks of the pavement;——all these plants, and many more, she wove into her fanciful garlands and borders.——on one of the pages were some musical notes. i touched them from curiosity on a piano belonging to one of our boarders. strange! there are passages that i have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if they were gasping for words to interpret them. she must have heard the strains that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my neighbor’s chamber. the illuminated border she had traced round the page that held these notes took the place of the words they seemed to be aching for. above, a long monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-hued, anxious and jaded and sullen, if you can imagine such an expression in water. on one side an alpine needle, as it were, of black basalt, girdled with snow. on the other a threaded waterfall. the red morning-tint that shone in the drops had a strange look,——one would say the cliff was bleeding;——perhaps she did not mean it. below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with his wings spread over some unseen object.——and on the very next page a procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page of fuller’s “holy war,” in which i recognized without difficulty every boarder at our table in all the glory of the most resplendent caricature,——three only excepted,——the little gentleman, myself, and one other.
i confess i did expect to see something that would remind me of the girl’s little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him.——there is a left arm again, though;——no,——that is from the “fighting gladiator,”——the[55] “jeune héros combattant” of the louvre;——there is the broad ring of the shield. from a cast, doubtless. [the separate casts of the “gladiator’s” arm look immense; but in its place the limb looks light, almost slender,——such is the perfection of that miraculous marble. i never felt as if i touched the life of the old greeks until i looked on that statue.]——here is something very odd, to be sure. an eden of all the humped and crooked creatures! what could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy? she has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace. a bactrian camel lying under a palm. a dromedary flashing up the sands,——spray of the dry ocean sailed by the “ship of the desert.” a herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the forehand, light in the hind-quarter. [the buffalo is the lion of the ruminants.] and there is a norman horse, with his huge, rough collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast. and here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering curves in their bowed necks, as if they had snake’s blood under their white feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons, standing on one foot like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold stare of monumental effigies.——a very odd page indeed! not a creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look at. you can make your own comment; i am fanciful, you know. i believe she is trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light of one of nature’s eccentric curves, belonging to her system of beauty, as the hyperbola and parabola belong[56] to the conic sections, though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like the circle and ellipse. at any rate, i cannot help referring this paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head connected with her friend whom nature has warped in the moulding.——that is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine. i believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times,——if it does not really get freed or half freed from her own. did you ever see a case of catalepsy? you know what i mean,——transient loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position in which they are put, as if they belonged to a lay-figure. she had been talking with him and listening to him one day when the boarders moved from the table nearly all at once. but she sat as before, her cheek resting on her hand, her amber eyes wide open and still. i went to her,——she was breathing as usual, and her heart was beating naturally enough,——but she did not answer. i bent her arm; it was as plastic as softened wax, and kept the place i gave it.——this will never do, though,——and i sprinkled a few drops of water on her forehead. she started and looked round.——i have been in a dream,——she said;——i feel as if all my strength were in this arm;——give me your hand!——she took my right hand in her left, which looked soft and white enough, but——good heaven! i believe she will crack my bones! all the nervous power in her body must have flashed through those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,——she who could hardly glove herself when in her common health. iris turned pale, and the tears came to her eyes;——she saw[57] she had given pain. then she trembled, and might have fallen but for me;——the poor little soul had been in one of those trances that belong to the spiritual pathology of higher natures, mostly those of women.
to come back to this wondrous book of iris. two pages faced each other which i took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind. on the left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked with a single bird. no trace of earth, but still the winged creature seemed to be soaring upward and upward. facing it, one of those black dungeons such as piranesi alone of all men has pictured. i am sure she must have seen those awful prisons of his, out of which the opium-eater got his nightmare vision, described by another as “cemeteries of departed greatness, where monstrous and forbidden things are crawling and twining their slimy convolutions among mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and mutilated inscriptions.” such a black dungeon faced the page that held the blue sky and the single bird; at the bottom of it something was coiled,——what, and whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not make out.
i told you the young girl’s soul was in this book. as i turned over the last leaves i could not help starting. there were all sorts of faces among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders that ran round the pages. they had mostly the outline of childish or womanly or manly beauty, without very distinct individuality. but at last it seemed to me that some of them were taking on a look not wholly unfamiliar to me; there were features that did not seem new.——can it be so? was there ever such innocence in a creature so full of life?[58] she tells her heart’s secrets as a three-years-old child betrays itself without need of being questioned! this was no common miss, such as are turned out in scores from the young-lady-factories, with parchments warranting them accomplished and virtuous,——in case anybody should question the fact. i began to understand her;——and what is so charming as to read the secret of a real femme incomprise?——for such there are, though they are not the ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.
i found these stanzas in the book, among many others. i give them as characterizing the tone of her sadder moments:
under the violets.
her hands are cold; her face is white;
no more her pulses come and go;
her eyes are shut to life and light;——
fold the white vesture, snow on snow,
and lay her where the violets blow.
but not beneath a graven stone,
to plead for tears with alien eyes;
a slender cross of wood alone
shall say, that here a maiden lies
in peace beneath the peaceful skies.
and gray old trees of hugest limb
shall wheel their circling shadows round
to make the scorching sunlight dim
that drinks the greenness from the ground,
and drop their dead leaves on her mound.
[59]
when o’er their boughs the squirrels run,
and through their leaves the robins call,
and, ripening in the autumn sun,
the acorns and the chestnuts fall,
doubt not that she will heed them all.
for her the morning choir shall sing
its matins from the branches high,
and every minstrel-voice of spring,
that trills beneath the april sky,
shall greet her with its earliest cry.
when, turning round their dial-track,
eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
her little mourners, clad in black,
the crickets, sliding through the grass,
shall pipe for her an evening mass.
at last the rootlets of the trees
shall find the prison where she lies,
and bear the buried dust they seize
in leaves and blossoms to the skies.
so may the soul that warmed it rise!
if any, born of kindlier blood,
should ask, what maiden lies below?
say only this: a tender bud,
that tried to blossom in the snow,
lies withered where the violets blow.
——i locked the book and sighed as i laid it down. the world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. very often it does not know what to do with genius. talent is a docile creature. it bows its head[60] meekly while the world slips the collar over it. it backs into the shafts like a lamb. it draws its load cheerfully, and is patient of the bit and of the whip. but genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train.
