 25 A dream of man and woman, divine or still, but human, solving the riddle old, shaping the age of gold. 26 Upon the shores of the river as she went home, the young fine fronds were thrusting aside the unfaded leaves. The forest stood in a pale and tender fog of green, as if an unseen artist had blurted it with a blender, perhaps to deceive an overweary eye as to his real intent in touching it at all. There was something at once unutterably delicate and urgent in the advance of the deathless spring upon the deathless summer. The eye leaned upon it with the relief which it finds in sunset, sunrise, zenith, fire, or sea, in those things only which bring the thought face to face with what is unfathomable. The heart bowed before it, quickened to ask, Where shall I find eternity without resurrection? She travelled alone, tearless and excited. She felt strong and strained. As yet she was filled less with a sense of loss than of love. Philip seemed quite near. Nearer than when it had been possible to be conscious of any imperfection in himself or in their union. Only his ideal visited her heart. She was not without a strange exultant sense that now she never could see a weakness or a flaw in him again. Life might try her cruelest, she could not fret them now. She thought of him with something of the proud and peculiar triumph of the widowed girl, who kneels to the vision of the man whose wife she never was, to learn to reverence him by one blind thrill the less. Unheard he seemed to her tense mood to speak to her as she rode solitary, and his voice had the tone of the wooing and the bridal time. Unseen to her soul's eyes he journeyed with her, and his face had the look of its first youth and the beauty of its noblest hour. Their relations seemed to her to run on quite uninterrupted. He leaned over her shoulder to read their undivided life. He had but turned a leaf before her in the story without an end. Aunt Chloe was sitting in the twilight with the little girl asleep across her generous arms. The geraniums in the windows were all pink that year. Aunt Chloe watched them while she hushed the child. The professor walked rather feebly up and down the silent city. He had been saying to his sister that he was growing old, he thought, and that the house seemed lonely. He stopped to write the picture of Sir William, whose fresh gray cord had twisted on its polished hook, and wondered who had taken Locke's understanding from the left elbow of the mahogany sofa, and if Professor Brown would call again to see about that pet chemist of his, who was marked so low on intuition, and how long it was since they had heard from Avis, and what it meant that we were having such a merciful spring, and said how green the grass was even now upon the yard. And then Aunt Chloe heard the gate click, and when they looked out across the pink geraniums, Avis, in her widow's dress alone, was walking up between the blades of grass. Aunt Chloe went out and led her in, asking no questions and saying no word. She led her into the study to her father, and put her baby into her arms, and went out and shut the door. And then Avis drew in her breath, and shook suddenly, and so began to cry. No solitude is so solitary as that of inharmonious companionship, and beside certain other phases of her life, her present one seemed at first to Avis to lack the essential qualities of loneliness. It was with that a vivid belief, which has the character of consciousness to imaginative minds, in Philip's watchful and intelligent sympathy, that she directed her energies to the object which her marriage and its consequences had interrupted. She opened the garden studio while the apples budded, and there she stayed patiently for a year. They questioned her little or none, and she worked in an absolute taciturnity, not characteristic of her sweet and kindly temper, which was quick to sacrifice an instinct of reticence to one of consideration for the feelings of a friend. Aunt Chloe knew there was a portrait of Little Jack Rose, and suspected a picture for the exhibition, and tried to remember that it showed a lack of acquaintance with life to be hurt by the conduct of the afflicted. When the year was out, Avis one day locked the studio, took her little girl, and went to find her father. She crossed her hands and stood before him, much in the attitude in which she stood on that June morning when she read Aurora Lee. Only now, between her folded palms, she held the fingers of the child. She said, "'Next week, father, I shall go into the art school, and teach, and I think I can get a private class besides.' "'Do you suppose?' asked the professor, after a sad silence. "'That your mother would think this to be best, my dear.'" More largely, perhaps, than a smaller man, the professor's sympathy yielded what his intellect grudged. He felt that he had made one of the concessions of his life in intimating to his daughter her mother's possible approval of her personal connections, or regret at their obstruction, since, of course, when his daughter had married, it was to be assumed that she yielded the tastes and occupations of her maidenhood like other women, like her mother before her. But the professor could not argue with the eccentricities of an afflicted child. His daughter's frosted future chilled him like some novel defect in the laws of nature, as if the sun should elect upon whose roof it should shine, or the rain pass him by to visit his neighbor's field. "'It is of no use,' said Avis wearily. "'My pictures come back upon my hands. Nobody wants them now. They tell me that my style is gone. Gopille says I work as if I had a rheumatic hand, as if my fingers were stiff. It is true my hand has been a little clumsy since—'Van.' But the stiffness runs deeper than the finger's father. "'Never mind. Don't mind. We've given it up. Wait and I. Haven't we wait?' "'I don't understand you,' said the little girl distinctly. Avis's daughter was a logical little body, clear-headed, speaking only when she had something to say. Wait did not understand what it was that had been given, did not see that anything had been given to anybody—it certainly was not grandpa's hour for the cough lozenge—and preferred not to allow herself to be compromised on any matter on which she was not perfectly clear. Her mother stood looking blindly down. Wait pulled at her dress, unnoticed. Your little daughter speaks," said the professor. Wait stood patiently. A sturdy lassie with straightforward eyes and a healthy temper of her own, aware that she was not of much importance to her mother just then, but perfectly able to bide her time. Avis continued to look down with her eyelids half closed. It did not seem as if she saw her. Something as elemental in Philip Ostrander's wife as the love of their child required her attention at that moment. She wondered how it would have been if she had cared for him in some other way, like some other women. If she had been made of tougher tissue, if her feeling for that one man, her husband, had not eaten into and eaten out the core of her life, left her a riddled, withered thing, spent, and rent, wasted by the autocracy of a love as imperious as her own nature, and as deathless as her own soul. But she would do it all over again. All. All. She would never love him by one throw the less. Avis stretched out her arms into the empty air. She did not know how to express distinctly, even to her own consciousness, her conviction that she might have painted better pictures, not worse, for loving Philip and the children. But this was what God meant for her, for all of them, once, long ago. She had not done it. It was too late now. And Wait was watching her with resolute, critical eyes, tugging at her hands now, with lip put up, would have cried if she had been a baby like Ave Rose. Avis turned with a supple motion, and snatched the little girl. I have my child, she cried. She thought of this more often after that. All was not over, the child had her life to live. The parental resurrection came to Avis as other forms of tenderness had done, slowly, but with passionate intelligence. She seemed to herself to be the first woman in the world who had said, My child shall not repeat my blunders. Or what does it all matter if my child may be spared my sorrows? Wait developed with the rapidity of most solitary children quite in her own fashion. When she was four years old, her mother came to Aunt Chloe one day, rigid with dismay. Aunt Chloe sprang dropping the cotton flannel for the beneficiaries. Is it her fingers or her throat? Oh, did I leave the oxalic acid out? I asked her if her doll was asleep, gasped Avis, and she said, Hush, Mama, it has been the object of my life that she should not know she was a doll. Her forehead is too full, said the doctor, exactly as if he had not said it to every other mother on his list that morning. Keep her out of school till you are convinced she is a dunce. Turn her out of doors with no more restriction than a cricket. One mother on the list at least obeyed him, and one elected lassie was let loose upon the wide, harmless fields and shore. Before she could read a line, Avis's daughter was a splendid little animal. At this point the mother's heart withdrew and took counsel of itself. It must be clearly remembered that Avis had been reared in social and intellectual conditions whose tendency is strictly to the depression of novelty in conduct or opinion. There are always phases of progress vital enough, perhaps, to their little coteries of prophets or disciples, competent even—heaven forbid that one be dulled of imagination about any remote forms of humanity—to their own organisms, circulation, heartthrobs, possibly, which the life of a university town can hardly be supposed to enter upon its curriculum of interests. Religion, sex, race, class, or whatever, looks for no recognition of its discrown state from the centres of scholastic culture. The moral evolution comes slowly to the intellectual specialist as faith to the physicist or doubt to the poet or geometry to the artist. Phases of thought quite familiar to most thoughtful people to-day, forms of advance pressing silently against thoughtful and thoughtless now alike, Avis had been trained to regard with the calm curiosity with which a free thinker tries to regard a Christian, a being in the nature of things, of inferior culture, because cherishing a superstition which is, in the nature of things, barbaric. As free from the compression of any agitating influence or upheaval, as if she and Waite had been sitting sheltered on a summer day in a convent garden, side by side among the sultry flowers, while the music from the altar sounded on, and the sweet veiled women passed with holy feet, Avis, with her earnest eyes and tender mouth and tired brows, found herself face to face with the future of her child. She found herself in the sensitive state of one who has made a gradual but radical change of climate, horizons with which her own youth was unacquainted beckoned before her, the hills looked at her with a foreign face, the wind told her that which she had not heard, in the air strange melodies rang out, uninterpreted colours gathered about the rising of the sun, her own chastised aspiration looked humbly out upon the day whose story she should never read. We've been told that it takes three generations to make a gentleman. We may believe that it will take as much or more to make a woman, a being of radiant physique, the heiress of ancestral health on the maternal side, a creature forever more of nerve than of muscle, and therefore trained to the energy of the muscle and the repose of the nerve, physically educated by mothers of her own fiber and by physicians of her own sex. Such a woman alone is fitted to acquire the drilled brain, the calmed imagination and sustained aim which constitute intellectual command. A creature capable of this command, in whom emotion intensifies reflection and passion strengthens purposes, and self-poise is substituted for self-extravagance. Such a creature only is competent to the terrible task of adjusting the sacred individuality of her life to her supreme capacity of love and the supreme burden and perils which it imposes upon her. A man in whom the sources of feeling are as deep as they are delicate, as perennial as they are pure, whose affection becomes a burning ambition not to be outvied by hers, whose daily soul is large enough to guard her, even though it were at the cost of sharing it, from the tyranny of small corrosive care which gnaws and gangrenes hers, such a man alone can either comprehend or apprehend the love of such a woman. No man conceives what a woman will do or dare for him until he has surprised her nature by the largest abnegation of which his own is capable. Let him but venture the experiment, if he will find himself vanquished by her in generosity to the end of the sweet warfare. Then first he knows what he has won, for then only does she suffer him to know. It is not till then that reverence and surrender radically begin their life in her. Nay, then, he is the man, he only among men, who understands what a woman's tenderness is. With her he is a crowned creature, but with him she is a free one. Avis was a care-worn woman, and like most people with whom life has dealt intensely and introspectively, the pressure of the advancing upon the retreating generation touched her personality more than her philanthropy or philosophy, where their subtle readings of the eternal riddle astir upon the desert had the stone lips of the sphinx begun to mutter. God knew, and the desert knew, and the dumb mouth. For her she had her child. It would be easier for her daughter to be alive and be a woman than it had been for her. So much is this, she understood. More than this she felt herself too spent to question. She folded her arms about the little girl, and laid her cheek upon her hair, and closed her eyes. She had the child. She had the child. Once sitting with Coy and the Parsonage parlor, the two women felt a talking of matters of which they did not often speak. Coy had the immense power of incommunicativeness sometimes found in simple and even impulsive women, in whom a kind of heart supplies the place of a deep imagination. For years now, with Avis, Coy's instinct had kept her close to the surface of the immediate. She felt it to be natural that there was always something not to be talked about in Avis's life. It was the way with women like Avis, to whom things happened. Nothing had ever happened to Coy, except John and the children. Coy had three children. They were not kept out of the Parsonage parlor any more than the son or the heir. Coy's children did not tire her. She looked radiantly at Avis across the brisk babel in which they sat. Coy wore a morning calf with purple ribbons. She had some pink ones, but took them out for the baby. She wondered how it was that people minded growing old. They talked a little that morning about the geological professor and his new book. Avis spoke calmly of the great gratification which the trustees found in his success. They spoke of the people who rented the house in High Street, and how they had built an L, and cut down the Elm Tree, and altered the porch. Then Coy spoke of Chattie Hogarth's Odyssey Club, and of the poem Mrs. Hogarth had written for the denominational weekly. She asked me how my BABE was yesterday, said Coy. I never want to know another thing about a woman than that she calls a baby a babe. I hope she won't suffocate the Odyssey Club. But they say there are some fine law students in it—rather young, though, I should think—and the girls that are coming along study Greek, and a really very pretty Avis. That stratum just below us, you know, that we're flirting with freshmen when we were engaged. Oh, look out, Avis! Wait will cut herself putting Jack's screwdriver into the baby's dimple. Then they talked a little about Wait, and a little about John and the children, and then they spoke of Stratford Allen's housekeeper, and when Coy had told her how comfortable she made him since Barbara went, and how glad everybody was that Stratford was so well cared for, and how much good he did with all his money, and how many fine pictures he had in his house, she said she supposed Avis knew that the woman's name was Jessup, and that she came from Texas, where her husband had got shot. "'And of course you've heard,' said Coy absently, that Stratford bought your sphinx last winter.' Coy spoke lightly, but her own voice sounded to her as if she had said, he bought your soul. She rather wished she had said nothing about the sphinx. She hurried on to speak of Barbara, who had not married her minister, but only a New York businessman. It was a trial for a harmless girl, but Barbara bore it well. Then she talked a little of John and the children, and after that she spoke of the last alumni meeting, and said that John said the wish to put up the monument in Florida originated with the members of Professor Ostrander's first class, the men who were under him in his opening year at college, clever men, John said, and that they spoke of Philip with emotion. And then, by way of variety, she talked of John and the children a little more. "'You seem to keep pretty well,' said Avus, after a silence. "'With all your care, Coy.' The words sounded superficial enough. Coy felt that Avus would rather be taken on her own level, and answered carelessly, "'Pretty well, Avus. There's about so much bother in everybody's life, I suppose. Some people take it in high tragedy. I take mine out in the mumps. I own my married life would have been happier if they hadn't all had the mumps while John was in Philadelphia, and Sarah laid up with her broken ankle, and deacon bobbly out on a heresy hunt, and the American board, as nearly as I understand it, destined to become bankrupt, unless it could pay off its debt out of our church. I own so much, Avus. And besides, I'll tell you, I never told it before, Ave, run away with Jack and Wade a minute. There is one thing I must admit. I do not like to ask John for money. There. But that is all, Avus.' Was it all, indeed? It was a peaceful, pleasant story, as the children shut the door it seemed very still suddenly in the parsonage parlor. The sun was upon the worn carpet in the playthings, Coy's sewing chair and little garments lying half-made, and purple ribbons, and upon the baby in her lap. Coy looked up from her sewing, and saw Avus sitting there and watching her, as the country, wasted by civil war, pauses to look off upon the little neutral state. A spark sprang into Coy's incurious gentle face. "'It is nature,' she cried. Explain it how you will.' "'But I,' said Avus, in a low voice, after an expressive pause. "'I am nature, too. Explain me, Coy.' Coy did not answer. It was to be expected that Avus should be more or less unintelligible. But when Avus turned presently to go, she kissed her, looking up with puzzled, affectionate eyes. Then she lifted the baby a little higher on her neck, and went into the study to talk to John. "'Somehow,' said Coy, "'I am always more sorry for Avus when I go away and think about her than I am when I sit and talk with her.' "'Poor girl,' said John Rose. As they stood in the window, leaning together, Avus and her widow's dress in the color of the morning, passed by, leading her little daughter by the hand. When they were at home that day, more silently perhaps than usual, wait in the corner with her picture-books and her mother sitting with crossed hands and vague eyes. The child came up and said in her distinct, impressive fashion. "'Mama, I cannot read this story till I am old enough. But it is a pretty story, and I want to hear it. The man has a yellow saddle, and his horse is red. Read me what he had a red horse for, and where he went to. Read me why the saddle was yellow. Read me. Read me till there is no more to read.' Wait stood leaning a little and stroking the back of her mother's hand with the palm of her own. If anybody had noticed this, she would have stopped. But Mama understood about such things. She did not talk and make a fuss. Avus took the book and read. She sat with her profile toward the child. Sir Lancelot rode over thwart and enlong in a wide forest, and held no path but as wild adventure led him. Then Sir Lancelot looked round, and saw an old chapel, but could find no place where he might enter. And as he lay, half waking and half sleeping, he saw the holy vessel of the sangria pass by him. So thus he sorrowed till it was day, and heard the fowls of the air sing. Then the hermit led the young knight to the perilous seat, and he lifted up the cloth, and found their letters that said, This is the seat of Sir Gallahad, the good knight. This is he by whom the sun-grail should be achieved. Now the name of the young knight was Sir Gallahad, and he was the son of Sir Lancelot, Duloc. End of Chapter 25 End of the Story of Avus by Elizabeth Stewart Phelps