She did not answer, and for the first time her silence was sweeter than her voice. He lifted her tip-toe in his embrace, but he did not wish her taller; her yielding spirit lost itself in his own, and he did not regret the absence of the strong will which he had once imagined hers.
A CIRCLE IN THE WATER.
I.
The sunset struck its hard red light through the fringe of leafless trees to the westward, and gave their outlines that black definition which a French school of landscape saw a few years ago, and now seems to see no longer. In the whole scene there was the pathetic repose which we feel in some dying day of the dying year, and a sort of impersonal melancholy weighed me down as I dragged myself through the woods toward that dreary November sunset.
Presently I came in sight of the place I was seeking, and partly because of the insensate pleasure of having found it, and partly because of the cheerful opening in the boscage made by the pool, which cleared its space to the sky, my heart lifted. I perceived that it was not so late as I had thought, and that there was much more of the day left than I had supposed from the crimson glare in the west. I threw myself down on one of the grassy gradines of the amphitheatre, and comforted myself with the antiquity of the work, which was so great as to involve its origin in a somewhat impassioned question among the local authorities. Whether it was a Norse work, a temple for the celebration of the earliest Christian, or the latest heathen, rites among the first discoverers of New England, or whether it was a cockpit where the English officers who were billeted in the old tavern near by fought their mains at the time of our Revolution, it had the charm of a ruin, and appealed to the fancy with whatever potency belongs to the mouldering monuments of the past. The hands that shaped it were all dust, and there was no record of the minds that willed it to prove that it was a hundred, or that it was a thousand, years old. There were young oaks and pines growing up to the border of the amphitheatre on all sides; blackberry vines and sumach bushes overran the gradines almost to the margin of the pool which filled the centre; at the edge of the water some clumps of willow and white birch leaned outward as if to mirror their tracery in its steely surface. But of the life that the thing inarticulately recorded, there was not the slightest impulse left.
I began to think how everything ends at last. Love ends, sorrow ends, and to our mortal sense everything that is mortal ends, whether that which is spiritual has a perpetual effect beyond these eyes or not. The very name of things passes with the things themselves, and
“Glory is like a circle in the water, Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, Till by broad spreading, it disperse to naught.”
But if fame ended, did not infamy end, too? If glory, why not shame? What was it, I mused, that made an evil deed so much more memorable than a good one? Why should a crime have so much longer lodgment in our minds, and be of consequences so much more lasting than the sort of action which is the opposite of a crime, but has no precise name with us? Was it because the want of positive quality which left it nameless, characterized its effects with a kind of essential debility? Was evil then a greater force than good in the moral world? I tried to recall personalities, virtuous and vicious, and I found a fatal want of distinctness in the return of those I classed as virtuous, and a lurid vividness in those I classed as vicious. Images, knowledges, concepts, zigzagged through my brain, as they do when we are thinking, or believe we are thinking; perhaps there is no such thing as we call thinking, except when we are talking. I did not hold myself responsible in this will-less revery for the question which asked itself, Whether, then, evil and not good was the lasting principle, and whether that which should remain recognizable to all eternity was not the good effect but the evil effect?
Something broke the perfect stillness of the pool near the opposite shore. A fish had leaped at some unseasonable insect on the surface, or one of the overhanging trees had dropped a dead twig upon it, and in the lazy doubt which it might be, I lay and watched the ever-widening circle fade out into fainter and fainter ripples toward the shore, till it weakened to nothing in the eye, and, so far as the senses were concerned, actually ceased to be. The want of visible agency in it made me feel it all the more a providential illustration; and because the thing itself was so pretty, and because it was so apt as a case in point, I pleased myself a great deal with it. Suddenly it repeated itself; but this time I grew a little impatient of it, before the circle died out in the wider circle of the pool. I said whimsically to myself that this was rubbing it in; that I was convinced already, and needed no further proof; and at the same moment the thing happened a third time. Then I saw that there was a man standing at the top of the amphitheatre just across from me, who was throwing stones into the water. He cast a fourth pebble into the centre of the pool, and then a fifth and a sixth; I began to wonder what he was throwing at; I thought it too childish for him to be amusing himself with the circle that dispersed itself to naught, after it had done so several times already. I was sure that he saw something in the pool, and was trying to hit it, or frighten it. His figure showed black against the sunset light, and I could not make it out very well, but it held itself something like that of a workman, and yet with a difference, with an effect as of some sort of discipline; and I thought of an ex-recruit, returning to civil life, after serving his five years in the army; though I do not know why I should have gone so far afield for this notion; I certainly had never seen an ex-recruit, and I did not really know how one would look. I rose up, and we both stood still, as if he were abashed in his sport by my presence. The man made a little cast forward with his hand, and I heard the rattle as of pebbles dropped among the dead leaves.
Then he called over to me, “Is that you, Mr. March?”
“Yes,” I called back, “what is wanted?”
“Oh, nothing. I was just looking for you.” He did not move, and after a moment I began to walk round the top of the amphitheatre toward him. When I came near him I saw that he had a clean-shaven face, and he wore a soft hat that seemed large for his close-cropped head; he had on a sack coat buttoned to the throat, and of one dark color with his loose trousers. I knew him now, but I did not know what terms to put my recognition in, and I faltered. “What do you want with me?” I asked, as if I did not know him.
“I was at your house,” he answered, “and they told me that you had walked out this way.” He hesitated a moment, and then he added, rather huskily, “You don’t know me!”
“Yes,” I said. “It is Tedham,” and I held out my hand, with no definite intention, I believe, but merely because I did know him, and this was the usual form of greeting between acquaintances after a long separation, or even a short one, for that matter. But he seemed to find a special significance in my civility, and he took my hand and held it silently, while he was trying to speak. Evidently, he could not, and I said aimlessly, “What were you throwing at?”
“Nothing. I saw you lying down, over there, and I wanted to attract your attention.” He let my hand go, and looked at me apologetically.
“Oh! was that all?” I said. “I thought you saw something in the water.”
“No,” he answered, as if he felt the censure which I had not been able to keep out of my voice.
II.
I do not know why I should have chosen to take this simple fact as proof of an abiding want of straight-forwardness in Tedham’s nature. I do not know why I should have expected him to change, or why I should have felt authorized at that moment to renew his punishment for it. I certainly had said and thought very often that he had been punished enough, and more than enough. In fact, his punishment, like all the other punishments that I have witnessed in life, seemed to me wholly out of proportion to the offence; it seemed monstrous, atrocious, and when I got to talking of it I used to become so warm that my wife would warn me people would think I wanted to do something like Tedham myself if I went on in that way about him. Yet here I was, at my very first encounter with the man, after his long expiation had ended, willing to add at le
ast a little self-reproach to his suffering. I suppose, as nearly as I can analyse my mood, I must have been expecting, in spite of all reason and experience, that his anguish would have wrung that foible out of him, and left him strong where it had found him weak. Tragedy befalls the light and foolish as well as the wise and weighty natures, but it does not render them wise and weighty; I had often made this sage reflection, but I failed to apply it to the case before me now.
After waiting a little for the displeasure to clear away from my face, Tedham smiled as if in humorous appreciation, and I perceived, as nothing else could have shown me so well, that he was still the old Tedham. There was an offer of propitiation in this smile, too, and I did not like that, either; but I was touched when I saw a certain hope die out of his eye at the failure of his appeal to me.
“Who told you I was here?” I asked, more kindly. “Did you see Mrs. March?”
“No, I think it must have been your children. I found them in front of your house, and I asked them for you, without going to the door.”
“Oh,” I said, and I hid the disappointment I felt that he had not seen my wife; for I should have liked such a leading as her behavior toward him would have given me for my own. I was sure she would have known him at once, and would not have told him where to find me, if she had not wished me to be friendly with him.
“I am glad to see you,” I said, in the absence of this leading; and then I did not know what else to say. Tedham seemed to me to be looking very well, but I could not notify this fact to him, in the circumstances; he even looked very handsome; he had aged becomingly, and a clean-shaven face suited him as well as the full beard he used to wear; but I could speak of these things as little as of his apparent health. I did not feel that I ought even to ask him what I could do for him. I did not want to have anything to do with him, and, besides, I have always regarded this formula as tantamount to saying that you cannot, or will not, do anything for the man you employ it upon.
The silence which ensued was awkward, but it was better than anything I could think of to say, and Tedham himself seemed to feel it so. He said, presently, “Thank you. I was sure you would not take my coming to you the wrong way. In fact I had no one else to come to — after I — —” Tedham stopped, and then, “I don’t know,” he went on, “whether you’ve kept run of me; I don’t suppose you have; I got out to-day at noon.”
I could not say anything to that, either; there were very few openings for me, it appeared, in the conversation, which remained one-sided as before.
“I went to the cemetery,” he continued. “I wanted to realize that those who had died were dead, it was all one thing as long as I was in there; everybody was dead; and then I came on to your house.”
The house he meant was a place I had taken for the summer a little out of town, so that I could run in to business every day, and yet have my mornings and evenings in the country; the fall had been so mild that we were still eking out the summer there.
“How did you know where I was staying?” I asked, with a willingness to make any occasion serve for saying something.
Tedham hesitated. “Well, I stopped at the office in Boston on my way out, and inquired. I was sure nobody would know me there.” He said this apologetically, as if he had been taking a liberty, and explained: “I wanted to see you very much, and I was afraid that if I let the day go by I should miss you somehow.”
“Oh, all right,” I said.
We had remained standing at the point where I had gone round to meet him, and it seemed, in the awkward silence that now followed, as if I were rooted there. I would very willingly have said something leading, for my own sake, if not for his, but I had nothing in mind but that I had better keep there, and so I waited for him to speak. I believed he was beating about the bush in his own thoughts, to find some indirect or sinuous way of getting at what he wanted to know, and that it was only because he failed that he asked bluntly, “March, do you know where my daughter is?”
“No, Tedham, I don’t,” I said, and I was glad that I could say it both with honesty and with compassion. I was truly sorry for the man; in a way, I did pity him; at the same time I did not wish to be mixed up in his affairs; in washing my hands of them, I preferred that there should be no stain of falsehood left on them.
“Where is my sister-in-law?” he asked next, and now at least I could not censure him for indirection.
“I haven’t met her for several years,” I answered. “I couldn’t say from my own knowledge where she was.”
“But you haven’t heard of her leaving Somerville?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Do you ever meet her husband?”
“Yes, sometimes, on the street; but I think not lately; we don’t often meet.”
“The last time you saw her, did she speak of me?”
“I don’t know — I believe — yes. It was a good many years ago.”
“Was she changed toward me at all?”
This was a hard question to answer, but I thought I had better answer it with the exact truth. “No, she seemed to feel just the same as ever about it.”
I do not believe Tedham cared for this, after all, though he made a show of having to collect himself before he went on. “Then you think my daughter is with her?”
“I didn’t say that. I don’t know anything about it.”
“March,” he urged, “don’t you think I have a right to see my daughter?”
“That’s something I can’t enter into, Tedham.”
“Good God!” said the man. “If you were in my place, wouldn’t you want to see her? You know how fond I used to be of her; and she is all that I have got left in the world.”
I did indeed remember Tedham’s affection for his daughter, whom I remembered as in short frocks when I last saw them together. It was before my own door in town. Tedham had driven up in a smart buggy behind a slim sorrel, and I came out, at a sign he made me through the bow-window with his whip, and saw the little maid on the seat there beside him. They were both very well dressed, though still in mourning for the child’s mother, and the whole turnout was handsomely set up. Tedham was then about thirty-five, and the child looked about nine. The color of her hair was the color of his fine brown beard, which had as yet no trace of gray in it; but the light in her eyes was another light, and her smile, which was of the same shape as his, was of another quality, as she leaned across him and gave me her pretty little gloved hand with a gay laugh. “I should think you would be afraid of such a fiery sorrel dragon as that,” I said, in recognition of the colt’s lifting and twitching with impatience as we talked.
“Oh, I’m not afraid with papa!” she said, and she laughed again as he took her hand in one of his and covered it out of sight.
I recalled, now, looking at him there in the twilight of the woods, how happy they had both seemed that sunny afternoon in the city square, as they flashed away from my door and glanced back at me and smiled together. I went into the house and said to my wife with a formulation of the case which pleased me, “If there is anything in the world that Tedham likes better than to ride after a good horse, it is to ride after a good horse with that little girl of his.” “Yes,” said my wife, “but a good horse means a good deal of money; even when a little girl goes with it.” “That is so,” I assented, “but Tedham has made a lot lately in real estate, they say, and I don’t know what better he could do with his money; or, I don’t believe he does.” We said no more, but we both felt, with the ardor of young parents, that it was a great virtue, a saving virtue, in Tedham to love his little girl so much; I was afterward not always sure that it was. Still, when Tedham appealed to me now in the name of his love for her, he moved my heart, if not my reason, in his favor; those old superstitions persist.
“Why, of course, you want to see her. But I couldn’t tell you where she is.”
“You could find out for me.”
“I don’t see how,” I said; but I did see how, and I knew as well as he what his
next approach would be. I felt strong against it, however, and I did not perceive the necessity of being short with him in a matter not involving my own security or comfort.
“I could find out where Hasketh is,” he said, naming the husband of his sister-in-law; “but it would be of no use for me to go there. They wouldn’t see me.” He put this like a question, but I chose to let it be its own answer, and he went on. “There is no one that I can ask to act for me in the matter but you, and I ask you, March, to go to my sister-in-law for me.”
I shook my head. “That I can’t do, Tedham.”
“Ah!” he urged, “what harm could it do you?”
“Look here, Tedham!” I said. “I don’t know why you feel authorized to come to me at all. It is useless your saying that there is no one else. You know very well that the authorities, some of them — the chaplain — would go and see Mrs. Hasketh for you. He could have a great deal more influence with her than any one else could, if he felt like saying a good word for you. As far as I am concerned, you have expiated your offence fully; but I should think you yourself would see that you ought not to come to me with this request; or you ought to come to me last of all men.”
“It is just because of that part of my offence which concerned you that I come to you. I knew how generous you were, and after you told me that you had no resentment — I acknowledge that it is indelicate, if you choose to look at it in that light, but a man like me can’t afford to let delicacy stand in his way. I don’t want to flatter you, or get you to do this thing for me on false pretences. But I thought that if you went to Mrs. Hasketh for me, she would remember that you had overlooked something, and she would be more disposed to — to — be considerate.”
“I can’t do it, Tedham,” I returned. “It would be of no use. Besides, I don’t like the errand. I’m not sure that I have any business to interfere. I am not sure that you have any right to disturb the shape that their lives have settled into. I’m sorry for you, I pity you with all my heart. But there are others to be considered as well as you. And — simply, I can’t.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1057