IX
Meantime, I meditated.
“I am in love with Avis—oh, granted! I am not the least bit in love with—we will euphemistically say ‘anyone else.’ But confound it! I am coming to the conclusion that marrying a woman because you happen to be in love with her is about as logical a proceeding as throwing the cat out of the window because the rhododendrons are in bloom. Why, if I marry Avis I shall probably have to live with her the rest of my life!
“What if that obsolete notion of Schopenhauer’s were true after all—that love is a blind instinct which looks no whit toward the welfare of the man and woman it dominates, but only to the equipment a child born of them would inherit? What if, after all, love tends, without variation, to yoke the most incompatible in order that the average type of humanity may be preserved? Then the one passion we esteem as sacred would be simply the deranged condition of any other beast in rutting-time. Then we, with the pigs and sparrows, would be just so many pieces on the chessboard, and our evolutions would be just a friendly trial of skill between what we call life and death.
“I love Avis Beechinor. But I have loved, in all sincerity, many other women, and I rejoice today, unfeignedly, that I never married any of them. For marriage means a lifelong companionship, a long, long journey wherein must be adjusted, one by one, each tiniest discrepancy between the fellow-wayfarers; and always a pebble if near enough to the eye will obscure a mountain.
“Why, Avis cannot attempt a word of four syllables without coming at least once to grief! It is a trifle of course, but in a lifelong companionship there are exactly fourteen thousand trifles to one event of importance. And deuce take it! the world is populated by men and women, not demigods; the poets are specious and abandoned rhetoricians; for it never was, and never will be, possible to love anybody ‘to the level of everyday’s Most quiet need by sun or candlelight.’
“Or not to me at least.
“In a sentence, when it comes to a lifelong companionship, I prefer not the woman who would make me absolutely happy for a twelvemonth, but rather the woman with whom I could chat contentedly for twenty years, and who would keep me to the mark. I am rather tired of being futile; and not for any moral reason, but because it is not worthy of me. In fine, I do not want to die entirely. I want to leave behind some not inadequate expression of Robert Etheridge Townsend, and I do not care at all what people say of it, so that it is here when I am gone. Oh, Stella understood! ‘I want my life to count, I want to leave something in the world that wasn’t there before I came.’
“Now Bettie—”
I arose resolutely. “I had much better go for a long, and tedious, and jolting, and universally damnable walk. Bettie would make something vital of me—if I could afford her the material—”
And I grinned a little. “ ‘Go, therefore, now, and work; for there shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks.’ Yes, you would certainly have need of a miracle, dear Bettie—”
X
I started for that walk I was to take. But Dr. Jeal and Colonel Snawley were seated in armchairs in front of Clarriker’s Emporium, just as they had been used to sit there in my college days, enjoying, as the Colonel mentioned, “the cool of the evening,” although to the casual observer the real provider of their pleasure would have appeared to be an unlimited supply of chewing-tobacco.
So I lingered here, and garnered, to an accompaniment of leisurely expectorations, much knowledge as to the fall crops and the carryings-on of the wife of a celebrated general, upon whose staff the Colonel had served during the War—and there has never been in the world’s history but one war, so far as Fairhaven is concerned—and how the Colonel walked right in on them, and how it was hushed up.
Then we discussed the illness of Pope Leo and what everybody knew about those derned cardinals, and the riots in Evansville, and the Panama Canal business, and the squally look of things at Port Arthur, and attributed all these imbroglios, I think, to the Republican administration. Even at our bitterest, though, we conceded that “Teddy’s” mother was a Bulloch, and that his uncle fired the last shot before the Alabama went down. And that inclined us to forgive him everything, except of course, the Booker Washington luncheon.
Then half a block farther on, Mrs. Rabbet wanted to know if I had ever seen such weather, and to tell me exactly what Adrian, Junior—no longer little Adey, no indeed, sir, but ready to start right in at the College session after next, and as she often said to Mr. Rabbet you could hardly believe it—had observed the other day, and quick as a flash too, because it would make such a funny story. Only she could never quite decide whether it happened on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, so that, after precisely seven digressions on this delicate point, the denouement of the tale, I must confess, fell rather flat.
And then Mab Spessifer demanded that I come up on the porch and draw some pictures for her. The child was waiting with three sheets of paper and a chewed pencil all ready, just on the chance that I might pass; and you cannot very well refuse a cripple who adores you and is not able to play with the other brats. You get
