New Place, had paused to rest. A girl was with him. Now laughingly she was pretending to assist the porter in lifting his burden. It was a quaintly pretty vignette, as framed by the peach leaves, because those two young people were so merry and so candidly in love. A symbolist might have wrung pathos out of the girl's desire to aid, as set against her fond inadequacy; and the attendant playwright made note of it.
'Well, well!' he said: 'Young Quiney is a so-so choice, since women must necessarily condescend to intermarrying with men. But he is far from worthy of her. Tell me, now, was there ever a rarer piece of beauty?'
'The wench is not ill-favored,' was the dark lady's unenthusiastic answer. 'So!-but who is she?'
He replied: 'She is my daughter. Yonder you see my latter muse for whose dear sake I spin romances. I do not mean that she takes any lively interest in them. That is not to be expected, since she cannot read or write. Ask her about the poet we were discussing, and I very much fear Judith will bluntly inform you she cannot tell a B from a bull's foot. But one must have a muse of some sort or another; and so I write about the world now as Judith sees it. My Judith finds this world an eminently pleasant place. It is full of laughter and kindliness-for could Herod be unkind to her?-and it is largely populated by ardent young fellows who are intended chiefly to be twisted about your fingers; and it is illuminated by sunlight whose real purpose is to show how pretty your hair is. And if affairs go badly for a while, and you have done nothing very wrong-why, of course, Heaven will soon straighten matters satisfactorily. For nothing that happens to us can possibly be anything except a benefit, because God orders all happenings, and God loves us. There you have Judith's creed; and upon my word, I believe there is a great deal to be said for it.'
'And this is you,' she cried-'you who wrote of Troilus and Timon!'
'I lived all that,' he replied-'I lived it, and so for a long while I believed in the existence of wickedness. To-day I have lost many illusions, madam, and that ranks among them. I never knew a wicked person. I question if anybody ever did. Undoubtedly short-sighted people exist who have floundered into ill-doing; but it proves always to have been on account of either cowardice or folly, and never because of malevolence; and, in consequence, their sorry pickle should demand commiseration far more loudly than our blame. In short, I find humanity to be both a weaker and a better-meaning race than I had suspected. And so, I make what you call 'sugar-candy dolls,' because I very potently believe that all of us are sweet at heart. Oh no! men lack an innate aptitude for sinning; and at worst, we frenziedly attempt our misdemeanors just as a sheep retaliates on its pursuers. This much, at least, has Judith taught me.'
The woman murmured: 'Eh, you are luckier than I. I had a son. He was borne of my anguish, he was fed and tended by me, and he was dependent on me in all things.' She said, with a half-sob, 'My poet, he was so little and so helpless! Now he is dead.'
'My dear, my dear!' he cried, and he took both her hands. 'I also had a son. He would have been a man by this.'
They stood thus for a while. And then he smiled.
'I ask your pardon. I had forgotten that you hate to touch my hands. I know-they are too moist and flabby. I always knew that you thought that. Well! Hamnet died. I grieved. That is a trivial thing to say. But you also have seen your own flesh lying in a coffin so small that even my soft hands could lift it. So you will comprehend. To-day I find that the roughest winds abate with time. Hatred and self-seeking and mischance and, above all, the frailties innate in us-these buffet us for a while, and we are puzzled, and we demand of God, as Job did, why is this permitted? And then as the hair dwindles, the wit grows.'
'Oh, yes, with age we take a slackening hold upon events; we let all happenings go by more lightly; and we even concede the universe not to be under any actual bond to be intelligible. Yes, that is true. But is it gain, my poet? for I had thought it to be loss.'
'With age we gain the priceless certainty that sorrow and injustice are ephemeral. Solvitur ambulando, my dear. I have attested this merely by living long enough. I, like any other man of my years, have in my day known more or less every grief which the world breeds; and each maddened me in turn, as each was duly salved by time; so that to-day their ravages vex me no more than do the bee-stings I got when I was an urchin. To-day I grant the world to be composed of muck and sunshine intermingled; but, upon the whole, I find the sunshine more pleasant to look at, and-greedily, because my time for sightseeing is not very long-I stare at it. And I hold Judith's creed to be the best of all imaginable creeds-that if we do nothing very wrong, all human imbroglios, in some irrational and quite incomprehensible fashion, will be straightened to our satisfaction. Meanwhile, you also voice a tonic truth-this universe of ours, and, reverently speaking, the Maker of this universe as well, is under no actual bond to be intelligible in dealing with us.' He laughed at this season and fell into a lighter tone. 'Do I preach like a little conventicle-attending tradesman? Faith, you must remember that when I talk gravely Judith listens as if it were an oracle discoursing. For Judith loves me as the wisest and the best of men. I protest her adoration frightens me. What if she were to find me out?'
'I loved what was divine in you,' the woman answered.
'Oddly enough, that is the perfect truth! And when what was divine in me had burned a sufficiency of incense to your vanity, your vanity's owner drove off in a fine coach and left me to die in a garret. Then Judith came. Then Judith nursed and tended and caressed me-and Judith only in all the world!-as once you did that boy you spoke of. Ah, madam, and does not sorrow sometimes lie awake o' nights in the low cradle of that child? and sometimes walk with you by day and clasp your hand-much as his tiny hand did once, so trustingly, so like the clutching of a vine-and beg you never to be friends with anything save sorrow? And do you wholeheartedly love those other women's boys- who did not die? Yes, I remember. Judith, too, remembered. I was her father, for all that I had forsaken my family to dance Jack-pudding attendance on a fine Court lady. So Judith came. And Judith, who sees in play-writing just a very uncertain way of making money-Judith, who cannot tell a B from a bull's foot,-why, Judith, madam, did not ask, but gave, what was divine.'
'You are unfair,' she cried. 'Oh, you are cruel, you juggle words, make knives of them… You' and she spoke as with difficulty-'you have no right to know just how I loved my boy! You should be either man or woman!'
He said pensively: 'Yes, I am cruel. But you had mirth and beauty once, and I had only love and a vocabulary. Who then more flagrantly abused the gifts God gave? And why should I not be cruel to you, who made a master- poet of me for your recreation? Lord, what a deal of ruined life it takes to make a little art! Yes, yes, I know. Under old oaks lovers will mouth my verses, and the acorns are not yet shaped from which those oaks will spring. My adoration and your perfidy, all that I have suffered, all that I have failed in even, has gone toward the building of an enduring monument. All these will be immortal, because youth is immortal, and youth delights in demanding explanations of infinity. And only to this end I have suffered and have catalogued the ravings of a perverse disease which has robbed my life of all the normal privileges of life as flame shrivels hair from the arm-that young fools such as I was once might be pleased to murder my rhetoric, and scribblers parody me in their fictions, and schoolboys guess at the date of my death!' This he said with more than ordinary animation; and then he shook his head. 'There is a leaven,' he said-'there is a leaven even in your smuggest and most inconsiderable tradesman.'
She answered, with a wistful smile: 'I, too, regret my poet. And just now you are more like him-'
'Faith, but he was really a poet-or, at least, at times-?'
'Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme-''
'Dear, dear!' he said, in petulant vexation; 'how horribly emotion botches verse. That clash of sibilants is both harsh and ungrammatical.
'Very unfeignedly I regret my poet,' she said, 'my poet, who was unhappy and unreasonable, because I was not always wise or kind, or even just. And I did not know until to-day how much I loved my poet… Yes, I know now I loved him. I must go now. I would I had not come.'
Then, standing face to face, he cried, 'Eh, madam, and what if I also have lied to you-in part? Our work is done; what more is there to say?'
'Nothing,' she answered-'nothing. Not even for you, who are a master-smith of words to-day and nothing more.'
'I?' he replied. 'Do you so little emulate a higher example that even for a moment you consider me?'
She did not answer.
When she had gone, the playmaker sat for a long while in meditation; and then smilingly he took up his pen.
