第56章

I wish the girl would go.I don't like to look at her so much, and yet I cannot help it.Always that same expression of something that I ought to know,--something that she was made to tell and I to hear,--lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap out of her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an hour of passion.

It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track.

The Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three Words.Set your mind at ease about that,--there are reasons I could give you which settle all that matter.I don't wonder, however, that you confounded the Great Secret with the Three Words.

I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to tell.When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the morning of the fifth of July.And just as that little patriotic implement is made with a slender train which leads to the magazine in its interior, so a sharp eye can almost always see the train leading from a young girl's eye or lip to the "I love you" in her heart.But the Three Words are not the Great Secret I mean.No, women's faces are only one of the tablets on which that is written in its partial, fragmentary symbols.It lies deeper than Love, though very probably Love is a part of it.Some, I think,--Wordsworth might be one of them,--spell out a portion of it from certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others.

I can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which seem to me to come near the region where I think it lies.I have known two persons who pursued it with the passion of the old alchemists,--all wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving up the daily search for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and their dreams changed to visions of things that ran and crawled about their floor and ceilings, and so they died.The vulgar called them drunkards.

I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this young girl's face produces on me.It is akin to those influences a friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from certain voices.I cannot translate it into words,--only into feelings; and these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing, which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world or on the very threshold of the next.

You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful incomprehensibleness of my description of the expression in a young girl's face.You forget what a miserable surface-matter this language is in which we try to reproduce our interior state of being.Articulation is a shallow trick.From the light Poh! which we toss off from our lips as we fling a nameless scribbler's impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest utterances which comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need, is only a space of some three or four inches.Words, which are a set of clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared to tones and expression of the features.I give it up; I thought Icould shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this young girl's face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use.

No doubt your head aches, trying to make something of my description.If there is here and there one that can make anything intelligible out of my talk about the Great Secret, and who has spelt out a syllable or two of it on some woman's face, dead or living, that is all I can expect.One should see the person with whom he converses about such matters.There are dreamy-eyed people to whom I should say all these things with a certainty of being understood;--That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me To him my tale I teach.

--I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar for this August number, so that they will never see it.

--Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious attempt, which may go for nothing, and you can have your money refunded, if you will make the change.

This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our breakfast-table.The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she again seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards him.That slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they sit side by side, is a physical fact I have often noticed.Then there is a tendency in all the men's eyes to converge on her; and Ido firmly believe, that, if all their chairs were examined, they would be found a little obliquely placed, so as to favor the direction in which their occupants love to look.

That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting opposite to me, is no exception to the rule.She brought down some mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber.She gave a sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and sent another by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.

--Sarvant, Ma'am I Much obleeged,--he said, and put it gallantly in his button-hole.--After breakfast he must see some of her drawings.