University of Virginia Library

One sunny Sunday morning, two years after,
Talifer came down stairs and found Althea
Laughing. When asked what she was laughing at,
She said, “At you, and Quick, and everything
That makes a creature pleased to be alive,
To see what comes. There was a time she wasn't—
Or wasn't particular. Are you more resigned,
And ready for your endurance to the end?”
She watched him with amusement in her eyes,
And he could see that she was throbbing with it,
Although it was not audible: “If you are,
I'm grateful. For you see if you were not,
Good Doctor Quick's untiring services
Might have a sad reward, and his return
Show for him nothing but a blighted harvest
Of all the joyful grain he has been sowing.
But if you're happy, and I'm laughing at you,
It could not all have fallen by the wayside,
Or upon stony places, or been mildewed
Before it fell. Surely it must have been
Good grain, or it would never have come up.”

“Resigned? Of course I am.” He laid his hands
Carefully on her head, and pulled her ears.
“Resigned, and reconciled, and undefeated
By a few obstacles and reservations.
I knew that if I married this red hair,
Sorrow would come of it, and servitude.
Yet I was not prepared or fortified
For any such unbecoming levity
As yours. Perhaps you are not quite aware
That this will be the first home-breaker's welcome
In my remembrance—and I hope the last.”

“I'll hope so, certainly.” She poked a part
Of a pink tongue out at him, and withdrew it
Suddenly, with a frown at his appearance.
“But you had best be watchful, and hereafter
Never wear one like that.”

Talifer cast
A downward look upon himself, and said,
“You call me too conservative, and have fits
To find that I've a memory. What's wrong with it?
Is it not cheerful, and inspiriting?
Is this day an occasion of no color?
With our deliverer—for whose intercession
We should have proper thanks and gratitude
In preparation—coming this afternoon,
You laugh and shake yourself. If you should laugh
Yourself to death, what would become of me?
Have you no self-repose? Have you no morals?”

“I don't know,” said Althea, “but I rather
Expect I haven't. And we'll call this thing
One of my lord's mistaken elegances—
Which mercifully are not habitual,
Or frequent. Now I have it; and I'll hide it
Where you will never more be dazzled by it
Into temptation. In a secret manner
That we'll invent, we may, if we are crafty,
Give it anonymously to the orphans.
When brides wear tiger-lilies, you may get you
Another just like it. I've a slow suspicion
That you had best remain conservative
For a while longer. Quick, if he should see it,
Would say that any woman who could watch it,
And be unmoved, would carry the cat to church.
Have you forgotten the grave hours of thought
He must have given to our complexities
Before he smashed them—as he might a clock
Because it wouldn't go? Now do you see?”

“I see why you can't help yourself from being
The seemingest red-headed Rose of Sharon
That ever blossomed on a Sunday morning,”
Said Talifer: “If I put on a red one,
Harmonious and agreeable with your hair,
Quick will appreciate the inspiration,
Giving you all the praise. I shall not mind.
Sorrow has taught the family worm to smile
And suffer, and to see no use in turning.
How is young Samuel?”

“He is happy and well.”
She said; “and for as long as heavenly mercy
Protects and shelters him, no clouds to come
Will dim the sunshine of his ignorance.
He is not old enough to know his father.”

Talifer, with a fond joy in his eyes,
And a forgotten collar in his fingers,
Stood like a schoolboy taller than his mother,
And helplessly transfixed with happiness
For getting himself praised. The more she laughed,
The more he beamed with a beatified
Paralysis that was unassailable;
And when with a reluctant resignation
He left her standing there, still laughing at him,
He made a violent and unusual face
That warmed her with a grateful reassurance
Of an unspoken code. If he should break it,
He would break everything, and himself with it,
And she knew that he knew it. She was born
To be like that, and Talifer should by now
Know what he wanted. She believed he did;
And comforted with her belief, she tied
A long cravat into a careful ruin
Of hard and irremediable knots,
Each in itself a pleasing piece of work,
And all a gratifying morning pastime.
When it was done, she sat there dangling it
Like a too-many-colored knotted snake
That she had slain. When Talifer returned,
He might say that a resident snake-killer
Would have been useful earlier. If he didn't,
He might still think so without saying so.
She held it up again to see it hang
And swing, and watched it as contentedly
As if it had been Karen.

That afternoon,
Alone under a tree, Althea played
With memory, as in childhood she had played
With a loose tooth, and so relived an hour
At home, three years ago, when Talifer,
Like a man changed into another man,
Had come, as he had made himself believe,
To set her free, and to be honorable,
Before it was too late. She felt the same
Sick chill going through her; and this time she wondered
If she enjoyed it, now the past was over,
And finally decided that she did.
All this that she had now, it seemed, was more
Than even God gave for nothing, or chance offered
Once in a hundred years to mortal choice
Because it happened so; and she knew better
Than to believe that her being miserable
Would heal the common wound. She might, indeed,
Be of more use upright and fortunate
Than supine and rebellious. She was doing
Some good, and if the world would not behave
More as it might if jungle-minded knaves
And patriots were not always playing with it,
Her tears would do no more. If Quick should come
Prepared for happiness, and should find a woman
With a world on her shoulders, he might wish
That he had never chosen or encountered
The task of her salvation.

She looked up,
And there was Talifer, who had come unseen,
And with a meditative solemn step
That made no sound. He sat and looked at her
As at a loved one who had stolen something,
Or at a dead friend whom he had offended
Before he died. And then he said, “I wonder
If all men have inside them little tombs,
Where squirming memories are like jacks-in-boxes
Pressed under covers that will not stay down.
Most likely all have several. But there's one
In me that has a small mean demon in it,
Whose head it will not hide for longer time
Than to prepare to pop it out again
When least announced. I have sent reason down
To plead with it, and humor to engage it
With its own method; but they both come back,
One with no language left, and one in tears.
It might be worse if Quick were not your friend,
And mine; for he was there in Karen's cottage
When I explained, and said I had found—peace;
And that's what I'd eat lizards to forget.
I am not naturally an imbecile,
Or you would not be here; and Quick would not
Have seized the moment when he had it with him,
And held it for your sake. It was for you
That he concerned himself so diligently
With my well-being. What are you laughing at?
You have been laughing ever since you got up.
Your Pilgrim Mothers would have spanked you for it.”

“No doubt,” she said. “Conditions and opinions
Prevailed then of a nature to make ladies
More vigorous and severe in their devotions,
And their observances, than they are now,
And men more stern and awful. In those days,
A faith in something hard and horrible
May have been necessary to transform
A forest wilderness into this place here,
Which looks as if the vikings might have seen it,
Just as it is. But I'm afraid they didn't.
Somebody must have worked. And we must hope,
For their sake, they were happier for believing
The more they toiled and the less fun they had,
The more God loved them for it. I can see,
Without being metaphysical in the least,
Why they believed no easy-going God
Could have made men to fell so many trees,
And lift so many rocks, and women to bear,
As needful rest and incidental change,
From twelve to twenty children between sweepings
And garnishings. A woman must have some rest.
It may be weakness and a shrinking sin
For me to say so, but I'm pleased no less
Not to have come so early. I am proud
Of what was done by those who were before me,
But not for life itself would I go back
To be my great-great-grandmother—who, I'm told,
Wore herself out at ninety and died smiling,
Sorry to go so soon. I'm still uncertain
That I've a sinless right to think of her
Except down on my knees; yet all the same,
I'd rather be where her bones are than be living
Her life instead of mine. You never supposed
That I could be so truthful, but I can—
On Sunday. In the world that's on its way,
We shall be only ornamental remnants;
We shall be curiosities—or we should be
If we were here. It's well to know the worst,
And face it like a Roman—or a Spartan,
If you like Spartans. I have hated them
Intensely, always. When you married me,
You married a thing clinging to the past
With a tenacious pride, something like yours.
You married a proud limpet—though I say it
Only to you and your ferocious eyes,
Which have a peaceful and domestic shine
Just now that doesn't scare me. If you knew
What you were doing when you brought me here,
We should go on, with only normal bloodshed,
Until we are no more.”

“I don't account,”
Said Talifer, laughing at her with his eyes,
“For all these powerful thoughts of yours today.
You must have read a book. In any event,
I am not unimpressed; I have, in fact,
Done some unspoken thinking recently,
In which I have some pride. You can't have all
The pride there is; and here is the right moment
For your new estimation of my brain.
Here is young Samuel in his chariot,
Coming to listen. He must know sometime
His useful doom; and if he hears it now,
Being his father's son, he will not flinch.
When he grows up, we'll make the scion work
Unceasingly, and save the family honor
From any such disrepute and execration
As your forebodings may anticipate.
Today the only vision, except yourself,
That haunts me is the coming of our friend,
About now, from experiment and exile—
Two years of it. Well, he is wiser now,
And soon should be in sight, with his round face
Haggard and hardly to be recognized.
He will need spirits to invigorate him,
And sympathy not much easier to express
Than to experience. You are still deceived,
I see, with a false presence, or pale phantom,
Of something you insist is humorous
In my calamitous lapse and aberration,
But if you try to find it with my eyes,
You may search harder than you do with yours,
And see it indistinctly. If you were not
A sanctified and precious vessel of sin,
You might restrain your mirth. If you had morals,
You would remember that you have a son,
Who may, as he develops and observes,
Be more and more like you than like his father.
Have you considered that, and all it means?
And here he is. Remark him, and remember
That he is yours to ruin.”

The son and heir,
From his perambulator, scanned his father
Somewhat as if in doubt of his importance;
And having striven in vain to change his mind,
He fixed a beaming gaze upon his mother,
And with a language of one syllable
And of two hands, made himself understood.
She lifted him from his imprisonment
And held him as if he were naturally
A part of her, and was no trouble to hold—
Which was a mystery still to Talifer,
Who found him fearsome and irregular,
And of no constant length or magnitude.
Like one who had read somewhere in a treatise
How it was done, he touched his infant's nose
With an abrupt unfaltering forefinger,
And sat back with an air of one who knew
What was expected and could always do it—
All with a shrewd smile of encouragement
And confidence between him and his son,
Who promptly welcomed and rewarded it
With a malignant scowl.

“I can hear steps,”
Althea said. “I hear him—and I see him.
And I see nothing haggard or decrepit,
Or different. I should call him the same Quick
That went away from us two years ago.
He walks, if anything, with a firmer foot,
And with a surer freedom in his legs
Than ever. He looks happy.”

“There might be,”
Said Talifer, with a dryness, “if we knew them,
Some reasons why he should—reasons apart
From seeing you and me. He knows more now
Than he did once, and that may be sufficient
To make him happy; although the happiest
Are nowhere the most learned. You might ask him.”

“Well, well, my children! What have you been doing?”
Now in a chair, with a large glass before him,
Quick smiled upon the scene of his return
With retrospective eyes: “God bless my soul!
Babies, and everything. His father beams
As if he thought the race, with him to save it,
Might still go on. I've seen the same before,
And always have accepted and respected,
Impartially, its import and assurance.
A face like Talifer's is like a sunrise
After unhappy days of gloom and rain.
I can remember when that face foretold
Only disintegration and despair.
Look at it now. And who is this new person,
Who sees more than he thinks he'd better say?
Give him to me. Children and animals
Know they are safe with me, and they alone
Appreciate immediately my merit.
No, I'm not going to drop him. Once I knew
A gentleman who was dropped in infancy
Out of a window, inadvertently,
By a red-headed mother. He was never
The same man afterwards. And what would be
This giant's name, perhaps? Micajah? Manfred?
Or Samuel would it be—after his father?”

“Yes, Samuel would it be—after his father,”
Althea said. “And if his name and station
Command no more respect than they are getting
From you, his patient father may be heard from.”

The doctor looked up from his infant burden
At Talifer, and then looked down again:
“You hear that, Samuel? Your patient father.
My God, but he was patient, Samuel—
If that's the word—and for some months too long.
But he was nothing to your patient mother,
And she was not so patient. No, it is not
The word, but let it pass. I'll tell somewhat
About it, if you listen. You should know it;
And if your father tells me I'm a liar,
I'll tell you more, for he'll be one himself.
Your inferences may not yet have dimmed
Your knowledge, Samuel, with a suspicion
That somehow this obscure phenomenon
Of ambulant mortality called man
Pays variously, with more than coin of earth,
For more than his terrestrial apparatus;
And you are not to suffer, or shoot yourself,
If you don't know. There are things I don't know.
I don't know why your mother should have paid
So heavily for your father's education.
But if she's happy with him, and satisfied,
He may be worth the price. We shall not ask
Your mother to go back for confirmation.
You must have learned by this time, Samuel,
The folly of that. You show it in your face.
You are presumably omniscient now—
At least you look so; and it has been argued
That we are all omniscient at your age,
And year by year are sillier till we die.
Sometimes it would appear so, certainly.
But that's an unproductive argument,
Like most, and we will not pursue it now.
Leaving it out, your father, Samuel,
Was manifestly for a time foredoomed.
He should have been. If I may seem severe,
Ask him one question for his meek assurance
That there's a genius in my moderation:
Ask him if he was not for a sad season,
Common to men who, having all God may give,
Cry for the unpossessed, considerably
An ass. Ask him, and he will not deny it,
For he knows better. You see, Samuel,
I say to you what I say to your father.
I am not ambidextrous in my friendship;
When I have gifts in one hand for my friend,
I have not in the other a sharp knife
For my friend's back. I'm rectitude all over,
And yet unstable. Your mother always knew it,
And weighed me with a lightness undeserved.
When she is old, and I am here no more,
She'll plant a little flower where I am buried,
And she'll sit watching it for hours and hours.
And then there was my uncle, a stern fellow,
Who said I was like Reuben in the Bible,
Who was no good at all. He might have broken
His father's heart if it had not been Jacob's,
Which was a rather tough one. So was mine;
It had to be. And yet I too can suffer.
I've suffered pangs and spasms seeing your father
Led helplessly to cold incarceration,
Where he believed was Peace—with a capital.
He told us he believed it. Now your mother,
Who has good manners when she thinks of them,
Is going to be amused. Whenever she frowns
Or glares at you, or takes you over her knee,
Samuel, you have only to say ‘Peace,’
And all will be forgotten. Observe her now:
Her most unworthy thoughts are slinking back,
Maliciously, just to remind your father
Of all he should have seen.”

“You can do nothing,”
Talifer said. “She was like that this morning.
She still believes that there was something quaint,
Or funny, in my misfortune. She had better
Do so than make a fireside viper of it,
For that's a serpent not so easy to kill.
I thought first it was pathological,
But now it appears harmless—mere illusion.
She will not die of it.”

Quick only smiled
With a calm satisfaction while Althea
Shook with unmanageable memories
In struggling silence. “You see, Samuel,
She will not die of it. It's mere illusion.
How do you know that you are not illusion,
Samuel? No, your mother won't die of it;
She can't. She was prepared by destiny,
Samuel, to fulfil your father's life
With more than he deserved; with so much more,
Indeed, that a probation was created
In the false image of an Ashtoreth,
Or Lilith, or Fish-Venus, or some sort
Of perilous reptile fashioned as a woman.
She had ambitions, and a learned eye
For the necessities of impending years,
And a sweet hatred of your gentle mother,
Who would have salted her while she was frying
Alive, and would have turned her with a fork,
And fanned the fire at times. Wherefore your father,
Not being so strong as fate was, married her;
And then his wits came back. Quite as a man
Wakes in a sweat from a malefic nightmare,
Your father came to daylight and saw truth—
By which I mean your mother—but the Fish
Was with him still. Now God knows what affliction,
Disaster, or destruction might have followed
Your father's hesitations and traditions,
And his forgetfulness that there's a knife
For more knots than are cut, if Doctor Quick,
His good friend and your mother's faithful slave,
Had not lived in this town. Strange as it sounds,
Your father, Samuel, might still have his Fish,
And you might be more surely an illusion
Than you are now; and with a blasting peril
Unparalleled haunting him and his house,
He might at last have cursed all out of him
The courage and sense to let your mother know.
But for the foresight of good Doctor Quick,
Your mother might never have known—though I'll be just,
And we will not believe it. Time and Events,
Your father's team of galloping tortoises,
Who arrived suddenly one afternoon,
Would have come sometime anyhow; and your mother,
Not fitted for the part of an impatient
Griselda, would have frowned unfeelingly
On numerous men of merit, like myself,
And still would have been waiting for your father,
Who is not nearly so remarkable,
Or so celestially worth waiting for,
As she believes he is. But fate said yes,
And so it was. And so good Doctor Quick,
As always, did the work and had no pay.
There's a word waiting on your mother's tongue
To be a wasp.”

“You always liked your voice,”
Althea said: “I've always told you so.
Go on, please. You are company.”

“I will,
For Samuel's sake, if you are so insistent.
Well, Samuel, as it proved, Time and Events
Were of a sudden service, as your father
Believed they might be. But if Doctor Quick
Had been elsewhere than here, or naturally
Had been less prompt and loyal in his habit,
I am not saying, Samuel, or surmising,
What might have fallen. At a sad sacrifice,
And a large inconvenience and expense,
He ferried the Fish-Venus and her playmates,
Her Plato, and her Hermes Trismegistus,
And her new Apollonius Rhodius,
Over the ocean to a little house
In Wales, which he had most erroneously
Supposed would hold her. But she wouldn't have Wales.
She said Wales was too chilly and too remote—
Which, had they been the last two adjectives
Alive, would never have been her two to use.
There was a magic river to make music,
And there were trees and hills and dictionaries,
Philosophers, and all the Greek and Latin
That any normal monster would require
For heavenly bread to feed her and her beauty,
But when October came she smiled and flew.
She was so beautiful that many believed
She was not real; and, Samuel, they were wrong.
She was unusual, but was not illusion;
She was no more illusion than you are,
Samuel. If you doubt me, ask your father;
And if he fidgets and stays reticent,
Ask anyone who's from Oxford. She's in Oxford,
Samuel, where she's had, or so I gather,
A fur-lined assignation with the past
Since her first sight of the Greek alphabet.
At any rate, she is there, where she is happy,
And harmless, too—unless to curious youth,
Who, seeing her suddenly, may forget their Greek
And metaphysics, which, could they only know it,
Is about all they see. If you and I,
Samuel, were out walking over there,
We might observe, with schooled serenity,
Dons following her like dogs, and ancient sages,
With a last gleam of evil in their eyes,
Watching her and forgetting their arthritis.
Your father, free, and far away from her,
Forgives her; and as long as his remittance
Has wings, she will have paradise in the bank.”

“I think young Samuel may have heard enough,”
Althea said, still quivering silently
With a recurrent mirth of reminiscence
Not shared by Talifer, nor indignantly
Reproved. “Give him to me,” she said.

“All right,”
Said Quick, “but you will scare him, and he'll hate you.
Have you no sort of reverence or regard
For what a mother means? How sure are you
That you have not a wrathful Julius Caesar,
Beginning to make faces while you shake him,
And meaning soon to howl?”

Talifer nodded,
With an agreement of one not annoyed:
“At first I was alarmed,” he said, “but later
Became cold-hearted and resigned. So now,
When it comes on, I wear the face of patience,
And wait till she returns. If she had manners,
Or morals, her obliterative instinct
Would urge her to conceal, or to forget,
Her joy in my remorse. If she had mercy,
Or decent sympathies, or a character,
She might, with years, be an agreeable helpmate.
But while she lets her memories and inventions
Rummage the past, more like a thankless cat
In an ash-can than an obedient wife,
What has a man to say? What has a man
To do, but wear the face of patience?”

“Take him,”
She said, and gave young Samuel to his father,
Who fancied for a minute he was nursing
An insane centipede. But no complaint
Came out of him, while with efficient hands
He mastered and compressed his struggling son,
And listened with a smile to the slow tone
Of peaceful bells that sounded from afar
Through the late afternoon. Althea, watching
Alternately the two contented faces
Of two admiring men, quivered and shook
Unfeelingly, until she moaned and choked
With an accumulation of impressions,
And had from Doctor Quick no more attention
Than a barbaric laugh. Young Samuel,
Too long misused, employed his power of sound
As an elected and clairvoyant martyr
Might publish the injustice of his birth,
With none to notice him. Talifer, smiling,
With eyes that were no longer terrifying,
Saw now around him only quiet and rest,
And realization; and with grateful ears
That were attuned again to pleasant music,
Heard nothing but the mellow bells of peace.