Concerning Snares

OUR neighbor is deaf, so converse with her is of the slightest. She has the air of one contentedly withdrawn from others, as if she had herself cut the cables to be free from the worry of contradictory messages.

Still we are neighbors, with but a narrow hall between, so we often chance to meet. This time it was at the foot of the stairs ; and as she would have slipped by, in her evasive fashion, we stayed her. We were two who met her, so shyness itself was shy of showing confusion. We are shy in the way of two, who live too close to be sure of the dividing boundaries of self, yet ever curiously conscious of our division from all others.

But we waylaid our neighbor. For on the table in the bay window was a bunch of heavy-headed, crumpled-leaved roses, which had come from her, and our room was fragrant with their breath, till the world seemed an old-fashioned garden wherein lovers walk.

We are used to the moor winds, with free, wild scents of gorse and heather. So a waft from the full-petaled crowd of roses beguiled us from the brave heights to sheltered pleasaunce fairness.

We stayed our neighbor to speak our thanks, and, wishful to show some courtesy to the stranger within our gates, whose thought of us had been so gracious, we made her free of our books. For we are dwellers in the granite house on the moor’s verge, and she but a bird of passage. We would give her straws for her nest. Truly we had no library, but there were full shelves, which had overflowed in streams on tables and desks, with runlets in big chairs and on the broad lounge.

So with full assurance we offered our books. But I must make you know, so far as it is given me to know, our solitary neighbor. She is tall and straight, with a quick, alert step. As I watch her set forth on her walks, always with a plaited straw satchel on her arm, I feel sure that she is going in a set direction to a known end, — not losing herself and the morning on the moor. Her face is strong and rugged, but softened as forceful faces are by the attrition of the years. There is an out-of-door fascination about it, as if she had lived much in the open, and taken as good, summer sun and winds of rough weather. Her eyes are fine, dark and clear, and when she smiles they flash across the face brightness like sudden sun across the moor.

In answer to my wish that she would come and take books at her pleasure, I won the smile, which shot with itself into my mind the line, “ Oh, good gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth.” She looked so real, so true, so sun-warm to the depths. Then came the answer : —

“ You are very kind, but I read very little. Books are such a snare.”

In some dazed way, Doris and I staggered into our own room, dropped into our easy-chairs, and our eyes met in a wide wonder which broke into peals of laughter.

The neighbor is deaf, so we dared to laugh; but neighbor, — shall we ever find her that after such confession ? We are set apart as by some cataclysm of nature.

We looked about our book-inhabited room, gasped, and laughed again.

We thought that we knew all phases of our books. We had summered and wintered with them through wandering years; had crowded our trunks with them, to the damage of dresses within and the dismay of porters without; had mourned over the many to be left and the few to be taken ; had bought books as long as the coin of the realm held out, then coveted them in fine bindings in that “ resort of the fashionable world for a hundred years,” and in worn leather and yellowed vellum in many a dusty corner beloved of the unfashionable for thrice a hundred years. We knew them for an entertainment to the eye, an exhilaration to the mind, a consolation to the spirit. We knew them as companions for the hour, as chance wayfarers on a journey, as friends “ until dfeath us do part ” and beyond; for surely the Immortals do not die.

We know the books which must be read aloud, with pause just made for acquiescent word or divergent thought; the books for lonely hours when two are a multitude ; the books which never lift their eyes and look you full in the face save in the light of the winter fire, and those other books which give their spirits in the greenwood shadows. We know the books which win lightly with a quick smile at the first word, the books which are good comrades on a long road ; and we all know the books which are ours by election, without which we could not have been, and which, without ourselves as readers, could not have been.

But a cold, strange light struck all our books, standing on shelves, piled on tables, or prisoned in packing cases, — books of our love, of our longing, of our memory, — in that phrase of accusing, “ Books are such a snare.” It took our breath away, then set us talking, and now I write in defense of the accused.

I have to thank our neighbor for shaking me suddenly from my own standpoint, giving me another outlook with a changed perspective. Doubtless I have heard sermons and listened to diatribes on the danger of miscellaneous reading ; and in my day have had romances ruthlessly confiscated, which neighbored class books, to the peril of the latter. I have read stories against story-telling, and books against the making of books.

Still, the simple words wherewith my neighbor declined, as might the fly to walk into the parlor of the spider, struck me sharply. Perhaps her personality weighted the words, for I feel in her a self-sufficing strength, an insulation from many of the currents of life. I watch her often as she sits on a garden seat on the terrace, busy with sewing or letterwriting, and I feel that she is both intent on her work and conscious of the wide, sweet world about her. She is resolute of purpose in some simple practical way by which her life is made of worth, yet responsive to the moods of the untamed moor.

She is a woman of few words ; I cannot hope to win her to any elucidation of her own position. So I must make light by striking a few lucifer matches from my own private box. Is it the loss of time which she feels to be the snare of reading ? But as a wise Indian chief said of the hurried white stranger, “ He has all the time there is.” And there would seem to be boundless time in the long days of her lonely life. No one has ever rightly divined how many hours go to the making of a day in the rainy season of Dartmoor. I speak feelingly, for even two with books have failed here of all means of measurement. Pendulums are weighted and heartbeats retarded ; nothing is regular but the drip-drip upon the pane. What does our neighbor make of the gray, unending hours ? There may be needle-work, — perhaps that most pathetic, for another woman’s children, — and fancy-work for charity bazaars. But is the spirit companioned ? Whither do her thoughts wander ? There are friends, doubtless, in well-regulated households. But well-regulated households are mostly so dull, and friends have their rigid limitations as to possibilities of romance.

Are we not all of one age, of one race, of one weather ? When a veil of rain drops between ourselves and the moor, is it not time to set sail for “ the seacoasts of Bohemia ” ? And where seek our barks save in our books ? Then away to Arcadia, Utopia, the Blessed Isles or our own châteaux en Espagne. Or if we have a realistic conscience as our chart, still are the seas spacious, and the shores which wait us more wondrous than our dreams. With Columbus we may draw the circle of the globe. And the world is the heritage of each, — the unfelled forests of the newest West, the fantastic temples of the oldest East, the ardency of Arab sands, and the white bergs of the Polar Sea. Shall we miss our own ? Have we not right to all, from the century-unstirred shadow of the Sphinx to the veering of the windmills which challenge Don Quixote his heir ?

Is the snare of books in that they tempt us to give to creatures of the imagination that sympathy which should be called forth by the men, women, and masks of our acquaintance ? But the last so predominate. We wear such well-schooled faces that we may neither read nor reveal the tragedies beneath the smiling seeming of our lives. It is etiquette to ignore the tumultuous heartbeats which make life. Neither depths nor heights are good form in the world of safe compromise wherein we dwell. One may not drop a plummet to sound the deeps of any neighbor; nor shall one dare scale the brave heights of idealism, save to know how lonely is the height, how far from the sheltered gardens where faces smile and low-toned voices answer.

So from superficiality and from solitude the refuge still is in books.

There we meet the great souls in their utmost stress and storm. We may rave with Lear in the black night, or scorch our eyeballs with Dante in flames of Inferno. We may touch the genius-riven depths of life, denied us in the living. In life we can know truly the travail of but one soul, and even pain is not so lavish of its gifts in the measured finite. Poignancy is as rare a bestowal as ecstasy. To most, experience is disappointment, disillusion : not the too much of pain, but the too little of joy; not the scathe of flame, but the trail of the common dust.

So, in moods of protest, we plunge to the tragedies of despair or mount to the passion of joy. We ride with Joan the Maid, — triumph, triumph all the way, though the goal be martyr fire. We strain our souls to the imperial height of Cleopatra dying into empire more spacious than Cæsar could offer, —Lord of the wide-winged Eagles.

As for the friends of real life, we know socially but some little inlet of the great waters, where the craft are few and slight, like ourselves, but fit to hug the shore, to seek moorings in shallow waters.

But there is the great sea, with its equinoxes of passion, its strong-winged ships, its venturers, its wrecks, — wide waves for the golden galleons, cold depths for the shivered hulks. We cross blue waters in the morning sunlight with the Argonauts ; with Medina Sidonia on the flagship of the Armada fight “ the winds of God,” and with Raleigh of the unhorizoned soul sail into the sunset.

So we travel on all water ways. If we dwell where the sea’s music swells overstrong for weak lives to bear, and if we have watched our own proud ships sail forth, only to be beaten back against the rocky coast, hollow wrecks through which the sucking waters draw to their inexorable engulfing; then God give us book friends to lure us to inland meadows and dappled shadows of home orchards. We have need of Chaucer’s May blossoming and Lowell’s day of perfect June.

The westering sun throws a glorifying ray across my neighbor’s roses, and I see other roses than these, — great bushes in my childhood’s gardens where I gathered them in big nosegays for my pet teacher’s desk. The days in the Schoolroom were so long, and the afternoon hours loitered so. But through the open window came droning bees, and sometimes a stray butterfly would settle on the very roses. Then all the children smiled, and the giver of the posy from the loveliest garden in the treeshaded village street felt herself praisefully part of honey and bees and butterflies and all summer diversions in the dullness of things. I am afraid that the gray child likes still to be on the butterfly side of things as against the schoolroom rules of life.

Now it is another garden, looking to the blue Pacific, and the roses gathered are brought to an invalid’s room. These are more weighted than the child’s roses, — not all with fragrance, not all with honey. They do not lure the butterflies ; but strange, winged thoughts flutter, then settle, then drift far. The summer pales and the petals drop.

A terraced garden on the Pincian Hill, — roses beneath the cypress spires. A child gathers them, and lays one tragic red by the stained marble of a dead Cæsar ; one ivory pale beside the poet with dream-dim eyes, who sang, when Rome was young, “ the sense of tears in mortal things ; ” and yellow roses — roses in chorus for the silent, sad Apollo. One watches, not glad with the child, nor calm with the dead gods — and doves wheel in the garden till the swift, purple twilight falls.

Where have I wandered ? How long have I dreamed ? This is the grayness of the Devon gloaming.

O grave, wise neighbor, roses are such a snare !

L. Studdiford McChesney.