The Golden Asse--a Tribute
Frater, Ave atque Vale
BY MARY ELLEN CHASE
OLD books suggest old debts, acknowledged, yet unpaid. In this single and momentous respect they differ from those of our own immediate time. For, the manifold question of comparative literary value quite set aside, new books, except it be in their references to the old, rarely, if ever, recall obligations or exact gratitude. The treasures of memory, of long association, do not lie within their uncut pages. They trail no clouds of glory, conceal within their words and phrases no shadowy recollections. To Hazlitt, their idolater, it is the old books which are links in the chain of our consciousness, which ‘ bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity.’ It is they that pervade the external and material life with a luminous and orderly sense of immortality, they that acquaint one early with the haunting, intangible notion of reality. They suggest old debts.
And of all old books surely the classics are the most wistful and reproachful to those of us who, a quarter of a century ago, were mightily concerned with parasangs and hexameters. Our names are written large upon their ledgers. To them we owe certain perceptions which an unalleviated Puritanism would have shorn of beauty — the sense of poetry latent in reverence for aged persons, the sudden apprehending of the power which follows any calm acceptance of the inevitable, the dawning, half-timid perception of a purely physical loveliness. We owe them, too, that train of old and long associations which forms the pattern of the tapestry of our lives. What Latin grammar, bearing on its green back the honorable imprint of ‘Harkness,’ ever failed to recall the whitecolumned academy of some New England town? My own dog-eared Cicero, relentlessly moved a few days ago to make room on the top shelves for the doubtful aristocracy of 1925, engulfed me in such waves of adolescent emotion that in abject apology I bade him come up higher; and the words ’Ithaca’ and ‘Odysseus’ — the latter even in modern and forbidden guise—suggest always to me the high, rock-rimmed Maine pastures and the dark cliffs above the sea. These are among the long effects of the classics — these the debts we can never discharge save by maintaining in ourselves something of their mellowed and well-ordered dignity.
It was young Lucius Apuleius of Carthage, that juggler of colored words, that notorious magic-monger, that tireless wanderer among the mountains and about the ancient, weird towns of Thessaly, who but lately through his Asse of Gold recalled again an old debt, the verbal acknowledgment of which I had long contemplated but never performed. Willingly lost for perhaps the fiftieth time in his perennially fresh adventures with sorcerers and thieves, wolves and serving maids, and dazzled by the rich sparkle of a prose which eighteen hundred years and a poor translation cannot dim, I was yet not insensible to the tug of old associations. And when Lucius, the adventurer, in the house of the sorceress Pamphiles, by a magic ointment and many incantations turned himself into an ass instead of into the owl which he desired to be, his original shape only to be regained by a meal of roses, I made a vow to discharge my indebtedness with all possible grace. For, twenty-five years ago, I knew such a ‘plaine asse,’ fit also to be termed ‘golden,’ and in those years all roses held magic possibilities.
I
In the late nineties, among the more remote New England communities barter had not ceased to exist as a convenient and eminently respectable means and method of trade. The Congregational pastor of our Maine village received annually one third of his salary in farm produce and firewood, and gave in exchange theological disputations on the Logos and the Paulian interpretation of the Law. These, however, though given in full measure, pressed down and running over, were seldom mistaken for the grace of God; and no one felt that the minister was underpaid. Bargains were struck with the doctor, usually in January, by which he, in exchange for certain commodities, — potatoes figured largely in all deals, — would care for the party to the second part, his wife and children, during all reasonable sicknesses over a twelve-month period. And, to complete the professional circle, my father, the village lawyer, entertained few expectations of payment in cash; for warranty and quitclaim deeds were luxuries not included in the family budgets, and, when they had to be met, one went to the cellar, the pasture, or the stable for the wherewithal.
It was to the last-named repository that the Misses Evelina and Sarah Mansfield, maiden ladies of late middle age, repaired in the spring of 1898. They owed my father for successfully representing their rights over a period of some years in the much disputed matter of a boundary line; they had the highest sense of honor and small cash resources. But they had Richard.
Richard Mansfield, like Modestine, was a diminutive ass, in color a clear gray of the old-fashioned variety, untouched by taupe or mauve. He had been sent the Misses Mansfield on the Christmas preceding by a younger and renegade brother, who years before had run away from home to seek his fortune in the Far West — a chimerical district known to his sisters only through the risqué stories of Mr. Bret Harte. With the season’s compliments and his own he had bridged the years by his gift of Richard, a somewhat tardy pledge of his continued esteem and, let us hasten to add, of his sense of humor. How Oliver Goldsmith would have delighted in the revengeful generosity of that black sheep of the house of Mansfield and in the comic situation engendered thereby!
It is quite safe to say that no fabled or historic personage, not even Henry VIII when he first saw Anne of Cleves in the flesh, was ever more bewildered as to what to do with a new possession than were the Misses Mansfield when Richard, his name unmistakably printed on a steel tag fastened to one ear, was forcibly urged up the slip of the Boston boat amid the guffaws of the crew and passengers. Nor did their bewilderment lessen after he had been placed in the one long-deserted stall of the family stable, his phaeton and glistening new harness inviting their participation in his legitimate activities. With commendable reserve they had told their neighbors that they could not understand their brother; and, indeed, it will be admitted that the case required perception rather than understanding. Miss Sarah, who possessed a fortitude quite lacking in Miss Evelina, had determined, as the snow gave place to spring mud and as Richard’s three months of oats began to tell on him, to lend the only possible dignity to the situation by the demonstration of the utilitarian, if not of the artistic, nature of their gift. Accordingly she had harnessed Richard, adjusting his breeching with trembling fingers from behind an empty flour barrel which she had thought best to place between him and her, and had taken Miss Evelina for a drive — a drive so fraught with misery and disgrace because of certain distressing habits of Richard, for the first time revealed, that the cheeks of both ladies burned for hours thereafter. What wonder then that Miss Sarah, tormented in the night watches, did not tarry for the day to arouse her sister when my father suddenly appeared before her distracted mental vision, not in the guise of a relentless creditor, but in that of a deliverer!
According to the town veterinarian Richard was thirteen years old when in the spring of 1898 he made the inconsequential journey from the Mansfield stable to our own. His gray coat was shaggy with a winter’s growth of hair, his brown eye was kindly, his underjaw determined, again like Father Adam’s beast in Monastier. On his left side, well rounded with the Mansfield corn and oats, his thick hair had long since given place to two letters, T L, cruelly branded into his tough black hide. That neat Roman type afforded us material for endless cogitations — the meaning of the letters in terms of words, their importance as to time and place, the certain torture that Richard had endured on the occasion of their impress. His long ears differed from those of others of his species only in his manipulation of them. From him we early learned the significance of earmarks as a means of identification, for those two long features were the outward and visible signs of certain temperamental stages. Usually carrying them at a not unpleasant obtuse angle, he brought them far forward in a benignant expression when he was extraordinarily pleased or expectant, lowered the left when he was disgruntled or dejected, and in periods of reflection — for he was contemplative to the philosophic point — laid both closely back upon his neck. His short tail was easily disconcerted and melancholy in the extreme.
How often had we occasion to bless that Far-Western humorist! Those were the days of pride in large families, and no less than a score of children from the immediate neighborhood gathered in our field and orchard on Saturdays and during the long summer vacations to participate in new plays and games made possible by Richard. A kindlier creature never existed. Surely I can never forget his goodness, even though I have until now neglected to chronicle it. His was that ‘sweet reasonableness’ which, we are told, was characteristic of the saints. As the ridgepole of a tent he would stand still almost indefinitely while we crawled in and out under the blankets and old quilts which we had draped across his back. For as Thiasus of Corinth decked the ass Lucius ‘with purple coverings, with a bridle of silver, with pictured cloths, and with shrilling bells,’ so we hung Richard’s neck with daisy chains, caparisoned his back with the discarded parlor portières, and led him in triumphal procession about the neighborhood.
He possessed, however, an impregnable self-respect, an integrity of nature which forbade imposition. In simpler phrase, he knew when he had had enough. He would willingly carry six children of varying sizes, stationed from his shoulders to that downward slope of his back which made riding perilous, across the fields or along the street until his dignity and sense of fitness reproved him. Then, suddenly stopping, he would bend his knees in a slightly perceptible motion which we children called ‘crumbling.’ If this warning passed unheeded — and, after having experienced the delightful sequel, we seldom heeded it — he invariably went on a few steps, and then, again stopping, crumbled unmistakably. Fair warning that! And yet we awaited the climax with excited giggles. It came. Simultaneously lowering his long neck and raising his hind quarters, he deposited us all, safely and gently, on the ground like a line of fallen dominoes, stayed for a moment to survey the situation, and then galloped away at an unwonted pace, granting only dark and threatening glances to those of us who were so unreasonable as to ask just then for more.
On holidays he shared in our high carnival. The ‘barly and beans’ which the Lady Charites fed the golden asse in gratitude for her safe deliverance from Thessalian thieves were but poor dainties when compared with Richard’s Thanksgiving feast of vegetables and sugar. And on Christmas he was as a favored guest. For had not the minister, forsaking the Logos for a season, reminded us of the part played by Richard’s forbears in the Bethlehem stable, during the anxious flight into Egypt, and on the Jerusalem streets, ringing with hosannas?
I can recall with a vividness almost painful every detail of our Christmas Eve pilgrimages to the stable — the warm, contented smell there in strange contrast to the cold in which we shivered, the high rafters and beams thrown into great, uncertain shadow in the swaying lantern light, the occasional heavy stir of the quiet animals, and the wide gray eyes of my sister Cynthia, watching Roger hang with careful deliberation Richard’s great red stocking on a nail just outside the window of his stall. In four hours, while we slept, would they in the stable, on the stroke of midnight, kneel in dumb adoration — Lady, my father’s thoroughbred mare, Constancy, the cow, and Richard? Or was it all just a tale told us like so many others? It was hard to imagine Lady kneeling. She was haughty in her blue blood, overbearing, not easily humbled. And Constancy was a creature who justified her existence by good works rather than by faith. But Richard — my sister Cynthia never doubted Richard, standing there in the light-shot darkness, his great ears expectantly forward as though at once awaiting the heavenly summons and challenging me to greater confidence. Nor would she ever consent to my desire for visible confirmation. For hers was that faith beloved of God — unassailable, and rendered tarnished and languid by proof.
II
In those beneficent pre-Ford days the country roads were open and safe for our journeyings; and the miles were many which Cynthia and I traversed with Richard. Those were the opening years of our teens — a time fraught with new sensations. The smallest details, heretofore unimportant, became monstrous with significance. There was a strange element of pain in all lovely things — wild roses against a gray boulder, the glimpse of the sea from a hilltop, a flock of goldfinches following the roadside in scalloped flight. Vaguely conscious that life was somehow different, we spent long days along the roads with Richard, calling on relatives some miles distant or driving to berry pastures inaccessible on foot.
Early he revealed to us the most distressing of his habits — that which had so fired the sallow checks of the Misses Mansfield and made further journeying with him incommensurate with prestige and position. He insisted upon periods of rest and complete relaxation, and never felt in any way encumbered by his harness or the shafts of his phaeton. His powers of selection were of the highest; I never knew him to choose an unattractive spot. Five miles from home — it mattered little whether he was approaching or departing therefrom — he would select a hilltop affording a sea breeze, or a mossy hollow by a spring, draw the phaeton to the roadside out of the sun in spite of our frantic tuggings upon the reins, stand still for a moment to assure himself that he had chosen well and that all was in readiness, and then with deliberate care lie down with a long, grateful sigh, his head invariably upon soft ground, some lush grass, tender alder twigs, or swaying buttercups well within reach of his eager nose.
His periods of rest were impossible of calculation. I have known him to lie for three hours in a particularly desirable spot on a particularly warm day. They were never less than an hour; and we early learned the uselessness of urging. Like his prototype, the wild ass of Job, he regarded not ‘the crying of the driver’; nor did he pay heed to all manner of chastisements. There was nothing to do but to accept the inevitable.
In the second summer of his life with us, however, we discovered a possible means of inducement. He had, let it be known, an inordinate weakness for carrots. Never was the smallest exhibited in his presence without awakening a gleam in the depth of his eyes, an expectant uplifting of his ears, and in his underjaw a perceptible yielding to temptation; and not infrequently did the orange succulence and vernal fragrance of one of these vegetables, if held just without his reach, lure him to rise and continue on his way. Sometimes, too, one served in yet another capacity; for when his usual pace of two and one-half miles an hour became loo tedious for endurance, either Cynthia or I, seizing a carrot , would spring from the phaeton and run at top speed ahead of him. always allowing him first, however, a scant but overwhelming nibble. By that simple device many a stretch of level road was briskly covered, with one of us perspiring onward and the other holding the lines and glorying in the increased rate of progress.
But the time came, and that soon, when the irksomeness of Richard’s hours of meditation and refreshment gave place to beneficence, when the cups of patient waiters began to brim with old and heady wine. It was Cynthia who first proposed bringing books, and it was my father who proffered the huge green umbrella. Then, indeed, we wanted for nothing. Richard sighing grateful sighs, his head in the cool moss of some wayside brook; the warm sun tracing the shadows of buttercups and timothy upon the brown road; Cynthia and I reading from the same book beneath the green umbrella.
There was an abandonment in reading in those days which I would fain catch again. Books existed for and by themselves; they established no relations, signified nothing in my mundane world. Words were intoxicants. I tasted, smelled, touched them. They were unknown fruit, strange and delectable, fragrance floating across wide seas, moonlight on still water. They were as remote from my stupid, halting speech as I was from my immediate and material surroundings. I never said them al ud, but I dwelt with them ‘in faery lands forlorn.’
True to the Apostle’s injunction, we were then ‘careful for nothing.’ There was doubtless added abandonment in the knowledge that no household task or ruleless baby could call us away at the worst possible moment, that the only hindrance to two hours of unalloyed enjoyment was the extremely unlikely chance that Richard would want to move on. But be the reasons what they were, let them lie in early adolescence or in an unusual situation, it is certain that books had before held no such lure, nor have they since.
Cynthia always finished before me — she read in great, thirsty gulps, not pausing for breath — and when she was ready to turn the page she sighed and tapped her foot with exasperation against the dashboard. But I was obdurate. I wanted time to say words and phrases over to myself, and I took it. I remember that in beginning The Lady of the Lake I paused long over
In lone Glenartney’s hazel shade.
That line engendered a thrill which I could not afford to lose, in spite of her very obvious irritation.
To this day certain hill summits, fern coverts, and wayside springs in that loveliest part of the Maine coast are sacred, and will ever remain so, to certain persons and situations in books. A flat, mossy rock on the top of one high hill — a hill commanding a farreaching view of Penobscot Bay—is dedicated forever to the stout Marchioness of Castlewood and to her irate reception, from her curtained bed, of the king’s soldiers. How grudgingly we acquiesced that afternoon in Richard’s sudden desire to press toward the mark! A wild-apple tree in a roadside hollow recalls always our tearful accompaniment of poor Smike when he ran away from school and went on his pitiful journey in search of the Niekelbys. We had cried, silently and shamefacedly at first, casting surreptitious glances in order to be assured that each was not cognizant of the other’s woe, until Cynthia, unable to bear it any longer, threw reserve to the winds and sobbed unrestrainedly in my blue gingham lap. By a roadside spring, sheltered from the sun by an overhanging bank of small firs and brake ferns, John Ridd made love to Lorna in such impassioned accents that Cynthia and I were cross and abrupt with each other in our efforts to pretend that such was but wearisome reading.
All those books which to-day beggar the attempts of the voluble moderns were ours in those days between grammar school and college —Dickens, Scott, Dumas, Marryat, William Black, Stevenson — and not a few of them were read by the roadside under the green umbrella. And as we read Richard rested, his eyes sometimes closed in sleep, sometimes wide in contemplation. Did he see the things to which, for the moment, situation and suspense blinded us — a dragon fly in blue and bronze, the jeweled shadow of a water spider on an amber pool? Who can tell?
We must have presented a most humorous picture to the passers-by —
I can still remember their smiles — and yet I do not think we ever thought the situation itself really funny. One of the functions of early adolescence is to dull the sense of humor; and unlike the Misses Mansfield we were untroubled by the fear of a waning prestige. Recollection does, however, depict one occasion upon which Cynthia’s sense of the ridiculous proved itself existent in spite of adolescence. The family was to spend an August weekend upon an uncle’s farm six miles distant, and, to allow for Richard’s pace and idiosyncrasies, Cynthia and I had started hours ahead of my father and mother, who were to follow in the surrey with the younger children. After four miles of the hot and dusty road Richard sought a convenient spring and stretched out his tired legs with a sigh that betokened a long and drowsy stay. The afternoon for once dragged — we had long since finished Kidnapped and had brought no other book — until Cynthia was seized with the aspiration to utilize her slight and recent acquaintance with Milton. Carefully unfolding the paper which held our week-end supply of accessories, she chalked thereon certain words with a stubby pencil, unearthed from my pocket, and pinned the sheet to the back of the phaeton. So that my father, driving up a half hour later with Lady, whose fine head twitched with scorn at the sight of the prostrate Richard, read, I fear with greater pride in his children than in the poet: —
‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’
III
It was my grandfather who, during his annual visit the summer following Richard’s advent, told us of Lucius Apuleius and of his magic transformation into a ‘plaine asse.’ He was a prince of story-tellers, and forty years spent among the classics had granted him endless equipment. Moreover, he entirely lacked the mellowless pedantry that too often clings to college professors of seventy. His stories were rich with the richness of their background, sparkling with the light from his extraordinarily blue eyes, active with the movement of his quick and lively words. Sitting with him in the orchard, Cynthia and I listened, while Richard roamed near by, munching some late buttercups and hearing, we knew not how consciously, the tragic adventures of the Asse Lucius.
Even then, in the fragmentary form given to us, we thought it a golden tale, as thought Marius and Flavian in Pater’s gracious and beneficent book. We had our favorite parts. Cynthia was inclined toward the sad adventures of the Lady Charites, kidnapped by thieves on her marriage day, her escape by means of the Asse, their recapture, and the savage plans for their terrible death, the final strategy which brought them once again safely home. She loved especially their triumphal entry into the Citie when the Asse ‘cryed stoutly,’ making the town to ring again with his shrilling sound; but the shining which was always in her eyes dimmed at the aftermath when the Lady Charites, like Juliet, must die for her love and loyalty. And, indeed, it is a fair story. She loved, too, the tale of Lucius’s shadow on the wall, which mercifully discovered to the kind soldiers his hiding place and that of his wicked master. As for me, no part of my grandfather’s recital matched in any way the conclusion, when the Asse, by eating the garland of roses, regained his human shape. There was wizardry in his tongue, I am sure of it; for, as he talked, there passed through our quiet orchard the procession to Isis. Masked figures in strange guises, women in white with wreaths of flowers, trumpeters with trumpets of gold and silver, priests in purple with vessels of gold, and at last the high priest himself bearing the roses which the goddess had sent to the prayerful Asse.
‘So you see,’ concluded my grandfather, looking in turn at Cynthia and me, ‘so you see how Lucius Apuleius became himself again. Merely a question of roses. How do you know that this Lucius of yours is really an ass? He woke me this morning calling “Never, never!” just as the Golden Asse did when they accused him of stealing Milo’s treasure. If you want to keep him like this, Cynthia, beware of roses.’
I felt sorry for Cynthia, for I knew the matter would stay with her until she had decided it one way or the other. There was never any middle ground for her. Either a thing was true or it was not. And at thirteen making up one’s mind is neither simple nor easy.
My grandfather was, in fact, devoted to Richard — Lucius, he called him. He was greatly disturbed twenty-five years ago over the speed of the world. He did not like the way horse cars were everywhere giving place to electric ones, and the rumors of successful horseless carriages distressed him. He talked almost angrily about the invasion of the telephone. I think Richard’s meditative ways reassured him. He used to ask the minister, who had been a college classmate, to drive with him; and the two white-haired old gentlemen would start toward the open country, quite overlapping the narrow seat of the phaeton with their black frock coats. Richard’s insistence upon hours of complete rest delighted them both. At the supper table my grandfather would laugh uproariously at them, throwing back his fine white head. One August day Cynthia and I, returning from the pasture with laden berry pails, came upon the trio at Richard’s favorite spring. Quite unaware of our approach, my grandfather and the minister continued some heated argument. They had twisted themselves about on the narrow seat until they uncomfortably faced each other; thenstraw hats were off; their white heads and anxious hands gesticulated eagerly. Cynthia thought the subject probably the Logos, but we never really knew. Meanwhile Richard lay in the cool grass beside the spring, his mind concerned with ultimate realities and not with those of time and space.
But I did not know until the second year of Richard’s stay with us how seriously Cynthia had taken my grandfather’s warning of the roses. We were driving one Saturday afternoon in July in search of meadow rue for church decoration when Richard stopped suddenly by a high bank which the spring rains had excavated sufficiently to form an agreeable shelter and over which blossoming wild roses grew in abundance. Before he had had time to complete the necessary arrangements for his rest, Cynthia had bounded from the phaeton, seized his bridle, and by mere force of will induced him to move on a few steps beyond the roses. When she came again to the phaeton with Children of the New Forest, which she had procured from the back, her cheeks were pink and she avoided my eyes. Then I understood what I have never since forgotten: that hers was a Faith Militant as well as a Faith Triumphant.
IV
Ten years were granted to Richard Mansfield after he left the Far West for the State of Maine. He died at twenty-three, a ripe old age. His last years would, I think, have tried one of a smaller nature. We were in college, negligent and very busy, and, I fear, we quite cruelly forgot him. But may he not well have reaped the confident fruit of those long hours of contemplation, have become careless of little things like neglect? He came of a noble race. To whom of us has it been granted to sec thrice the angel of the Lord with a drawn sword, once in the way, again in a path of the vineyards, and yet again in a narrow place?
Remembering his patient acquiescence as a playmate, I contend that he was at once a Stoic and a practical Christian; recalling his sober delight in the things of this world, I dub him an Epicurean; seeing him again lying for long hours by the roadside, I even question if he was not a disciple of Plato, probing into the nature of Justice or of Temperance or of Fortitude. Finally, holding in thankful and lasting remembrance the long and luminous effects of those great and old books of my childhood, I salute him in the words of Catullus: Frater, Ave atque Vale — Brother, Hail and Farewell!