THE COMING OF MY SHIP
Straight to the sunrise my ship’s sails are leaning,
Brave at the masthead her new colours fly;
Down on the shore, her lips trembling with meaning,
Love waits, but unanswering, I heed not her cry.
The gold of the East shall be mine in full measure,
My ship shall come home overflowing with treasure,
And love is not need, but only a pleasure,
So I wait for my ship to come in.
Silent, half troubled, I wait in the shadow,
No sail do I see between me and the dawn;
Out in the blue and measureless meadow,
My ship wanders widely, but Love has not gone.
“My arms await thee,” she cries in her pleading,
“Why wait for its coming, when I am thy needing?”
I pass by in stillness, all else unheeding,
And wait for my ship to come in.
See, in the East, surrounded by splendour,
My sail glimmers whitely in crimson and blue;
I turn back to Love, my heart growing tender,
“Now I have gold and leisure for you.
Jewels she brings for thy white breast’s adorning,
Measures of gold beyond a queen’s scorning”—
To-night I shall rest—joy comes in the morning,
So I wait for my ship to come in.
Remembering waters beat cold on the shore,
And the grey sea in sadness grows old;
I listen in vain for Love’s pleading once more,
While my ship comes with spices and gold.
The sea birds cry hoarsely, for this is their songing,
On masthead and colours their white wings are thronging,
But my soul throbs deep with love and with longing,
And I wait for my ship to come in.
ROMANCE AND THE POSTMAN
A letter! Do the charm and uncertainty of it ever fade? Who knows what may be written upon the pages within!
Far back, in a dim, dream-haunted childhood, the first letter came to me. It was “a really, truly letter,” properly stamped and addressed, and duly delivered by the postman. With what wonder the chubby fingers broke the seal! It did not matter that there was an inclosure to one’s mother, and that the thing itself was written by an adoring relative; it was a personal letter, of private and particular importance, and that day the postman assumed his rightful place in one’s affairs.
In the treasure box of many a grandmother is hidden a pathetic scrawl that the baby made for her and called “a letter.” To the alien eye, it is a mere tangle of pencil marks, and the baby himself, grown to manhood, with children of his own, would laugh at the yellowed message, which is put away with his christening robe and his first shoes, but to one, at least, it speaks with a deathless voice.
It is written in books and papers that some unhappy mortals are swamped with mail. As a lady recently wrote to the President of the United States: “I suppose you get so many letters that when you see the postman coming down the street, you don’t care whether he has anything for you or not.”
Indeed, the President might well think the universe had gone suddenly wrong if the postman passed him by, but there are compensations in everything. The First Gentleman of the Republic must inevitably miss the pleasant emotions which letters bring to the most of us.
The clerks and carriers in the business centres may be pardoned if they lose sight of the potentialities of the letters that pass through their hands. When a skyscraper is a postal district in itself, there is no time for the man in grey to think of the burden he carries, save as so many pounds of dead weight, becoming appreciably lighter at each stop. But outside the hum and bustle, on quiet streets and secluded by-ways, there are faces at the windows, watching eagerly for the mail.
The progress of the postman is akin to a Roman triumph, for in his leathern pack lies Fate. Long experience has given him a sixth sense, as if the letters breathed a hint of their contents through their superscriptions.
The business letter, crisp and to the point, has an atmosphere of its own, even where cross lines of typewriting do not show through the envelope.
The long, rambling, friendly hand is distinctive, and if it has been carried in the pocket a long time before mailing, the postman knows that the writer is a married woman with a foolish trust in her husband.
Circulars addressed mechanically, at so much a thousand, never deceive the postman, though the recipient often opens them with pleasurable sensations, which immediately sink to zero. And the love-letters! The carrier is a veritable Sherlock Holmes when it comes to them.
Gradually he becomes acquainted with the inmost secrets of those upon his route. Friendship, love, and marriage, absence and return, death, and one’s financial condition, are all as an open book to the man in grey. Invitations, cards, wedding announcements, forlorn little letters from those to whom writing is not as easy as speech, childish epistles with scrap pictures pasted on the outside, all give an inkling of their contents to the man who delivers them.
When the same bill comes to the same house for a long and regular period, then ceases, even the carrier must feel relieved to know that it has been paid. When he isn’t too busy, he takes a friendly look at the postal cards, and sometimes saves a tenant in a third flat the weariness of two flights of stairs by shouting the news up the tube!
If the dweller in a tenement has ingratiating manners, he may learn how many papers, and letters are being stuffed into the letter-box, by a polite inquiry down the tube when the bell rings. Through the subtle freemasonry of the postman’s voice a girl knows that her lover has not forgotten her—and her credit is good for the “two cents due” if the tender missive is overweight.
“All the world loves a lover,” and even the busy postman takes a fatherly interest in the havoc wrought by Cupid along his route. The little blind god knows neither times nor seasons—all alike are his own—but the man in grey, old and spectacled though he may be, is his confidential messenger.
Love-letters are seemingly immortal. A clay tablet on which one of the Pharaohs wrote, asking for the heart and hand of a beautiful foreign princess, is now in the British Museum. But suppose the postman had not been sure-footed, and all the clay letters had been smashed into fragments in a single grand catastrophe! What a stir in high places, what havoc in Church and State, and how many fond hearts broken, if the postman had fallen down!
“Nothing feeds the flame like a letter,” said Emerson; “it has intent, personality, secrecy.” Flimsy and frail as it is, so easily torn or destroyed, the love-letter many times outlasts the love. Even the Father of his Country, though he has been dead this hundred years or more, has left behind him a love-letter, ragged and faded, but still legible, beginning: “My Dearest Life and Love.”
“Matter is indestructible,” so the scientists say, but what of the love-letter that is reduced to ashes? Does its passion live again in some far-off violet flame, or, rising from its dust, bloom once more in a fragrant rose, to touch the lips of another love?
In countless secret places, the tender missives are hidden, for the lover must always keep his joy in tangible form, to be sure that it was not a dream. They fly through the world by day and night, like white-winged birds that can say, “I love you”—over mountain, hill, stream, and plain; past sea and lake and river, through the desert’s fiery heat and amid the throbbing pulses of civilisation, with never a mistake, to bring exquisite rapture to another heart and wings of light to the loved one’s soul.
Under the pillow of the maiden, her lover’s letter brings visions of happiness too great for the human heart to hold. Even in her dreams, her fingers tighten upon his letter—the visible assurance of his unchanging and unchangeable love.
When the bugle sounds the charge, and dimly through the flash and flame the flag signals “Follow!” many a heart, leaping to answer with the hot blood of youth, finds a sudden tenderness in the midst of its high courage, from the loving letter which lies close to the soldier’s breast.
Bunker Hill and Gettysburg, Moscow and the Wilderness, Waterloo, Mafeking, and San Juan—the old blood-stained fields and the modern scenes of terror have all alike known the same message and the same thrill. The faith and hope of the living, the kiss and prayer of the dying, the cries of the wounded, and the hot tears of those who have parted forever, are on the blood-stained pages of the love-letters that have gone to war.
“Ich liebe Dich,” “Je t’aime,” or, in our dear English speech, “I love you,”—it is all the same, for the heart knows the universal language, the words of which are gold, bedewed with tears that shine like precious stones.
Every attic counts old love-letters among its treasures, and when the rain beats on the roof and grey swirls of water are blown against the pane, one may sit among the old trunks and boxes and bring to light the loves of days gone by.
The little hair-cloth trunk, with its rusty lock and broken hinges, brings to mind a rosy-cheeked girl in a poke bonnet, who went a-visiting in the stage-coach. Inside is the bonnet itself—white, with a gorgeous trimming of pink “lute-string” ribbon, which has faded into ashes of roses at the touch of the kindly years.
From the trunk comes a musty fragrance—lavender, sweet clover, rosemary, thyme, and the dried petals of roses that have long since crumbled to dust. Scraps of brocade and taffeta, yellowed lingerie, and a quaint old wedding gown, daguerreotypes in ornate cases, and then the letters, tied with faded ribbon, in a package by themselves.
The fingers unconsciously soften to their task, for the letters are old and yellow, and the ink has faded to brown. Every one was cut open with the scissors, not hastily torn according to our modern fashion, but in a slow and seemly manner, as befits a solemn occasion.
Perhaps the sweet face of a great-grandmother grew much perplexed at the sight of a letter in an unfamiliar hand, and perhaps, too, as is the way of womankind, she studied the outside a long time before she opened it. As the months passed by, the handwriting became familiar, but a coquettish grandmother may have flirted a bit with the letter, and put it aside—until she could be alone.
All the important letters are in the package, from the first formal note asking permission to call, which a womanly instinct bade the maiden put aside, to the last letter, written when twilight lay upon the long road they had travelled together, but still beginning: “My Dear and Honoured Wife.”
Bits of rosemary and geranium, lemon verbena, tuberose, and heliotrope, fragile and whitened, but still sweet, fall from the opened letters and rustle softly as they fall.
Far away in the “peace which passeth all understanding,” the writer of the letters sleeps, but the old love keeps a fragrance that outlives the heart in which it bloomed.
At night, when the fires below are lighted, and childish voices make the old house ring with laughter, Memory steals into the attic to sing softly of the past, as a mother croons her child to sleep.
Rocking in a quaint old attic chair, with the dear familiar things of home gathered all about her, Memory’s voice is sweet, like a harp tuned in the minor mode when the south wind sweeps the strings.
Bunches of herbs swing from the rafters and fill the room with the wholesome scent of an old-fashioned garden, where rue and heartsease grew. With the fragrance comes the breath from that garden of Mnemosyne, where the simples for heartache nod beside the River of Forgetfulness.
In a flash the world is forgotten, and into the attic come dear faces from that distant land of childhood, where a strange enchantment glorified the commonplace, and made the dreams of night seem real. Footsteps that have long been silent are heard upon the attic floor, and voices, hushed for years, whisper from the shadows from the other end of the room.
A moonbeam creeps into the attic and transfigures the haunted chamber with a sheen of silver mist. From the spinning-wheel come a soft hum and a delicate whir; then a long-lost voice breathes the first notes of an old, old song. The melody changes to a minuet, and the lady in the portrait moves, smiling, from the tarnished gilt frame that surrounds her—then a childish voice says: “Mother, are you asleep?”
Down the street the postman passes, bearing his burden of joy and pain: letters from far-off islands, where the Stars and Stripes gleam against a forest of palms; from the snow-bound fastnesses of the North, where men are searching for gold; from rose-scented valleys and violet fields, where the sun forever shines, and from lands across the sea, where men speak an alien tongue—single messages from one to another; letters that plead for pardon cross the paths of those that are meant to stab; letters written in jest too often find grim earnest at the end of their journey, and letters written in all tenderness meet misunderstandings and pain, when the postman brings them home; letters that deal with affairs of state and shape the destiny of a nation; tidings of happiness and sorrow, birth and death, love and trust, and the thousand pangs of trust betrayed; an hundred joys and as many griefs are all in the postman’s hands.
No wonder, then, that there is a stir in the house, that eyes brighten, hearts beat quickly, and eager steps hasten to the door of destiny, when the postman rings the bell!
A SUMMER REVERIE
I sit on the shore of the deep blue sea
As the tide comes rolling in,
And wonder, as roaming in sunlit dreams,
The cause of the breakers’ din.
For each of the foam-crowned billows
Has a wonderful story to tell,
And the surge’s mystical music
Seems wrought by a fairy spell.
I wander through memory’s portals,
Through mansions dim and vast,
And gaze at the beautiful pictures
That hang in the halls of the past.
And dream-faces gather around me,
With voices soft and low,
To draw me back to the pleasures
Of the lands of long ago.
There are visions of beauty and splendour,
And a fame that I never can win—
Far out on the deep they are sailing—
My ships that will never come in.
A VIGNETTE
It was a muddy down-town corner and several people stood in the cold, waiting for a street-car. A stand of daily papers was on the sidewalk, guarded by two little newsboys. One was much younger than the other, and he rolled two marbles back and forth in the mud by the curb. Suddenly his attention was attracted by something bright above him, and he looked up into a bunch of red carnations a young lady held in her hands. He watched them eagerly, seemingly unable to take his eyes from the feast of colour. She saw the hungry look in the little face, and put one into his hand. He was silent, until his brother said: “Say thanky to the lady.” He whispered his thanks, and then she bent down and pinned the blossom upon his ragged jacket, while the big policeman on the corner smiled approvingly.
“My, but you’re gay now, and you can sell all your papers,” the bigger boy said tenderly.
“Yep, I can sell ’em now, sure!”
Out of the crowd on the opposite corner came a tiny, dark-skinned Italian girl, with an accordion slung over her shoulder by a dirty ribbon; she made straight for the carnations and fearlessly cried, “Lady, please give me a flower!” She got one, and quickly vanished in the crowd.
The young woman walked up the street to a flower-stand to replenish her bunch of carnations, and when she returned, another dark-skinned mite rushed up to her without a word, only holding up grimy hands with a gesture of pathetic appeal. Another brilliant blossom went to her, and the young woman turned to follow her; on through the crowd the child fled, until she reached the corner where her mother stood, seamed and wrinkled and old, with the dark pathetic eyes of sunny Italy. She held the flower out to her, and the weary mother turned and snatched it eagerly, then pressed it to her lips, and kissed it as passionately as if it had been the child who brought it to her.
Just then the car came, and the big grey policeman helped the owner of the carnations across the street, and said as he put her on the car, “Lady, you’ve sure done them children a good turn to-day.”
MEDITATION
I sail through the realms of the long ago,
Wafted by fancy and visions frail,
On the river Time with its gentle flow,
In a silver boat with a golden sail.
My dreams, in the silence are hurrying by
On the brooklet of Thought where I let them flow,
And the “lilies nod to the sound of the stream”
As I sail through the realms of the long ago.
On the shores of life’s deep-flowing stream
Are my countless sorrows and heartaches, too,
And the hills of hope are but dimly seen,
Far in the distance, near heaven’s blue.
I find that my childish thoughts and dreams
Lie strewn on the sands by the cruel blast
That scattered my hopes on the restless streams
That flow through the mystic realms of the past.
POINTERS FOR THE LORDS OF CREATION
Some wit has said that the worst vice in the world is advice, and it is also quite true that one ignorant, though well-meaning person can sometimes accomplish more damage in a short time, than a dozen people who start out for the purpose of doing mischief.
The newspapers and periodicals of to-day are crowded with advice to women, and while much of it is found in magazines for women, written and edited by men, it is also true that a goodly quantity of it comes from feminine writers; it is all along the same lines, however, the burden of effort being to teach the weaker sex how to become more attractive and more lovable to the lords of creation. It is, of course, all intended for our good, for if we can only please the men, and obey their slightest wish even before they take the trouble to mention the matter, we can then be perfectly happy.
A man can sit down any day and give us directions enough to keep us busy for a lifetime, and we seldom or never return the compliment. This is manifestly unfair, and so this little preachment is meant for the neglected and deserving men, and for them only, so that all women who have read thus far are invited to leave the matter right here and turn their attention to the column of “Advice to Women” which they can find in almost any periodical.
In the first place, gentlemen, we must admit that you do keep us guessing, though we do not sit up nights nor lose much sleep over your queer notions.
We can’t ask you many questions, either, dear brethren, for, as you know, you rather like to fib to us, and sometimes we are able to find it out, and then we never believe you any more.
We may venture, however, to ask small favours of you, and one of these is that you do not wear red ties. You look so nice in quiet colours that we dislike exceedingly to have you make crazy quilts of yourselves, and that is just what you do when you begin experimenting with colours which we naturally associate with the “cullud pussons.”
And a cane may be very ornamental, but it’s of no earthly use, and we would rather you would not carry it when you go out with us.
Never tell us you haven’t had time to come and see us, or write to us, because we know perfectly well that if you wanted to badly enough, you would take the time, so the excuse makes us even madder than does the neglect. Still, when you don’t want to come, we would not have you do it for anything.
There is an old saying that “absence makes the heart grow fonder”—so it does—of the other fellow. We don’t propose to shed any tears over you; we simply go to the theatre with the other man and have an extremely good time. When you are every, very bright, you can manage some way not to allow us to forget you for a minute, nor give us much time to think of anything else.
When we are angry, for heaven’s sake don’t ask us why, because that shows your lack of penetration. Just simply call yourself a brute, and say you are utterly unworthy of even our faint regard, and you will soon realise that this covers a lot of ground, and everything will be all right in a few minutes.
And whatever you do, don’t show any temper yourself. A woman requires of a man that he shall be as immovable as the rock of Gibraltar, no matter what she does to him. And you play your strongest card when you don’t mind our tantrums—even though it’s a state secret we are telling you.
Don’t get huffy when you meet us with another man; in nine cases out of ten, that’s just what we do it for. And don’t make the mistake of retaliating by asking another girl somewhere. You’ll have a perfectly miserable time if you do, both then and afterward.
When you do come to see us, it is not at all nice to spend the entire evening talking about some other girl. How would you like to have the graces of some other man continually dinned into your ears? Sometimes we take that way in order to get a rest from your overweening raptures over the absent girl.
We have a well-defined suspicion that you talk us over with your chums and compare notes. But, bless you, it can’t possibly hold a candle to the thorough and impartial discussions that some of you get when girls are together, either in small bevies, or with only one chosen friend. And we don’t very much care what you say about us, for a man never judges a woman by the opinion of any one else, but another woman’s opinion counts for a great deal with us, so you would better be careful.
If you are going to say things that you don’t mean, try to stamp them with the air of sincerity—if you can once get a woman to fully believe in your sincerity, you have gone a long way toward her heart.
Haven’t you found out that women are not particularly interested in anecdotes? Please don’t tell us more than fifteen in the same evening.
And don’t begin to make love to us before you have had time to make a favourable impression along several lines—a man, as well as a woman, loses ground and forfeits respect by making himself too cheap.
If a girl runs and screams when she has been caught standing under the mistletoe, it means that she will not object; if she stiffens up and glares at you, it means that she does. The same idea is sometimes delicately conveyed by the point of a pin. But a woman will be able to forgive almost anything which you can make her believe was prompted by her own attractiveness, at least unless she knows men fairly well.
You know, of course, that we will not show your letters, nor tell when you ask us to marry you and are refused. This much a woman owes to any man who has honoured her with an offer of marriage—to keep his perfect trust sacredly in her own heart. Even her future husband has no business to know of this—it is her lover’s secret, and she has no right to betray it.
Keeping the love-letters and the offers of marriage from any honourable man safe from a prying world are points of honour which all good women possess, although we may sometimes quote certain things from your letters, as you do from ours.
There’s nothing you can tell a woman which will please her quite so much as that knowing her has made you better, especially if you can prove it by showing a decided upward tendency in your morals. That’s your good right bower, but don’t play it too often—keep it for special occasions.
There’s one mistake you make, dear brethren, and that is telling a woman you love her as soon as you find it out yourself, and the most of you will do that very thing. There is one case on record where a man waited fifteen minutes, but he nearly died of the strain. The trouble is that you seldom stop to consider whether we are ready to hear you or not, nor whether the coast is clear, nor what the chances are in your favour. You simply relieve your mind, and trust in your own wonderful charms to accomplish the rest.
And we wish that when the proper time comes for you to speak your mind you’d try to do it artistically. Of course you can’t write it, unless you are far away from her, for if you can manage an opportunity to speak, a resort to the pen is cowardly. And don’t mind our evading the subject—we always do that on principle, but please don’t be scared, or at least don’t show it, whatever you may feel. If there is one thing a woman dislikes more than another it is a man who shows cowardice at the crucial point in life.
Every man, except yourself, dear reader, is conceited. And one particular sort of it makes us very, very weary. You are so blinded by your own perfections, so sure that we are desperately in love with you, that you sometimes give us little unspoken suggestions to that effect, and then our disgust is beyond words.
Another cowardly thing you sometimes do, and that is to say that we have spoiled your life—that we could have made you anything we pleased—and that you are going straight to perdition. If one woman is all that keeps you from going to ruin, you have secured a through ticket anyway, and it’s too late to save you. You don’t want a woman who might marry you only out of pity, and you are not going to die of a broken heart. Men die of broken vanity, sometimes, but their hearts are pretty tough, being made of healthy muscle.
You get married very much as you go down town in the morning. You run, like all possessed, until you catch your car, and then you sit down and read your newspaper. When you think your wife looks unusually well, it would not hurt you in the least to tell her so, and the way you leave her in the morning is going to settle her happiness for the day, though she may be too proud to let you know that it makes any difference. Women are quick to detect a sham, and they don’t want you to say anything that you don’t feel, but you are pretty sure to feel tenderly toward her sometimes, careless though you may be, and then is the time to tell her so. You don’t want to wait until she is dead, and then buy a lily to put on her coffin. You’d better bring her the lily some time when you’ve been cross and grumpy.
But don’t imagine that a present of any kind ever atones for a hurt that has been given in words. There’s nothing you can say which is more manly or which will do you both so much good as the simple “forgive me” when you have been wrong.
Rest assured, gentlemen, that you who spend the most of your evenings in other company, and too often find fault with your meals when you come home, are the cause of many sorrowful talks among the women who are wise enough to know, even though your loyal wife may put up a brave front in your defense.
How often do you suppose the brave woman who loves you has been actually driven in her agony to some married friend whom she can trust and upon her sympathetic bosom has cried until she could weep no more, simply because of your thoughtless neglect? How often do you think she has planned little things to make your home-coming pleasant, which you have never noticed? And how often do you suppose she has desperately fought down the heartache and tried to believe that your absorption in business is the reason for your forgetfulness of her?
Do you ever think of these things? Do you ever think of the days before you were sure of her, when you treasured every line of her letters, and would have bartered your very hopes of heaven for the earthly life with her?
But perhaps you can hardly be expected to remember the wild sprint that you made from the breakfast table to the street-car.
TRANSITION
I am thy Pleasure. See, my face is fair—
With silken strands of joy I twine thee round;
Life has enough of stress—forget with me!
Wilt thou not stay? Then go, thou art not bound.
I am thy Pastime. Let me be to thee
A daily refuge from the haunting fears
That bind thee, choke thee, fill thy soul with woe.
Seek thou my hand, let me assuage thy tears.
I am thy Habit. Nay, start not, thy will
Is yet supreme, for art thou not a man?
Then draw me close to thee, for life is brief—
A little space to pass as best one can.
I am thy Passion. Thou shalt cling to me
Through all the years to come. The silken cord
Of Pleasure has become a stronger bond,
Not to be cleft, nor loosened at a word.
I am thy Master. Thou shalt crush for me
The grapes of truth for wine of sacrifice;
My clanking chains were forged for such as thee,
I am thy Master—yea, I am thy vice!
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