was just beautiful without rhyme or reason. I did not know
anything about beauty. But now I know, or, rather, am just
beginning to know. This grass is more beautiful to me now that I
know why it is grass, and all the hidden chemistry of sun and rain
and earth that makes it become grass. Why, there is romance in the
life-history of any grass, yes, and adventure, too. The very
thought of it stirs me. When I think of the play of force and
matter, and all the tremendous struggle of it, I feel as if I could
write an epic on the grass.
“How well you talk,” she said absently, and he noted that she was
looking at him in a searching way.
He was all confusion and embarrassment on the instant, the blood
flushing red on his neck and brow.
“I hope I am learning to talk,” he stammered. “There seems to be
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so much in me I want to say. But it is all so big. I can’t find
ways to say what is really in me. Sometimes it seems to me that
all the world, all life, everything, had taken up residence inside
of me and was clamoring for me to be the spokesman. I feel – oh, I
can’t describe it – I feel the bigness of it, but when I speak, I
babble like a little child. It is a great task to transmute
feeling and sensation into speech, written or spoken, that will, in
turn, in him who reads or listens, transmute itself back into the
selfsame feeling and sensation. It is a lordly task. See, I bury
my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils
sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies. It is a
breath of the universe I have breathed. I know song and laughter,
and success and pain, and struggle and death; and I see visions
that arise in my brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I
would like to tell them to you, to the world. But how can I? My
tongue is tied. I have tried, by the spoken word, just now, to
describe to you the effect on me of the scent of the grass. But I
have not succeeded. I have no more than hinted in awkward speech.
My words seem gibberish to me. And yet I am stifled with desire to
tell. Oh! – ” he threw up his hands with a despairing gesture –
“it is impossible! It is not understandable! It is
incommunicable!”
“But you do talk well,” she insisted. “Just think how you have
improved in the short time I have known you. Mr. Butler is a noted
public speaker. He is always asked by the State Committee to go
out on stump during campaign. Yet you talked just as well as he
the other night at dinner. Only he was more controlled. You get
too excited; but you will get over that with practice. Why, you
would make a good public speaker. You can go far – if you want to.
You are masterly. You can lead men, I am sure, and there is no
reason why you should not succeed at anything you set your hand to,
just as you have succeeded with grammar. You would make a good
lawyer. You should shine in politics. There is nothing to prevent
you from making as great a success as Mr. Butler has made. And
minus the dyspepsia,” she added with a smile.
They talked on; she, in her gently persistent way, returning always
to the need of thorough grounding in education and to the
advantages of Latin as part of the foundation for any career. She
drew her ideal of the successful man, and it was largely in her
father’s image, with a few unmistakable lines and touches of color
from the image of Mr. Butler. He listened eagerly, with receptive
ears, lying on his back and looking up and joying in each movement
of her lips as she talked. But his brain was not receptive. There
was nothing alluring in the pictures she drew, and he was aware of
a dull pain of disappointment and of a sharper ache of love for
her. In all she said there was no mention of his writing, and the
manuscripts he had brought to read lay neglected on the ground.
At last, in a pause, he glanced at the sun, measured its height
above the horizon, and suggested his manuscripts by picking them
up.
“I had forgotten,” she said quickly. “And I am so anxious to
hear.”
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He read to her a story, one that he flattered himself was among his
very best. He called it “The Wine of Life,” and the wine of it,
that had stolen into his brain when he wrote it, stole into his
brain now as he read it. There was a certain magic in the original
conception, and he had adorned it with more magic of phrase and
touch. All the old fire and passion with which he had written it
were reborn in him, and he was swayed and swept away so that he was
blind and deaf to the faults of it. But it was not so with Ruth.
Her trained ear detected the weaknesses and exaggerations, the
overemphasis of the tyro, and she was instantly aware each time the
sentence-rhythm tripped and faltered. She scarcely noted the
rhythm otherwise, except when it became too pompous, at which
moments she was disagreeably impressed with its amateurishness.
That was her final judgment on the story as a whole – amateurish,
though she did not tell him so. Instead, when he had done, she
pointed out the minor flaws and said that she liked the story.
But he was disappointed. Her criticism was just. He acknowledged
that, but he had a feeling that he was not sharing his work with
her for the purpose of schoolroom correction. The details did not
matter. They could take care of themselves. He could mend them,
he could learn to mend them. Out of life he had captured something
big and attempted to imprison it in the story. It was the big
thing out of life he had read to her, not sentence-structure and
semicolons. He wanted her to feel with him this big thing that was
his, that he had seen with his own eyes, grappled with his own
brain, and placed there on the page with his own hands in printed
words. Well, he had failed, was his secret decision. Perhaps the
editors were right. He had felt the big thing, but he had failed
to transmute it. He concealed his disappointment, and joined so
easily with her in her criticism that she did not realize that deep
down in him was running a strong undercurrent of disagreement.
“This next thing I’ve called ‘The Pot’,” he said, unfolding the
manuscript. “It has been refused by four or five magazines now,
but still I think it is good. In fact, I don’t know what to think
of it, except that I’ve caught something there. Maybe it won’t
affect you as it does me. It’s a short thing – only two thousand
words.”
“How dreadful!” she cried, when he had finished. “It is horrible,
unutterably horrible!”
He noted her pale face, her eyes wide and tense, and her clenched
hands, with secret satisfaction. He had succeeded. He had
communicated the stuff of fancy and feeling from out of his brain.
It had struck home. No matter whether she liked it or not, it had
gripped her and mastered her, made her sit there and listen and
forget details.
“It is life,” he said, “and life is not always beautiful. And yet,
perhaps because I am strangely made, I find something beautiful
there. It seems to me that the beauty is tenfold enhanced because
it is there – ”
“But why couldn’t the poor woman – ” she broke in disconnectedly.
Then she left the revolt of her thought unexpressed to cry out:
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“Oh! It is degrading! It is not nice! It is nasty!”
For the moment it seemed to him that his heart stood still. NASTY!
He had never dreamed it. He had not meant it. The whole sketch
stood before him in letters of fire, and in such blaze of
illumination he sought vainly for nastiness. Then his heart began
to beat again. He was not guilty.
“Why didn’t you select a nice subject?” she was saying. “We know
there are nasty things in the world, but that is no reason – ”
She talked on in her indignant strain, but he was not following
her. He was smiling to himself as he looked up into her virginal
face, so innocent, so penetratingly innocent, that its purity
seemed always to enter into him, driving out of him all dross and