It is said that the world is created anew for every person who is in love. There is therefore this constant miracle of a new heavens and a new earth. It does not depend upon the seasons. The subtle force which is in every human being, more or less active, has this power, as if love were somehow a principle pervading nature itself, and capable of transforming it. Is this a divine gift? Can it be used more than once? Once spent, does the world to each succeeding experimenter in it become old and stale? We say the world is old. In one sense, the real sense to every person, it is no older than the lives lived in it at any given time. If it is always passing away, it is always being renewed. Every time a youth looks love in a maiden's eyes, and sees the timid appealing return of the universal passion, the world for those two is just as certainly created as it was on the first morning, in all its color, odor, song, freshness, promise. This is the central mystery of life.
Unconsciously to herself, Margaret had worked this miracle. Never before did the little town look so bright; never before was there exactly such a color on the hills-sentiment is so pale compared with love; never before did her home appear so sweet; never before was there such a fine ecstasy in the coming of spring.
For all this, home-coming, after the first excitement of arrival is over, is apt to be dull. The mind is so occupied with other emotions that the friends even seem a little commonplace and unresponsive, and the routine is tame. Out of such a whirl of new experiences to return and find that nothing has happened; that the old duties and responsibilities are waiting! Margaret had eagerly leaped from the carriage to throw herself into her aunt's arms-what a sweet welcome it is, that of kin!—and yet almost before the greeting was over she felt alone. There was that in the affectionate calmness of Miss Forsythe that seemed to chill the glow and fever of passion in her new world. And she had nothing to tell. Everything had changed, and she must behave as if nothing had happened. She must take up her old life—the interests of the neighborhood. Even the little circle of people she loved appeared distant from her at the moment; impossible it seemed to bring them into the rushing current of her life. Their joy in getting her back again she could not doubt, nor the personal affection with which she was welcomed. But was the New England atmosphere a little cold? What was the flavor she missed in it all? The next day a letter came. The excuse for it was the return of a fan which Mr. Henderson had carried off in his pocket from the opera. What a wonderful letter it was—his handwriting, the first note from him! Miss Forsythe saw in it only politeness. For Margaret it outweighed the town of Brandon. It lay in her lap as she sat at her chamber window looking out over the landscape, which was beginning to be flushed with a pale green. There was a robin on the lawn, and a blackbird singing in the pine. “Go not, happy day,” she said, with tears in her eyes. She took up the brief letter and read it again. Was he really hers, “truly”? And she answered the letter, swiftly and with no hesitation, but with a throbbing heart. It was a civil acknowledgment; that was all. Henderson might have lead it aloud in the Exchange. But what color, what charming turns of expression, what of herself, had the girl put into it, that gave him such a thrill of pleasure when he read it? What secret power has a woman to make a common phrase so glow with her very self?
Here was something in her life that was her own, a secret, a hope, and yet a tremulous anticipation to be guarded almost from herself. It colored everything; it was always, whatever she was doing or saying, present, like an air that one unconsciously hums for days after it has caught his fancy. Blessed be the capacity of being fond and foolish! If that letter was under her pillow at night, if this new revelation was last in her thought as she fell asleep, if it mingled with the song of the birds in the spring morning, as some great good pervading the world, is there anything distinguishing in such an experience that it should be dwelt on? And if there were questionings and little panics of doubt, did not these moments also reveal Margaret to herself more certainly than the hours of happy dreaming?
Questionings no doubt there were, and, later, serious questionings; for habit is almost as strong as love, and the old ways of life and of thought will reassert themselves in a thoughtful mind, and reason will insist on analyzing passion and even hope.
Gradually the home life and every-day interests began to assume their natural aspect and proportions. It was so sweet and sane, this home life, interesting and not feverish. There was time for reading, time for turning over things in the mind, time for those interchanges of feeling and of ideas, by the fireside; she was not required to be always on dress parade, in mind or person, always keyed up to make an impression or receive one; how much wider and sounder was Morgan's view of the world, allowing for his kindly cynicism, than that prevalent in the talk where she had lately been! How sincere and hearty and free ran the personal currents in this little neighborhood! In the very fact that the daily love and affection for her and interest in her were taken for granted she realized the difference between her position here and that among newer friends who showed more open admiration.
Little by little there was a readjustment. In comparison, the city life, with its intensity of action and feeling, began to appear distant, not so real, mixed, turbid, even frivolous. And was Henderson a vanishing part of this pageant? Was his figure less distinct as the days went by? It could not be affirmed. Love is such a little juggler, and likes, now and again, to pretend to be so reasonable and judicious. There were no more letters. If there had been a letter now and then, on any excuse, the nexus would have been more distinct: nothing feeds the flame exactly like a letter; it has intention, personality, secrecy. And the little excitement of it grows. Once a week gets to be twice a week, three times, four times, and then daily. And then a day without a letter is such a blank, and so full of fear! What can have happened? Is he ill? Has he changed? The opium habit is nothing to the letter habit-between lovers. Not that Margaret expected a letter. Indeed, reason told her that it had not gone so far as that. But she should see him. She felt sure of that. And the thought filled all the vacant places in her imagination of the future.
And yet she thought she was seeing him more clearly than when he was with her. Oh wise young woman! She fancied she was deliberating, looking at life with great prudence. It must be one's own fault if one makes a radical mistake in marriage. She was watching the married people about her with more interest-the Morgans, our own household, Mrs. Fletcher; and besides, her aunt, whose even and cheerful life lacked this experience. It is so wise to do this, to keep one's feelings in control, not to be too hasty! Everybody has these intervals of prudence. That is the reason there are so few mistakes.
I dare say that all these reflections and deliberations in the maidenly mind were almost unconscious to herself; certainly unacknowledged. It was her imagination that she was following, and scarcely a distinct reality or intention. She thought of Henderson, and he gave a certain personality, vivid maybe, to that dream of the future which we all in youth indulge; but she would have shrunk from owning this even to herself. We deceive ourselves as often as we deceive others. Margaret would have repudiated with some warmth any intimation that she had lost her heart, and was really predicting the practical possibilities of that loss, and she would have been quite honest with herself in thinking that she was still mistress of her own feeling. Later on she would know, and delight to confess, that her destiny was fixed at a certain hour, at a certain moment, in New York, for subsequent events would run back to that like links in a chain. And she would have been right and also wrong in that; for but for those subsequent events the first impression would have faded, and been taken little account of in her life. I am more and more convinced that men and women act more upon impulse and less upon deep reflection and self-examination than the analytic novelists would have us believe, duly weighing motives and balancing considerations; and that men and women know themselves much less thoroughly than they suppose they do. There is a great deal of exaggeration, I am convinced, about the inward struggles and self-conflicts. The reader may know that Margaret was hopelessly in love, because he knows everything; but that charming girl would have been shocked and wounded to the most indignant humiliation if she had fancied that her friends thought that. Nay, more, if Henderson had at this moment made by letter a proposal for her hand, her impulse would have been to repudiate the offer as unjustified by anything that had taken place, and she would no doubt have obeyed that impulse.
But something occurred, while she was in this mood, that did not shock her maidenly self-consciousness, nor throw her into antagonism, but which did bring her face to face with a possible reality. And this was simply the receipt of a letter from Henderson; not a love-letter—far enough from that—but one in which there was a certain tone and intention that the most inexperienced would recognize as possibly serious. Aside from the announcement in the letter, the very fact of writing it was significant, conveying an intimation that the reader might be interested in what concerned the writer. The letter was longer than it need have been, for one thing, as if the pen, once started on its errand, ran on con amore. The writer was coming to Brandon; business, to be sure, was the excuse; but why should it have been necessary to announce to her a business visit? There crept into the letter somehow a good deal about his daily life, linked, to be sure, with mention of places and people in which she had recently an interest. He had been in Washington, and there were slight sketches of well-known characters in Congress and in the Government; he had been in Chicago, and even as far as Denver, and there were little pictures of scenes that might amuse her. There was no special mystery about all this travel and hurrying from place to place, but it gave Margaret a sense of varied and large occupations that she did not understand. Through it all there was the personality that had been recently so much in her thoughts. He was coming. That was a very solid fact that she must meet. And she did not doubt that he was coming to see her, and soon. That was a definite and very different idea from the dim belief that he would come some time. He had signed himself hers “faithfully.”
It was a letter that could not be answered like the other one; for it raised questions and prospects, and the thousand doubts that make one hesitate in any definite step; and, besides, she pleased herself to think that she did not know her own mind. He had not asked if he might come; he had said he was coming, and really there was no answer to that. Therefore she put it out of her mind-another curious mental process we have in dealing with a matter that is all the time the substratum of our existence. And she was actually serious; if she was reflective, she was conscious of being judicially reflective.
But in this period of calm and reflection it was impossible that a woman of Margaret's habits and temperament should not attempt to settle in her mind what that life was yonder of which she had a little taste; what was the career that Henderson had marked out for himself; what were his principles; what were the methods and reasons of his evident success. Endeavoring in her clear mind to separate the person, about whose personality she was so fondly foolish, from his schemes, which she so dimly comprehended, and applying to his somewhat hazy occupations her simple moral test, were the schemes quite legitimate? Perhaps she did not go so far as this; but what she read in the newspapers of moneymaking in these days made her secretly uneasy, and she found herself wishing that he were definitely practicing some profession, or engaged in some one solid occupation.
In the little parliament at our house, where everything, first and last, was overhauled and brought to judgment, without, it must be confessed, any visible effect on anything, one evening a common “incident” of the day started the conversation. It was an admiring account in a newspaper of a brilliant operation by which three or four men had suddenly become millionaires.
“I don't see,” said my wife, “any mention in this account of the thousands who have been reduced to poverty by this operation.”
“No,” said Morgan; “that is not interesting.”
“But it would be very interesting to me,” Mrs. Fletcher remarked. “Is there any protection, Mr. Morgan, for people who have invested their little property?”
“Yes; the law.”
“But suppose your money is all invested, say in a railway, and something goes wrong, where are you to get the money to pay for the law that will give you restitution? Is there anything in the State, or public opinion, or anywhere, that will protect your interests against clever swindling?”
“Not that I know of,” Morgan admitted. “You take your chance when you let your money go out of your stocking. You see there are so many people who want it. You can put it in the ground.”
“But if I own the ground I put it in, the voters who have no ground will tax it till there is nothing left for me.”
“That is equality.”
“But it isn't equality, for somebody gets very rich in railways or lands, while we lose our little all. Don't you think there ought to be a public official whose duty it is to enforce the law gratis which I cannot afford to enforce when I am wronged?”
“The difficulty is to discover whether you are wronged or only unfortunate. It needs a lawyer to find that out. And very likely if you are wronged, the wrongdoer has so cleverly gone round the law that it needs legislation to set you straight, and that needs a lobbyist, whom the lawyer must hire, or he must turn lobbyist himself. Now, a lawyer costs money, and a lobbyist is one of the most expensive of modern luxuries; but when you have a lawyer and lobbyist in one, you will find it economical to let him take your claim and all that can be made out of it, and not bother you any more about it. But there is no doubt about the law, as I said. You can get just as much law as you can pay for. It is like any other commodity.”
“You mean to say,” I asked, “that the lawyer takes what the operator leaves?”
“Not exactly. There is a great deal of unreasonable prejudice against lawyers. They must live. There is no nobler occupation than the application of the principle of justice in human affairs. The trouble is that public opinion sustains the operator in his smartness, and estimates the lawyer according to his adroitness. If we only evoked the aid of a lawyer in a just cause, the lawyers would have less to do.
“Usually and naturally the best talent goes with the biggest fees.”
“It seems to me,” said my wife, musing along, in her way, on parallel lines, “that there ought to be a limit to the amount of property one man can get into his absolute possession, to say nothing of the methods by which he gets it.”
“That never yet could be set,” Morgan replied. “It is impossible for any number of men to agree on it. I don't see any line between absolute freedom of acquisition, trusting to circumstances, misfortune, and death to knock things to pieces, and absolute slavery, which is communism.”
“Do you believe, Mr. Morgan, that any vast fortune was ever honestly come by?”
“That is another question. Honesty is such a flexible word. If you mean a process the law cannot touch, yes. If you mean moral consideration for others, I doubt. But property accumulates by itself almost. Many a man who has got a start by an operation he would not like to have investigated, and which he tries to forget, goes on to be very rich, and has a daily feeling of being more and more honorable and respectable, using only means which all the world calls fair and shrewd.”
“Mr. Morgan,” suddenly asked Margaret, who had been all the time an uneasy listener to the turn the talk had taken, “what is railroad wrecking?”
“Oh, it is very simple, at least in some of its forms. The 'wreckers,' as they are called, fasten upon some railway that is prosperous, pays dividends, pays a liberal interest on its bonds, and has a surplus. They contrive to buy, no matter of what cost, a controlling interest in it, either in its stock or its management. Then they absorb its surplus; they let it run down so that it pays no dividends, and by-and-by cannot even pay its interest; then they squeeze the bondholders, who may be glad to accept anything that is offered out of the wreck, and perhaps then they throw the property into the hands of a receiver, or consolidate it with some other road at a value enormously greater than the cost to them in stealing it. Having in one way or another sucked it dry, they look round for another road.”
“And all the people who first invested lose their money, or the most of it?”
“Naturally, the little fish get swallowed.”
“It is infamous,” said Margaret—“infamous! And men go to work to do this, to get other people's property, in cool blood?”
“I don't know how cool, but it is in the way of business.”
“What is the difference between that and getting possession of a bank and robbing it?” she asked, hot with indignation.
“Oh, one is an operation, and the other is embezzlement.”
“It is a shame. How can people permit it? Suppose, Mrs. Fletcher, a wrecker should steal your money that way?”
“I was thinking of that.”
I never saw Margaret more disturbed—out of all proportion, I thought, to the cause; for we had talked a hundred times about such things.
“Do you think all men who are what you call operating around are like that?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Probably most men who are engaged in what is generally called speculation are doing what seems to them a perfectly legitimate business. It is a common way of making a fortune.”
“You see, Margaret,” Morgan explained, “when people in trade buy anything, they expect to sell it for more than they gave for it.”
“It seems to me,” Margaret replied, more calmly, “that a great deal of what you men call business is just trying to get other people's money, and doesn't help anybody or produce anything.”
“Oh, that is keeping up the circulation, preventing stagnation.”
“And that is the use of brokers in grain and stocks?”
“Partly. They are commonly the agents that others use to keep themselves from stagnation.”
“I cannot see any good in it,” Margaret persisted. “No one seems to have the things he buys or sells. I don't understand it.”
“That is because you are a woman, if you will pardon me for saying it. Men don't need to have things in hand; business is done on faith and credit, and when a transaction is over, they settle up and pay the difference, without the trouble of transporting things back and forth.”
“I know you are chaffing me, Mr. Morgan. But I should call that betting.”
“Oh, there is a risk in everything you do. But you see it is really paying for a difference of knowledge or opinion.”
“Would you buy stocks that way?”
“What way?”
“Why, agreeing to pay for your difference of opinion, as you call it, not really having any stock at all.”
“I never did. But I have bought stocks and sold them pretty soon, if I could make anything by the sale. All merchants act on that principle.”
“Well,” said Margaret, dimly seeing the sophistry of this, “I don't understand business morality.”
“Nobody does, Margaret. Most men go by the law. The Golden Rule seems to be suspended by a more than two-thirds vote.”
It was by such inquiries, leading to many talks of this sort, that Margaret was groping in her mind for the solution of what might become to her a personal question. Consciously she did not doubt Henderson's integrity or his honor, but she was perplexed about the world of which she had recently had a glimpse, and it was impossible to separate him from it. Subjected to an absolutely new experience, stirred as her heart had never been before by any man—a fact which at once irritated and pleased her—she was following the law of her own nature, while she was still her own mistress, to ponder these things and to bring her reason to the guidance of her feeling. And it is probable that she did not at all know the strength of her feeling, or have any conception of the real power of love, and how little the head has to do with the great passion of life, the intensity of which the poets have never in the least exaggerated. If she thought of Mr. Lyon occasionally, of his white face and pitiful look of suffering that day, she could not, after all, make it real or permanently serious. Indeed, she was sure that no emotion could so master her. And yet she looked forward to Henderson's coming with a sort of nervous apprehension, amounting almost to dread.
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