The loves of Pelleas and Etarre by Zona Gale - HTML preview

XVII

CHRISTMAS ROSES

When our guests were gone Pelleas and I sat for some while beside the drawing-room fire. They had brought us a box of Christmas roses and these made sweet the room as if with a secret Spring—a Little Spring, such as comes to us all, now and then, through the year. And it was the enchanted hour, when Christmas eve has just passed and no one is yet awakened by the universal note of Get-Your-Stocking-Before-Breakfast.

“For that matter,” Pelleas said, “every day is a loving cup, only some of us see only one of its handles: Our own.”

And after a time:—

“Isn’t there a legend,” he wanted to know, “or if there isn’t one there ought to be one, that the first flowers were Christmas roses and that you can detect their odour in all other flowers? I’m not sure,” he warmed to the subject, “but that they say if you look steadily, with clear eyes, you can see all about every flower many little lines, in the shape of a Christmas rose!”

Of course nothing beautiful is difficult to believe. Even in the windows of the great florists, where the dear flowers pose as if for their portraits, we think that one looking closely through the glass may see in their faces the spirit of the Christmas roses. And when the flowers are made a gift of love the spirit is set free. Who knows? Perhaps the gracious little spirit is in us all, waiting for its liberty in our best gifts.

And at thought of gifts I said, on Christmas eve of all times, what had been for some time in my heart:—

“Pelleas, we ought—we really ought, you know, to make a new will.”

The word casts a veritable shadow on the page as I write it. Pelleas, conscious of the same shadow, moved and frowned.

“But why, Etarre?” he asked; “I had an uncle who lived to be ninety.”

“So will you,” I said, “and still—”

“He began translating Theocritus at ninety,” Pelleas continued convincingly.

“I’ll venture he had made his will by then, though,” said I.

“Is that any reason why I should make mine?” Pelleas demanded. “I never did the things my family did.”

“Like living until ninety?” I murmured.

O, I could not love Pelleas if he was never unreasonable. It seems to me that the privilege of unreason is one of the gifts of marriage; and when I hear The Married chiding each other for the exercise of this gift I long to cry: Is it not tiresome enough in all conscience to have to keep up a brave show of reason for one’s friends, without wearing a uniform of logic in private? Laugh at each other’s unreason for your pastime, and Heaven bless you.

Pelleas can do more than this: He can laugh at his own unreason. And when he had done so:—

“Ah, well, I know we ought,” he admitted, “but I do so object to the literary style of wills.”

It has long been a sadness of ours that the law makes all the poor dead talk alike in this last office of the human pleasure, so that cartman and potentate and philosopher give away their chattels to the same dreary choice of forms. No matter with what charming propriety they have in life written little letters to accompany gifts, most sensitively shading the temper of bestowal, yet in the majesty of their passing they are forced into a very strait-jacket of phrasing so that verily, to bequeath a thing to one’s friend is well-nigh to throw it at him. Yes, one of the drawbacks to dying is the diction of wills.

Pelleas meditated for a moment and then laughed out.

“Telegrams,” said he, “are such a social convenience in life that I don’t see why they don’t extend their function. Then all we should need would be two witnesses, ready for anything, and some yellow telegraph blanks, and a lawyer to file the messages whenever we should die, telling all our friends what we wish them to have.”

At once we fell planning the telegrams, quite as if the Eye of the Law knew what it is to wrinkle at the corners.

As,

MRS. LAWRENCE KNIGHT,
 LITTLE ROSEMONT,

L.I.

I wish you to have my mother’s pearls and her mahogany and my Samarcand rug and my Langhorne Plutarch and a kiss.

AUNT ETARRE.

and

MR. ERIC CHARTRES
 TO HIS CLUB,

Come to the house and get the Royal Sèvres tea-service on which you and Lisa had your first tea together and a check made out to you in my check book in the library table drawer.

UNCLE PELLEAS.

And so on, with the witnesses’ names properly in the corners.

“Perfect,” said I with enthusiasm. “O, Pelleas, let us get a bill through to this effect.”

“But we may live to be only ninety, you know,” he reminded me.

We went to the window, presently, and threw it open on the chance of hearing the bird of dawning singing all night long in the Park, which is of course, in New York, where it sings on Star of Bethlehem night. We did not hear it, but it is something to have been certain that it was there. And as we closed the casement,

“After all,” Pelleas said seriously, “the Telegraph Will Bill would have to do only with property. And a will ought to be concerned with soberer matters.”

So it ought, in spite of its dress of diction, rather like the motley.

“A man,” Pelleas continued, “ought to have something more important to will away than his house and his watch and his best bed. A man’s poor soul, now—unless he is an artist, which he probably is not—has no chance verbally to leave anybody anything.”

“It makes its will every day,” said I.

“Even so,” Pelleas contended, “it ought to die rich if it’s anything of a soul.”

And that is true enough.

“Suppose,” Pelleas suggested, “the telegrams were to contain something like this: ‘And from my spirit to yours I bequeath the hard-won knowledge that you must be true from the beginning. But if by any chance you have not been so, then you must be true from the moment that you know.’ Why not?”

Why not, indeed?

“I think that would be mine to give,” Pelleas said reflectively; “and what would yours be, Etarre?” he asked.

At that I fell in sudden abashment. What could I say? What would I will my poor life to mean to any one who chances to know that I have lived at all? O, I dare say I should have been able to formulate many a fine-sounding phrase about the passion for perfection, but confronted with the necessity I could think of nothing save a few straggling truths.

“I don’t know,” said I uncertainly; “I am sure of so little, save self-giving. I should like to bequeath some knowledge of the magic of self-giving. Now Nichola,” I hazarded, to evade the matter, “would no doubt say: ‘And from my soul to your soul this word about the universe: Helping is why.’”

“But you—you, Etarre,” Pelleas persisted; “what would the real You will to others, in this mortuary telegram?”

And as I looked at him I knew.

“O, Pelleas,” I said, “I think I would telegraph to every one: ‘From my spirit to your spirit, some understanding of the preciousness of love. And the need to keep it true.’”

I shall always remember with what gladness he turned to me. I wished that his smile and our bright hearth and our Christmas roses might bless every one.

“I wanted you to say that,” said Pelleas.

END