The Bride of the Mistletoe

A gold chain is around his neck; gold bands are around his arms. He is clad in robes of spotless white. He ascends the tree to a low bough, and making a hollow in the folds of his robes, he crops with a golden pruning hook the mistletoe and so catches it as it falls. Then it is blessed and scattered among the throng, and the priest prays that each one so receiving it may receive also the divine favor and blessing of which it is Nature’s emblem. Two white bulls, the horns of which have never hitherto been touched, are now adorned with fillets and are slaughtered in sacrifice.

Then at last it is over, the people are gone, the forest is left to itself, and the New Year’s ceremony of cutting the mistletoe from the oak is at an end.

Here he ended the story.

She had sat leaning far forward, her fingers interlocked and her brows knitted. When he stopped, she sat up and studied him a moment in bewilderment:

“But why did you call that a dark story?” she asked. “Where is the cruelty? It is beautiful, and I shall never forget it and it will never throw a dark image on my mind: New Year’s day—the winter woods—the journeying throng—the oak—the bough—the banquet beneath—the white bulls with fillets on their horns—the white-robed priest—the golden sickle in his hand—the stroke that severs the mistletoe—the prayer that each soul receiving any smallest piece will be blessed in life’s sorrows! If I were a great painter, I should like to paint that scene. In the centre should be some young girl, pressing to her heart what she believed to be heaven’s covenant with her under the guise of a blossom. How could you have wished to withhold such a story from me?”

He smiled at her a little sadly.

“I have not yet told you all,” he said, “but I have told you enough.”

Instantly she bent far over toward him with intuitive scrutiny. Under her breath one word escaped:

“Ah!”

It was the breath of a discovery—a discovery of something unknown to her.

“I am sparing you, Josephine!”

She stretched each arm along the back of the sofa and pinioned the wood in her clutch.

“Are you sparing me?” she asked in a tone of torture. “Or are you sparing yourself?”

The heavy staff on which he stood leaning dropped from his relaxed grasp to the floor. He looked down at it a moment and then calmly picked it up.

“I am going to tell you the story,” he said with a new quietness.

She was aroused by some change in him.

“I will not listen! I do not wish to hear it!”

“You will have to listen,” he said. “It is better for you to know. Better for any human being to know any truth than suffer the bane of wrong thinking. When you are free to judge, it will be impossible for you to misjudge.”

“I have not misjudged you! I have not judged you! In some way that I do not understand you are judging yourself!”

He stepped back a pace—farther away from her—and he drew himself up. In the movement there was instinctive resentment. And the right not to be pried into—not even by the nearest.

The step which had removed him farther from her had brought him nearer to the Christmas Tree at his back. A long, three-fingered bough being thus pressed against was forced upward and reappeared on one of his shoulders. The movement seemed human: it was like the conscious hand of the tree. The fir, standing there decked out in the artificial tawdriness of a double-dealing race, laid its wild sincere touch on him—as sincere as the touch of dying human fingers—and let its passing youth flow into him. It attracted his attention, and he turned his head toward it as with recognition. Other boughs near the floor likewise thrust themselves forward, hiding his feet so that he stood ankle-deep in forestry.

This reunion did not escape her. Her overwrought imagination made of it a sinister omen: the bough on his shoulder rested there as the old forest claim; the boughs about his feet were the ancestral forest tether. As he had stepped backward from her, Nature had asserted the earlier right to him. In strange sickness and desolation of heart she waited.

He stood facing her but looking past her at centuries long gone; the first sound of his voice registered upon her ear some message of doom:

“Listen, Josephine!”

She buried her face in her hands.

“I cannot! I will not!”

“You will have to listen. You know that for some years, apart from my other work, I have been gathering together the woodland customs of our people and trying to trace them back to their origin and first meaning. In our age of the world we come upon many playful forest survivals of what were once grave things. Often in our play and pastimes and lingering superstitions about the forest we cross faint traces of what were once vital realities.

“Among these there has always been one that until recently I have never understood. Among country people oftenest, but heard of everywhere, is the saying that if a girl is caught standing under the mistletoe, she may be kissed by the man who thus finds her. I have always thought that this ceremony and playful sacrifice led back to some ancient rite—I could not discover what. Now I know.”

In a voice full of a new delicacy and scarcely audible, he told her.

It is another scene in the forest of Britain. This time it is not the first day of the year—the New Year’s day of the Druids when they celebrated the national festival of the oak. But it is early summer, perhaps the middle of May—May in England—with the young beauty of the woods. It is some hushed evening at twilight. The new moon is just silvering the tender leaves and creating a faint shadow under the trees. The hawthorn is in bloom—red and white—and not far from the spot, hidden in some fragrant tuft of this, a nightingale is singing, singing, singing.

Lifting itself above the smaller growths stands the young manhood of the woods—a splendid oak past its thirtieth year, representing its youth and its prime conjoined. In its trunk is the summer heat of the all-day sun. Around its roots is velvet turf, and there are wild violet beds. Its huge arms are stretched toward the ground as though reaching for some object they would clasp; and on one of these arms as its badge of divine authority, worn there as a knight might wear the colors of his Sovereign, grows the mistletoe. There he stands—the Forest Lover.

The woods wait, the shadows deepen, the hush is more intense, the moon’s rays begin to be golden, the song of the nightingale grows more passionate, the beds of moss and violets wait.

Then the shrubbery is tremblingly parted at some place and upon the scene a young girl enters—her hair hanging down—her limbs most lightly clad—the flush of red hawthorn on the white hawthorn of her skin—in her eyes love’s great need and mystery. Step by step she comes forward, her fingers trailing against whatsoever budding wayside thing may stay her strength. She draws nearer to the oak, searching amid its boughs for that emblem which she so dreads to find and yet more dreads not to find: the emblem of a woman’s fruitfulness which the young oak—the Forest Lover—reaches down toward her. Finding it, beneath it with one deep breath of surrender she takes her place—the virgin’s tryst with the tree—there to be tested.

Such is the command of the Arch Druid: it is obedience—submission to that test—or death for her as a sacrifice to the oak which she has rejected.

Again the shrubbery is parted, rudely pushed aside, and a man enters—a tried and seasoned man—a human oak—counterpart of the Forest Lover—to officiate at the test.

He was standing there in the parlor of his house and in the presence of his wife. But in fealty he was gone: he was in the summer woods of ancestral wandering, the fatherland of Old Desire.

He was the man treading down the shrubbery; it was his feet that started toward the oak; his eye that searched for the figure half fainting under the bough; for him the bed of moss and violets—the hair falling over the eyes—the loosened girdle—the breasts of hawthorn white and pink—the listening song of the nightingale—the silence of the summer woods—the seclusion—the full surrender of the two under that bough of the divine command, to escape the penalty of their own death.

The blaze of uncontrollable desire was all over him; the fire of his own story had treacherously licked him like a wind-bent flame. The light that she had not seen in his eyes for so long rose in them—the old, unfathomable, infolding tenderness. A quiver ran around his tense nostrils.

And now one little phrase which he had uttered so sacredly years before and had long since forgotten rose a second time to his lips—tossed there by a second tide of feeling. On the silence of the room fell his words:

“Bride of the Mistletoe!”

The storm that had broken over him died away. He shut his eyes on the vanishing scene: he opened them upon her.

He had told her the truth about the story; he may have been aware or he may not have been aware that he had revealed to her the truth about himself.

“This is what I would have kept from you, Josephine,” he said quietly.

She was sitting there before him—the mother of his children, of the sleeping ones, of the buried ones—the butterfly broken on the wheel of years: lustreless and useless now in its summer.

She sat there with the whiteness of death.

V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES

The Christmas candles looked at her flickeringly; the little white candles of purity, the little red candles of love. The holly in the room concealed its bold gay berries behind its thorns, and the cedar from the faithful tree beside the house wall had need now of its bitter rosary.

Her first act was to pay what is the first debt of a fine spirit—the debt of courtesy and gratitude.

“It is a wonderful story, Frederick,” she said in a manner which showed him that she referred to the beginning of his story and not to the end.

“As usual you have gone your own way about it, opening your own path into the unknown, seeing what no one else has seen, and bringing back what no one else ever brought. It is a great revelation of things that I never dreamed of and could never have imagined. I appreciate your having done this for me; it has taken time and work, but it is too much for me to-night. It is too new and too vast. I must hereafter try to understand it. And there will be leisure enough. Nor can it lose by waiting. But now there is something that cannot wait, and I wish to speak to you about that; Frederick, I am going to ask you some questions about the last part of the story. I have been wanting to ask you a long time: the story gives me the chance and—the right.”

He advanced a step toward her, disengaging himself from the evergreen.

“I will answer them,” he said. “If they can be answered.”

And thus she sat and thus he stood as the questions and answers passed to and fro. They were solemn questions and solemn replies, drawn out of the deeps of life and sinking back into them.

“Frederick,” she said, “for many years we have been happy together, so happy! Every tragedy of nature has stood at a distance from us except the loss of our children. We have lived on a sunny pinnacle of our years, lifted above life’s storms. But of course I have realized that sooner or later our lot must become the common one: if we did not go down to Sorrow, Sorrow would climb to us; and I knew that on the heights it dwells best. That is why I wish to say to you to-night what I shall: I think fate’s hour has struck for me; I am ready to hear it. Its arrow has already left the bow and is on its way; I open my heart to receive it. This is as I have always wished; I have said that if life had any greatest tragedy, for me, I hoped it would come when I was happiest; thus I should confront it all. I have never drunk half of my cup of happiness, as you know, and let the other half waste; I must go equally to the depth of any suffering. Worse than the suffering, I think, would be the feeling that I had shirked some of it, had stepped aside, or shut my eyes, or in any manner shown myself a cowardly soul.”

After a pause she went over this subject as though she were not satisfied that she had made it clear.

“I have always said that the real pathos of things is the grief that comes to us in life when life is at its best—when no one is to blame—when no one has committed a fault—when suffering is meted out to us as the reward of our perfect obedience to the laws of nature. In earlier years when we used to read Keats together, who most of all of the world’s poets felt the things that pass, even then I was wondering at the way in which he brings this out: that to understand Sorrow it must be separated from sorrows: they would be like shadows darkening the bright disk of life’s clear tragedy, thus rendering it less bravely seen.

“And so he is always telling us not to summon sad pictures nor play with mournful emblems; not to feign ourselves as standing on the banks of Lethe, gloomiest of rivers; nor to gather wolf’s bane and twist the poison out of its tight roots; nor set before us the cup of hemlock; nor bind about our temples the ruby grape of nightshade; nor count over the berries of the yew tree which guards sad places; nor think of the beetle ticking in the bed post, nor watch the wings of the death moth, nor listen to the elegy of the owl—the voice of ruins. Not these! they are the emblems of our sorrows. But the emblems of Sorrow are beautiful things at their perfect moment; a red peony just opening, a rainbow seen for an instant on the white foam, youth not yet faded but already fading, joy with its finger on his lips, bidding adieu.

“And so with all my happiness about me, I wish to know life’s tragedy. And to know it, Frederick, not to infer it: I want to be told.”

“If you can be told, you shall be told,” he said.

She changed her position as though seeking physical relief and composure. Then she began:

“Years ago when you were a student in Germany, you had a college friend. You went home with him two or three years at Christmas and celebrated the German Christmas. It was in this way that we came to have the Christmas Tree in our house—through memory of him and of those years. You have often described to me how you and he in summer went Alpine climbing, and far up in some green valley girdled with glaciers lay of afternoons under some fir tree, reading and drowsing in the crystalline air. You told me of your nights of wandering down the Rhine together when the heart turns so intimately to the heart beside it. He was German youth and song and dream and happiness to you. Tell me this: before you lost him that last summer over the crevasse, had you begun to tire of him? Was there anything in you that began to draw back from anything in him? As you now look back at the friendship of your youth, have the years lessened your regret for him?”

He answered out of the ideals of his youth:

“The longer I knew him, the more I loved him. I never tired of being with him. Nothing in me ever drew back from anything in him. When he was lost, the whole world lost some of its strength and nobility. After all the years, if he could come back, he would find me unchanged—that friend of my youth!”

With a peculiar change of voice she asked next:

“The doctor, Herbert and Elsie’s father, our nearest neighbor, your closest friend now in middle life. You see a great deal of the doctor; he is often here, and you and he often sit up late at night, talking with one another about many things: do you ever tire of the doctor and wish him away? Have you any feeling toward him that you try to keep secret from me? Can you be a perfectly frank man with this friend of your middle life?”

“The longer I know him the more I like him, honor him, trust him. I never tire of his companionship or his conversation; I have no disguises with him and need none.”

“The children! As the children grow older do you care less for them? Do they begin to wear on you? Are they a clog, an interference? Have Harold and Elizabeth ceased forming new growths of affection in you? Do you ever unconsciously seek pretexts for avoiding them?”

“The older they grow, the more I love them. The more they interest me and tempt away from work and duties. I am more drawn to be with them and I live more and more in the thought of what they are becoming.”

“Your work! Does your work attract you less than formerly? Does it develop in you the purpose to be something more or stifle in you the regret to be something less? Is it a snare to idleness or a goad to toil?”

“As the mariner steers for the lighthouse, as the hound runs down the stag, as the soldier wakes to the bugle, as the miner digs for fortune, as the drunkard drains the cup, as the saint watches the cross, I follow my work, I follow my work.”

“Life, life itself, does it increase in value or lessen? Is the world still morning to you with your work ahead or afternoon when you begin to tire and to think of rest?”

“The world to me is as early morning to a man going forth to his work. Where the human race is from and whither it is hurrying and why it exists at all; why a human being loves what it loves and hates what it hates; why it is faithful when it could be unfaithful and faithless when it should be true; how civilized man can fight single handed against the ages that were his lower past—how he can develop self-renunciation out of selfishness and his own wisdom out of surrounding folly,—all these are questions that mean more and more. My work is but beginning and the world is morning.”

“This house! Are you tired of it now that it is older? Would you rather move into a new one?”

“I love this house more and more. No other dwelling could take its place. Any other could be but a shelter; this is home. And I care more for it now that the signs of age begin to settle on it. If it were a ruin, I should love it best!”

She leaned over and looked down at the two setters lying at her feet.

“Do you care less for the dogs of the house as they grow older?”

“I think more of them and take better care of them now that their hunting days are over.”

“The friend of your youth—the friend of your middle age—the children—your profession—the world of human life—this house—the dogs of the house—you care more for them all as time passes?”

“I care more for them all as time passes.”

Then there came a great stillness in the room—the stillness of all listening years.

“Am I the only thing that you care less for as time passes?”

There was no reply.

“Am I in the way?”

There was no reply.

“Would you like to go over it all again with another?”

There was no reply.

She had hidden her face in her hands and pressed her head against the end of the sofa. Her whole figure shrank lower, as though to escape being touched by him—to escape the blow of his words. No words came. There was no touch.

A moment later she felt that he must be standing over her, looking down at her. She would respond to his hand on the back of her neck. He must be kneeling beside her; his arms would infold her. Then with a kind of incredible terror she realized that he was not there. At first she could so little believe it, that with her face still buried in one hand she searched the air for him with the other, expecting to touch him.

Then she cried out to him:

“Isn’t there anything you can say to me?”

Silence lasted.

“Oh, Fred! Fred! Fred! Fred!”

In the stillness she began to hear something—the sound of his footsteps moving on the carpet. She sat up.

The room was getting darker; he was putting out the candles. It was too dark already to see his face. With fascination she began to watch his hand. How steady it was as it moved among the boughs, extinguishing the lights. Out they went one by one and back into their darkness returned the emblems of darker ages—the Forest Memories.

A solitary taper was left burning at the pinnacle of the Tree under the cross: that highest torch of love shining on everything that had disappeared.

He quietly put it out.

Yet the light seemed not put out, but instantly to have travelled through the open parlor door into the adjoining room, her bedroom; for out of that there now streamed a suffused red light; it came from the lamp near the great bed in the shadowy corner.

This lamp poured its light through a lampshade having the semblance of a bursting crimson peony as some morning in June the flower with the weight of its own splendor falls face downward on the grass. And in that room this soft lamp-light fell here and there on crimson winter draperies. He had been living alone as a bachelor before he married her. After they became engaged he, having watched for some favorite color of hers, had had this room redecorated in that shade. Every winter since she had renewed in this way or that way these hangings, and now the bridal draperies remained unchanged—after the changing years.

He replaced the taper against the wall and came over and stood before her, holding out his hands to help her rise.

She arose without his aid and passed around him, moving toward her bedroom. With arms outstretched guarding her but not touching her, he followed close, for she was unsteady. She entered her bedroom and crossed to the door of his bedroom; she pushed this open, and keeping her face bent aside waited for him to go in. He went in and she closed the door on him and turned the key. Then with a low note, with which the soul tears out of itself something that has been its life, she made a circlet of her white arms against the door and laid her profile within this circlet and stood—the figure of Memory.

Thus sometimes a stranger sees a marble figure standing outside a tomb where some story of love and youth ended: some stranger in a far land,—walking some afternoon in those quieter grounds where all human stories end; an autumn bird in the bare branches fluting of its mortality and his heart singing with the bird of one lost to him—lost to him in his own country.

On the other side of the door the silence was that of a tomb. She had felt confident—so far as she had expected anything—that he would speak to her through the door, try to open it, plead with her to open it. Nothing of the kind occurred.

Why did he not come back? What bolt could have separated her from him?

The silence began to weigh upon her.

Then in the tense stillness she heard him moving quietly about, getting ready for bed. There were the same movements, familiar to her for years. She would not open the door, she could not leave it, she could not stand, no support was near, and she sank to the floor and sat there, leaning her brow against the lintel.

On the other side the quiet preparations went on.

She heard him take off his coat and vest and hang them on the back of a chair. The buttons made a little scraping sound against the wood. Then he went to his dresser and took off his collar and tie, and he opened a drawer and laid out a night-shirt. She heard the creaking of a chair under him as he threw one foot and then the other up across his knee and took off his shoes and socks. Then there reached her the soft movements of his bare feet on the carpet (despite her agony the old impulse started in her to caution him about his slippers). Then followed the brushing of his teeth and the deliberate bathing of his hands. Then was audible the puff of breath with which he blew out his lamp after he had turned it low; and then,—on the other side of the door,—just above her ear his knock sounded.

The same knock waited for and responded to throughout the years; so often with his little variations of playfulness. Many a time in early summer when out-of-doors she would be reminded of it by hearing some bird sounding its love signal on a piece of dry wood—that tap of heart-beat. Now it crashed close to her ear.

Such strength came back to her that she rose as lightly as though her flesh were but will and spirit. When he knocked again, she was across the room, sitting on the edge of her bed with her palms pressed together and thrust between her knees: the instinctive act of a human animal suddenly chilled to the bone.

The knocking sounded again.

“Was there anything you needed?” she asked fearfully.

There was no response but another knock.

She hurriedly raised her voice to make sure that it would reach him.

“Was there anything you wanted?”

As no response came, the protective maternal instinct took greater alarm, and she crossed to the door of his room and she repeated her one question:

“Did you forget anything?”

Her mind refused to release itself from the iteration of that idea: it was some thing—not herself—that he wanted.

He knocked.

Her imagination, long oppressed by his silence, now made of his knock some signal of distress. It took on the authority of an appeal not to be denied. She unlocked the door and opened it a little way, and once more she asked her one poor question.

His answer to it came in the form of a gentle pressure against the door, breaking down her resistance. As she applied more strength, this was as gently overcome; and when the opening was sufficient, he walked past her into the room.

How hushed the house! How still the world outside as the cloud wove in darkness its mantle of light!