Crucial Instances

After that the House possessed her.  As if conscious of its victory, it imposed a conqueror’s claims.  It had once been suggested that she should write a life of her grandfather, and the task from which she had shrunk as from a too-oppressive privilege now shaped itself into a justification of her course.  In a burst of filial pantheism she tried to lose herself in the vast ancestral consciousness.  Her one refuge from scepticism was a blind faith in the magnitude and the endurance of the idea to which she had sacrificed her life, and with a passionate instinct of self-preservation she labored to fortify her position.

The preparations for the Life led her through by-ways that the most scrupulous of the previous biographers had left unexplored.  She accumulated her material with a blind animal patience unconscious of fortuitous risks.  The years stretched before her like some vast blank page spread out to receive the record of her toil; and she had a mystic conviction that she would not die till her work was accomplished.

The aunts, sustained by no such high purpose, withdrew in turn to their respective divisions of the Anson “plot,” and Paulina remained alone with her task.  She was forty when the book was completed.  She had travelled little in her life, and it had become more and more difficult to her to leave the House even for a day; but the dread of entrusting her document to a strange hand made her decide to carry it herself to the publisher.  On the way to Boston she had a sudden vision of the loneliness to which this last parting condemned her.  All her youth, all her dreams, all her renunciations lay in that neat bundle on her knee.  It was not so much her grandfather’s life as her own that she had written; and the knowledge that it would come back to her in all the glorification of print was of no more help than, to a mother’s grief, the assurance that the lad she must part with will return with epaulets.

She had naturally addressed herself to the firm which had published her grandfather’s works.  Its founder, a personal friend of the philosopher’s, had survived the Olympian group of which he had been a subordinate member, long enough to bestow his octogenarian approval on Paulina’s pious undertaking.  But he had died soon afterward; and Miss Anson found herself confronted by his grandson, a person with a brisk commercial view of his trade, who was said to have put “new blood” into the firm.

This gentleman listened attentively, fingering her manuscript as though literature were a tactile substance; then, with a confidential twist of his revolving chair, he emitted the verdict:  “We ought to have had this ten years sooner.”

Miss Anson took the words as an allusion to the repressed avidity of her readers.  “It has been a long time for the public to wait,” she solemnly assented.

The publisher smiled.  “They haven’t waited,” he said.

She looked at him strangely.  “Haven’t waited?”

“No—­they’ve gone off; taken another train.  Literature’s like a big railway-station now, you know:  there’s a train starting every minute.  People are not going to hang round the waiting-room.  If they can’t get to a place when they want to they go somewhere else.”

The application of this parable cost Miss Anson several minutes of throbbing silence.  At length she said:  “Then I am to understand that the public is no longer interested in—­in my grandfather?” She felt as though heaven must blast the lips that risked such a conjecture.

“Well, it’s this way.  He’s a name still, of course.  People don’t exactly want to be caught not knowing who he is; but they don’t want to spend two dollars finding out, when they can look him up for nothing in any biographical dictionary.”

Miss Anson’s world reeled.  She felt herself adrift among mysterious forces, and no more thought of prolonging the discussion than of opposing an earthquake with argument.  She went home carrying the manuscript like a wounded thing.  On the return journey she found herself travelling straight toward a fact that had lurked for months in the background of her life, and that now seemed to await her on the very threshold:  the fact that fewer visitors came to the House.  She owned to herself that for the last four or five years the number had steadily diminished.  Engrossed in her work, she had noted the change only to feel thankful that she had fewer interruptions.  There had been a time when, at the travelling season, the bell rang continuously, and the ladies of the House lived in a chronic state of “best silks” and expectancy.  It would have been impossible then to carry on any consecutive work; and she now saw that the silence which had gathered round her task had been the hush of death.

Not of his death!  The very walls cried out against the implication.  It was the world’s enthusiasm, the world’s faith, the world’s loyalty that had died.  A corrupt generation that had turned aside to worship the brazen serpent.  Her heart yearned with a prophetic passion over the lost sheep straying in the wilderness.  But all great glories had their interlunar period; and in due time her grandfather would once more flash full-orbed upon a darkling world.

The few friends to whom she confided her adventure reminded her with tender indignation that there were other publishers less subject to the fluctuations of the market; but much as she had braved for her grandfather she could not again brave that particular probation.  She found herself, in fact, incapable of any immediate effort.  She had lost her way in a labyrinth of conjecture where her worst dread was that she might put her hand upon the clue.

She locked up the manuscript and sat down to wait.  If a pilgrim had come just then the priestess would have fallen on his neck; but she continued to celebrate her rites alone.  It was a double solitude; for she had always thought a great deal more of the people who came to see the House than of the people who came to see her.  She fancied that the neighbors kept a keen eye on the path to the House; and there were days when the figure of a stranger strolling past the gate seemed to focus upon her the scorching sympathies of the village.  For a time she thought of travelling; of going to Europe, or even to Boston; but to leave the House now would have seemed like deserting her post.  Gradually her scattered energies centred themselves in the fierce resolve to understand what had happened.  She was not the woman to live long in an unmapped country or to accept as final her private interpretation of phenomena.  Like a traveller in unfamiliar regions she began to store for future guidance the minutest natural signs.  Unflinchingly she noted the accumulating symptoms of indifference that marked her grandfather’s descent toward posterity.  She passed from the heights on which he had been grouped with the sages of his day to the lower level where he had come to be “the friend of Emerson,” “the correspondent of Hawthorne,” or (later still) “the Dr. Anson” mentioned in their letters.  The change had taken place as slowly and imperceptibly as a natural process.  She could not say that any ruthless hand had stripped the leaves from the tree:  it was simply that, among the evergreen glories of his group, her grandfather’s had proved deciduous.

She had still to ask herself why.  If the decay had been a natural process, was it not the very pledge of renewal?  It was easier to find such arguments than to be convinced by them.  Again and again she tried to drug her solicitude with analogies; but at last she saw that such expedients were but the expression of a growing incredulity.  The best way of proving her faith in her grandfather was not to be afraid of his critics.  She had no notion where these shadowy antagonists lurked; for she had never heard of the great man’s doctrine being directly combated.  Oblique assaults there must have been, however, Parthian shots at the giant that none dared face; and she thirsted to close with such assailants.  The difficulty was to find them.  She began by re-reading the Works; thence she passed to the writers of the same school, those whose rhetoric bloomed perennial in First Readers from which her grandfather’s prose had long since faded.  Amid that clamor of far-off enthusiasms she detected no controversial note.  The little knot of Olympians held their views in common with an early-Christian promiscuity.  They were continually proclaiming their admiration for each other, the public joining as chorus in this guileless antiphon of praise; and she discovered no traitor in their midst.

What then had happened?  Was it simply that the main current of thought had set another way?  Then why did the others survive?  Why were they still marked down as tributaries to the philosophic stream?  This question carried her still farther afield, and she pressed on with the passion of a champion whose reluctance to know the worst might be construed into a doubt of his cause.  At length—­slowly but inevitably—­an explanation shaped itself.  Death had overtaken the doctrines about which her grandfather had draped his cloudy rhetoric.  They had disintegrated and been re-absorbed, adding their little pile to the dust drifted about the mute lips of the Sphinx.  The great man’s contemporaries had survived not by reason of what they taught, but of what they were; and he, who had been the mere mask through which they mouthed their lesson, the instrument on which their tune was played, lay buried deep among the obsolete tools of thought.

The discovery came to Paulina suddenly.  She looked up one evening from her reading and it stood before her like a ghost.  It had entered her life with stealthy steps, creeping close before she was aware of it.  She sat in the library, among the carefully-tended books and portraits; and it seemed to her that she had been walled alive into a tomb hung with the effigies of dead ideas.  She felt a desperate longing to escape into the outer air, where people toiled and loved, and living sympathies went hand in hand.  It was the sense of wasted labor that oppressed her; of two lives consumed in that ruthless process that uses generations of effort to build a single cell.  There was a dreary parallel between her grandfather’s fruitless toil and her own unprofitable sacrifice.  Each in turn had kept vigil by a corpse.