A Sappho of Green Springs. Bret Harte
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o' them verses—and they kinder sing themselves to ye, don't they?—it wasn't the chyce o' words—and I reckon they allus hit the idee in the centre shot every time—it wasn't the idees and moral she sort o' drew out o' what she was tellin'—but it was the straight thing itself—the truth!”
“The truth?” repeated the editor.
“Yes, sir. I've bin there. I've seen all that she's seen in the brush—the little flicks and checkers o' light and shadder down in the brown dust that you wonder how it ever got through the dark of the woods, and that allus seems to slip away like a snake or a lizard if you grope. I've heard all that she's heard there—the creepin', the sighin', and the whisperin' through the bracken and the ground-vines of all that lives there.”
“You seem to be a poet yourself,” said the editor, with a patronizing smile.
“I'm a lumberman, up in Mendocino,” returned the stranger, with sublime naivete. “Got a mill there. You see, sightin' standin' timber and selectin' from the gen'ral show of the trees in the ground and the lay of roots hez sorter made me take notice.” He paused. “Then,” he added, somewhat despondingly, “you don't know who she is?”
“No,” said the editor, reflectively; “not even if it is really a WOMAN who writes.”
“Eh?”
“Well, you see, 'White Violet' may as well be the nom de plume of a man as of a woman, especially if adopted for the purpose of mystification. The handwriting, I remember, WAS more boyish than feminine.”
“No,” returned the stranger doggedly, “it wasn't no MAN. There's ideas and words there that only come from a woman: baby-talk to the birds, you know, and a kind of fearsome keer of bugs and creepin' things that don't come to a man who wears boots and trousers. Well,” he added, with a return to his previous air of resigned disappointment, “I suppose you don't even know what she's like?”
“No,” responded the editor, cheerfully. Then, following an idea suggested by the odd mingling of sentiment and shrewd perception in the man before him, he added: “Probably not at all like anything you imagine. She may be a mother with three or four children; or an old maid who keeps a boarding-house; or a wrinkled school-mistress; or a chit of a school-girl. I've had some fair verses from a red-haired girl of fourteen at the Seminary,” he concluded with professional coolness.
The stranger regarded him with the naive wonder of an inexperienced man. Having paid this tribute to his superior knowledge, he regained his previous air of grave perception. “I reckon she ain't none of them. But I'm keepin' you from your work. Good-by. My name's Bowers—Jim Bowers, of Mendocino. If you're up my way, give me a call. And if you do write to this yer 'White Violet,' and she's willin', send me her address.”
He shook the editor's hand warmly—even in its literal significance of imparting a good deal of his own earnest caloric to the editor's fingers—and left the room. His footfall echoed along the passage and died out, and with it, I fear, all impression of his visit from the editor's mind, as he plunged again into the silent task before him.
Presently he was conscious of a melodious humming and a light leisurely step at the entrance of the hall. They continued on in an easy harmony and unaffected as the passage of a bird. Both were pleasant and both familiar to the editor. They belonged to Jack Hamlin, by vocation a gambler, by taste a musician, on his way from his apartments on the upper floor, where he had just risen, to drop into his friend's editorial room and glance over the exchanges, as was his habit before breakfast.
The door opened lightly. The editor was conscious of a faint odor of scented soap, a sensation of freshness and cleanliness, the impression of a soft hand like a woman's on his shoulder and, like a woman's, momentarily and playfully caressing, the passage of a graceful shadow across his desk, and the next moment Jack Hamlin was ostentatiously dusting a chair with an open newspaper preparatory to sitting down.
“You ought to ship that office-boy of yours, if he can't keep things cleaner,” he said, suspending his melody to eye grimly the dust which Mr. Bowers had shaken from his departing feet.
The editor did not look up until he had finished revising a difficult paragraph. By that time Mr. Hamlin had comfortably settled himself on a cane sofa, and, possibly out of deference to his surroundings, had subdued his song to a peculiarly low, soft, and heartbreaking whistle as he unfolded a newspaper. Clean and faultless in his appearance, he had the rare gift of being able to get up at two in the afternoon with much of the dewy freshness and all of the moral superiority of an early riser.
“You ought to have been here just now, Jack,” said the editor.
“Not a row, old man, eh?” inquired Jack, with a faint accession of interest.
“No,” said the editor, smiling. Then he related the incidents of the previous interview, with a certain humorous exaggeration which was part of his nature. But Jack did not smile.
“You ought to have booted him out of the ranch on sight,” he said. “What right had he to come here prying into a lady's affairs?—at least a lady as far as HE knows. Of course she's some old blowzy with frumpled hair trying to rope in a greenhorn with a string of words and phrases,” concluded Jack, carelessly, who had an equally cynical distrust of the sex and of literature.
“That's about what I told him,” said the editor.
“That's just what you SHOULDN'T have told him,” returned Jack. “You ought to have stuck up for that woman as if she'd been your own mother. Lord! you fellows don't know how to run a magazine. You ought to let ME sit on that chair and tackle your customers.”
“What would you have done, Jack?” asked the editor, much amused to find that his hitherto invincible hero was not above the ordinary human weakness of offering advice as to editorial conduct.
“Done?” reflected Jack. “Well, first, sonny, I shouldn't keep a revolver in a drawer that I had to OPEN to get at.”
“But what would you have said?”
“I should simply have asked him what was the price of lumber at Mendocino,” said Jack, sweetly, “and when he told me, I should have said that the samples he was offering out of his own head wouldn't suit. You see, you don't want any trifling in such matters. You write well enough, my boy,” continued he, turning over his paper, “but what you're lacking in is editorial dignity. But go on with your work. Don't mind me.”
Thus admonished, the editor again bent over his desk, and his friend softly took up his suspended song. The editor had not proceeded far in his corrections when Jack's voice again broke the silence.
“Where are those d——d verses, anyway?”
Without looking up, the editor waved his pencil towards an uncut copy of the “Excelsior Magazine” lying on the table.
“You don't suppose I'm going to READ them, do you?” said Jack, aggrievedly. “Why don't you say what they're about? That's your business as editor.”
But that functionary, now wholly lost and wandering in the non-sequitur of an involved passage in the proof before him, only waved an impatient remonstrance with his pencil and knit his brows. Jack, with a sigh, took up the magazine.
A long silence followed, broken only by the hurried rustling of sheets of copy and an occasional exasperated start from the editor. The sun was already beginning to slant a dusty beam across his desk; Jack's whistling had long since ceased. Presently, with an exclamation of relief, the editor laid aside the last proof-sheet and looked up.
Jack Hamlin had closed the magazine, but with one hand thrown over the back of the sofa he was still holding it, his slim forefinger between its leaves to keep the place, and his handsome profile and dark lashes lifted towards the window. The editor, smiling at this unwonted abstraction, said quietly—
“Well, what do you think of them?”
Jack rose, laid the magazine down, settled his white waistcoat with both hands, and lounged