Part 1 (1/2)
The Ruling Pa.s.sion.
by Henry van d.y.k.e.
PREFACE
In every life worth writing about there is a ruling pa.s.sion,--”the very pulse of the machine.” Unless you touch that, you are groping around outside of reality.
Sometimes it is romantic love: Natures masterpiece of interested benevolence. In almost all lives this pa.s.sion has its season of empire.
Therefore, and rightly, it is the favourite theme of the storyteller.
Romantic love interests almost everybody, because almost everybody knows something about it, or would like to know.
But there are other pa.s.sions, no less real, which also have their place and power in human life. Some of them come earlier, and sometimes they last longer, than romantic love. They play alongside of it and are mixed up with it, now checking it, now advancing its flow and tingeing it with their own colour.
Just because love is so universal, it is often to one of the other pa.s.sions that we must look for the distinctive hue, the individual quality of a life-story. Granted, if you will, that everybody must fall in love, or ought to fall in love, How will he do it? And what will he do afterwards? These are questions not without interest to one who watches the human drama as a friend. The answers depend upon those hidden and durable desires, affections, and impulses to which men and women give themselves up for rule and guidance.
Music, nature, children, honour, strife, revenge, money, pride, friends.h.i.+p, loyalty, duty,--to these objects and others like them the secret power of personal pa.s.sion often turns, and the life unconsciously follows it, as the tides in the sea follow the moon in the sky.
When circ.u.mstances cross the ruling pa.s.sion, when rocks lie in the way and winds are contrary, then things happen, characters emerge, slight events are significant, mere adventures are transformed into a real plot. What care I how many ”hair-breadth 'scapes” and ”moving accidents”
your hero may pa.s.s through, unless I know him for a man? He is but a puppet strung on wires. His kisses are wooden and his wounds bleed sawdust. There is nothing about him to remember except his name, and perhaps a bit of dialect. Kill him or crown him,--what difference does it make?
But go the other way about your work:
”Take the least man of all mankind, as I; Look at his head and heart, find how and why He differs from his fellows utterly,”--
and now there is something to tell, with a meaning.
If you tell it at length, it is a novel,--a painting. If you tell it in brief, it is a short story,--an etching. But the subject is always the same: the unseen, mysterious, ruling pa.s.sion weaving the stuff of human nature into patterns wherein the soul is imaged and revealed.
To tell about some of these ruling pa.s.sions, simply, clearly, and concretely, is what I want to do in this book. The characters are chosen, for the most part, among plain people, because their feelings are expressed with fewer words and greater truth, not being costumed for social effect. The scene is laid on Nature's stage because I like to be out-of-doors, even when I am trying to think and learning to write.
”Avalon,” Princeton, July 22, 1901.
I. A LOVER OF MUSIC
I
He entered the backwoods village of Bytown literally on the wings of the wind. It whirled him along like a big snowflake, and dropped him at the door of Moody's ”Sportsmen's Retreat,” as if he were a New Year's gift from the North Pole. His coming seemed a mere chance; but perhaps there was something more in it, after all. At all events, you shall hear, if you will, the time and the manner of his arrival.
It was the last night of December, some thirty-five years ago. All the city sportsmen who had hunted the deer under Bill Moody's direction had long since retreated to their homes, leaving the little settlement on the border of the Adirondack wilderness wholly under the social direction of the natives.
The annual ball was in full swing in the dining-room of the hotel. At one side of the room the tables and chairs were piled up, with their legs projecting in the air like a thicket of very dead trees.
The huge stove in the southeast corner was blus.h.i.+ng a rosy red through its thin coat of whitewash, and exhaling a furious dry heat flavoured with the smell of baked iron. At the north end, however, winter reigned; and there were tiny ridges of fine snow on the floor, sifted in by the wind through the cracks in the window-frames.
But the bouncing girls and the heavy-footed guides and lumbermen who filled the ball-room did not appear to mind the heat or the cold. They balanced and ”sashayed” from the tropics to the arctic circle. They swung at corners and made ”ladies' change” all through the temperate zone. They stamped their feet and did double-shuffles until the floor trembled beneath them. The tin lamp-reflectors on the walls rattled like castanets.
There was only one drawback to the hilarity of the occasion. The band, which was usually imported from Sandy River Forks for such festivities,--a fiddle, a cornet, a flute, and an accordion,--had not arrived. There was a general idea that the mail-sleigh, in which the musicians were to travel, had been delayed by the storm, and might break its way through the snow-drifts and arrive at any moment. But Bill Moody, who was naturally of a pessimistic temperament, had offered a different explanation.