BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 3529.V57A8 
 
 The answerer 
 
 3 1924 021 656 065 
 
The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021656065 
 
THE ANSWERER 
 
 BY 
 
 GRANT OVERTON 
 
 The singers do not beget — only the Poet begets; 
 
 The singers are nxielcom V, understood, appear often enough — 
 hut rare has the day been, likeiuise the spot, of the birth of 
 the maker of poems, the Ans-werer . . . 
 
 He has the pass-key of hearts . . . 
 
 What can be ans'wer''d he answers — and ijuhat cannot he 
 ans'wer''d, he shoius honjn it cannot be ansnjuer'di 
 
 He is the Ansixierer, 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 
 
 1921 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY 
 HARCOURT, BRACK AND COMPANY, INC. 
 
 rmNTCD IN THE U. S. A. BT 
 
 THE QUINN a BODEM COMPANr 
 RAHWAY, n. j. 
 
3Por 
 ARTHUR 5ULLIVANT HOFFMAN 
 
Note: I had intended to offer here what I conceive jus- 
 tifies the large liberties taken with the known and unknown 
 facts of several lives; but now I see how futile that must 
 be. Either there is justification or there is none, and, if 
 there is, the reader will derive it for me from the work 
 itself; otherwise, all stands condemned. For extenuation is 
 not enough. , . . My aim is to communicate feeling; my 
 material is partly history, my method is fiction. I have 
 hoped, as the fused result, to achieve essential truth. 
 
 Gbani Ovebxon. 
 
 Patchogue, Long Island, New York. 
 1920-1921. 
 
THE ANSWERER 
 
PART ONE 
 A MIRACLE IN FIFTH MONTH 
 
 It was, oh, so fine a morning — so clean, sweet, bright; with 
 the thick sand of the country road compacted by early 
 showers. The young man who sauntered along (springiness 
 a-plenty in each leisured footfall) stopped again and again 
 to take deep breaths. The breeze stirred his thick, black, 
 lustrous hair. Broad shoulders, well-squared, proportioned 
 his good height. A carelessly adjusted suit of homespun 
 hung as if ready at a twitch to uncover the Greek symmetry 
 of satin'd flesh and muscle. But the soul of this young 
 man was in the eyes he lifted from the road to the blue and 
 white heaven — gray-blue eyes as direct as the day. 
 
 The day was April's, or Fourth Month's, but the hour 
 was his own, he told himself. He cried out his perfect pos- 
 session of it, dwelt upon its wonder; in a loud voice, half- 
 shouted, half-sang: 
 
 " Sunshine: grass, the mark of earth's annual adolescence: 
 tender-budding sprouts of trees: air which quickens the sap 
 and the blood — ^you're all a part of myself! And I am 
 some part of you! To eternity! Eternity? Why, it's 
 nowl There's nothing worthier than all this, I guess, to be 
 eternal! " 
 
 He was silent; then went on, aloud: 
 
 3 
 
4 THE ANSWERER 
 
 "You're mine, you living, beautiful world! But you're 
 any one's who goes forth. You're a child's as much as a 
 man's; yes, more than a man's! I — it's hard to get that 
 said right; said full, complete, up to the hilt! If a fellow 
 could say that right what a poet he'd be! Oh ... I wish 
 I could say it! Not just to utter something pretty sounding 
 but to let the truth, the beauty, the wonder of all living 
 breathe out in words, be triumphantly voiced! " 
 
 He swung his arms in an awkward, enthusiastic gesture 
 of liberation. He began to speak, measuredly, in a rhythm 
 which varied the monotony of his easy walking gait. 
 
 ' There was a — child — went forth — each day. 
 And the objects he looked upon, stirring wonder, love, 
 Each and every object he saw, that thing he became . . . 
 For a day, for an hour, for centuries lived in an instant. 
 The earliest lilacs, the swelling grass, the bird singing, 
 The young lamb just born in Third Month, all became part 
 
 of him ' 
 
 And he a part of them, with wonder — ^and pity — and love . . ." 
 
 His headshake had no trace of impatience, seemed to de- 
 note only an imperfect satisfaction; the sigh which followed 
 was brimmed with happiness. " I am not born yet," he 
 consoled himself. 
 
 Life begins, may be lived and end before birth. Birth? 
 That is either an accident or a miracle, perhaps both (he 
 thought) — almost certainly both! But this day is for liv- 
 ing! Seven or seventy, or thrice seven (my own age on a 
 nearing anniversary), birthed or tmbirthed, yoimg animal 
 or creature leading a merely vegetative existence, there re- 
 poses on me, Walt Whitman, no duty, no burden of obliga- 
 tion of any sort. The world, or womb, of Outdoors encloses 
 
THE ANSWEREIR 5 
 
 me, invites me to feed and grow; nourishes, protects me, 
 encourages my tiny stirrings and, no doubt, rejoices in them, 
 rejoices that the child quickens this day (so bright! so 
 sweet!) of Fourth Month. . . . 
 
 The road, winding between two hillsides, unfolded upon a 
 valley checkered with a pattern in young wheat and plowed 
 soil and moving xmdulantly to the feet of the Long Island 
 hills. In the foreground, on a little rise, in a clearing among 
 slender white-oaks, stood the schoolhouse, small, oblong, 
 with little-paned windows and a hood over the bell. For 
 all its paintless boards, the weathered little edifice had the 
 air of a citadel, and gave forth a suggestion of consolidat- 
 ing, somehow, the common interest of scattered and isolated 
 lives — ^humble lives that had yet a collective import and a 
 ponderable sum. When, in the fresh, sparkling morning, the 
 small iron bell oscillated under its hood, sending a thin clang- 
 clang! across to the forested hillsides, it seemed as if the 
 valley were speaking, as if a voice were reciting the creed 
 which inspired the dwellers on half a hundred random farms. 
 Women busy in wide kitchens or scattering corn for hungry 
 fowls sometimes paused a moment, listening to the sound 
 of the distant bell; but the men hoeing in the fields, pro- 
 tected by broad-brimmed hats from the sim's blaze and 
 moimting heat, went impassively on with their work, hear- 
 ing but unheeding. 
 
 The first stroke would cause boys and girls along the 
 upland road to stop a game of leap-frog or to clutch with 
 sudden firmness the shoes and stockings they were carry- 
 ing. Mr. Whitman, the teacher, had arrived at the school- 
 house. He would ring for perhaps five minutes and then 
 
6 THE ANSWERER 
 
 wait tolerantly for maybe five minutes more. When you're 
 young it ain't so awful hard to run a mile, with panting 
 lapses, in ten minutes; but when time must be taken to put 
 on shoes and stockings, fifteen minutes is lots better. At- 
 tendance in school barefoot isn't sanctioned; on the other 
 hand, a pair of shoes is a costly article, made to measure and 
 obtainable only once a year when the traveling cobbler 
 comes by the farm. 
 
 However, Mr. Whitman — or "Walt" as all the boys 
 called him — was always easy with you. He never birched. 
 Some of the older boys had made a mistake about him at 
 the beginning of the winter term — ^when farmwork was 
 done and fathers were reluctantly acceding to mothers' de- 
 mands for more schoolin' for the eldest. Yes, some of the 
 older boys had mistooken Teacher's mild, kind of easy-goin' 
 way, and offered to wrastle him. 
 
 One after another he had downed the three sons of Free- 
 gift Terry so there had been no time for the geography lesson 
 that morning. And afterward he had shooken hands with 
 the Terry boys, all except the youngest his own age or older 
 and all as tall and heavy as himself. And the oldest Terry 
 had said: "You're Teacher, Mr. Whitman! " and Mr. 
 Whitman had answered: " Call me Walt; and all you boys 
 and girls just forget I'm Teacher and remember we're all of 
 us out to learn something! School's dismissed. Everybody, 
 shoo! " Then the youngest Terry had rung the bell so hard 
 the rope broke. 
 
 How Walt had laughed! But he was always ready to 
 laugh, and he joined in all their games with the boys and 
 seemed mostly to hate going indoors. All through the cold 
 
THE ANSWERER 7 
 
 of winter, with heavy snows, at least one window had been 
 kept open in the schoolroom; though owing to the attitude 
 of parents, Walt had to ask the class not to say anything, 
 home, about the window. The class agreed, liking the touch 
 of mischief though indifferent to Walt's new-fangled idea 
 about something he called "ventilation." Nobody knew 
 what ventilation was, but Walt said it sharpened your senses 
 just as study sharpened your mind. Anjrway, the stove in 
 the middle of the schoolroom, kept redhot with wood the 
 boys had stacked against the back wall clear up to the ceil- 
 ing, threw out a steady warmth; you could always move up 
 closer to it. 
 
 Winter was by; this was the time of spring plowing and 
 planting. The three Terrys and all of the older boys were 
 dropping out to renew the work of the farm. Even the 
 younger children would be needed " to home " in a few 
 weeks; school was practically over. It was hard to go in- 
 doors, harder to stay there; and Walt had a way of asking, 
 with a laugh: " Well, boys and girls, shall we have a recita- 
 tion or a recess-itation? " He was always joking, kind 
 of! 
 
 So ran the youthful summary, often recapitulated, lightly 
 touched upon, a point here and an instance there as the pu- 
 pils, coming by ones, twos and threes out of the valley, 
 gradually coalesced, mornings, on the school road, where it 
 turned off from the Smithtown road just above Rumsey 
 Piatt's store. Sometimes Teacher Walt, a little later than 
 usual, would come swinging along, and finding all the nine 
 boys and seven girls fore-gathered, would cry: " Going to 
 let Mr. Piatt teach ye to-day? " At the sound of their 
 
8 THE ANSWERER 
 
 mirth Rumsey Piatt would appear in the door, which opened 
 on a high stoop reached by fourteen steps — a gnarled old 
 man past eighty who, as a lad of eighteen, had taken part 
 in the disastrous battle of Long Island, faUing a prisoner to 
 the British bloodycoats. With bright, unwinking eyes the 
 storekeeper would look over the lot of them, not a muscle 
 of his lean face moving, though in some mysterious way he 
 was all the time chawing his tobacco. A silence would fall; 
 then, ejecting suddenly from the corner of his mouth some 
 of the delectable juice, Rumsey Piatt would exclaim, his 
 voice a quavery treble: 
 
 " Go 'long and larn, yo' uns! When I was your^age, I 
 was larned with a bagonet! " 
 
 This contrast and striking reminiscence elicited, invari- 
 ably, a full moment of respectful silence and regard. The 
 veteran slipping inside the store after a brief glance at the 
 weather, a buzz would rise as the group moved schoolward 
 — one of the older boys was telling, for the nth. time, of see- 
 ing the livid streak made by the blade of the Britisher's 
 bayonet, grazing ol' Rumsey Piatt's arm, back in '76. An' 
 in '12, though nigh onto sixty, he'd been a cap'n in the 
 m'litia. . . . 
 
 Thus on many a morning; but not on this glorious day 
 and morning of April, 1840. Passing Piatt's* Store, striding 
 along the up-road, Walt came upon none of the yoimgsters. 
 The circumstance went unremarked, for his thoughts were 
 elsewhere; but when he reached the schoolhouse the slight 
 oddity of encountering no one, of finding no pupil already 
 on hand, caught his attention. 
 
THE ANSWERER 9 
 
 He grasped the rope and the bell, like a voice reciting an 
 immutable and simple gospel, sent its unchanging intona- 
 tion floating over the valley. 
 
 After several moments he rested, looking down the road. 
 It was empty. Of a sudden he laughed aloud and heartily, 
 the laugh dying into a succession of chuckles. So this was 
 the windup! Even his two eight-year-olds hadn't put in an 
 appearance. 
 
 "Hurrah! " Teacher, liberated from school, turned a 
 handspring at the edge of the road in front of the school- 
 house. With a last truant glance along the deserted road, 
 Walt climbed a boundary ditch on the farther side of the 
 highway and struck off, in a rambling fashion, through the 
 woods to the south, on the side away from the valley. 
 
 Later he would return, of course, for there were a few 
 personal belongings — clothes, a notebook and two or three 
 books — at Freegift Terry's farm, his last sojourning-place 
 in the routine of boarding roimd. Then he wanted to see 
 again yoxmg Freegift Terry, two years his junior and the 
 third of the farmer's three sons. Besides the old people 
 and the three boys, there was only Esther, about seventeen. 
 The farmer would also be looking for him sooner or later to 
 pay him the $20 currency due and payable for the teacher's 
 services since the first of the year. . . . However, all that 
 could wait. He must leave the valley, dear place though 
 it was; must go somewhere, see new faces, sail again on the 
 Great South Bay, strip and bathe in the surf where the At- 
 
10 THE ANSWERER 
 
 lantic met the white-gray beach I And meet the people, talk 
 with the busy farmer-fathers and the lovable, gentle, hard- 
 working mothers who kept spruced and shining the wide 
 kitchens of the large, old farmhouses. And the young men, 
 and the wild, half-savage but dependable baymen, a race of 
 themselves! Vagabonds who slept under hedges, itinerant 
 peddlers, wandering preachers, the frequenters of roadside 
 taverns — ^he must rub up against them all; must, must! 
 They had such rich stores of nature, showed such variety of 
 traits, were so finely human, so good, so bad, so mixed and 
 so zealous; each living well or ill with such a strong relish! 
 And then, the Outdoors! Like a vast, never- failing sweet- 
 ener and purifier, with exercise to knit the muscles and 
 varied beauty to delight the mind! 
 
 For a brief while his intention was arrested by the look- 
 back of his thoughts to Huntington, his own town, truly, 
 since at West Hills, on the outskirts of the village, stood the 
 house in which he had been born. And in Himtington was 
 the little journal, the newspaper he had founded a year and 
 a half earlier, while teaching school and in intervals of 
 teaching school. It was called The Long Islander because 
 that was what it gave him the finest pleasure to call himself 
 — " Walt Whitman, Long Islander." Or, at times, in some 
 connections, he preferred the old Indian name for the Island 
 — Paumanok, fish-shaped Paumanok. . . . Huntington? 
 The Long Islander? 
 
 He stood, hesitating, and the breeze, coming from the 
 south, settled his answer. It brought him, or he fancied it 
 did, a whiff of salt from the sedge meadows, the bay and 
 the ocean. How matchless the Atlantic would look this 
 
THE ANSWERER ii 
 
 morning! Quickly he thrust his hand in his pocket to make 
 sure, clapped hold of pages cut out of one of his books, and 
 drew them forth. A play from his volume of Shakespeare, 
 but which? Ah, The Tempest t Of a shipwreck, an evil 
 monster, a good spirit, and young lovers — and all on an 
 island. This must be saved for the beach — ^fit surroxmdings 
 — for it makes such a huge difference where you read! 
 Granted something sound, ripe-thoughted and powerfully- 
 expressed, Walt said to himself, where you read counts for 
 more than what. 
 
 About to thrust back the loose pages, his eye caught on 
 some of the fine-print lines and he checked his hand while 
 he read them first silently and then, va. a deliberate, moved 
 voice: 
 
 " The isle is full of noises, 
 Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not. 
 Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments_ 
 Will hum about mine ears ; and sometime voices, 
 That, if I then had waked after long sleep. 
 Will make me sleep again : and then, in dreaming, 
 Thf clouds methought would open, and show riches 
 Ready to drop upon me." 
 
 The words of Prospero? Of Ariel? He looked to see; 
 and the delight of the touching relation was deepened for 
 him on discovering that they were the words of the evil 
 monster, Caliban. 
 
 3 
 Out of evil, good, was his first reflection; but then he saw 
 that took him but a little way. It begged the old, old ques- 
 tion of what is good, what evil? The lusts of the flesh, 
 for example; the keen appetites which asserted themselves 
 
12 THE ANSWERER 
 
 so inextinguishably in Walt Whitman; — could any natural 
 appetite be evil? Some taught that the evil lay not in the 
 appetite but in its gratification; but what was an appetite 
 for? Doubtless any indulgence should be curbed, should 
 be kept within reasonable bounds, must have regard for the 
 rights and privileges of others. . . . But sympathetic un- 
 derstanding, comprehension, shared feeling ought to take 
 care of that, ought to safeguard against wrongs to others, 
 if scarcely against excesses injurious to the self. No man 
 could wrong a woman, knowing how a woman felt; and 
 what man, born of woman, could help knowing sufficiently 
 how a woman felt? It must be that for one swift interval 
 the senses enslaved the mind. . . . And why not? In this 
 day and generation anything sensual was heaped with scorn, 
 although the selfsame ascetics that called sensual enjoyment 
 evil believed devoutly in the legend that all wickedness came 
 from parents who ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge — 
 knowledge of good and evil! The Deity had forbidden our 
 parents to eat of the fruit of that tree; the Deity had not 
 wished them to know that this was good and that was evil. 
 Was that so? 
 
 Or had not trusted these humans to decide. . . . 
 
 Were not those who continually pointed out evil simply 
 repeating, day in and day out, the offense for which the first 
 pair had been driven forth from Eden? 
 
 Oh! to have Elias Hicks here, and ask him the question! 
 Hicks, the Quaker, dead these ten years. Walt would never 
 forget him as once heard not many months before his death. 
 The nine-year-old Walt had been taken with his parents to 
 (of all places!) the gay ballroom of Morrison's Hotel, on 
 
THE ANSWERER 13 
 
 Brooklyn Heights, with windows giving on the East River 
 and ship-filled New York harbor. For Elias preached any- 
 where. 
 
 The great, elegant apartment, used chiefly for genteel con- 
 certs, balls and assemblies, held many settees and chairs 
 besides having a velvet divan running along the walls. 
 Every seat was soon taken; the room seemed to contain 
 many richly-dressed, fashionable women and all the notable 
 men of the town. Mr. Pierrepont was there, George Hall, 
 N. B. Morse, Judge Furman, General Jeremiah John- 
 son. . . . 
 
 A straight, Cromwellian figure clothed in drab cloth, with 
 broad-brimmed hat and black, piercing, beautiful eyes con- 
 fronted them in a moment or two of perfect stillness. Then 
 the voice, resonant, melodious, grave. . . . The true reli- 
 gion, one heard, consisted not at all in rites. Bibles, sermons 
 or Sundays — ^but in noiseless secret ecstacy and unremitted 
 aspiration, in purity, in a good practical life, in charity to 
 the poor and toleration to all. 
 
 4 
 
 " Passing Freegift Terry's, friend? " 
 
 Walt hailed a traveler on horseback in the road below. 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " 'Twill be a favor if you'll tell him Walt Whitman's off 
 for a few days to the south." 
 
 " Who's 't that's off? " 
 
 "Walt Whitman— jest say, 'Walt'! " 
 
 The horseman assented and farewell'd with a sweeping 
 arm. 
 
14 THE ANSWERER 
 
 Moving southward, Walt found the road too dusty for 
 comfort, the sun having quickly parched its bed of sand. He 
 struck off a little to the east, bearing for Babylon village, the 
 noise of his passage through occasional brush disturbing rab- 
 bits and quail. In openings, not far distant and generally en- 
 circled by trees, his eye was pleased with glimpses of deer 
 feeding on tender spring shoots and berries. They seldom 
 appeared to take notice of him but, having grazed a while, 
 would toss their antlers or their sleek heads of does and go 
 crashing away through the bushes — ^shrub oak, as polite 
 writers called it; " scrub oak " in the speech of the people. 
 Walt stopped to admire such a burst — three does and their 
 mates coursing by — ^and was surprised by the glint of sun- 
 shine on metal somewhere ahead of him. He looked about. 
 Oh, yes; surveyors! They were laying out the line of the 
 steam railroad, which was shortly to be extended from 
 Hicksville — ^pushed through, some said, clear to the county- 
 seat of Suffolk county, at Riverhead; perhaps rpight even 
 be carried to Greenport. Greenport— Sag Harbor! Sag 
 Harbor, with its great fleet of whaling-ships! Why not go 
 there? Why not talk with some of the captains, view the 
 ships, mingle with the men, hear their yarns and true, mar- 
 velous experiences? 
 
 The Welsh Williamses of his mother's stock had been 
 sailors, some of them; in his farthest boyhood, Walt had 
 heard the legend of that old sea wolf, Kossabone, who had 
 died at ninety, seated in a great arm chair in his home, his 
 blue eyes upon the bay, the winged vessels, the distant cape. 
 His great-grandmother's grandfather? Perhaps; none had 
 known certainly; the distance had dimmed everything but 
 
THE ANSWERER 15 
 
 the picture, like an impressive and masterly canvas, a vision 
 which should forever fix him in the memory of his descend- 
 ants. " I give, devise, and bequeath — " A heritage of im- 
 derstanding is the true bequest. . . , 
 
 Greenport — Sag Harbor; but meanwhile here was the glit- 
 ter of the sun on a surveyor's transit, and here were men, 
 youthful, bronzed, sighting lines, hallooing. The sound of 
 the broadax rang from nearby woods. Walt hastened for- 
 ward, and hailed. 
 
 Glad enough to see him they seemed; there were four of 
 them, lodged at a house on the road a half-mile or more 
 off, they said. The youngest, who might have been nine- 
 teen, smiled at Walt in the fashion of sudden, complete 
 friendliness which Youth knows and Age has lost the trick 
 of. The look made them secret-sharers. . . . His name was 
 Joel — Joel Skidmore. 
 
 " Huntington way? " 
 
 "Yes. You belong to the West Hills Whitmans? 
 Thought so." 
 
 He showed Walt the principle of the transit; waved his 
 hand, describing careless gestures; spoke pridefully of their 
 determination and ability to survey " mile after mile of this 
 track as straight as if you'd laid it down on the map with a 
 ruler's edge." Curves were dangerous? " Very," affirmed 
 young Skidmore. "Maybe, some day, they'll be less so. 
 You see, anything moving fast, in a straight line, if it's 
 obliged to take a bend — " He discussed ballistics, finishing: 
 " — and already we drive along the rails at twenty miles an 
 hour! " 
 
 Walt listened interestedly; he felt himself constantly 
 
i6 THE ANSWERER 
 
 drawn to this youth, so nearly his own age and almost ex- 
 actly the age of young Freegift Terry, toward whom he had 
 felt a similar affection. This strong, instant feeling, first 
 roused by the irank, smiling glance of the boy Freegift, now 
 as quickly stirred by something in the look of Joel Skidmore, 
 was a puzzling, unaccountable thing! " Friendliness " was 
 too pale a word; it was a feeling far too intense, dear, 
 precious to be characterized by any word but " love." A 
 special form of love, with something brooding in it, yet pos- 
 sible (he judged) only between the young and equal-aged. 
 The love of comrades! Undeniably, it was a passion; it 
 flamed within you; was a thing of the body quite as tortur- 
 ingly as of the spirit. And lawless. . . . 
 
 Boys bathing side by side, racing naked on the smooth 
 white contours of the beach, sleeping together under the 
 moonlight, an arm resting lightly on a breast, a sigh escaping 
 the lips of the dreamer. ... A pounding at the wrists and 
 temples; and an ache of happiness. . . . 
 
 But if this died, if the years transmuted feeling, re-di- 
 rected passion, destroyed the concentration, focus, on par- 
 ticular persons — ^what then? What, indeed, but a spread- 
 ing flood, the wave weaker but rolling wider, the scorch gone 
 but the dispersed warmth remaining, bathing all the world, 
 all men, all women, all humankind in its affectionate under- 
 standing, sympathy, comprehension, tolerance? That which 
 had been a bodily attraction, gross yet beautiful, became 
 (it must be) a lofty endowment, an institution on which so- 
 ciety rested, the institution of the love of comrades, manly, 
 high-towering. . . . 
 
 The boy Joel had stopped speaking and was looking at 
 
THE ANSWERER 17 
 
 him with smiling face and eyes both shy and bold. Abruptly 
 Walt took up the thread of the youth's enthusiasm. 
 
 " Yes, you're right! Oh! what a grand country this is! 
 Not just our own Long Island, but all these States! Like a 
 poem; like the amplest conceivable poem! And you say 
 after you have surveyed this route, you are going to the 
 South or West? Oh! how I should like to go with you! 
 We two boys together clinging, never leaving each other, go- 
 ing the roads, excursions North and South — ^how fine that 
 would be! " 
 
 " Stay here with us; you can shoulder a transit; I'll show 
 you enough so 'at you'll be useful. Come midsummer, we'll 
 have the line mapped plumb to Greenport — then you and 
 I'll travel! " 
 
 Walt shook his head. " I'm for Babylon village, then the 
 bay and beach — ^fishing and swimming; maybe I'll try to 
 make a poem or two." 
 
 " D' you rime well? Easily? " 
 
 " Oh. . , fair enough. But it's mighty cramping, like 
 trying to keep healthy while you stay indoors all the time." 
 
 " Edgar Poe's a won'erful poet, they say." 
 
 " Musical, like a waterfall. I've heard the ocean! " 
 
 Joel's eyes danced. "Ah, so've I! That's something 
 better than music — tinkle! " 
 
 The sun was high and the surveying party quitted to eat. 
 
 " Come along, Walt Whitman! Plenty of room for one 
 more at the farmer's table! " 
 
 "Don't miss seeing the farmer's pretty daughters! " 
 
 " Stay the night! Sow seed for your supper! Marry a 
 daughter and stay forever! " 
 
i8 THE ANSWERER 
 
 Walt laughed. 
 
 " I am a carpenter, farmer, printer, teacher," he explained, 
 coming, " and — oh, yes! — at present a tramp-travder." 
 
 " He'll be a man in the world in the eyes of the farmer's 
 daughter's." 
 
 " Can make himself useful." 
 
 " Oh, a man of the world need only be ornamental." 
 
 One of the surveying party coarsened the badinage. On 
 Joel Skidmore's face a deep flush showed; he looked anx- 
 iously at their companion, but Walt's face was serene, ex- 
 pressionless, though he mxist have heard. 
 
 The farmhouse was typical of the region and period; Walt 
 looked with pleasure about the immense kitchen which had 
 at one end a fireplace and hearth nearly as wide as the room, 
 domed by a great chimney. The strong, thick timbers of 
 the ceiling had been darkened by the smoke of many fires ; 
 the housewife's cloths and brushes had been at them until, 
 for all their smokiness, they gleamed like huge bands of a 
 mysterious metal. The floor was stone. A long table, un- 
 spread with any cloth, steamed with food taken from kettles 
 that hung on iron cranes over the fireplace's embers. A 
 negress, very old, probably an ex-slave, was squatted down 
 on the hearth poking the well-roasted sweet potatoes out of 
 the wood-coals. 
 
 The roominess, the table like an immense, low altar, the 
 kneeling woman, all gave the sense of standing in a taber- 
 nacle; but an everyday, highly-appetizing incense soaked 
 the air. Framed in a wide doorway Walt saw the farmer's 
 two daughters. Suddenly they were pushed gently aside 
 from behind and the farmer's wife came through the door 
 
THE ANSWERER 19 
 
 and into the kitchen. Walt's first impression was: My 
 own mother! 
 
 At once he began to sense differences, little, unnameable 
 distinctions; but his mind took scarcely any note of these 
 and affirmed all the marked resemblances. This was, agiain, 
 the old face of the mother of many children (some lived; 
 some had died; she had borne them all). A face of fullest 
 knowledge, of content. A face that looked out from be- 
 neath a Quaker cap — clear, beautiful; the face that one saw 
 above the spinning-wheel, the soft skin like flax, the hair 
 like flax but whiter, softer. Such a face did not so much 
 smile as spread a strengthened radiance. ... No yoiing 
 woman could have that special beauty, like an autumnal 
 sky, cleared for the evening. Nor any man, young or 
 old. . . . 
 
 One of the daughters dropped her eyes modestly but the 
 other gave Walt — gave aU five young men — looks merry, 
 meaningful, mischievous. The farmer, busy in his fields, was 
 not there to observe his girls. Jenny — that was her name — 
 jumped up constantly to wait on the surveyors. She would 
 place a dumpling on a plate and her fingers woiild lightly 
 touch a cheek or shoulder. Joel blushed at the contact; 
 Walt caught the hand and lightly patted it. Another put 
 his arm about her waist. Jenny shrieked. Her mother ob- 
 served everything with undisturbed placidity. 
 
 All ate heartily, with almost no talk; there were no courses 
 and the meal was soon finished. Jenny, slipping outside the 
 kitchen, could be seen standing dose to one of the men, 
 the one whose arm had gone about her. They whispered, 
 fingers twining; she broke away with a cry and a pretense 
 
20 THE ANSWERER 
 
 of flight from him, but immediately, posed herself in the 
 doorway to wave a good-by. Her eyes admired him. On 
 the way back to work, the other three made game of Joel 
 for his blush and other matters. 
 
 " Can't ye take what's offered ye, lad? " 
 
 " He's particular, is Joel; Jermy's too tisual for him. He's 
 waiting to take a snatch at t'other, her sister." 
 
 " Jenny's been all around . . . your turn next, Joel." 
 
 Joel brazened it out; laughed, red-faced, though Walt 
 saw the discomfiture in his eyes. And noted that though he 
 laughed, he said nothing. When work had been resinned 
 and they were a little apart from the rest, the boy turned 
 to Walt and said fiercely: 
 
 "I can't stand it — their making a fool of me. I — ^I — 
 Stay over to-night and I'll leave the job and go along o' you, 
 'f you're willing, to-morrow." 
 
 " Come with me? What great times we'll have! " Walt's 
 arm went affectionately, exuberantly, about the boy's shoul- 
 der. Then his face altered and he said, gently: "You 
 mustn't mind what they say, though; don't come for that 
 reason, come for better reasons ! Tell me, why do you mind 
 their talk? " His question was earnest; the tone of asking, 
 persuasive. 
 
 Joel fumbled for words. At length: 
 
 " Well, I— I hate all that kind of thing, but "—with a 
 species of desperate candor — " I guess what cuts is a feel- 
 ing they're belittlin' me. As if I weren't — a man grown." 
 
 Walt's eyes praised the honest admission. But the boy's 
 tongue was loosed. He went on, with increasing intensity: 
 
 " I'm as much a man grown as any of 'em. What do they 
 
THE ANSWERER 21 
 
 know? They don't know all my thoughts and feelin's, I 
 guess! Now, tell me, do they? I don't talk; they are al- 
 ways talkin'. They're always tellin', too: 'I said this, 
 she said that; then I kissed her ' — an' a lot more. ... If 
 it's all true, or the half on it, why do they need to tell about 
 it? " He appealed to Walt, who answered: 
 
 " Now you've hit it, Joel! If it's true — if! Joel, it isn't 
 — ^it just ain't! You know it, I know it; each knows it of 
 the other even as it's told. But — the tale is to the teller 
 and comes back most to him; the song is to the singer, 
 ke hears it perfectly sung! A fellow doesn't talk about 
 the fish on his string; he yarns about the fish he almost 
 hooked." 
 
 They ran boundary lines through the afternoon. Walt, 
 easily absenting himself without notice, wandered back to- 
 ward the farmhouse. The girl, Jenny, was spreading white, 
 fresh-washed linens on bushes. Walt approached her, smil- 
 ing. 
 
 She smiled back invitingly but tossed her head at the 
 same instant as if to say: " Come along if you want to, 
 but if you don't I sha'n't care! " He came steadily forward 
 until he was very close; then said: 
 
 "You're the prettiest gal this side Huntington, Jenny! " 
 
 Her black, opaque eyes reflected little flashes of the sun- 
 light. But she said nothing. 
 
 " The men are crazy about you, even Joel." 
 
 No answer. Her eyes were on the cloth she was spread- 
 ing. 
 
 " I'll warrant I could make you like me better than any 
 of 'em." 
 
22 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " Conceit! " she murmured, but gave him her glance and 
 a renewed invitation. 
 
 He took her hand, pressed it, and went on: 
 
 " I've listened to them; heard them tell how well you 
 liked 'em. According to their tell, you like each of 'em bet- 
 ter than the others. You'd never say no to any of them; in 
 fact, you've never refused whichever one's talking at the 
 moment." 
 
 The opacity of her eyes seemed to surrender to dq)ths 
 of uncertainty, a quality of uneasiness or mistrust of his 
 meaning. He waited for the look of intense curiosity. It 
 came. 
 
 " So I know you'll be glad of me! You'll like me lots 
 better than their best." 
 
 " Much you know! " she answered, pertly. " Besides, I 
 don't waht you! " 
 
 Walt looked genuinely surprised. 
 
 " Why, Jenny! Any one to hear you would think you 
 were choicy! " 
 
 " Well, I am! " 
 
 But his gusts of laughter made this proclamation futile. 
 
 "Why, no, Jenny, you're not choicy; you're not picking 
 and choosing, not you! You're taking all comers! You're 
 any one's that offers . . , impartial, like the weather; vari- 
 able as the weather, to be sure — " 
 
 The full import of what he was saying came upon her 
 like a man whose pretended admiration masked a violent 
 and terrible seizure and embrace — came upon her while her 
 eyes were still regarding with secret favor his plentiful black 
 hair, stalwart figure and clean, sensitive features. The light 
 
THE ANSWERER 23 
 
 went from her eyes as a flame is snuffed out somewhere be- 
 hind a luminous pane; she was almost white-lipped; her 
 breast rose and fell. 
 
 "You — ^you've mistooken me. You've no warranty to 
 say — to let on you believe — " 
 
 The change in his look was transfiguring; yet not a line 
 of the face altered. Simply, something came out of the 
 gray-blue eyes which had never wavered from the direct -e- 
 gard they fastened on her black ones ; something sped from 
 him to her, caught her up as surely as a strong arm encircles 
 a stumbling child. Her breath, drawn in sharply by a sob, 
 escaped in a relaxing sigh. Nothing was said for several 
 minutes; defense, apology, extenuation were forgotten. 
 
 " What is it we want, you and I? " he muttered finally 
 but with no air of addressing the question to her. " Friends? 
 Yes. Lovers? Yes! Don't shrink back, Jenny! Lovers? 
 Why not, why not? Every woman should have a hundred 
 lovers; every man should love a hundred women. She has, 
 he does! You can't make it otherwise; it oughtn't to be 
 otherwise. . . . Who says that love means bodily com- 
 merce? Then, for him or her, love means nothing but bodily 
 commerce! . . . You thought I had mistaken you, Jenny, 
 but I was only by way of showing you the risk." 
 
 " You think— I'm— wicked." 
 
 " I think nothing of the sort! Jenny, there's no virtue in 
 me, or any other man, or any woman, to pronounce upon 
 your doings— to say ' Jenny did right ' or ' Jenny acted 
 wrong.' No, no! Only, whatever you do, the risk 0' being 
 misunderstood is there. Or, not so much the risk o' being 
 misunderstood, either — there's less real misunderstanding in 
 
34 THE ANSWERER 
 
 the world than people like to play at; people pretend to 
 misunderstand as it serves their purposes. No, not the risk 
 o' being misunderstood " — ^he chuckled, rather sadly — " so 
 much as the certainty o' being misjudged! " 
 
 After a pause he went on: 
 
 " Joel's going away with me in the morning." She looked 
 at him, for a second, with betraying eyes. " Ah! . . . And 
 yet there's nothing between you and Joel except — that he 
 loves you and you love him," Walt finished gently. " No 
 words, not even exchanged looks! Oh! I know." 
 
 She spoke in a stifled voice. 
 
 " He's the only one I — " 
 
 "He's one that is worth caring about," Walt answered 
 the unfinished confession. He made the moment easier for 
 her with a whimsical glint of the gray-blue eyes. " Good- 
 by! " he exclaimed, "save a place for me at supper! " 
 
 5 
 A different Jenny sat with them at the evening meal. And 
 afterward Walt contrived to get away from the others on a 
 pretext of taking a walk with Jenny and Joel. He talked 
 easily for a little distance; then left with the excuse of going 
 back to see the farmer about a return in the harvest season. 
 A few sentences covered the topic, and he and Jenny's father 
 discussed politics — Van Buren, the prospects of the Whigs 
 at the fall elections, Andy Jackson and Henry Clay; for the 
 day was still a day of persons, or personalities, rather than 
 of parties. Walt scandalized the farmer by his lack of par- 
 tizanship, or perhaps bigotry, though the countryman's 
 phrase was "political principles, the positive principles of 
 
THEANSWERER 25 
 
 Thomas Jefferson, sir! " Young Mr. Whitman listened to 
 the exposition of rural ideals in goverpment — " we till the 
 soil, sir, whilst those rascals in office soil the till! " — ^but 
 throughout the audition a separate consciousness seemed to 
 exist within him; he had a strange sensation of being both 
 here and elsewhere, and was possessed, pervaded by a glow 
 of clairvoyance. 
 
 Jenny . . . what was her waywardness? The girl wan- 
 toned with the essential innocence of whatsoever was beau- 
 tiful, alive! Wantoning yet innocent — ^it was necessary to 
 fall back upon the French word abandon to describe her. 
 Like a showy flower, but a flower is for any bee that passes. 
 Not so the woman, this girl of the farm among the scrub 
 oaks, the sandy soil and lonely blossoming. She was for 
 Joel; he had seemed to know it from the first but how, he 
 allowed, he could not tell. It had been almost as if he could 
 hear the varying beating of their hearts and had recognized 
 the profound, essential accord — systole, diastole — in 
 rhythms inaudible and to any formal judgment, far 
 apart. . . . 
 
 What those two would find to say to each other, or 
 whether, indeed, they would find words relevant at all, he 
 speculated only briefly. But he pondered silently, in his 
 separate consciousness, on the miracle of young lovers. It 
 was a iniracle that had never happened to himself, Walt 
 Whitman. He had loved — ^yes! — impartially and enthu- 
 siastically all manner of people; a variety of places; hills, 
 orchards of rose-pink and white, the sky and the resonant, 
 magnificent sea; the wonderful faces of quiet mothers, the 
 immature faces of children and growing boys. And his 
 
26 THE ANSWERER 
 
 mind had been given oh! so often to the contemplation of 
 vistas beyond his power to describe or even to characterize 
 — vistas that had something inhuman, unearthly about them, 
 so far did th^ reach, so high they raised you up! But 
 love? the single object, overwhelmingly concentrated feel- 
 ing, the one woman? Not yet; it might be, never; for Walt 
 faced the fact of his own universality. 
 
 The heat and light of the sun, focussed by a burning- 
 glass, endangered the existence of the thing they were con- 
 centrated upon; shriveled the flower, set fire to the leaf. A 
 mere fraction of the force of the ocean, cumulated in a giant 
 wave, multipled its dispersed destructive power. What was 
 love, this love? Was it heat-light kindling flame — the over- 
 riding wave of unspent force? Smoke and crackle and 
 ashes; the sun shone on. The wave broke; the ocean re- 
 mained an inexhaustible reservoir. . . . 
 
 Banks, the United States Bank, Martin Van Buren and 
 the more than doubtful value of steam railroads while we 
 had excellent canals and waterways. Walt, rising from his 
 chair, looked out into the darkening spring evening and saw 
 two figures proceeding toward the house. In a few mo- 
 ments Jenny and Joel entered; for good night they found 
 each other's eyes a second. The farmer, emptying his pipe, 
 ceased his deliberate taps to inquire of Walt: 
 
 " You look mortal set up, friend? " 
 
 " I've just made a poem." 
 
 " So! let's hear it." 
 
 " 'Tisn't recitable, or in words; for all that 't is a poem, 
 the most jubilant poem; full of manhood and womanhood 
 
THE ANSWERER 27 
 
 and infancy, ftill of sunshine and the motion of waves — a 
 poem of joys! " 
 
 The eyes in the weathered face followed Walt's. An ex- 
 pression of grave surprise was succeeded on the farmer's 
 face by one of calculating appraisal. He paid no attention 
 to his daughter but scrutinized Joel Skidmore with care, 
 finally saying: 
 
 " We'll be able to double the acreage, then, next year." 
 
 Walt and Joel were bedded in the attic, a place of large 
 lateral dimensions and uncertain headroom which they had 
 to themselves. 
 
 The boy was shaking with excitement; his lit face and 
 shining eyes, disclosed by the fitful gleams of a single candle, 
 gave an extraordinary impression, as if he were a creature 
 seen in a vision. He talked jerkily, in whispers; and it re- 
 quired the full leap of his companion's intuition to follow, 
 comprehend meanings. . . . 
 
 In half-undress, stretched out on the blankets of their 
 bed, which was the floor under a sloping gable, his clasped 
 hands supporting his head and tilting it to one side, Walt 
 watched Joel bending over and ftmibling with his shoes. 
 The smooth skin of the boy's arms had a warm ivory color- 
 ing; the muscles moved beneath it as a swell comes and 
 goes under the unmarred surface of the sea. Behind him, 
 against the diverse planes of the gabled roof, amazing 
 shadows were projected, suggesting an incessant, frantic 
 struggle in the art of representation, a vain but interminable 
 
28 THE ANSWERER 
 
 effort to dqjict a three-dimensional creature in a world of 
 but two dimensions, a world that knew thickness but could 
 not conquer it. . . . In this weird struggle of the shadows 
 there was something delineative, something sad. It was al- 
 together too like the grotesque endeavor of mortals to com- 
 pass ideas — ideas, shapes apart from them and shapes that 
 mankind can lay no hold of. . . . 
 
 "Walt! Walt!" 
 
 Joel's incoherent whispering commanded every inch of 
 his companion's attention at last. The confession was ex- 
 plicit and staggering. 
 
 " God! . . . Did you tell her you were going away in the 
 morning? " 
 
 " I caw'i— now! " 
 
 " You must! " 
 
 "No . . . everything's different. Everything's changed! 
 I want to stay — with her! " 
 
 Walt groaned. 
 
 " And double the acreage next year? Marry her— chain 
 yourself to this cleared groimd among the scrub oaks? You 
 see how the farmer views you — as a welcome conscript to 
 speed the plow! " 
 
 That didn't matter! Walt meditated, so far as extreme 
 mental turmoil would allow. His first dismay somewhat 
 overcome, he tested the situation. 
 
 " You don't suppose you are the first? " 
 
 She had said so, and Joel believed her implicitly. His 
 thought running back to Jenny's behavior during their talk 
 of the afternoon, Walt accepted Jenny's word and Joel's be- 
 lief in it. Indeed, affirmed it further with his own full be- 
 
THE ANSWERER 29 
 
 lief; for there had been no falseness in look, word or accent. 
 ..." You think — I'm — " He heard again her sob upon 
 the word, " wicked." 
 
 For a moment Walt felt an impulse to blame himself in 
 this business. But then a rude instinct rose up in strong, 
 instant denial. What had he said? " bodily commerce? " 
 and this direct phrase only in an emphatic distinction in- 
 capable of being misunderstood. He was not even certain 
 that Jenny had caught words which weren't addressed to 
 her and were simply the result of his habit of reflecting 
 aloud. 
 
 Into one species of blunder his racing thoughts did not 
 lead him. Walt asked no question designed to fix the re- 
 sponsibility for what had happened. Responsibility — ^which 
 is not precisely synonymous with " blame." Those who 
 assign the blame for anything, he saw, merely color their 
 view of it; those who try to settle responsibility grope in 
 the dark; those who talk of consequences mistake their 
 guesses for the workings of eternal law. . . . 
 
 Joel, by his side, was obscuring the clear but difficult 
 perception of things-in-themselves, these intuitions which 
 came as vividly out of the revealed situation as bright 
 strokes of lightning flash from darkly-laden clouds. The 
 patter of rain muffles the thunderclap. The incessant, stam- 
 mering ecstacy of the boy's happiness was equally continu- 
 ous, insistent on making itself heard. 
 
 "Oh, Walt! She's so wholly dear to me — ^now! I feel 
 that nothing I can ever do to protect her, guard her, will 
 ever be enough. Just to think that she's given — " 
 
 He overflowed with the sense of an immense tenderness 
 
30 THE ANSWERER 
 
 for Jenny, his Jenny; by the gift of her body, Walt re- 
 flected, she had acquired in exchange dominion over his 
 soul. For Joel's words, mood, uncontrollable emotion swept 
 into limbo the material aspects of this occurrence — or acci- 
 dent — or fatality; however you chose to designate it. Walt 
 was stunned with the pure beauty that was the heart of an 
 episode which the world would stamp as low, base, or else 
 jeer at lewdly. For a moment he wondered if Jenny had 
 been raised to any such pitch of exaltation as this boy, her 
 lover; but saw almost instantly how beside the point any 
 such speculation must be. She had lifted the boy — or 
 rather, the man; for he was that from hence forth — to the 
 heights, to the sublime height, and to his thrilled vision 
 she was there beside him. Indeed, to his sight, she had 
 been there before him, and had beckoned and drawn him 
 up to her. . . . 
 
 Looked at from the lower levels, what was there to see? 
 A youth who, in a few hours, had quitted adolescence for 
 maturity. A timid, questing boy, with no " definition," as 
 a painter would say, just a bright, blurred young thing, had 
 become as fixed and irremovable as one of these Long Island 
 hills. It was exactly as if, in one department. Nature had 
 reversed a familiar process, and the butterfly, folding its 
 gay wings and entombing itself in a chrysalis, were about 
 to emerge, almost immediately, as a grub. Walt made this 
 comparison in no disparaging spirit; his interest was the 
 pure curiosity of the poet or the scientist, with a keen regret 
 that he was to lose a prospective companion on the road 
 and a sharp eagerness to know all about a transformation 
 that happened to so many of the race and would (or 
 
THE ANSWERER 31 
 
 wouldn't?) befall himself . . . some fine day — "fine" in 
 the old sense of " final: terminal " of course. . . . 
 
 The possessor of happiness, the beloved of the gods, the 
 youth turned man and the knower of inconceivable felicity 
 — the mere-nineteen-year-old by his side on the floor of that 
 attic, had at length left off his whispering and lay silent, per- 
 haps spent of words worthy to communicate his intense feel- 
 ing. In the profound quiet under the gables Walt felt, for 
 a period, depressed and lonely. It did seem to him, at that 
 moment, as if the life of the grub were infinitely desirable — 
 the life of a few isolated acres, of sunrise and sunset, of 
 winter and summer, of spasmodic, backbreaking toil. For 
 what? For food, shelter, clothing; the comfort of other 
 lives; the duty or privilege of reproduction. Who, looking 
 at the grub, knew how brightly he saw his existence? Here 
 was one creeping out of the chrysalis — ^behold his delight, 
 transporting joy, in newly-achieved grubhood! There, in 
 the person of Jenny's father, was the same creature after 
 many years of grubbiness. Disillusioned, imhappy? Not at 
 all! " We'll be able to double the acreage, then, next year! " 
 The old question in the rigid catechisms, as to what was 
 the chief end of man, seemed fairly self-answered or self- 
 answering. 
 
 With women was it any different? Walt's thoughts 
 turned to Jenny's mother, to his own mother. Women, he 
 instinctively felt (as if, somehow, he were mentally almost 
 at one with them) were surer of happiness than men. No 
 woman need be without child; if she bore her husband no 
 children, then he remained to her in their place. Children 
 were wayward? or half-witted? or crippled? When had 
 
32 THE ANSWERER 
 
 such fortune ever failed to make them dearer to the mother? 
 Here Walt could speak from personal knowledge. There 
 was his little brother, Jeff, such a fine lad! but not robust. 
 Their mother cherished Jeff — though scarcely tenderer of 
 him than Walt himself was. The baby, Eddie — 
 
 Walt would not trust himself to think upon Eddie. After 
 all, Eddie was so young! It was horrible to think that the 
 youngest might grow up an idiot (grow up? How cruel 
 words are! No, not " grow up " — ^merely age without grow- 
 ing up). . . . 
 
 There seemed to be some marvelous, merciful compensa- 
 tion whereby the happiness of women — of mothers — ^was 
 made secure to them. The love that filled the mother's heart 
 as the milk filled her breasts was spontaneous and always 
 just-proportioned, if one could use a measuring word to de- 
 scribe something plainly immeasurable. But what I mean, 
 Walt thought to himself, is: Where the mother cannot be 
 happy in her child, it is somehow made up to her so that 
 she is happy in her love of her child. . . . 
 
 And in the thought of such a happiness, creatively imag- 
 ined, he fell asleep. 
 
 7 
 On the Babylon road, next morning, all such sustained 
 contemplation of the inner ideal was banished by the exuber- 
 ance of sunshine and a dry, cool (almost chilly! ) northwest 
 wind. The sweet taste of buckwheat cakes drenched in 
 syrup, the delicious fragrance of the farmer's cider, stir of 
 blood and the bright grandeur of the day outdoors were all 
 
THE ANSWERER 33 
 
 part and parcel of Walt's overflowing sense of well-being. 
 The sense of well-being — and that familiar, irresistible sense 
 of freedom which comes from the long look ahead on a 
 country road. How I love these old wood roads! the tramp- 
 teacher thought to himself, and he began to recollect some 
 of their names, names that had a special significance al- 
 ready, in some instances, lost. There was the Yellow House 
 Road; over on the north shore he had come, in his wan- 
 derings, upon the Crystal Brook Road. . . . Names of 
 places on Paumanok, this " Island of Shells " in the lingua 
 of the Indian tribes, had often an equal charm. Fire Place 
 and Canoe Place, for examplel Oldtimers, like Rumsey 
 Piatt, ignored such modern designations as Port Jefferson 
 and Mount Sinai, and spoke still of goin' t' Drown Meadow 
 or puttin' up at Old Man's. . . . 
 
 In Babylon, where he had taught one year, Walt felt 
 almost as much at home as in Huntington; he repaired to 
 the house of Zophar Wines, sure of a welcome. The 
 eighteen-year-old daughter. Temperance, a demure girl with 
 dark hair and the steel-blue eyes of her Puritan father, 
 opened the door with a curtsey and the slight blush which, 
 with her, always took the place of a smile. Ha: mother 
 was dead. Walt's greeting was hearty. 
 
 " Well, Temperance! Here you see me again, foot-loose 
 — the same young vagabond! " 
 
 She widened the way and he entered, looking about him. 
 Nothing was changed since the winter he had boarded there. 
 No — ^yes! A steel engraving, the Parable of the Loaves and 
 Fishes, had been shifted to the opposite wall. 
 
34 THE ANSWERER 
 
 Temperance decorously took his sapling-stick, which Walt 
 had cut for hinaself on the way into Babylon, and placed it 
 in a corner. Then she said: 
 
 " Father is in the parlor. He has spent the morning there 
 asking for guidance. Dinner is almost ready." 
 
 Her tone was earnest, not cold but grave, contained; and 
 her words had an inflexible accent, as if the pronunciation 
 of each syllable discharged a duty. Familiarity with tone 
 and accent, with her manner and the atmosphere of that 
 home, prevented Walt from feeling in any degree ill at ease. 
 Warmth, cordiality in the ordinary sense, were not to be ex- 
 pected, were simply non-existent here; an early Christian 
 martyr appearing on the threshold would have been received 
 with more respect, undoubtedly, and perhaps with a display 
 of reverence; he would not, however, have been embraced. 
 Walt thought for an amused moment of that impetuous 
 apostle Saint Paul, who instructed his followers to " salute 
 one another with a holy kiss." Paul, a good deal like him- 
 self — fiery, joyous, impulsive, enthusiastic. What woidd 
 happen if he, Walt, flung his arms about Temperance and 
 kissed her . . . probably a kiss on the forehead was 
 meant. . . . 
 
 Temperance had left the room and in the midst of his 
 hazardous speculation the door leading to the parlor opened 
 and Zophar Wines came in. He was tall, almost Walt's 
 height, with a beard encircling the face from ear to ear, 
 iron-gray and apparently never scissored. Two oblique lines 
 from the sides of the high-bridged nose to the stern corners 
 of the narrow mouth had lost their usual delineative im- 
 portance because of a fanatical light in the eyes, a light new 
 
THE ANSWERER 35 
 
 to Walt. It stopped for a moment the cheerful greeting 
 on the young man's lips and gave Zophar Wines opportunity 
 to say: 
 
 "Walter Whitman, have you heard the great word? Is 
 it the message of the Lord that has brought you here to join 
 our band and make such preparation as we can against the 
 great Day? " 
 
 A new sect, thought Walt, not very much astounded. He 
 had heard of new sects since his childhood but it seemed to 
 him they had been especially plentiful in the last two-three 
 years, since the hard times of 1837. 
 
 "No — no — I'm afraid I've not been directed here, Mr. 
 Wines. If so, I hadn't suspected it." 
 
 "Who knoweth the Lord's ways? . . . full of mercy. 
 You were doubtless directed, appearing at this time. The 
 message is clear. We are to prepare for the Second Coming. 
 The day, the hour — even the minute — ^is set." 
 
 " You mean ... the end of the world? " 
 
 "The end of this world, yes! and the beginning of the 
 Life Eternal. . . ." 
 
 Walt slightly shuddered. " But — " 
 
 " I have been on my knees for a number of hours " — ^he 
 tottered and steadied himself with a hand on the back of a 
 chair — " seeking instructions and guidance. All has been 
 made dear to me. I shall cancel all my mortgages this aft- 
 ernoon, discharge every one of indebtedness to me, and 
 otherwise take the first steps in the final adjustment of my 
 worldly affairs." 
 
 "Good, good!" The comment was involuntary. "I 
 mean," Walt amended, " I think it must be wonderful, beau- 
 
36 THE ANSWERER 
 
 tifull to think you can enrich people like that, by a word 
 and just the few strokes of a pen! Though — if the world's 
 to end, can it make such a difference about debts and 
 things? " 
 
 " ' Give all thou hast to the poor—' " 
 
 " They'll have no chance to enjoy it." 
 
 " It is not given them for their enjoyment — " 
 
 " But for your forgiveness? " 
 
 Zophar Wines frowned, saying, however, with pitying pa- 
 tience: "You do not xmderstand." 
 
 " Do you? Are you sure? " 
 
 " It may be not ... it is my business to execute the 
 Divine command." 
 
 The door to the dining room opened and Temperance 
 Wines stood aside to let them pass. 
 
 They stood while Zophar Wines said grace. The two 
 men seated themselves. Temperance glided to and fro, 
 bringing a few supplementary dishes. Then she, too, sat. 
 Her father attended strictly to eating. 
 
 The zest taken from his outdoor appetite, Walt ate slowly, 
 with ventures of his eyes toward the girl, less often toward 
 the rich holder of mortgages. On one of these excursions 
 his glance struck full upon a look of Temperance's. The 
 pure, steely gaze suggested a young creature perfectly ar- 
 mored against any ambush by the emotions — either her own 
 or another's. The warm and care-free, therefore reckless, 
 blood in Walt found in this protected look as great a provo- 
 cation as any free lance ever found in the sight of a securely- 
 defended fortress. AvantI Her countenance unbearably 
 challenged his nature. Zophar Wines spoke: 
 
THE ANSWERER 37 
 
 " You have secured the cloth, Temperance? " 
 
 « Yes, father." 
 
 " Doubtless you will set to sewing upon it this day? " 
 
 She assented. Her father said to Walt, explanatorily: 
 
 " Our preparations are well under way. We shall be 
 ready. . . . The women have taken upon them the task of 
 preparing our robes, to be worn on the great Day, now so 
 near at hand." 
 
 " Robes? " The young man made an effort to appear in- 
 telligent. " But I thought on the Day of Judgment we were 
 all to stand na — " He checked himself, unembarrassed but 
 imwishful to embarrass Temperance. 
 
 " It is true our souls shall stand naked before the Seat 
 of Judgment," answered Zophar Wines, in a calm, quiet 
 voice. " But, though these bodies are nothing, it is meet 
 that we should array ourselves ... for the hour when the 
 heavens shall be unrolled and the earth shall shrivel up and 
 the ocean run dry. . . ." 
 
 " Is all Babylon preparing? " 
 
 " No. . . . Alas! this community is well-named. Though 
 there are many who are thoughtless, rather than wicked. 
 Many, indeed, in our own Congregational flock — ^almost half 
 — have been deaf to the words of our pastor." 
 
 " Mr. Sammis? " 
 
 " Aye. A wonderful, inspired leader. It was specially re- 
 vealed to him in a vision how we should all foregather on 
 Fire Island beach, there to await the final summons." 
 
 " And see the ocean run dry," Walt marveled. 
 
 " Day of wrath and day of burning! " 
 
 "Oh! ... I can't believe that! " 
 
38 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " Those who do not believe will be lost," declared Zophar 
 Wines sadly. 
 
 " Temperance, do you believe? " Impetuously asked. 
 
 Temperance Wines spoke in her contained, small voice 
 that had only one accent — inflexibility: 
 
 " Selah Mulford, the younger, is of little faith. He scoffed 
 openly. ... I have broken my betrothal with him." 
 
 Walt's chair grated noisily on the floor. He did not rise 
 but sat regarding her as if she had suddenly changed shape 
 to something inhuman. 
 
 " But— that isn't— why should you—? " 
 
 The end of the world, he reflected, had probably been 
 somewhat advanced as to day and hour for the younger 
 Selah Mulford. The first reaction to Temperance's dis- 
 closure was a recoiling as from an act of savage cruelty; 
 and yet this was no unusual manifestation of the Puritan 
 temperament. History, not to speak of legend, recorded 
 plenty of similar actions. . . . 
 
 How such conduct was to be conceived, imderstood, Walt 
 did not pretend to himself that he knew — not yet, not yet I 
 though he hoped to know, to understand in order to tolerate. 
 There were Puritans in the world and (he did not doubt) 
 they were somehow necessary to it, served some useful pur- 
 pose. He came back to an awareness of Zophar Wines's 
 tones: 
 
 "The young man was very violent, which showed the 
 devil that was in him and which he could not cast out." 
 
 " I must go see him! " Walt exclaimed. " Ohi the poor 
 fellow! Temperance, don't you know he loved you? " 
 
 A rebuking murmur came from her father. The full per- 
 
THE ANSWERER 39 
 
 sonal force of Walt, the strong, animal magnetism of the 
 young man facing her, had entered into his speech or else 
 had vibrated wordlessly in the space between them. For a 
 second the steel-blue eyes seemed to darken ever so slightly, 
 the long upper lip was noticeable. . . . Then she spoke, 
 perfectly-controlled : 
 
 " I was guided." 
 
 Walt broke loose. He turned on Zophar Wines. 
 
 " You all look for guidance — from outside, never from 
 within! I should think, if God were anywhere, he would 
 be within men. But you go outside. I should be afraid 
 of that; afraid I might be guided by devils of one sort or 
 another. Why, you are Christians, aren't you? Yes. And 
 it's all the other religions who look for guidance to outside 
 gods and devils and ghosts and men and women who have 
 died and what not. I thought the one thing marking a 
 Christian was, he believes that God is within men? " 
 
 He left the table abruptly, and the room; rushed out of 
 the house leaving his sapling-stick behind. Budded like 
 Aaron's rod, it had seemed to him, a few hours earlier, a 
 greater miracle. But now he felt sick — a, sick man in a 
 world grown wicked, a world shortly to be judged and the 
 greater part of it eternally damned. 
 
 8 
 
 Like most houses of its day, the residence of Zophar 
 Wines was almost on the edge of the sidewalk. Therefore 
 it befell that Walt's initial velocity carried him into heavy 
 collision with another and more feebly-moving body — a 
 body which seemed unfitted to sustain impacts. 
 
40 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " Gosh! . . . Forgive me! I'm sorry." 
 
 Selah Mulford, the younger, propped himself with his 
 hands, his legs remaining disjecta membra on the ground. 
 
 " Sorry? Sho'm I, sho'm I." 
 
 " Why . . . it's you, eh, Selah? " 
 
 "Name's Beelzebub," came a languid correction. 
 "Name's Beelzebub." With sudden energy: "Ever shee 
 me b'fore? I'm th' Prinshe of Dev'ls. H'lo, li'l Dev'l! " 
 He greeted Walt affectionately. 
 
 " Here." Walt was bending over, with gentle lifting tugs. 
 " Get up, Selah. You remember me, don't you? Walt? 
 Walt Whitman? " 
 
 "Thish th' end o' th' world," stated the sitter. "As 
 Beelzebub, Prinshe of Dev'ls, I'm here to claim my own." 
 
 He meditated, physically inert. 
 
 " I came here d'rect from my infernal abode (hiccough) 
 . . . wash prosheeding awright, revolvin' on m' own axshis 
 when — What, 'xshactly happened? " 
 
 " I ran into you — didn't see you — coming out of Mr. 
 Wines's house here." 
 
 A light of recognition dawned triumphantly. . . . Young 
 Mulford struggled to his feet. Swaying against Walt, he 
 proclaimed: 
 
 " Thash it — ^Winesh! Thash the countershine. Musht 
 remember t' give it when challengshe'. Come, have a 
 drink! " 
 
 I'm damned if I don't! was Walt's irmer reaction to this 
 invitation. As he hooked his arm in Selah Mulford's he 
 saw again the eyes of the girl. Temperance, like a sunless 
 
THE ANSWERER 41 
 
 winter morning. And the face, incapable of a smile; a little, 
 self-conscious blush was all it ever exhibited. . . . 
 
 The Woodchuck Hole, as the tavern was called, stood 
 hospitably open; there was a bustle about the bar due to 
 arrivals on the noon stages. Greetings fusiladed in Walt's 
 direction, with a few conmients on his escort. 
 
 " Well, ef here ain't Selah back agin! " 
 
 "Hello, thar— Hosanna! " 
 
 Hard cider, whisky and rum were offered to the thirsty. 
 It was before the day of beer; there were no light wines, 
 but Madeira or port was available for those who drank ex- 
 pensively. Walt and Selah took hot rum sweetened with 
 a drop of molasses. 
 
 " 'Pears to me half of Babylon's here." 
 
 Walt addressed the proprietor of the Woodchuck Hole, 
 who grinned as he replied: " This here new seck's been 
 won'erful for trade. There's three sets o' people. Some be- 
 lieves as how the end 0' everything's coming Saturday week; 
 some disbelieves it; some — and they're the biggest — allows 
 as they don't know but they're takin' no chances! They're 
 takin' a nip whilst they're sure of gettin' it. Mortal scared, 
 some on 'em are, too." 
 
 " I hear Mr. Sammis's preaching the end." 
 
 " Yep. But I ain't scoring up any liquor. Them as 
 drinks pays their money right down on the shelf! " 
 
 Walt finished his second glass of rimi. " Have 'nozzer," 
 Selah Mulford insisted heavily. But Walt shook his head 
 and took a fresh grip on his companion's arm. " Come on, 
 Selah, you've had enough. We've got to git! " 
 
42 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " Whash use goin' an3rwhere? " 
 
 "Well, the world ain't at an end yet! " 
 
 Amid some friendly derision Walt conducted the young 
 man outside, turning from the main street to a lane that led 
 south and ended, after they had made a slow progress of 
 less than half a mile, at the shore of the Great South Bay. 
 
 " Jump in! " 
 
 " Here . . . hoi' on, Walt! " 
 
 A brief struggle was followed by a prodigious splash. A 
 moment later the temporary Beelzebub was frantically 
 scrambling up the short piling that bulwarked the shore. 
 Walt fled like the wind. A dripping savage pursued, ^and 
 finally overtook him. They wrestled breathlessly. 
 
 " Damn you, Selah, you've got me all wet! " 
 
 Nothing could have exceeded in effectiveness the obvious 
 retort, except, possibly, the manner in which Selah made it. 
 
 9 
 
 This was a Thursday; the end of everything being still 
 nine days distant; and because it would never do to abandon 
 young Mulford in that time Walt dragged him with himself 
 over to the Great South Beach; and also because, on the 
 beach, there was no Woodchuck Hole and no sidewalk lead- 
 ing, past Zophar Wines's front door. 
 
 The season was rather unusually advanced; one got the 
 feeling of the approaching month as June, rather than May. 
 There was no longer the suggestion of ice along the ocean 
 shore, mornings; the dull, soft brown of the bayside 
 meadows gave a hint of changing color to pale, delicious 
 green. Hourly, it seemed, through the day flights of birds 
 
THE ANSWERER 43 
 
 streamed overhead, going northward. The sun, in any 
 shelter from the wind, poured down a heat not markedly 
 different from that of midsummer. Bracing weather, bracing 
 but perfect. . . . 
 
 The two young men, lightly provisioned, quartered them- 
 selves in one of the very few habitations on the beach, a one- 
 room shack put up for the use of fishermen. The long 
 stretch of sand dunes, never exceeding a half-mile in width, 
 separated from Babylon by seven miles of salt water, had, 
 in its incomparable loneliness and sea-born beauty, just 
 the effect upon Selah Mulford that Walt hoped for. The 
 Woodchuck — ^Walt's name for him — resumed his twenty- 
 year-old nimbleness. This boisterousness sometimes re- 
 lapsed into long periods of contemplation — " but not think- 
 ing very much about anything " — ^which better suited Walt's 
 own habit. At such times the two would thrash over their 
 problems. 
 
 "Walt I" 
 
 " Hi, Woodchuck! " 
 
 " Ever love a girl? " 
 
 " N-no. Not yet." 
 
 « Well— don't! " 
 
 " Not aimin' to." 
 
 " Oh . . . 'f course not. Fellow never is! I'm saying: 
 Don't." 
 
 " Ain't you over that by this time? " A little derisively. 
 
 The Woodchuck spoke with sudden vehemence: 
 
 " What in hell do you know about it, anyway? " 
 
 " What in hell made you ever think you was in love with 
 Temperance Wines — anyway? " 
 
44 THE ANSWERER 
 
 The patient sank back on the sand, his head pillowed on 
 his hands. Walt risked a cast: 
 
 " 'Twasn't anything she said or did, I bet." 
 
 " Mebbe not "—sulkily. 
 
 " Well, then, 'Chuck—" 
 
 The Woodchuck elevated himself; glared at his pesterer. 
 
 " 'F you want to know . . . Walt, it was the look of her 
 — something in her face, I can't describe it, makes you feel 
 as if she provoked you, like a flower out o' reach. I don't 
 mean she's pretty," he went on, " nor handsome. Tem- 
 perance's no beauty, only, there's that about her makes her 
 seem the only one of her kind. I guess you're imderstand- 
 ing what I mean," he finished, his keen eyes on Walt's con- 
 fessing covmtenance. 
 
 " But, 'Chuck, you ain't saying did you love her? " 
 
 The Woodchuck squirmed. " Ain't that love? " he de- 
 manded. " What — ^what is it, then " — ^rather feebly. 
 
 Walt mused. " 'Pears to me like — ^himting," he said. 
 
 " She's not that kind of a girl! " 
 
 " You mean you're not that kind of a fellow! " 
 
 " I ain't no worse'n you are, Walt Whitman! I'm a sight 
 better'n most of the fellows I know." 
 
 " There's something about a girl like Temperance," Walt 
 commented aloud, "raises the dickens in a man. ... So 
 almighty pure and cold! You wonder if you could make 
 her human. Ain't that so? " 
 
 " Guess that's so. But look here: You're not by way 
 of being fair. I didn't just think about Temperance like 
 that. I — ^I admired her — ^worshiped her, in a way! Always, 
 
THE ANSWERER 45 
 
 kept thinking: She's 'way above me in — ^in goodness. Any- 
 how things went, ske'd be right." 
 
 " Prop you up. I see. 'Stead of that, she knocked the 
 few remaining props right from under you." 
 
 "A-a-ahl You don't know anything about it! " 
 
 "I'm here to be set right, to learn," Walt submitted. 
 " I've a real, lively curiosity about something that might 
 happen to me, if not to-day, then to-morrow." 
 
 " It won't be the same with you. It isn't the same with 
 any two fellows, I bet. Besides, you're different from most 
 men." 
 
 " How? " Walt felt affronted. 
 
 " Oh, you — ^you love 'em all; love everybody; that satis- 
 ■fies you; your guts is different. Walt, you've no notion 
 what I've been through — helll I get so sick sometimes I 
 think the only way to be clean and halfway decent and get 
 back any self-respect is to — to marry some good girl — if 
 sbe'd have me -. . ." 
 
 He stopped, his teeth closing on bis lip, and two tears 
 rolled down his boyish face. Walt's eyes sbone, too, and 
 the look he gave the Woodchuck was a look of great love. 
 And with a gesture of his hand toward the other, Walt said: 
 
 " 'Chuck . . . don't I know! But you couldn't have 
 married Temperance Wines, not and been happy! Say, you 
 tell me if a girl like her who never felt a wicked impulse in 
 her life, mebbe — ^anyway an impulse she'd call wicked — 
 could make a wife, a wife, for a fellow like you — or me, or 
 most of us? It ain't reasonable. . . . You and I ain't got 
 the temperament to live that way. Why, all those sort of 
 
46 THE ANSWERER 
 
 people die in the performance of their dutyl — ^because what- 
 ever they do is a discharging of their duty, never a pleas- 
 ure, never a deep, joyous satisfaction." 
 
 " Read me something, Walt; or no, make up something 
 to recite. That'd be better." 
 
 " 'Chuck— I can't say the things I aim to say. Not yet." 
 
 " Go on! Say them anyhow! " 
 
 Walt propped his head in his hands, his elbows resting on 
 his knees. His eyes were fixed lovingly on Selah Mulford's 
 face. After a while his voice broke the silence between 
 them and imposed a tiny pattern of human words against 
 the steady intonations of the surf. 
 
 " A young man came to me with a message from his brother, 
 How know the message; how know that he came from his 
 
 brother — and my brother? 
 How know the whether and when of his brother? 
 Tell him to give me . . . signs. 
 
 "I stand before the young man face to face; I take his right 
 hand in my left hand, his left in my right hand, 
 And I answer for his brother and for . . . men ... I answer 
 for the Poet, and send these signs : 
 
 " Him all wait for . . . him all yield up to ... his word is 
 
 decisive. 
 Him they accept" — ^Walt gestured toward the ocean — ^"in him 
 
 lave . . . 
 Him they immerse, and he immerses them." 
 
 He stopped; his hands rested palms downward on the 
 sand; his body was immobile but the light in his eyes, some 
 strong radiation of physical health and magnetism proceed- 
 ing from him, held Selah Mulford in a thralldom of surprise, 
 an emotional vise so strong that the youth could not tell, 
 afterward, whether admiration or latent awe or a noble 
 
THE ANSWERER 47 
 
 curiosity made him powerless to do more than breathe 
 lightly. . . . Walt's voice was like a clear-toned bell: 
 
 " He puts things in their attitudes, 
 
 He puts to-day! out of himself . . . with plasticity . . . and 
 love . . . 
 
 What can be answered he answers, and what cannot be an- 
 swered he shows how it cannot be answered. 
 
 He is the . . . Answerer . . ." 
 
 Ceased the bell-like tones, ended the chant on that word 
 " Afisweiei " stressed so musically on the first syllable, fin- 
 ishing in a light rmirmur lost in the wash of waters just 
 beyond them. Walt leaped to his feet, stood erect, poised, 
 free, eagerly youthful, youthfully yearning. His flung-apart 
 arms fell, he dropped to the sand beside the other, clasped 
 him, exclaimed: 
 
 " Oh, Selah, if a man can only feel everything, he'll know 
 everything! And he'll be able to answer every unsatisfied 
 need of our natures! The rich, the poor, the ennui'd and 
 the lonely, the happy and the miserable, the chaste and the 
 soiled, the unclean — all, all will respond to him, and he to 
 them. He'll have his poems wrought not in words but in 
 lives, in human flesh and bone and nerves and red, pulsed 
 blood! He'll be an Answeiev. Oh, Selah, that's what I 
 want to be! " 
 
 10 
 
 But there were many, many hours in which it seemed to 
 Walt that he was only a carnal creature. The strength of 
 these lusts of the flesh frightened him; he was not different 
 from other young men in that satisfaction brought shud- 
 
48 THE ANSWERER 
 
 ders. The awful despondency from which not even the sym- 
 pathetic companionship of the Woodchuck could save him 
 finally provoked in Walt a spiritual rebellion. He said to 
 his comrade one day: 
 
 " 'Ghuck, it's no use; I'm bad, bad! Where I hoped there 
 might be some gold in my composition, I'm streaked with 
 clay instead. You know what I am; I don't see how you 
 can endure being with me. Tell me, now, how is it? " 
 
 The Woodchuck was embarrassed to find words. 
 
 " Well, Walt, whenever I go wild and start to wade across 
 the bay for liquor, you hold me back, don't you? You're 
 doing something for me! " , 
 
 " Trouble is, I can't do anything for myself." 
 
 Selah Mulford groped for a great truth; said finally: 
 
 " Walt! If you can do something for any one else, it's 
 tirne to quit worrying about yourself! " 
 
 " My Star and Garter! Guess you're right, 'Chuck. . . . 
 Must be nigh midday; the sun's high. And hot! What do 
 you say to a bath in the ocean? The water'U be like ice, 
 but there's no wind; weather's as warm as July, almost." 
 
 Leisiu:ely they stripped, picked their barefooted way care- 
 fully over broken shells and bits of splintered driftwood and 
 together, with a shout, ran with swashing strides down the 
 shelving lip of the sand until they stood waist-high in the 
 Atlantic. Though the day was windless, a tumbling, racing 
 surf remained from the southeasterly winds of several days 
 before. 
 
 The water, virginally green and blue, pricked like a thou- 
 sand needles. To escape its instant numbing effect Walt 
 and his comrade kept incessantly in the liveliest motion. 
 
THE ANSWERER 49 
 
 They danced, shrieked, pummelled each other; desisted to 
 duck a glittering comber; sprang to the summit of a breaker, 
 riding it for a second like seahorses until it flung them 
 sprawling on the slope of the shore. Then, breathless, faces 
 dripping and their eyes alone apparently alive in naked, 
 half-drowned bodies, the two lay still for an interval, re- 
 garding each other impenetrably. With a yell Walt leaped 
 toward Selah Mulford. Too latel In a twinkling there was 
 nothing but the sky and the ocean and the wide sand along 
 which, like reawakened figures from a frieze of Hellenic 
 sculpture, one beautiful Greek sped in pursuit of another. 
 
 Heads down, chests heaving, feet spurning the sand; dodg- 
 ing, twisting, turning; the faint whistling of breath inaudible 
 in the symphonic racket of the surf, neither of these primi- 
 tives caught sight of a company of people gradually assem- 
 bling on the crests of the dunes. They interlocked in strug- 
 gle; fell apart, exhausted; and were mute with astonish- 
 ment, gazing at each other, when there first came to them, 
 as from suddenly-opened heavens, the sound of voices, un- 
 accompanied by any instrument, lifted in song:; 
 
 " Thy kingdom come, O God ! 
 Thy rule, O Christ, begin 1 
 Break with Thine iron rod 
 The tyrannies of sin! 
 
 'Where is Thy reign of peace. 
 And purity, and love ? 
 When shall all hatred cease? . 
 
 The singers, clothed in white raiment, stood in a circle, 
 those nearest the ocean shore facing away from it. Walt 
 
50 THE ANSWERER 
 
 and 'Chuck, running, stooped, to the base of the dunes, be- 
 gan with frantic contortions to clothe themselves. 
 
 "We pray Thee, Lord, arise . . . 
 Revive our longing eyes, 
 Which languish for Thy sight." 
 
 The hymn tune, " St. Cecelia," virtually a plain chant, 
 carrying in its second bar a modulation to the dominant, 
 returning to the tonic for an exquisitely ascending petition 
 before the reposeful close, floated out over the vociferous 
 ocean and ascended to the blue sky in which the gold flame 
 of the sun burned with an unwavering radiance. The two 
 young men, as if arrested by the perception of something 
 bizarre yet touching, stood their ground, lips parted, eyes 
 downcast. 
 
 "O'er heathen lands afar 
 Thick darkness broodeth yet." 
 
 Afar, of course; and yet, somehow, just out of sight be- 
 yond the sparkling plain before them. Lands of strange 
 temples and fantastic towers, of men with hideous faces, 
 filed teeth, and women some of whom were completely veiled, 
 some wholly unclad. The fresh, salty air of the sea deserted 
 the nostrils which inhaled odious smells mingled with suave, 
 spiced incense. . . . The pure voices of the women among 
 the singers, clear-toned soprani, took up the last poetic 
 words in which the prayer of the hymn was consummated 
 and the faith of the petitioners most perfectly expressed: 
 
 "Arise, O morning Star, 
 Arise . . . and never set." 
 
THE ANSWERER 51 
 
 Walt and Selah Mulford exchanged inquiring looks and 
 nods. Then, without any words, they clambered up the 
 slope. 
 
 II 
 
 There were about half a hundred people, pretty evenly 
 divided between men and women with a sprinkling of chil- 
 dren; the band of Adventists was led by the Reverend Mr. 
 Sammis of Babylon; Zophar Wines and Temperance Wines 
 were among them. 
 
 All without exception were attired in white but the gar- 
 ment, long, loose and flowing, varied considerably as to cut 
 and material with the wearer. Some had apparently pro- 
 cured the finest linen; a few wore cheesecloth; the children 
 had not kept spotless and even some of the adults exhibited 
 rents and torn places where catbriar had caught them on 
 their way to the dunes. Well out on the bay the two boats 
 which had ferried over the pilgrims could be seen heading 
 back to Babylon. Noting this, the Woodchuck whispered 
 to Walt: 
 
 " D'ye suppose any of the crowd made a private arrange- 
 ment to return, Walt, just in case — " 
 
 Walt answered with a twinkle but nudged for quiet. The 
 Reverend Mr. Sammis was speaking: 
 
 " Dearly beloved brethren ... ye know that the Book 
 is sealed with seven seals . . . and it hath been foretold that 
 as the seals are opened there shall appear four horses with 
 riders ... on the white horse rides a conqueror, on the red 
 horse rides a slayer with sword, on the black horse is 
 mounted famine, on the pale horse rides pestilence . . . 
 
32 THE ANSWERER 
 
 then are the saints apparelled in their white robes; the 
 sixth seal being opened, there cometh a great earthquake; 
 the sun blackens, the moon is as blood; the stars fall to 
 earth as a fig-tree casteth her figs untimely when shaken of 
 a mighty wind; the heaven departeth as a scroll rolled to- 
 gether and every mountain and island is moved from its 
 place . . ." 
 
 The expressions on the faces ranged from entranced devo- 
 tion to sweat-pouring terror. A frightened child wailed at 
 even intervals; some trembled so they could not keep their 
 feet. Walt and his fellow clutched each other, watching, 
 listening, communicating by finger-grips their shared sense 
 of the futile agony of the scene. Then Walt, with a shove, 
 drew Selah Mulford away with him. In silence the two 
 youths dropped down to the ocean shore and stumbled off 
 toward the shack where they got their meals and slept. 
 Once, as they went, Walt stopped; seemed to be listening; 
 broke the quiet between them by throwing back his head for 
 a prodigious laugh. . . . 
 
 12 
 
 The Woodchuck looked at him with curiosity but Walt 
 offered no explanation of the laugh imtil bacon was sizzling 
 in the pan. Then, as he poured out cider for both, he ex- 
 claimed: 
 
 "To-night! To-night . . ." 
 
 He refused to explain further. Through the afternoon, 
 spent lounging on the ocean shore, they had an animated 
 and curious debate, " for," as Walt insisted, the corners of 
 his mouth twitching a little, " we must follow the great his- 
 
THE ANSWERER 53 
 
 torical examples in the presence of Eternity — Socrates, as 
 an instance. 'Chuck, consider that I am Socrates and have 
 drained the cup of hemlock, and shape your dialogue ac- 
 cordingly! Let us converse on a high plane! " 
 
 " Then, O Socrates, you do not regard death as the great- 
 est of evils? " inquired the Woodchuck, gravely. 
 
 " Aren't you forgetting my role? " asked Walt. " As So- 
 crates, it is my place to put the questions and trip you up 
 neatly on your answers." 
 
 " Forgive me, Socrates, and let me tell you that since you 
 have swallowed that stuff, death can have but small terrors 
 for you. For my part, I believe that it is easier to die than 
 to endure what we saw those people enduring this morning." 
 
 "You say well, 'Chuck — er — Chuckibiades; for the ter- 
 rors of anticipation exceed everything else. But tell me:; 
 You are youthful, high-spirited and turbulent, the cause 
 of many public scandals in Bab — er — ^Athens, Long Island. 
 Have you never thought that for excesses in one direction 
 we invariably pay by extortions in another? " 
 
 " No, I had not made that reflection, Waltias." 
 
 "Well, does it not strike you, Chuckophon, that these 
 people we saw have exceeded in the practice of some virtues 
 with the result that they have been deprived of other vir- 
 tues? " 
 
 " No doubt, Waltocles, but ought you not first to define 
 virtue in general and then give us full particulars? " 
 
 "Virtue," said Walt, abandoning his role and studying 
 a bit, " is — ^let me see. I'd say, Selah, that virtue in general 
 is the highest common human factor, the greatest thing pos- 
 sible to all men and women." 
 
54 THE ANSWERER 
 
 "The greatest good of which all men and women are 
 capable, you mean? " 
 
 "No! The greatest thing— positive trait or vital prin- 
 ciple — they are capable of asserting in their lives." 
 
 " Why not say: Virtue is the absence of vice? " 
 
 " What! Malie virtue merely negative, and vice the posi- 
 tive force? Certainly not! Why, Selah, isn't that just the 
 fatal error the churches, sects, so many religions fall into? 
 They make evil a positive, active power in the world; they 
 talk about righteousness but they make righteousness an 
 empty void, lifeless and deadly, a condition of ' thou shalt 
 not ' do this, that or t'other. Prohibition is, of itself, use- 
 less in a living world, Selah. It can never be extended to 
 cover all the positive, upspringing forms of life — ^weeds of 
 evil, if you like. Take Zophar Wines. There is a com- 
 mandment against theft but none against usury." 
 
 " He has cancelled all his mortgages." 
 
 " Good, good! At the end of his life, he has ceased to 
 rob, has made restitution as of May i, 1840, we will say." 
 
 " I see — ^pretty late to weed the garden! Some of the 
 weeds have seeded. . . . But I've heard you say you didn't 
 believe in consequences? " 
 
 " Not just that! I've said what we call ' consequences ' 
 are simply guesses, after all. There is a Law always work- 
 ing — ^but we don't know it." 
 
 " Shakespeare says, the evil that men do lives after them; 
 the good is oft interred with their bones." 
 
 " Shakespeare says what all men say in all circumstances, 
 even to contradicting themselves. You can no more ex- 
 
THE ANSWERER 55 
 
 press the whole truth in a quotation than you can achieve 
 perfection in a single human." 
 
 " Walt - . . you know, these days over here you've done 
 me a lot of good." 
 
 " 'Chuck, you're wrong! I've mebbe done you harm; if 
 there's good it's because you've done yourself good! To 
 live! After all, that's the only virtue, the only positive 
 trait, vital principle. On the way here I ran across a boy 
 and a girl " — ^he related, without reticence but with tender- 
 ness, the story of Jenny and Joel, finishing: " Jenny gave 
 herself, obeyed her instinct which was a pure instinct and 
 therefore infallible. Something positive, something lived, an 
 assertion of herself! " 
 
 " But suppose he had been another kind. . . . And you 
 tell me, Walt, you invited him to leave — run away with 
 you? " 
 
 " How sneaking that was of me, wasn't it? But, you see, 
 the evil I urged (evil, so-called) was a negative thing, power- 
 less in the presence of the genuine, vital, positive, assertive 
 good Jenny freely offered. The strength of virtue! Not in 
 innocence, or restraint . . . negation, withholding. It lies 
 in inspired, intuitive action, not reasoned, not bargaining, 
 but giving, giving! . . . from an inner fund of inexhaustible 
 good! " 
 
 13 
 They lay there and separately pondered. It seemed to 
 Selah Mulford that Walt had expressed the whole truth, ex- 
 pressed it dangerously, indeed, for its perception by many 
 intelligences — ^yet more completely than he had found it ex- 
 
S6 THE ANSWERER 
 
 pressed in anything his own twenty years had heard or read. 
 The undiluted truth, he thought he knew enough to assert, 
 would always be dangerous. Any man who handled it, 
 handled gunpowder. The truth, which alone could set men 
 free, could very likely only do so by destroying them and 
 all their world about them. The business of society was to 
 keep the powder well-damped, drying a little now and then, 
 permitting a slight evaporation so that a small amount of 
 the explosive might be used judiciously. . . . The Wood- 
 chuck's test of the truth of what Walt had said was to ap- 
 ply it, imaginatively, to his own case. He was certain that 
 if Temperance Wines could have once behaved as that girl 
 Jenny had behaved he, Selah Mulford, would have had to 
 respond to her as the youth Joel had responded — ^with the 
 gift of his whole soul. For it was her soul that Jenny had 
 given. . . . Preposterous? That was a word which could 
 only be applied by those who, having given nothing, having 
 received nothing, felt nothing. . . . 
 
 He looked at Walt, lying stretched on his back in the 
 shelter they had found at the foot of the dunes, and won- 
 dered about him. Wondered what would become of a man 
 so unusual, so strangely, richly endowed, so imafraid. He 
 was a genius, of course; and whatever happened he would 
 not remain obscure. Still, thought Selah Mulford, is it a 
 genius that the world can xise? 
 
 By his side Walt, sun-warmed and happy, was not think- 
 ing but attending absently to the soimd of the ocean. He 
 essayed, at first very unsuccessfully, to correlate the action 
 of eye and ear. The eye saw certain undulations, the ear 
 received various sounds. With words— poems— the effect 
 
THE ANSWERER 57 
 
 striven for was much the same. While the poet conjured up 
 a picture of a scene or person, he endeavored at the same 
 time and with an identical means, the words of his poem, to 
 enlist, soothe, or perhaps trouble, agitate, the hearing. The 
 problem was to make a pattern. . . . 
 
 People appreciated the smooth, regular sound of a water- 
 fall who heard only a confused noise in the ocean. They 
 liked stamped calicoes but could make nothing of a Turkey 
 carpet. Yet almost as quickly as they became familiar with 
 a pattern, they tired of it; wanted something more com- 
 plex, different, to which they could return for new surprises 
 and the constant re-discovery of order in apparent irregu- 
 larity. 
 
 Rhythm. . . . 
 
 It compassed all human existence as the sea engirdled the 
 main. Men explored Nature, seeking hidden patterns, ani- 
 mating rhythm; made laws . . . patterns; felt love . . . 
 perceived the most glowing thread in the pattern they were 
 studying, and followed it; were by faith enraptured . . . 
 faith in a pattern to be unriddled for them; could not even 
 conceive of their God apart from pattern, since they held 
 Him to have made them in His own image. 
 
 O! about all this there is something little and canting, 
 something less than human, something lifeless, dead, cramp- 
 ing as a cheap pattern! Let us, thinks Walt, concern our- 
 selves only with the animation, the large, loose, irregular 
 rhythm that underruns our world! How intolerable would 
 this ocean be if it echoed the same set of sounds, played ' 
 one fixed tune for the east winds, another for the west; if 
 its recitation were in iambic pentameters for simshine and^ 
 
S8 THE ANSWERER 
 
 muffled strokes, like a bell tolled, for storm! If one bark- 
 ened minutely, carefully — 
 
 So barkening, one caught brief, occasional regularities of 
 sound, recognizable rhythms but always detached, frag- 
 mentary, broken in upon, never allowed to become tagged or 
 tiresome. 
 
 He recollected with a sense of astonishment the times he 
 had raced up and down this beach or the equally lonely 
 beach at Coney Island declaiming to the surf and seagulls 
 by the hour — spouting Homer after the model of the prac- 
 tising Demosthenes, though doing it out of sheer exuberance, 
 thrill, and not to master any part of the art of the orator. 
 Jackass! 
 
 " 'Chuck! " 
 
 " Eh? " 
 
 " Demosthenes was a fool. The ocean's the only thing 
 worth hearing with a pebble in its mouth. Instead of spout- 
 ing just to hear himself talk, why didn't he listen? " A 
 pause. " He might have heard something " — ^in a whisper. 
 
 14 
 
 Over supper they were two harum-scarum boys again. 
 
 "To-night! " 
 
 " Well, what of to-night? You said that this afternoon. 
 Going to join the Adventists up there, on the dunes? " 
 
 " Follow me." 
 
 They went out into the darkness, a magnificent splendor 
 as palpable as noonday, pierced aloft with the prismed flame 
 of stars, thinned, whitened by the low line of the surf. As 
 yet, no moon. The shifting wind was now northwesterly. 
 
THE ANSWERER 59 
 
 but light, fitful. Walt, wetting his finger to detect the quar- 
 ter whence it came, gave a satisfied mxu"mur. " Pretty soon 
 'twUl blow." 
 
 " A great rushing wind . . . from Heaven ... to 
 cleanse an impure world." Selah Mulford's tone was half- 
 believing. 
 
 And for a moment they gripped each other, looking sea- 
 ward where a ghostly foam played. 
 
 " It's unreal, isn't it? " 
 
 " Ah, it's beautiful . . . has its own reality." 
 
 They tramped along at the base of the dunes. A figure 
 materialized out of the dusk in front of them. They came 
 close, peered, and Selah Mulford exclaimed: " Why, it's 
 Dan Dibble." 
 
 A pathetically disproportioned little man. He had 
 divested himself of the white robe of the Adventists, carry- 
 ing it, crumpled, in one hand. With the other he grasped 
 and held them, his skinny fingers gathering in the cloth of 
 their coats at the breast. The impression derived from the 
 little man's thickened speech was one of terror mixed with 
 unbelievable calculation. 
 
 " I see'd you," he declared confidentially to both the 
 young men. " First-off, I see'd Selah; then I reckernized 
 Walt, here. I guess you ain't expectin' anything to hap- 
 pen. The hour's three in the morning. Then a trumpet 
 blast'll sound. I don't know's I kin say's I really look for 
 ... It. But mebbe it's jest as well to be ready. Only, I 
 ain't ready. I — ^I've a good many sins on my conscience." 
 He must have been shaking, for his hand, grasping first one 
 then the other, trembled. " Ain't either 'f you making any 
 
6o THE ANSWERER 
 
 reckoning on the End? " He was obviously trsdng to see 
 their faces, read what they felt. 
 
 " No," they admitted. He seemed doubtfully relieved. 
 
 " Well, I had to git away " — ^as if an apology were called 
 for — " being as how it onnarves me so. Maybe I'll git back 
 to 'em 'fore three o'clock. I been clost to death onct or 
 twice and it didn't trouble me any; funny I feel so 'pset 
 about this, ain't it? Some 'f 'em seem right happy; look on 
 it as a deliverance out of their troubles. There's the Wid- 
 der Tabe, who was by way of losin' her homestead; Zophar 
 Wines was going to foreclose. Now he's cancelled the mort- 
 gage so she's safe whatever happens. Alsop Horton's get- 
 ting a riddance o' that shrewish wife o' his'n, for he figgers 
 either they'll be apart or else her nater'U be different. And 
 so forth." His tone throughout was serious. He sighed. 
 " Well, I won't detain you . . ." 
 
 He took a step, halted and came back to say in a lowered 
 voice: 
 
 " Likely the one for whom it's the greatest deliverance 
 out of her trouble is that daughter of Hannah Furrier's — 
 you know, Sarah; the omnarried one . . ." And left 
 abruptly. 
 
 Walt and Selah moved slowly on through the dusk. 
 
 "I can't sleep to-night; can you? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 A half-hour or so later, Walt was saying: 
 
 " It's a poor time to bring the world to an end — ^very 
 poor! Look at this country of ours. It hasn't yet lasted 
 out some men's lifetimes. There's old Rumsey Piatt, who 
 fought in '76. The life of a nation ought to exceed the long- 
 
THE ANSWERER 6i 
 
 est life of any man, ought to span a couple of centuries; 
 it can't be judged in less. These States are just an experi- 
 ment so far." 
 
 " The last trump, blowing now, would be an awful dis- 
 appointment to the Whigs. They're counting on Novem- 
 ber." 
 
 " If the last trump blows I hope the devil'U take both our 
 political parties! They're a perversion of democracy, they 
 cumber the earth 1 Our representative government is half 
 a century old, exactly, and already there's a parasitic 
 growth. . . . Spoils! Spoils of office! Why, Selah, there's 
 more than one lust that can canker society! I fear, yet 
 hope, for the success of our experiment. Look at all the 
 centuries behind us in which men had, for the most part, 
 only their private concerns, all public matters being beyond 
 their control or grasp. Only when misgovernment became 
 unendurable did they interfere, make public affairs their 
 affair. You know, in founding this nation, we as much as 
 said to ourselves that human nature could be changed — 
 could be broadened. The proverb is: What's everybody's 
 business is nobody's business. This republic asserts the 
 principle that what's everybody's business can be made 
 each individual's business. Can it? Ah, it's too early yet 
 to tell! I hope so — ^but I have fears about it. Why? Be- 
 cause men and women, so many of them, don't, can't, won't 
 manage their own affairs with wisdom. You think I mean 
 property? Well . . . perhaps I mean property, but 
 scarcely the kind you imagine. Not worldly goods; chat- 
 tels. No — Olives! There's only one kind of property as- 
 sured to each man and each woman, and that's a body and 
 
6a THE ANSWERER 
 
 soul (I don't like the habit of making a sharp division be- 
 tween the two; body and soul are fleshed together and no 
 real distinction between them is possible — ^wouldn't be use- 
 ful if we could make it). Do men and women take care of 
 the one precious thing that's theirs? do they procure healthy 
 bodies? perfect, expand their souls? How many? Even 
 in this grand, new country with all its breadth of outdoors 
 — mountains, waters, climates, forests, fertile soils — men and 
 women, too many of them, live by outworn customs, ape the 
 habits and thoughts of the past, deliberately, as it seems, 
 enslave themselves to all sorts of superstitions and think 
 the only kind of property worth having is the kind that's 
 outside themselves. ... To get that they will rob them- 
 selves! Ain't it foolish, damnable? to think a man would 
 rob himself, or a woman would rob herself, of health, hap- 
 piness, home-fruition, children, clean-souledness. a full and 
 vigorous enjoyment, feasting on life, to get something he or 
 she don't need? " 
 Incredulous contempt rang in Walt's voice. . , . 
 
 Sometime after midnight they approached cautiously the 
 dune of the Adventists. The moon was out, disclosing the 
 band very plainly. The embers of a small fire of driftwood 
 glowed in the center of an irregular circle of eleepers. For 
 one and all, wearied with a day- and nightlong vigil, men, 
 women and frightened children had sunk to rest. Rest? At 
 any rate they were motionless and some were unmistakably 
 past consciousness. Walt and the Woodchuck stood look- 
 ing at them for some time. 
 
THE ANSWERER 63 
 
 " What deviltry have you been meaning, all along, Walt, 
 with your 'To-night, to-night! ' D'you think to blow a 
 fish-horn along about three o'clock? " 
 
 " You come along, 'Chuck, over towards the bay side." 
 
 They worked their way through scrub and brush and 
 emerged on the edge of a sedge meadow. The fine grass was 
 still mostly the withered brown of last year's late growth. 
 Again Walt noted the direction of the wind, still northwest 
 but much stronger. Then he bent down and fired the 
 meadow. 
 
 " Wish I had a loud fish-horn, 'Chuck! " 
 
 But the Woodchuck, suddenly comprehending all, was 
 helpless with rather scandalized laughter . 
 
 A dense cloud of stifling smoke formed quickly and was 
 carried by the wind, mostly undiluted, directly over the 
 white-robed sleepers. The mischief-makers, scampering, got 
 to the vicinity of the dune in time to hear the first asphyx- 
 iated cough. Suddenly from the midst of the smoke-field 
 there came, in the recognized voice of Daniel Dibble, a loud 
 and clear pronouncement: 
 
 " Here we all are in hdl! " Then the conclusion, bitter 
 but philosophical — " jest as I expected! " 
 
 16 
 
 "I'd ought to be kicked." 
 
 Walt spoke penitently, yet he looked impenitent still, and 
 both he and Selah Mulford laughed when the Woodchuck 
 agreed: 
 
 "Yes, you ought. What say, I get Dan Dibble to do 
 it?" 
 
64 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " All is for the best in the worst possible world. That's 
 a reasonable conclusion to arrive at, ain't it? Zophar Wines 
 is clean-slated, able to start life afresh as an honest man; 
 the Widow Tabe has a roof that may leak but won't be 
 lifted imless by hurricane; even Dan Dibble's mind is 
 easier." 
 
 " How about Alsop Horton? Is he happier? " 
 
 " Who knows but his wif e'U cease to nag him, after this 
 ordeal they've gone through together? " 
 
 " What did the Reverend Sammis say whilst you talked 
 with him this morning, Walt? " 
 
 Walt's palm smote his thigh. He rocked a little. Then, 
 ynih seriousness: 
 
 "That's a wonderful man! I do admire that preacher! 
 It seems that he holds the end of the world did come, jest 
 as forecasted. Yes! He said to me, ' It looks like the 
 same world, but it ain't — isn't! ' He'd even preached a 
 short sermon to 'em, explaining that, as daylight was com- 
 ing on. He'd said: ' Brethren, I was wrong— we all were 
 wrong — in one sense; but in another and a better sense we 
 were right! The end of everything hasn't come in the man- 
 ner we persuaded ourselves it was coming. Why? I'm 
 convinced it's because we misunderstood what is meant by 
 the Second Coming. I'm convinced that what, all along, has 
 been meant is the coming of the Lord Christ into our human 
 hearts. I believe He has come, is coming, into the hearts 
 of all of us — ^will enter if we don't wilfully bar Him out. 
 And if that is so, then the world we knew has indeed come 
 %0 an end and a Judgment has taken place and a new Life is 
 
 ginning for each one of us. If that is true, and it rests 
 
THE ANSWERER 65 
 
 •with each one of us to make it true, then the thing for us 
 to do is to go back to Babylon and convince our neigh- 
 bors, by our daily lives and our every act, that something 
 more marvelous has happened than the thing we dreamed 
 of — and in this particular Change they will have to be- 
 lieve! ' 
 
 " I call that great gospel, great, great! " finished Walt. 
 
 He and the Woodchuck were again alone on the beach. 
 Boats manned by the curious and skeptical, appearing from 
 across the bay that morning, had ferried home the group of 
 Adventists. 
 
 " That explains why they none of them seemed shame- 
 faced or angry when they were loading. Mr. Sammis's good 
 talk must have plucked them up powerfully," commented 
 Selah Mulford. He added: " Well, here we are alone again 
 ■with a fine subject of conversation lost to us. Conversa- 
 tion? How long 've we been over here, Walt? This is the 
 tenth day, isn't it? By Jefferson! " 
 
 " What? " 
 
 " Here we've spent ten days together, with some down- 
 right outspokenness betwixt the two of us, but — Well! 
 All I can say is, I never in my life spent as long as ten hours 
 — out gunning or anything like that — ^with another fellow 
 or fellows and not been told a half-dozen smutty stories! " 
 He put his head to one side, adding quizzically: " Don't 
 you know any smutty stories? " 
 
 " I don't like 'em," Walt answered, shortly. " If others 
 want to tell 'em, they can (as you say, they mostly do). 
 Why the devil people can't think and behave candidly about 
 sex, is beyond me. Sex contains — ^all; body and soul; mean- 
 
66 THE ANSWERER 
 
 ings and proofs and purities. Don't you feel it so, 'Chuck? 
 I do believe the real impurity is of the mind; maybe it comes 
 of an undeveloped spirituality, the soul's arrested growth. 
 A man or a woman may commit an act impure (or so called) 
 and yet be and remain better, sweeter, more wholesome and 
 more honest! than another man or woman of irreproachable 
 conduct but diseased spirituality, soiled mind, dwarfed, 
 shriveled imagination." 
 
 " Oh, by the way, Walt—" 
 
 Selah Mulford checked himself, but soon went on: 
 
 "I didn't see anything of that girl Dan Dibble spoke 
 about last night, did you? " 
 
 " In the boatloads this morning? Who was she? " 
 
 " Sarah Furrier. She's the youngest daughter of old Han- 
 nah Furrier. You remember Dan Dibble said he guessed 
 likely the end o' everything would be a greater deliverance 
 for her than for most." 
 
 " I wouldn't know her," said Walt, thoughtfully, " un- 
 less — Dibble's tell would ... be enough to go on. Wasn't 
 she with her mother? " 
 
 " Hannah Furrier wasn't along." 
 
 " Sammis — ^he'd look after her." 
 
 " He might have overlooked her absence. You see, Walt, 
 t — ^I don't believe very many know, yet. . . ." 
 
 " You think she wasn't with 'em this morning? " 
 
 "I'm sure of it." The Woodchuck spoke with formed 
 conviction. " I looked 'em all over, interested to see how 
 they were taking things. Lord, Walt! You don't suppose 
 any thing's happened to her, do you? She can't have stayed 
 here on the beach, can she? " 
 
THE ANSWERER 67 
 
 The thought intimidated them both, stood in their eyes. 
 Walt spoke quietly: 
 
 " We'll have to search and make sure. She couldn't have 
 ... in the disappointment — But we won't talk, we'll 
 travel! " 
 
 The quest was never begun. A sound outside the door 
 made them turn. The girl, Sarah Furrier, appeared framed 
 in the doorway, gave a dismayed sound at the sight of them, 
 tried to steady herself with one hand and collapsed on the 
 sill before Walt's quick leap covld bring his arm about her. . 
 
 17 
 
 She was conscious as they lifted her up, her eyes wide with 
 anguish, and after they had laid her on the shakedown bed 
 she began quietly sobbing. The Woodchuck, male and help- 
 less, stood awkwardly looking down at the girl; but Walt 
 exhibited an instant gentleness and tenderness like a wo- 
 man's. He sat beside the bed, on the floor, and took and 
 held her hand; his gray-blue eyes, clear, direct and unwav- 
 ering, fastened on hers. After a while her sobs ceased, the 
 long-lashed lids drooped. But Walt made very sure she 
 was soumdly asleep before he disengaged her hand and rose 
 to his feet noiselessly, beckoning to Selah Mulford. They 
 tiptoed outside and whispered. 
 
 " What'll we do with her, Walt? " 
 
 " Take her home as soon as she's slept and had a bite to 
 eat. I want to talk with her — can maybe help her a little." 
 
 " Gosh almighty! / couldn't talk with her; it's as much 
 as I can do to look at her. Don't believe I could look in 
 those eyes, square. They — they make a fellow feel as if he 
 
68 THE ANSWERER 
 
 were somehow guilty, as if he were to blame for all the 
 wickedness all men ever did." 
 
 " It's not Sarah Furrier looks at you from those eyes, 
 Selah, but a creature unmercifully dealt with. You may 
 see the same look in the eyes of a dying doe or in the eyes 
 of a child who doesn't understand his punishment. It's the 
 hurt — too often mortal — to the soul." 
 
 " The fellow ought to be killed! " 
 
 " That doesn't go deep enough. She must be encouraged 
 to live! . . . don't you see? " 
 
 "No, damn me if I do! " exclaimed the Woodchuck, 
 wrathfuUy. " What's life going to hold for her hereafter ex- 
 cept pain and misery and disgrace and sorrow? " 
 
 " A child." 
 
 " And what'U life hold for her child, tell me? " 
 
 " Love. . . . That's all life holds for any of us, when 
 you stop to think, isn't it so, Selah? " 
 
 i8 
 
 After a few hours she awoke. The completeness of her 
 exhaustion had been overcome, and a little food revived her 
 further. She sat, her eyes fixed on Walt's with a look that 
 had regained something of her own personality. He held 
 her hand lightly closed in his own. They were alone, Selah 
 Mulford having made the excuse that he would get the small 
 boat ready. 
 
 "You wandered away from the others early this morn- 
 ing? " 
 
 " I — I couldn't bear the disappointment. To know I had 
 to go on living! to face ... to go through with— it — I 
 
THE ANSWERER 69 
 
 thought I would drown myself. I walked down to the ocean 
 . . . but as I stood looking at the water, I knew I couldn't 
 go through with that, either." 
 
 The words were produced with difficulty. The look of 
 anguish flitted across her eyes. 
 
 " Isn't it likely — now — the worst is all over? " he asked 
 gently. " We don't live through any experience twice; and 
 what's been lived through has been lived through." 
 
 She was silent, but her eyes seemed to draw strength from 
 the steadiness of his. 
 
 " He knows? " She nodded. 
 
 " And has offered to do nothing? " A second nod. 
 
 Walt considered; said, in an even tone: 
 
 " Perhaps he can be persuaded to offer something." 
 
 " No! " burst from her. " He never pretended he loved 
 me." Her tone was stricken. " I thought I loved him, un- 
 til I told him and he denied . . . then I knew I didn't love 
 him. It was just as if he were dead and buried, and . . . 
 the other one wasn't here yet to love. Will I love it? How 
 can I? " A shudder took her. 
 
 " Steady! " Then when she was controlled: 
 
 " Love it? You've got to love it so boundlessly, the world 
 will seem bright to it. Your love has got to guard and pro- 
 tect . . ." 
 
 A returning hail proclaimed that the little catboat was 
 ready. 
 
 The sail across was marked by desultory talk between 
 Walt and Selah Mulford. At Babylon, Walt took Sarah 
 Furrier home. 
 
 Hannah Furrier looked at the young man with acute sus- 
 
70 THE ANSWERER 
 
 picion. But those gray-blue eyes were disarmingly inno- 
 cent . . . unnoticing; the voice was merely careless-courte- 
 ous. 
 
 " Brought your daughter home safe and soimd, Mrs. Fur- 
 rier! So much excitement and confusion this morning the 
 boats got off without her." 
 
 Hannah Furrier replied amiably. . . . Mr. Whitman, the 
 one that had taught school here two winters back, to be surel 
 . . . always seemed a respectable, nice young man. 
 
 19 
 
 " Good-by, 'Chuck." 
 
 " Good-by. . . . Where you heading for, Walt? " — ^asked 
 wistfully. 
 
 Walt looked puzzled; shrugged, and laughed. 
 
 "Wish I knew, 'Chuck! Or — no. Guess I'd rather be 
 spontaneous; surprise myself. I've a thought of going east 
 a ways, might even revisit Montauk. You sure you won't 
 come? " 
 
 The eyes in the clean, idealistic face of Selah Mulford 
 were slightly somber; had lost their usual look of compre- 
 hension replied to by a light defiance of things seen. One 
 foot, pivoted on the heel, turned slowly, crushing gravel. 
 
 " Something I've got to study out here." 
 
 Their hands had been lingering in a farewell clasp. They 
 exchanged a direct gaze. Suddenly they clung together, 
 kissed and swiftly separated. Walt struck east with gather- 
 ing strides. At the bend of the road he looked back, waved 
 and shouted. 
 
 Selah Mulford answered the gesture but not the hail. 
 
THE ANSWERER 71 
 
 When, half a moment later, the road was empty except for 
 a handful of stirred-up dust now settling back into place, he 
 turned and walked steadily imtil he came to Hannah Fur- 
 rier's cottage. The struggle that was going on in him seemed 
 to be intensified at the sight of the low-roofed cottage, close 
 to a patch of tall, smooth-columned pine trees like an im- 
 provised chapel erected as an adjunct of a natural shrine. 
 The image pleased him, for he had come with the intention, 
 nascent but emerging, of offering sanctuary. At the thought 
 he was both exalted and terrified. 
 
 He tried, as he walked past, to review the situation with 
 a certain calculated clearness. Since those hours yesterday 
 his mind had scarcely left the subject of Sarah Furrier. It 
 had never occurred to him to think of her abstractly. His 
 mind had been fixed quite steadily on her person. The look 
 in her eyes when she had first confronted Walt and him- 
 self. Her undeniable prettiness, which had now taken on 
 an aspect strange to his lifelong glimpses of her, so that 
 she appeared no longer a distinctly pretty girl but a woman 
 of a quite inexplicable and impossible sort of beauty. 
 Through a sleepless night his new vision of Sarah Furrier 
 had steadily elaborated itself. 
 
 He remembered her as a shy thing, not at all the kind 
 to encourage advances. He supposed that, if she had a 
 lover, or if one came to her in the role of a lover, all the 
 generous instincts in her must probably have been set vibrat- 
 ing with such violence as to alter the whole pitch of her 
 nature. She would never be the same again, but it might 
 very well be that the tone of her, nerves re-strvmg and her 
 emotions retuned, would be better, more golden, with a 
 
72 THE ANSWERER 
 
 fuller resonance and a surer octave. The young man in- 
 dulged in this figure from an intuitive comparison with the 
 violin which he sometimes played at home, but very un- 
 satisfactorily. It was a Cremona instrument, acquired over 
 a century earlier by an ancestor whose mercantile enter- 
 prises had necessitated many visits to Genoa and whose 
 Italian wife, of the family of the Marchesi Brignole, may 
 have infused into the English strains of the Mulfords that 
 touch of unrest and desire which alters temper into tem- 
 perament. 
 
 Temper is fixed, but it was through the medium of 
 his own special temperament that Selah Mulford saw Sarah 
 Purrier. And so seen she had become to him, overnight, 
 perplexingly, tormentingly desirable. He was aware, though 
 only faintly, of the sensuous appeal she had for him; what 
 really weighed was a complicated tissue of emotional con- 
 ceptions threatened by conventional doubts which he hated 
 even as he forcedly entertained them. Who was the father 
 of her child? As if that could matter in the light of his 
 new insight upon her! Did he love her? If not, why was 
 he suffering now? and what was the meaning of this uncon- 
 trollable impulse to offer sanctuary? Why this exaltation at 
 the thought of her consenting? of embracing her? and why 
 the terror lest the dominant impulse moving him be only 
 a brief assertion of the instinct of nobility and a sentimental 
 satisfaction of the instinct to sacrifice? In a flash of pro- 
 founder self-understanding he saw himself as merely a vic- 
 tim of circumstances — a youth depressed by his own weak 
 indulgences, numbed by the misadventure of his betrothal 
 to Temperance Wines, revived, warmed by his contact with 
 
THE ANSWERER 73 
 
 Walt and flung in all his helplessness into this desperate 
 but beautiful adventure. He saw this, but yet not even : 
 all this mattered. . . . 
 
 He had passed the cottage and, unconsciously turning, 
 had come back and now found himself in front of it again. 
 A figiure stood alone under the pines. 
 
 His hand lifted the latch of the gate. A shadowy realiza- 
 tion of how communicatively he must explain came over 
 him. With Temperance, there had been no need to ex- 
 plain; expression was impliedly an impropriety. But this? 
 
 His memory roused, as if summoned to help him in a 
 supreme moment. It echoed words of a few days before: 
 
 " He puts things in their attitudes, 
 
 He puts to-day! out of himself . . . with plasticity . . . and 
 love . . . 
 
 What can be answered he answers, and what cannot be an- 
 swered he shows how it cannot be answered/' 
 
 There was that, then, to do . . . this day and forever 
 more. 
 The gate swung open. 
 
 20 
 
 The lesson of the open road, as Walt saw it this JMay 
 morning, was one of reception without either preference 
 or denial. " They pass — I also pass — none can be inter- 
 dicted." The road had a cheerful voice and a man might 
 travel on it to the end of his days, right happily. 
 
 Ah . . . and will I? he wondered. 
 
 " Don't venture ... if you leave me you are lost! " 
 
 He cast a quick glance about him. No one in sight. 
 But whose voice, then, had spoken? 
 
74 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " I am already prepared ... I am well-beaten . . . 
 safe." 
 
 What the devil! Did the road from Babylon lead to 
 Damascus? Was this cheerful voice of the road with its 
 gay, fresh accent and its easy sentiment the summons to 
 repentance? It plainly urged him to stifle his inclination 
 to divagate, to strike off over a bit of untraveled country, 
 an impulse he was continually obeying for a purpose he was 
 far from being clear about. Those who wished to arrive 
 anywhere in the world took care to stick to the well-beaten 
 road. 
 
 " I am not afraid to leave you," he said aloud, but inde- 
 cisively. 
 
 The highways of existence led to a comfortable and pros- 
 perous termination, he supposed. They proceeded through 
 one of the many descriptions of love or lust by way of 
 marriage and regularized industry to the goal of a wife, 
 a habitation and accumulated moneys; but chiefly to the 
 goal of an indestructible self-satisfaction. This was not to 
 say it was always easy traveling — one usually encountered 
 bad going and large numbers found the highway impass- 
 able. The one supreme advantage accruing to each road- 
 taker and road-sticker was that nobody ever prosecuted him 
 for trespass. He might be balked or helped, in distress or 
 breakdown be left unaided, the right of way might be 
 denied him unless and until he asserted and forced it; but 
 he never had to be forgiven. 
 
 Forgiveness was the one quality that man collectively 
 could not feel. A man might forgive his brother, a woman 
 her sister; but men could not forgive their road-departing 
 
THE ANSWERER 75 
 
 brothers; women were incapable of extending to their errant 
 sisters the absolution of forgiveness. 
 
 Then, since he who wandered would not escape a sen- 
 tence and its fulfilment, how strong must be the inner 
 compulsion upon him to make him deliberately abandon 
 the main-traveled road! 
 
 All this, he assured himself in a reflective interval, was 
 not just idle theorizing nor fanciful speculation. Soon, on 
 the last day of this Fifth Month, 1840, just beginning, 
 Walt Whitman would be twenty-one. As the custom of 
 the country and period stood, he would then be very defi- 
 nitely a full-grown man. Physically he had reached his 
 good height and maturity a half-dozen years since. Men- 
 tally he still felt very much unfledged, though conscious 
 of a development beyond that of the run of twenty-one- 
 year-olds. Emotionally he was aware of being specially en- 
 dowed; though this was a doubtful advantage and one too 
 readily operating as a handicap. Emotion, in the fullest 
 sense, was a freight of quicksilver, always spiUing and dart- 
 ing in a thousand directions, forever luring the carrier off 
 the smooth, recognized road and into ditches and past no- 
 trespass signs. 
 
 At twenty-one and at least half the time before reaching 
 twenty-one most men of his generation had married, were 
 regularly occupied and had acquired or were acquiring a 
 home. He, Walt Whitman, was none of these nor with 
 the prospect of any of them. 
 
 Not that this irked him. It was not that. But the road, 
 with its high signification of one accepted route, had set 
 him thinking. He felt (and therefore knew with the only 
 
76 THE ANSWERER 
 
 sure knowledge, certitude) that he must give the problem 
 fairest consideration. 
 
 The first milestone on the road was marriage. 
 
 Very many of the men and women of my time, reflected 
 Walt, look upon marriage simply as a means to an end. 
 I think they are right; for those who take that view, un- 
 doubtedly that is all marriage is or can be. Every man 
 and woman strives for self-satisfaction and for most men 
 and women self-satisfaction is derived from a tolerable part- 
 nership, cohabitation, the mutually constructed home, chil- 
 dren, the owned bit of ground and well-constructed house, 
 money or other reasonable bulwarks securing the comfout 
 of old age. That is good, sound, healthful! No thing 
 finer than this, the lived Poem of average lives! 
 
 With a lesser number, marriage is an end in itself. They 
 are those who love, like the boy Joel. . . . Marriage, so 
 felt, must be a life-long ecstacy, an unfolding flower, the 
 renewed sound of the loveliest music. There will always 
 be a freshness about it. It will be like this morning for 
 wonder and like the sound of the ocean for praise. All 
 the usual offices of life will be performed and all the ends 
 so valued by most men and women achieved — or if any 
 are neglected, go unarrived at, they never have had signifi- 
 cance and cannot have any. 
 
 He compared the two journeyings to travel by land, 
 always comfortably in sight of dependable landmarks, and 
 deep-sea voyaging where the shifting stars, the shape of 
 the earth, the service of the winds were solely to be relied 
 on, where the repose of the soul was in faith, in the sub- 
 
THE ANSWERER 77 
 
 stance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not 
 seen. . . . 
 
 And in the full flood of poetic thought, the crest of the 
 great wave of emotion, Walt thought: I must embark on 
 the deep-sea voyage! Let me only love! and let me but 
 fix upon a single object of all the inexhaustible and pure 
 feeling I know to exist within me! Let me think, believe, 
 that a woman waits for me even as I seek imweariedly 
 for her. . . . Let me but find her, losing not an in- 
 stant. . . . 
 
 His wistfulness was so great upon him that he walked 
 the road unevenly, with a lagging step and fingers that 
 closed and unclosed and a mouth not steady, He felt a 
 sense of hunger and a sense of pain. 
 
 The thought of Esther Terry came upon him so suddenly 
 as to blur things before his eyes. 
 
 21 
 
 He had to give up, and sat down by the roadside, feeling 
 faint and diz2y. 
 
 Why had he not thought of the daughter of Freegift 
 Terry before? He, who had spent that whole past winter 
 teaching in the valley where was her home, who had lived 
 for the last month in that home? How explain it, this 
 blindness? or how account for it, this instant's revelation? 
 
 She was seventeen, he, twenty-one. Her face, her whole 
 person, reproduced itself before him. He saw the blue 
 irises of her eyes, each flecked with golden-brown so that 
 in the sunlight they lost their naive and timid look and 
 
78 THE ANSWERER 
 
 appeared to dance, though veiledly. The slight rounded- 
 ness of her shoulders appealed for pillowing on a firm young 
 breast and the smooth shapeliness of her forearm was made 
 to clasp about her lover's bared throat. And all that coiled, 
 saddle-colored hair. . . . 
 
 He checked himself, flushing. 
 
 Of her face, the modeling of the features, he remained 
 uncertain; but she had the frank smile that had made him 
 love the boy Freegift, youngest of her three brothers but 
 older than she. She had no sisters. 
 
 She was more intelligent than her brothers, or no, per- 
 haps not that, but she had seemed more perceptive in his 
 relations with the family; it had been easier to kindle her 
 interest than that of the others in the things that interested 
 himself — themes of outdoors and themes brought up by the 
 few books Walt had and sometimes read from, aloud. She 
 was seventeen, a farmer's daughter not living in any of the 
 villages; certainly a year at the most would see her be- 
 trothed, probably married — settled down, beginning to travel 
 the well-beaten road. ... It would make, at the outset of 
 her journey, any^pay, a difference to her with whom she 
 traveled. 
 
 Here and now Walt felt for the first time the pitch of 
 compassion, which is the pity that understands and, sharing 
 a level lifts it to be a summit. Compassion, as ever with 
 youth, imaccompanied by resignation; compassion, with 
 quiet acceptance or rebellious defiance, unvaryingly sublime. 
 . . . Compassion, that brings a man and a woman together 
 and then sets these twain forever apart. . . . 
 
THE ANSWERER 79 
 
 It was not a question of whether he could love her, but 
 only of whether his love could come to her. 
 
 At once he felt the supreme hopelessness of making her 
 feel his love and the vast incertitude of whether she could 
 love him. 
 
 An abyss opened, Was he right? Was this love? Was 
 he merely the victim of his own emotional nature. Some- 
 thing, perhaps the very intensity of what he had been feel- 
 ing, flung him down from an immeasurable height. He was 
 left stunned. 
 
 After a while he rose, stood up straight and looked at 
 the broad and pleasant road — ^vista — ahead of him. It led 
 somewhere. But there was a finer thing, the joy, the 
 preciousness of making the journey together. 
 
 Tears came to his eyes; the immense wistfulness, the 
 acute shock, the devastating sense of loneliness felt for the 
 first time he could ever remember, the torture of uncer- 
 tainty all descended on him, seemed to strike at his heart 
 and brain. And yet he felt not an impulse to return to 
 the valley, but a terror lest he were still too near to it. 
 He had to set his teeth, as he went on eastward, to keep 
 from running — running, running, till he could run no more. 
 
 22 
 
 Not to hail another wayfarer, or respond to salutation, 
 was to stir suspicion. In succession Walt fell in with a 
 hare-brained youth who had been digging in different spots 
 on Long Island in search of buried treasure; a negro slave 
 fugitive from South Carolina but here able to go about 
 
8o THE ANSWERER 
 
 openly; a Whig politician (middle-aged, paunched and in- 
 cessantly taking snuff so that he sneezed and lost the im- 
 portant words in anything you said); and a handsome 
 young fellow, bronzed and earringed, who was heading for 
 Sag Harbor to sign for a whaling cruise. 
 
 Conversation was reduced to that lowest common de- 
 nominator, the weather and crop prospects, but after a 
 while the treasure-hunter declared: 
 
 " Good country, this Island; yet I'm hankering to get 
 back to lUynoise." 
 
 " You from Illinois? " asked Walt, interestedly. 
 
 "Yep; from Springfield. It's the capital. Say, you 
 ought to see otir State! We've got room!" 
 
 "Achoo! What you come back here for, then? " the 
 Whig inquired. 
 
 " So that's what a sneeze sounds like! I ain't heard 
 one in years. Out West it's so vast you can't hardly hear 
 anything unless a man's making a political speech." 
 
 "Tippecanoe and Tyler too!" chanted the Whig piously. 
 
 " That's what old Abe was talking, last I saw of him," 
 mused the Illinoisan. 
 
 "Who?"— from Walt, 
 
 " Fellow named Lincoln — ^Abe Lincoln. Friend o' mine 
 out in Springfield. He ain't really old, not more'n about 
 thirty. We just call him that. Fact is, Abe's got the 
 oldest-lookin' face ever was seen on a yoimg man. It's sort 
 of furrowed, like plowed-up land. We-l-ll " — in a thought- 
 ful drawl — "there was a girl he met some years ago back 
 there in New Salem, and she took and died. I d' know's 
 it's to be wondered at if Abe is Abe. . . ," 
 
THE ANSWERER 8i 
 
 "What's he do; I mean, what's his line?" asked the 
 Whig, recovering from fresh attacks of snuff. 
 
 "Abe's a lawyer; he's in the Illynoise Legislature." 
 
 The politician shook his head. "Never heard of him," 
 he remarked indifferently. 
 
 Walt thought he would ask the Illinoisan more about that 
 other fellow later. So the girl had died ... his thought 
 rested for a moment on Esther Terry, but only lightly. 
 The sweat he had been in a half-hour earlier was over; and 
 if he could not think of love without incertitude, death was 
 a thing that had no reality at present. Surprisingly the 
 voice of the earringed young sailor rang out: 
 
 "You were talking about your vastnesses out West — 
 you, there. Go afloat with me and I'll show you a plain 
 that swamps yoiu^ prairie! " 
 
 " No money in that," came the retort. " I'd sooner 
 look for pirate treasure on Long Island than for a needle 
 in a haystack; and for a needle in a haystack than for a 
 whale in the ocean." 
 
 "No money, eh? That's because you've never seen a 
 payday at the end of a three-year voyage with all hands 
 sharing in the profits! " 
 
 All this while th'e fugitive slave had kept with them in 
 pedestrian silence. Now, however, with the whites of his 
 eyes showing, he asked the sailor: 
 
 " Is mebbe chance for black man, suh, on bo'd ship- 
 whaler? " 
 
 " Why not? New Bedford's full of South Sea Islanders— 
 Fijians and Erromangoans and the devil knows who not. I 
 was up there to get a berth; stopped o'ernight at the 
 
82 THE ANSWERER 
 
 Spouter Inn and the landlord says: ' I'll have to sleep ye 
 with another. Ye haven't any objections to sharing a har- 
 pooneer's blanket, have ye? ' I had an objection to shar- 
 ing anybody's blanket, but 'twas no go; and may I never 
 have been a school teacher if the fellow didn't turn out 
 to be a tattoed cannibal! " 
 
 " You must 'a' stood about as much chance of sleep as 
 a stump-tailed bull in fly time," compared Walt, adding: 
 " But you say you've taught school? I've been doing that. 
 My name's Whitman — ^Walt Whitman." 
 
 "Herman Melville. Where do you belong to?" 
 
 " Here. I was born over on the north shore. You? " , 
 
 "You're a Long Islander, I'm a Narrow Islander. Be- 
 hold, sir, a native of the insular city of Manhattoes, anno 
 Domini 1819." 
 
 " So! We're the same age." 
 
 " And if I'm not mistaken " — the sailor was regarding 
 Walt keenly — " of somewhat the same temper." 
 
 " I like — ^people. Think I should probably have been 
 quite fond of your cannibal companion." 
 
 "Why, I grew to be — not too close. New Bedford's 
 a sweet place, full of maples — ^long avenues of green and 
 gold. In August grand horse-chestnuts flower forth, like 
 colossal candelabra all lighted." 
 
 " Oh, how good an image! " Walt exclaimed. " Do you 
 write? You must! I've a yearning to, myself, one day." 
 
 "Aye, I'll be having some yarns and some thoughts to 
 put on paper, later," was the reflective answer. "Have 
 you read Emerson's Nature?" — ^with a swift glance. 
 
 "Haven't I! 'The sun shines to-day also,'" quoted 
 
THE ANSWERER 83 
 
 Walt. "There's the man and the voice for this country; 
 of ours! " 
 
 "I heard Father Taylor preach at the sailors' Bethel 
 in Boston and talked with him afterward. He says Emer- 
 son is ' one of the sweetest souls God ever made, but he 
 knows the New Testament no more than Balaam's ass knew 
 grammar.' I remarked that Balaam's ass seems to have 
 made himself imderstood, spite of grammatical deficiencies. 
 There'll be those who will imderstand Emerson, too." 
 
 " Understand him and love him! " 
 
 " A man named Hawthorne up that way I took a strong 
 liking to," continued Melville. " Shy, solitary; bent, he 
 says, upon learning how to write. He has done some 
 stories which he calls Twice-Told Tales, very delicate but 
 beautiful. Says himself they are ' flowers which blossomed 
 in too retired a shade.' " 
 
 " That sounds like Edgar Foe." 
 
 "I think the two have something in common, though 
 I am pretty sure they do not know each other, only each 
 other's work. Yet it's imlikely Foe has read anything of 
 Hawthorne's." 
 
 " What do you make of Foe? " 
 
 "Why, not much. Too unhealthy. I've seen him once 
 or twice in New York. It's a face without sunlight." 
 
 " Is he the fiend you hear about? Or just a being cursed 
 with his own nature, like Burns? Yet there's much that's 
 healthy and fine in Burns's songs." 
 
 " Foe's no fiend, but it may be there's a curse upon him. 
 I don't share your taste for Burns. Up Boston way they're 
 all by way of forming a new group, intellectually speak- 
 
84 THE ANSWERER 
 
 ing. Emerson fathers it, spiritually — ^Emerson and Carlyle, 
 whom he makes so much of — ^but stands aloof from the 
 others, like Bronson Alcott, who are all for practical de- 
 tails — practical or impractical, I'm sure I don't know 
 which. There is talk of a convention to be held in Bos- 
 ton to settle something, nobody knows just what, or rather, 
 no half-dozen agree. Some want Abolition, some a new 
 religion, others to confiscate land. Hawthorne told me 
 that even Emerson admitted there were ' madmen, mad 
 women, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come- 
 Outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day Baptists, Quak- 
 ers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and — ^philoso- 
 phers.' " 
 
 Walt threw back his head in hearty laughter. The 
 man from Illinois, overhearing in spite of the Whig poli- 
 tician's nasal interruptions a part of the catalogue, ob- 
 served: 
 
 " Out West we say: ' I'll try anything once.' " 
 
 " By the shade of John Harvard! " retorted the sailor. 
 " That's nothing. Up Boston way they're in the mood 
 to try everything at once! " 
 
 " All this nonsense about AboHtion is bad for the coun- 
 try," declared the Whig politician, shortly. 
 
 " What's good for humanity can't be bad for any coun- 
 try "—from Walt. 
 
 "Humanity be hanged! We've got to think of the 
 United States." 
 
 "There will be plenty to say that in this centtiry and 
 the next century — in every century," Walt answered. " But 
 
THE ANSWERER 85 
 
 America means opportunity. Opportunity, like charity, be- 
 gins at home; shall it stop there? " 
 
 The Whig said sententiously: " Slavery is an institu- 
 tion." 
 
 " So was King George III. But we got rid of him." 
 " An unhappy parallel. After all, when you destroy 
 slavery you abolish a right in private property. . . ." 
 The two argued for some time, Walt affirming finally: 
 " 'Tis hopeless, our talking, hopeless! The deeper we 
 get, the farther we go apart. Institutions are little to me; 
 men and women are everything! . . ." 
 
 23 
 
 Toward noon the group disintegrated, the Whig stopping 
 at a roadside tavern, the treasure-hunter striking off on 
 a road south with the plan of crossing the bay that after- 
 noon, and the fugitive negro going with him as far as 
 the old manor of the NicoUs, where freemen of his race 
 awaited him. Melville and Walt made a meal by the 
 wayside, each having bread, cheese and cider with him. 
 Then they lay stretched in the shade of a hoUowed-out 
 boundary ditch and compared enthusiasms. 
 
 " I love the sea," explained Melville. " It cures my fits 
 of spleen. There are times when I hate the land and 
 everybody on shore. And when I go to sea, I take good 
 care to go as a simple sailor, plumb down into the fore- 
 castle and right aloft to the royal masthead. There's medi- 
 cine in being thumped and ordered about, just as there's 
 medicine in the pure air you breathe on the fo'c's'le head." 
 
86 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " I'd relish that life," conceded Walt. " There's medi- 
 cine in it for the body, as you say, and there must be, 
 too, for the soul. For you and me, anyway." He hesi- 
 tated: " I was thinking earlier this day how mystical a 
 deep-sea passage must be." Thus he guarded his full 
 thought by not revealing its application. He went on: 
 "What is the sea but a field for pioneering? The day 
 will come when every mile of land will have been explored 
 and either settled or forgotten. Where, then, shall men 
 pursue the life of adventure? In the air, perhaps; in the 
 exciting quests of the laboratory and the study, no doubt; 
 on the sea, as always, for certain sure." 
 
 " What I like best about the sea" — Melville took up the 
 analysis — " is: It abolishes success." 
 
 A stranger appearing in a company of faniiliars attracts 
 instant notice. Walt was all attention. In the midst of 
 worthy but known friends, here stood a new idea! Mel- 
 ville smiled and proceeded to effect an introduction: 
 
 " Society being what it is," he said, " a man, ashore, is 
 judged, not by his worth, by the stuff he shows to be in 
 him, but by his success." 
 
 " But he must be worthy, must have stuff in him, to 
 win success, mustn't he? " 
 
 " Ah, we know better than that! " 
 
 " What measures success? " demanded Walt. 
 
 " The new, arriving gauge seems to be money," Melville 
 said, after some reflection, " at least, in New York. In 
 Boston, perhaps some special talent or some preposterous 
 idea." He smiled. "Throughout the South it is family; 
 but family and wealth are there synonymous. Of coiurse 
 
THE ANSWERER 87 
 
 we have, except for the South, abolished in this country 
 what you might call hereditary success — men and women 
 born to the purple. Success in all ages and among all 
 men from the beginning of the race has been accredited 
 to the man who acquired a beautiful wife. There has 
 never, I suppose, been a time when the male who had for 
 his very own a lovely woman did not excite the envy of all 
 other men — and the excitation of envy is the proof of a 
 man's success. Isn't it? " He thrust the question home. 
 
 " I may envy another his vast though tragic experience 
 of life. I may envy a man his happiness, though he has 
 nothing else and has never had anything else," Walt remon- 
 strated. 
 
 " But still — ^you are envious. The thing you envy is 
 a form of success," insisted Melville. 
 
 " At sea, as on a frontier, the thing called ' success ' sim- 
 ply does not exist," continued the sailor. " It is always 
 and only a matter of a man's stuH. Is the stuff in him? 
 Can he do his work properly? If so, all right, whatever 
 the outcome. But if not, all wrong. You see? He cannot 
 ' succeed.' The thought of envying him would never arise. 
 There is no money to make — I am speaking of the sailor — 
 and there is no ' career.' There is not even the deadly illu- 
 sion that shadows the performance of a man on the land. 
 I mean the illusion that his ' success ' was achieved wholly 
 or mainly by his own qualities and exertions." 
 
 " You're somewhat of a fatalist," commented Walt, his 
 head on one side, his eyes lowered. And he went on, in 
 the manner of calm negligence: " Then you make no ex- 
 ception in favor of success in love? " 
 
88 THE ANSWERER 
 
 The sailor frowned; said: " I know nothing about that." 
 His " that " had a ring of something so close to envy as 
 made Walt smile, surmise and wonder if here were not a 
 case for pity. . . . Melville was saying, with a touch of 
 harshness: 
 
 "The acquisition — exclusive possession — of a lovely 
 woman, which I spoke of as one of the incitements to envy, 
 has not necessarily anything to do with love. I suppose 
 love is the one thing in the world which cannot be recog- 
 nized from outside." But this was more questipn than 
 assertion. 
 
 " Oh . . . others can recognize it." And Walt thought 
 again of Jenny and Joel. " Fact is, I suspect you've got 
 the truth just turned inside out; and that others may rec- 
 ognize it first. The hardest thing must be for the lover 
 to know when he or she loves. Very often, anyway! We 
 aren't trained to look in upon ourselves, not exactly; isn't 
 that true? " 
 
 " You and I are both in-lookers, of course." Melville 
 had an air of advancing a piece on a chessboard. 
 
 " We should know when we love, you mean? I want 
 to get at the process. Is an ideal first formed and is some 
 one person then made to enclose it, or arrayed in it, or il- 
 lumined by it as by a powerful light projected upon her 
 or him? Give me your idea." 
 
 Struck by a note in Walt's voice, the sailor asked: 
 
 " You are niot inquiring for This is just a theme 
 
 adrift between us? a speculation loose and running free? 
 There's no bowline in the bight and t'other end of our 
 
THE ANSWERER 89 
 
 talk, if we ever reach it, isn't clove-hitched to your thought, 
 your meditated action? " 
 
 "What matter?" Walt tried to speak carelessly, but 
 found he couldn't. 
 
 "Ah, answer enough," exclaimed the sailor. "Let me 
 tell you what I think. It is this: Love may sometimes 
 be arrived at; not always. But there is a stage, consciously 
 or unconsciously, beyond which the affair passes out of our 
 hands; a change comes in the personality; a stage of growth 
 has been reached." 
 
 This was to Walt a new and wonderful insight; inwardly 
 he quivered with excitement and the buoyancy of his voice 
 was lost; he spoke with a sort of difficulty like a man 
 chagrined for words: 
 
 " I wonder if one's real, inner Self doesn't suffer a loss 
 of some kind? I wonder if, in some moments, at least, a 
 man who loves doesn't feel that some part of his Self has 
 irrecoverably gone from him? If he hasn't a sense of a 
 sort of violation of the Self strangely like a violation of 
 the body? ... I wonder! " 
 
 " He is no longer wholly himself? I mean: His Self 
 is not any more entirely, uniquely his own? He is partly 
 that other one and that other one is partly him? Yes, I 
 think that is how it strikes home. That is how it would 
 have to strike home to you and me, to all the in-lookers, 
 to the empiricists, to the transcendentalists, to the mystics 
 among mankind. Yes, that would have to be true," agreed 
 Melville. 
 
 "How finely suggestive you are! And that other ex- 
 
90 THE ANSWERER 
 
 pression of yours," Walt resumed, " about a stage of growth 
 having been reached. That would be a change in the mind, 
 in the whole emotional structure like the change of the 
 body in adolescence. Don't you guess so? A man's emo- 
 tions could never be the same any more; they would have 
 changed pitch for good like the voice of the growing boy. 
 He would think about all things differently. And if his 
 love were in any way frustrated? met disappointment? 
 what then? oh, what then? " 
 
 A cry escaped Melville, but an instant later he was 
 laughing lightly and saying: 
 
 " What then, O my friend Whitman? What then? Why 
 — ^religion, or lust, or the muddy river, or the ruthless reach 
 for money, or a bullet in the breast in battle, or the ex- 
 treme unction of the all-merciful sea! What then? What 
 then? What then? Oh, my God . . . what . . . then? " 
 
 And with a gesture which conveyed both farewell and a 
 cutting adrift, the sailor strode ahead on the road alone. 
 
 24 
 
 Thus passes the light of the world! thought Walt, and 
 he lay in the ditch, as if numbed, feeling that the sun must 
 be blackened in the sky and a night pitch-dark, without 
 stars, drop all about him. All that sense of paralyzed ex- 
 pectancy which one might have been expected to feel 
 at the vigil on the beach — ^which some had felt — seemed 
 to descend full upon him, lying here, abandoned to the 
 exaltation of an introspective hope and the terror of an 
 uncertified and unassessable self-knowledge. For he was 
 again alone, and not alone. The thought of Esther Terry 
 
THE ANSWERER gr 
 
 was with him and with such overpowering violence as to 
 make him mentally and bodily helpless. Waves of un- 
 merciful but undefined feeling tossed him about, as if his 
 mind were a millrace. Yet something in him struggled 
 against the mad currents, some doubt, a derelict of reason 
 and ordinary perception, not yet wholly submerged or 
 swept on to limbo. 
 
 When he could move he got up stiffly and began to 
 travel along the road. He walked mechanically, not yet 
 able to think. He had gone some distance before he per- 
 ceived himself to be going — ^back. 
 
 25 
 
 All at once the splendor of the day, the downpouring 
 sunshine, the fresh-smelling fields and even the effect of 
 little white clouds floating carelessly in the sky got into 
 his blood. What did anything matter? He was young, 
 alive! 
 
 There was no such thing as love in a sense profoundly 
 and psychically transforming. There were only slight phys- 
 iological changes, excitations, or mere disturbances. . . . 
 
 You young animal, Walt! — so the vagabond addresses 
 himself with laughing exuberance — ^you yovmg animal! 
 Well . , . what cotild be healthier, more satisfying, than 
 to be a young animal? What could be better than to 
 cultivate the satisfaction and aplomb of animals? What 
 do you know, lad? You know what you feel. . . . 
 
 Remember these winters when, with chums, you've gone 
 out on the frozen plain of the Great South Bay with hand- 
 sled, ax and eel-spear? What frosty, warming work to 
 
92 THE ANSWERER 
 
 chop holes in the ice! And in no time the baskets were 
 full of fat, sweet, white-meated fellows. Or perhaps it was 
 summer and you hunted the beach high and low to find the 
 two or three clustered eggs which the sun was to hatch 
 for the sea-gull that laid them. Or you sailed in a boat, 
 looping lazily about Shelter Island, putting in at Fort Pond 
 Bay and tramping gaily to Montauk, there to lie prone on 
 Turtle Hill and watch the ceaseless roll of the Atlantic. 
 The bluefishers and sea-bass takers, the harsh, silent men 
 herding cattle on Montauk, the mute and scornful full- 
 bloods left of the Indian tribe or the loose-lipped half- 
 breeds — these were your company and with them you prac- 
 tised fraternity, learning much with little said. Baymen, 
 farmers, pilots, the charcoal-burners of the mid-Island pine 
 barrens; the bare feet and rolled-up trousers, the clam- 
 digging, hauling down the creek with the boat, loading the 
 hay-boat, chowder-parties on the shore and straw-rides to 
 inland picnics, house-raisings and the housewifely arts of 
 the good-hearted farmers' wives; the smell of pine and 
 the perfume of sedge-meadows. . . . And with all this rich, 
 full stream of existence, you have fancied at moments that 
 life held something else? What nonsense! What more 
 could life hold than health and sleep and fun and a perfect 
 savor? 
 
 It was absurd that he should be taking the road back. 
 
 He forced himself to stop walking and stood for a few 
 minutes inhaling deeply and deliberately. The utter ir- 
 rationality of his nature had never so impressed him before. 
 What was he doing? and toward what tending? 
 
 " A man ought to reason," he argued out loud. 
 
THE ANSWERER 93 
 
 Reasoning always started with a question or with an 
 assertion. One ought to be able to ask himself a question, 
 anyhow! Answering it was a separate problem. Or . . . 
 be able to assert something or other. 
 
 " Do I love her? " Uttering the words aloud ought to 
 help in vividness, in reality. For curiously the moment was 
 unreal. " Do I love her? " 
 
 Too difficult! He tried again, asking impersonally: 
 
 " Am I in love? " 
 
 There seemed no way of answering that, either. So he 
 inquired: 
 
 " Do I know what love is? " To that, yes! 
 
 " Have I ever experienced it? " 
 
 No. . . . Then it is impossible that I can be in love, 
 or that I love Esther Terry. 
 
 Such a triumph of reasoning as that ought to bring 
 complete and instant relief, seciurity, mental ease. He could 
 not say he felt anything of the sort. Reasoning had never 
 seemed so wholly contemptible before. The age of reason! 
 Some time in the last century, hadn't it been? 
 
 26 
 
 When he arrived back at Babylon it was near to sun- 
 down and Walt went to the house where Selah Mulford 
 lived with his mother, a widow, for supper and a bed. 
 
 The house was greatly lit. A negro servant opened the 
 door, and Walt asked: 
 
 " Are you giving .a party, Ebenezer? " 
 
 Ebenezer replied that a guest, a lady, was expected by 
 the evening stage from west. 
 
94 THE ANSWERER 
 
 "It is Miss Fviller, Margaret Fuller," explained SelaH 
 Mulford as he led the way to the bedrooms. " Mother 
 knows her. She is on her way from New York to Boston 
 and goes to-morrow by stage to Greenport, thence by the 
 boat. I believe she is to meet Major Jack Downing or 
 Mrs. Sigourney or some other writer at Greenport. You 
 know all these people, I believe; for my part, I can't tell 
 one from t'other." 
 
 He spoke with a careless glibness and had so much the 
 air of youth in a burning preoccupation of its own that 
 Walt wondered what had come over him since morning. 
 There was no chance to inquire. Sounds from downstairs 
 proved the guest's arrival and Mrs. Mulford sent Ebenezer 
 to them with a message that dinner was ready. 
 
 The four of them were assembled in the parlor-drawing 
 room long enough for an introduction and a few pre- 
 liminary remarks. Mrs. Mulford, in lavender silk, smiled 
 comfortably at Walt. She was a woman of a placidity 
 so astonishing that one scarcely understood the snowy 
 whiteness of her hair which might have been powdered, 
 seen above her face of complete calm, with not a single 
 noticeable wrinkle. She had been a Schermerhorn from 
 Brooklyn and her mother had been a Van Velsor, of the 
 same family as Walt's mother, but the relationship was 
 too distant for ciphering out. 
 
 Margaret Fuller, the writer and intellectual, one of this 
 new breed of women who seemed to derive from the works 
 of Goethe or to have seeded from the Nature of Jean 
 Jacques Rousseau, presented the greatest possible contrast 
 to her hostess. She was even physically unattractive^- 
 
THE ANSWERER 95 
 
 "homely," Walt admitted to himself, in the everyday ex- 
 pression — ^but there was a touch of sensuousness about her, 
 visible in the full lips and the mouth's mobility. The eyes 
 were direct and clear but sparkled only at the perception 
 of some thought, her own or another's, which struck her 
 as having facets and fires of abstract beauty. She was 
 emotional, too, but her emotions responded, or were allowed 
 to respond, to ideas alone. Above all, she talked briskly, 
 delightfully and with a varying brilliance, as if her mind 
 were proof against physical fatigue. 
 
 " Oh," she was saying to Mrs. Mulford, " we are going 
 to try some sort of experiment, at Concord or elsewhere. 
 If only Emerson will join! I must convert him — impress 
 him with his own responsibility. Men do tend to shun 
 responsibility, don't they, dear Anneke? They are with 
 their ideas as with their offspring; it is enough that they 
 have begotten them — thereafter others must look to the 
 rearing and nurture! I shall tell Emerson quite frankly 
 that he must legitimatize his child." 
 
 Mrs. Mulford tried to look shocked but her natural 
 placidity would not let her. 
 
 " Bronson Alcott worships Emerson and Emerson has 
 been the soul of kindness to Mr. Alcott but somehow they 
 never quite come into contact with each other. While 
 Alcott talks, Emerson obviously goes on thinking about 
 something else; in fact, he said one day to Alcott: ' Bron- 
 son, when you are talking, Plato becomes a reality instead 
 of remaining just a beautiful dream! ' And it is humiliat- 
 ing to admit it, Anneke, but my own effort to win Emer- 
 son's intimacy has so far failed. I can make him laugh — 
 
96 THE ANSWERER 
 
 indeed, he complained to Mrs. Alcott that I made him laugh 
 too much! — but despite my most artful leadings and pauses 
 the man seemed simply to freeze into silence, utter dumb- 
 ness, -with every opportunity I gave him to speak. There 
 is a good deal that is other-worldly about him." 
 
 "Well, but Emerson's a poet," protested Walt. 
 
 " That's only one aspect." Miss Fuller turned her eyes, 
 with their intellectual gleam, on the young man. 
 
 "No! I beg your pardon— the poet includes everything 
 else," Walt answered. "When you say a man's a poet 
 you perhaps deprive him of some usual human traits, quali- 
 ties, endowments ; and in the same breath, by the same word, 
 you acknowledge the existence in him of superior traits, 
 superior endowments. It is not a question of peiming 
 verses." 
 
 " I see " — she spoke thoughtfully and with the momen- 
 tary light of intellectual pleasure in her eyes, she had a 
 handsome look. "It is to put the poet in a class with 
 prophets, seers, those whom the ancients considered in- 
 spired by the gods." 
 
 " They were inspired by their fellow men." 
 
 " You mean — ? " 
 
 "They absorbed all and gave it back again, purified; 
 they turned the water into wine." 
 
 " They were inspired by Nature, like Rousseau? " sug- 
 gested Margaret Fuller. 
 
 " Rousseau's Nature was his own body, his healthy ani- 
 malism," Walt declared. 
 
 " I don't believe Emerson is aware he has a body," was 
 her pensive remark, on this. 
 
THE ANSWERER 97 
 
 " Oh, my dear Margaret, and Mr. Whitman! " Mrs. Mul- 
 ford murmured. " You young people do discuss such sub- 
 jects nowadays! " 
 
 There was a laugh. Walt noticed that Selah Mulford 
 joined in it tardily. The young man was crumbling a 
 piece of bread. What had happened to him since the 
 morning? 
 
 " It's quite imfathomable how such a mind as Emerson's 
 works." Miss Fuller had returned to the disembodied 
 spirit and was considering the processes of intellectual 
 creation. " Apparently he is not able to compose except 
 when rambling in the woods and pastures. He says he 
 does not cast about for thoughts, nor wait for them. They 
 come. In the intervals of their coming, his senses are 
 busy with the weather or the landscape, an anemone or a 
 rhodora, a chipmunk, or the sheen of ice on the Walden 
 pond. Each day he sets down in his journal certain 
 thoughts. Some may have occurred that day, some came 
 first a few days ago but have been perfecting themselves 
 in the recesses of his mind. His writing on any subject 
 is a sifting from his journal entries — ^matched pearls loosely 
 strung." 
 
 " And he never composes deliberately? " asked Walt, 
 greatly impressed. 
 
 " I'm sure he couldn't," said Margaret Fuller, with de- 
 cision. "He is incapable of conscious effort or conscious 
 concentration and that is where he differs from everybody 
 else I have ever heard of or read about. His sermons are 
 made (you can't say ' written ') in the same fashion. But 
 his voice! Warm, rich, wonderful! And his manner, his 
 
98 THE ANSWERER 
 
 very presence, has something serenely shining about it." 
 Walt thrilled. Selah Mulford quoted suddenly a line, 
 the last, of the Pnradiso — to-night he felt himself very 
 much a descendant of the Marchesi Brignole. Miss Fuller, 
 evidently at home in Italian, gave an exclamation of dis- 
 may at the sound of the words. 
 
 "There! " she said as she and Mrs. Mulford left the 
 room, "what a reminder of the great man's limitations! 
 Emerson is unable to see anything whatsoever in Dante, 
 he says, that he cannot find also in Zerah Colburn! . . . 
 But yet a poet, Mr. Whitman! " She paused in the door- 
 way. " Don't be too long apart from us. I like your 
 talk." 
 
 27 
 
 Selah Mulford faced Walt, and told him: 
 
 " I am going to marry Sarah Furrier. I asked to-day, and 
 she — consented." 
 
 "... Your mother? " 
 
 "Will never know. Nor will any one else. We shall 
 be wed at once. If, some months from now . . . who will 
 find anything to say; tell me? Simply, there will be an- 
 other . . . Mulford. My mother took my annoimcement 
 with a good grace." 
 
 The boy had slumped down in his chair at the table; 
 his chin rested on his breast. With a movement Walt 
 flung himself on the arm of the chair, one hand encircling 
 Selah 's neck. Beneath the palm of that hand he could feel 
 an artery throbbing. He said at length: 
 
 "You and she talked freely? " 
 
THE ANSWERER 99 
 
 "Walt, there can be nothing we did not tell each other! 
 It was a sort of nakedness, without shame, and we both 
 knew and said that neither of us ever had known anything 
 like it. I think the holy of holies must exist somewhere 
 in the mind, and but one person is admitted to it in the 
 longest lifetime. That has nothing to do with — the other 
 thing, or any other thing! I do not believe it has any- 
 thing to do with marriage," concluded Selah Mulford, in- 
 vincibly. 
 
 " But you contemplate marriage," Walt said, as if ob- 
 jecting. " You two have had this — ^I think ' communion ' 
 is the one word, don't you? — ^and the freshness and the 
 wonder of that will last, as it seems to you, well, forever! 
 Marriage has no bearing; your own words! Consider and 
 tell me: What is it you do? You make a sacrifice, don't 
 you? for her sake — and it cannot be completely successful. 
 You put her in your debt with an act she can never 
 repay (how can she repay; what can be a true equiva- 
 lent?). Oh, I greatly fear you will both of you live to 
 regret it!" 
 
 Selah Mulford twisted his head about and looked upward 
 into Walt's face. His first fierce intention was softened by 
 what he saw there and when he spoke it was to say, qmte 
 gently: 
 
 " Man, you don't understand. We love each other." 
 
 " Are you sure of that? And how? Do you know how 
 most folk would analyze this? They would say it was an 
 extreme oscillation — swoop of the pendulum in the opposite 
 direction — a rebound from your experience with Temper- 
 ance Wines. . . . Ah, you may look at me as hardly as 
 
loo THE ANSWERER 
 
 you like, Selah. Maybe I'm the Tempter himself. But 
 you can't get rid of the Devil by consigning him to hell; 
 he lives there." 
 
 A strong bitterness flavored Walt's concluding words; he 
 seemed to himself to be tasting gall. Again that fleeting 
 sense of personal guilt assailed him, the precise feeling that 
 had overtaken him on hearing Joel Skidmore's ecstatic con- 
 fession. He put it aside, with an efifort, and a kind of dizzi- 
 ness took its place; the inner lives and emotional expe- 
 riences of Joel and Selah and Sarah Furrier and Herman 
 MelviUe confused themselves with his own emotions that 
 day and with the persistently returning vision of Esther 
 Terry. Stronger than all this turmoil was a knife-like pang 
 of sharpest envy; he recalled with vain contrition Melville's 
 words about envy; he fought against the admission, even 
 to himself, that in thinking of Joel and listening to Selah 
 he, Walt Whitman, was envying a form of success — the 
 greatest, the most incontestable, the one (to him) as yet 
 unknown. 
 
 And as if his exalted happiness had conferred on him 
 some special insight Selah Mulford, studying the face of 
 Walt, futile in the assumed role of Tempter, was observing 
 good-humoredly: 
 
 " You know you haven't told me what brought you back 
 to-night. What on earth did, anyway? Why aren't you a 
 day's journey Montaukward? " 
 
 Walt murmured: "Oh, didn't I tell you? Well, I— I 
 changed my mind. Besides, there's twenty dollars wait- 
 ing for me at Freegift Terry's." The reference to her 
 
THE ANSWERER loi 
 
 father's home affected him as though he had made a slip 
 of the tongue. " Come, we must join Miss Fuller and 
 your mother," he finished hurriedly. 
 
 " Yes, certainly." But Selah Mulford continued to stare 
 at his comrade with a look of speculative surprise. 
 
 " What have you men been talking about? " Margaret 
 Fuller demanded. " Do you know, Anneke," turning to 
 Mrs. Mulford, " I love better than almost anything hear- 
 ing men talk among themselves. I always hate leaving 
 them after dinner and I always long to hide behind cur- 
 tains and eavesdrop." 
 
 Mrs. Mulford made another effort to appear scandalized 
 but the pleasant gravure of her face succeeded only in 
 altering to a vague and momentary vacancy, as if she had 
 mislaid an emotion without which she woidd not appear 
 quite ladylike. 
 
 Selah laughed, a little too unforcedly. 
 
 "We have been discussing love." 
 
 " Oh, how indelicate you are, Selah." But his mother 
 spoke contentedly. 
 
 " You don't sound shocked," he answered good-humoredly. 
 Mrs. Mulford sighed. If she could neither look shocked 
 nor sound shocked, well, she had done her best for the 
 conventionalities . 
 
 "I think I am disappointed," declared Margaret Fuller, 
 with an effect of consideration. "Women talk so much 
 about love. I had hoped for some masculine topic. Like 
 abolition." 
 
 " The peculiar thing about abolition as a topic of talk," 
 
I02 THE ANSWERER 
 
 Walt told her, drawlingly, "is: It abolishes friendships, de- 
 cency in debate, and everything, in fact, except human 
 slavery." 
 
 " That is witty. You must tell me how you stand — 
 you are extreme anti-slavery? yes — and then we can talk 
 of something else. You might tell me what you were say- 
 ing about — ^love. Was it all in the magnificent vein of 
 Selah's line from Dante? " And she quoted again: 
 
 "'L'amor che muove il sole e I'alfre stelle . . ' 
 
 " Was it the love which swings the sun and stars? " 
 
 " How that phrase frees the spirit! " The clear beam 
 from Walt's eyes made a completer answer than his com- 
 ment. Miss Fuller shook her head; said with an intellectual 
 pounce: 
 
 "Ah, Mr. Whitman! You talk of a phrase freeing the 
 spirit? What are phrases? We who use them know how 
 to depise them, I fancy." 
 
 Walt gazed at her serenely. 
 
 "You despise too much, ma'm," he told her. "Take 
 care! 'Tis a habit grows on one fast. And no one can 
 afford to feel contempt, not ever, I guess." 
 
 One saw the feminine intellect accoutring itself. " Why, 
 bless the man! what a gospel. Perhaps ' despise ' is not the 
 wprd; but surely you'll allow all civilization, all progress 
 to consist in more or less continuous discriminations; we 
 are aways rejecting something or other in favor of something 
 else." 
 
 "I feel it is wrong," he withstood her. 
 
THE ANSWERER 103 
 
 " You woxild be totally unsophisticated? " 
 
 " No, I would be perfectly sophisticated. Perfect so- 
 phistication accepts everything. Those who are always re- 
 jecting, ignoring, passing by and discarding are those who 
 have not fully — ^how put it? have not fully — arrived. They 
 lack the last poise, their position, mentally, intellectually 
 and emotionally is still precarious and they know it. So 
 they balance themselves with dizzy shrugs and tread the 
 tightrope of disdain — disdain of this or that thing which 
 is humble and lowly and human. They are snobs? But 
 to call them that is to take our place, for the moment at 
 least, with them. They are imperfectly sophisticated. . . . 
 Perfect sophistication is of no use except to enable us to 
 recapture the freshness, the simplicity, the beauty of the 
 world. Can you separate its beauty from a rose? No. 
 The real beauty of the world is equally inseparable from 
 the total world — a. world which contains both roses and 
 skunk cabbages. You cannot pick the rose alone and say: 
 ' Here is the beauty of the world.' You must enlarge your 
 notion, concept, of beauty to include the skunk cabbage 
 also." 
 
 " But it is a yoimg genius! " exclaimed Margaret Fuller, 
 half-aloud and as if she were phrasing the comment in 
 German. " Es ist ja die Weltanschauung." And she began 
 to urge Walt to visit Boston and Concord, meet Emerson 
 " and all the others," exchange ideas. To such suggestions 
 and to her urgings he shook his head. 
 
 " Why not? " 
 
 " You have your disdain for phrases; I have my distrust 
 of ideas," he said, smiling, "Oh, I am not perfectly so- 
 
I04 THE ANSWERER 
 
 phisticated, any more than the rest. There are still plenty 
 of ideas — some seem my own but probably are not, some 
 come from others — of which I am badly scared." 
 
 "Tell me a few." 
 
 He gave a great laugh. " No-no 1 You will have them 
 all out of me, soon enough, anyway. It is not women who 
 are unable to defend themselves against men, but the men 
 who are defenseless before the women — or soon will be! 
 Between the sexes there will always be a servile insurrec- 
 tion going on." 
 
 "Dux femina facti. But we mean to have our rights." 
 She spoke spiritedly, with a lift of her head; not a phrasQ 
 but a mere word, with its assertion of a principle involved, 
 had kindled her glance; but the faint flush and the red 
 fullness of the mouth held his attention. He wondered 
 greatly about her and about all women; how much they 
 would take (wouldn't it be all, and more ever-demanded? 
 weren't they, at the last, insatiable?). And he wondered 
 how much she (and they) could tell. . . . 
 
 28 
 
 Selah's mother having directed at him a familiar look 
 of interrogation, he had risen and accompanied her into the 
 room used as a library. • Coals threw heat and a mild light 
 from the grate; the son placed candles and he and his 
 mother sat down to a game of chess. Arnieke Mulford 
 was a poor chess-player but the leisureliness of the game 
 afforded her, while she waited for her son's deliberated 
 moves, those reflective intervals, not too long, which many 
 wives and many mothers covet toward the end of a day. 
 
THE ANSWERER 105 
 
 Her own moves were made without much premeditation, as 
 a rule; she preferred to have Selah win on the board if only 
 she succeeded in avoiding a checkmate among her own 
 musings. 
 
 She was careful not to speak until he lifted his hand 
 from a knight and it was her turn. 
 
 " I think I ought to tell you, Selah; it may hurt you 
 now, but will perhaps be easier for you later. I know." 
 
 And her " know " had a gentle intonation which made 
 him look up quickly, inquiring, with a faint imeasiness: 
 
 " You — know? Know what, mother? " 
 
 Her reply was perfect. " Son, I mean I know what you 
 didn't tell me to-day." 
 
 His look was strange, but she understood it. The lace 
 on her sleeve capsized a rook and a pawn as she reached 
 and took his hand in her fingers, holding it lightly and for 
 just a moment, with a little pressure that was like a fare- 
 well. She held his eyes with her own. 
 
 " It is all right, son. 1 — Sarah will make a fine woman 
 and a good wife." She smiled. " The two things are not 
 the same, though I suppose most young men think so." 
 
 He could not reply to her. The sense of estrangement 
 from her which had so curiously been upon him from 
 that morning had changed, at the admission from her 
 lips, to a sudden feeling of hate. It was horrible to face 
 the fact that in that instant he had hated his own mother. 
 He had thought to himself, almost immediately: I must 
 be utterly unstrung, and not well nor myself any longer. 
 . . . What was incomprehensible was that, meeting his 
 mother's gaze, he saw she understood this phase, too. 
 
io6 THE ANSWERER 
 
 But he could not talk to her about it. Simply, he could 
 not. Somehow, between them, the game was left unfin- 
 ished, and they sat in a silence looking at the dropping 
 coals. At length she felt her hand caught, lifted with a 
 reluctant wistfulness, and held for a second against his hot 
 lips. . . . 
 
 29 
 
 That was all the son could manage toward his mother 
 (and who knows? perhaps it was enough and more than 
 enough) but to Selah alone with Walt in one of the large 
 bedrooms there came the gift of words, facile if none too 
 coherent. 
 
 "Walt, I am a changed man! I — do you know, this 
 evening, I've wondered if I may not be going out of my 
 mind! The beauty of it! and something hurting, hurting, 
 deep down, shaking me all over. My mother . . . you 
 know how close we've always been to each other and now 
 I've — sort of — lost her and yet I'm glad of it! It makes 
 it worse because I can see she understands it and I don't; 
 I feel . . . moments . . . toward Sarah as a boy, a young 
 boy at his best feels toward his mother. That's the ideal 
 side, or one ideal side of my feeling. The rest is . . . just 
 a surge of passion, I guess. God help me! It makes you 
 feel so weak; makes you have moments when you want to 
 cry, only you can't cry . . . you're just nothing but a little 
 child again. Walt, I didn't know a man could suffer so! " 
 
 The knuckles of his clenched fists were white. He turned 
 on Walt: 
 
 " Man! Haven't you anything to say to me? " 
 
THE ANSWERER 107 
 
 " What should I have to say to you? " Walt's voice was 
 toneless. 
 
 " Aren't you — aren't you glad? Come, tell me you didn't 
 mean all you were saying to me at the dinner table! " 
 
 " Oh . . . that! How could I mean anything? I don't 
 know anything about it, do I? " A sudden contorting 
 spasm struck across his face and Selah Mulford saw the 
 blue-gray eyes glisten. " Don't listen to me, Selah! I've 
 never been in love; likely I never shall be." 
 
 As if his own transfigured existence had given him an ex- 
 tension of some perceptive faculty, Sarah Furrier's lover 
 cried suddenly: 
 
 " You are in love. That's what brought you back." All 
 at once he stiffened. " Wait! You — she isn't Sarah, is she, 
 Walt? You didn't come back for . . ." 
 
 " It isn't any one! " Walt flung back. " That is, I— I 
 had remembered some one but the whole idea is preposter- 
 ous, silly, and I must put it out of mind. The — the best 
 way to do that seems to be to go back and look at her and 
 convince myself that it's only a delusion." 
 
 " It isn't. I don't beUeve it ever is." 
 
 " Well, I—" 
 
 " Look here." Selah rapidly matured his new self-knowl- 
 edge and offered it as wisdom. " First off, I guess, you've 
 got to be in love with love. My belief is: It's something 
 like my violin; you have first to be attuned for it. Other- 
 wise no music's possible. And even then there's plenty of 
 chance for mistakes. Discords. Hang it! That compari- 
 son's no good, either." He thought a disconsolate moment 
 and then resumed: ' 
 
io8 THE ANSWERER 
 
 "The violin's only one thing, the bow that plays upon 
 it, that's the other. Temperance — ^Temperance Wines — 
 was the wrong bow. And that doesn't give my meaning. 
 What I want to know is, Walt: Where does it really begin? 
 Who begins it? And shucks! I don't care about that — 
 how can I? — since it all has happened. I'm just in it, im- 
 mersed." He lay back on the bed, still half-clothed, his 
 hands clasped behind his head, his eyes watching the waver- 
 ing shadows thrown by the flickering candlelight upon the 
 low ceiling. 
 
 " Walt, when you love everything is terrible and delicious! 
 You feel all soft, no better than jelly, but you don't care 
 and you know you could resist, force through, anything! 
 And all the time yoxu: mind is filled with lovely images and 
 lights and dancing shadows; you watch the fire in the fire- 
 place and the flames are singing; you think of all the beau- 
 tiful places you have ever seen — ^you mind, don't you? the 
 great width of the Main Street in Easthampton, where all 
 my father's family came from these two hundred years past, 
 that wide, wide street with immense, friendly elms and the 
 old burying groxmd on the side hill and the serene old 
 church? Yes, I think of Easthampton and the big elm 
 trees I used to play under when I was a shaver and all the 
 plain brown stones where my people lie in rows for their 
 rest along the pleasant street they made and walked upon. 
 I think, too, of that seafaring great-parent of mine who 
 visited all the harbors of the world and amassed money but, 
 best of all, sated his own lifelong curiosity. I think of 
 the noblewoman he took for his bride, a young girl of an- 
 
THE ANSWERER 109 
 
 other race and a proud family — ^you know, really, there was 
 no more fiercely aristocratic strain in all the sweep from 
 Rome to the Alps than the Marquises Brignole. I think of 
 her and my ancestor who took her to wife particularly; it 
 must have seemed to both of them so vast a hazard of their 
 fortunes, of their respective happiness. No doubt they were 
 lifted to the skies, but were they also desperately fright- 
 ened, too, I wonder? Yes, I wonder; but I do not really 
 care. In every life, even the humblest, I suppose, there 
 must come one supreme hour in which all one's future is 
 clutched, crumpled, in his fingers and flung down recklessly 
 — ^like the last banknotes on the roulette table. And it is 
 not as if there were anything to be won! What can be won 
 that is finer than the superb risk of that moment? There 
 are many ways of challenging fate by the final pledge, the 
 stake of one's happiness. But what can compare with this 
 way? " 
 
 " You could so easily be misunderstood," Walt said, as if 
 musing aloud. " And yet, I do not misunderstand you. 
 You use the language of the magnificent gambler but that 
 is only your imagination playing about the heart of it all, 
 as the colored flames play about a salt-soaked piece of drift- 
 wood. The oak plank burns; gives forth a steady heat. I 
 suppose the pitch of passion has to be reached. . . . But 
 it ought not to burn out in a bonfire. It ought to light a 
 beacon. That's it: Beacon or bonfire? You know," turn- 
 ing to Selah, " when I ask that I don't think of you. You 
 know the fellow I am thinking of." He gave a little jerk of 
 his arm toward himself. " The flame has to be fed, has to 
 
no THE ANSWERER 
 
 be tended, trimmed, kept steady. I — can't, can't tell. I 
 . . . pray Heaven I may find out when again I see her. 
 Soon, oh, soon! " 
 
 30 
 
 Selah bade him good-night and left him, and Walt snuffed 
 out his candle, trying for sleep. There was none and he 
 fell to thinking of what Margaret Fuller had said that eve- 
 ning after Selah and his -mother were at their chess. He 
 had said, reverting to the topic of love, that he supposed 
 women speculated about it, theorized, much more than men. 
 To which she had instantly answered: 
 
 "Women don't theorize about love; no. They consider 
 actual cases." 
 
 " Is the sex so practical? " 
 
 " It is we who are practical, Mr. Whitman, and you men 
 who walk with your heads in the clouds." 
 
 " And you don't analyze your feelings? " 
 
 " Oh, never! — I am talking about my sex, not myself. 
 We are too busy feeling to do anything of the sort. And we 
 never go back afterward to dissect. You may have read 
 Wordsworth's definition of poetry as emotion recollected in 
 tranquillity. Ubder that definition, no woman could ever 
 qualify as a poet. Women do not recollect emotions any 
 more than the bridge recollects the water that has flowed 
 under it. Women may re-live certain moments — just as the 
 same water, turned about, can be made to flow back under 
 the bridge. But that is not recollection and it is not tran- 
 quil." 
 
 The inflection of her voice, in pronouncing that last sen- 
 
THE ANSWERER in 
 
 tence, was undisturbed; had it any significance personal to 
 her? Walt had asked himself. He thought not, but he had 
 ventured saying: 
 
 " You differentiate yourself from your sex as a whole 
 in all this? " 
 
 " I am different," she admitted. " I suppose, one of 
 these days, I shall find myself less different than I now 
 imagine." Then it was all ahead of her, he deduced, not 
 bothering to define " it." She was going on: 
 
 " The important thing is to recognize a difference — exag- 
 generation of it effects its own cure. What women need is, 
 on the intellectual side, to strive to be more like men. In 
 doing so they will run no real risk of becoming less the 
 woman. Except in isolated cases. It is something like 
 plants. You have heard of the methods of these skilled 
 gardeners, these horticulturists? They cross-fertilize. We 
 don't understand it yet, quite; but we get new varieties. 
 Sex always remains." 
 
 "You would have women become, in ways of thought, 
 more nearly like men, or try hard to; but how about men? 
 Wouldn't it be equally good if men, on the emotional side, 
 could become more like women, or try for it? " 
 
 " Why, yes " — thoughtftilly — " for that would mean a 
 more humane world. It is feeling, not our reason, that oils 
 our lives. A man can have the quick, sensitive feeling of a 
 woman without the sacrifice of manhood — courage or 
 strength. All the great poets, or artists of any sort, have 
 this feminine niceness, sensitiveness." 
 
 " And all your women who succeed in acquiring some- 
 thing of the male mind — ^what will they become? " 
 
112 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " Don't forget we have always had one such, now and 
 again." 
 
 " But when? Who? " 
 
 " How about England's Queen Elizabeth? " 
 
 " You don't mean her good male swearing? " 
 
 " I mean her statecraft, her bold imagination, her cour- 
 age." 
 
 " Another? " 
 
 " Joan of Arc? " 
 
 " I don't know as I can confute you." 
 
 " But observe this," she directed him. " The immortal 
 great do not find their sublime fulfilment in sex. The Virgin 
 Queen, the Maid of Orleans — oh, I know, often they marry, 
 but it is marriage so frequently drained of something; they 
 do not bring their best to marriage, but their second best. 
 It has to be." 
 
 " Would you go so far as to say that a man who loves 
 to the deepest depth and to the highest height of his being 
 might know by that, and know then, that he was not marked 
 for ultimate greatness — ^I mean in the future reckoning of 
 his fellows? " 
 
 "Not just that. He is ready with the gift of his Self, 
 in its finest flower; but the gift may be denied; his love 
 may suffer a disappointment. This precious gift may be 
 left in his hands, and if that experience does not kill some- 
 thing in it he may yet give the gift, in another shape, to 
 the world at large." 
 
 Walt had had a sense of tremendous destiny quivering in 
 the balance ... his own and yet not his own. Had this 
 been simple, naive conceit? Was it mere swollen ego in 
 
THE ANSWERER 113 
 
 himsdf? He could not tell. There must be times when 
 every man, to himself, played Napoleon, or Alexander, or 
 Shakespeare, or saw himself seated among the Olympians, 
 or heard his own inner voice, enthralled, as if a god 
 spoke. . . . 
 
 Every man had one supreme gift to offer, once, or per- 
 haps after frustration a second time, the gift of his Self in 
 finest, fullest flower. He made the gift to the many or to 
 the one. And perhaps it was rejected by the one and ac- 
 cepted by the many, or perhaps it was not enough for the 
 many but overflowed for the one. Which? And how did 
 one know? And how far was the gift volimtary? And 
 when was it proffered? 
 
 To these questions there seemed, more acutely than ever, 
 no answer. 
 
 As he lay there, very wakeful in the darkness, the fresh 
 air of the May night entering through an opened window, 
 he thought with a faint bitterness of his own vision of him- 
 self as the Answerer, one who should feel all, understand 
 all, and to all, however small the offering, bring some de- 
 sired gift. An Answerer? He who was on the knife-blade 
 of torment and could not shrink away from it? He, then, 
 was to save others, somehow, who could not save himself — 
 
 31 
 
 In the night he dreamed, a thing he never did. He waS 
 somewhere in a neutral, misty region and at a little distance 
 there sat a creature enthroned; he knew she was a woman, 
 but who he could not tell, and her face was hidden, turned 
 
114 THE ANSWERER 
 
 away from him. As he regarded her speechlessly, for how 
 long a time he could not have told, slowly her head turned 
 toward him and her face shone upon him. 
 
 The effect was instant and terrible. He flung himself on 
 the ground at her feet, with shaking hands caught the hem 
 of her robe and drew it to his twisting lips. He did this 
 conscious only of an irresistible and overwhelming impul- 
 sion from within, as if the pure and beneficent light of an 
 immortal countenance had struck into his soul and set it 
 free in a realm of ether lit by a single glance. . . . He saw 
 her face as one sees the sun and could not bear to look upon 
 it. He could only know that she shone upon him kindly. 
 He could only know, sense somehow, that this was a Wo- 
 man. . . . 
 
 Waking, he found himself sobbing weakly, without tears. 
 It was a long while before he could regain any control of 
 himself as he lay there. And he tried desperately to imder- 
 stand. He had not truly seen that Face; there could be no 
 such thing as recognition were he to look again upon it. He 
 would know it in one way only, by its effect upon him. 
 There were not words to describe the awe, the terror, the 
 ecstacy and the surrender of that moment . . . there were 
 not words . . . and it might be that there was not the 
 emotion. . . . 
 
 Was this a dreamlike apotheosis of love? for his thought 
 shrank from the suggestion that the Face was one of any 
 mortal woman, though it might be a composite of many 
 mortal faces and sum up in the radiance of its look all those 
 mortal attributes that were incorruptible, beyond-earthly 
 
THE ANSWERER 115 
 
 and sublime. He thought of old Greek legends, of the Me- 
 dusa who sjmibolized the starlit night, of the Furies with 
 snaky locks denoting the searching light of day from which 
 nothing was hidden, of lovely lole, personification of the 
 violet-colored clouds which loved to swim above the Ionian 
 isles. All these glorious conceptions faded into dimness be- 
 side the racking reality of what had been merely his dream. 
 Because it did not fade nor dim on waking, the image 
 took on for him an impressive nature, became both a por- 
 tent and an eidolon. It stood outside himself but it came 
 from within himself. It was a Body within his body, the 
 real I-myself, the whole purport of the fleshed being called 
 Walt Whitman. He had asked for answers, and his Self 
 had given this . . . Answer. 
 
 32 
 
 From that stark conclusion he could not escape and it 
 rested, recessed but present, in his consciousness (he se- 
 cretly knew he should never evict it and it would go on with 
 its silent attendance upon everything he did). What the 
 image meant, what the eidolon portrayed, would become 
 clear. This Woman who left him sobbing tearlessly was 
 something that entered into and was a fixed part of the true 
 Walt Whitman. That kneeling figure, weak and overcome, 
 was also a fixed part of the true Walt Whitman. A circle 
 that had to be pondered, and, duly pondered, would remain 
 a circle ... or a spiral? opening out, opening out, in ever- 
 enlarging arcs and whorls into eternity? . . . and closing 
 in, with sinuous, curved perfection into a dot, into a mathe- 
 
116 THE ANSWERER 
 
 matical point without thickness or breadth or any dimension 
 whatever? and the curve was Walt Whitman and curved 
 both ways. 
 Long, deep breaths, effortlessly exhaled. He slept, 
 
 33 
 
 By a different road than the one he had struck in quit- 
 ting it, Walt reentered the valley the next morning. It was 
 a day of mist which fumed out of hollows as if a dozen 
 incantations were progressing at once; of sunshine which 
 laid spears of gold-washed light on the wooded hillsides and, 
 interpenetrating the rising mist, made the luminous and tex- . 
 tured atmosphere essential for miracles. Fifth Month! 
 May. 
 
 The age of miracles is not past, thought Walt, and I might 
 be living in those middle centuries when, on such a day, 
 there set forth afoot or on horseback young men like my- 
 self, going to join the Crusade and carolling as they went. 
 He recalled the words of the old Crusaders' Hymn: 
 
 "Fairest Lord Jesus, 
 Ruler of all nature, 
 O, Thou of God and man the Son 1 
 Thee will I cherish. 
 Thee will I honor. 
 Thou, my heart's glory, joy and crown. 
 
 "Fair are the meadows, 
 Fairer still the woodlands 
 Robed in the blooming garb of spring. 
 Jesus is fairer, 
 Jesus is purer, 
 Who makes the woeful heart to sing. . . ." 
 
 A naive joy must have filled their breasts and innocently 
 they had confounded a pagan pleasure in the beauty of the 
 
THE ANSWERER 117 
 
 hour and season with the profounder and less-understood 
 exaltation of their holy errand. . . . Holy because inno- 
 cently entered upon. Holy because their hearts were en- 
 listed. 
 
 This, the heart, unquestioning, valorous and unafraid, was 
 the true holiness of any undertaking, and alone sanctified 
 it by the pure emotion poured out unstintingly by humble 
 men. It was what men brought to a quest that made the 
 quest holy. Not even the long, legendary hunt for the Grail 
 had possessed significance except as men endowed it with 
 the deepest significance. . . . There was a lesson here. 
 
 How dear, familiar and welcoming looked the roomy farm- 
 house! It stood behind a row of whitewashed palings and 
 the tall lilac bush in the dooryard was rich with blossoms, 
 great purple clusters and, around by the kitchen door, an- 
 other bush was just bursting into white. The scent of the 
 lilacs filled the air as he came up to the fence; their strong 
 perfume mastered his senses so that he felt giddy and 
 reached out a hand to grasp a paling. He stood so for some 
 minutes. 
 
 A thump on the shoulder and a young arm flung about 
 his neck woke him; he looked up into the face of young 
 Freegif t Terry ; boy confronted boy and tried to bundle the 
 other in his arms; they hugged, thrust apart, hugged again; 
 then stood with glad, meeting eyes. Those of the youngest 
 son of Farmer Freegift Terry were brown, lustrous and ap- 
 pealingly affectionate. The c9ntours of his face had a thin- 
 ness, an unaccentuation of especial charm, the charm of 
 something not quite finished. He had none of Walt's 
 achieved growth and perfect bodily symmetry; was slim- 
 
ii8 THE ANSWERER 
 
 mer, definitely masculine but indefinitely immature. That 
 there was but two years difference in their ages was incred- 
 ible; more incredible was it, as Walt had once declared, that 
 they were the same animal; and he had added: " Are we? 
 Maybe not. You are not a faun, I suppose, and I am not a 
 centaur; yet we are as far apart to the eye as a faim and a 
 centaur." 
 
 " Hello, young critter! " 
 
 " Where away and why, old critter? " 
 
 " Freegift, I made a sort of mistake. I should 'a' taken 
 you with me; then we'd 'a' got somewhere. I , . . I jest 
 been over and roundabout Babylon." 
 
 " Father's holding your wage." 
 
 " Oh, that . . . yes. Where's all the rest, 'sides your- 
 self? " 
 
 " We're all here, scattered about as the work takes us." 
 
 " What'll I do for my keep? " 
 
 *' We're clearing some more ground, besides the planting." 
 
 " I suppose your mother's well, and Esther? " 
 
 " Esther's got a beau. David Sayre." 
 
 " That Smithtown fellow? " 
 
 " Yes . . . why, what about him? " 
 
 The look on Walt's face dissolved. "Nothing about 
 Mm" he said, simply. " I was only wondering about — 
 Esther." 
 
 " She's all right," replied her brother, carelessly, " I've 
 got to go out in the field. See you at dinner." 
 
 Walt stood a while longer by the palings. He was recall- 
 ing David Sayre, a bashful young farmer with a shock of 
 reddish hair and a mild, freckled countenance. It was no 
 
THE ANSWERER 119 
 
 wonder he came after Esther but to her he must seem, 
 though pleasant and kind, both unattractive and dull. He 
 would be like having mashed turnips every day for dinner. 
 
 Walt made this reflection almost grimly. He turned the 
 house and there Esther stood. 
 
 A remembered vision struck alive, made a reality. She 
 faced him, with a look of surprise changing to delight. So! 
 — ^just as he had recollected, the sxm made her blue eyes, 
 flecked with golden-brown, appear to dance (though veil- 
 edly). The saddle-colored hair, put up in coils, was not in 
 the least lustrous but drank in the sunlight and intensified 
 the warmness of its brown. The bare forearm, the little 
 roundedness of her shoulders . . . 
 
 He supposed they greeted each other and a remark or two 
 must presumably have been interchanged; at the instant and 
 afterward he could be sure of absolutely nothing except the 
 swift destruction of all his preconceptions, theories and self- 
 willed ideas. She affected his senses as had the fragrant 
 lilacs. She was an embodiment of the deliciousness of the 
 air and the sunshine and the innocently gay Fifth Month 
 morning. She made him feel like a clod, a prig and a fool; 
 and in the inconceivably rapid pulsations that her presence 
 set up within him he oscillated between a feeling unfathom- 
 ably tender and a stony insensitiveness that was not so much 
 hate as a wish for her obliteration, a wish she had never 
 been born. 
 
 34 
 . . . Afterward, reliving those hours after Walt's return 
 from wayfaring, Esther Terry did not see how she could 
 
120 THE ANSWERER 
 
 have behaved otherwise. And this was absolutely the only 
 comment in which her woman's mind indulged. For she 
 was a woman. Many girls of her own seventeen years were 
 already married and remained, essentially, girls still. She 
 in her singleness was conscious of her distinct superiority 
 to them; she was older in perceptiveness ; she was wiser 
 because she shared their mtimacies and their combined ex- 
 perience and, through them, led several lives vicariously her 
 own. 
 
 Being a woman she did not analyze what she knew; she 
 was not interested in any effort to reach general conclusions; 
 and she knew well that, like all her sex, if she were misled 
 it would not be in the manner in which men were invariably 
 misled, by some glittering proverb or piece of compressed 
 and so-called wisdom, but by a hesitation in which the clear 
 guidance of her instinct woidd be lost. 
 
 She said to herself that she didn't see how she could have 
 acted otherwise. Then mentally she crossed out the word 
 " acted " and substituted for it the word " behaved." That 
 was better, for her part throughout had been passive; had 
 been exclusively a matter of behavior, of outwardness and 
 attitude imderlain by the invincible operation of her in- 
 stinct which, thank gracious goodness, had never in all those 
 hours, interspersed through several days of a week in May, 
 become numbed. What might have happened to it if she 
 had not already come to think of David Sayre " in that 
 way," she didn't know — or think about — or care, since she 
 had. 
 
 The moment Walt surprised her, coming around the house, 
 she had read in his glance the why of his return. The fact 
 
THE ANSWERER 121 
 
 that he had been certain to come back to the farm, that his 
 re-appearance might be looked for any day, was just as 
 well since it was " why " enough for the men — ^her father 
 and her brothers. All men wanted was a reason and they 
 were perfectly satisfied. That was what had always made 
 relations with Walt — the casual contacts in her home while 
 he was " boarding out " with them — a special problem. He 
 was unique; appearances never satisfied him; a man's suf- 
 ficient reason was not always his motive; he so often sensed 
 things which were otherwise the little, harmless secrets of 
 her mother and herself from the men-folks. Many and 
 many a time she and he had looked across the table at each 
 other, their eyes exchanging trifling intelligence with or 
 without an accompanying smile. As when she had suddenly 
 decided that the gown with three flowered ruffles was un- 
 becoming. She had just remarked to Mrs. Terry (of course, 
 with a look) that it seemed to have faded and plainly wasn't 
 going to wear well. The " men " had complained of her 
 non-appearance in it any longer ; whereupon she and Mother 
 had told them about its fading. . . . After a little grumbling 
 they had subsided, forgetting all about the dress forever; 
 but Walt had jtist looked at her and said, easily: 
 
 " It's a fact a dress like that will fade overnight, al- 
 most." 
 
 You see! He was helping her out (for he spoke with calm 
 seriousness, handing out to the men one of those " facts " 
 they insisted on having dished up, like boiled hominy which 
 must always " go with " the pork). And at the same time, 
 his eyes told her he was both poking fun and approving — 
 above all, he knew^ 
 
122 THE ANSWERER 
 
 And in his knowledge, he was nearly always sympathetic 
 and unfailingly loyal to her secrets, or her mother's. That 
 made him fun, with a constant little edge of excitement. 
 In his role as a sort of bystander. Esther had never thought 
 of him, then, in any other role. For some time. Then, be- 
 cause he was a man, and because it was her feminine pre- 
 rogative to re-arrange the cast of her acquaintances and put 
 every one of the opposite sex in different roles, except those 
 whose parts were fixed by the ties of close relationship, she 
 had mentally cast Walt for the leading part in the drama in 
 which she was playing and would continue to play Esther 
 Terry, a drama which, if not exactly Shakespearian, was 
 delightfully her own. 
 
 Walt as hero had not suited the requirements of her 
 imagined play. He knew too much. He was admirable as 
 the friend of the heroine. He would, of course, be the friend 
 of the heroine's husband-lover. But his true allegiance 
 would be to the heroine herself; he would never give her 
 away to her husband. Women need such a friend (Esther 
 was thinking of what she had observed and what she had 
 heard from the girls she knew who were not long married) . 
 Women need such a friend but such a friend is rarely vouch- 
 safed them outside their own sex. And the near friend, if a 
 woman, cannot help so much. Let us see: She can console, 
 advise, and help weave the harmless plots by which the 
 married woman effectuates her happiness — ^and his, if only 
 he knew it! But that is all. The near friend, if a woman, 
 can do nothing directly or indirectly with him; if he so much 
 as suspects any special intimacy between her and his wife 
 he will hate her with a jealous hate, particularly in the first 
 
THE ANSWERER 123 
 
 years of marriage. It is a part of his darling stupidity; he 
 is made that way; he cannot help himself. 
 
 The near friend, if a man, has a role so difficult that you 
 never cast any one in it unless he assumes it himself. It 
 wouldn't be fair to . . . like making an actor play Hamlet 
 and then asserting he was no actor though he was admirable 
 in dozens of other parts. But if a man assumes the role of 
 the near friend, if he never communicates directly but only 
 senses things imfailingly, and if he then, when the occasion 
 demands it, proceeds independently; if, without seeming to, 
 he now and again steers the husband just the littlest bit as a 
 man can steer another ... if, if, if! ... he can be won- 
 derjtd! Such a performance, solely for an audience of one, 
 is priceless. It is like a world-artist appearing exclusively 
 before a queen in a drama on which the happiness and even 
 the lives of both are depending. . . . The audience and the 
 play are invisibly one. 
 
 Such, not bothered to be put into words, had been Esther 
 Terry's complete understanding. She was seventeen and 
 she was seventy. Born and brought up on a farm, a drama 
 was, to her, the expression of actual lives, like those she 
 saw being lived aroimd her, in terms of the printed Shake- 
 speare which was her only knowledge of a play. She had 
 never seen an acted play, nor been inside a playhouse; when 
 she read Shakespeare, therefore, she had no feeling of artifice 
 except in the language — and that (no doubt) was mostly 
 because it belonged to earlier centuries. For her Shake- 
 speare had no suggestion of scenery, stage costumes, antique 
 clothing, trappings or conventions; Othello was not a 
 swarthy, ranting Moor but a jealous husband; Portia was a 
 
124 THE ANSWERER 
 
 woman besting a man with man's own weapons ; Juliet and 
 her lover were any young pair thwarted by their elders, as 
 young Richard Reeve and Mary Homan had been thwarted. 
 Life was Shakespeare with variations. 
 
 It was Walt who had intensiiied her enjoyment of those 
 classical plays by the manner of his reading aloud. He had 
 not assumed that because she was seventeen and a girl, she 
 couldn't get their full meaning. Instead, he had let her 
 know that he tmderstood them as well as she. That had 
 been her first insight into his possibilities. They were not 
 possibilities as a husband. With such a husband there 
 would be no drama. The successful heroine, the truly happy 
 wife, was one whose husband discovered and re-discovered 
 her fitness in her role. But Walt knew all about such a 
 thing from the start; he would have to pretend . . . worse, 
 her innocent pretending would be spoiled by his seeing 
 through everything. People who see through cannot " play 
 against " each other. 
 
 All this understood, or felt; not exactly thought; let it be 
 impressed: Not bothered to be put into words (quite im- 
 wordable, anyway). 
 
 This settled, the re-casting of characters could go on; 
 it was all so tentative and agreeable and, as yet, comfortingly 
 inconclusive. Men drill, themselves or each other; but 
 women rehearse. Neither the absolutely satisfactory hat or 
 husband exists. Seventeen-year-old Esther Terry had not 
 acquired this valuable piece of knowledge in her seventeen 
 years; she had been born with it. With the innocence that 
 was also a birthright she had imagined every eligible man 
 as her leading man, David Sayre among others, and he had 
 
THE ANSWERER 125 
 
 been as satisfactory as any. Indeed, it was in his favor that 
 he had been among the first her imagination had tried; for 
 this made more likely her ultimate mental return to him. 
 Before that had come about, his mild, freckled face had 
 begun to appear with an observable regularity at the Terry 
 farm. He had sat with them, evenings, in the parlor. He 
 had excelled himself in bashfulness in her presence. He 
 had not spoken and Esther considered it improbable that 
 — ^well, exactly — ^he ever would. But this was what she 
 wanted; hers was the bigger part to play, wasn't it? 
 
 Then, interrupting the nicely-going scene, Walt. 
 
 In his look as he stood before her, in his voice full of 
 nervous excitement, she grasped the meaning and the pur- 
 pose of the interruption. For just a moment it threw her 
 into complete confusion; she felt she must be blushing and 
 her knees had a curious tendency to give way under her. 
 But, she saw immediately, he was far too disturbed to no- 
 tice anything. What had profoimdly astonished her, how- 
 ever, was the revelation that afternoon, when they man- 
 aged a half-hour together, of the change effected in him. 
 She ran through what they had said to each other, adding 
 the interpretations her mind had placed upon it at the time. 
 
 Of course the real starting-point was when he had said: 
 
 "Esther, I came back because I've discovered I love 
 you." 
 
 " Walt, I couldn't ever marry you " — under her wistful- 
 ness she was invaded by an unexpected pang at the thought 
 she couldn't. It was purely a woman's regret at having to 
 put aside something that wouldn't just do but yet was 
 fascinating. He was fascinating. 
 
126 THE ANSWERER 
 
 She felt that more strongly than ever in the short silence 
 which was terminated by his saying: 
 
 " I can't believe you are in love with Davy Sayre." 
 
 Said not a bit scornfully, but with a note of bewilderment 
 she never remembered to have heard before in his voice. 
 That elusive accent had been her first glimpse of how 
 changed he was. 
 
 " I can't believe you are in love with me." 
 
 " Oh, but I am! " he had exclaimed with extraordinary 
 tenderness. " I'm not self-deceived now. And I'm not so 
 good-and-stupid in the man-fashion as to think that, if I 
 were, it wouldn't be plain to you. The thought of love came 
 first, the thought of you afterward; but one led surely to 
 the other. And then I began to suffer. ... I suffered un- 
 til I saw you this morning. I can't tell you what I felt at 
 that moment. I had pictured what it would be; then the 
 very blood in my veins became etcher's acid. Don't you 
 see what you have done to me? don't you? " 
 
 She saw, this time with a thrill of fright, that something 
 corrosive had been at work, and was. And he was sincere 
 in thinking it was herself, or the vision of herself. But — 
 how could it be so? They had been apart. And any thought 
 of him had been without effect of that sort on her. 
 
 " I can see you have changed, somehow." 
 
 " How? " 
 
 " You have met some oiie, or heard something, that has 
 worked upon you. You thought of love, then you thought 
 of me; that was the wrong way about. If the thought of 
 me had deepened and broadened ... I don't believe I can 
 explain what I mean; but it is this: If ever I were to love a 
 
THE ANSWERER 127 
 
 man" — and she had been thinking of David Sayre; not 
 wilfully; he had just bashfully intruded himsdf — " I would 
 have the thought of him first and the thought of love, of 
 my loving him, afterward." 
 
 He had protested it couldn't make any difference (and 
 this had been a further clue to what the change was that 
 had come over him), 
 
 "I've arrived . . . that's all that matters! Wait! Let 
 me tell you what it means. . . ." 
 
 Then had come his wonderful description — ^wonderful 
 even if he mistook meanings. Poor boy! he couldn't see 
 aright; it wasn't his fault. 
 
 " I suppose I am unlucky. I know, in ways, I am dif- 
 ferent from most young fellows. And to be different is 
 unlucky. But it need not last. It can be overcome— while 
 you're young, flexible, strong. Don't we bend trees to 
 make a hedgerow along the boundary ditch? And we yoke 
 young people and mostly they team well. I thought it over 
 — much. And I saw something of what it meant. I mean 
 not only love but marriage where love is. There needed 
 to be passion. The thought of her, or of him, mustn't leave 
 you physically unmoved. But more than that was needed. 
 A great faith in life itself was needed. That would last. 
 That would last because it was the true passion, the larger 
 love. It would be so big you could never pass beyond it; 
 a Life immense, buoyant, enclosing and outreaching the very 
 stars! And more real than this world about us, because 
 self-created. . . . Don't you see, Esther? A man is a new 
 Adam in a universe of his own fashioning and at last he 
 
laS THE ANSWERER 
 
 fashions a woman, really from himself, to share with him 
 all its loveliness and beauty and grandeur. . . ." 
 
 After a little she had said: 
 
 " That is just it, Walt. It isn't I you love, but what you 
 make of me, build around me. Something, as you say, fash- 
 ioned ' really from yourself.' I am Eve, just an after- 
 thought. You created this New World without me. Oh, 
 Walt! you will never persuade any girl that way! She 
 must come first! " 
 
 She hadn't been able to help that vexed exclamation, 
 though out of a real pity for him she had kept back the 
 rest. She had wanted to cry out: You are changed, and 
 at last I understand how. Something has destroyed your 
 special gift, or niunbed it. Now you are just as unseeing 
 as any other man. They say love is blind. It has blinded 
 you. Why, a month ago you would have read me at once, 
 would have known everything about Davy and myself; I 
 couldn't have kept a bit of it from you and if you had 
 chosen to break it up ... to interfere . . . you might 
 have succeeded ... I don't know! But then, you 
 wouldn't have been in love with me yoiurself and you 
 wouldn't have wanted to interfere. Now, when you do 
 want to interfere, your clear sight is gone and you just 
 grope about with eager fingers. . . . 1 do feel sorry for 
 you! but I don't love you and I never shall. I shall love 
 Davy. I . . . 
 
 And with shut eyes she had endured the kisses on face 
 and throat, the quiver of the firm hand grasping her shoul- 
 der; a feeling delicious and sad had flooded her and all 
 
THE ANSWERER 129 
 
 the time, behind dropped eyelids, she had been imaging 
 the face so dose to her own as Davy's. ... It had made 
 her ache with joy to think of the time when Davy would 
 discover that she wanted . . . this ... of him, and 
 would give it her. What made Davy so dear was the 
 realization that she could give him unimagined ecstacy, 
 ecstacy he didn't know existed. 
 
 " No! No! " she had found herself answering to Walt's 
 whispers. " I — don't — ^love you, Walt. I " — she had weak- 
 ened, or relented, sufficiently to add — " believe you do love 
 me in a — a quite strange way. I am sorry." 
 
 She was too shaken to stand any more, then, and had 
 made him leave her. 
 
 35 
 
 . . . There had been several other encounters but the 
 only one in which any new or significant light had been 
 shed, for her, upon the nature of Walt's feeling had oc- 
 curred two days later. In the interval Davy had spent one 
 evening with the family under Walt's eyes. She had been 
 a little, uneasy, but Walt had been gay and poised — all his 
 usual self — and, if anything, had made the visit easier for 
 Davy. She could see, as they sat there, that Walt didn't 
 dislike young Sayre and she realized that when he had said 
 he couldn't believe she was in love with Davy, he had said 
 it all. He wasn't jealous (but he ought to be, if he loved 
 her). Why wasn't Walt bitterly jealous, anxious? Be- 
 cause he had something ■which Davy cotddn't take from 
 him. That was it. He didn't love herself, Esther ; he loved 
 his embodiment of her. And such love, though it appealed 
 
I30 THE ANSWERER 
 
 to her as romantic and astounding, and though it did move 
 her like a beautiful passage of poetry, was unreal. Just 
 that. It made her, the flesh-and-blood her, a shadow; the 
 ghost of the being he loved; and it affected her like a hal- 
 lucination, almost made her skin creep. She hated it! 
 
 She must tell Walt so and make him understand, even 
 if to do so was to shrink herself in his eyes. After all, what- 
 ever she did would not hurt the figure of his worship and 
 if she were only flesh and blood, she couldn't help it and 
 she didn't want to be anything else. It had been very wrong 
 of her to let him kiss her, put his arms about her; but 
 she had been taken unawares, not so much by liis swiftness 
 as by the overpowering pounce of her own imagination, 
 visualizing Davy . . . She could extricate herself, if need 
 be, at a heavy cost; but get free of this she must, even at 
 the cost of that. . . . 
 
 The next encounter, then. 
 
 Walt had found her the next evening burying hei face 
 in the rich clusters of the purple lilacs and they had walked 
 down the road. The moist serenity of the May twilight 
 had flowed around them and along all the horizons the 
 pale, beautiful sky had shown or reflected bands of tender 
 color. It had been perfect and they had gone a half mile 
 or more, turning into the upland -oad that led them by 
 the schoolhouse, before either had spoken. Then Walt: 
 
 " I love you, first and most, for you — for your Self. You 
 know, don't you? that something in me is yours forever? 
 It is so. They speak of love as if a man were the lord and 
 master. A man may be lord and master afterward, but 
 that is not the beginning. I wonder what is the beginning? 
 
THE ANSWERER 131 
 
 The JBrst awareness comes when a man understands that 
 something which was his is wholly his no longer. He has 
 moments when he feels . . . seduced, betrayed, outraged 
 . . . and all the time he is in an ecstacy over it. She has 
 done this thing to him and she has the security of his utter 
 surrender before she makes her surrender. My darling 
 woman, that is the miracle of love; you have wrought the 
 miracle. A miracle ... in Fifth Month . . ." 
 
 She had been profoundly stirred by his exposition. So 
 much of it was true! and she knew, for her vital instance, 
 that David Sayre was, in the sense of Walt's words, her 
 victim, without knowing it. He never would know it, Davy, 
 for he was too ordinarily masculine ever quite to under- 
 stand what had happened to him, emotionally. Men didn't, 
 except this one walking with her. She considered. She 
 had decided that this great emotion which had come to 
 him had made Walt unseeing. He could no longer pene- 
 trate her thoughts, easily, lightly, as of old. But in the 
 light of what he was saying she thought she understood 
 him even better. All his clear penetration was, for the 
 hour, withdrawn from everything outside and focussed on 
 himself. Where he had been used to read the feelings of 
 other people he now needed all his faculty to read his own, 
 in so unprecedented a turmoil. It was very marvelous but, 
 somehow, it made her afraid. He was abnormal — specially 
 gifted but dangerously gifted. In fact, he was, in one way, 
 altogether too feminine. She meant, emotionally. His de- 
 scription of his own feeling, so extraordinary in its insight, 
 showed that. He actually, unaided, understood himself 
 and this was not the way of the well-balanced, usual man 
 
132 THE ANSWERER 
 
 who came only to a partial understanding of himself through 
 the aid of some woman whom he loved and who, most 
 important factor, loved him. ... So much, unworded, 
 Esther Terry grasped, and, unable to word it, she felt des- 
 peration stealing upon her. 
 
 " Walt, everything you say only proves to me how im- 
 possible it is ... I do not love you and I know I cannot 
 love you. I know — more. I know that what you love isn't 
 me at all. You would be terribly disappointed — ^wretched 
 — ^when you found out . . ." 
 
 " Even if you are right, or partly right — even if I love 
 you and more than you, the world I have built about you 
 is secure, safe! " he exulted. " Say it's self-deception — 
 though I believe every lover could be called self-deceived. 
 Self-deception is the one illusion that can never be^ de- 
 stroyed." 
 
 " Then it does not need me to save it for you." 
 
 He tried frantically to retrieve: " Oh, but it does! Life 
 without you is going to be just the self-deception and noth- 
 ing else. Just illusion. You are to make the reality! Can 
 you know," his voice dropped and became a sound of ten- 
 derness and desire, " how suddenly real, how warm and 
 sweet it became the other day when you let me kiss you, 
 put this hand on your shoulder? Can you? . . ." 
 
 She had had to stop him, force herself free; her breath 
 had been coming very fast and her head had burned just 
 back of the eyes. She hadn't been panic-stricken, not that, 
 but the time had come to end ... to put aside the thought 
 of shame and tell him at any cost. . . . 
 
 "Walt! I f»j«* make you understand. I don't love you. 
 
THE ANSWERER 133 
 
 I won't be able to. And I do love David Sayre. Listen; 
 I have got to prove this to you, I know that. Well, then: 
 All the while, the other day, that you were kissing me, I 
 felt it was . . . Davy. And because I imagined it was 
 Davy, I — I liked it. It shames me to tell you but it is 
 the only way to make you know how I feel. Please . . . 
 I don't want to be thought any worse of than necessary; 
 I didn't do that, think of him, deliberately. Something, the 
 thought of him, just leaped on me, took me unawares . . . 
 now you must see! " 
 
 She had been unable to keep back the tears, making a 
 hot furrow down her cheeks and misting her eyes so that, 
 when she had felt able to glance at him, she could not see 
 very well the expression on his face. But she had under- 
 stood well enough that he was suffering . . . and after an 
 agonized interval she had caught his toneless words: 
 
 "... I suppose it might be easier if I could understand 
 what you see in him," he had been saying and she hadn't 
 missed the pathetic appeal in the very tonelessness of his 
 utterance, the note of bewilderment, like a man blinded 
 and groping. 
 
 " I can't tell you what I see in him " — and that had been 
 the truth. She couldn't. She hadn't the words. Any 
 words she could have managed would have made it seem 
 very small ... or perhaps almost indecent, shameful. . . . 
 What she felt would be soiled by words. 
 
 She had had to struggle with a fierce resentment that it 
 should be so, a resentment that wanted to vent itself upon 
 poor Walt and hurt him on Davy's behalf and on her own, 
 hurt him for what he had compelled her to put in words. 
 
134 THE ANSWERER 
 
 All the while she was talking to him, rapidly, this struggle 
 had been going on. 
 
 " I can't tell you what I see in him and, anyway, it 
 would be useless; it is a thing you could not vmderstand. 
 There is selfishness in it — ^it isn't all unselfish like the feel- 
 ing you have toward me; perhaps it is a feeling less fine 
 but I am sure I have it and I am sure it is the full meaning 
 of love to me. I think you are not quite human, Walt. I 
 don't know how to say what I mean; you are made up so 
 differently. Your mind works like a woman's; you sense 
 things; you used to sense things my father and brothers 
 couldn't; now you sense your own feelings in a way no 
 man, no ordinary man, ever does. And there is something 
 — well, noble — about you; and I love it without loving you. 
 It is the poetry in you; it is what I love in passages of 
 Shakespeare or any treasured book. But that would never 
 belong to me; you couldn't give it, I couldn't share it; I 
 could bring nothing to it, to you. I want to tell you some- 
 thing; I feel certain you were made for something great — 
 some great accomplishment, some wonderful experience; 
 but you were never made for just plain love, love of man 
 and woman . . ." 
 
 That honesty had cost her a good deal. She had had to 
 fight against a cruelty deep within her and her voice had 
 faltered more than once. He had burst out in a harsh, ugly, 
 hateful voice: 
 
 "You don't know anything about it! You think I am 
 ' noble '? Made for something great? I am a healthy male 
 animal, and I have healthy male lusts. I lust for you, for 
 what you can give me, and I covet your eyes and lips . . . 
 
THE ANSWERER 133 
 
 and you tell me I cannot have them. Do you want to 
 drive me mad? for you may do that. Only " — she had 
 shrunk back and he had stopped the reach of his hands for 
 her, stiffening with a surprised look, as if the knife of her 
 words had just reached his heart — " only I . . ." 
 
 Silence. Then, in a piteous accent: 
 
 " It has all been such a mistake. The thought of love 
 came first. There is a curse on any man who thinks. I 
 will never think again; I will live to feel. Forgive me. It 
 was a mistake to try to make a beautiful world, built 
 around a thought. A man might better never have lived 
 than to do anything so foolish. Let him feel, and keep to 
 the world he is born in." 
 
 She had waited. 
 
 " And now, when I do feel, it comes too late. Too late 
 because your feeling has gone out to another, but too late, 
 anjrway, because you would rightly enough distrust my ar- 
 rived-at feeling. And I know what I lose — ^know I shall 
 never have it back, know it will never come again." 
 
 She had had in that instant a complete vision of what she 
 was losing (for she didn't deny she had lost something, 
 though feeling it was not a thing that she could have kept 
 or that could ever have been truly hers). For a moment 
 the sacrifice had seemed very heavy; not many women had 
 offered them a devotion of such breadth and splendor. In 
 his imselfishness he was terribly sincere. And his out- 
 biurst about lust was nothing but maddened perversity; he 
 had been suffering. She ached for him and for herself, and 
 then a slow, wonderful sense of triumph had invaded her 
 at this sacrifice she was making ... it seemed somehow 
 
136 THE ANSWERER 
 
 to bring Davy nearer to her and to make him more pre- 
 cious. . . . 
 
 Then they had walked back together — it was still quite 
 light — and once he had reached for her hand and she had 
 let him take it. He had held it a moment, his own seemed 
 cold, and then had let it go. She had left him at the gate; 
 the next morning, very early, he was gone without her 
 seeing him. 
 
 And that had been all. Yes, all. 
 
 She had relived it this once and was finished with it. 
 The memory of her would fade with him. . . . Dear, 
 homely Davy! If you could know how much I shall love 
 you, how much I can bring to youl . . . But you, Walt, 
 were made for loneliness ever5rwhere; there is a place in 
 you where no one, no one, could quite enter. You showed 
 it to me, just lifted a curtain, but I let it fall. ... I should 
 like, some day, to see you again; to have you for my friend, 
 my friend and Davy's (you would be his true friend, too, 
 you know), And now . . . good-by, Walt . . . dear, great 
 lost lover . . . 
 
 36 
 
 . . . And afterward . . . 
 
 Long afterward, Walt was able to sum up all that hap- 
 pened from his first sight of Esther Terry on his return to 
 the farm until their final parting in those two commonplace, 
 worn words, uttered every day of our lives and always 
 lightly, the comic mask for our deepest griefs — the two 
 words: " Of course . . ." 
 
 Of course she had had her woman's clairvoyance imfail- 
 
THE ANSWERER 137 
 
 ingly with her. Of course she had been right — and wrong; 
 and he had' been right — and wrong. Theirs had been a 
 misunderstanding complete, inavertable, irrevocable; im- 
 personal, also; rooted not in character but in sex, or rather, 
 traceable to the very beginnings of life and as mysterious 
 and inexplicable as the Thing which impels the simplest, 
 most rudimentary cell to split apart, becoming two whole 
 cells that remain disunited. 
 
 He was able to see this: The severing proved, of itself, 
 their preexisting oneness. 
 
 Hence Identity; from this scar of experience, a knowl- 
 edge of all lesser experience, a perception of the original 
 unity of all experience and of the underlying common Iden- 
 tity of every living soul. 
 
 This miracle ... in Fifth Month. . . . 
 
 37 
 
 What had most dismayed Walt as he faced Esther Terry 
 in the hour of his return was a strange and sudden piece 
 of self-imderstanding accompanied by the birth of passion 
 within him. 
 
 The piece of self-understanding, he supposed, might come 
 from the accident of his having met first, and so few min- 
 utes earlier, Esther's brother. Between brother and sister 
 the physical resemblance was strikingly complete. He had 
 always felt for young Freegift TA'ry a strong physical at- 
 traction coupled with the emotion of affection. It had 
 been something in the boy's face ... so far as Walt had 
 been able to give an inner accounting. Now he compre- 
 
138 THE ANSWERER 
 
 bended that his feeling for Freegift had adumbrated some- 
 thing larger, intenser, and something now fully upon him. 
 For with this curious knowledge which, pleasant or un- 
 pleasant had distinctly to be faced, came, though separately, 
 an emotional impact that it was not in him to withstand. 
 This was the birth of passion, he somehow knew even as 
 it racked him; and in the midst of an imprecedented storm 
 and stress he recalled the identifying words from the lips 
 of Herman Melville: " There is a stage . . . beyond which 
 the affair passes out of our hands." 
 
 That stage he had arrived at; a fundamental change had 
 been effected in him and with what was immediately ahead , 
 for himself, for both Esther and himself, his will could 
 have nothing to do. His nature was at the mercy of an- 
 other's, for this hour. And afterward? For the first time 
 in his life there did not seem to be such a thing as the 
 future. He supposed that was because he was actually liv- 
 ing in it and it had become his present. . . . 
 
 He had felt himself a clod, at the sight of her, for her 
 poise, her brightness had the effect of making everything 
 else inert and unalive. He had felt himself a prig, for he 
 had talked in his utter fatuity to Jenny and to Sarah Fur- 
 rier, both of whom knew things he had yet to learn (and 
 could, 'perhaps, being a man, never learn). He had felt 
 himself an utter fool ... for not until this moment and 
 this confrontation had he comprehended what love is. And 
 so riving was that comprehension that the twin desires tore 
 at him — the desire to show her his infinite tenderness, the 
 stony wish that she had never been born. . . . 
 
 In their first talk he had controlled himself to say: 
 
THE ANSWERER 139 
 
 "Esther, I came back because I've discovered I love 
 you." That was near enough to truth, since he knew, now, 
 that he did love her. Of what avail to have said: "I 
 came back because I thought I might be in love with you. 
 And I set eyes on you and knew it to be so? " . . . No 
 matter. She had answered, very gently: 
 
 " Walt, I couldn't ever marry you." 
 
 Then he had voiced his honest incredulity. He couldn't 
 believe she was in love with Davy Sayre. He had seen too 
 deeply into her, in those weeks of living under one roof; he 
 knew her imaginative quality, her tastes that the young 
 farmer from Smithtown could never share. There was noth- 
 ing ambrosial about him; and her clearsightedness must 
 tell her— 
 
 " I can't believe you are in love with me." 
 
 She wasn't in love with young Sayre, then! Her shift- 
 ing the ground on which they trod, clearly implied it. She 
 was appealing to him for proofs, for the exact honesty that 
 his first declaration had evaded. In a rush of chivalrous 
 feeling he had met the appeal: 
 
 " Oh, but I am! I'm not self-deceived — ^now. , . . The 
 thought of love came first, the thought of you afterward; 
 but one led surely to the other. And then I began to suf- 
 fer. . . . Don't you see what you have done to me? don't 
 you? " 
 
 She must. Being a woman, it was impossible that she 
 shouldn't. Being Esther, she would be honest with him. 
 But it was natural she should move toward admission with 
 a certain reluctance. Along this new path, one was con- 
 stantly skirting one knew not what precipices. 
 
I40 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " I can see you have changed, somehow." 
 
 Brave and plucky girl! His heart praised her. Now, to 
 test her advance: 
 
 " How? " 
 
 And at the beginning of her answer he had heard certain 
 syllables like the light, dry rattling of stones on a treach- 
 erous mountain path; and then without warning his secure 
 foothold had crumbled away under him: 
 
 " You . . . met some one, or heard something. . . . You 
 thought of love, then you thought of me . . . wrong way 
 about. ... If I were ever to love a man . . ." 
 
 Her voice came to him from an immense distance over 
 the brink beneath which he lay, for the moment stunned. 
 
 When he could talk he had disputed her contention that 
 the thought of " that one " must come first, the thought of 
 love coming afterward. Had disputed it in the only effec- 
 tive way, by the picture of where he was, of the arrived-at 
 condition, the reached goal. Only by means of such a pic- 
 ture would she grasp the immateriality of the road he had 
 traveled. What had he said? He had opened with an 
 acknowledgment that, perhaps, he was so unlucky as to 
 travel alone. ". . . To be different is unlucky. But it 
 need not last. . . . We yoke young people and mostly they 
 team well. I thought it over — much. And I saw some- 
 thing of what it meant. . . . There needed to be passion. 
 . . . But more than that was needed. A great faith in 
 life itself was needed. . . . That would last because it was 
 the true passion ... so big you could never pass beyond 
 it . . . enclosing and outreaching the very stars! . . . real, 
 because self-created. A man is a new Adam in a universe 
 
THE ANSWERER 141 
 
 of his own fashioning and at last he fashions a woman, 
 really from himself, to share with him all its loveliness and 
 beauty and grandeur." 
 
 As he had talked the words, the phrases, had welled up 
 out of him; yet in the act of uttering them some deep in- 
 stinct had remained unsatisfied. He knew already what 
 it was. It was the artist-instinct which remained obscurely 
 baffled in his effort to make and recite poems. And its 
 constantly-reasserted presence made him angrily unhappy. 
 What! could it not leave him alone in this crucial hour of 
 his life? could he never for one solitary instant be rid of 
 its critical, detached gaze and its imperious demands? He 
 hated it, sitting forever in a corner of his consciousness like 
 a creature you could never banish from your sight. Now 
 when his life, or his happiness (which was the same thing) 
 depended on his perfect freedom to become what she might 
 require him to become, this creature, with cold eyes, kept 
 him from the perfection of surrender. And it did this — 
 how? Merely by criticizing his efforts, by pointing out to 
 him the ridiculous inadequacy of his words, by too audibly 
 declaring to his innermost ear: 
 
 "You fail in self-expression; always have; always will. 
 You cannot make her know. You cannot make her the 
 perfect surrender you wish because you have already given 
 me a lien upon you. You gradually awoke to my exist- 
 ence in your house, in your brain; you did not stifle and 
 crush me; and you caimot, now. Here I sit and appraise 
 everything you think, and feel, and do; here I sit as long 
 as you live and (who knows?) it may be longer. I will 
 goad you with a merciless goad, and you shall do what I 
 
142 THE ANSWERER 
 
 impel you to do; and the greatest thing you do will not be 
 feast enough to glut me. In this inspired love of yours 
 you are making your first and most desperate attempt at 
 self-expression in the one form in which the millions of 
 men achieve it. And how? With words. But they do not 
 use words. They utter a series of soimds of conventional 
 meaning. Words? You fool! All that you can say will 
 be but a shadow, not even edged with flame. . . ." 
 
 What Esther had been replying had come as an echo, 
 merely: 
 
 "... It isn't I you love, but what you . . . build 
 around me. Something . . . fashioned ' really from your- 
 self.' ... An afterthought. You will never persuade . . . 
 that way." 
 
 It was not the echo but that inner sound of scornful 
 laughter which had stung him to take her in his arms; and 
 then began an ecstacy and wild delirium of the senses. To 
 have her throat imder his lips . . . 
 
 38 
 
 In the succeeding days that had remained the supreme 
 moment in which, for however small an interval, he had 
 escaped the merciless critic within. And not from any 
 sensual standpoint but because he knew she could give 
 him this escape, this deliverance, Walt looked upon Esther 
 as priceless. It was true the deliverance came through 
 the senses but he was clear that it came untarnished. And 
 the possession of her could render it perpetual. . . . 
 
 This revelation gave him calm, and pure happiness in 
 the confident expectation of assured future happiness. He 
 
THE ANSWERER 143 
 
 looked around at — and through — all the world. Life for 
 those incomparable hours was like looking into the placid, 
 penetrable waters of a wide lake. He understood at last 
 the fable of Narcissus. He felt as if his true self existed 
 only as something mirrored in her eyes — ^her eyes flecked 
 with golden-brown like still waters percipient of sunshine. 
 In a dawn of splendor, he lived, gay, poised, involved in a 
 rapport which communicated something from the dead 
 to the living and from the living to the unborn. 
 
 Are you stifled? O inner critic? Are you silenced, ex- 
 commimicated at last? You have declared that I shall 
 never know the satisfaction of achieved self-expression; 
 what have you to say any longer? Have I answered you? 
 Yes, I think I have answered you. What you called a 
 shadow is a clear, invisible flame. What you said I could 
 not compass, I have compassed. The artist in me is satis- 
 fied; I have risen to manhood, am become one with my 
 kindred , . . love and death and dust, and love upspring- 
 ing . . . and shall fulfil the cycle which is alone com- 
 pletely, wholesomely human, and therefore alone the high- 
 est, final art. 
 
 Art, he reflected, is like life, perpetuated only through 
 the intercession of the senses, yet constantly besought to 
 despise the senses, like children who should be entreated 
 to deny their own mother as some one beneath them. For 
 his part he would never hereafter make the mistake of as- 
 suming that because a thing was sensual it was base. One 
 might as well call the red earth degrading. Nothing was, 
 in itself, either coarse or fine; in what it brought forth all 
 virtue resided. 
 
144 THE ANSWERER 
 
 . . . And he looked, without anxiety or rancor, at young 
 David Sayre, come over to spend the evening at the Terry 
 homestead. He felt a wide friendliness for the freckled 
 face beneath all that thick, unruly, red hair. What a whole- 
 some fellow Sayre was! and it seemed to Walt that the 
 young farmer was healthier and more wholesome than him- 
 self in the simple, usual, important respects . . . unimag- 
 inative, but for that very reason, unexacting; like the locust 
 tree for endurance; a stalwart figure whose inertness had 
 ' the effect of a rude but magnificent repose. Slow-tongued, 
 kind, faithful . . . when I say emphatically that he is 
 faithful, Walt asked himself, just what, to the curl of the 
 last planed shaving, do I mean? 
 
 Well, his faithfulness is plainly the superbest thing he 
 will have to offer any woman; it will not be restricted to a 
 narrow faithfulness to her as a woman but will employ her, 
 quite unconsciously, as the finest, most delicate, cherished 
 instrument by whom and through whom he keeps his faith 
 with the race. By her and through her — through the union 
 they make and the home they build and the children she 
 bears him; what they sow and the harvests they reap — ^he 
 will accomplish himself and she will accomplish herself. 
 That is to keep the faith. . . . And I, I— Walt Whitman? 
 And you, Esther? Shall we not do likewise? 
 
 You are to make it possible. Through you alone, will it 
 be possible for me. Through me alone, it exults me to 
 know . . . now . . . will it be possible for you. Because 
 we shall be more fully conscious than all these others, these 
 hundreds and these thousands of fellow-men and fellow- 
 women, we shall make a deliberate beauty where, momen- 
 
THE ANSWERER 145 
 
 tarily groping, they achieve none. The material is human 
 clay? Then you and I will be aware of the ultimate, per- 
 fected shape the clay is to take under our fingers; its tranr 
 sitional and ugly and meaningless shapes will not obscure 
 for us the emerging Design. ... Or say that the lives 
 of two joined together are like to a piece of music; then 
 where others struggle through discords, we will move up- 
 ward through planned and cunning modulations ; and where 
 all those, caught in a web of half-tones and a maze of un- 
 certain intervals, wander at times without an Ariadne- 
 thread in the labyrinth of tonality, we two will sing, will 
 triumphantly improvise, in resolving keys and in every 
 mode. . . . Venite, missa est. 
 
 The great curve of Dante's line swung its immense arc 
 over Walt's thought as he looked at Esther's head, inclined 
 forward in the firelight. Love, that moves the sun and the 
 uttermost stars . . . 
 
 39 
 She stood in the day's decline close to the bush of pxuple 
 flowering lilac, putting her white cheeks deep among the 
 clusters; the strong yet delicate odor of the blossoms con- 
 stricted his throat. The walk together along the upland 
 road, their nearness, the intimacy of twilight, had meant 
 more to him than any words. It had been the severest 
 effort of his life to approximate his feeling at that hour in 
 any words. 
 
 " I love you, first and most, for you — for your Self." 
 That had been the first, firmly-sounded chord of his 
 frank confession. She might know full well what was in his 
 
146 THE ANSWERER 
 
 heart to say, nevertheless it was owing her that he should 
 endeavor to say it. And so: 
 
 ". . . The first awareness comes when a man under- 
 stands that something which was his is wholly his no longer. 
 He has moments when he feels . . . seduced, betrayed, out- 
 raged . . . and all the time he is in an ecstacy over it." 
 
 . . . What was it she had finally said? 
 
 All he was declaring, she had told him, only proved to 
 her how impossible the whole thing was. She didn't love 
 him, knew she couldn't love him. He didn't love her, or 
 what she felt was her (" I know that what you love isn't me 
 at all "). He would be wretched with disappointment. , . . 
 
 No, no! Pass over all that. Pass over his yielding an- 
 swer in which he tried to face with candor the part of love 
 which is self-deception. Pass over their words, fugitive and 
 ephemeral. Pass over . . . pass over. 
 
 Pass to the moment when his short, thick, shaking fingers 
 had touched lightly her shoulder, his young face coming 
 close to her young face and his hungry eyes prisoning those 
 eyes of hers that, like dappled birds, fluttered and strug- 
 gled against the slightest surrender. Pass to the instan- 
 taneous escape. 
 
 ". . . All the while, the other day, that you were kissing 
 me, I felt it was . . . Davy. And because I imagined it 
 was Davy, I — I hked it. . . . Something, the thought of 
 him, leaped on me. . . ." 
 
 " Ye know that the Book is sealed with seven seals . . . and 
 it hath been foretold that as the seals are opened there shall ap- 
 pear four fiorses with riders . . . on the white horse rides a con- 
 queror, on the red horse rides a slayer with sword, on the black 
 horse is mounted famine, on the pale horse rides pestilence" — 
 
THE ANSWERER 147 
 
 the red horse and the black; left and right; slash and starve — 
 " the immortal great do not find their sublime fulfilment in sex " 
 — what is fulfilment ? Die once ; begin again — " he is ready with 
 the gift of his Self, in its finest flower; but the gift may be de- 
 nied " — light laughter and the sound of a savage voice : " What 
 then? Why . . . religion, or lust, or the muddy river, or the 
 ruthless reach for money, or a bullet in the breast in battle, or 
 the extreme unction of the all-merciful seal What then? . . ." 
 
 And in the midst of the jumble of voices another voice 
 which had kept reiterating, with something nasty and men- 
 acing in the soothing quality of its uninflectedness: 
 
 " People never know it when they are going insane. 
 People never know it when they are going insane. . . ." 
 
 Like an anodyne, that baneful murmur; a cooling mum- 
 ble to a child who, all the while, feels himself in a remorse- 
 less, unrelaxing grip. Steady . . . steady; this isn't going 
 to hurt you. And all the while it is hurting you . . . anni- 
 hilating you. 
 
 A senseless part of you goes on, in a silly way, all the 
 time, behaving on the whole quite naturally and inventing 
 and uttering thoughts and tags of things. You suppose 
 something. Anything, so long as it's out loud. 
 
 " I suppose it might be easier if I could tmderstand what 
 you see in him." 
 
 You don't. It wouldn't. 
 
 " I can't tell you what I see in him." 
 
 She means she won't try. Nice little He; can be minted 
 more satisfactorily if alloyed, strengthened, with truth. 
 So— 
 
 She can't tell you what she sees in him and, anyway, 
 it would be useless; he couldn't understand. There is self- 
 ishness in it — ^it isn't all unselfish like your own feeling 
 
148 THE ANSWERER 
 
 toward her; perhaps is a feeling less fine but represents 
 the full meaning of love to her. And you yourself are not 
 entirely human . . . you are made up so differently. You 
 sense things, your own feelings too, in a way no ordinary 
 man ever does. You are rather — noble — and she loves that 
 in you without loving you. . . . But that would never be- 
 long to her. She can bring you nothing. You were made 
 for greatness, but not for just plain love, love of man and 
 woman. . . . Every word tests the alloyed, minted lie which 
 gives forth a bright, silvery ring of a " working " truth. 
 . . . Minted words, minted lies, each stamped in relievo 
 with her profile which, head slightly lowered forward, he 
 saw gleaming palely so close to him in the Fifth Month 
 twilight. The head of one of those goddesses, beyond the 
 realm of truths and falsehoods, whom the Greeks had wor- 
 shiped — goddesses who were women, too. Expressions, those 
 goddess-women, of the highest art, which consists in the 
 violent dissonances and the subtle accord of living . . . 
 becoming, being; becoming, being . . . endlessly . . . the 
 passionate ecstacy of the senses set to the grave rhythm of 
 the heart. . . . The sole intercession was through the 
 senses. 
 
 ". . . You think I am * noble '? ... I am a healthy 
 male animal. ... I lust for you, for what you can give 
 me. Do you want to drive me mad? for you may do that. 
 Only—" 
 
 A tremendous chord of agony, struck out of nothingness 
 on every nerve in his body, stopped him. 
 
 " Only I . . ." 
 
 Stammered. Then a blank. Then a peaceful ebbing- 
 
THE ANSWERER 149 
 
 back of consciousness with the complete yet quiet com- 
 prehension of a world thrown down. Like birth? No, be- 
 cause birth carried with it no such awareness. Like death, 
 in which an awareness ceased, only, perhaps, to be born 
 again. One died, immediately awaking with the thought: 
 Of course this is not the same existence; at the instant it 
 seems oddly famihar but that feeling will vanish after a 
 little ... of course. 
 
 How did one go on talking to some one in the world just 
 quitted? Oh, yes! One made a strenuous effort of mem- 
 ory and . . . and recaptured the lingo, spoken and other- 
 wise. And doing so brought one gradually but all, com- 
 pletely, back — ^back into the sad world of May twilights 
 and lost lilacs. Confess you recognize your surroundings! 
 Confess your failure to escape . . . 
 
 " It has all been such a mistake. The thought of love 
 came first. There is a curse on any man who thinks. I 
 will never think again; I will live to feel. Forgive me. It 
 was a mistake to try to make a beautiful world, built around 
 a thought. A man might better never have lived than do 
 anything so foolish. Let him feel, and keep to the world 
 he is born in." 
 
 And cannot escape from. And . . . little, lifting ray 
 of hope out of nowhere . . . may yet come to a knowl- 
 edge of, and find a beauty in? Beauty? Nothing to do 
 with happiness. Nothing . . . except as it might kindle 
 happiness. You had to keep feeling, feeling ... a pure, 
 widening flow. Alas! 
 
 " Aod now when I do feel, it comes too late. Too late 
 because your feeling has gone out to another, but too late, 
 
ISO THE ANSWERER 
 
 anyway, because you would (rightly enough) distrust my 
 arrived-at feeling. And I know what I lose — ^know I shall 
 never have it back, know it will never come again." 
 
 With those words, the last that had been uttered be- 
 tween them, he had had a brief, surprising physical sensa- 
 tion, as if she had touched him with a finger — ^immediately 
 gone. They had walked the road homeward in silence. 
 
 Once, clutching and unclutching his fingers, he had felt 
 something warm in his hand, but on perceiving that he had 
 taken hold of hers, he let it go. 
 
 At the gate she had left him. Standing outside the 
 whitewashed palings, close to the lilac bush tall-growing, 
 held by its mastering odor, he had looked at the figure mov- 
 ing across the dooryard on which the old farmhouse fronted. 
 A great star drooped in the western sky and in the swamp, 
 in secluded recesses, a shy and hidden bird, a hermit thrush, 
 in notes bashful and tender, sang by himself a song. . . . 
 
 40 
 
 Once, Paumanok, 
 
 When the snorvs had melted — when the lilac-scent was in the 
 air, and the Fifth-Month grass was growing . . . 
 
 For a few hours the oblivion of deep slumber. Waking 
 shortly after midnight, mentally feverish and unable to 
 resume sleep, Walt rose, dressed and slipping from the 
 house entered a farm-lane fenced by old chestnut rails gray- 
 green with dabs of moss and lichen. Here, in a forward 
 April, the apple-tree blossoms fell in showers like delicate 
 snowy meteors. The scent of lilac moved softly upon the 
 breath of this May night. 
 
THE ANSWERER 151 
 
 In the northwest turned the Great Dipper with its point- 
 ers round the Cynosure. A little south of east stood the 
 constellation of the Scorpion, with red Antares glowing in 
 its neck; great Jupiter stared in the east. The sky was 
 splashed with phosphorescence. 
 
 When the moon swam into view she imparted to the 
 aspect of everything on earth shimmering and shifting color- 
 efiects of pellucid green and tawny vapor. 
 
 Out of the cradle endlessly rocking. 
 
 Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle 
 
 He remembered a summer on this Long Island's shore 
 when he had come upon a nest in some briers. Four light 
 green eggs, spotted with brown. Every day the he-bird, 
 to and fro flitting, keeping near at hand; every day the 
 she-bird, crouched on her nest, silent, with bright eyes; 
 daily himself, the curious boy, wary in approach, careful 
 not to disturb, cautiously peering, absorbing, translating. 
 
 The song of the he-bird, praise of the downshining sun, 
 fearlessness of day or night, of wind or weather, while 
 they two were mated. 
 
 One sudden day, one fore-noon, when the she-bird was 
 not crouching on the nest . . . returned not that after- 
 noon, nor the next . . . never appeared again. 
 
 All the rest of that summer, in the sound of the sea, at 
 night under the full moon and above the sound of the 
 lulled sea, flitting from brier to brier, he had heard the re- 
 maining, solitary guest, the he-bird. 
 
 The song of the he-bird, an imploration addressed to 
 
IS2 THE ANSWERER 
 
 the sea-winds along Paumanok's shore, a promise that he 
 waited till they should bring her back. 
 
 Yes, when the stars glistened, 
 
 All night long, on the prong of a moss-scalloped stake, 
 
 Down, almost amid the slapping waves. 
 
 Sat the lone singer, wonderful, causing tears. 
 
 He had been calling upon his mate, he had been pouring 
 forth the meanings which I, the lover, know. He had lost 
 his mate. I, who have not enjoyed — ^how do I know? But 
 I do. Perhaps that means something. I have treasured 
 every note. Surely, that must mean something. 
 
 Why, then a child, now a man yet by these tears a little 
 boy again — ^why, once, and more than once, crept I down 
 to the beach, silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending my- 
 self with the shadows, searching out obscure shapes, listen- 
 ing to dim echoes, watching the white arms out there in 
 the breakers . . . white arms, tirelessly tossing? Why did 
 I harken? to what end, O my little brother of the sky, kept 
 I the exact memory of your notes? and can I translate the 
 painful burden of your remembered song? 
 
 Soothe! soothe! soothe! 
 
 Close on its wave soothes the wave behind. 
 
 And again another behind, embracing and lapping, every one close. 
 
 But my love soothes not me - . . 
 
 The moon, as to-night, had hung low, having risen late; 
 the moon had lagged and hung low — ^perhaps heavy with 
 love. The sea had pushed madly upon the land, with the 
 untiring xurgency of the lover. The solitary singer had 
 seemed with his cry to search the sea and the moon and 
 
THE ANSWERER 153 
 
 the sky for the shadow of his beloved. At length, the aria 
 sinking . . . 
 
 All else continuing, the stars to shine, the winds to blow, 
 the sea like a fierce old mother incessantly moaning. What 
 an inexpressible ecstacy came to me, the boy with his bare 
 feet in the waves and the wind blowing his hair! To me 
 . . . there must have been love long pent in my heart at 
 last tumultuously bursting forth, for strange tears took a 
 way down my cheeks and we were a trio ; and to my boy's 
 soul the old mother Sea kept sullenly timing her answers, 
 hissing some drowned secret. I heard myself also mutely 
 demanding of the singing bird that he answer, whether it 
 was indeed toward his mate he sang or mostly to me, " for," 
 I cried in my heart to him, " I, that was a child, my tongue's 
 use sleeping, now I have heard you, now in a moment I 
 know what I am for. A thousand echoes have started in 
 me, never to die! " 
 
 . . . Odor of flowering lilac. A sense of fixation so 
 strong that it seemed to replace the fluidity called con- 
 sciousness with something indelibly graven, tenoned in 
 granite. A slow recession of everything but the immediate 
 moment and his actual surroundings. The stone had sunk 
 to the bottom of the pool; consciousness began to flow over 
 it with now and then a little swirling on the surface of the 
 stream, marking a site, a submerged obstacle or anchor- 
 age, a hidden position. Look! we can just see a ripple . . . 
 that means the light must be coming. 
 
 Yes, see — to the eastward. Dawn. 
 
 A sound of footstq)s. Turning, he saw young Freegift 
 [Terry entering the lane. 
 
154 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " Ho, Walt! Where away? " 
 
 The boy carried a milking-stool. Walt waited for him 
 to come up, then: 
 
 " Say my good-bys for me, Freegift, won't you? " 
 
 " 'F course. When'll you be back this time, Walt? " 
 
 "Ah! I'm off for good this time." 
 
 " Hold on, Walt! . , . Don't say that." 
 
 Freegift Terry came a step nearer. A knowing, yet timid 
 look was in his eyes, meeting Walt's. He said: 
 
 " She — she's a fool, Walt. She's the gol-blamedest 
 fool! " 
 
 Walt jack-knifed with laughter. The purge of it helped, 
 vastly steadied him. 
 
 " No — no, Freegift! You ain't meaning jest that. You 
 . . . wait. Whatever happens — ^you and some girl or other 
 — ^you won't feel that way." 
 
 " I wouldn't let myself care for the best girl that ever 
 lived! " 
 
 " Boy, it'd all depend on something you ain't got any 
 control over, something in you that she'd have control over. 
 . . . You don't believe that, no; and you won't believe it 
 then any more than now. I didn't believe it— and I may 
 not believe it some future time. Jest at this time, that's 
 how I'm explaining myself to myself." 
 
 " Dave Sayre— he's nothing! " 
 
 " Freegift, I guess any of us is fifty per cent, what some 
 one else makes us out to be." 
 
 I must get away, thought Walt, moved, as he stood look- 
 ing at the boy's face, which was altogether too like . . . 
 
 " Well, we'll make it ' So long! ' " he declared aloud and 
 
THE ANSWERER 155 
 
 heartily. "I may be back; I'll write, anjrway. Maybe 
 you'll hunt me up, come after me." 
 
 Freegift Terry dashed the milking-stool to the ground, 
 said in a quivering voice: 
 
 " I'll go with you! " — ^but catching the instant negation 
 of Walt's look — " You won't . . . you don't want me to? " 
 
 Walt couldn't speak; could only shake his head, wave his 
 hand; and in another moment he was up the lane and 
 away. 
 
 Away where? he asked himself in that boy's first words. 
 But to this unscotched question he still found no answer. 
 He was moving west on a road which, he knew, led into 
 the Jericho turnpike. And so, if he kept his direction, he 
 would be coming by nightfall to the outskirts of Jamaica. 
 Was he going back to Brooklyn where so much of his boy- 
 hood had been spent? Or would he be turning north, shortly^ 
 to revisit Huntington? 
 
 Brooklyn was better. He thought, with a thrill of pleas- 
 ure that surprised him, of Fulton Ferry, the magnificence 
 of the harbor seen from Brooklyn Heights, of lower Man- 
 hattan walled about with ships, of Broadway and its stages 
 and the oathbound brotherhood of the stage-drivers. 
 Crack-o! with the whip and the large, rude jest. A boyish 
 love of the daily adventure, a zest for crowds invaded him. 
 
 Yes, Brooklyn and Manhattan. It would be easy to- 
 live; he could set type in a printing office. That would 
 give him a little money, enough, not too much. And would 
 take only part of his time. Then, he'd be able to do a 
 little writing. It wasn't as if he had never tasted success. 
 Why, even when he was only about twelve he had had bits 
 
iSe THE ANSWERER 
 
 in the Long Island Patriot, and a piece or two in George P. 
 Morris's fashionable New York Mirror. How his heart had 
 double-beat as he watched for the fat, red-faced, slow-mov- 
 ing carrier who distributed the -Mirror I and the fine excite- 
 ment as he cut the leaves, roughly, with a finger that trem- 
 bled. 
 
 Starting The Long Islander in Huntington had been most 
 splendiferous fun. He had bought a good horse and every 
 week had traipsed over a slice of the Island serving his 
 newspaper — giving a day and a night just to that. The 
 happiest jaunts! going over to the south side, to Babylon, 
 across to Smithtown and through Commack, getting ac- 
 quainted with the dear old-fashioned farmers and their 
 wives, stopping by the hayfields and experiencing a hearty 
 and home-made hospitality everywhere; then, after a sup- 
 per and talk, riding away in the dusk through the scrub- 
 oak'd plain so perfumed with pine and the balsamic odor 
 of sweet fern. . . . 
 
 Life had all such good times as those in it, too. . . . 
 
 Life? why life was living! that's to say, movement, trans- 
 lation, flux . . . but not just the flow of sensations, either. 
 It was finding yourself in the midst of that incessant flow, 
 feeling how it transformed you (never two hours quite the 
 same creature, or the same identical substance) and sub- 
 mitting to the constant make-over, though with friendly 
 tusslings and a good-natured resistance. There lay the 
 fun; there wasn't any lesson but to have your fun. Ah, 
 these sulky retreats! these wincings! They were just 
 worthless. 
 
THEANSWERER 157 
 
 May-montk — month of swarming, singing, mating birds — 
 the bumble-bee month — month of the flowering lilac . . . 
 
 (Month of May twilights and lost lilacs.) 
 
 And then my own birth-month. The lights, perfumes, 
 melodies — the bluebirds, grass birds and robins, in every di- 
 rection — the noisy, vocal, natural concert. 
 
 Tympanist, a neighboring woodpecker, tapping his tree. 
 
 A while since the croaking of the pond-frogs and the first 
 white of the dogwood blossoms. Now the golden dande- 
 lions, spotting the ground . . . the white cherry and pear- 
 blows . . . the wild violets with their blue eyes looking up 
 and saluting my feet as I saunter the wood-edge . . . the 
 budding apple-trees . . . the light-clear emerald of the wheat- 
 fields, the darker green of the rye. A warm elasticity per- 
 vading the air . . . cedar-bushes decked with their little 
 brown apples . . . convocation of blackbirds, in garrulous 
 flocks gathering on some tree^ 
 
 (Yet the saddest loss and sorrow of my life is close at 
 hand, has just been ejjperienced.) 
 
 A typical farmhouse hove in sight. Breakfast! But first 
 I feel for a bath down there in that wide brook behind the 
 shelter of those drooping willows. Ridded of the dust of 
 the road, fresh, tingling, with no memory of a sleepless 
 night, and a boy's morning appetite, so I'll be welcome at 
 the farmer's table and good company to pay for my meal- 
 ing. (I'll offer to do half a day's work; I'm in no hurry; 
 I'll guide a plow and be making plans.) 
 
 He slipped behind the trailing screen of the willows and 
 leafing briers, stripped and stood for several moments in 
 
158 THE ANSWERER 
 
 the sunshine, listening to the gurgle of the water and feeling 
 a medicine in the sound. Then he doused himself. Shock 1 
 as the cold of the clear stream forced the breath out of his 
 body . . . shock! and lesser shock I . . . How good this 
 was! oh, good, good, goodl 
 
 END OF PAST ONE 
 
PART TWO 
 GULF STREAM 
 
 " CosMOPOLis, or chrysalis? " 
 
 Madison Slocomb laughed; and then, struck by the ques- 
 tion, became abruptly serious. He gestured lightly about 
 him and answered, with an alertness uncommon at the 
 South: 
 
 "Who can tell? She is Nouvelle Orleans and she has 
 not yet decided. Besides, although I was born behind her 
 levees, I am scarcely more than one of her stepchildren. 
 My father's father was not a Louisianan, nor was my 
 father native here. You will see, Mr. Whitman, you will 
 see after the shortest sojourn below Canal Street, how one 
 may be irremediably an exile in the city of his birth." 
 
 " And yet you would import me, an utter stranger, to 
 edit your new daily newspaper? WTio will read the Cres- 
 cent; who will buy a journal conducted by a Yankee out- 
 sider named Walt Whitman? " 
 
 " Oh, we exiles — we Slocombs and Hillhouses and Storys 
 and the like who have no Latin blood. Besides, the num- 
 ber of us is growing very fast. And with a victorious army 
 back from Mexico City, General Taylor and his aides in 
 constant circulation, cotton going up and the town gen- 
 erally overflowing like a bursting bale — " 
 
 159 
 
i6o THE ANSWERER 
 
 In succeeding days, loitering along the galleried streets, 
 passing the shadowed, tunneled entrances to the houses, 
 Walt thought he should never again see, as he had certainly 
 never seen before, such a richly-colored animation. Not 
 New York, not many-hived Manhattan with its ship-fringed 
 littoral, compared with this crescent shore diked against 
 the muddied Mississippi. 
 
 New Orleans had an air of being perpetually en fete un- 
 der a canopy of blue emblazoned with gold; if the day dark- 
 ened one looked instinctively aloft, expecting a shower, or 
 deluge, not of water but of confetti. The streets were full 
 lof rattle — ^yes, rattle was the word! though by it was ex- 
 pressed not metallic sounds, not the hive's susurrus, but a 
 combined precipitated effect as largely upon the eye as upon 
 the ear: Drif tings to and fro of soldiers, litters of the 
 wounded and fevered, the bright uniforms of officers and 
 the glint of sunshine on scabbards that dangled as they 
 strode past; faces, dark, bright, easily smiling or stained 
 with excitement, and complexions that were blue-white, pink- 
 white, faintly yellowed, ivory-toned, turbidly-tinted like the 
 roiled waters of the vast river, rose-brown and raw-coppery, 
 polished-opaque ebony or dull, teaked black. 
 
 The faces of contained Yankee traders, of wealthy negro 
 gentlemen who were men of family and owners of slaves; 
 of indolent Creoles, French ladies, a woman of the camp 
 followers, a religieuse . . . boys' faces bronzed, mustached 
 river pilots, African masks, thin-lipped Spanish countenances 
 and black-bearded men who looked like very much younger 
 brothers of the demi-piratical Jean and Pierre Lafitte, lost 
 lords of Barataria. 
 
THE ANSWERER i6i 
 
 The levees were white with cotton and the river steam- 
 boats, diagonally wedged, were infested with a race of steve- 
 dores while on the shore, carts, mules and blacks resembled 
 a swarm so thick that one perceived movement only at the 
 edges. Chartres, Royal, Bourbon, Burgundy, Dauphine 
 streets. Place d'Armes with the Cathedral and the Pon- 
 talba buildings. Patterned wood blocks from Belgium, the 
 ballast of ships, paving the roadways. Factors Row, the 
 French market, and the Absinthe House. The new Opera 
 House, the recessed barroom of the St. Charles Hotel, bar- 
 room of acreage rather than feet-square; the beautiful ro- 
 tunda of the St. Louis Hotel and its wide sweep of waxed, 
 perfected floor in the magnificent ballrooms. . . . 
 
 In the Place d'Armes, facing the open square as it seemed 
 immemorially, the three great lions. But a better symbol 
 of the present was a thing you could hold in your hand, a 
 single, spilling cotton boH. 
 
 After his first few days in New Orleans, Walt saw little of 
 Madison Slocomb. The merchant, with whom he had struck 
 a match and an acquaintance in the lobby of the Broadway 
 Theater, New York, was affected by the restlessness of the 
 period, nothing more. Carried North by a bit of business, 
 he had taken with him a vaguely cherished and sentimental 
 idea of founding a newspaper. Why not? Look at the 
 Picayune and the Delta! They had sold almost in bales, 
 like cotton, read everywhere from the planters' gi'eat houses 
 to the river bank. The letters of Chaparral and other war 
 correspondents explained much of this avidity, no doubt; 
 
i63 THE ANSWERER 
 
 nevertheless, people now hankered for the news, or at least 
 for the newspaper, as they hankered for their cafe lait at the 
 coffee stalls — ^would hereafter insist upon one as fully as the 
 other. Simple! Besides, the price of cotton was going up, 
 up, up all the time. Every one had money. ... A news- 
 paper of one's own was a special hobby, like a good stable. 
 Enough if it paid its way after a little; it needn't make 
 money. Let cotton do that. . . . Slocomb had been might- 
 ily taken with this young fellow, this Whitman — not quite 
 twenty-nine yet, with experience as a printer and writer; 
 had for the last year or so edited the Eagle newspaper in 
 Brooklyn; gave him $200 and told him to start off down th§ 
 the Mississip' and he was as good as his word, came right 
 here and rolled up his sleeves and set to work; tall, with a 
 fine, open face, gray eyes that look straight at you, black 
 hair and beard and easy, square, powerful shoulders; an 
 upstanding fellow all right! Thus the pleased merchant to 
 some cronies in the cool comfort of one of the Canal Street 
 clubs. 
 
 Walt, on his side, was more than satisfied with a job in 
 which, after all, nothing more was expected of him than a 
 routined, capable performance. Nearly eight years in New 
 York and Brooklyn, years in which he had constantly con- 
 trived to rub against and study all sorts of people, enabled 
 him to read correctly the mind of his employer. This was 
 essentially an easygoing soul, this chap Slocomb. And I 
 like an easygoing soul for my master, Walt declared to 
 himself, with a candid laugh. I am probably, yes, certainly 
 in many particulars, a loafer, as plenty of persons have 
 called me; it doesn't follow that I am a slouch. I am no 
 
THE ANSWERER 163 
 
 slouch at the type-case, for example. But one of these 
 tjrpical tramp printers, whiskey-fed and bible-backed, I 
 could never become. Nor one of these peering, desk-ridden 
 writer-hacks and editor-hacks, could I ever become. They 
 will have to plant me among the daisies first. 
 
 He had abandoned his desk and was strolling through the 
 iron-grilled avenues of the arrondissement, the old Spanish 
 and French city, and thinking how extraordinarily unlike 
 his favorite Manhattan all this was. He missed, though as 
 yet not badly, the jolly group of congenial spirits who were 
 always assembling, afternoons, at Pfaff's Broadway place, 
 grouped about the long table extending the length of the 
 cave under the sidewalk, drinking, eating, chaffing, smoking. 
 He missed the Broadway omnibuses and their riproaring 
 drivers; most of all he missed the Fulton Ferry. ... I 
 must quit this mood of comparison, he thought, or I'll work 
 myself into a state of fancied mournfulness in which I'll 
 have no true perception of the new things all around me, 
 things and people different, curious and full of discoveries 
 for me, if only I'll make myself eligible to know them. And 
 I want to know; I guess that is all I want, presently. 
 
 Then, which? For there are in all New Orleans just two 
 places where I might make a beginning of human wisdom. 
 One is the levees; t'other is the barroom of the St. Charles 
 or the St. Louis. Let it be the barroom for I am deathy- 
 thirsty and hanker for a cobbler with strawberries and snow 
 topping the tall tumbler ... or a few swallows of the mild, 
 delicious French brandy. . . . 
 
 The immense barroom, place of polished woods and gleam- 
 ing glassware, resembled, in its intent activities, a roofed. 
 
i64 THE ANSWERER 
 
 polite public forum. The number of the inhabitants drink- 
 ing wasn't many, only a percentage at any hour or minute. 
 In alcoves men sat and mingled the intermittent transaction 
 of business with much social gossip and political argument. 
 In a corner, or more accurately, a quarter, an auction was 
 going on. Walt drifted toward the cluster of some dozens 
 of men, mostly frock-coated with broad-brimmed hats, who 
 surrounded the auctioneer, as aloof from the rest of the 
 room as if divided from it by partitioning panels. A specula- 
 tor for falling prices was being sold out. The auctioneer 
 was delicately humorous. " My client, gentlemen, wishes to 
 'dispose of all his effects as he has engaged to take Gineral 
 Santa Anna on a b'ar hunt in a neighboring parish." The 
 crowd laughed and some one said, in a clear drawl: " Let 
 b'ar eat b'ar." 
 
 Drifting back to the bar, Walt found himself alongside a 
 man who drank his brandy in uncritical gulps. Br-r-r! He 
 was shivering, for all the warmth of the day, this fellow; 
 must have ague; his teeth chattered. 
 
 " Back from Vera Cruz, amigo? " 
 
 The face turned toward Walt was, for all the chap's dis- 
 comfit, humorous, valiant and winningly Kelt. A sentence 
 in Spanish^ meeting Walt's headshake, was succeeded by 
 English, brogue'd despite a formal manner that testified to 
 education. 
 
 " I'm saying 'tis a deal farther than True Cross I'm com- 
 ing from. Your name, may I ask? " 
 
 Given, and the Kelt responded: 
 
 " 'Tis Jose O'Donoju — D-o-n-o-j-u which was wanst 
 
THE ANSWERER 165 
 
 D-o-n-o-h-u-e — saluting you, Mister Whitman. What'U you 
 be drinking with me, sir? " 
 
 They loitered over an exchange of glasses, making ac- 
 quaintance rapidly and freely. 
 
 " Up from the South I am, Friend Walt," explained Jose 
 O'Donoju, whom now the good brandy had warmed and 
 steadied. 
 
 " The South? " Walt asked. 
 
 With a rollicking laugh, the other commented: 
 
 " And a wee bit puzzled you are to hear me say that. 
 I'm found by you in what, I doubt not, is your furthest 
 South. But I am meaning the other hemisphere entirely. 
 You must not be after forgetting the world is round both 
 up and down as well as sideways." He gestured comically; 
 took off and re-settled on his head a gold-laced military 
 cap, exposing close-cropped hair which, in a long growth, 
 would perhaps have been the hvint orange that had evi- 
 dently been the original color of the narrow, short, bleached 
 strips of hair covering the cheekbones. His lean, tanned 
 young face was, on the whole, aquiline, adventurous and 
 aristocratic; Irish in contours, Spanish in the delicate ab- 
 breviation of sidewhiskers, youthful in being otherwise so 
 smooth-skinned and clean-shaven. 
 
 " Down in the region of another river, a slightly lesser 
 Mississippi, La Plata, we are having bloody war," he was 
 declaring. " Your little excursion to Mexico City, if you 
 will pardon me for so saying, is no proper comparison. D'ye 
 know that Montevideo has been under siege for five years? 
 but of course you wouldn't." 
 
i66 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " I've heard of Francia, the Paraguayan dictator," Walt 
 said humbly. 
 
 " Who has not? They call him El Supremo. He is dead. 
 You should meet some of our live ones! " 
 
 " What's an Irishman doing in those parts? " 
 
 " Never ask an Irishman what he's doing away from Ire- 
 land. Fightin', to be sure — ^what else? But is Jose 
 O'Donoju all Irish? Ah, most likely. What's the strait 
 betwixt Jose O'Donoju and Joseph O'Donohue? Although 
 I've an ancistor was cast ashore in a bog after the shipwreck 
 of Philip's Armada; he was a Spanish Mendoza, a grandee 
 of ould Spain. I was at Trinity in Dublin, then at Oxford 
 before I grew restless and spoilin'." 
 
 " Seems to me I've heard tell of an O'Donoju in Mexico, 
 years back. Wasn't he the last Spanish viceroy, 'bout 1820 
 or '22?" 
 
 " Sure, amigo 'tis my half-brother you mention; but he 
 was old enough to have been my uncle and we saw little of 
 each other." 
 
 " Well, Senor O'Donoju, you may come from farther but 
 you can't be any more of a stranger hereabouts than my- 
 self." 
 
 " Is that the way of it? " Two brown eyes, lit with easy 
 friendliness, became instantly sympathetic. "Par Dios, 
 Amigo Walt, you mustn't be lonely in a town where I have 
 a hundred good friends! Come with me. Do you know the 
 family of Fleurus, or have you had Raoul Dumouriez 
 pointed out to you? No? Have you been a guest at Casa 
 Callava? That is all wrong. I live to set such wrongs 
 right, taking care to enjoy meself the while. Allans/ " 
 
THE ANSWERER 167 
 
 3 
 
 So it was that, within twenty-four hours, Walt found him- 
 self as completely in a new world as if the gallant O'Donoju, 
 bent upon mad adventure, had whisked him off to another 
 planet. 
 
 This was a world truly cosmopolitan and yet incredibly 
 provincial ; as old, in effect, as Europe, and as new, in fact, 
 as the nineteenth century; a world which was founded on 
 lineage and went on by means of dynasties; and yet, con- 
 tradictorily, a world that toyed with devastating ideas, so 
 that the young people in it seemed to Walt like children dic- 
 ing with cubes of dynamite. To Jeanne Fleurus, the leader 
 of that cercle, he said one afternoon, while their acquaint- 
 ance was still merely days old: 
 
 " Mam'selle, you make me think of another lady. Pandora. 
 She opened a chest, you know — " 
 
 The Creole, with a low, running laugh, interrupted him. 
 
 " It was a powder-box, filled with poudre de riz, was it 
 not, M'sieu' Walt Whitman? La Pandora, she wished to 
 powder her nose." 
 
 " It was a powder magazine, from what I've heard. But 
 that's just it! You must ' amuse ' yourself, as you say in 
 French; you do not care if you powder your nose with gun- 
 powder." 
 
 "But, yes! I do, much. Gunpowder would not make me 
 more becoming. It would deface my looks." 
 
 Walt gave her the open consideration and admiration of 
 her charms thus called for. Mile. Fleurus met his look with 
 a smile that seemed to contain nothing but a disarming 
 
i68 THE ANSWERER 
 
 candor. For instance, it was not at all bold; and if a qual- 
 ity of assurance was behind the smile, the assurance was 
 perfectly concealed. What Walt contemplated was a face of 
 the t5T)e preserved for posterity by painters of the French 
 court. It was small, classic in feature, gay in repose; it had 
 a blended air of dignity, of being born famous, of having 
 been bred to a place and a role. The differences from the 
 Versailles portraits were few. There was a rosy tint at the 
 margins of the smooth complexion, a certain duskiness of 
 warm color under the shadow of the .masses of blue-black 
 hair and under the eyebrows, where lids sometimes drooped 
 over the intense black eyes. Again, there was the mouth, 
 sensuous, innocent, sweet. 
 
 She was of distinguished beauty even in a society which, 
 had dozens of beautiful Creole women quite as young as she. 
 And that was not too young, for there had been the years 
 in a convent school, followed by a year or two in a school or 
 seminary in Richmond; nevertheless, Jeanne was far younger 
 than Walt, younger even than the twenty-six-year'd Jose 
 O'Donoju, frankly her lover in quest of her hand. 
 
 This, so far, Jeanne and her father had not given him. 
 The elder Fleurus, scion of the French regime, was a stout, 
 middle-aged heritor of a rich import business, chiefly in fine 
 wines; a jealous father. The other member of the house- 
 hold was Jeanne's aunt, her father's widowed sister. Ma- 
 dame Fleurus — she had been wedded to a cousin — seated a 
 few feet away, was examining critically the gold lace oil 
 Jose O'Donoju's military chapeau, possibly with a view to 
 copying it in lace embroidery that lay on the table beside 
 
THE ANSWERER 169 
 
 her. Now she handed back the stiffened cap to its owner, 
 inquiring in French: 
 
 " And what is it that they would make of you, with this 
 braid? " 
 
 " I? I am a general." 
 
 "So! Pouf! He is a general " — ^her still handsome eyes 
 directed upward, as if inquiring of heaven or, perhaps, the 
 cupids posed playfully on the ceiling of the sola. " Of what, 
 pray? Of a regiment of savages, of scarecrows! " 
 
 A very Irish grin appeared on the General's face. He 
 bowed low. 
 
 " Madame Fleurus has contempt for my gauchos, for our 
 horsemen of the pampas. She belongs to the Blanco party. 
 I suppose, Madame, you despise the great Garibaldi who is 
 assisting us Colorados — Garibaldi, the liberator! " 
 
 " That man? Of course. Does he not wear a red shirt? " 
 
 Amid general laughter O'Donoju exclaimed: 
 
 " I shall order him a uniform from Paris. Then you will 
 receive him, no doubt! " 
 
 " Jamais! You will have to order him a portion of the 
 true religion, likewise! " 
 
 " Religion," spoke up suddenly a white-faced, spectacled 
 young man, introduced to Walt earlier as " Mr. Traubel." 
 He expressed himself with difficulty, yet with precision, in 
 English. " Religion had better engage itself with our bodies, 
 lest our souls take flight." 
 
 Madame Fleurus looked at him angrily, but Jeanne pit-a- 
 patted with her little hands. 
 
 "How good! Oh, if Papa were only here! He is too 
 
I70 THE ANSWERER 
 
 fat and contented. Tell M'sieu' Whitman, M'sieu' 
 Tr-rouble, about your great man in Allemagne, in Gairmany, 
 nom de — ^what is his nom? Marzh? " 
 
 " Karl Marx, Mam'selle. A liberator! " 
 
 " Of coxirse! Senor — ^pardon me, dear Jose! — General 
 O'Donoju has his liberator, that Garibaldi; M'sieu' Trouble 
 has his other, this Marzh, M'sieu' Whitman, please 
 choose! " 
 
 Walt turned with interest to talk to the young German, 
 and found to his great satisfaction that he was talking to a 
 revolutionist. As the handsome, crop-headed Irish youth 
 had been his first acquainter with a New World in birjh- 
 throes, so the pale, earnest disciple of Marx, a student and 
 traveler, first brought before Walt the spectacle of an Old 
 World honeycombed with revolt. Perpetually, it seemed, 
 men struggled for emancipation; and Herr Traubel term- 
 inated a long and vivid account of seething Europe with a 
 few words designed to place in perspective what, at the mo- 
 ment, had so largely the appearance of senseless confusion. 
 
 " Tyranny, Mr. Whitman, assumes as many shapes as the 
 Old Man of the Sea in that Eastern fable. It comes now 
 from above; some day it may come from below. For cen- 
 turies it has been manifested chiefly as political tyranny. 
 For centuries, at least from the time of the English Magna 
 Charta almost to the present and even in the present, men 
 have struggled to throw off tyranny in its political shape. 
 J a wohl! though with the establishment of these American 
 States and the bloody horror of the French Revolution, I 
 think the back of political tyranny was broken. It re- 
 mains to crack a few bones. . . . But look! As soon as you 
 
THE ANSWERER 171 
 
 throw off this Old Man of the Sea, this thing Tyranny, in 
 one shape, it comes back in another, again fastens itself on 
 you. The new form of tyranny will be, is, social — economic. 
 Suddenly, just as we have triumphed over political tyranny, 
 men make inventions in an unprecedented number. An ugly 
 black monster, with an engulfing mouth, appears to swallow 
 men and women, girls and boys, by the thousands. The 
 factory! The worker is sucked from the soil and penned 
 into cities. The loom is taken from his cottage and he must 
 follow it. The tool is wrested from his hand and operated 
 by a flywheel, his hand loses its cunning; where he made a 
 pair of boots he does nothing but stitch soles. His work 
 loses all variety; he loses his interest in it; it is a treadmill 
 task. He owns his tool no longer, his home is gone, and his 
 garden and scarcely he sees his own family. He is blind, 
 harassed; he does not know how to struggle with tyranny 
 in this new guise. But he will find out how. It may take 
 him half a century, or a century, to find out what afflicts 
 him. It may take him then as many centuries to throw off 
 this new shape of tyranny as it took him to break the back 
 of political tyranny. No one knows, but — ^let the struggle 
 begin! " 
 
 The words produced a powerful impression not only on 
 Walt but on the others, who had fallen to listening. In 
 especial, Jeanne Fleurus, her black eyes glowing, exclaimed: 
 
 " Do you hear that, M'sieu' Whitman? And you, Jose 
 amigo? But here in Nouvelle Orleans we talk of nothing 
 but the great rise in the price of cotton, the scandal of the 
 Dumouriez connection and the big Empire we are to create 
 in Texas and the South and West. Or we translate French 
 
172 THE ANSWERER 
 
 verse, or render M'sieu' Poe into French. And Jose, he 
 gallops on horseback among cattleherders. I hope, Jose, you 
 use only the flat of your sword upon them." 
 
 " And in New York," took up Walt, " we talk of nothing 
 but abolition or Booth and Forrest at the Bowery Theater 
 or city or national officeholding." 
 
 " In a city of your Massachusetts State, Lowell, I have 
 seen between seven and eight thousand young women, mostly 
 from farms, who work thirteen hours a day in summer," said 
 Traubel. " The factory bell rings at half-past four in the 
 morning; at five the girls must be in the mill. They get 
 thirty minutes, at 7 o'clock, to go to their boarding-houses, 
 eat breakfast and return to the work; in thirty minutes at 
 noon they must do likewise for- dinner." 
 
 " And the pay? " 
 
 " Five cents an hour. But no one complains regarding 
 the pay." 
 
 " At any rate, it isn't slave labor," offered Jeanne. 
 
 " Mademoiselle Fleurus, if you work like that you do not 
 care at all whether you nominally own your own body. 
 Some one else owns your soul. The true slavery is the ef- 
 fective control of the time and the occupations of some other 
 person. In England, Karl Marx found it worse, or perhaps 
 I should say, more widespread. Slavery? Your slavery of 
 the blacks? Of course that, at its worst, is far more abhor- 
 rent; but very often, in fact, it is much better and more 
 human." 
 
 Jeanne Fleurus, regarding idly her rose-nailed fingers, 
 seemed to be considering something and as Traubel finished 
 she looked up at Walt, remarking: 
 
THE ANSWERER 173 
 
 " M'sieu' Whitman, what is there so dangerous that you 
 find in our playing with ideas? " 
 
 The direct question seemed to throw Walt's mind into 
 even greater confusion — or was it chiefly an emotional dis- 
 turbance he felt? Mile. Fleurus prompted him. 
 
 " "|"ou know, you ^aid to me a while ago, we dabbled with 
 gunpowder." 
 
 With hesitation he responded, at last: 
 
 " Mam'selle, all my notions are upset, flung in the stream 
 and floating down with the current. I'd always supposed 
 you Southern people were very provincial but here I touch 
 worlds I never dreamed of in New York. New Orleans — 
 we think of it as aristocratic and old; but I have to come 
 here to learn what thousands of toilers are newly exercised 
 about. Your French families, inherited customs, leisure, 
 wealth; your long pedigrees — all that you take for granted 
 and interest yourselves in an Empire of Texas or a Republic 
 of La Plata or the prospects of bloodshed in Berlin." 
 
 " C'est mot, M'sieu' Whitman! All that is Jeanne Fleurus. 
 My Papa would groan over it, were he less placid. Nothing 
 makes him groan except anxiety lest he may not quickly 
 find for me a suitable alliance. In the meantime I won't be 
 ennui'd. Pending the day of my salon, let me have my 
 cercle. If any interesting traveler, like M'sieu' Trouble, 
 comes to him 'with introductory letters. Papa shall bring 
 him home. I have wrung from him this concession, under 
 threat that otherwise I shall elope — " 
 
 " Avec moi! " exclaimed Jose O'Donoju, placing his gold- 
 laced general's cap over his heart, and bowing over her hand. 
 Jeanne laughed. 
 
174 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " You will make me Queen of — ^what is it? of Patagonia, 
 eh, my General? " 
 
 " I will go back and liberate Ireland and you shall reign 
 at Tara! " uttered gallantly the voluntary exile. 
 
 The yoimg men made their adieux, an immense relief in 
 the face of Madame Fleurus having almost the quality of a 
 benediction upon them. 
 
 " I have a double errand," explained O'Donoju, as the 
 three walked along St. Charles Street. " I pay my cotttt to 
 Mile. Fleurus and together, she and I, we bleed her blissed 
 father for money for our South American cause. But that 
 second thing is all very fair. If we should be after winning, 
 he is to have the yerba mate concession. D'ye gamble? 
 No? Too bad. I've gold that is burning a hole in me 
 pocket. Oh, no, 'tis not gold for our brave Colorados, 'tis 
 a bit of me own money. I'll just go risk it while the feelin' 
 is strong that I can't lose." He took leave of Walt and 
 Traubel with a promise to look them up on the morrow, " if 
 me winnings don't so burden me I have to keep playin' to 
 reduce thim." 
 
 Traubel and Walt moved away slowly to the office of the 
 Crescent, where, Walt said humorously, " I've no work to 
 do except be handy for a visit from the owner, Mr. Slo- 
 comb." Finding a ^-eat similarity in their intellectual 
 tastes, they exchanged ideas eagerly about Goethe and the 
 philosophy of Hegel. 
 
 " There is a comprehensiveness in Hegel appeals power- 
 fully, I may say irresistibly, to me," avowed Walt. " I don't 
 read German, worse luck, and have to depend on transla- 
 tions and summaries. People call Hegel cold, a callous 
 
THE ANSWERER 175 
 
 sjrstem-maker; he is too big for them, I guess that's all. 
 Doesn't it come pretty much to this? Hegel says we can't 
 have goodness without badness — not because one sets off 
 the other but because both are parts of a whole. Isn't that 
 it? Tell me, tell me! " 
 
 " You put it well for words so simple," Traubel admitted. 
 " It -begins with what he called the paradox of our self-con- 
 scious life — ^his Negativitdt. I never know what I am, but 
 only what I was a second, a minute, an hour ago — ^yester- 
 day, last week, last year. I never know what I am, all by 
 myself, and I cannot. Cut me off from my fellows and what 
 am I? Then I only know what I am not. I am not any 
 longer any one's friend, nor any country's citizen, nor any 
 man's son, or brother, or father. I discover I am nobody, 
 and I never was anybody except with reference to some one, 
 or something, else. You see? " 
 
 "Yes. Yes! . . ." 
 
 " Then — I have made a great discovery. I have no self. 
 It is only a part of something larger. ... To be somebody, 
 anybody, I must be more than merely /." 
 
 " How great, fine! Peter was the rock on which was built 
 a church; but on this truth can be built something greater 
 than a church — the solidarity of the human spirit, the 
 brotherhood of man! " Walt was ecstatic. 
 
 A vertical line in the forehead followed swiftly the smile 
 on the pale face of the student and revolutionary but he said, 
 with emotion: 
 
 " It is good to see such enthusiasm." He went on: 
 
 " Now, as to good and bad. I cannot be good by just try- 
 ing for pure goodness. I can only be good by rejecting, 
 
176 THE ANSWERER 
 
 triumphing over, something bad. And if there were no bad, 
 I could not be good; I could only be the one thing that ex- 
 isted in the world. No bad, no good; no vice, no such thing 
 as virtue. This he calls the logic of passion, of suffering, of 
 struggle. We are made so. We see all the contradictions — 
 good against bad, and so on — but what we do not see, un- 
 less we look longer, is that the contradiction is our way of 
 seeing it! Good and bad are the two faces of a coin, op- 
 posed aspects of something that includes both." 
 
 " Wait! Answer me, and let me see if I grasp it rightly, 
 fully. ... Is there a soul? I mean what Emerson calls 
 the Over-Soul; I suppose what most men mean by God — 
 what most men really believe in, worship? " 
 
 "Yes! " 
 
 " Is it exemplified, embodied in occasional, rare men, in 
 any one man? and I leave out all question of the divinity, 
 or partial divinity, of Christ." 
 
 "Not touching on the question of the divinity of Christ: 
 Hegel says No! No one individual, by himself, exemplifies 
 anything." 
 
 " Is an essence of the soul, or the Over-Soul, to be found 
 in each and every man — ^some tiny drop, we'll say, in the 
 poorest, worst? " 
 
 " Again, No! " 
 
 " Emerson's mystical, of course. As I read him, he has 
 a sort of sea of goodness, or fullness — ^an illimitable reservoir 
 of the Over-Soul — ready to flow into the heart of every 
 man. Like having water on tap in the kitchen." 
 
 "That is hope, or faith. It is romantic, like Fichte. 
 Hegel is not romantic. Neither is he vague." 
 
THE ANSWERER 177 
 
 "Then? . . ." 
 
 " You, in your life, thoughts, acts, goodness or badness 
 are one fleeting aspect of that Soul. So am I. So are all 
 men who ever lived or shall live. It isn't embodied in you 
 but you are a facet, a glimpse, of It. It is not an essence 
 in each of us but we collectively are that essence. Like 
 drops of water that make the ocean. But only all the drops, 
 and only when knitted together." 
 
 " What a grand, sublime doctrine, gospel ! And to come 
 to our New World from that Old! I swear I must learn 
 German and study it. But here's the office. Come up, do! 
 . . . Well; but look: I must see you again, soon and often. 
 What do you say? Come around in the morning, afternoon 
 — any time. That's right, that's right. I'll look for you! " 
 
 4 
 
 Walt foimd Madison Slocomb waiting for him. The 
 owner of the Crescent, seated at ease and cheerfully hum- 
 ming an air from last night's opera — Bellini's " Norma " had 
 been sung at the New Opera House, with Grisi; and the 
 hummed air was " Casta diva " — ^looked up with a smile, 
 exclaiming: 
 
 " I'm afraid I've neglected you a good deal! I mean, 
 as a stranger in the city. As an editor, I purposely neglect 
 you. Editors must have elbow-room, don't you think so, in 
 order to edit? " 
 
 "Gracious, yes! Takes a good deal of room, plenty of 
 seaway, to be a great editor." Walt was chuckling. " But 
 a puppet can be made to dance in very little space." 
 
 "Well, I want an editor, not a jumping- jack! Seems to 
 
178 THE ANSWERER 
 
 me you're 4oing good work. I like the paper; so do my 
 friends. If you wanted to, I'd be willing for you to write 
 political articles." 
 
 "Heaven's mercy, no. What would a Yankee say that 
 you Southerners would listen to? I don't believe I have any 
 politics, just now. I'm doubtful, dubitating. Beginning to 
 feel like a new boy in a strange school." And Walt began 
 telling Madison Slocomb of his meeting with Jose O'Donoju, 
 afternoons at the Fleurus mansion, the topics treated by 
 Traubel, and so on. Slocomb listened interestedly, saying: 
 
 " You are lucky. I don't know this Mr. Traubel, of 
 course. I know of O'Donoju and I've a business acquaint- 
 ance merely with the Fleurus father, the importer. We new 
 families who have been here only a generation or two do not 
 enter the Creole society except we marry into it. But the 
 Fleurus connection is one of the oldest — ^pure French, ex- 
 cept for a strain of Spanish blood in the early part of the 
 last century. Now the Dumouriez family — ^between you 
 and me I don't call Raoul Dumouriez anything better than a 
 nigger." 
 
 " What is the ' scandal of the Dumouriez connection ' ? " 
 asked Walt, recalling an allusion in Mile. Fleurus's talk of 
 the afternoon. 
 
 " Eh? Oh, you mean Raoul. He's taken a placee since 
 his marriage with the Antoine heiress." The merchant, see- 
 ing Walt's mystification, went on, explanatorily: 
 
 " Raoul is a sang-mele, I believe — negro blood half a 
 dozen generations back. But it wasn't for that I called 
 him no better than a nigger, but because he's such a devil 
 generally. Aristocrat, though." 
 
THE ANSWERER 179 
 
 ♦' Hold on, Mr. Slocomb! What's a placee? And I don't 
 understand; do the people here keep track of a negro strain 
 half a dozen generations back? How do they distinguish? " 
 
 Madison Slocomb offered Walt a cheroot. " Oh, yes ; for- 
 got you don't smoke." He lit one himself, exhaled leisurely, 
 and leaned back in his chair. 
 
 "It's — complicated! First, about the infusion of black 
 blood. That has been going on, more or less, of course, 
 since the very beginning. Now, under certain circumstances, 
 the thing is almost as much an institution as slavery. We 
 have negroes, or, at least, men with a distinct strain of black 
 blood, who are gentlemen, who are slave-owners, and whose 
 standing among gentlemen is, for all practical purposes, as 
 good as the best. And they are staunch defenders of slav- 
 ery. Some of them are very rich, thoroughly well-educated, 
 too. Their daughters are sent to Paris. When the girls 
 come back here — often astonishingly beautiful women — 
 they look up, not down and not, usually, on their own level 
 either. Well, a white man cannot marry such a girl ; I mean 
 a union can't be legalized. Though very often he falls 
 genuinely in love with her. Her skin may be as white as his 
 own, you know. ... He declares his affection. She ad- 
 mits or denies her liking for him. If she admits a reciprocal 
 affection, she refers him to her mother. The mother makes 
 all the arrangements and if they are not satisfactory the girl 
 and the suitor are parted. The girl may love him but she 
 is acquiescent in the fashion of continental Europe, where 
 she was educated." 
 
 " But what arrangements does the mother make? " 
 
 " She ascertains the man's circumstances. He must be 
 
ii8o THE ANSWERER 
 
 able to support her daughter and any children. He must 
 furnish security for such support, and for her support should 
 he ever leave her and an agreed, sufficient sum for each of 
 the children. And ' support ' means in a style as liberal as 
 she has been used to, or perhaps better. . . . Suppose all 
 this is settled satisfactorily. Rooms or a house procured in 
 the right quarter of the city. The couple go to housekeep- 
 ing. The woman goes about, as before, in her own circle 
 — and it is wide. The man moves in that circle and his 
 own. They go to parties and beds masques together. She 
 misses nothing she has been used to. . . ." 
 
 " What does she call him? " 
 
 " Her ' husband.' Why shouldn't she? There are only 
 two differences in thai union from a formal marriage. The 
 first is the omission of the legal ceremony. The second is 
 that the woman does not enter the particular social circle 
 in which her husband was born and in which, to some ex- 
 tent, he continues to move." 
 
 " And she, I suppose, is his plac6e? " 
 
 " So she is called. As a class, these women are affection- 
 ate and almost without exception they are constant. The 
 unions are generally as happy, often happier, than mar- 
 riages." 
 
 " And there is no stigma? " 
 
 " Oh, none whatever." 
 
 " But what is done when the man comes to marry? " 
 
 "He may part from his placee or he may not. If he 
 does, he makes the settlement agreed upon before their 
 union. His affection for her, or her affection for him which 
 stirs him with a feeling that the separation is cruel, may 
 
THE ANSWERER i8i 
 
 lead him to pay her over and above the agreed sums. Where 
 the man is making a family alliance rather than a marriage 
 for love, he is pretty likely not to part from his placee but 
 to support both establishments. Men who become strongly 
 attached to their placees often never marry; they educate 
 their children in the best style and at death leave them all 
 their property." 
 
 " But the children? " 
 
 " Why, they can't be said, in our society, to be badly off. 
 That is the advantage of an old, long-established society. 
 The negro blood has been still more thinned. The boys, 
 enriched, become planters; if they marry, they marry women 
 with at least as much white blood as themselves. Some of 
 the girls go abroad to societies where race distinctions are 
 less marked, but most of them stay here." 
 
 " In turn, becoming placees? " 
 
 " Yes, attenuating the negro blood still farther. So now, 
 what with this and the carefuUy-pedigree'd old French and 
 Spanish families, you see how it is possible, as in the case of 
 Raoul Diunouriez, to estimate precisely racial heritages." 
 
 " What is it you called him? Have you names for all the 
 degrees of blood? I thought ' mulatto ' and ' quadroon ' 
 were the only designations." 
 
 " Oh, Lord, no. They're elementary. If you'd get Ma- 
 dame Fleurus — the old lady — to talk, you'd hear half a 
 dozen others. When I called Dumouriez a sang-mele I was 
 employing the nicest distinction we bother with. That 
 means, or may mean, that he had a great-great-great-great- 
 grandmother who was pure black. As a matter of fact, I 
 don't know that he had. Accurately, it means he is one- 
 
i82 THE ANSWERER 
 
 sixty-fourth negro blood — ^but the only way I know it, or 
 you, or any one else, is by the tradition of his pedigree. 
 Physically, nothing whatever to indicate it." 
 
 " But he's a devil." 
 
 " Decidedly. What I object to exclusively is the brute's 
 ugly disposition. What the Creole aristocrats object to is 
 his taking a placee after his marriage with Mile. Antoine. 
 Or rather, the Antoines don't like it. Before, was all right; 
 after, is not quite the same thing. Not nice." Slocomb 
 grinned, lighting a fresh cheroot; he stood up, saying: 
 
 " You've nearly made me forget my errand. I came in to 
 invite you to the club with me for dinner. Then we'll go 
 to the theater." 
 
 Walt assented, and was rewarded at the show at the St. 
 Charles by his first glimpse of General Zachary Taylor, 
 freshly returned from the wars. A short play was followed 
 by the performance of Dr. Colyer's troupe of " model ar- 
 tists," in whom the interest of the audience obviously cen- 
 tered, for their groupings and solo poses were received with 
 almost boisterous applause. But, in fact, the theater was 
 crowded with men, mostly young, uniformed and shoulder- 
 strapped. Old Rough-and-Ready, Zach, the hero of Buena 
 Vista, alone among the officers, so far as one could tell, wore 
 the clothes of civil life. Walt studied the veteran comman- 
 der with interest. Here was a man who had been just about 
 Walt's own age in the war of '12. 
 
 " Looks a good deal like Fenimore Cooper," he told Madi- 
 son Slocomb, " as I once saw him, a few years ago, in a 
 courtroom in Chambers street. New York, back of the City 
 
THE ANSWERER 183 
 
 Hall. Cooper was suing somebody for libel, I think, or else 
 for pirating his stories; never was such a man for litigation 
 — flawed right and left." 
 " That's General Pillow, over there." 
 " Houseful of militaires. Look at Zach now! " 
 At something on the stage that struck him as comical. 
 General Taylor, jovial at all times, was laughing unrestrain- 
 edly. Anything like conventional ceremony or etiquette 
 was plainly as alien to him as to Andy Jackson. His large 
 bulk shook and the many wrinkles of his sixty-four years, 
 creased more deeply in the dark-yellow face, caused Slo- 
 comb to say: 
 " Blessed if he doesn't look like an old alligator! " 
 " Instead of the next President of the United States! " 
 " I suppose there's no doubt the Whigs will name him," 
 Slocomb admitted. " And with Van Buren and the Free 
 Soilers bolting, he may be elected. It's a joke, though. 
 Zach's a Louisiana slave-owner; besides, the dear old fellow 
 doesn't know whether he's a Whig or a Democrat." 
 
 "Whom are you Southern Democrats going to pick to 
 run? " 
 
 " I'll tell you a secret. We're going to take Lewis Cass, 
 of Michigan. It's Calhoun's counsel. He says we've got to 
 take Northern men from now on. If we don't win, Calhoun 
 says call a convention and see what steps we had better 
 take to dissolve the partnership." 
 " You mean — ^withdraw from the Union? " 
 " / don't mean it, nor like the idea, but that's what it will 
 come to, I guess." 
 
i84 JHE ANSWERER 
 
 5 
 
 The next day being Sunday, Walt followed his usual cus- 
 tom of visiting the French Market in the morning. Par- 
 ticularly was he tempted by the Indian and negro hucksters 
 — the persons, not their wares. Specimens of healthy man- 
 hood finer than these, he was thinking as he watched some 
 of the Indians, straight and supple, couldn't be found; and 
 as for the darkies a fellow could get infected with enough 
 merriment, hearing them, to last him the week. 
 
 He sought out the enormous mulatto woman who sold 
 coffee and biscuits. How huge she was! and he computed, 
 from what he knew of human sizes and weights, that she 
 must weigh fully 230 pounds. Her shining copper kettle, 
 for all its immensity, was strictly in proportion. . . . Such 
 coffee for breakfast, or at any other time, was outside all his 
 experience. 
 
 The cup holding this nectar was at his lips when he cau^t 
 sight, over its rim, of Jose O'Donoju, a few yards away. 
 The South American general was smiling at a strikingly 
 handsome woman of color, not dark, perhaps a quadroon. 
 The smile, which was not much more, Walt judged, than a 
 frank expression of admiration, appeared to attract some 
 little attention. It was not returned, and after a couple of 
 minutes O'Donoju ended it with a slow and polite inclina- 
 tion of his head. A second later his transferred gaze fell on 
 Walt toward whom, producing instantly a smile of entirely 
 another character, he hastened. 
 
 " Here's the turnin' of my luck, to rin across you! " He 
 came up, stood still, and proceeded to turn first one, then an- 
 
THE ANSWERER 185 
 
 other, of his pockets inside out in a ceremonial manner. 
 " Behold what is left; I'm meanin' to say, what isn't; I 
 fell into the clutches of a club, on Canal Street in a fine 
 white house. 'Twas a whited sepulcher, no less. There 
 they introduced me to a game called boston." He looked at 
 Walt menacingly. " 'Twas not Boston you were by way of 
 tellin' me you came from, was it? " 
 
 " Hell, no! " But Walt was laughing. 
 
 The victim of boston continued his plaint. 
 
 " With me last peso staked and sproutin' wings, who 
 should tap me gently on the shoulder but Papa Fleurus. He 
 drew me into a corner and in dulcet whispers informed me 
 that a means of suddenly growin' rich had been newly dis- 
 covered. I, like a simpleton, barkened. And what did the 
 dear old embtistero propose? That I give up the sacr-red 
 cause of liberty and help him and his fellows in a crafty 
 scheme to extend their Cotton Empire! " 
 
 " To extend? " 
 
 " Sure, my dear Whitman, all the wealth of the planters 
 and all the skill of the politicians below Richmond is being 
 expinded forty different ways for that purpose. Openly, they 
 can but talk. There's Jefferson Davis says the Gulf of 
 Mexico should become an American lake; some one else is 
 generally raving about ' our manifest destiny.' It sounds 
 grand, and had they a few men like Bolivar or San Martin 
 or me countryman, Bernardo O'Higgins, the Supreme Di- 
 rector of Chile, I'm not saying something might not be ac- 
 complished ; but they've no one better than fellows like Nar- 
 ciso Lopez, Walker, and a lot of lesser riffraff. They will 
 filibuster in Cuba and Cintral America; get their pawns in 
 
i86 THE ANSWERER 
 
 gun-running scrapes and leave them to be stood against the 
 walls of calabooses and shot. Then some one like the legal 
 light, Judy Benjamin, will pronoxmce a fimeral oration over 
 them, a thousand miles away, in the shape of an argimient 
 that shootin' them was unconstitutional but correct." 
 
 O'Donoju had been talking in an imdertone, half-humor- 
 ous, half-earnest, as he and Walt saimtered through the 
 market; now as they left it the Keltic warrior, passing his 
 hand wearily over his forehead, said, wholly in earnest: 
 
 " D'ye know, I'm positive if I'd make mysilf their tool, 
 Papa Fleurus would consint to me as Mile. Jeanne's hus- 
 band. I'm tempted sore; if it wasn't for thinkin' I can per- 
 suade Jeanne anyhow, I believe I'd strike a bargain. Dios! 
 how my head aches! I'll be leaving you now to get the 
 saint's own sweet sleep." With a friendly wave, he was off. 
 
 Walt felt his desire to view the sights evaporate as he fell 
 to thinking, not of the imperial conspiring O'Donoju had 
 talked about, but of the phrase he had used about believing, 
 or hoping, he could "persuade Jeanne anyhow." For all 
 Mile. Fleurus's character of independence, Walt could see, 
 by this time, how difficult it would be for her to accept the 
 gallant Jose without her father's consent. Probably, con- 
 fronted by a fait accompli, a secret wedding or a runaway 
 match, Papa Fleurus would acquiesce; but if he chose, no 
 longer the indulgent parent, to be stern and unbending, then 
 his daughter would necessarily become an exile from the 
 only society she knew. Nor could the roving O'Donoju con- 
 duct her into any other acceptable society, unless it were 
 abroad, in Paris, say. But tiiat would be a very precarious 
 
THE ANSWERER 187 
 
 and doubtful enterprise. There were, in truth, as Walt said 
 to himself, just two grand social climaxes, two achieved aris- 
 tocracies, for the Southerner. One, South Carolinian, meant 
 a pew in St. Michael's Church at Charleston and the right 
 to attend the balls of the St. Cecelia Society; the other, 
 Louisianan, was even more impenetrable, like these sur- 
 rounding swamps and jungles in which the live-oak kept 
 growing. 
 
 Thought of the live-oak renewed in him the loneliness 
 from which he had lately been suffering. He had been 
 struck by that tree, glistening solitary in wide flat spaces, 
 standing all alone . . . without a friend or a lover near 
 . . . standing so all its life and uttering joyous leaves of 
 dark green. Moss htmg down from its branches and its 
 look — rude, unbending, lusty — ^had made him think of him- 
 self; but he acknowledged to a wondering envy of that tree: 
 How could it stand there, uttering joyous leaves, without 
 the presence or hope of a friend or lover? All my life? I 
 know very well I could not. These past years I have en- 
 joyed myself mingling with the crowds in Manhattan, mak- 
 ing friends with both men and women, tasting every experi- 
 ence, I should suppose, life has to offer; the feast has been 
 generous, varied. Is life like that? Is it a delicious ban- 
 quet spread for epicures? and must he who suffers for 
 genuine sustenance, nourishment, go hungry? 
 
 Absently he looked about to see where his feet had led 
 him. St. Charles Street. Here were the mansions of the 
 Creole aristocrats, here and on Royal and Toulouse Streets. 
 Yonder, a little way, was the Maison Fleurus; across the 
 
i88 THE ANSWERER 
 
 street in Casa Callava lived connections of the last Spanish 
 governor of Florida. It was noon, and families were return- 
 ing to their homes from the service in the Cathedral. 
 
 Walt became aware of some one standing alone in the 
 shadow of the arched tunnel-entrance of one of the houses 
 across the street and adjoining the Callava domicile. A 
 house like its neighbors, galleried, with delicate iron grille- 
 work, its fagade merged in the panorama of the handsome 
 street-front. It was a woman, and she was looking intently 
 upon him. 
 
 His first surprise was succeeded by an extraordinary sen- 
 sation of adventure. She was scarcely visible, dressed in 
 some black stuff; her face was little more than an outline 
 and he could not see her eyes at all. How, then, did he 
 know (as certainly he didf) that he was the sole person she 
 was observing? An inexplicable intelligence seemed to fasten 
 itself upon him; his mind, brought sharply to the place and 
 the minute, was cool, collected and precisely planning . . . 
 or else exactly obedient. Which? It was no matter. 
 
 Without start or stopping, he continued along the street 
 for some distance, then crossed leisurely and saimtered back 
 on that side. 
 
 In some way, he Icnew just what to do. As he drew near 
 the house, he lowered his head slightly as if intent on some 
 thought unrelated to the errand of his feet. Unhasting, he 
 approached the house and without looking up passed assur- 
 edly into the entrance, the shadow of which closed behind 
 him like a silent door shutting out the street. 
 
 At one side, as with all these houses, was the staircase, 
 of great breadth and polished treads with easy rises. His 
 
THE ANSWERER 189 
 
 foot was on the first step when he felt a slim hand placed 
 lightly on his arm above the elbow. He turned, with a 
 whispered " Madame, vous vottlez — ?" 
 
 And stopped, trembling all over. The touch of her fin- 
 gers, the perfume that seemed to emanate from her dark, 
 coiled hair . . . like flowering jasmine . . . 
 
 Apparently a habit of taking Walt to the club was fasten- 
 ing upon Madison Slocomb and as Walt relished the bouilla- 
 baise which was the club's special dish, particularly when 
 followed by redsnappers stuffed with oysters, he sought no 
 excuses for a hospitality he couldn't conceivably repay. Nor 
 would he let the one-sidedness of the arrangement lessen his 
 good appetite. To-night there was to be a conference of a 
 political character which Slocomb wanted to attend, though 
 confessing to Walt: 
 
 " I'm not in the inner circles, politically, any more than I 
 am a member of the New Orleans aristocracy, socially. Still, 
 the planters haven't all the money of the South and they 
 know it; moreover, they can be friendly without condescen- 
 sion. Stay by me; you may see a high light or two and you 
 won't spoil any real secrets because they won't be spilled in 
 our presence." 
 
 " Celebres? " laughed Walt. " I am tolerably used to 
 them; don't stammer or swallow my Adam's-apple in their 
 presence. Perhaps because my first meeting with one took 
 place at an early age. I was five, and was one of a group 
 of children who turned out to see the corner-stone laid for 
 
I90 THE ANSWERER 
 
 a free public library in Brooklyn. The dignitary who was 
 to lay the stone, helping some of the children to safe spots, 
 picked me up, held me for a moment to his breast and kissed 
 me. He was General Lafayette." 
 
 " I hereby back out of the contest. I can't promise you 
 any one of much more than local importance, I guess. No 
 national figure, like Calhoun or our wrinkled old Zach. 
 Hard to think of Zach as President, if he should get elected." 
 
 " I've met Poe. Cordial, in a quiet way, dressed well but 
 appeared subdued, perhaps a little jaded. When I was 
 thirteen or fourteen — I remember 'twas a sharp, bright 
 January day — I saw on Broadway, just below Houston 
 street, a very old man, bent, feeble, stoutish, bearded; 
 swathed in rich furs, with a great ermine cap on his head, 
 almost carried down the steps of his high front stoop and 
 tucked in a gorgeous sleigh. John Jacob Astor. Then, other 
 times, also on Broadway I recollect Andy Jackson with his 
 upstanding hair, not roached but like a heavy mane. Clay, 
 Webster, Martin Van Buren though he hasn't the look of a 
 celebre in the least. Had a glimpse of Dickens while he was 
 in New York. William CuUen Bryant I feel I know — al- 
 ways very kind and sociable, despite what people who don't 
 know him will say. I was interested to meet a man who 
 comes from down this way and has settled in uppermost 
 Manhattan, bought an estate there; a man of most winning 
 manner and safely successful, I judge, after many years of 
 struggle. We met only the once, casually, but I'll always 
 remember that conversation; he was interested in, was an 
 authority on, birds — ^wonderfully observant and curious 
 about outdoor life as I've always been." 
 
THE ANSWERER 191 
 
 " What was his name? " 
 
 " Audubon — ^wasn't that it? " 
 
 « Not J. J. Audubon? " 
 
 " That's the man! I remember now. John James Audu- 
 bon. Has done a book of marvelous drawings, pubUshed 
 some years ago, I think in England, studies of American 
 birds — Birds of America was the title." 
 
 " By whiskey! To think of J. J. Audubon coming out 
 on top after all these years! He must be close to seventy. 
 Why, between twenty and thirty years ago, when I was a 
 yoimgster, he gave me my dancing and fencing lessons! 
 Anything to make a living, for him, those days. He had a 
 good property, I believe, inherited from his father, French 
 naval officer who had estates in Santo Domingo. J. J. lost 
 it all in business ventures though he never made any bones 
 about admitting it was his own fault. He'd quit work any 
 hour of any day to go hunting or fishing or just tramping 
 outdoors. . . . Well, I'm glad the old fellow has struck it 
 rich." 
 
 " Don't know but what I'm somewhat like him," Walt 
 said reflectively. He shrugged. " Perhaps " — in a low, un- 
 expectedly serious tone — " I'll strike it rich, too, some direc- 
 tion or other, yet." 
 
 " Plenty of time," offered Slocomb with li^tness. 
 " You're not yet quite twenty-nine, and Audubon was forty 
 or over when he cultivated my wrists and ankles." 
 
 They rose from the table, moving into a lounging room 
 where the first person Walt saw was Jose O'Donoju. 
 O'Donoju and Slocomb, meeting for the first time, shook 
 hands. The Irishman said: 
 
192 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " I've been meanin' to look ye up, Whitman amigo, but me 
 hands have been full with affairs of honor." 
 
 Walt didn't catch the import, but Slocomb said at once: 
 
 " Whom have you been dueling with? Are you hurt? " 
 
 " Not a drop of Irish blood has been shed," proclaimed 
 the warrior. " On the other hand, or hands, as the case is, 
 some excellint though faintly tainted French fluid has been 
 added to the large amount saturatin' Louisiana soil. Or 
 perhaps our friend Raoul has only parted with the drop of 
 black in him." 
 
 " Dumouriez! You haven't been — ? " 
 
 " I have. Not wanst, but twice. Dissatisfied with losin' 
 only about a half-pint, he sent a subsequent challenge." 
 
 " But what — ? " began Walt innocently enough. Slo- 
 comb intervened, saying: 
 
 "No, no! Mr. Whitman doesn't understand. The code 
 is that if a gentleman tells you he has been engaged, you 
 may ask him: With whom? if he is hurt? — anything of 
 that sort. It isn't permissible to ask anything about events 
 leading up to — " 
 
 " Very correct, Mr. Slocomb." O'Donoju executed a little 
 bow, from the waist. " Howiver, it happens that I am free 
 to speak of the second encoimter. The hostile Dumouriez, 
 having run his lift hand against the point of my rapier, a 
 most beautiful piece of Toledo, I do assure you, was forced 
 to borrow a handkerchief to stanch the flow. Mine was 
 asked for. Unfortunately, at that juncture, I was com- 
 pelled to use it myself before surrindering it to his second; 
 and at this gross insult he challenged me for the following 
 morning." 
 
THE ANSWERER 193 
 
 " Oh, ho-ho-ho! " Slocomb and Walt were helpless with 
 laughter. The duelist, with twitching lips nevertheless in- 
 sisted: 
 
 " You'll not be after misunderstandin', I hope. The 
 O'Donoju intended no insult to his late adversary's honor, 
 but was, by the advint of circumstances not culminatin' in 
 a sneeze, absolutely compilled to resort to the pocket-cloth 
 and blow his nose instantly! " 
 
 " Lord, this is lovely. All New Orleans will be laughing 
 at Dumouriez," declared Slocomb, with difficulty recovering 
 his aplomb. 
 
 " The following mornin'," finished O'Donoju, " Raoul the 
 Ruffled carelessly brought his right hand against my useful 
 weapon. Until he has had time to perfect himself in the 
 art of pulling a trigger with his big toe, his opponent ex- 
 pects to be at liberty. Have you dined? Yes? I am sorry. 
 Au revoir, then, gentlemen." 
 
 "What a miracle, that man! " exclaimed Walt to Slo- 
 comb. " He fights a duel — rather a couple of duels — ^and 
 then jests about it. The way to live, eh? Fulfil the code 
 the world demands, but don't make the mistake of taking 
 the code seriously! " 
 
 " What a miracle as a swordsman, you'd better pro- 
 nounce! " was the answer. " Dumouriez is the best in New 
 Orleans, probably the best in the South. And ambidextrous 
 — equally good with either hand. He must have been quite 
 at O'Donoju's mercy and your friend simply played to dis- 
 able him. Wonderful! " 
 
 " But the original cause — ? " 
 
 " Undoubtedly involved, near or remotely, a woman. 
 
194 THE ANSWERER 
 
 That's why one may not inquire. You noticed he said noth- 
 ing about that." 
 
 They joined a group of a dozen or fifteen men sitting and 
 standing in an irregular circle. An unannounced but un- 
 derstood formality seemed to govern the little assembly. 
 First one, then another spoke; the rest listened attentively; 
 after any individual utterance a low buzz of interchanged 
 comment .prevailed for several minutes. At the sound of a 
 new voice these murmurs would stop and the group would 
 give him audience. Slocomb, whispering, indicated to Walt 
 a man whose face, strongly-featured but withal kind, V7alt 
 felt to be attractive unless it were for an excess of self-con- . 
 fidence. 
 
 " Davis — Jefferson Davis of Mississippi." 
 
 " Believes in the conquest of Mexico, doesn't he? " 
 
 " Oh, we all do." 
 
 "This man over this side, standing; very keen-looking, 
 looks smart; smiling." 
 
 " He's partly Jewish, a brilliant lawyer. Benjamin's his 
 name. Member of Slidell's firm. Made a great argument 
 in the Creole ship case. Judah P. Benjamin." After a 
 moment's further study, Slocomb added: 
 
 " Fellow sitting next to Davis is the new Senator from 
 Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas. He has Southern connections, 
 embraces our point of view generally and should be a power- 
 ful ally." 
 
 Walt and his companion listened to the talk. Benjamin, 
 taking the floor, was arguing for a quiet confidence in " our 
 future." Why, after all, worry because of Van Buren? or 
 
THE ANSWERER 195 
 
 this preposterous Free Soil party? or a possible Whig victory 
 this year? 
 
 " Gentlemen, look ahead. Has the North our wealth? 
 Has it our secure social structure? Has it an educated rul- 
 ing class? Has it a philosophy, political or otherwise? Has 
 it our economic adjustment, actual or potential? Who 
 would answer ' Yes ' to any of these questions? The only 
 industrial system at the North is a chaos from which 
 emerges nothing but the greedy, systematic exploitation of 
 white labor — white, mind you — ^by individual cunning. The 
 prosperity of the North is at the mercy of mere trade, traf- 
 ficking; retail shopkeepers and commission agents. The 
 real production of wealth is here in our South. Has the 
 North any single controlling commodity, like cotton? Of 
 course, it hasn't. And the North knows it. Our ultimate 
 development may be retarded but it cannot be prevented, 
 for the final guarantees of national prosperity are in our 
 hands. ..." 
 
 He spoke persuasively, and his detached, semi-legal, dis- 
 passionate review made a clear impression. Stephen 
 Douglas followed, regretting that the Oregon boundary 
 should have been compromised, scowling once or twice as 
 he talked. Walt was struck by the way in which the scowl 
 transformed his face from something pleasant into a coim- 
 tenance dangerously sinister. Last the sitting Davis dis- 
 coursed briefly. 
 
 " The destiny," he asserted, " is a non-political empire, 
 the first of its kind. Mr. Benjamin has drawn suggestively 
 the outlines. In the domain of politics, we inherit that 
 
196 THE ANSWERER 
 
 powerful safeguard, the doctrine or principle of the rights 
 of the individual States. In every other respect our aspira- 
 tion, wholly legitimate, must be imperial. Our real founda- 
 tion is not, as our enemies pronounce, slavery with a super- 
 imposed aristocracy of the whites, but the production of 
 economic wealth directly and increasingly from the very soil 
 itself, an enterprise constantly enlarging in which all classes 
 of our society are vitally concerned and in which the larg- 
 est, the overwhelming number, of our population are im- 
 mediately engaged. We scarcely realize our own felicity 
 and fortune. Everything that constitutes the South to-day 
 springs from the ground we plant, and continue to plants 
 No State in the history of mankind has been so homeogene- 
 ous, so singularly unified, or, being so, has been so clearly 
 conscious of its structure and its purposes." 
 
 A steady voice from the listening group added: 
 
 " Or so prepared to carry them out! " 
 
 The arising murmur, animated and applausive, died down 
 at the sound of yet another voice. The speaker, apparently 
 a planter who had been passing through the room and 
 paused merely to deliver a piece of news meant for general 
 distribution, said: 
 
 " Gentlemen, some travelers overland have just brought 
 a report of rich gold deposits in California. Discovered in 
 January. At a place called Sutter's Mill, I believe. They 
 say a rush locally had begun before they left. Great ex- 
 citement. I thought you'd like to know. . . ." 
 
 He passed on. In the momentary silence some one asked: 
 
 " If there's really gold, the Territory is liable to be filled 
 
THE ANSWERER 197 
 
 up with grabbing Yankees, isn't it? We need California! " 
 No one seemed ready with an answer. 
 
 7 
 
 In hours away from her Walt endeavored to define for his 
 own reassurance his relations with Floride Dumouriez but 
 the rapid current of his awakened emotion made the feat 
 impossible. Such definition, it occurred to him, was like 
 the task of building a bridge over a stream too wide to be 
 arched by a single span — too turbulent, also, for the sink- 
 ing of the necessary piers. An anchorage in that river of 
 treacherous rages was not achievable. He loved her, yet 
 was repelled by her; he felt certain that what she felt to- 
 ward him was neither clearly love nor hate though always 
 and unmistakably passion. 
 
 The romantic-illicit circumstances of their first meeting 
 had plainly some\(ihat to do with this. For it was romantic 
 to have felt her eyes mysteriously dwelling upon him and 
 to have suffered, as he knew he had suffered, that curious 
 though not disagreeable invasion of her will. Her will 
 which, taking possession of him, had ordered him to take no 
 immediate notice of her vicinity; so that he had walked on 
 and by the house, had crossed the street some distance above, 
 had strolled back and, with a reasonable air of mental pre- 
 occupation, had entered the foyer as if its dark invitation 
 were for him alone. 
 
 In truth, he had reason to believe it was ; for the heiress 
 of the Antoines and wife of Raoul Dumouriez felt toward 
 her husband no passion whatever, nothing but a cold hate. 
 
igg THE ANSWERER 
 
 This was visible although she never made the slightest ref- 
 erence to his existence. Walt could not but admire the 
 presence in her character of something implacable as well 
 as something unappeased, perhaps never to be appeased. 
 On' entering that mansion he saw, at no time, a single ser- 
 vant. What Mme. Dumouriez did with them he hadn't the 
 slightest idea, for such an establishment as her husband's 
 required dozens. He saw no one but Floride. Though, ex- 
 cept servants, who was there to see? It was obvious that 
 her husband was away from home most of the time — no 
 doubt he dwelt exclusively with that placee who postdated 
 his wife and whose elevation into favor had scandalized all 
 her cousins. These cousins, or second cousins, for they were 
 not nearly related, were all she had, she had once informed 
 Walt, except for a ten-year-old brother who had been sent, 
 after the death of her father and mother, to school in 
 Charleston. She spoke of Hippolyte — that was hk. naijie — 
 with a tenderness Walt found surprising; he thought her 
 eyes filled; but a moment later she said, with her customary 
 coldness: 
 
 " I would not have Hippolyte in this house." 
 In this house where, unless it were for the vanishing ser- 
 vants, she was so much alone, Walt had with her long, ex- 
 quisite hours. Arriving at the set time — for her last word 
 to him was ever a specific instruction as to when he was 
 next expected — ^he would enter the dim, roofed foyer and 
 feel, as he turned toward the staircase, her little hand laid 
 delightfully on his arm, just like that unforgettable first en- 
 counter. Reenacting the scene, he would carry it further 
 with his whisper: " You wish — ? " But now she would 
 
THE ANSWERER 199 
 
 answer with a low command: " Kiss mel " The scent of 
 jasmine would be in his nostrils. . . . 
 
 The emotion she aroused in him, as he clasped her in his 
 arms, was a feeling of something intoxicatingly lovely and 
 ineffably sad. That was the distilled quality of what she 
 was able to stir in him; it was real, like the fragrance of jas- 
 mine; if it was also evanescent, surely the waning of the 
 spell she exerted left in him a definite sense of loss, of spir- 
 itual bereavement. For the spell was spiritual and this, or 
 the sense of this, was what distinguished their encounters 
 from every ordinary sort of intrigue. Without the genuine 
 pathos he felt existent in their relation, that relation would 
 have been no better, if no worse, than a dozen similar affairs 
 in the last few years, affairs perhaps less romantic in their 
 inception but all alike in their inevitable outcome. Such 
 affairs were agreeable, exciting episodes but neither party to 
 them misunderstood their imderlying commonplace, which 
 was the strictly prosaic thing called physical attraction. 
 Sex! A simple function disguised as a series of accidents to 
 retain the invaluable element of sxuprise. But Floride was 
 quite apart from all that. 
 
 Apart and unshakeably above; and her instant bestowal 
 of all which those others made their ultimate surrender was 
 the best, the indisputable proof of her aloofness, her mag- 
 nificent superiority. Put in words her attitude, from the 
 very first, would have been: " I can give, without effort or 
 hesitation, what other women bargain for as their final treas- 
 ure. Take me. . . . You see? that costs me nothing. I am 
 incredibly rich. You don't know how rich I am, I who have 
 had none to give to. . . ." Yes, he could hear her sajdng 
 
200 THE ANSWERER 
 
 something very like that in that low, distinct, slightly husky 
 ihroated-music which was her voice. 
 
 Florida! . . . But she had the beauty of magnolia blos- 
 soms; their generosity as well. . . . 
 
 If at times she repelled him he understood, in his heart, 
 that it must be his recognition of the fact that he could 
 never make her completely happy. He tried to solve the 
 mystery of this but could, as yet, only get as far as: If 
 she were less Floride, of the Antoines! If I were less Walt 
 Whitman! In the profound dissonance which made the 
 combined chord of their two personalities each discovered, 
 sometimes apart, sometimes together, an inner satisfaction 
 impossible to explain. Was that sex? What complex fimc- 
 tion thus disguised itself, retaining the invaluable element 
 of surprise? 
 
 But always her evident passion gave the tension and the 
 pitch. At all moments, with her, away from her, Walt felt 
 the unvarying vibration in which her conception of him had 
 been formed; was and would be sustained. It were better 
 to be hated by such a woman, he told himself with sincerest 
 conviction, than to be loved unimaginatively by one less fine. 
 Had you, of flesh and red blood and nerves and lighted 
 reason, rather be hated than be loved? Yes! Floride, Flo- 
 ride! ... it is because you know you have not utter hold 
 of me. For I will certainly elude you, even while you should 
 think you had unquestionably caught me — ^behold! — already, 
 you see, I have escaped from you. 
 
 . . . No! It wasn't meant! Floridel Floride! 
 
THE ANSWERER 201 
 
 8 
 
 From time to time young Traubel drifted into Walt's office 
 and the two of them sat and talked or else went on sight- 
 seeing strolls together along the levees, through the streets 
 or over to Lake Pontchartrain to view the fine sunsets. Oc- 
 casionally they went to Mile. Fleurus's where the enjoyment 
 was always multiplied, rather than just added to, by every 
 newcomer who could talk on any subject whatsoever. 
 
 The revolutionaire was by no means cut off from his coun- 
 trymen, of whom New Orleans had long contained a respect- 
 able number. These were of all kinds, from several families 
 whose ancestry matched that of the best French and Span- 
 ish blood in the city to small shopkeepers and even free ne- 
 groes of whom it was impossible to say much except that 
 they bore German surnames. Concerning these last Walt 
 expressed one day ciu'iosity which Traubel was able to 
 satisfy. 
 
 " German peasants were brought here in the land specula- 
 tion you call the Mississippi Bubble. Most of them died. 
 But when, in 1764, the Acadians were exiled from Nova 
 Scotia, they were sent first to Haiti and then, unable to 
 stand that climate, were transferred to Louisiana. About 
 the same time a few thousand Germans founded in Haiti a 
 state called Bombardopolis and some of them, for the same 
 reason, the climate, came here with the Acadians." 
 
 " What a melange! " 
 
 " No, racial internaixture has been going on since the 
 world began. If the revolution succeeds in Germany as it 
 has just succeeded in France, if we get a republic or guar- 
 
,202 THE ANSWERER 
 
 antees of political liberty, my country will become a State 
 as great as any in the world. But if we fail — ! " 
 
 "Then? Then?" 
 
 " The best of Germany will pour into America for some 
 years to come. At home, what? I wonder! Perhaps Prus- 
 sia will rule, with an idea, as South Carolina seems to sway 
 this South. Why are political ideas always imperial in 
 their tendency? " 
 
 " The idea of these States isn't imperial, it's democratic." 
 
 " I might point to Texas, but I'll only observe, instead, 
 that the only difference between the imperialism of empire 
 and the imperialism of democracy seems to be the difference^ 
 of conscious and unconscious tendency. Where the em- 
 peror conquers for selfish reasons, the democrat insists on 
 sharing the blessings of democracy; both expand them- 
 selves." 
 
 " That's growth." 
 
 "You mean it's inevitable. I suppose so. But I think 
 the process might be helped by candor." Traubel laughed 
 at an occurring example. " Imagine, Mr. Whitman," he 
 requested, " England announcing, as she annexes some for- 
 lorn region at the ends of the earth, 'Excuse me, but I've 
 got to grow! ' " 
 
 "And the blending of races that we see going on here? 
 What do you suppose will be the result? A new species? 
 and a better? " 
 
 " I won't guess. Science is just beginning to examine the 
 facts with plants and animals. The English scientist, Dar- 
 win, seems to be leading us to the brink of great discoveries. 
 Have you been interested by the mixtures of white and black 
 
THE ANSWERER 203 
 
 here in New Orleans? I have, and by the precise way the 
 French people classify them." 
 
 " Slocomb just touched on it one day. I wish he'd told 
 me more." 
 
 " I keep a notebook; try to train myself in scientific 
 method. It is full of cases I've heard about and I try to 
 discard the superstitions and exaggerations. There's so 
 much of both, I find conclusions hard. But the few I can 
 reach are wholly — ach! what is the English word? not ' dis- 
 appointing ' exactly. Ja! I have it — ^non-committal." 
 
 " But Slocomb told me of a man, Raoul Dumouriez, who's 
 what is called a sang-mele — one-sLxty-fourth negro blood. 
 That may mean, probably does, that he's the sixth genera- 
 tion from a white-black union, with only white blood in- 
 fused for certainly over a himdred years. Slocomb admitted 
 Dumouriez can't be told from a pure white. Has a devilish 
 temper but that's not peculiar to any race." 
 
 " The child of a white and a negro is always recognizably 
 a negro. My notes convince me of that. In the second and 
 later generations nothing can be predicted, nothing at all. 
 The individual may appear to be entirely white blood, or 
 mixed blood, or black. He may have a light skin and hair 
 that is tufted, or a black skin and blue eyes, or be black and 
 have perfectly straight hair, or be completely like a white 
 except for the negro body odor, or any other combination 
 whatever." 
 
 " But suppose the black blood becomes negligible? " 
 
 " Scientifically, it can never become negligible. Nor could 
 a drop of white blood in an ocean of black. A hybrid is a 
 hybrid; unstable; the drop may show itself any time." 
 
204' THE ANSWERER 
 
 " Well, but practically— " 
 
 "What is that word, 'practically'? However, I know 
 what you would ask. I find that generally one-eighth negro 
 blood or white blood — a black or white great-grandparent — 
 is enough to make a perceptible difference; but very often 
 one-sixteenth is noticeable and sometimes even less." 
 
 Walt stood still — they had left the office of the Crescent 
 and were on an aimless ramble. Visibly staggered, he in- 
 quired: 
 
 " Then to absorb the black generally — obliterate, with few 
 and diminishing exceptions the negro physical characteris- 
 tics — would be impossible? To reduce the black blood to 
 at least one-thirty-second would take five generations — " 
 
 " In which those with black blood, or lessened black blood, 
 must be married exclusively with pure whites. Are you a 
 mathematician? " 
 
 "No-no! My two-and-two generally make five." 
 
 " In racial mathematics, one-and-one generally make five, 
 mein Freund Whitman 1" The average family has three chil- 
 dren. Now, just for exercise of something besides our legs, 
 I will do a little figuring. The best estimate I can get is 
 that there are now in this country 3,500,000 negroes. Of 
 these less than 500,000 have some white blood, but we will 
 not reckon on that except to help vs along. We will say 
 there are 3,500,000 blacks. Sekr gut! Perhaps 2,000,000 
 are marriageable or will become so. They must be married 
 to 2,000,000 pure whites. Result: 6,000,000 mulattoes. 
 These must be married to 6,000,000 pure whites. Result: 
 18,000,000 quadroons. These must be married to 18,000,- 
 000 pure whites. Result: 54,000,000 metifs. Marry these 
 
THE ANSWERER 205 
 
 to 54,000,000 whites and we might have 162,000,000 
 meameloucs. Marry these to 162,000,000 whites and look 
 for 486,000,000 quarterons, each of whom will have one- 
 thirty-second negro blood. The next generation, if children 
 of whites and quarterons, would be sang-meles — ^let me see, 
 ja! 1,458,000,000 Raoul Dumouriezs." 
 
 " Must be a gross mistake somewhere. Not all would 
 marry; many would die young." 
 
 " True enough. The proportion is the thing. With all 
 possible corrections, that would stay the same." 
 
 " Africa will have to remain the Dark Continent — dark- 
 skinned, an3rway! " 
 
 " Physical characteristics are one thing, traits of mind are 
 another," suggested the studious young German. " Our 
 century knows nothing about it, and probably the next will 
 not. While in the North I read a book by a fugitive slave, 
 named Frederick Douglass. I was told he was pure black. 
 He wrote with much ability. Have you read anything by 
 the Frenchman, Alexandre Dumas? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 " He does plays, stories. ' I think they are as good at least 
 as the English Walter Scott's. But I learned here the other 
 day that Dumas's grandmother was a Santo Domingo ne- 
 gress. So he has, maybe, one-eighth black blood." 
 
 " After all," commented Walt, with a touch of speculative 
 enthusiasm, " great, positive characters may arise, assert 
 themselves! Such natural persons, superiorly endowed, 
 count out of all proportion to their number in any race, or 
 any generation. Isn't that so? But you spoke of Scott. 
 Every one here in the South seems to read him, though 
 
2o6 THE ANSWERER 
 
 chiefly his novels, stories, which I care least about. Am no 
 hand to read novels, anyway. Scott's poetry has been my 
 inexhaustible source of rich, varied pleasure. About my six- 
 teenth year, I guess, I got hold of a stout volume, octavo of 
 a thousand pages with jungles of footnotes; I have it and 
 read it yet — the Border minstrelsy, ' Marmion,' ' Lady of 
 the Lake,' ' Rokeby,' all the dramas, essays on poetry, on 
 romance— oh, a perpetual feast! Byron I have much loved, 
 but seem to care less for." 
 
 Traubel looked at his companion keenly, met the clear, 
 gray-blue eye, and was struck by its lucid serenity. He 
 asked: 
 
 " Tell me. Whitman mein Freund, what is it you would 
 most like to do, to become? " 
 
 His pale-looking face of a German student and intellec- 
 tual was extremely earnest; eye to eye Walt received the 
 question and appeared to digest it for some minutes. Stand- 
 ing together on the peopled levee, they seemed to themselves 
 completely isolated; and a curious tension was established. 
 ... At length Walt exclaimed: 
 
 " Why ask me that? Do you want me to confess I don't 
 know? I've thought of so many things ; they don't fit. Or 
 I don't fit them^ Ever since I was a youngster I've scrib- 
 bled, written. Trash, trash! I've tried to write verse. It's 
 worthless; isn't even third-rate verse. I've talked, lectured. 
 That wa'n't any good, either. Sometimes I think there ain't 
 flwything; but as soon as I quit thinking, go outdoors, see 
 people, sights, and mingle with persons I begin to live again; 
 feel redblooded, inexpressibly excited, eager; have the strong 
 sense that I am meant for all this and that something good. 
 
THE ANSWERER 207 
 
 something positive will yet come out of it all, be expressed 
 by me or through me, it doesn't matter which. Maybe in 
 action; maybe in both words and action blending. Which, 
 which? And when? How long must I wait — watch, absorb, 
 steep, ripen? " 
 
 " In Europe, at this hour, you would live in action! " 
 
 " Europe? No! I'm American. What I feel, what I 
 want to live, express, is peculiarly American." 
 
 " I'm not sure there is, as yet, anything peculiarly Amer- 
 ican! " 
 
 "There is! I know, feel, there is. You and all Euro- 
 peans, skilled observers like Dickens among you, come here 
 and don't perceive it; why? Because it is yet undistilled; 
 but it shall be distilled! Oh, call it my insufferable con- 
 ceit, if you will; but I shall yet help to distil it! " 
 
 9 
 
 The life of words — worse! the life of mere meditated 
 words, plumed thoughts, and reverie arising in the midst of, 
 and out of observation — as against the pressed claims of the 
 life of action . . . 
 
 Shortly after the talk with Traubel, Walt and the young 
 German were again at the Maison Fleurus as callers or 
 rather, perhaps, as persons transiently uppermost in Mile. 
 Jeanne's constantly rotating cercle. Indeed, that was 
 Jeanne's own expressed conception of their presence this 
 afternoon. 
 
 " My cercle revolves not giddily, like a roulette wheel; 
 on the other hand, it comes never to a standstill," she de- 
 
2o8 THE ANSWERER 
 
 dared, smiling. " Then, atissi, it has more chances in its 
 circumference. I never lose." 
 
 " Would I could say as much! " uttered Jose O'Donoju, 
 with an air of classic declamation. " I never win! " 
 
 " You cannot expect to win wars and money both," re- 
 buked Jeanne. 
 
 " I've lost me money. If I lose the War of Liberation — " 
 
 " How do you expect to win a war in South America when 
 you stay here in Nouvelle Orleans, muy Jose? " 
 
 " I'm here to get funds for the cause. Or am I? The 
 buenos Colorados say I am; so do I. Your illustrious pere 
 says I am here to be hired as a filibustero in Cuba; I say 
 not. I say also I am here to become his son-in-law; he 
 says not. You say — " 
 
 " It is evident, my dear friend, that the deciding vote 
 rests with me. I determine your destiny in all directions. 
 Be patient, your fate is in wise hands." Unusual sounds of 
 indignant disapproval, coming from Madame Fleurus, ter- 
 minated this chaffing. The South American general turned 
 to conciliate Jeanne's aunt, Jeanne began to talk with Walt 
 and Traubel, first introducing a man of winning appearance 
 and manner who sat very quietly for one of that group. He 
 struck Walt as being a few years older than himself — 
 thirty-five, possibly. 
 
 " M'sieu' Whitman, M'sieu' Trouble, this is Eugene Fuller 
 of Nouvelle Orleans, but a native of the North, like you, 
 M'sieu' Whitman. Of Massachusetts." 
 
 Walt asked at once: 
 
 " Are you related to Margaret Fuller? " 
 
 " She is my sister." Eugene Fuller was siuprised; pleased 
 
THE ANSWERER 209 
 
 yet somehow disconcerted. I've flustered him, thought Walt, 
 and, besides, he feels hardly at ease among the lot of us. 
 But I like his looks and I guess I want to get to know 
 him. . . . 
 
 With a perceptible effort to be civil, Eugene Fuller asked: 
 
 " Do you know my sister? " 
 
 " I met her once, casually, years ago." The words seemed 
 to revive in Walt's mind with extraordinary clearness an 
 evening spent in a Long Island parlor back in, let's see, 
 in 1840? Yes. 1840, Fifth Month. . . . Aloud he con- 
 tinued: 
 
 " 'Twas at the Mulfords', in Babylon. She was passing 
 through, just staying over night; I likewise. We had a 
 long, fine talk after supper. Strangely enough, though later 
 she came to work in New York, on the Tribune under 
 Horace Greeley and I was constantly in New York myself 
 those days, we never saw each other at that time. I saw, 
 could as I thought constantly detect her writing. New 
 York has a peculiar property of bringing folks side by side 
 and never letting them meet." 
 
 " How I should dislike that city! " declared Mile. Fleurus. 
 " What is the Yankee proverb? yes! it is a haystack and all 
 of the inhabitants are needles. Paris is quicksilver, always 
 ruiming together and spilling apart. Charleston is a rich 
 cake in careful layers. Richmond is like a pair of embroid- 
 ered, easy old slippers. How I loved Richmond! But then, 
 perhaps it was mostly M'sieu' Edgar Poe." 
 
 " You knew Poe? " asked Traubel. 
 
 " Who did not? He was our girlish hero. Once he spoke 
 to us, the young ladies of the seminary; but afterward he 
 
2IO THE ANSWERER 
 
 became scandalous and we were instructed that, as a person, 
 he had ceased to exist. Oh, how funny it was! " Jeanne 
 laughed unrestrainedly. " But as if that did not make him 
 only the more fascinating! You can imagine, doubtless, how 
 for us jeunes fiUes no poet could exist without an interest in 
 his person of the liveliest! Byron, par exemple! Was he 
 wicked? We spent hours regenerating him in our secret 
 hearts. It is not appreciated, mes amis, the good such men 
 do by stimulating the purest and most virtuous — truly un- 
 selfish — emotions in the feminine bosom! " For all her ban- 
 ter, thought Walt, she more than half means it. 
 
 " Poe interests Europe outside of England. So far, he is 
 your only American writer who does." Traubel was talk- 
 ing. " The young girl here as everywhere may be anthropo- 
 poetic, but European readers and critics are not." 
 
 " M'sieu' Trouble! What is that name you call us? " 
 
 " Anthropo-poetic? That would mean to insist on seeing 
 the person behind the poet, or the poem." 
 
 "C'est barbaref" 
 
 " Es ist ja nicht ! Nothing of the sort! It is good Greek. 
 A well-built word; one excellent thing about our German 
 tongue is that it permits, even encourages, such word-build- 
 ing, as did Greek." 
 
 " Why not such word-building in English? " asked Walt, 
 interested. 
 
 Traubel threw up his hands. 
 
 " Ack, English! The universal solvent. It takes all 
 tongues and gives their words its own silver-plating, or de- 
 composes them for its use, or forms a precipitate with them 
 
THE ANSWERER 211 
 
 or produces new, beautiful crystals of speech. What a lan- 
 guage! " 
 
 " The language of Poe," said mischievously Jeanne 
 Fleurus. 
 
 " Is it? " demanded Walt. " I want to be fair, just. But 
 does Poe, in his poetry, use English? Seems to me he rings 
 carillons. Like perpetual chimes of music bells, ringing from 
 lower b fiat up to g. Yet, within their limited range of 
 melody, I see them to be melodious, beautiful expressions, 
 doubtless unexcelled expressions, of certain pronounced 
 phases of human morbidity." He turned, tolerantly gestur- 
 ing, to Traubel. "The poetic area is very spacious; has 
 room for all; has so many mansions! But with what he 
 says in The Poetic Principle I find myself in fullest agree- 
 ment; I mean his dictum that, at any rate for our day, our 
 occasions, there can be no such thing as a long poem — ^no 
 Iliad, no Paradise Lost.. The same thought has haunted me 
 but Poe's argument, short as it is, works out the sum, proves 
 it, satisfies me." 
 
 " What is this? Are you a poet, M'sieu' Whitman? " 
 Jeanne, listening, had subjected Walt to a sharp scrutiny 
 in which, perhaps, purely feminine perception reinforced ob- 
 jective vision. Walt laughed. 
 
 " Phrenologist says not," he assured her, with practised 
 concealment that amused the impassive Traubel. " I have 
 been examined, topographized, bumps on my head carefully 
 charted. Nelson Fowler was very leisurely about it, made 
 an elaborate examination at the Phrenological Cabinet of 
 Fowler & Wells, Nassau Street near Beekman, New York; 
 
212 THE ANSWERER 
 
 I have, in a mixture I can't remember, voluptuousness, in- 
 habitiveness, combativeness, conscientiousness, alimentive- 
 ness, intuitiveness, copious friendship, some sublimity, firm- 
 ness, self-esteem, individuality, and the faculties of form, 
 locality, eventuality and comparison — a few elude me." 
 
 " And you are a born tactician," said Traubel, his eye 
 meeting Walt's. Walt returned the glance calmly; his 
 divertissement had been successful and Jeanne was now ex- 
 changing remarks across the room with O'Donoju. 
 
 Traubel, turning to Eugene Fuller, was asking about the 
 Brook Farm experiment. Fuller explained: 
 
 " I know little about it. I had left New England some 
 years before, in '35, to act as tutor on the Storrow planta- 
 tion in Virginia. My sister wasn't a member of the Brook 
 Farm community, only a visitor, though people will have 
 it that she lived there. That is wrong." 
 
 " I lament having come to America too late to visit Brook 
 Farm. That would have rounded out importantly my study 
 of such experiments," Traubel declared. " For a country 
 so yoimg, America has many such." 
 
 " What do you mean? " Walt added. " Of course, there 
 are the Mormons. And we've all heard of seven-and-seventy 
 sects, reforms, what-not in the last half-dozen years. But I 
 thought it had mostly died down." 
 
 " I have in mind particularly the experiments of my coxm- 
 trymen," was Traubel's answer. " Odd, small religious sects 
 like the Labardists who came to Delaware in a handful in 
 1684 and the Pietists who settled near Germantown ten 
 years later. Both those colonies soon perished, but the Dun- 
 kards have done better with their so-called cloister of 
 
THE ANSWERER 213 
 
 Ephrata. The Moravians, at Bethlehem, tried communistic 
 living; it did not work well but Bethlehem thrives as a 
 town. But the newer ventures are more interesting. I 
 have visited the place called Economy, about twenty miles 
 from Pittsburgh, which is the third home in this coimtry of 
 Father Rapp's Harmony sect. That is a settlement of great 
 beauty with simple, well-proportioned buildings and many 
 vines and flowers, including a floral labyrinth. Those people 
 are rich, for on some of their land is coal and they have good 
 mills and looms and make good wines. Perhaps, now that 
 the good Father Rapp has just died, they will not do so 
 well." 
 
 " But what do such folks believe? " 
 
 " Oh, no use of tobacco, celibacy; some allow music, some 
 do not. It is a mixture of religious ideas and communism; 
 apparently neither set of ideas has hold enough alone. Well, 
 you can see! Communism is purely intellectual, and these 
 are, or were, little-educated people, peasants mostly. It 
 needs the emotional, the religious appeal. There is also a 
 commimity called Zoar, in your State of Ohio, and the sect 
 of the Inspirationists have just abandoned five villages with 
 mills, shops and schools to settle in Iowa at a place they 
 call Amana. Christian Metz, the leader at Amana, is strong 
 and able. That should last awhile, though all amusement, 
 even music, is forbidden; celibacy is encouraged but not in- 
 sisted on." 
 
 " Sixty-odd young Frenchmen have just passed through 
 here on their way to found a similar colony," said Eugene 
 Fuller. " Disicples of fitienne Cabet, I believe." 
 
 " Ach, yes! He wrote about 'Icaria,' an ideal society 
 
214 THE ANSWERER 
 
 like "— Traubel explained to Walt—" the English Sir 
 Thomas More's ' Utopia.' " 
 
 " It's a shame," Eugene Fuller insisted. " Those young- 
 sters will get the fever in the swamps of some Louisiana 
 parish or else they'll go loco on the Texas plains. There 
 ought to be some way to stop them." 
 
 "A free country! Besides, Mr. Fuller," Traubel added 
 simply, " who can protect men from themselves? Surely no 
 government, for a government cannot even protect itself 
 from ideas! " 
 
 Soon after the cercle broke up. Walt, taking leave of 
 Jeanne, was at pains also to say farewell to O'Donoju and 
 Traubel, for he wanted to talk further with Eugene Fuller, 
 to whom, as they approached Canal Street, he said with 
 emphasis: 
 
 " I count meeting you here to-day a piece of the best, the 
 luckiest good fortune! Although I never saw your sister in 
 New York, I much admired her writings and I have never 
 forgotten the light she shed, the help she gave, searching in- 
 sights from her observation, reading, experience, in our talk 
 'way back, eight years ago very nearly. She had, has, a 
 powerful, 'cute mind. Do tell me what you hear of her! 
 She left the Tribune, I know; went abroad a year — or was 
 it longer? — ago. Must be longer." 
 
 " Yes, it approaches two years. She sailed in August, 
 1846. She visited England, Scotland, Paris, Rome. Last 
 summer she was in Switzerland, returning last October to 
 Rome. It — it has been the fulfilment of her lifelong dream." 
 
 A hesitation, or uncertainty, due to some unexplained 
 emotion, struck Walt's ear at once, seemed to give the cue 
 
THE ANSWERER 215 
 
 to something in his own nature, frequently touched, never 
 unresponsive. Eugene Fuller had a presence, a personality, 
 actually more attractive and winning than that of his sister. 
 Walt felt it, and perhaps the brother of Margaret Fuller felt 
 also something imordinary, something even provoking to in- 
 timacy, in the frank-faced, bearded younger man walking 
 beside him. He said tentatively: 
 
 " Margaret was always strikingly outspoken, in conversa- 
 tion." 
 
 " Oh, she did much for me at a critical moment! A deep, 
 beautiful, but intensely painful experience lay just ahead 
 of me; she could not avert it from me, wouldn't have wanted 
 to, nor would I have wanted her to. Nor, perhaps, make it 
 easier in the undergoing; but afterward her words, remem- 
 ?jered, frequently pondered, were a great comfort, solace, to 
 me! " 
 
 "Thank you for that! " Eugene Fuller spoke warmly. 
 " I have sometimes thought, hearing so many things said, 
 so many criticisms, that Margaret had scarcely any true 
 friends. And our separation made the fact of her friend- 
 ships seem less real, I suppose, than the certainty of her 
 enemies." 
 
 " Give me her address, do! and I will write to her. I 
 should have done so before; but for a long, long while any 
 thought of thanking her brought up something so painful I 
 had to thrust it all back, back in my recollection. I sup- 
 pose, truthfully examined, I'd find that to be the real reason 
 I never made the effort to look her up, acknowledge her 
 help, in New York. But I'll write to her now in Rome, 
 yes! " 
 
2i6 THE ANSWERER 
 
 Eugene Fuller flushed, looked dismayed. As he halted 
 on the sidewalk in visible perplexity and irresolution Walt 
 exclaimed: 
 
 " Have I said anything wrong? I'll unsay it, then. I 
 meant only well — " 
 
 " No, that is all right! I — I was wondering if I could 
 show you something in confidence? It contains a secret 
 ... I have really no right to show it to any one . . . but 
 you have spoken so finely of Margaret, I think, perhaps, if 
 you will promise not to speak of it — " 
 
 " I will most certainly not speak of it. You've my prom- 
 ise! But, wait! Do as you feel. Take time, if you wish, 
 to deliberate a little." 
 
 " No," Eugene Fuller answered convincedly. " I am cer- 
 tain it is right to show it to you. You — ^you have been 
 frank. It is a letter from Margaret. I think, since al- 
 though you saw her some years ago, you really and rightly 
 feel you know her intimately, it is better you should read it 
 than that I should try to give you the substance, which I 
 couldn't do without being unfair to her. I mean, it would 
 not sound right or reasonable in any other telling than her 
 own. I have it in my pocket. Will you come to the Club 
 with me? Do; and you shall take your time over it and 
 afterward we will have dinner together." 
 
 10 
 
 " Dearest Eugene," ran Margaret's letter, dated from 
 Rome, a month earlier, " have you wondered at not hearing 
 oftener from me? Then, when you have read this letter, 
 perhaps your wonder will be less. For at last. Brother, I 
 
THE ANSWERER ai; 
 
 have emerged from the life of thought and dreams and pa- 
 tient (not always patient! ) waiting into the life of action. I 
 have, in modest seeming, that wish you once heard me ex- 
 press: To be a Pericles rather than an Anaxagoras, to trans- 
 late myself and not anybody else however heavenly-gifted. 
 True, the great Goethe says: ' Thought expands, but 
 lames; action animates, but narrows.' Yet with all his im- 
 mensity, you know I have never gone to Goethe as a guide 
 or friend, but as a great thinker who made me think. Now, 
 in my thirty-eighth year, I hope I have done my thinking 
 to some effectual purpose; if not, surely, in the posture of 
 my present affairs, it is too late. Is it? I am confident not. 
 And I have this to say further: Judge me, let all who 
 know judge me, not by the thirty-seven years that are gone, 
 the slow preparation, the aching study and continuous anx- 
 iety, the dawdling, the tried expedients, the continually-de- 
 ferred wish — all that! It is over with, sunk, lost, sub- 
 merged; hold it no more against me than the years of a child 
 at school in appraising the produced work of a graduated, 
 emergent man. 
 
 " For how many years have I not thought of myself as 
 destined for the role, exquisite but imsuitable, of renuncia- 
 tion. Once in my early life, as I think you know, there came 
 to me a deep experience of emotion in relation to another, 
 followed by profound disappointment. After that it used 
 to be that I would say to myself that I had no home on the 
 earth. In the pain of this acknowledgment there was yet 
 the consolation of an image ever-present of a home that 
 would have a degree of beautiful harmony with my inward 
 life. Driven from home to home as a Renouncer, I seemed 
 
2i8 THE ANSWERER 
 
 to myself to absorb the picture and the poetry of each. 
 Keys of gold, silver, iron and lead accumulated in my 
 casket. 
 
 " No one loved me; but I loved many a good deal; and 
 the varied calls on my sympathy were such as to make me 
 hope not to be made partial, cold or ignorant in my isola- 
 tion. I had no child, and the woman in me has so craved 
 this experience that it has seemed the want of it must para- 
 lyze me. That death in life has been spared me, as I now 
 know; the cup has passed from my lips. In all reverence, 
 in humility and ecstacy, I sing: ' My soul doth magnify 
 the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Sa- 
 viour.' . . . 
 
 " For, dear Eugene, my brother, I am a wife; more, I 
 have the promise of becoming a mother. 
 
 " Read on and you shall know all the circumstances that 
 can be commtmicated in a letter; but before you read fur- 
 ther, I charge you to keep this secret closely for the good 
 reasons which will appear in what follows. I do not mean 
 that you may not confide in any one whatsoever, but let it 
 not be in more than one or two of those who know or have 
 known me and let the justification for their choice be not 
 formal but spiritual kinship. . . . 
 
 " In early spring now almost a year ago, as you know, I 
 first reached Rome. It was soon after that arrival, while I 
 was yet too thrilled with happiness to do much more than 
 venture out in a golden haze, that I went one day with Mr. 
 and Mrs. Spring to hear vespers at St. Peter's. After the 
 service I suggested we wander about separately as pleased 
 us, viewing the chapels, etc., and meeting at an agreed place. 
 
THE ANSWERER 219 
 
 There, however, I failed to find them. While 1 was going 
 about and looking for them among various groups a young 
 and gentlenianly Italian who saw my visible uncertainty 
 came up. He offered, as I could gather, to guide me. With 
 my assent we looked for some while longer, the crowd gradu- 
 ally leaving. At length he tried to procure a carriage for 
 me; none was to be had, and so we walked to my residence. 
 There was an attempt at conversation, not very successful, 
 for he knew no English and my spoken Italian is, or was 
 then, rather, highly deficient. We parted at my door ; I told 
 the Springs of this little adventure. 
 
 " Not more than a day or two afterward I observed the 
 same gentleman walking in front of the house, as if he con- 
 templated calling. And a little later he did. ... I must 
 shorten these preliminaries, and will do so by simply saying 
 that we met once or twice before I left Rome to visit the 
 cities of the North and Switzerland. This is how I came to 
 know the man who is now my husband, Giovanni Angelo, 
 Marchese (Marquis) Ossoli. 
 
 " Last October I returned to Rome, taking an apartment 
 in the Corso and highly resolving to live for six whole 
 months on $400. You who know what economies I have 
 been used to will appreciate that this was not so hopeless 
 an undertaking as, to many others, it must sound. Besides, 
 was I not in better health than at any time since my child- 
 hood? Far better; for with the best intentions, Father 
 nearly ruined my health as a child by his cramming and 
 forcing methods of study, so that had I been a boy I had 
 been qualified to enter Harvard College at eleven years. 
 Now here in Rome I seemed to have reconquered good 
 
220 THE ANSWERER 
 
 health; the perpetual headaches were absent; and for hap- 
 piness not even the best days of my previous life were com- 
 parable with these. Much was due to congenial acquaint- 
 ances, of course, and to the surroundings, so packed with 
 history and the memorials of other lives lived so richly, dis- 
 astrously, with tragedy or with triumph — ^but lived! More, 
 oh, how much, much more! was due to the renewal of my ac- 
 quaintance with Ossoli. ... In the unaffected way which 
 alone was possible to my circumstances, I iised to receive 
 people on Monday evenings. To these small gatherings 
 Giovanni invariably came. My Italian improving, we were 
 able to talk freely and I foxmd to my delight that his youth 
 made him, despite his family and connections, sympathize 
 with the republican cause. I, of course, had been a sym- 
 pathizer with the advocates of Italian liberty and unity since 
 my first arrival abroad and encounters in London with the 
 noble and ardent Mazzini. It inspires me to believe that I 
 was able, to an extent, to encourage Giovanni in his purpose 
 of embracing the Cause and, even at the sacrifice of tradi- 
 tions and the risk of estrangement from his brothers, pledge 
 himself to the party of the people. 
 
 " I ought to make it clear, I suppose, that while our 
 friendship was thus maturing I was not, or at least knew 
 not that I was coming to love him. Nor did it occur that 
 he had such thought of me; for one thing he was so much 
 younger than I, being but thirty. 
 
 " As winter drew on Giovanni's father, the old Marchese, 
 fell quite seriously ill and while he lingered in this condition 
 the care of looking after him devolved chiefly upon Giovanni 
 who was the youngest and the only immarried child. For a 
 
THE ANSWERER 221 
 
 while we saw not much of each other except for a few min- 
 utes daily. One day shortly after his father's death Giovanni 
 told me that he loved me and asked me to become his wife. 
 ' I must marry you or be miserable,' were his words. I was 
 dumbfoundered; told him I must refuse to look upon him as 
 a lover ; told him that a marriage with me would be entirely 
 unfitting and that it were best he should marry a younger 
 woman. I valued, treasured, his friendship; I could not 
 think myself suited to the role of his wife. 
 
 " With this the matter rested. Some weeks went by. 
 Giovanni came as frequently as ever — nor would I have had 
 him do otherwise, in the circumstances — ^but his manner be- 
 came increasingly hopeless and even in some sort desperate 
 and moody. He was so utterly unlike himself that all our 
 acquaintances noticed the change and kept remarking to me 
 on his paleness, his apparent dejection and obvious unhap- 
 piness. Of myself in the same time I can speak with less 
 confidence, but I came to doubt whether I did not love him, 
 after all, and, at length, to feel, to know that I did. . . . 
 As for his affection, I couldn't remain unconvinced any 
 longer. ... To sum up, then, I had to be honest and con- 
 cede him honest. We were married last December, secretly, 
 and our marriage is now several months old. 
 
 " Why secretly? you will ask, and think such an act very 
 unlike your sister Margaret. I cannot hope to make you 
 feel with their full, justifying force the several good reasons. 
 Giovanni's brothers are chamberlains in the Papal household 
 and Giovanni has long been looked upon as a black sheep 
 by the Ossolis and their kinsmen on account of his radical 
 political ideas and sympathies. He has been conspicuous 
 
223 THE ANSWERER 
 
 for his adherence to Mazzini and is placed in a position suf- 
 ficiently difficult by his captaincy in the Civic Guard. His 
 marriage with a foreigner, requiring smoothing perhaps in 
 ordinary conditions, might, at this juncture, if known, mean 
 an abriqjt break with his people in which no explanation 
 would be listened to and out of which no reconciliation after- 
 ward could arise. To do Giovanni justice, he was quite 
 wDling to run this risk; but how could I, in my position, 
 countenance his doing so? Should I not have acted with 
 the most extraordinary selfishness and egotism? A wife 
 older than her husband, of no physical attractiveness, an 
 alien to his country and tongue without means oif property* 
 of her own, to give satisfied assent to a step which might 
 mean the immediate and hopeless sacrifice of everything, 
 everybody, he has known? And this at a time when his na- 
 tive country is in a perplexed turmoil and needs the services 
 of every one of her children given as their hearts direct! 
 The republican cause, while we hope, work and pray, is far 
 from success and may even go down to final defeat; in em- 
 bracing that cause, in the event of its non-success, my hus- 
 band may sacrifice not only his title (for which neither he 
 nor I care at all) but all of the little property he has, or can 
 hope to inherit — everything in the world, as most persons 
 would account it. No! No! There are immediate diffi- 
 culties and anxieties and distractions quite enough; Giovanni 
 jeopards enough and more than enough in our marriage and 
 in his political action. Let us exercise what prudence and 
 wholly defensible discretion we may in our troubled situa- 
 tion. 
 " It is troubled, and a fresh trouble, however blissfully 
 
THE ANSWERER ^23 
 
 awaited, is that prospect which I revealed to you in the com- 
 mencement of this letter. But for that we lay our plans as 
 well as is possible; and with the approach of summer I shall 
 leave Rome and go to a tiny village in the Abruzzi moun- 
 tains, a hamlet called Rieti, where Giovanni will be able to 
 join me from time to time and where I shall have the services 
 of a trusted nurse, formerly in the employ of his family. 
 Giovanni must principally remain here in Rome to discharge 
 his duties with the Guardia Civile as well as to prevent the 
 arousing of suspicion of our marriage. For, though I could 
 not bring myself for his sake to consent to its being known, 
 once the course of secrecy has been entered upon the neces- 
 sity to preserve it becomes paramount to everything else. 
 I pray that changed conditions may end that necessity 
 speedily. 
 
 " Would you like to know Giovanni's personal appear- 
 ance? I wonder if I can describe it; probably not in any 
 way that will lead to your satisfaction. He is thirty, as I 
 have said, and goodlooking, quit« handsome, I believe, in 
 the general estimation apart from my own; he is tall and 
 thin and there is a slightly melancholy expression about his 
 eyes, or so I have heard it called, though to me it is merely 
 pensive and winning. He is above all amiable and tender, 
 not intellectual natively or to my own extent; simple, natural, 
 goodi That he has great personal courage, much spirit, 
 zeal and patriotic devotion I feel and, in the fortunes so 
 changing about us daily, the world may come to know. I 
 enclose a lock of his hair, blue-black like that of so many of 
 his countrymen; and only wish I could send you a picture 
 to show you the delicate features and the expression I have 
 
224 THE ANSWERER 
 
 spoken of about the eyes. ... He is full of the most con- 
 stant and lover-like attentions, over and above, I should 
 think, the habitual courtesy and attentiveness in which men 
 of the highest European classes are bred. His education, 
 while not extensive, is such as most Roman gentlemen re- 
 ceive; a priest has the care of them in childhood and acts 
 as tutor. Giovanni has no foreign languages except for 
 reading French a little ; his chief interest among his studies, 
 he tells me, was always Italian history. He has much re- 
 serve, listens rather than talks, and is not quickly inter- 
 ested in other people, so that most of the Americans here 
 tend to think there is not much in him and find him rather; 
 dull. To be sure, only myself can know how lover-like he 
 can be; nothing appears too trivial in the way of attentions 
 to me; he is genuinely thoughtful and unselfish in a strik- 
 ing degree. And nothing, I think, shows this better than 
 the fact that for some time before our marriage, realizing 
 instinctively how limited were my means, he was always in 
 the habit of making what Italians term little economies — 
 suggestions or arrangements that would better suit my feeble 
 old purse. 
 
 " Oh, I am happy, Eugene, happy, happy, happy I 
 " At present I am staying on the Piazza Barberini. This 
 .is formed by the convergence of three streets and is adorned 
 with Bernini's Triton blowing a conch. In a side street, 
 behind, is the Villa Ludovisi and here, in the vanished cen- 
 turies, lay the gardens of Sallust. The piazza takes its name 
 from the Barberini palace, on one of the three streets meet- 
 ing at the piazza; this particular street ascends the Quirinal 
 crowned by the palace occupied usually by the Popes in 
 
THE ANSWERER 225 
 
 summer. All this is rather in the north and easterly part of 
 Rome, you must know, and you are not to picture me liv- 
 ing among ancient ruins; the Colosseum and ancient Rome 
 in general occupy the southerly part of the city, though the 
 Baths of Diocletian are in easy walking distance. 
 
 " You will wonder anxiously, no doubt, what plans, if any, 
 I have made in the event of anything imtoward — ^war, civil 
 commotion or merely a personal problem of some sort aris- 
 ing. In such a case I shall take Mrs. Story fully into my 
 confidence, even to the extent of trusting her with my be- 
 longings including the certificate of iny marriage. . . . But 
 that is very xmlikely to be necessary. I am so happy, so 
 hopeful, I believe our fortunes must turn out well. 
 
 " Why? I scarcely know unless it be that for me my 
 marriage with a man who loves me, and whom I love, is the 
 consummation of all toward which, as I now see it, my life 
 has tended. That consummation, so long and so heart- 
 breakingly delayed, might easily have come too late. I 
 might have become dried up, dessicated and sealed against 
 the deepest possibility of human emotion — at least, so it 
 seems to me now; though perhaps in looking backward we 
 invest with superfluous horror the fate we have eluded. You 
 will understand, also, how strongly I am appealed to not 
 by the possibty romantic elements preceding and entering 
 into my marriage but by the circumstances in which I — 
 Giovanni and I together — ^find ourselves placed. I mean 
 the translation of deliberated plan (not mere impulse) into 
 glorious and inspiring action in which we can and do join. 
 For, fine as was the achievement of liberty in our New 
 World, the reconquest of liberty here in the Old has a 
 
226 THE ANSWERER 
 
 double, nay a many-folded inspiration. It is not simply that 
 a nation is to be born, but Italy, Rome, is to spring into 
 new life! 
 
 "I wish I could say that other Americans here felt in any 
 degree as I do, but I am afraid I cannot. In the main, 
 they seem indifferent, or perhaps annoyed at the inconven- 
 iences to which the civil struggle inevitably subjects them. 
 It is curious that people should so largely remain unable to 
 look at a cause, like Italian unity, in the terms of the lofty 
 principle by which it has been conceived. Or, when once 
 they have done so, that they should lose the moral eleva- 
 tion of that insight in the dust of a struggle to execute its 
 purpose. , . . Our littleness is not to be overcome in a few 
 generations or centuries, 'Action animates, but narrows.' 
 So be it; perhaps I, too, will become narrow; but act I 
 must. 
 
 " And in action there is great solace, solace that is or will 
 be needed by Giovanni and myself in the days immediately 
 ahead. So much is uncertain, indefinite, barely probable! 
 We do not know when we can make our marriage known 
 with discretion; we do not know but that it may have to 
 be made known in conditions that leave nothing to discre- 
 tion or even to hope outside of our unaided selves. Should 
 the worst befall, we can with fortune make our way to 
 America; there I have some friends, there I can work and 
 Giovanni will labor to establish himself, successfully I feel 
 confident. But for the moment, or the hour, or the day we 
 are comfortably and safely placed; do not worry yourself 
 in the least about me (how can you when I tell you of my 
 supreme happiness!) and should there be anything you can 
 
THE ANSWERER ^^^, 
 
 do I will not hesitate to let you know. . . . Keep well and 
 prosper at the South. Do you remember in our childhood 
 how you and I were nearest companions? We were, of 
 course, about of an age; but I think it was something shared 
 in our natures that used to make us love to wander out to- 
 gether, across streams and through the woods, walking and 
 talking or oftener silent — ^never other than happy. Those 
 good days! Let the memory of them freshen your thoughts 
 of me. . . . Guard well my dear secret, Eugene, for now I 
 must close this too-long letter with the truest affection for 
 you from Giovanni as well as from your sister, 
 
 "Margaret Fuller Ossoli." 
 
 II 
 
 When he finished reading Margaret Fuller Ossoli's letter, 
 tears had stood in Walt's eyes; and tears came to them 
 afterward in hours when, remembering a Fifth Month eve- 
 ning in a quiet Long Island parlor, he remembered also 
 the days and nights immediately following. Esther! . . . 
 L'amor che muove il sole e I'altre stelle. 
 
 " The immortal great do not find their sublime fulfil- 
 ment in sex." And, not eight years afterward, from the 
 same throat, the eternal song of preparing motherhood: 
 " My soul doth magnify the Lord . . ." 
 
 He wondered, with a great ache of separation and loneli- 
 ness, if Esther, also . . . 
 
 Useless! Useless! Have you not confronted all that, 
 Walt, and plowed it under? Deliberately, thoroughly? 
 with the determination, purposely brave, that since you 
 cannot harvest the growth it shall enrich the soil for future 
 
228 THE ANSWERER 
 
 growth? Yes, yes; but where is now that future growth? 
 What are you? What will you yet become that you are 
 not already? 
 
 Do you remember certain days spent with another boy 
 on the edge of an Homeric ocean? Haven't you jotted 
 down somewhere in your profuse, disconnected notebooks 
 particular words, phrases, then uttered, later re-fashioned 
 and elaborated? words indicative, as nearly as words can 
 be, of your ultimate, felt destiny? Yes . . . destiny . . . 
 as surely as the tripled note that opens the profoundly- 
 moving Beethoven symphony. 
 
 " A young man came to me with a message from his brother . . . 
 And I answered for his brother and for men . . . and I an- 
 swered for the poet, and sent these signs. 
 
 " Him all wait for, him all yield up to ; his word is decisive. 
 Him they accept, in him lave; in him perceive themselves as 
 
 amid light. 
 Him they immerse, and he immerses them. 
 
 " Beautiful women, the haughtiest nations, laws, the landscape, 
 people and animals, 
 The profound earth and its attributes, and the unquiet ocean. 
 All enjoyments and properties . . . 
 
 "He puts things in their attitudes. 
 He puts to-day out of himself with plasticity and love. 
 . . . He is the Answerer." 
 
 You, Walt, you in your complete Self feel your unre- 
 vealed capacity! Yes! You know there is in you some- 
 thing inexhaustible! Yes! Something deathless! Yes! 
 An Answerer! Yes! Yes! Yes! 
 
 Walt, you contain enough; why don't you let it out then? 
 
 I will. To the task, then; to the destined role. 
 
 First, let me have a clear understanding with my lesser 
 
THE ANSWERER 229 
 
 self, with my human frailty and impatience and querulous- 
 ness and dejection in the face of sure vicissitude. It will 
 take years. It will likely go unrecognized and will certainly 
 go unrewarded. . . . What are the requisites? 
 
 Here is a blank page; here a pencil. 
 
 The known universe has one complete lover and that 
 is the greatest poet. . . . The American poets are to en- 
 close old and new for America is the race of races. . . . The 
 passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, culti- 
 vators of gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy 
 women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of 
 horses, the passion for light and the open air— all is an 
 old, varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty and 
 of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people. . . . The 
 poetic quality is not marshalled in rime or uniformity, or 
 abstract addresses to things, nor in melancholy complaints 
 or good precepts. The gaggery and gilt of years will not 
 prevail. Who troubles himself about ornaments or fluency 
 is lost.. The old red blood and stainless gentility of greai 
 poets will be proved by their unconstraint. 
 
 This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and 
 the animals, despise riches, give alm^ to every one that 
 asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income 
 and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, 
 have patience and indtdgence toward the people, take off 
 your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or 
 number of men; go freely with powerful, uneducated per- 
 sons, and with the young and with the mothers of families, 
 reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in 
 any book and dismiss whatever insults your own soid — 
 
230 THE ANSWERER 
 
 And your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the 
 richest fluency. 
 
 12 
 
 Of the quality of pathos which Walt felt in the relation 
 existing between himself and the wife of Raoul Dnmouriez, 
 Floride Dumouriez, last of the Antoines — excepting only a 
 juvenile brother — was without awareness. She could not 
 know that this delicate and intangible atmosphere, the 
 flavor rather than the substance of emotion, alone con- 
 stituted the actual hold she had upon her . . . lover? 
 Well, yes; as the world's phrase goes. 
 
 That this was so, when she was a woman and Walt was 
 a man, was strange, and no doubt would have baffled a 
 spectator of their affair, had there been any. There was 
 not; Floride saw to that. Servants she could completely 
 control, and did with the accustomedness of one born the 
 mistress in a servile society. But others, not slaves? The 
 one thing she could not guard against was a possibility 
 that some one in the neighboring houses might observe the 
 repeated visits of one man obviously not a member of 
 Creole society. Very well, let them do so. A word to 
 her vile husband would be sufficient; even if Raoul foimd 
 out the truth he would certainly kill any one who had 
 dared to proclaim it — and all New Orleans knew that. If, 
 also, he decided to kill his wife, Floride would meet that 
 situation which, after all, would have no novelty among 
 their quarrels unless through the excess of his determina- 
 tion and its translation into actual or attempted violence 
 
THE ANSWERER 231 
 
 on her person. . . . Against such violence she had long 
 been prepared. 
 
 But suppose a woman across the street observed some- 
 thing and whispered it about? Every woman across the 
 street, or across any street, had a husband, a brother, some- 
 body close, to be toitche. Raoul's polite word, always in 
 his curious falsetto which caused Floride a concealed shiver. 
 That falsetto, in her opinion, was the n^gre in him. Some 
 ancestor had been a witch doctor; but Raoul had his own 
 special sorceries, of the most efficacious. He was, despite 
 the misadventure of his encounters with some Irish Span- 
 iard or other, a deadly duellist; what he did not accom- 
 plish personally on the champ d'honneur was generally at- 
 tended to by his hired ruffians in the shadow of the levees. 
 
 These were the carefully balanced considerations on which 
 the wife of Raoul Dumouriez placed her reliance. They 
 did not insure against catastrophe but they made it seem 
 improbable; and in the event of its befalling she did not 
 fear for herself so much as for Walt. Why? He would 
 be first among the natural objects of her husband's ven- 
 geance. And — though she did not doubt his personal cour- 
 age or self-reliance — he was outlandishly impossible as the 
 antagonist of Dumouriez. In that house on Royal Street 
 she could protect him, but outside — 
 
 In a moment of relaxed assurance over him, she put to 
 Walt the question one day: 
 
 " How would you deal with my husband? Tell me . . . 
 not that you will have to ; I will see to that." 
 
 "I? I would not deal with him at all," was the calm 
 answer. 
 
232 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " What? " He was incomprehensible, or else craven. 
 " Do you mean you would run away? Or perhaps you 
 mean that you would hide behind my skirts? " Her tone 
 was sardonic, not angry. 
 
 " No, that would not be necessary, would it? " 
 
 " It might be." For his own morale, it were best he 
 should believe that. 
 
 He shook his head serenely. " I don't think so." 
 
 "Very well. Assume that you are in no danger in this 
 house, even if he should enter this room this minute. What 
 would your life be worth over the threshold? Zat! " The 
 epitomizing syllable vocalized a snap of her thumb and 
 finger. 
 
 "Ma pauvre Floride!" he exclaimed with a tender- 
 ness she did not clearly understand. The few French 
 words he picked up were, at least, pronoimced beautifully; 
 and his voice had nuances. 
 
 "Ah! I see! You mean that, after all, it is only I 
 who would suffer! " was the verdict she rendered on his 
 display of emotion. 
 
 He shook his head again; and this time, seeing that by no 
 simple ruse — a spur rowelling his pride — ^wovdd she be able 
 to draw him out, she adopted another line. . . . Contin- 
 ually she was adopting other lines, testing, trying, risking, 
 for all the world like a desperate general who has made 
 a conquest and somehow cannot settle down and take his 
 advantage from the dubitable gain. . . . She pleaded: 
 
 " Cher ami, you must know it is only my powerful anx- 
 iety for you that thus irritates me, making me say things 
 I do not mean." 
 
THE ANSWERER 233 
 
 In answer to the arm placed about his neck, Walt kissed 
 her. His reply to her words, alone, might have seemed 
 less reassuring. 
 
 " No one says what he means, does he, Floride? I don't 
 pretend to. You are unhappy; I think you are always 
 unhappy. Why? You don't know. You will never know." 
 
 Consoled by his caress, she received this observation 
 dreamily and with an apparent indifference; but after a 
 little, as if his words had suggested a train of thought, 
 she commenced to talk, half to him and half to her- 
 self: 
 
 " No, I don't know why I am unhappy. Probably you 
 are right in declaring I shall never know. Happiness comes 
 from within; but within me there is nothing, is there? 
 Unless it is a hunger. ... I love my young brother but 
 maybe that is only because I am separated from him. 
 . . . When I am separated from you, I love you! Now,, 
 at this moment, I both love and hate you. How is that? 
 Perhaps you know? Comprenez-vous? " 
 
 " How foolish you are to ratiocinate! " Walt told her. 
 " You did much more wisely when you took up your posi- 
 tion in the entrance downstairs, that Sunday, and with 
 your invisible glance, singled me out from the crowd which 
 was passing. That act was not a reasonable one; if it 
 had been, it would have had no charm for you. Nor was 
 I a reasonable choice from among those passers-by. How,, 
 then, do you expect what has followed, and exists, to be 
 reasonable? Come, don't be reasonable! " 
 
 " It is for your sake, not my own. I have to think of 
 you; I am responsible, if anything should happen." 
 
234 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " Nothing is going to happen except that some day, natur- 
 ally, you will weary of me. The oscillation you feel — 
 first loving, then hating me — ^will die down. Quiet will 
 succeed, and in that quiet you will receive me for a few 
 moments, or a half -hour; then we will say au revoir as 
 usual but you will omit to mention when I am to revisit 
 you. And that will be all." 
 
 " And I shall be imhappier than ever! " 
 But immediately she exclaimed, with conviction: 
 "Here! You say nothing about yourself. Why? Be- 
 cause you do not love me. Some other woman. She has 
 taken from you something I want and should have — some- 
 thing that would make me happy! The first, sparkling 
 freshness of your emotion, perhaps; perhaps the self- 
 deception which creates I'extase of the lover. She has done 
 me a terrible, an irremediable wrong." In French: " The 
 velvety bloom; she had that! She rubbed it against her 
 cheek, carelessly,- and threw away the petals." In English: 
 " Now I have made the discovery — ^not by reasoning, either. 
 Oh, how awful for me! Don't you want to know what 
 it is I have discovered? " 
 
 " That you don't love me, of course." 
 " No, something different. . . . Look. Starved of love, 
 conducted into a marriage of convention, of family, of 
 property, I have gone on these years until my suffering, 
 my necessity, has perverted me . . . made me different. I 
 will illustrate: It is like an actor forced by circumstances 
 to play a feminine role. Only, reversed! Behold myself, 
 Floride Antoine, driven by inner pressures to play the mas- 
 culine role. The aggressor, yes; to the extent possible. I 
 
THE ANSWERER 235 
 
 cannot go out in the streets, but I can stand in the shadow 
 of the joyer. . . . But a role is a role; one cannot play 
 it one minute to abandon it the next; one must, at the 
 very least, sustain it all through that action. So, seel 
 What follows? Why," — in French — " I become endued with 
 masculinity as a garment? Mais, nont The actor to suc- 
 ceed must think, feel, his part." English: " So with me. 
 I have put m3^elf in the man's role. What the Rosalind 
 of M. Shakespeare did as a protection and continued as 
 an exciting plaisanterie is for me desperate earnest." 
 
 Toward her, Walt was aware of a new complication of 
 feeling; in her dramatic interpretation of her imhappy role 
 she affected him as did the great actresses he had seen — 
 Fanny Kemble as " Bianca " in Fazio was not a forced 
 comparison nor could his experience evoke a more im- 
 pressive. . . . She was engaged in a task of self-interpre- 
 tation and she was wholly sincere; but he saw now for 
 the first time how essentially an artist she was by inner- 
 most nature. That meant, not any least trace of insin- 
 cerity, but a gift for seeing herself always in mental mirrors 
 — embodied at some greater or less distance and lighted by 
 the artificial illumination of her desires. If the desires 
 gave out, were suddenly to be extinguished, leaving her in 
 darkness . . . she could not go on, she could not go 
 on. . . . 
 
 " My mistake is that I see the truth! " she uttered 
 stormily. 
 
 " Your mistake is that I am not great enough to fill the 
 real role, dominating, masculine! " he assured her, as she 
 lay back in his arms. " I ought to be able to make you 
 
336 THE ANSWERER 
 
 happy; I am not. What you call yoiu: mistake is a fault, 
 a lack, in me." . . . Was this lying? His feeling toward 
 her dictated the words — ^pity but pity without condescen- 
 sion, the sense of pathos so swelled by her mood to-day, 
 a genuine tenderness and a thong by which she was forever 
 drawing him to her. Lying? Not if feeling inspired what 
 he said. Those only lie who speak without feeling; pre- 
 cise words, what do they matter? He would recite any 
 creed that she asked or the recitation of which, by the 
 mere sound of his voice, might help her. The real creed 
 would be the inarticulable tie that united them. 
 
 She had a prophetic vision of her future. 
 
 " I shall go on, as an actor goes on who sees his im- 
 perfections in his role. Playing the same part, over and 
 over again. The part I am forced into by something 
 insatiable in me. What is it? I am no better than an 
 adventuress. But the adventuress — ^what is her adventure? 
 Always she plays the same part, the same role, to extinc- 
 tion. Is that adventure? There is no adventure in sex, 
 for one is always the same sex." 
 
 " No," he admitted, " there is no adventure in sex. 
 There is nothing of that sort; there is only the possibility 
 of fulfilment. For most of the race." 
 
 " Fulfilment? " she murmured. " What is that word? 
 How can you use it? It is evident to me that you do 
 not know its meaning any more than I." 
 
 " If you mean I have not realized it, I can say I ex- 
 pect to." 
 
 " How? " — ^with controlled jealousy. 
 
 "Through you as much as through any one." Walt 
 
THE ANSWERER 237 
 
 was earnest. " Perhaps more than through any other one. 
 You do not thwart or resist me. In that there is a lesson. 
 You did not seek to define me, nor do you seek to under- 
 stand me; you did but invite me, acclaim me. In that 
 there is a lesson. Is it meaningless that your eye singled 
 me out? is it without significance that I found you? Out 
 of the rolling ocean, the crowd, came something whispered, 
 communicated: ' I love you, before long I die; you have 
 traveled a long way merely that I might look on you, 
 touch you. You could not die till I once had looked on 
 you. Now we are safe. We have met, we have touched, 
 we are safe.' ... Is it not so? And what if again we 
 are separated by the irresistible sea? Every day, at sun- 
 down, I will salute the air, the ocean and the land. And 
 every day, at sunrise, you will salute the land, the air 
 and the ocean. Your eyes will be upon the ocean, the 
 crowd. My eyes will be upon the ocean, the crowd. And 
 among the men and women, the multitude, you will per- 
 ceive one picking you out by secret and . . . divine signs 
 . . . acknowledging none else — ^not parent, wife, brother, 
 child as nearer. And from the midst of the multitude I shall 
 perceive one picking me out, acknowledging none else so 
 near. Lovers and perfect equals, discovering each other by 
 faint indirections. Always the mystere, the surprise, the 
 delicious renewal, the understanding passion! " 
 
 . . . What has become of happiness-unhappiness, love- 
 hate, the sense of pathos and the sense of equal pity in 
 this breathless communion? In the deep silence of that 
 apartment two incomparable actors, playing against each 
 other in the deathless drama, consummate their roles. 
 
238 THE ANSWERER 
 
 13 
 
 The cause of the first duel between Raoul Dumouriez 
 and the astonishing O'Donoju, though it could not be dis- 
 cussed by the principals, had immediately become a matter 
 of general knowledge in New Orleans. It was that inci- 
 dent, observed by Walt and so many others, occurring in 
 the French market on the Sunday in the course of which 
 Walt and Floride Dumouriez had their first meeting. Had 
 not O'Donoju smiled, publicly and ingratiatingly, at an 
 exceptionally handsome woman of color, the belle of belles 
 at the last Quadroon Ball? and the placee of Raoul Dumour- 
 iez? Dozens had seen the smile, the blankness of look 
 which met it, and the slow, polite inclination of the head 
 with which that stranger of striking appearance had 
 acknowledged his mistake. Of all the observers, quite 
 possibly Walt was alone in not knowing that a duel must 
 idllam. The insult was deliberate. Unconscious? Pouf! 
 You say this South American warrior did not know she 
 was the placee of Dumouriez? I do not believe it; but 
 certainly, with une femme si distinguee he knew a challenge 
 would follow. But what was that to him, with a wrist 
 like lightning. First one of Dumouriez's hands, then the 
 other. C'est mervdUeux. 
 
 The fact was, despite sophisticated pronouncements to 
 the contrary, the gallant O'Donoju had had no more idea 
 of the identity of Raoul's placee when he saluted her with 
 his smile than of fighting twice in the ensuing forty-eight 
 hours. It is not certain that, knowing who she was, he 
 would have acted differently. Without any other allusion 
 
THE ANSWERER 1239 
 
 to the affair, Mile. Fleurus observed to her suitor, some 
 days afterward: 
 
 " I suppose, Jose amigo, you find a pretty face irre- 
 sistible." 
 
 He looked at her in astonishment; said: 
 
 " Por DiosI It never has occurred to me that a pretty 
 face was a thing to be resisted! " 
 
 Amid some laughter, Walt exclaimed: 
 
 " I wonder if O'DonoJu isn't right? Non-resistance; that 
 implies no temptation. The puritan, he is the fellow who 
 is always setting up imaginary temptations. He's a shadow- 
 boxer. He prays: ' Lead me into temptation so I may 
 show how easily I could overcome it if it were real.' Along 
 comes a real temptation, sneaks up on him in the rear, lays 
 him by the heels. A swift backward kick is the best safe- 
 guard. Now, take a mule; a mule is never overcome by 
 temptation." 
 
 " Diosl Make me a mule! " implored O'Donoju, adding 
 reproachfully to Jeanne Fleurus: 
 
 " But as long as he is your father, I must not disable 
 him." 
 
 Jeanne reflected. In an undertone: 
 
 " I will make one more effort. Come to-night! " 
 
 Walt, exchanging politeness with Madame Fleurus, 
 screened his question and her answer. 
 
 " Where? " 
 
 " Oh . . . across Royal Street? I will slip into the en- 
 trance of any house that happens to be dark; Casa Callava 
 usually is. Nine." 
 
 Immediately thereafter the two young men left, separ- 
 
240 THE ANSWERER 
 
 ating as soon as they gained the street. Walt had to 
 return to the Orescent office for an hour; after dinner he 
 was to go to Floride . . . but that was his and her secret. 
 O'Donoju, elated over the prospect of the evening, rushed 
 away to make certain preparations for a quick departure 
 from the city. He would have Jeanne with him if he went; 
 if not, if he stayed, he would have her anjrway. All de- 
 pended upon the measure of her success with Papa Fleurus 
 — amiable old embusterol When I am his son-in-law, said 
 the spirited Jose to himself, I shall handle him as he de- 
 serves; I will be perpetually soUcitous about his health, his 
 work lest he overexert himself; I will make him feel at 
 least ten years older, the blissid old rascal, for he has made 
 me feel that much older than I am, meself . . . . 
 
 ... In the New Orleans of 1848 a person with one- 
 eighth white blood was called a sacatra. One such, a young 
 woman named Alceste, a grandchild of the natural daughter 
 of the first Hippolyte Antoine, was in a strict sense the 
 second cousin of Floride Dumouriez, born Antoine. The 
 two children with a great-grandfather in common had grown 
 up together in an intimacy entirely unaffected by the fact 
 that one was the mistress and the other the slave. 
 
 When, after Floride's marriage to Raoul Dumouriez, her 
 husband had, with no particular concealment, pursued Al- 
 ceste, Floride had offered the sacatra her freedom. In 
 lamentable distress, Alceste had pleaded not to be separ- 
 ated from her mistress; and after hearing one or two things 
 the girl was able to tell, Floride assented, giving her certain 
 instructions. Thereafter the daily life proceeded with ex- 
 ternal smoothness in the Maison Dumouriez; following a 
 
THE ANSWERER 2411 
 
 period of sulky fits the sang-mele husband was known to 
 have taken a placee and to be living with her to the practi- 
 cal desertion of his wife. 
 
 Floride and Alceste continued to share a secret. 
 
 It would keep. 
 
 14 
 
 Equally to threats and blandishments Papa Fleurus re- 
 mained immovable. HelasI what a parent! 
 
 " Do you want me to die to you? " 
 
 Papa Fleurus passed his pudgy hand over a head ton- 
 sured by nature and the rapid calculation of cargo profits. 
 
 " I want you to die to that young vagabond," he de- 
 clared. 
 
 " But you can make him your partner! " 
 
 " What? And lose money? He cannot add, he can only 
 kill." 
 
 " Perhaps he can subtract." 
 
 " Enough! Leave me. I multiply." 
 
 "Oh, multiply, multiply! ... I will yet teach you how 
 to divide! " 
 
 She went out. Though furious with him, Jeanne was far 
 from despair. Always he acquiesced before facts. Wishes, 
 desires, emotions, plans — those were not facts; she might 
 have known they would not stir him. 
 
 Taking the best of her jewels, as well as a sum of money 
 she had, and ascertaining that Madame Fleiurus was retired 
 to her chamber, the daughter of the importer who dealt 
 only with facts slipped quietly out of the house. Across 
 Royal Street she saw to her surprise that Casa Callava was 
 
242 THE ANSWERER 
 
 brilliantly lighted. That family of Spanish Creoles must 
 have returned this day to town from Pass Christian. How- 
 ever, the entrance of the next house was quite dark. 
 
 That was the Maison Dumouriez; she didn't want to 
 go there. But she had told Jose a dark entrance; all the 
 other houses in the vicinity were well-lighted; he would 
 pick out this one, and — ^what did it matter, anyway? It 
 was merely to meet; they would depart together after an 
 exchange of perhaps six words. 
 
 A bell struck nine. Jose would be waiting, in a fever 
 of impatience. 
 
 Jeanne crossed the street and passed imder the shadowy 
 archway. Silence. No one stepped forward, with an eager 
 question. ... It was strange; and she felt a chill of dis- 
 appointment. But something had detained him. He would 
 be here in a trifle, in no time at all! 
 
 She stepped back a little further into the cloak of 
 shadow; and immediately trod on something. ... At once 
 she knew it was a human body; recoiling against the wall 
 of the passage she stood for a full moment, arms outstretched 
 to stay her from falling, the palms of her hands against 
 the cold stone. A faint sound, half-groan half-sigh, brought 
 her suddenly to her knees. She crouched over this . . . 
 (but he was not dead!) . . . and despite the shuddering 
 revulsion that controlled her body her fingers persisted in 
 exploring the face . . . they touched the peculiarly-shaped 
 military chapeau with its raised embroidery of gold lace — 
 
 "Jos6! " 
 
 That cry, hardly distinct or piercing enough to attract 
 attention above the murmur of the flowing street, was re- 
 
THE ANSWERER 243 
 
 ceived with acoustical courtesy by the vaulted walls and 
 impassively conducted up the entrance staircase of stately 
 width and a certain ornate grandeur. 
 
 IS 
 
 Well before nine, O'Donoju arriving in Royal Street and 
 mindful of Jeanne's directions had made for the Casa Cal- 
 lava only to stop short on observing that house's high 
 degree of illumination. He looked about — ^just as, so little 
 later, Jeanne herself was to do — and noticed that the house 
 next door, belonging to Dumouriez, was dark; also that 
 no other house was dark. The thought of Dumouriez's 
 entrance as a place for his rendezvous with Mile. Fleurus 
 was distasteful; but he shrugged off the feeling. Time 
 was short; Jeanne would look for him, and, in the circum- 
 stances, he would have no excuse if he failed to obey her 
 word literally. 
 
 Quickly, without noise, he entered the enemy's archway. 
 At once Floride Dumouriez, waiting there for Walt, glided 
 toward him from the wall just beyond the staircase, taking 
 his arm. O'Donoju wheeled; spoke. 
 
 " Out, Jeanne — " 
 
 Floride, realizing her mistake almost before he spoke, 
 shrank back, with difficulty checking a cry of dismay. In 
 surprise O'Donoju, after a slight hesitation, advanced to- 
 ward her. It was not Jeanne . . . but if it was not Jeanne, 
 who, then . . . ? The idea that the mistress of that house 
 could be waiting there in the dark was, of course, outside 
 the range of instant conjecture. 
 
 Floride had understood earlier in the day that her hus- 
 
244 THE ANSWERER 
 
 band had left New Orleans. This was false. Raoul Du- 
 mouriez, seized with a sudden whim, had decided that 
 evening to stay in town instead of going to Charleston for 
 the races. The whim had ramified unexpectedly, as whims 
 have a way of doing, into an offhand resolution to return 
 to Royal Street, surprise his wife and perhaps smooth over 
 things with her a little, outwardly at any rate. Who knew? 
 a reconciliation might even be possible. The sang-mele had 
 unlimited faith in his power to cajole women and amuse 
 himself while doing so. . . . Besides, lately his beautiful 
 placee had been altogether tiresome, too anxious to please. 
 If Floride had a merit, it was variety, even in coldness, even 
 in arctic anger. . . . 
 
 As Dumouriez turned into the dark entrance of his 
 house he heard, in the unmistakable voice of his wife, a 
 voice now sharp with fright, the words: 
 
 "No! No! Leave me alone. You — " 
 
 There was some man there with her. . . . With a leapj 
 the sang-mele was against him. A violent struggle ensued 
 in the darkness, a furious and merciless encounter with 
 not a word spoken. Only the desperate gasps of those 
 men came from their throats. But even that sound did 
 not last. The husband of Floride Dumouriez never went 
 unarmed. As if reserved to show its efficacy under these 
 very special circumstances, the handy poniard, lifted from 
 a sheath elaborately chased, passed swiftly between two 
 ribs of the South American general, d gauche, and was with- 
 drawn with equal deftness. Resistance ceased; the con- 
 tending figure crumpled quickly. 
 
 Raoul Dumouriez stood up. This Irish animal — ah, omf 
 
THE ANSWERER 245 
 
 he knew him! — was dead. He looked about but Floride 
 had disappeared. Where? Up the staircase, or outside in 
 the street? Should he enter the house, find her, and — ? 
 Her words had been: " Leave me alone." They made her 
 sound blameless; but how came she down here in the 
 passage, in darkness, with a man? with any man? . . . 
 Well, it was important to get men to remove this corpse, 
 his men who would do their job, whisper nothing and re- 
 member nothing. That, first. Later he could return and 
 settle with Floride. She could say nothing. And he was 
 happy to have slain this . . . vermin of a soldier. But 
 now, to business. He paused, leaving the entrance, saying 
 in French with a low laugh: 
 
 "Wait, little dead brute. I return at once with those 
 who will drop you in the Mississippi ... for a voy- 
 age . . ." 
 
 16 
 
 As soon as the two men grappled, Floride got away. . . , 
 She recognized in the second comer Raoul, whom, she 
 had been certain, was leaving that day for Charleston. 
 Who the man that had so frightened her might be, she 
 didn't know, nor now care. The thing was: Raoul was 
 back, back! and, at any moment, Walt might appear. . . . 
 The impulse to run out in the street, run to meet, to 
 ward off Walt, she stamped on. That would spare nobody 
 and would bring instant disclosure. . . . Raoul would come 
 upon them unless this other person killed him. Then, 
 perhaps, they would be all right; no casual intruder could 
 be half so dangerous as Raoul. She must — What must 
 
246 THE ANSWERER 
 
 she do? What cotdd she do but wait, watch fearfully to 
 see — 
 
 A swift movement placed her part the way up the stair- 
 case, in deeper darkness, where she might gather the issue 
 of that terrible struggle. Her heart pounded, she held her 
 breath. But it was soon over (Raoul must have knifed him) 
 and then, briefly, she saw her husband silhouetted in the 
 lighter shadow where the entrance gave on the sidewalk; 
 heard his voice, that horrible falsetto, in a contemptuous 
 promise. 
 
 "Wait ... I return at once . . ." 
 
 He had gone. Now — 
 
 What, now? If Walt walked in, no harm would come to 
 him. He would turn at once to the staircase; with a clasp 
 and a whisper she could draw him up with her to the rooms 
 above ... or she could take his arm and they could leave 
 quickly together; could go far, oh far! from this wretched 
 place. 
 
 She was not thinking of the man lying in the entrance; 
 it did not occur to her that he was matter for concern. He 
 was dead. Raoul had said so; besides, this was not new 
 work with Raoul who, in the attenuated strain of negre 
 that was in him, seemed to preserve an undiminished fer- 
 ocity, the concentrated trait of innumerable remote ancestors 
 of a barbarousness without parallel. 
 
 How the minutes fled! She had a feeling that time was 
 rushing past with dreadful rapidity, as if the neck of an 
 hourglass, suddenly swelling, were letting all the sands 
 through. How long must she wait? How long could she 
 safely wait? . . . But her sense of the passage of time 
 
THE ANSWERER 247 
 
 was obliterated; she did not know whether five or fifteen 
 minutes had passed. Oh, hurry, hurry, Walt! If, in one 
 moment more, you do not come, I must fall back on Alceste; 
 even that, since they will not know where to find Raoul, 
 may miscarry. One more moment. . . . 
 
 A figure glided quickly into the entrance. But, no! this 
 was a woman! A woman! Dieul what new complica- 
 tion — 
 
 "Jose! " 
 
 The piteous cry of Jeanne Fleurus came distinctly to 
 Floride, hovering on the staircase. It explained much. 
 This, then, was the woman whom that fellow had been 
 looking for, mistaking the house. How horrible! Floride 
 had not caught the faint sound made by the wounded 
 O'Donoju when Jeanne's foot stumbled on him. Now she 
 heard from the kneeling Jeanne: 
 
 " Jose! . . . You are alive, at least. Oh, what has hap- 
 pened here? . . ." 
 
 With these words, arriving tardily, Walt, tiurning into 
 the entrance, stopped dead, with an exclamation of aston- 
 ishment. 
 
 "Hello! What—?" 
 
 17 
 He struck a match, saw by the flare the prone O'Donoju 
 and as if obeying a swift and automatic instinct had the 
 Irishman in his arms and was bearing him up the stair- 
 case. Jeanne and Floride followed, clinging to each other 
 with a mutual sufiocation of explanation from which Floride 
 emerged long enough to call: 
 
248 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " Alceste! Alcestet La lumerel " 
 
 From above the sacatra answered, lamps were lit and 
 Walt carried his burden to the lairge sofa. 
 
 " A physician? " 
 
 But Floride had already despatched Alceste " on an er- 
 rand — vital." Jeanne Fleurus said: 
 
 " I will go across to our house and send one of the 
 servants. If he can be moved, may he not be brought 
 over there? " 
 
 It seemed doubtful what the doctor would say. "At 
 least, I shall hear to-night how he is? " Jeanne entreated 
 Walt. He answered with quick emphasis, and on that 
 "Yes-yes! " she hurried out. 
 
 Walt looked carefully at the bared breast. A clean 
 wound with extroverted edges showed where the poniard 
 had entered; there was little or no bleeding. He murmured: 
 " Doesn't look bad," adding: " But I'm no medico." Flor- 
 ide looked without flinching; then, over the body of the 
 unconscious O'Donoju, her eyes and Walt's met. 
 
 His look gave her what she needed. 
 
 Rapidly, in an undertone, without removing her eyes 
 from his, she condensed the incidents of the half-hour, con- 
 cluding: 
 
 " So he will be back. At any moment. You under- 
 stand? " 
 
 "You'd rather I'd go away? Is that it? No ... no; 
 I can't do that." 
 
 "Why not? I tell you, I can deal with him. I have 
 begun already to deal with him, Alceste, she has gone, 
 she has gone to — " 
 
THE ANSWERER 249 
 
 She broke off abruptly, mysteriously; then, changing the 
 course of her persuasion, said: 
 
 " Besides, there is no need of involving you, of his 
 knowing that you — " 
 
 "Hush!" 
 
 Voices below. Then a silence and the sound of one 
 man's steps ascending the staircase. Floride made a ges- 
 ture, incomplete; Walt had the sense of her wanting to 
 wring her hands and not knowing just how. . . . She had 
 time for a whisper: 
 
 " Let me talk ... at first . . . me." 
 
 The head and shoulders of Raoul Dumouriez appeared. 
 He took in the scene, halting at the top of the flight. On 
 his face there was an absence of expression which permitted 
 Walt to observe the over-perfection of the finely-chiseled 
 features, the straightness and silkiness of the small black 
 mustache and the weird effect of what at first appeared to 
 be a head of closely-cropped silky black hair. Amazed at 
 this hair, Walt could not keep his eyes off it and finally 
 he saw the peculiar phenomenon. Not close cropping but 
 an arrested growth made the head resemble that of a few- 
 weeks'-old infant, dark and downy; the skin of the scalp 
 was drawn with preternatural tightness like the head of 
 a drum and the hair had with difficulty struggled through 
 in a growth destined to remain forever pre-adolescent. For 
 the rest, with his half-dropped lids, the sang-mele looked 
 distinctly sleepy. 
 
 He stood, looking at his wife, at Walt and at the ex- 
 tended O'Donoju without a trace of any emotion. Floride 
 spoke smoothly: 
 
250 THE ANSWERER 
 
 "With the help of this gentleman, I have brought our 
 intruder up here, A doctor ha:s been sent for, as he still 
 breathes." 
 
 " Merck" The husband blinked an indifferent acknowl' 
 edgment to Walt. " I have some men below. We can 
 take him away, to the hospital." 
 
 He advanced a step. Walt spoke. 
 
 " It will not do to move him until the doctor has seen 
 him." 
 
 A shrug was the only answer as Dumouriez resumed 
 his advance. 
 
 " You are not to touch him," said Walt, coming in front 
 of O'Donoju. 
 
 The sang-mele stopped, with his half-awake glance tak- 
 ing in the details of this casual stranger. Lithe, compact, 
 strongly-knit — ^yes; but easily overpowered by a call down- 
 stairs. ... In a mincing voice turned suddenly falsetto 
 Dumouriez observed: 
 
 " I am quite capable of taking you to the hospital with 
 him, mon aim, or — to the morgue." 
 
 " Oh, damn you," was Walt's verbal answer, completed 
 by an action he seemed to himself to perform intuitively, 
 with perfect carelessness. He squarely turned his back 
 on the sang-mde. As he bent over O'Donoju, looking with 
 real anxiety for some trace of reviving consciousness, he 
 was conscious of a division in himself which he found ex- 
 tremely bizarre. In these circumstances. . . . Not that I 
 have not before this, times and other times, felt myself 
 two selves; but now, faced with an actual danger, risk, 
 emergency (what you will) the concealed self is my boss. 
 
THE ANSWERER asi 
 
 The usual self is roped and bound; is scared to death but 
 looks helplessly on while I coolly offer my back to this 
 . . . rattlesnake. 
 
 Beside him Walt could hear Floride's quickened breath- 
 ing. But from behind came no sound. . . , O'Donoju was 
 stUl unconscious. ... In a matter-of-fact manner, Walt 
 straightened up and faced easily about. The husband of 
 Floride had made no move but, with eyes almost completely 
 closed, mere slits, seemed to be thinking. As Walt turned, 
 he said: 
 
 " I shall, of course, kill you for that insult. At a more 
 proper time — " 
 
 In the grip of the self-he-didn't-know, Walt found him- 
 self interrupting with a dangerous fluency of answer. 
 
 " Kill me? Doubtless you think so. At a proper time, 
 eh? Why, what time could be more proper than the pres- 
 ent? Go — or come — right ahead. Here I am; here I have 
 been now for several convenient moments. If I am a little 
 difficult, why, there is your gang downstairs. After you 
 have killed me you can finish killing him " — motioning to- 
 ward O'Donoju. "You can then kill your wife; you can 
 kill the doctor when he comes. One by one, or a dozen at 
 a time, you can kill any others. Kill? You damned fool! 
 What can you kill? One man against the world! Why, if 
 I threw you down the staircase to that pack of vermin, 
 they'd tear you limb from limb; you've taught them to kill! 
 Shucks! Get out! " 
 
 The rattlesnake should be wholly the rattlesnake; it is 
 a fatal mistake for it to possess any other wisdom than 
 that of the serpent. A sense of something beyond the 
 
252 THE ANSWERER 
 
 reach of its strike or not sure to succumb to its venom is 
 fatal. Coil, rattle, strike! is the only safeguard, in linked 
 and unhesitating action. No man can imitate the superb 
 automatism of the snake. A man's purpose is always and 
 incessantly strengthening or weakening his arm. Swift are 
 the muscles; thought is swifter. And thought is at the 
 mercy of emotion — of pride, of anger, of doubt, of fear, 
 of humiliation, of the sense of compared powers and com- 
 parative weakness, of possible failure. . . . When, after the 
 coiled rattle, Walt spoke his careless " damn you! " the 
 rattlesnake had failed to strike, arrested in action for the 
 briefest second by the emotion of profound surprise. A 
 second! at the end of which the faultless opportunity was 
 lost forever. It would never come again; a lesser oppor- 
 tunity might, a greater opportunity might; but this one, 
 never. 
 
 The intrusion of thought — and surprise is an emotion 
 Tfhich gives instant birth to thought — ^placed the sang-mele 
 at an insuperable disadvantage. The intuitive-Walt which 
 had sprung forward in the crisis had taken further advan- 
 tage, or, if you like, had increased its initial advantage, 
 by mixing with the authentic scorn of its heaped insults 
 more food for thought. " What can you kill? One man 
 against the world! " Food for thought? yes, but arsenic 
 for action. 
 
 Dumouriez had the sense of something moving out of his 
 reach. It was heightened, fixed, by Floride's behavior. 
 
 Except for breath more quickly drawn, she had remained 
 during the exchanges immobile, at the foot of the sofa 
 on which lay the oblivious O'Donoju. She had been stand- 
 
THE ANSWERER 25s 
 
 ing. Now suddenly she arranged a ruffle of lace on the 
 bosom of her dress and, as Walt concluded his contemp- 
 tuous interruption with the words: " Shucks! Get out! " 
 — she laughed. A low laugh of secure amusement. 
 
 " No! " she exclaimed, astoundingly. " Don't go. Don't 
 go, mon Raoul. Why should you withdraw from your own 
 house? . . . But it would be pleasanter if you would send 
 away those people downstairs." 
 
 Voices came from below; Dumouriez moved irresolutely, 
 but before he had decided anything a man appeared on 
 the staircase, the summoned physician. The scene was 
 ended. Alceste appeared suddenly and was sent for hot 
 water, restoratives. . . . Dumouriez, going to the head of 
 the stairs gave a sulky order; his " people " could be heard 
 leaving. 
 
 "Move him? Under no conditions, except to a bed," 
 said peremptorily the physician. " Come, I will help you 
 with that." He added, still bent over the sofa: " Close 
 to the heart. But as long as he does not start bleeding 
 . . . safe enough in a few days." 
 
 He gathered up O'Donoju very carefully in his arms. 
 As Alceste conducted him to one of the bedrooms, Walt 
 turned to Floride. 
 
 " I must go over and tell Mile. Fleiurus. She'll be anx- 
 ious." 
 
 He started for the staircase, followed by a malignant 
 look from behind the dropped lids of Raoul Dumouriez. 
 At the same instant a commotion rose suddenly from 
 below; feet swarmed on the stairs, and Walt stood back 
 in astonishment. A band of perhaps a dozen white men 
 
254 THE ANSWERER 
 
 came welling up the wide flight with stern faces and vigilant 
 eyes. 
 " There he is! There's DumouriezI Surround him! " 
 They sprang about him in a circle, the falsetto cry rang 
 out like the squeal of a cornered rat, and a strong arm 
 clutched the wrist that held the bared poniard, clutched 
 it, turned it inward with a slow, remorseless, vise-like action. 
 The knife dropped; in the grip of a dozen hands they 
 bore him to the floor. Steel clamped the wrists and a 
 rope knotted the ankles. Without explanation, brushing 
 past Walt, they dragged him with them, his hobbled feet 
 thumping the broad, descending treads. 
 
 Walt looked at Floride. She had sunk on the sofa, eyes 
 closed. His startled eye went back to the exit through 
 which the doctor had passed, carrying O'Donoju. In that 
 doorway stood the sacatra Alceste, lips parted, white teeth 
 gleaming. 
 
 i8 
 
 The explanation? Walt never obtained an explanation. 
 No one appeared to know or have heard what had become 
 of Raoul Dumouriez. At any allusion to him men remarked 
 that they hadn't " seen him lately " — ^and talked of some- 
 thing else. To Jeanne Fleurus, later that evening, Walt 
 had told what happened. And she had said: 
 
 " Forget that you were there. That is the best thing 
 you can do, muy amigo. Do not mention your — delusion — 
 to any one else. That might — " 
 
 She broke off. " I must visit Jose to-morrow." 
 
 Floride would say only: 
 
THE ANSWERER 255 
 
 " Nothing took place, my Walt. But Dumouriez will 
 be a long time absent. Come any time! " 
 
 He could not have questioned Alceste, even had he con- 
 templated asking the slave what the mistress would not 
 tell. The sacatra spoke nothing but a dialect-French. 
 
 Madison Slocomb, sounded cautiously, appeared to know 
 no more than that " Dumouriez hasn't been around lately. 
 At Charleston, maybe." Eugene Fuller was a blank. 
 Finally, feeling that he could trust him, Walt took Traubel 
 to some extent into his confidence. 
 
 The studious German listened carefully, under a pledge 
 of silence, to a peculiar occurrence Walt had " heard about." 
 Walt named the victim, however, " that sang-mele, Dumour- 
 iez." 
 
 "So! " said Traubel at last. "This must be another 
 of your strange American institutions. And no one admits 
 knowing anything about it! That is like Russia under 
 the Tsars, or like France in the days of the Bastille. I 
 can only make a guess. Since the Nat Turner rebellion 
 in Virginia — ^how long ago? Wasn't it in 1831? — ^when, as 
 I read, sixty-one whites were killed — " 
 
 " I remember. That slave insurrection. I was a boy. 
 But Nat Turner was a negro." 
 
 " Perhaps, in his heart, Dumouriez was not more than 
 one-sixty-fourth white." 
 
 Reflecting on this afterward, Walt found himself unable 
 to agree. Yet it was quite possible that in his scheming 
 the sang-mele had been willing and had made plans to 
 identify himself with the blacks (as their leader and almost 
 a white) . . . ultimately. For what purpose? Some fan- 
 
256 THE ANSWERER 
 
 tastic idea of dominion, perhaps — of empire . . . Hayti . . . 
 Touissant L'Ouverture. It must be. Fact or suspicion; 
 either; and the smile of a watching sacatra. 
 
 19 
 
 Momentous hour! that had molded several lives. 
 
 For on the day after his wounding Jeanne Fleurus was 
 married to Jose O'Donoju as the Irish adventurer lay, 
 still but ecstatic, in the house of his enemy; the hand of 
 Papa Fleurus was forced. Torn from his arithmetic and 
 percentages of profit, the importer was confronted with the 
 fait accompli; as always, he acquiesced before a Fact. He 
 did more, he made the best of it. A case of his rarest, 
 earliest importation was transferred across Royal Street 
 and there opened. 
 
 " Sure, 'tis a treasure of jewels cased in cobwebs," said 
 poetically the South American general as the contents were 
 held aloft for his view. 
 
 " And each drop shall be set in crystal," laughed Madame 
 O'Donoju, as a house-servant appeared with glasses. She 
 held high her thin-stemmed chalice, proposing a toast: 
 
 " To the worldly success of Fleurus & O'Donoju." 
 
 " What? " 
 
 " You are to be Papa's partner in business." 
 
 " You mean he has consented to become my partner in 
 bankruptcy." 
 
 "Well — for better, for worse! " 
 
 " Faith, I see. You have taken me for better and he 
 for worse." 
 
 They laughed. Jeanne said: 
 
THE ANSWERER 257 
 
 " It is your turn to offer a toast." 
 
 Jose lifted his glass, containing the remainder of what 
 the physician would allow him. 
 
 " To the spiritual success of O'Donoju & Fleurus! " 
 
 His convalescence caused the doctor the greatest amaze- 
 ment. 
 
 " Humph! Going to settle down now, I hope?" 
 
 " Soon as ever I've settled up with me friends, the 
 Colorados. I'll become their North American financial 
 agent — Show's that? Can an Irishman become a banker? 
 Would ye predict success in so unprecedented an under- 
 taking? " 
 
 " An Irish arm and a French purse will win at anything 
 except roulette." 
 
 " Bumo!" 
 
 . . . Hour that molded lives! And the other half of 
 the mold? 
 
 Floride had seen a Walt new to her (new, had she 
 known it, to Walt himself) — a Walt who could say in- 
 differently to the menace of Raoul Dumouriez: " Damn 
 you! "... and calmly turn his back. A revelation? Per- 
 haps. She had thought she fully understood the nature of 
 the man; he was her lover, made so by her own mysterious 
 action, by the unsubdued will of her powerful personality 
 no longer latent nor concealed. He was her lover, yes; and 
 he was also what she admired with the largest measure 
 of intellectual admiration contained in her feminine nature: 
 He was an actor, natural-born and with a tremendous gift. 
 Once or twice she had heard him use the expression " nat- 
 ural persons," and the expression secretly delighted her. 
 
258 THE ANSWERER 
 
 Of course! He was a natural person; but what was a 
 natural person? Not a mere animal, to be sure; no. 
 But a perfectly-endowed actor. Yes, that was it, A man 
 differed from an animal in having an intelligence which 
 made him capable of seeing himself in a role. No animal 
 could see itself in a role. No man could help so seeing 
 himself, at moments, anyway. And the gifted man, the 
 natural person, saw himself so at all times, but without 
 pertiu'bation, without undue self-consciousness, without em- 
 barrassment or inner stage-fright. En effet, this peculiar 
 and constant vision enabled him to lose all self-conscious- 
 ness at almost every hour of his life, and, thus freed, 
 act his part to the richest extent of his powers. So ana- 
 lyzed, Walt was truly the most natural person, the most 
 accomplished actor, she had ever known. 
 
 And herself, she was, she considered, an actress of no 
 mean ability, in this deeper sense that she was defining. 
 But what chance had she had, before Walt's advent, to 
 display her true powers? Those were of a predominantly 
 emotional character; but what was the expression of emo- 
 tions which did not include love? Disordered music, with- 
 out key, without tonality. And whom had she had to love? 
 That distant young brother, with the phase of love which 
 is merely an immense tenderness, like a gentle melody in- 
 tended to be no more than the embellishment of a major 
 theme. It was like having to construct a sonata out of a 
 handful of grace-notes. 
 
 Nor would a sonata, the composition for a single instru- 
 ment, be what she wanted; nothing less than symphonic 
 proclamation would suffice for her " content " — ^what she 
 
THE ANSWERER 259 
 
 had for outpouring. It was even doubtful to her whether 
 any man or any number of men or all of her lifetime would 
 serve adequately for the fullest manifestation, the richest 
 proclamation of what she believed to be herself. And yet, 
 in Walt, she had found, at the very outset, a man, just 
 one single man, who seemed to give her inexhaustible oppor- 
 tunity. . . . She had begun to have a suspicion that all his 
 variety, all his resource had been displayed in her drama 
 when an unforeseen crisis arising gave him the chance to 
 astonish her. Mon brave! But it was not for his bravery 
 that she freshly adored him; it was his wonderful piece of 
 histrionism in the quick turn of his role. 
 
 He had secrets, then, recesses which she had not fath- 
 omed. . . . 
 
 " How could you do that? " she asked Walt, frankly giv- 
 ing him in her voice and look the praise of incomprehension. 
 " To say that — and then to turn your back! " 
 
 The bearded young man smiled; when he smiled it was 
 with a burst of sunlight from the gray-blue eyes. Oddly, 
 his beard had not the effect of ageing him; did not hide 
 the square, generous chin. Nor did the mustache weaken the 
 mouth, so wide, full-lipped and red-lipped, so expressive of 
 what Walt had once called himself in talking with her, 
 " the caresser of life." A mouth sensuous but not sensual, 
 capable of smacking the lips over a relished savor but in- 
 capable of lighting the eyes with the light of greed. In 
 fact, as Floride observed, the lower half of that face was 
 merely sensuous, eager, innocent and young; but undis- 
 tinctive (it might have belonged to any man) and uncon- 
 trolling. What controlled and distinguished was above a 
 
26o THE ANSWERER 
 
 line drawn in the plane of the upper lip — the vigorous nose 
 with wide nostrils, high cheekbones and remarkable eyes 
 with well-pronounced and well-arched brows and the really 
 dominating forehead with the black hair tumbling back from 
 it as a wave ruffles back from the wall of the shore. 
 
 " Don't give me any credit! " he instructed her. " Was 
 it I you saw? Maybe that was the real ' 1/ but the usual 
 * I ' didn't have anything to say about it. It appears this 
 Walt Whitman is two persons — two or more, for I'm not 
 just sure I've got to the end of him. One Walt was trem- 
 bling at the knees, very much afraid, scared, wobbly, quak- 
 ing. The other Walt came from somewhere, kicked the, 
 first in a corner and— ran things. The other Walt acted 
 like a brave man or a fool — ^which? He stuck out his 
 tongue and turned his back. Lucky he didn't get a knife 
 in it. I suppose he knew what he was doing, better than 
 we do; must have? well, maybe, since all came out right. 
 Now the other Walt's gone. If your Raoul should walk into 
 this room, I believe I'd jump out of the window if I didn't 
 jump out of my skin first. Why? I'm no fighter; have 
 sometimes wrestled, thrown men and boys in friendly tus- 
 sles; but I never fought any one in my life; I guess I 
 shouldn't know how. But . . . mystery! Where did the 
 other Walt come from? where did he go to? Mystery, 
 mystery! " 
 
 " He comes when he is needed. Where from? From 
 your mind, of course, my silly Walt! " 
 
 "When he is needed? Yes, but is he dependable? I 
 hope, so, but feel no certainty. If he comes from the 
 mind, does he go back there? And what does he do all 
 
THE ANSWERER 261 
 
 the time — sleep? Or do some work we don't know about? 
 You should be able to solve the puzzle. Women are so 
 differently constituted — feel more and therefore know more 
 than men." 
 
 " All that is no mystery to me," declared Floride. " But," 
 she added, " I cannot explain it." 
 
 "The old, the never-ending trouble! " Walt exclaimed. 
 " A man can explain but he doesn't know; a woman knows 
 but she can't explain." 
 
 He added: " And a man can't find out." 
 
 20 
 
 But he knew he was on the path toward finding out. 
 
 Not for nothing had he these special insights, these mo- 
 ments of perception — perception without disenchantment — 
 in which he saw with a clarity sorrowful and yet bright 
 what must be the end of his and Floride's relation. Was 
 he to blame? No ... he was not to blame, any more 
 than she. There was no blame; life was so, a mighty river 
 — rather, an ocean. Never, from the first, had he prac- 
 tised deception or concealment; he had told her their destiny 
 as he saw it; what had he withheld? That, once, he had 
 so loved as to sacrifice something of the perfect integrity 
 of his nature? But that was not concealed from her by 
 his silence. She knew that, had named it between them; 
 and he was too sincere with her to utter an empty denial. 
 One thing, perhaps, he had withheld: The new, delicious, 
 profoundly-troubling feeling that was astir in his heart and, 
 in moments, had an effect of still intoxication upon his 
 senses; — the feeling that out of the vast ocean of life in 
 
262 THE ANSWERER 
 
 which for all these years he had been derelictive he was 
 at last caught up in the bosom of a silent, indissuadable 
 stream or current or river. . . , Gulf Stream. That was 
 the figure for it in all its majesty, moving widely and un- 
 seen. Gulf Stream, which, originating somewhere within 
 or without him, was to carry him onward to an expanded, 
 illimitable destiny. 
 
 That destiny was a voice The Answerer singing a song 
 The Poet. 
 
 The song of songs would be himself, what he contained 
 (all that the world contained and all that the unseen worlds 
 contained) ; it would invert the deep wisdom of those poems 
 of India and the East, poems he had spent years in slowly 
 absorbing, giving them their Western complement. Where- 
 as they accomplished the principle of Identity by losing the 
 self in the boundless self, it was his infinitely^difficult task 
 to demonstrate the same principle by showing how the 
 boundless, imiversal self was all contained in the single, 
 personal self, in the true individual natural person, in the 
 separate, unitary soul which had (must, must have!) the 
 power ... to set free . . . 
 
 21 
 
 A power to set free seemed, indeed, to be eversnyhere 
 in the air of those days of 1848, to Walt not less than 
 to thousands of others. Everywhere? Well, not in the 
 Southern empire of the North American republic. There 
 Walt felt the existence of a power at once compact and 
 widespread, but scarcely a liberating power. What was 
 its special characteristic? what the peculiar " feel " of that 
 
THE ANSWERER 263 
 
 power which gave to men's minds a strange assurance 
 and placed on their lips the confident (yes, exultant) phrases 
 about their (our) " manifest destiny "? When before had 
 men dared easily to name destiny as manifest, as plainly 
 marked out? In Rome? In Athens? In Alexandria? In 
 Nineveh? In Tyre? Yes, so might men have talked in 
 the old days. . . . 
 
 The source of the sense of power which Walt found all 
 about him was many-rooted. Partly it sprang from political 
 leadership which, from the days of the founding of the 
 Republic, had never shifted from the South. Partly the 
 stratification of Southern society, like layer upon layer of 
 bulwarked masonry, like the mortised and tenoned and 
 moated wall of a feudal castle, gave to the ruling caste 
 the sense of impregnable security. But more was owing 
 to the philosophical doctrines and religious sanctions which, 
 on every hand proclaimed, convinced the minds and swayed 
 the hearts of scrupulous, honorable, conscientious and kindly 
 men. And those who were not scrupulous or honorable, 
 who were without conscience or kindliness? This, Walt 
 noted, sufficed for them: That the white fleece of the fields 
 was becoming a golden fleece; cotton was rising, rising, 
 rising; and with it rose the value of land and the value of 
 those who worked the land, whose dark bodies, glistening 
 with sweat, were in the view of some savants but doubt- 
 fully human. 
 
 But God damn me! God bless me! Walt apostrophized 
 himself, I can't at all take the view, even the composite, 
 blended view, which all these Southerners are satisfied with. 
 They tDt the picture this way, that way, asking: Isn't it 
 
264 THE ANSWERER 
 
 pretty? Isn't it glorious! And it seems to me neither 
 pretty nor glorious. Why? Not that thousands and thou- 
 sands of the blacks aren't as well off, or better off, under 
 slavery than under any form of freedom I (or any one else, 
 likely) can conceive for them. Some terribly suffer, sold 
 South from Virginia and lashed by overseers; would not 
 a same or greater percentage suffer in African tribal wars 
 and cruelties? Ah! that touches a point. America isn't 
 Africa. Shall America perpetuate, even on the smallest 
 scale, Africa? 
 
 He began to see more clearly the real nature of his 
 objection, which had not for its sharpest focus the glisten-, 
 ing bodies in the fields or the debatable souls of black 
 folk. Those who affirmed the negro to have no soul were 
 unshakeably sure that his master had a soul. And it was 
 that soul, Walt felt, which stood in daily, hoiurly peril. 
 
 The runaway slave came to my house and stopped out- 
 side, he wrote in a notebook wherein he was beginning to 
 set down phrases, sentences, penciled word-pictures — the 
 stuff of some day's poem o: poems. I heard his motions 
 crackling the twigs of the woodpile; through the swung 
 half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak, and 
 went where he sat on a log, and — " gave him reassurances " ? 
 Too roundabout, that; faulty in cadence; weak. The sim- 
 ple, vigorous verb — and, he resumed writing, assured him, 
 and brought water, and fill'd a tub for his — " sweaty " wUl 
 not do. The verb, the verb! — his sweated body and bruis'd 
 feet, and gave him a room that enter'd from my own — if 
 any choose to read into that phrase a deeper meaning, I 
 
THE ANSWERER 265 
 
 will not exclude a deeper meaning — and gave him some 
 coarse clean clothes, and remember perfectly well . . . 
 
 What, what? The condensed, epitomizing half-dozen 
 words, giving with sparse stroke that vivid picture? . . . 
 and remember well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness 
 — NOT " rolling eyes," but eyes that moved ceaselessly side- 
 ways, watching fearfully in all directions from their corners, 
 eyes that circumvented everything in the room and pierced 
 doors and searched behind the simple furniture — and re- 
 member putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; 
 he staid with me a week before he was recuperated and 
 pass'd north; (/ had him sit next me at table — my fire- 
 lock lean'd in the corner) . . . 
 
 That was oh! good, good! I know it to be good. Let 
 me see if I can't, here and now, do another picture. . . . 
 
 The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses; the 
 block — ^what verb to describe that block's movement? 
 "swigs"? no; hasn't the right ring. I've the word! — 
 the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain; the negro 
 that drives the dray of the stone-yard, steady and tall he 
 stands, pois'd on one leg on the stringpiece; his blue shirt 
 eoaposes his ample neck and breast, and loosens over his 
 hip-band; his glance is calm and commanding — he tosses 
 the slouch of his hat away from his forehead . . . 
 
 I love this, delight in this! Each word must tell like the 
 sharp line of an artist's apparently careless but really stud- 
 ied drawing; each verb must be a significant sweep of the 
 crayon over the drawing-board. Now for a phrase or two, 
 final, giving perspective; as when, the drawing completed. 
 
266 THE ANSWERER 
 
 you stand back with cocked eye to take all in quickly. . . . 
 
 The sun jails on his crispy hair and mustache — jails on 
 the black oj his polished and perject limbs. 
 
 There! Take it all in, the whole, the composition, the 
 lighting. And the meaning? Is it just a bright, fugitive 
 glimpse? It means nothing unless it has kindled emotion in 
 me; nothing means anything except as it moves me, you, us 
 all. But the aroused emotion? That can, after all, only 
 be hinted; can't be said. A hint, then; just a hint. . . . 
 
 / behold the picturesque giant, and love him . . . 
 
 Something further, barely touched on . . . 
 
 And I do not stop there ... 
 
 Don't stop with any one man, or with all men; to round 
 off, complete my thought . . . and I do not stop there — 
 he re-read, and then wrote firmly — 
 
 In me the caresser oj lije wherever moving.. That com- 
 pletes the thought, my happy phrase of t'other day. Lije 
 is the significant word; the caresser oj lije — wherever mov- 
 ing. ... It sings! It sings! 
 
 22 
 
 To the moments of ecstacy succeeded the hour of apathy 
 from which he emerged into a feeling of sadness as he 
 thought of his fast-approaching birthday, end of this Fifth 
 Month. He would be twenty-nine; and had accomplished 
 nothing. 
 
 Fifth Month, and up at the North the lilacs would be 
 richly blossoming. Heart-shaped leaves and delicate, 
 pointed blossoms. 
 
 Suddenly, sitting tliere at his desk he could smell the 
 
THE ANSWERER 567 
 
 lilacs. . . . Oh, Esther, Esther! Why couldn't I have had 
 you? and now I have not even the embosoming lilacs, not 
 even the sight of the farmyard with its whitewashed palings 
 and, standing beside the bush, your little throat among the 
 odorous clusters, you. I have nothing but the remembered 
 fragrance — sharper, sweeter, more ethereal, more lasting 
 than all these heavy perfumes of the glistening, magnetic 
 South. It was this month, the month of lilacs, that . . . 
 
 The renunciation — ^yours? mine? — is made, the grievous 
 loss is safely scarred over, I suppose; then why this recur- 
 ring weakness? this trembling in all my young, strong body? 
 Will it always be so? Oh, I can't think, work; I can at 
 such times as this only suffer. My loves, my friendships, 
 which mean so much to me don't, can't, in all their totality 
 — ^past, present, future — mean more than the least fraction 
 of what you could have meant to me. . . . 
 
 A sound of approaching footfalls. Walt looked up. It 
 was Madison Slocomb in the easy attire of a planter; he 
 had just bought acreage in Mississippi and, abandoning 
 commerce, contemplated his accession to the Southern aris- 
 tocracy with the satisfaction of a commoner lifted to the 
 peerage. 
 
 "Hello! " he said genially. "How's things? " 
 
 " Well," was the answer. " But I am going to leave you. 
 Going North again. I've just decided." 
 
 " Pshaw! I'm sorry. Don't suppose I can induce you 
 to stay? " The regretful acquiescence was due to a keen 
 look at Walt's face. 
 
 " No. . . . No. You've been mighty good to me. New 
 Orleans, working for you, everything, the whole shooting 
 
568 THE ANSWERER 
 
 match, is going to be a pleasant, yes, an affectionate recol- 
 lection." 
 
 " Good. I'm glad of that. I'll just keep alive a hope 
 that you'll come back." 
 
 23 
 
 To Eugene Fuller a brief farewell was also necessary, and 
 Walt received a promise of such further news as might en- 
 able him to follow the fortunes of the Marchesa Ossoli in 
 Italy. Then, good-by to the fiscal agent of the South Amer- 
 ican Colorados; good-by to Jeanne. 
 
 " I shall miss yom: cercle," Walt avowed to Mme. O'Doa- 
 oju, " or rather, since now you're married, it has become a 
 salon, hasn't it? " 
 
 " A salon h deux," said the wife of Jose O'Donoju, with 
 a glance, mischievously merry — and, yes, something else — 
 at the ex-general, her husband. 
 
 The commanding officer drew Walt aside for a parting 
 whisper. 
 
 " I hope to forestall the salon with a nursery," he commu- 
 Tiicated. " Good-by, me friend; the luck of the O'Donojus 
 go with you! " 
 
 The earnest Traubel had already left New Orleans; had, 
 in fact, left America, to retiurn to Germany and watch the 
 work of the National Assembly just convening at Frank- 
 furt for the purpose of framing a constitution for a free 
 German State. 
 
 Last, and immediately following a walk aroimd the city — 
 one more breakfast in the French Market, one more stroll 
 along Canal Street — ^Walt sought out Floride. . . . 
 
THE ANSWERER a6^ 
 
 She received him, her eyes intimately reading his face in 
 which she found, as ever, no effort at concealment. During, 
 the perfunctory exchange of a few conventional words, she 
 remained composed and, in the beauty of her morning 
 toilette, a figiure of the embodied Creole tradition — petite, 
 lovely in the subtle proportioning of her body, assured; al- 
 together admirable. But then, as he hesitated slightly in 
 what he had to say, her lip quivered, two tears forming 
 in her eyes crept slowly down her cheeks, and with the sud- 
 den burst of the storm of her passion she flung her arms 
 about his shoulders. 
 
 "No! No! Je t'implore! Stay! . . . stay . . ." 
 
 The light pressure of his hands upon her arms was only 
 momentary, but seemed to renew her fortitude, her im- 
 mense personal pride. She was calm again, she held herself 
 aloof. 
 
 "Oui. Iljata . . ." 
 
 There was a moment of silence in which he could not lift 
 his eyes. She repeated, tonelessly: "II faut . . . U jaitt 
 ... it must ... it must . . . souffrir . . ." 
 
 At the word " suffer " he looked up, gently but definitely. 
 
 " Yes, we suffer. We will always suffer, and we will al- 
 ways be glad of it, you and I. Neither of us would be happy 
 without . . . the adventiire of passion. I mean passion, 
 the pure, full, right sense of the word — ' suffering.' The 
 adventure of passion — and the adventure of love." She 
 listened, eyes lowered, lips parted, to the timbre of his voice, 
 like the sound of a bell, a little husky-throated, as if some 
 faint flaw in the metal of the casting made the sound trou- 
 bled. " Both of us have endured things and we have begun 
 
270 THE ANSWERER 
 
 to find endurance — delicious? Yes, there is something joy- 
 ous in the reality that we know how to endure. The only 
 reality! The things we endure aren't real; but our endur- 
 ance of them is. That's the sweet self in us, that exquisite 
 sense, feeling, renewing passion of endurance, of suffer- 
 ing. . . ." 
 
 " Kiss me! Kiss me, Walt! " 
 
 She climg to him and he obeyed her. She said: 
 
 " After you — there will be others? " 
 
 '' After me — others." 
 
 " You? " 
 
 " I'll turn sometimes into a shadowy passage. And then 
 I'll feel with a thrill of clear joy your hand placed upon my 
 arm. I'll just whisper: ' Floride, you wish — me? ' . . . Oh, 
 my darling, don't, don't cry so! " 
 
 But even as he endeavored to console her, torn with pity 
 for her unhappiness, which would pass, he knew, relieved 
 by her yielding to it — even as he held her in his arms for 
 this last, last time, the sharp, ethereal scent of blossoming 
 lilacs mastered him. Memory! Thou vast rondure, thou 
 mighty ocean ! 
 
 24 
 
 The sense of wonder, of constant miracle was upon Walt 
 as he voyaged up the Mississippi. This land, these States! 
 By day he saw, beyond the low, flat banks, the wide-spread- , 
 ing farmlands ; by night he looked at the sky, fully of starry 
 constellations, like an enormous banner flung over the des- 
 tinies of the peoples of the new Republic. The sense of all 
 the eye could reach and much, much more than the eye 
 
THEANSWERER .271 
 
 could reach was strong — awake, asleep. Concentrate, he 
 tried to reduce this irresistible emotion to words, sitting 
 long hours with pencil and notebook, writing, crossing 
 out. . . . 
 
 Starting from fish-shape Paumanok, where I was bom, he 
 wrote, and after a long interval, his thought turning affec- 
 tionately, with lively anticipation, homeward: Wdl-begot- 
 ten, and rais'd by a perfect mother. . . . 
 
 He could articulate, join together, nothing now; so must 
 just set down detached fragments, for later weaving. 
 
 Americanos! Masters! For you a program of chants. 
 Chants of the prairies, chants of the long-running Mississippi. 
 O the lands! interlinked, food-yielding lands! of coal and 
 iron; of gold; of cotton, sugar, rice. Land of the pastoral 
 plains, sweet-air' d interminable plateaus! See, in arriere, 
 the wigwam, the trail, the hunter's hut, the fiatboat, the 
 maize-leaf, the claim staked out, the rude fence; finally the 
 backwoods village. See, beyond the Kanzas, countless herds 
 of buffalo, feeding on short curly grass. See the strong and 
 quick locomotive, as it departs, panting, blowing the steam- 
 whistle; see plowmen plowing farms. See mechanics busy at 
 their benches, with tools; see from among them, superior 
 'pidges, phUosophs, Presidents emerge, drest in working 
 dresses. 
 
 He sat dreamily listening to the voices of the leadsman 
 and the pilot. Sailing the Mississippi at midnight was a 
 good subject for a poem. Perhaps the idea dimly in the 
 back of his mind was wrong; perhaps he should see if he 
 could not cast his thoughts into some of the regular, ordered, 
 piloted channels of song. Rimed, meter'd verse. . . . 
 
272 THE ANSWERER 
 
 Setting to work conscientiously he spent the rest of the 
 afternoon on the projected lines suggested by the river at 
 night, with this final result: 
 
 Vast and starless, the pall of heaven 
 
 Laps on the trailing pall below; 
 And forward, forward, in solemn darkness, 
 
 As if to the sea of the lost we go. 
 
 Now drawn nigh the edge of the river, 
 
 Weird-like creatures suddenly rise; 
 Shapes that fade, dissolving outlines 
 
 Baffle the gazer's straining eyes. 
 
 Towering upward and bending forward. 
 Wild and xuide their arms are thrown. 
 
 Ready to pierce with forked fingers 
 Him who touches their realm upon. 
 
 Tide of youth, thus thickly planted, 
 
 While in eddies onward you swim. 
 Thus on the shore stands a phantom army. 
 
 Lining forever the channel's rim. 
 
 Steady, helmsman 1 you guide the immortal; 
 
 Many a wreck is beneath you piled. 
 Many a brave yet unwary sailor 
 
 Over these waters has been beguiled. 
 
 Nor is it the storm or the scowling midnight. 
 
 Cold, or sickness, or fire's dismay-^ 
 Nor is it the reef, or treacherous quicksand. 
 
 Will peril you most on your twisted way. 
 
 But when there comes a voluptuous languor. 
 
 Soft, the sunshine, silent the air. 
 Bewitching your craft with safety and sweetness. 
 
 Then, young pilot of life, beware. 
 
 This, as he read it over the following day, was not poetry. 
 He did not know what it was; "flapdoodle, I guess," he 
 said to himself. His critical intelligence studied the lines 
 comparatively. The opening figure of the two palls was 
 good, though worn . . . the third line was weak, especially 
 
THE ANSWERER 273 
 
 in the repetition of " forward "... with the second stanza 
 the Poesque effect was confirmed but any dignity the 
 verses possessed was shipwrecked on the awful (awful!) 
 line: " Him who touches their realm upon "... to give 
 Poe credit, he would never have perpetrated a line like that 
 ... on the other hand, the line: " Steady, helmsman! you 
 guide the immortal " had a certain ring and elevation; was 
 dignity pretty successfully recaptured; but then, imme- 
 diately, besides the tiresome inversion of verbs one came 
 upon the equally tiresome stock poetical offsets: " Many — 
 many; nor — nor "... and damn the necessities of meter, 
 to call a quicksand " treacherous " was to be silly; might as 
 well talk about the " dark darkness " or " sticky mud "... 
 and as for the last stanza . . . 
 
 If it was intended as an indirect reflection of his own ex- 
 perience South, it was false — false! But wasn't it false, 
 an3rway? He considered a little. Yes, I think it is a piece 
 of utter claptrap, just nice smooth conventional " solemn 
 warning " — like a book for children's Sunday reading . . . 
 trash. And the whole " poem "? 
 
 " God bless me! " he exclaimed aloud, suddenly. " Lydia 
 Sigourney might have written it." 
 
 Just the thing for Godey's Ladies' Book! 
 
 Cheap, slick, water-your-hair-and-wave-it-back-from-your- 
 forehead sentimentality. 
 
 He could see the contemptuous grin on the clean, fresh 
 face of any hardy young woodman, bayman, pioneer. . . . 
 Unquestionably he could sell the thing. Well, perhaps he 
 might sell the thing; that, it struck him laughably, was all 
 it was good for. . . . 
 
274 THE ANSWERER 
 
 What was wrong? He had filled the mold faithfully 
 enough; had had as much as the usual inspiration. But 
 damn! Those lines bore no relation to usual life, as it was 
 lived; above all, bore no relation to the life and breath of 
 vigorous, rough, crescent America. This large, irregular, ex- 
 panding land had, if it had anything, two striking character- 
 istics: One was the racing sap of a national adolescence, 
 the other was a great, expansive drift of thought and char- 
 acter — something loosely stratified and geologically-forming 
 about it. The large, loose drift of character, unconsciously 
 forming; that was it. 
 
 Pretty little rondels, ballades, villanelles; carefully sing- 
 songed and sawed-off lines, chiming syllables — they wouldn't 
 express it. Besides, there was about them the affectation, 
 if you tried to fit them to American subjects, that there 
 would be about an American order of nobility . . . some- 
 thing imported, all put up in nice, neat packages . . . alien. 
 Take the grand idea of democracy, not merely political de- 
 mocracy but the felt-for brotherhood of all men in a free 
 nation: Could you keep it in (say) iambic pentameters? 
 wouldn't it spill over? swash around? . . . You could only 
 proclaim it in surges like the surges of the Atlantic, beating 
 upon Paumanok; you could only chant it; you could only 
 set its spirit free. 
 
 His thought, looping back, returned to Floride. . . . 
 There again, the same questing difficulty. The emotion she 
 inspired in him had its own rhythm; not a correct, formal 
 swing at all; something broken about it, something very 
 beautiful. ... In the high saturation of his emotion he 
 again set to work. ... By nightfall, though it had taken 
 
THE ANSWERER 27s 
 
 far longer to achieve, he was measurably satisfied with 
 seven lines of varying length; was sure to himself of their 
 cadence — ^half-recitative, half-arioso — and, in the mood of 
 completest sincerity in which he had wrought them, he 
 must put his trust for the supreme essential: That they 
 might touch in some one else, some future day, the feeling 
 in which he dwelt. 
 
 Once I pass'd through a populous city, imprinting my brain, for 
 
 future use, with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions; 
 Yet now, of all that city, I remember only a woman I casually 
 
 met there, who detain'd me for love of me; 
 Day by day and night by night we were together, — All else has 
 
 been forgotten by me; 
 I remember, I say, only that woman who passionately clung to 
 
 me; 
 Again we wander — we love — we separate again; 
 Again she holds me by the hand— I must not go! 
 I see her close beside me, with silent lips, sad and tremulous. 
 
 He did not know whether this was a poem, but it was the 
 best e3q)ression of what he felt. . . . The truest. 
 
 25 
 About noon on a Saturday the river steamer Pride of the 
 West put Walt ashore, with her other passengers, at St. 
 Louis. The Mississippi voyage had been uneventful, though 
 pleasant; with good weather and no great crowd of passen- 
 gers, yet with every berth taken. Finding that he could 
 secure passage on the steamboat Prairie Bird, bound up the 
 Illinois River and leaving at dusk, he bought his ticket and 
 spent the few hours he had in St. Louis hunting a meal. 
 This seemed to involve rambling all over town but was an 
 errand unfavorable for sightseeing. 
 
276 THE ANSWERER 
 
 The Prairie Bird cast off promptly (her destination was 
 La Salle) but encountered, in a couple of hours, such a rain 
 and blow as made her haul in along shore and tie fast to the 
 bank. Her whole night's passage, in consequence, was only 
 thirty miles. Between an overload of passengers and a 
 deckload of freight, Walt, who had spent an uncomfortable 
 night on the floor of the cabin, found himself hardly able to 
 turn around. 
 
 The resounding names of some very small villages on the 
 river drew his attention — Marseilles, Naples, and so on. 
 The river banks were low and grew a very rank vegetation. 
 At Peoria he had the impression of a pleasant town ; going 
 ashore while the Prairie Bird lingered, he was struck with 
 the rich quality, and cheapness, of the surrounding coun- 
 try. Three or four miles from Peoria, the best of soil could 
 be bought, he learned, for $3 or $4 an acre. 
 
 At La Salle the Prairie Bird shoo'd them every one away; 
 like most of the travelers Walt was to go on board a canal- 
 boat bound for Chicago. In the interval he bumped against 
 a man whose face was remotely familiar. The other stared 
 with equal perplexity and doubt at Walt. Finally: 
 
 " Haven't I run across you, East, some years back? " 
 Walt asked. 
 
 " I was East — ^le' me see — ^back in '40." 
 
 " In '40? I was school teaching on — ^Hold a minute! 
 D'you remember walking one day, about this time 0' the 
 year, along a Long Island road and falling in with two-three 
 other travelers? One was a nigger, one was a Whig, a poli- 
 tician, all the time dipping snuff and sneezing his head off, 
 I was a third — " 
 
THE ANSWERER 277 
 
 " Sure's I'm alive! I remember — remember well! " 
 
 " You were the fellow from Illinois." 
 
 " You bet! An' the' was one more — fellow with thin gold 
 earrings, sailor of some sort. I remember you! " 
 
 They canvassed that dispersed company. The Illinoisan 
 asked: 
 
 " You don't know what became of any of those people, I 
 s'pose? " 
 
 "Yes," said Walt, "I do— one. The sailor-chap's by 
 way of being a celebre, a notoriety, now. Name was Her- 
 man Melville. You recall he was talking some about going 
 on a whaling voyage? Seems he fetched up at New Bed- 
 ford, Nantucket, or somewhere and joined a whaler. He 
 and another fellow were ill-used and shook the ship in the 
 Pacific Islands — place called Nukahiva, one of the Mar- 
 quesas group. Warlike natives made them prisoners; after 
 several months Melville's companion escaped; then an Aus- 
 tralian whaler picked up Melville. He batted around the 
 Pacific for a year or two longer; came home to New York 
 about three-four years ago, and wrote a book about his ex- 
 periences — Typee was the name of it; made a pronounced 
 sensation. Very striking picture of his life among the canni- 
 bals. I think he's since written another book, same sort, 
 but am not sure." 
 
 "You don't say! " 
 
 " The others I've never seen — ^you're the first. In fact, I 
 never ran across Melville, only know about him. Look 
 here, weren't you treasure-hunting on Long Island? After 
 Captain Kidd's buried gold? I seem to recollect it." 
 
 "Yes; I was one of those crazy people" — sheepishly — 
 
278 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " but I got all over that foolishness. Look's now, though, 
 as if the chance to strike it rich was before me at last. Have 
 you heard? they say gold has been found in California! 
 Lots of it, lying right on the surface o' the ground! " His 
 excited voice sank nearly to a whisper. 
 
 " So the report was in New Orleans, some time before I 
 left." 
 
 "I'm goin' there if I have to crawl on my hands and 
 knees." 
 
 Walt laughed. " Well, you're welcome to all you can lay 
 hold of. Looks to me as if you'd have plenty of company; 
 great deal of excitement, I find, everjrwhere." He mused. 
 " Wonder how our old friend the Whig politician is, these 
 times? Sneezing for Taylor, no doubt! " 
 
 " The Whigs are going to carry the country this fall, all 
 right. Old Zach's a fine candidate; Cass the Michigander 
 can't beat him, with Martin Van Buren and the Free Soil 
 crowd bolting the Democrats. Say! you ought to read the 
 speech our Congressman, Abe Lincoln, made t'other day 
 about Gineral Cass! Wait; I've got the paper with it in 
 right in my pocket." He fumbled and produced the sheet. 
 " You know, years back, Abe was a volunteer when we was 
 raising soldiery to tame old Chief Black Hawk and shove 
 him an' his warriors back acrost the Mississipp'. 'Twa'n't 
 anything; Abe's only battle was with his own men, once, 
 when they'd got hold of a poor old friendly Injun and was 
 goin' to hang him. . . . Here, you read this. . . . Your 
 boat leavin' on the canal? Take it with you; 'twill ease the 
 tedjiousness! . . . Darn glad to 've run acrost you again. 
 So long! . . ." 
 
THE ANSWERER 279 
 
 The canal-boat, moderate-sized, with about seventy pas- 
 sengers, got off bravely but almost immediately stuck on a 
 mud-bar. While she was with difficulty and no great des- 
 patch being worked free, Walt xmfolded the newspaper and 
 turned to a marked column containing the Congressman's 
 speech. Evidently Mr. Lincoln, as a Whig, had had a little 
 fxm with the Democrats. He read: 
 
 " The other day one of the gentlemen from Georgia, an 
 eloquent man, and a man of learning, so far as I can 
 judge, not being learned myself, came down upon us as- 
 tonishingly. He spoke in what the Baltimore American 
 calls the ' scathing and withering style.' At the end of 
 his second severe flash I was struck blind, and foimd my- 
 self feeling with my fingers for an assurance of my con- 
 tinued existence. A little of the bone was left, and I 
 gradually revived. He eulogized Mr. Clay in high and 
 beautiful terms, and then declared that we had deserted 
 all our principles, and had turned Henry Clay out, like 
 an old horse, to root. 
 
 " This is terribly severe. It cannot be answered by ar- 
 gument — at least I cannot so answer it. I merely wish 
 to ask the gentleman if the Whigs are the only party he 
 can think of who sometimes turn old horses out to root. 
 Is not a certain Martin Van Buren an old horse which 
 your own party have turned out to root? and is he not 
 rooting a little to your discomfort about now? 
 
 " But the gentleman from Georgia further says we 
 have deserted all our principles, and taken shelter under 
 General Taylor's military coat-tail, and he seems to think 
 this is exceedingly degrading. Well, as his faith is, so be 
 it unto him. But can he remember no other military coat- 
 tail under which a certain other party have been shelter- 
 ing for near a quarter of a century? Has he no acquaint- 
 ance with the ample military coat-tail of General Jack- 
 
28o THE ANSWERER 
 
 son? Does he not know that his own party have run the 
 five last presidential races under that coat-tail? And that 
 they are now running the sixth under the same cover? " 
 
 Walt was laughing to himself, so that some of the others 
 on the boat cast occasional curious and smiling glances in 
 his direction. 
 
 " Yes, sir, that coat-tail was used not only for General 
 Jackson himself, but has been clung to, with the grip of 
 death, by every Democratic candidate since. You have 
 never ventiured, and dare not now venture, from under it. 
 Your campaign papers have constantly been ' Old Hick- 
 ories,' with rude likenesses of the old General upon them; 
 hickory poles and hickory brooms your never-ending em- 
 blehis ; Mr. Polk himself was ' Young Hickory,' ' Little 
 Hickory,' or something so; and even now your campaign 
 paper here is proclaiming that Cass and Butler are of the 
 true ' Hickory stripe.' 
 
 " Now, sir, you dare not give it up. Like a horde of 
 hungry ticks you have stuck to the tail of the Hermitage 
 lion to the end of his life; and you are still sticking to it, 
 and drawing a loathsome sustenance from it, after he is 
 dead. A fellow once advertised that he had made a dis- 
 covery by which he could make a new man out of an old 
 one, and have enough of the stuff left to make a little yel- 
 low dog. Just such a discovery has General Jackson's 
 popularity been to you. You not only twice made Presi- 
 dent of him out of it, but you have had enough of the 
 stuff left to make Presidents of several comparatively 
 small men since; and it is your chief reliance now to make 
 still another." 
 
 The comparison of the Democrats to the fellow who could 
 make a new man and have some stuff left for a little yellow 
 
THE ANSWERER 281 
 
 dog had set Walt to laughing consumedly. Several passen- 
 gers called out to know what he was reading. 
 
 " Hold on till I finish," he answered. " Then you can 
 have it." 
 
 " Mr. Speaker, old horses and military coat-tails, or 
 tails of any sort, are not figures of speech such as I would 
 be the first to introduce into discussions here; but as the 
 gentleman from Georgia has thought fit to introduce them, 
 he and you are welcome to all you have made, or can 
 make by them. If you have any more old horses, trot 
 them out; any more tails, just cock them and come at 
 us. I repeat, I would not introduce this mode of discus- 
 sion here; but I wish gentlemen on the other side to un- 
 derstand that the use of degrading figures is a game at 
 which they may not find themselves able to take all the 
 winnings." 
 
 It appeared that at this point in the speech there had 
 come from the Democratic side cries of "We give it up! " 
 to which the Illinois Congressman had responded: 
 
 " Aye, you give it up, and well you may; but for a very 
 different reason from that which you woxdd have us under- 
 stand. The point — the power to hurt — of all figures con- 
 sists in the truthfulness of their application; and, under- 
 standing this, you may well give it up. They are weapons 
 which hit you, but miss us. 
 
 " But in my hurry I was very near closing this subject 
 of military tails before I was done with it. There is one 
 entire article of the sort I have not discussed yet — I mean 
 the military tail you Democrats are now engaged in dove- 
 taDing into the great Michigander. Yes, sir; all his biog- 
 raphies (and they are legion) have him in hand, tying him 
 to a military tail, like so many mischievous boys tying a 
 
282 THE ANSWERER 
 
 dog to a bladder of beans. True, the material they have 
 is very limited, but they drive at it might and main. He 
 invaded Canada without resistance, and he o«^vaded it 
 without pursuit. As he did both under orders, I suppose 
 there was to him neither credit nor discredit in them; but 
 they constitute a large part of the tail. He was not at 
 Hull's surrender, but he was close by; he was volunteer 
 aid to General Harrison on the day of the battle of the 
 Thames; and as you said in 1840 Harrison was picking 
 huckleberries two miles off while the battle was fought, I 
 suppose it is a just conclusion with you to say Cass was 
 aiding Harrison to pick huckleberries." 
 
 " Lord, what a good speech! " chuckled Walt. Said some 
 one: 
 
 " Here, gimme that paper, will you? " 
 
 " Jest a minute; jest a minute! " 
 
 Congressman Lincoln had continued with an allusion to 
 his own military career: 
 
 " By the way, Mr. Speaker, did you know I am a mili- 
 tary hero? Yes, sir ; in the days of the Black Hawk war 
 I fought, bled, and came away. Speaking of General 
 Cass's career reminds me of my own. I was not at Still- 
 man's defeat, but I was about as near it as Cass was to 
 Hull's surrender; and, like him, I saw the place very soon 
 afterward. If General Cass went in advance of me in 
 picking huckleberries, I guess I surpassed him in charges 
 upon the wild onions. If he saw any live, fighting In- 
 dians, it was more than I did; but I had a good many 
 bloody struggles with the mosquitoes . . . although I 
 never fainted from the loss of blood . . ." 
 
 "Here, take it! " Walt chucked the newspaper to sev- 
 eral impatient bystanders. " That's the funniest speech I've 
 
THE ANSWERER aSj 
 
 ever read; in a way it beats Webster! at any rate, when 
 we all know Cass is only a pressed-pantaloon militaire." 
 
 At last free of the mudbank, the canal-boat progressed 
 slowly. The voyage — ^if one could so call it — ^was full of 
 discomfort; without the coolness at night, the journey would 
 have been, Walt felt, insufferable. At Chicago he stayed 
 for the next day's steamer which would land him eventually 
 in Buffalo; the excellence of the American Temperance 
 Hotel, where he slept, partly made up for the weariness of 
 the journey North. 
 
 Blue and wide in the bright sunshine of the morning lay 
 the expanded waters of Lake Michigan, and what followed 
 in the next few days was so spacious, so sight-absorbing, that 
 Walt spent long dreaming hours over it. Michigan, Huron, 
 Erie! 
 
 "America always! " he told himself. "Always the free 
 range and diversity . . . the prairies, pastures, forests, 
 cities, travelers, Canada — the snows. Always these compact 
 lands, lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing the huge, 
 oval lakes. . . ." 
 
 When he could bring himself to withdraw his eyes from 
 the surroxmding vision, when, for an hour or so, the move- 
 ment of the ship in the inland sea promised no new aspect 
 of the wonderland through which he was passing, he busied 
 himself with his notebook. The phrase he had struck on, 
 as expressing the American environment and its working, 
 " the large, loose drift of character, unconsciously forming," 
 haimted the back of his mind. He struggled for collateral 
 lines, phrases. . . . 
 
 The log at the ivoodnpUe, he wrote, the ax supported by it. 
 
284 THE ANSWERER 
 
 . . . The sentiment of the huge timbers of old-fashion'd 
 houses and barns. The remember'd print or narrative, the 
 voyage at a venture of men, families, goods; the outset any- 
 where. The settlements of the Arkansas, Colorado, Ottawa; 
 the slow progress, the scant fare, the ax, rifle, saddle- 
 bags. . . , 
 
 Then, in a, briefly-sustained burst of clear, white light of 
 inspiration, the fist of his disengaged hand clenching and 
 tmclenching: 
 
 The beauty of all adventurous and daring persons. 
 
 The beauty of wood-boys and wood-men, with their clear un- 
 trimm'd faces, * 
 
 The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on 
 themselves. 
 
 The American contempt for statutes and ceremonies, the bound- 
 less impatience of restraint. 
 
 The loose drift of character, the inkling through random types, 
 the solidification. 
 
 There he had it, placed, in its setting, like a jewel . . : 
 and the inspiration lasting a second longer, or with a short 
 flash returning, he put down, as an after- thought, the line: 
 
 The large, unconscious scenery of my land . . . 
 
 The pencil dropped from his fingers; he sat inert, head 
 bent a little forward, quietly, deeply thinking. A casual 
 speculation as to what he would do when he fetched back in 
 New York drifted over the surface of his thought as an un- 
 considered trifle floats on a lake's wide waters. He never 
 knew what he would do. . . . It made no possible difference, 
 actually, whether he " nailed " again — ^that's to say, helped 
 his carpenter-brother — or set type in the Eagle office (he had 
 
THE ANSWERER ^85 
 
 no fool pride; wasn't sensitive about descending from editor 
 to compositor; would as lief do anything he could do well) ; 
 or whether he would try to pick up a living by fugitive 
 work as an author. He could sell bits here and there. . . . 
 And that would give him the days he wanted, needed, must 
 have — days for loitering on Broadway and mixing with the 
 crowds on the sidewalks, days spent in foundries, shops, 
 rolling mills, slaughter-houses, woolen and cotton factories, 
 shipyards, on wharves; days with people (all sorts of peo- 
 ple!) merrymaking at clambakes, races, weddings and on 
 sailing and bathing parties; days on ferries, in taverns, in 
 the interiors of prisons, hospitals and poorhouses — at the 
 funerals of the great and the poor. Nights, too, at the opera, 
 at plays of which he was so fond, at political meetings, at 
 carousings. . . . 
 
 I do not begin to know the people, he said to himself. 
 
 Whatever I do, I shall really be immersing myself in the 
 life all about me. The Gulf Stream! . . . Whatever I do, 
 I shall be (now at last consciously) preparing myself for 
 this.. His eye fell again on the lines scribbled in his note- 
 book. To answer, in some fashion, for all America ... to 
 be, not perhaps worldlily, but consciously, intently the Great 
 Poet. . . . 
 
 Suddenly he sighed. It will take years, years! he gravely 
 acknowledged to himself. Then aloud, with intensity: 
 
 " Let it! Let it! " he exclaimed. 
 
 END OF PART TWO 
 
PART THREE 
 DARK MOTHER 
 
 " William," Walt was saying, " damn me if you aren't even 
 a disturbing influence as a listener! You listen — impetu- 
 ously. You have a charged, poised air; electrical in your 
 silence and lightning in your discourse! " 
 
 William Douglas O'Connor laughed, and the laugh was 
 filled with his superb, spilling personal magnetism, vitality. 
 Since their first meeting in Boston in i860, two years earlier, 
 he and Walt Whitman had been immediate, close friends. 
 The Irish-American was what, all his life, Walt felt he had 
 most wanted; the singer of the Song of Myself was a man, 
 or over-man, whom O'Connor could love, minister to, help 
 and frankly worship with a worship intelligent, not blind. 
 They were reciprocally inspiring one to the other, 
 
 "On! On! Forget about me! " O'Connor said warn- 
 ingly. " Tell me about Emerson. Why, oh, why the devil 
 didn't you tell me about your talk with him before? You 
 wouldn't, or you didn't." 
 
 " I did, William! » 
 
 " Oh, the fact — ^yes. But no details! That was when I 
 had known you so short a time, I couldn't presume to ask for 
 details. What did Emerson say, exactly? What arguments 
 did he use against the poems you've now grouped as Chil- 
 dren of Adam? " 
 
 287 
 
288 THE ANSWERER 
 
 "Arguments? He used them all. Heaps, loads; every 
 argument that ever was invented, I guess. I couldn't an- 
 swer 'em; didn't try. But I finally told him it was no good. 
 No good, no good, no good at all! " 
 
 Walt brought his fist down on a small table. His clear 
 eyes shone with a light of vivacity, amusement and — some- 
 thing excited but wholly serious, as if behind the fun and 
 the frolic of the recollection there lay the sharp memory of 
 a fateful determination. The gray and white so plentifully 
 present in his abundant hair and beard, so contrasted with 
 masses of hair still black, made him ordinarily look middle- 
 aged or even older. But not at such moments as this, whcQ, 
 in close conversation one could see the firm, smooth skin of 
 the upper cheek, with a good color; when the direct light 
 of the youthful eyes shone upon his auditor; and when the 
 actuality of his lightly-carried forty-three years was sud- 
 denly impressed by a supple movement of the muscular body 
 or the swift play of a thrust-out arm. 
 
 "Arguments, yes!" he resumed, answering O'Connor. 
 " Emerson had them, every one. But they all came down 
 to this: The certainty, the inevitability, of being utterly 
 mistinderstood. Mind you, William, Emerson himself did 
 not misunderstand; couldn't misunderstand, big, insighted 
 man that he is. But, he said, and I couldn't controvert 
 him: The world will misunderstand; the world will say 
 this is a naked, shameless, indecent, pornic fellow, this Walt 
 Whitman — a fellow who makes his toilet in public, who 
 counts nothing sacred and who knows no such thing as 
 seemly reticence. And Emerson asked me: Is it worth 
 risking all the message you have for them for the sake of 
 
THE ANSWERER 289 
 
 this one item of the message? I didn't answer. There 
 could be no verbal answer." 
 
 " Good God! " O'Connor's indignation flashed forth, 
 touched with Keltic humor. " Aren't we all naked under 
 our clothes? as I asked a woman t'other evening when she 
 shuddered at the mention of you and your Leaves of Grass." 
 
 " Emerson would enjoy that! " 
 
 "Yes, I think so! No one argues for the recitation of 
 the Children of Adam poems in public before large, mixed 
 audiences, any more than any one argues for undressing in 
 public. But what I want to know is: Don't these idiotic 
 people ever undress at all? Don't they, once in a while at 
 least, take off their clothes privately? By the same token, 
 don't they, occasionally, if only for a bath and a change, 
 take off their dirty old mental garments and consider them- 
 selves — their souls, their real longings, desires, ambitions, 
 hopes — nakedly, honestly, and without self-deception? 
 Which are they, people or ostriches? . . . Oh, Walt, what 
 a shabby, furtive state the human mind goes about in! To 
 my thinking, it is a disgrace to us that a poet dare not, for 
 example, sing the super-mortal raptures of the nuptial 
 night." 
 
 " Right! You are more than right, William. There 
 you've named a common human experience or ecstacy, clean, 
 healthful, joyous — a crowning moment of a lifetime. But 
 tabu! One is privileged to talk about other things equally 
 sacred, about God Himself, His nature, purposes, character. 
 But one may not talk freely about men and women. Is it 
 right? I swear it isn't right! I told Emerson it wasn't 
 right. And Emerson did not deny the wrongness of it, but 
 
290 THE ANSWERER 
 
 said: We must be patient, and inch along toward freedom; 
 we must make haste slowly. Then I said: The world has 
 not been moved forward by the patient corrections, small 
 adjustments, of coral-insect men grubbing steadily through 
 the ages. The world has been pried up by Archimedean 
 levers, by Savonarolan bonfires, by positive tortures, agonies, 
 such as that of France in 1789; by the flaming and fearless 
 prophecies of Isaiahs and by the revolutionary declarations 
 of Galileos. E pur si muove! ' Nevertheless, it moves! ' 
 . . , Emerson denied not that, either! Up and down the 
 breadth of Boston Common, between old elms, by Beacon 
 Street, we walked for two solid hours of a bright, sharp, 
 February midday. Emerson did almost all the talking. He 
 was — is still, I suppose — in his prime; a keen mind in a 
 vigorous body, physically and morally magnetic, full-armed 
 and wielding with equal force the emotional as well as the 
 intellectual weapon. William, it was a terribly one-sided en- 
 counter! He was in overwhelming force; he reconnoitered, 
 reviewed, attacked, pressed home, like an army corps in 
 order, artillery, cavalry, infantry. . . . But here was the 
 deep paradox! I was outpointed in every direction, headed 
 off, surrounded, called upon to surrender, ringed about, tacti- 
 cally wiped off the field — ^and yet felt down in my soul the 
 clear and unmistakable convictionj to disobey. Finally, 
 ' What have you to say to such things? ' Emerson asked. 
 And I told him candidly: ' Only that while I can't answer 
 them at all, I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my 
 own theory, and exemplify it.' Whereupon we went and 
 had a good dinner at the American House! " 
 " And since? " 
 
THE ANSWERER 291 
 
 "Thenceforward I never wavered; since then I've never 
 been touched with qualms, as, I'll confess, I had been two- 
 three times before." 
 
 "Bravo, Walt!" 
 
 Walt appeared to muse; then laughed. 
 
 " You and I were not made for qualms, William! Some 
 day we'll quarrel, I suspect. You have a personal similarity 
 to Thoreau extending beyond the circumstance that both you 
 and he lost your jobs defending old John Brown of Har- 
 pers Ferry." 
 
 " Damn you, Walt, I'm no Puritan eccentric like Tho- 
 reau! " 
 
 " Thoreau was too narrow, yes; a good deal like the sharp- 
 ended lead pencils he knew how to make. The best thing I 
 remember about Thoreau was Emerson's story. Emerson 
 told how ' Henry ' was jailed over night for refusing to pay 
 poll tax — claimed all taxes were wrong, or something like 
 that. Word was sent to Emerson in the morning; ' Henry ' 
 was in the lockup. Emerson, greatly upset, presented him- 
 self outside the cell; the two men faced each other with the 
 bars between, Emerson exclaiming: ' Henry, why are you 
 here? ' Thoreau, hair all ruffled, alert, sleepless, resembling 
 a defiant eaglet, or cockatoo, faced his benefactor; de- 
 manded: ' Waldo, why are you not here? ' Good, wasn't 
 it! Emerson chuckled himself, telling the story. That was 
 Thoreau all over — anarchistically individualist." 
 
 " Whereas your Leaves is individualistically cosmic." 
 
 " Is it? I hope so, William. I hope you are right. My 
 clear feeling was that I, Walt Whitman, must have some- 
 thing to say to and for any man or any woman. I must 
 
292 THE ANSWERER 
 
 be, to the fullest possible stretch, The Answerer. You re- 
 member that poem? " 
 
 " Remember! " O'Connor quoted: 
 
 The gentleman of perfect blood acknowledges his perfect blood. 
 The insulter, the prostitute, the angry person, the beggar, see 
 
 themselves in the ways of him; he strangely transmutes them, 
 They are not vile any more . . . they hardly know themselves, 
 
 they are so grown. 
 
 "Aye," the poet assented. "As for the Children of 
 Adam poems, they are a necessary part of my avowed pur- 
 pose to chant, first and always, ' the great Pride of man in 
 himself.' Sex, amativeness, yes, even animality has its due, 
 place in that all-embracing chant; though meanings that 
 don't usually go along with those words are behind all and 
 will duly emerge, and though the whole subject is sought to 
 be lifted into a new light and different atmosphere. To do 
 away with long-cultivated shame, furtiveness of thought, 
 sneaking pleasure, deliberate debasement of the natural 
 senses, will be difficult, oh, formidably difficult! But I do 
 believe we must accomplish it. If we are to have a superior 
 race of men and women, healthy and well-begotten children, 
 great natural persons and characters worthy of continental 
 America, we must, must achieve a shifted attitude toward 
 the thought and fact of sexuality; must accept it easily and 
 without self-consciousness, naturally and proportionally as 
 an element in character, personality, the emotions, and as a 
 theme in literature or any of the arts. 
 
 " Now, mind you, William," Walt shook an earnest finger. 
 " I am not going to argue the question by itself, as Emer- 
 son wanted to. It does not stand by itself. The vitality of 
 
THE ANSWERER 293 
 
 it is altogether in its relations, bearings, significance. You 
 can no more take it by itself than you can take the clef out 
 of a symphony or the perspective out of a picture or the 
 human body apart from the soul. To those who would 
 exalt the soul and degrade the body in which it is presently 
 enclosed, I say: ' What God hath joined, no man may put 
 asunder! ' " 
 
 " Walt, to hear you say that — to have something in me 
 leap up and affirm it, in the face of the whole world if need 
 be — Life holds not many such moments as this! " 
 
 Thirty years lit a torch from the beacon of forty-three. 
 
 The two men were sitting, this December of 1862, in 
 O'Connor's home in the capital, Washington. For about a 
 year the rolls of the Light House Bureau had carried O'Con- 
 nor's name as a clerk; he had been for some years a hus- 
 band and father. On this particular evening, the two young 
 children being abed, Mrs. O'Connor had taken herself off 
 to do some mending, leaving Walt and her husband to talk 
 their hearts out. Now she appeared at the door, a news- 
 paper in her hand. 
 
 " There's been a severe battle at Fredericksburg," were 
 her words, as she came in to them. " Almost a disaster for 
 us, I'm afraid." 
 
 O'Connor jumped up with an imprecation. 
 
 " And we've no more than got rid of McClellan! " he 
 cried. " Now Burnside proves a man of straw! Fredericks- 
 burg! Lee's strongest position, of course; why couldn't 
 we have attacked him anywhere else? Oh, the incompe- 
 
294 THE ANSWERER 
 
 tents! " He seized the newspaper, running rapidly over the 
 despatches. " Burnside's corps commanders appear all to 
 have disagreed with him. Damn Burnside; for the matter 
 of that, damn all his corps commanders! But there's one 
 man I'm sorry for: He's the man at the end of Pennsyl- 
 vania Avenue." 
 
 " The man in the White House " — from Walt. And Mrs. 
 O'Connor said, simply: " Yes, Mr. Lincoln." 
 
 A moment's deep silence, and then Mrs. O'Connor asked: 
 
 " It's strange, isn't it? how we are always thinking of 
 him? I can't explain it; but I know when anything goes 
 terribly wrong — or splendidly right, either — I never seem 
 to think about the general who did the work, or what the 
 result will mean for or against us. I always find myself 
 thinking anxiously of what it will mean to Mr. Lincoln. 
 Perhaps that is just because he's the President and has to 
 bear the whole weight; but I don't believe so. I'm sure I 
 shouldn't feel that special, almost tender, anxiety about Mr. 
 Seward, or Mr. Chase, or Mr. Stanton. It must be the man 
 himself. William is the same way and so, too, are you, 
 Walt." 
 
 "The President," said William O'Connor vehemently, 
 " is the only immistakable human asset the North has got; 
 I've said so before and I'll say so now." 
 
 "The President's an asset; most of the generals seem to 
 be liabilities," Walt admitted. " I hope we're still solvent. 
 While we have Lincoln, I think we'll stay solvent. This, 
 William, is a man so great he shrinks several sizes all the 
 people about him. I guess that's back of our feeling? " He 
 turned inquiringly to Mrs. O'Connor. She nodded, but with 
 
THE ANSWERER 295 
 
 her head on one side, as if only partially accepting Walt's 
 explanation. " William, little Philip's not so well to-night," 
 she told her husband. 
 
 " What, is the boy-child sick? " Walt asked at once with 
 the utmost concern. 
 
 "Vaccination against smallpox," declared the father in 
 an angry voice. " At least, they'll never convince me it's 
 anything else! Have you sent for the doctor? " — to the 
 mother. Before she could answer, the doorbell answered for 
 her. She hastened from the room, with: " That will be 
 the doctor now " reaching them in a diminuendo. 
 
 " Go ahead, Walt, with what you were saying." But 
 after a look at his friend's face, Walt said abruptly: 
 
 "No-no! Go to your wife, William; go to little Phil. 
 I'll just sit here and glance over the news. I won't leave 
 till I hear how he is." 
 
 O'Connor went out. Walt picked up the paper, but did 
 not begin immediately to read it. For the moment he could 
 not. He was the father and the mother, bending over the 
 crib; he was something in the clutch of their joined hands, 
 twined fingers, as fearfully they waited for what the physi- 
 cian would say. He was the delicate boy, in a still struggle 
 with fever; he was the love of the parents fighting invisibly 
 to ward off the peril of their son, and to comfort, to reassure 
 each other. All this he was, because all this he felt. . . . 
 After a little he picked up the newspaper, which had slipped 
 to the floor. 
 
 On an inside page was a partial and confused, unalpha- 
 betized list of Federal wounded. Walt went slowly and 
 carefully through the names of officers. Slowly and care- 
 
296 THEANSWERER 
 
 fully . . . what did he expect? No, not eiapect . . . hope;' 
 and a negative hope, a hope not to find — 
 
 "Whitman, George, captain 51st Volunteers, seriously." 
 
 In a subdivision headed " N". Y." Walt's hands, holding 
 the spread newsprint, began to tremble. Oh, poor Mother! 
 was his first clear thought. 
 
 The handsome O'Connor came quietly, quickly into the 
 room. The look on his face was frenzied, the incomprehen- 
 sible shadowed his fine eyes. Advancing on Walt, seizing 
 him by the shoulder in a hurting grip, he whispered: 
 
 " Little Philip can't . . . the doctor says we're going to 
 — ^lose him. Oh, dear God! " 
 
 " I'm struck at, too, William. Look! " And Walt showed 
 the line of print. 
 
 "Your brother! " 
 
 " I must go out, must telegraph Mother in Brooklyn; 
 then I'll stop back. Probably I'll not get to bed at all this 
 night; in earliest morning I'll be starting for Fredericks- 
 burg. Now go back to your wife, William, keq) with her; 
 keep with Philip's mother! " 
 
 3 
 
 In the extreme disorder following Burnside's bloody de- 
 feat, it took Walt three days and nights, with sleep in 
 fugitive snatches only, to find George Whitman, described 
 as struck in the face by the bursting of a shell and seri- 
 ously wounded. When at length brother had found brother, 
 the captain of volunteers was already recovering from in- 
 juries far less than had at first been supposed. 
 
 But the winding banks of the Rappahannock seemed, ia 
 
THE ANSWERER 297 
 
 numberless tents and in almost every habitation, to be 
 strewn with the hopeless, the frightfully wounded, the muti- 
 lated, the dying. Thousands . . . they were thou- 
 sands. . . . 
 
 Death, like a reckless, largely-winning player for high 
 stakes, seemed to be waiting nonchalantly for each spin- 
 ning of the sun from dawn to dark; and at each spin care- 
 lessly to scoop in lives in huge handfuls. Death, with dis- 
 eased talons, tore at the Army of the Potomac; the pawns 
 in this desolating gamble were mutinous, worn out, despair- 
 ing, afraid. All the corps commanders flung themselves on 
 Bxurnside who had so appallingly blundered. Burnside per- 
 sisted in blimder. It was understood that, in Washington, 
 the Commander-in-Chief had asked Halleck for an opinion; 
 and that Halleck in an access of futility had replied by 
 offering to resign. Burnside was reported to be ready to 
 resign; "Fighting" Joe Hooker was alternately resigning 
 and declaring that the situation, both military and political, 
 demanded a Dictator. Only Mr. Lincoln, it appeared, was 
 not privileged to resign, or fly into a tantrum, or lose his 
 head, or set up as a Dictator. . . . 
 
 On 21 December, 1862, Walt found himself outside a 
 large brick mansion standing on the bank of the Virginian 
 river which somebody — Burnside, Hooker or whomever it 
 might fall to — ^would yet have to cross. At the foot of a 
 tree, within thirty feet of the front entrance of the house, 
 lay a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands ... a full 
 load for a one-horse cart. Near the heap lay several corpses, 
 each covered with a brown woolen, or shoddy, blanket. In 
 the dooryard, but nearer the river, were a number of fresh 
 
298 THE ANSWERER 
 
 graves. Walt examined these; they were mostly graves of 
 officers marked by the name daubed on pieces of barrel 
 staves or broken boards stuck in the dirt. 
 
 He went indoors. The house, facing the river, was a 
 large house and a fine house. Upstairs and down it was 
 packed with wounded. The inescapable impression, though 
 quite unfounded, was that this residence had received only 
 the worst cases. The men lay anywhere in their old clothes; 
 all appeared unclean and bloody. Some cried out continu- 
 ally in pain, but a majority of the victims lay sleeping, 
 or feigning sleep, or without stirring except for the twitch 
 of eyes this way and that and the very slight movements 
 of their mouths, chewing tobacco. For some reason, the act 
 of chewing conferred on these a stronger appearance of 
 stoical endurance than the rest bore; illusive, yet real; 
 though actually they endured less austerely, the cud easing 
 them. 
 
 No order, no system, everything impromptu, no sup- 
 plies. 
 
 " I expect it's the best that can be done," Walt muttered 
 to himself. 
 
 His initial reaction to such sights and scenes had culmi- 
 nated in a wave of the intensest bitterness. He had mentally 
 reviewed two earlier hours. The first of these was the 
 April night when, after the close of a performance of an 
 opera in Fourteenth street. New York, he had been walking 
 down Broadway, on his way to Brooklyn. Midnight. A 
 series of loud cries heralded the newsboys. They came 
 tearing up the street, darting from side to side like frantic 
 
THE ANSWERER 299 
 
 swallows. A paper was thrust in his hand and the coin 
 snatched from it. He crossed to stand under the great 
 lamps that blazed in front of the Metropolitan Hotel — 
 " Niblo's." 
 
 It was the attack on Sumter. A small crowd, perhaps 
 thirty or forty persons, gathered. For the benefit of some 
 who had no papers, one present read aloud the telegraphic 
 despatch. There was great attention and perfect silence. 
 People listened, looked at the pavement for a few minutes, 
 and then moved away without speaking, like aimless par- 
 ticles on separate and unknown errands. 
 
 Again: first Bull Run. At daylight in a drizzle of rain 
 which continued until dark, the defeated troops commenced 
 pouring into Washington over the Long Bridge. It was the 
 end of an unspeakable march of twenty miles. Dust, grime, 
 smoke, sweated into their clothing in layers; rain soaking 
 them down. At first sparsely, then thicker, these enervated 
 and fatigued scarecrows appeared in the streets of the capi- 
 tal, appeared in Pennsylvania Avenue, and sank down on 
 doorsteps or disposed themselves in the attitudes of ex- 
 treme exhaustion in areaways and basement entrances. 
 Their number was constantly recruited by fresh stragglers 
 and disordered mobs. Rarely, oh, rarely! one saw incoming 
 a regiment in perfect order, marching silently with lowering 
 faces, stern, weary to sinking, all black and dirty . . . gaps 
 in the line. . . . Two aged women, of very well known fam- 
 ilies, stood at an improvised table on the sidewalk, serving 
 quartered loaves of bread and hot coffee in all that muddle 
 and drizzle. . . . Willard's, the fashionable hotel, was thick, 
 
300 THE ANSWERER 
 
 crushed, creeping with shoulder-straps (sneak, blow, put on 
 airs there in Willard's sumptuous parlors and barrooms . . . 
 I think this is your work. Where are your companies?). 
 
 . . . These two earlier scenes, notably, came back to Walt 
 as he stood on the lawn overlooking the Rappahannock. 
 But the bitterness had gone from them; only a residue 
 of remembered bitterness remained. The infinitely more 
 concentrated scene about him — the heap of human refuse, 
 the wretched graves, the torture house he had just quitted — 
 had an effect quite different from anything else in these 
 past twenty months. He felt, not bitter, but — ^heroic? At 
 any rate, lifted clean out of himself, out of the war, out 
 of the atmosphere of hatreds and passions, out (almost) 
 of every ordinary relation, thought, preoccupation. Every 
 usual emotion was cau^t up in the vast tide of fundamental 
 feeling; not pity, but compassion — ^which means to " suf- 
 fer with." He suffered with all this, with all these, and it 
 exalted him as he could not remember ever to have been 
 exalted before. 
 
 Why? In what lay the difference? Should not the 
 sheer, dreadful concentration of agony and death within 
 a few feet of him have inspired a bitterness intenser than 
 any he had felt at more diluted sights of human misery? 
 Why did I feel so bitter then and now feel nothing of 
 that at all? he asked himself. Was it not because, in what 
 I then saw, as in Washington after first Bull Run, I saw 
 but could do nothing? The intuitive, repressed Jeeling of 
 helplessness distilled the gall of my thoughts. But now. — 
 now! — there is no such intuition to be kept back, trod 
 under. Now I know I can help. 
 
THE ANSWERER 301 
 
 Help! A pitiful handful, perhaps. Curiously, the 
 thought of how small the help can be does not disturb; 
 and the certitude I feel of helping — how that raises me 
 up! If I can cheer one fellow I may be the means of 
 saving his life. . . . What are my own words? A man is 
 a summons and challenge. 
 
 I must answer. 
 
 ... He turned, reentered the house; spoke to the man 
 nearest the door and continued, visiting each of the wounded 
 throughout the mansion. With some he talked only, to 
 one he gave newspapers asked for, for several he wrote 
 letters to their folks at home. 
 
 I must have something to give, other days, he thought 
 as he emerged toward sundown. Something, anything, even 
 if it's only an apple or a bite off a plug of tobacco. How 
 their faces lit! They need me, need me! (Perhaps I need 
 them.) They shall have me, all of me — all, all! 
 
 4 
 
 (Perhaps I need them.) 
 
 Beginning with this first day, Walt resolved to keep notes 
 of some of the things he heard and saw. He would, in 
 impromptu jottings with a pencil, brief '' cases," persons, 
 occurrences by bedsides. For this purpose, two or three 
 sheets of paper, folded small to pocket-size, the folds slit 
 and fastened with a pin, served well enough. These soiled 
 and creased, sometimes bloodstained, livraisons, or booklets, 
 might some day be useful. 
 
 December 23 to 31. — The restdts of the late battle are 
 exhibited everywhere about here in thomands of cases {hun- 
 
302 THE ANSWERER 
 
 dreds die every day), in the camp, brigade, and division 
 hospitals. These are merely tents and sometimes very poor 
 ones, the wounded lying on the ground, lucky if their blan- 
 kets are spread on layers of pine or hemlock twigs, or small 
 leaves. No cots; seldom even a mattress. It is pretty cold. 
 The ground is frozen hard, and there is occasional snow. I 
 go aroiUnd from one case to another. I do not see that I 
 do much good to these wounded and dying; but I cannot 
 leave them. Once in a while some youngster holds on to 
 me convulsively, and I do what I can for him; at any rate, 
 stop with him for hours, if he wishes it. 
 
 I wonder why I feel sucli a strong love for these young- 
 sters? was Walt's meditation as he wrote this. It is just 
 as strong as the fellow-love I used to feel, when a youth, 
 for other youths ; for any handsome or affectionate-appearing 
 boy of my own years, even a stranger. The feeling I have 
 tried to utter in the Calamus poems; it shocks many. Yet 
 just that feeling, active or latent, is the base of any ap- 
 proach to an ideal society, to human brotherhood. The 
 love of comrades — just that. Boys quite commonly feel 
 it; men seem to think they must be ashamed of such a 
 feeling. Love, affection, for adults, must be from one sex 
 to the other. Or from father toward son, or from mother 
 toward daughter. But I do not feel that restriction. I 
 wonder why? I wonder! 
 
 True it is, when I sit beside one of these boy soldiers 
 of twenty-one or younger (many younger), it lies in the 
 back of my thought that this boy, or a boy as lovable as 
 this, might be my own joyfully-recognized son if ... if 
 Esther . . . but I know that thought is only a thread inter- 
 
THE ANSWERER 303 
 
 woven in my whole feeling. The main flow of my feeling 
 is further back — at least as far back as adolescence and 
 maybe farther. Is it possible that it derives from my 
 dear mother? and if so, how? She has always been the 
 loveliest woman in the knowledge of many women. . . . 
 
 The mother at home quietly placing the dishes on the suppertable. 
 The mother with mild words . . . clean her cap and gown . . . 
 
 a wholesome odor falling off her person and clothes as she 
 
 walks by. 
 
 And this also is she: 
 
 Behold a woman! 
 
 She looks out from her Quaker cap . . . her face is clearer and 
 
 more beautiful than the sky. 
 She sits in an armchair under the shaded porch of the farmhouse. 
 The sun just shines on her old white head. 
 Her ample gown is of creamhued linen. . . . 
 
 I have always, since first-remembered childhood, nearly wor- 
 shiped my mother. I used to think that perhaps more 
 of her entered into me than of my father; him I loved and 
 yet, with us young children, his hasty temper made him 
 sometimes formidable. . . . Though her silence would con- 
 ceal it, I suspect my dear mother powerfully defended us 
 from Father, powerfully and secretly willed that I, in espe- 
 cial, should love her. . . . Can it be that I inherited, by 
 her determination or otherwise, a major portion of her 
 affectional nature? Perhaps, largely, I am the creature of 
 her Wish, of her deep, deep,' not clearly formulated Wish; 
 perhaps I love her because she is the greater part of me; 
 perhaps I love those young men whom, had they been 
 fleshed and about her in younger days, she would have 
 loved. ... I wonder! 
 Something there is that links spirit to spirit, parent toj 
 
304 THE ANSWERER 
 
 child, even as the body of mother and child are joined; 
 ■why could it not be the secret Wish — for so I should prefer 
 calling the invisible connection. That must have been what 
 lay implicit in my mind when I wrote several of the lines 
 in the poem, There Was a Child Went Forth — the lines: 
 
 His own parents. 
 
 He that had fathered him, and she that had conceiv'd him in her 
 
 womb, and birth'd him. 
 They gave this child more of themselves than that. . . . 
 
 For sure it is, if the physical and mental inheritance were 
 all, we could predict everything concerning the child ex- 
 cept the sex, and once he or she was born, the future body 
 and exact intelligence would be knowable. Yet, never were 
 men and women like that. Oh, I wonder! 
 
 What either flowers forth or struggles to flower forth 
 is the secret Wish, rooted in primitive sex, visible only 
 as budding or blossoming emotion. I think, with due study 
 and after long examination without prejudice as to " good " 
 and " evil " (for we must go far into the hinterland where 
 the mind is as yet irresponsible and " good " and " evil " 
 exist not yet) — I think we shall find how literally right 
 was Shakespeare when he declared: " We are such stuff 
 as dreams are made on." I, for example: Maybe I am 
 nothing but the stuff of my mother's girlish dreams of young 
 lovers. . . . Innocent, I; and equally innocent, she; the 
 real stuff of Life, the Wish and not the Word, has been, 
 for a passing instant, bodied forth in her . . . then in my- 
 self 
 
 This would explain much; and to complete the explana- 
 tion but one detail more is needed. How does the Wish 
 seek to clothe itself? for the disembodied Wish is always 
 
THE ANSWERER 305 
 
 seeking to clothe itself in a form of flesh. It seeks that 
 other one, is forever asking of every person met: Are you 
 the New Person drawn toward me? Which is only a 
 shy way of asking: Are you the New Person who will 
 draw me and, for a time less or longer, house me? And 
 the answer is read, or tends to be read, almost instantane- 
 ously in . . . faces. 
 
 Faces ! We make them answer. I did well when I wrote the 
 poem about faces — ^wrouglrt perhaps more truly than I knew. 
 
 The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist's face; 
 
 The ugly face of some beautiful Soul . . . 
 
 The sacred faces of infants, the illumined face of the mother of 
 
 many children; 
 The face of an amour, the face of veneration . . . 
 The face withdrawn of its good and bad, a castrated face. . . , 
 
 This now is too lamentable a face for a man; 
 
 Some abject louse, asking leave to be — cringing for it; 
 
 Some milknosed maggot, blessing what lets it wrig to its hole. 
 
 This face of a healthy honest boy is the program of all 
 good. This was my Wish (or, if -you like, my mother's 
 Wish, or my mother's mother's Wish) constantly and keenly 
 observing, penetrating, reviewing, rejecting, accepting. Walt, 
 did you know you were like t'hat? I order myself: Let 
 the buried Wish stand up clear and face it boldly ... the 
 while I wonder. 
 
 5 
 Besides the hospitals, I also go occasionally on long tours 
 through the camps, talking with the men, etc. Sometimes 
 at night among the groups around the fires, in their shebang 
 enclosures of bushes. These are curious shows, full of char- 
 acters and groups. I soon get acquainted anywhere in camp, 
 with officers or men. . . . 
 
3o6 THE ANSWERER 
 
 Christmas Eve, '62. The half-dozen men, Walt one of 
 them, were yarning around the bonfire. The brush palisade 
 isolated them from all the world, leaving them alone with 
 each other, with their tiny fire, and with the far, frosty stars. 
 
 " I was married two years ago this night," said suddenly 
 a young Vermonter, breaking a short silence. " We've a 
 boy, 'bout a year old. Counting some on seeing him the 
 first time, I be." 
 
 " Our first's a year old, exactly, this night," mildly boasted 
 a Pennsylvanian. " Born on Christmas Eve. Girl." 
 
 A pause. 
 
 "If the President don't put Joe Hooker in command 
 of this army, Jeff Davis Tvill be playin' Santa Claus to us 
 all in Andersonville next Christmas." The pessimist, an 
 older man, emptied his pipe with loud taps on the heel 
 of his shoe — a shoe consisting of a heel and a hole. He 
 looked disgustedly at the hole. " See that! " 
 
 " Coin' to hang up your stockin', Lem, I s'pose? " 
 
 " Stockin'! Who says I got a stockin'? I got some- 
 thin' I put on my foot either end up ; makes no diff 'rence. 
 I got a pair of anklets, that's what I got." 
 
 "Ne' mind, Lem. We're on our way to a warmer cli- 
 mate! " 
 
 At this there was a general laugh. 
 
 " What I can't see," complained the man who had been 
 rallying Lem, " is how old Abe in Washin'ton figgers on 
 gettin' anybody fit t' command this here army agin Lee — 
 now Little Mac's been retired." 
 
 "Huh! 'Little Mac' ! " countered Lem with a growl. 
 " Some of you fellers '11 never git it out 'f your heads that 
 
THE ANSWERER 307 
 
 there ain't any gineral but McClellan! McClellan never 
 moved — an' ef you ask my opinion, I don't think he wanted 
 to whip Lee, leastways he didn't want to very hard." 
 
 "Hoi' on! " "What call you got t' say that, Lem? " 
 Debate sputtered, like bacon in the frying-pan; at moments 
 the speeches had an acrid flavor, as if some of the fat were 
 spilling in the fire. 
 
 " Can any of you fellers sing? " 
 
 Walt's dear, resonant question, in a hearty voice, brought 
 a surprised stoppage of talk. Several answered, rather ir- 
 resolutely: 
 
 " Sing? Well, y-a-a-s! " 
 
 " I useter sing t' home." 
 
 " Only tune I know is ' John Brown's Body.' " 
 
 " I was thinking of some Christmas music," Walt ex- 
 plained. " Guess you all know one or two things — ' While 
 Shepherds Watched ' and the like o' that. . . ." 
 
 They did; enough, at any rate, knew the tunes — scarcely 
 the words. They sang, then, the tunes, repeating over and 
 over the few remembered words. In the sharp air of a 
 Virginia winter's night the uncertain but powerful voices 
 of this handful of men astonished the occupants of neigh- 
 boring shebangs. The familiar hymn tunes were caught 
 up at other bivouacs and nucleating bonfires. A wavering, 
 tremulous chain of singing spread up and down the in- 
 voluted banks of the dark river. Mysteriously, one was 
 aware of the ragged Army of the Potomac as having a 
 collective, enunciable soul. Instinctively, one's eye searched 
 the heaven for the portent of the Star. Adeste, fidelest 
 Laeti, triwnphantes . . . 
 
3o8 THE ANSWERER 
 
 Far up and down the bloodied banks of the winding 
 river, far into the miraculous Night, extended the singing. 
 
 Early in the new year, eighty-fifth year of These States, 
 Walt found himself leaving camp at Falmouth, Virginia, 
 and accompanying wounded men by rail and by boat to 
 Washington. The rail journey, on the Aquia Creek Rail- 
 road, was made with the injured men piled in careful, 
 dose rows on flat cars — " platform cars " as they were 
 called. The start was an hour before simrise, but the sim 
 was up before the train had completed the dozen miles of 
 track. Sentries with rumpled hair and half-awake look, 
 cavalry camps in the distance, were the only diversion on 
 the journey. On reaching Aquia Creek Landing, more 
 wounded were found waiting. At length all were got aboard 
 the government steamer, which proceeded up the Potomac. 
 
 Walt found himself constantly busy. " Only trouble is," 
 he explained humorously to a boy who held tight to his 
 hand, " there ain't enough of me to go 'round. Son, that 
 fellow over there wants me to write a letter to his mother. 
 I'll stop back." Reluctantly the fingers let him go. 
 
 Dear Madam: This is a letter from your son, Charles, 
 •mritten hastily on a Government boat by a friend of your 
 son and of other soldiers. Charles was hit in the leg and 
 side at Fredericksburg that eventful Saturday, 13th of De- 
 cember. He lay the succeeding two days and nights help- 
 less. on the field, between the city and terraces of batteries; 
 Ms company and regiment had been compell'd to leave him 
 to his fate. To make matters worse, it happen'd he lay with 
 
THE ANSWERER 309 
 
 his head slightly do-umhill, and cotdd not help himself. At 
 the end of some fifty hours he was brought off, with other 
 wounded, under a flag of truce. I ask him how the rebels 
 treated him as he lay during those two days and nights 
 within reach of them — whether they came to him — whether 
 they abused him? He answers that several of the rebels, 
 soldiers and others, came to him at one time and another. 
 A couple of them, who were together, spoke roughly and 
 sarcastically, but nothing worse. One middle-aged man, 
 however, who seem'd to be moving around the field, among 
 the dead and wounded, for benevolent purposes, came to him 
 in a way he will never forget; treated Charles kindly, bound 
 up his wounds, cheer'd him, gave him a couple of biscuits 
 and a drink of whiskey and water; asked him if he could 
 eat some beef. This good secesh, however, did not change 
 Charles's position, for it might have caused the blood to. 
 burst from the wounds, clotted and stagnated. Charles has 
 had a pretty severe time; has been carefully tended for the 
 past fortnight and is now in shape to be mov'd on this short 
 trip up the Potomac to Washington. There you will hear 
 from him in a day or two more, telling you what hospital he 
 is in, etc. If possible I shall keep track of him and write 
 myself; if I lose track, will surely find him in a few days 
 at the outside, and meanwhile you will probably have been 
 notified his whereabouts. Charles sends his love and I can 
 
 r 
 
 add, sitting here and talking with him, seeing him smile, 
 that he retains a good heart, and is at present on the gain. 
 {It is not uncommon for the men to remain on the field this 
 way, one, two, or even four or five days.) 
 
 W, W. 
 
3IO THE ANSWERER 
 
 7 
 
 All Washington seemed to be slowly converting into a 
 hospital. There were the Eighth Street, the Armory Square, 
 the Campbell, the H Street, and even the Patent Office was 
 being utilized. In three very large apartments on the second 
 story of the spreading building devoted to Invention, 
 wounded men were niche'd in close rows. Laid in the nar- 
 row, deep lateral openings between high and ponderous 
 glass cases crowded with models, the badly hurt and dying 
 men, with emaciated faces and unmoving bodies, gave an 
 impression of still unresurrected mortals entombed in an 
 elaborate sarcophagus and accompanied, like the Eg3^tian 
 dead, by propitiatory gifts, bizarre and costly, intricate, 
 hideous and beautiful. At night the blare of gas-lights 
 lit up for them and for the transfixed, appalled visitor deli- 
 cate articulations, in wood and metal, of every kind of 
 utensil or machine it had entered the mind of man to con- 
 ceive; the wildest visions of insane conjecture were suddenly 
 thrown into relief as embodied realities, and the lucid sim- 
 plicities of genius were exposed in their three-dimensional 
 and triumphant perfection. Look! Here is what Man has 
 wrought! Here in the case of polished and gleaming glass, 
 here on the rumpled bed-cot. ... 
 
 This effect of the scene upon the imaginative mind, greater 
 probably than any designed scheme could have achieved, 
 was not reproduced in the thoughts, curiosities and passing 
 preoccupations of those who lay in the improvised and 
 wholly temporary hospital. Imaginative minds are thank- 
 fully few. A wounded soldier able to turn his head and 
 
THE ANSWERER 311 
 
 study the astounding contraption enthroned beside his bed, 
 asked Walt: 
 
 " Friend, what air thet? Read me the label." 
 
 Walt made the circuit of the glass case, reporting: 
 
 " It's a perpetual-motion machine — anyway, that's what 
 Oscar Terwilliger of Catamoimt, Kentucky, meant it to 
 be." 
 
 "Won't it go?" 
 
 "Why, yes; I guess so. Trouble is, it stops.'- 
 
 " Oh, I see. When y' don't want it to." 
 
 " Aim was, for it never to stop." 
 
 "Whut, never? Who'd want an injin he couldn't stop? 
 Quit foolin' me. . . ." 
 
 Walt spent a while explaining the utility of perpetual 
 motion, if it could be arrived at. The soldier was uncon- 
 vinced. For example, Walt instanced a clock that would 
 never need winding. But the other only declared he wouldn't 
 have such a clock around. 
 
 " A clock that 'd never run down 'd give me the creep- 
 an'-crawl. ... I'd wake up in the night, get out 0' bed 
 and go downstairs, light the lamp, look at the clock to see 
 ef it hadn't struck work. . . . We don't want nothin' 'at 
 goes on forever." 
 
 " Mebbe not. Mebbe — not! " Something in the thought 
 struck on something in Walt. 
 
 Forever! No, we didn't want anything that went on 
 forever. We didn't want life, or death, or even love that 
 would last . . . forever. Why? In anything that endured 
 forever there was an implied changelessness. The thing 
 eternal was the thing without growth. And growth alone 
 
312 THE ANSWERER 
 
 was the memorable ecstacy. Not to live michanging, like 
 a stone, but to grow. . . . 
 
 8 
 
 To grow! 
 
 One day Walt saw a copy of a letter just written (26 
 January, 1863) to General Hooker. It ran: 
 
 " General: I have placed you at the head of the Army 
 of the Potomac. Of course I have done this upon what 
 appear to me to be sufficient reasons, and yet I think it best 
 for you to know that there are some things in regard to 
 which I am not qmte satisfied with you. I believe you to 
 be a brave and skilful soldier, which of course I like. I also 
 believe you do not mix politics with your profession, in 
 which you are right. You have confidence in yourself, which 
 is a valuable if not an indispensable quality. You are ambi- 
 tious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather 
 than harm; but I think that during General Burnside's com- 
 mand of the army you have taken counsel of your ambition 
 and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did 
 a great wrong to the country and to a most meritorious and 
 honorable brother officer. I have heard, in such a way as 
 to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and 
 the government needed a dictator. Of course it was not for 
 this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. 
 Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. 
 What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk 
 the dictatorship. The government will support you to the 
 utmost of its ability, which is neither more nor less than it 
 has done and will do for all commanders. I much fear that 
 
THE ANSWERER 313 
 
 the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the army, of 
 criticizing their commander and withholding confidence from 
 him, will now turn upon you. I shall assist you as far as 
 I can to put it down. Neither you nor Napoleon, if he were 
 alive again, could get any good out of an army while such 
 a spirit prevails in it; and now beware of rashness. Beware 
 of rashness, but with energy and sleepless vigilance go for- 
 ward and give us victories. 
 
 The golden-haired, cherub-countenanced young man who 
 showed the copy of this letter to Walt was John Hay, one 
 of Mr. Lincoln's secretaries, and one of several warmly en- 
 thusiastic, admiring youths who were drawn first to the 
 author of Leaves of Grass, and, irresistibly thereafter, to 
 the personality of, not the poet indeed, but the man Walt 
 Whitman. " The two Johns," Walt was already in the 
 habit of saying, affectionately jesting, of John Hay and 
 John Burroughs; and then, with a glance at O'Connor 
 who was usually present, " and the one William." For 
 he felt — they all did — that about O'Connor there was some- 
 thing (manner, magnetism, wit?) perishable, perhaps, but 
 incomparable. 
 
 Finishing, Walt struck the letter with his hand, exclaim- 
 ing: 
 
 "He grows! John, doesn't it daily amaze, awe, almost 
 scare you — ^you who see him constantly — to observe him 
 growing? Can't you figure out his secret? capture the 
 recipe? Year ago, we had a President who was patiently 
 trying to hit upon a way to handle McClellan; laboriously 
 
314 THE ANSWERER 
 
 setting out to teach an old dog new tricks or, at least, make 
 him perform his old ones. A patient, awkward man among 
 the animals! Now, what? We have a gentle but indomit- 
 able master. Not a bully, not a man with a whip! No 
 slave-driver, no overseer, no cunning and crafty politician to 
 whom men are puppets pulled by wires. But a man, big, 
 big! with overshadowing height, farthest-spreading shoul- 
 ders, and instantly-sensed, quickly-obeyed, powerfullest 
 mind. By God, John! such a man, once in hundreds of 
 years, is all the advance of civilization, the one step forward 
 we are able to take! " 
 
 " I want you to meet him. I want to fix it, some day," 
 said Hay, eagerly. 
 
 " Meet him? " Walt shook with the heartiness of his 
 laughter. " I've already met him. Eh? You know what 
 I mean! Only way to meet a man like Mr. Lincoln is to 
 grasp him. The puny, the little-minded, never can. How 
 many, do you suppose, who shake his hand and say some- 
 thing meet him? . . . But I hope to do that, of course, 
 some day. If you fix it, you spoil it; accomplish nothing. 
 Highly-purposed, it will come. . . ." 
 
 9 
 
 Though the third edition of his Leaves of Grass, pub- 
 lished in i860, was far ampler than the volmne that the 
 great Emerson had saluted so prophetically in 1855, Walt 
 had known from the beginning of the secession war how far 
 from final the book of i860 must be. In intervals of his 
 work among, the wounded he was busy with thoughtful 
 revisions of his book. The changes, on the whole, were 
 
THE ANSWERER 31s 
 
 not many; often he would scratch out words, writing in 
 others, only to cross out the emendation and restore the 
 first phrasing. At this intermittent task few ever caught 
 him; but the angel-faced John Hay, stealing an hour from 
 secretarial duties, was one of the detective few. 
 
 Bits, scraps of paper were scattered all over the small 
 deal table at which Walt pensively sat; loose sheets of 
 paper littered the floor and had drifted into corners of the 
 room; they were so numerous that their imperceptible in- 
 dividual thinnesses formed visible thicknesses and made the 
 floor an uneven surface to walk on. Uneven and slippery; 
 John Hay, treading with no special care, felt his feet fly 
 suddenly from under him and sat down with a bang which 
 made the room shake. 
 
 " John! Is that the way you go. about the White 
 House?*" asked the poet, looking up with a start. 
 
 " You're an untidy beast, Walt," grumbled the youngster, 
 getting up and cautiously feeling posterior parts. " I sup- 
 pose it comes of working in a newspaper office, this mess." 
 He' surveyed the room. " What are you fussing with? Is 
 it a new poem? " 
 
 " There are no new poems. . . . No, I've been tinkering 
 with my Poem of Many in One. It will want some altera- 
 tions. A new commencement: 
 
 As I sat alone, by blue Ontario's shore. 
 As I mused of these mighty days . . . 
 
 Then, throughout, slight, significant changes absorbing into 
 it the lessons of these years of war." 
 
 " ' By blue Ontario's shore,' " repeated John Hay. 
 " That's very musical, very evocative, altogether lovely! 
 
3i6 THE ANSWERER 
 
 For a bit like that, it seems to me the poets of strict meter 
 and delicate riming might forgive you something." 
 
 " Scarcely, John, scarcely! A wrong may be forgiven; 
 but to forgive a difference is not so easy. Custom, habit! 
 The world forges its own shackles; let every one wear them! 
 But this poem: Year after my book first appeared, I wove 
 much of the prose preface to the first Leaves into this 
 Poem of Many in One. More must now be interwoven. 
 I have written this, to go in at some place: 
 
 (Angry cloth I saw there leaping! 
 
 I stand again in leaden rain, your flapping folds saluting; 
 
 I sing you over all, flying, beckoning through the fight — O the 
 hard-contested fight! 
 
 O the cannons ope their rosy-flashing muzzles! the hurtled halls 
 scream! 
 
 The battle-front forms_ amid the smoke — the volleys pour in- 
 cessant from the line; 
 
 Hark! the ringing word. Charge! — now the tussle, and the furious 
 maddening yells; 
 
 Now the corpses tumble curl'd upon the ground. 
 
 Cold, cold in death, for precious life of you. 
 
 Angry cloth I saw there leaping.) 
 
 Tell me, is it good? Do you embrace it, John? Or is it 
 flawed? " 
 
 " It seems to me perfect. That phrase for the flag — 
 * angry cloth ' ! — ^and the pounce of the verb, ' leaping ' ! 
 The antithesis in the next to the last line, also; where you 
 say: ' Cold in death, for precious life of you.' . . . But 
 the best thing of all is the way the eye is sent to the flag, 
 which is made to seem a thing alive, then carried to the 
 battlefield and then drawn back again to the flag, to the 
 symbol for which men are dying." 
 
 " In this passage here, I aim to add two lines. The part 
 about individuals. 
 
THE ANSWERER 317 
 
 Underneath all, indiznduals! 
 
 The American compact is altogether with individuals . . . 
 
 I think somewhere in here, to enforce the point with a sharp 
 and memorable illustration, I will add: 
 
 (Mother! with subtle sense severe — with the naked sword in 
 
 your hand, 
 1 saw you at last refuse to treat but directly with individuals.") 
 
 That seems to me just the thrust, just the reminder needed 
 out of the personal experience of us all." 
 
 " Yes, but do you realize that it is beautifully, exquisitely 
 cadenced poetry? That the greatest poet that ever lived, 
 in his most magnificent moment, couldn't have achieved 
 anything finer than the choice and balance of words in that 
 single line? ' Mother . . . subtle sense severe . . . naked 
 sword . . . hand.' " 
 
 "John, hush! You praise as excessively as William." 
 
 " The thought is historically true," continued Hay, reflec- 
 tively. " I mean the thought that we are treating only 
 with individuals. Of course, in our view, the Confederacy 
 doesn't exist; a civil rebellion on the part of certain individ- 
 uals, persons, exists; a rebellion on the part of some civil 
 governments, individual States, exists. For a poet, you are 
 an unusually good statesman! " 
 
 " Spell it with a capital ' S,' John; make it two words 
 linked with an apostrophe. I am a States' Man, above all 
 — the poet has always come afterward with me." 
 
 " Only the other day," Hay was saying, " Mr. Lincoln 
 came again upon that favorite phrase in army orders about 
 ' driving the invader from our soil.' It made him despair, 
 as it always does, and he exclaimed: 'Will our generals 
 
3i8 THE ANSWERER 
 
 never get that idea out of their heads? The whole coun- 
 try is our soil.' " 
 
 " So it is, so it is! But it takes a clear vision like the 
 President's not to lose the perception in such a time as this. 
 Hay, watch your man closely; study him; memorize his 
 slightest gesture; treasure up the unconsidered trifles of his 
 talk. You are living with a man who is as great as any 
 the world has ever seen; I know, feel so! Greater than 
 Napoleon, I am sure; greater than Cromwell; greater than 
 the Caesars or the Charlemagnes of misty memory. Real- 
 ize this; realize also that this man is not known (if indeed 
 he ever can fully be known) to his people or to other peo- 
 ples. But some day he must be known ; perhaps, yes prob- 
 ably, it will devolve most heavily upon you to tell the world 
 about him — ^you who have been with him constantly, are 
 now, night and day. And to discharge your task, you must 
 have known, must have comprehended him, yourself, in all 
 his immensity, variety, resource, bravery. Even then you 
 may not be able to make the world understand . . . but 
 you will have done something to make the world understand; 
 you will have served humanity well — oh, well! " 
 
 " I'd ask nothing larger, Walt, than just this chance to 
 be with him, watch him, and learn what I can." 
 
 After Hay had gone, Walt continued amid the litter to 
 work at the modification of the poem, one of his longer 
 ones. For a while, after repeated perusals and a period 
 of motionless reflection, he did nothing but draw his pencil 
 again and again through certain lines, adding nothing in 
 place of what he crossed out. Eventually eleven lines had 
 dwindled to five, which read: 
 
THE ANSWERER 319 
 
 O I see now, flashing, that this America is only you and me, 
 
 Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me. 
 
 Its crimes, lies, thefts, defections, slavery, are you and me, 
 
 Its Congress is you and me — the officers, capitols, armies, ships, 
 
 are you and me. 
 Its endless gestations of new States are you and me . . . 
 
 The concluding line reminded him. that certainly within a 
 
 few weeks or months West Virginia woidd be admitted as a 
 
 State of the Union; this despite the agony of destructive civil 
 
 war; and in the remote reaches of the Far West was the 
 
 Territory of Nevada, already pressing for Statehood. . . . 
 
 How wonderful that in the midst of this crisis and struggle 
 
 the Union could still go on, expanding, renewing itself. . . . 
 
 A great surge of feeling swept Walt. And suddenly, with 
 the utmost vividness and distinctness, he remembered a 
 dream of his youth, a dream of being somewhere in a neu- 
 tral, misty region and at a little distance there sat a crea- 
 ture enthroned. . . . 
 
 He knew she was a woman, but whom he could not tell, 
 and her face was hidden, turned away from him. As he 
 regarded her speechlessly, for how long a time he could not 
 have told, slowly her head turned toward him and her 
 face shone upon him. 
 
 The effect, instant and terrible, had been that he had 
 flung himself on the ground at her feet, with shaking hands 
 that caught the hem of her robe and drew it to his twisting 
 lips. He did this conscious only of an irresistible and over- 
 whelming impulsion from within, as if the pure and benefi- 
 cent light of an immortal countenance had struck into his 
 soul and set it free in a realm of ether lit by a single 
 glance. ... He had seen her face as one sees the sun 
 and could not bear to look upon it. He could only know 
 
320 THE ANSWERER 
 
 that she shone upon him kindly; coiUd only know, sense 
 her to be a Woman. . . . 
 
 This he had dreamed. . . . West Virginia; far Neva- 
 da. .. . 
 
 The pencil moved steadily over a blank sheet of paper. 
 He read the result aloud. 
 
 {Democracy! while weapons were everywhere aim'd at your 
 
 breast, 
 I saw you serenely give birth to immortal children — saw in dreams 
 
 your dilating form; 
 Saw you with spreading mantle covering the world.) 
 
 10 
 
 He wore his haversack over his shoulder and as he went 
 from bed to bed they turned their heads, or lifted them, 
 showing pale, frightened, smiling, or sick and beseeching 
 faces; they drank in his approach as if it were a healing 
 odor like balsam liberated in the hospital's close air. And, 
 pausing at every bedside, Walt unshouldered the huge coil 
 that was his burden, diving into it for some gift. . . . For 
 one, an orange; for another, a little box of writing paper; 
 here he gave a small sheet of postage stamps and for the 
 next man there were two home newspapers. To many he 
 also gave tobacco; a little jar of raspberries came to light 
 for the sixteen-year-old boy whose leg had been taken off 
 below the knee. The next patient required, not a reach 
 within the haversack, but a hand slipped in a coat pocket; 
 from which was duly extracted and quietly pressed into a 
 reluctant palm a small sum of money. The soldier red- 
 dened; his wrist resisted; then, as the color ebbed from his 
 face, with averted eyes, his fingers closed tightly over the 
 coins. He finally said, in a very low voice: 
 
THE ANSWERER 321 
 
 " I hadn't a cent. I—" 
 
 " I sent the word — a telegraphic message. Then I sat 
 down and wrote her, to make sure, not to come on, as you 
 will surely get well." 
 
 " I— I—" 
 
 " Don't try to say it. Mind, your throat! We'll talk 
 next week, when it's rested. . . ." 
 
 As almoner of others, Walt appeared to have the illimit- 
 able resources of a Santa Claus. He stopped in the aisle, 
 remarking to himself: 
 
 "Lord 'a' massey! Looks to me as if I'd enough stuff 
 to go through the next ward entire." 
 
 Figs and sweet crackers " stretched out." A packet of 
 stamped envelopes went around easily; one apiece and three 
 left over; these given extra on a show of hands requesting 
 them. This ward of the Campbell Hospital was being 
 cleaned up and all the men were receiving clean clothes. 
 Much fun reigned among the men dressing or being dressed, 
 with naked chests and bare feet and a great tossing to and 
 fro of shirts, underwear and even pillows. 
 
 In the afternoon, Walt pilgrimaged to Armory Square 
 Hospital. There was a disagreeable case, perforation of 
 the bladder by a bullet, which he had on his mind from the 
 day before. In spite of the disheartening circumstances, 
 this fellow was of cheerful mind; he is a handsome boy, 
 Walt thought, as he stood beside the bed. Yes ... a 
 bright face. The almoner fetched out a stick of hore- 
 hound candy. 
 
 The lad was delighted. He sucked a little, remarking: 
 
 " This'll be good for my bad throat." 
 
322 THE ANSWERER 
 
 Down the aisle a group of surgeons and nurses were con- 
 gregating. From the neighborhood of a fearful wound in 
 a fearful condition some loose splinters of bone were being 
 removed. This tedious operation seemed to Walt to be 
 performed with great tenderness, and, once it was fairly 
 under way, the soldier, propped up in bed, bore it with 
 uncomplaining silence. Much wasted, noted Walt in one 
 of his jottings. Had lain a long time quiet in one position 
 {not for days only but weeks), a bloodless, brown-skinn'd 
 face, with eyes full of determination — belong'd to a New 
 York regiment. . . . Not far away a wife sat by the side 
 of her husband, dangerously ill with typhoid. In the next , 
 ward, a mother sat with her son. She tells me she has seven 
 children, and this is the youngest. {A fine, kind, healthy, 
 ' gentle mother, good-looking, not very old, with a cap on her 
 head, and dress'd like home — what a charm it gave to the 
 whole ward.) I liked the woman nurse in ward E — I noticed 
 how she sat a long time by a poor fellow who just had, this 
 morning, in addition to his other sickness, bad hemorrhages — 
 she gently assisted him, reliev'd him of the blood, holding 
 a cloth to his mouth, as he coughed it up — he was so weak 
 he coidd only just turn his head over on the pillow.. 
 
 But the many of them! Page after page of Walt's little 
 improvised booklets was needed for the barest record of 
 names, regiments, condition of the wounded and an abbre- 
 viated note of a man's home folks. Marcus Small, Com- 
 pany K, Seventh Maine; dysentery and t5T)hoid; talks of 
 being able soon to visit his people in East Livermore (speaks 
 in a feeble voice — I hold his hand and do most of the talk- 
 ing). Thomas Lindly, First Pennsylvania Cavalry; shot 
 
THE ANSWERER 323 
 
 very badly through the foot; has to be constantly dosed with 
 morphme; — his face ashy and glazed, bright young eyes; 
 I give him a large handsome apple, lay it in sight, tell him 
 to have it roasted in the morning, as he generally feels 
 easier then, and can eat a little breakfast. I write two 
 letters for him. . . . An old Quaker lady sitting by the side 
 of her son, Amer Moore, Second U. S. Artillery, shot in 
 the head two weeks since, from hips down paralyzed. . , . 
 Thirty wide four-horse wagons used as ambulances pass 
 up Fourteenth Street on the way to Columbian, Carver and 
 Mount Pleasant Hospitals. Hospitals; everywhere new hos- 
 pitals. . . . Nine-tenths of the soldiers, at least, are native- 
 born, and all so young. Fifteen to twenty-one, not many 
 but most of them. And the Southerners seem to be even 
 younger or to have, in proportion, more very yoxmg 
 boys. . . . 
 
 To emanate ordinary cheer, to radiate physical mag- 
 netism, to have and to preserve poise and aplomb and pres- 
 ence, was, Walt found, the principal prescription. . . . One 
 must be a great lover, one must be a strong, unswervable 
 believer — in what? In God? No doubt. In men? Of 
 course. In life? Yes, in life. In death. In death, too. 
 . . . Not nursing nor medicines nor delicacies nor gifts of 
 money nor anything else did so much good as the putting- 
 forth of a sense of health and a sense of love, compassionate 
 and impassioned, strengthening and ardent, always sincere. 
 ... He was himself at this time blessed with perfect health; 
 exercise made him robust and the companionship of friends 
 made him happy. Before starting on one of his morning 
 or afternoon or evening tours (they were likely to last four 
 
324 THE ANSWERER 
 
 or five hours apiece, and sometimes longer) Walt soon grew 
 careful to start well-rested. Well-rested, bathed, cleanly- 
 clad in fresh, sweet-smelling clothes; cheerful after a good 
 meal; inspired with a feeling of something not material, 
 something impalpable, something quite resistless ... to 
 give . . . 
 
 II 
 
 " You haven't told me your name. Son." 
 
 "Hippolyte. Hippolyte Antoine." 
 
 Hippolyte Antoine . . . Hippolyte. . . . 
 
 "You're pretty badly hurt, but doing well, Hippolyte. 
 You look cheerful, look like getting well! " 
 
 "I can't get well. Doctor says he can make me com- 
 fortable, though. So ... I reckon I'm all right." 
 
 Gunshot wounds in the abdomen. Delayed, transferred 
 case from Fredericksburg. Hippolyte . . . Hippolyte An^ 
 toine! 
 
 The clear February sunlight streamed in the windows; 
 the ward was almost a solarium; and in the midst of this 
 pale, ethereal brightness lay a curious black spot. Every 
 nerve in Walt's body carried directive messages, from and 
 to the brain, like a tangle of strung telegraph wires crowded 
 with hurrying orders and counter-orders on the eve of battle. 
 He said quietly: 
 
 " Isn't there something I can give you, Hippolyte — some- 
 thing I can get for you, do for you? " 
 
 "Yes, please. If you'd write a short letter to my sister, 
 Floride, in New Orleans." 
 
 It had come. The black spot expanded suddenly. Then 
 it vanished, leaving a curious ringing noise in the ears; 
 
THE ANSWERER 325 
 
 and all about lay the clear February sunlight and within 
 hand's reach lay a twenty-seven-year-old, peacefully dying. 
 
 A supreme effort. 
 
 "All right, Hippolyte. I'm ready." 
 
 " ' Dear Floride,' " dictated the brother, " ' a visitor to 
 this hospital is writing for me. I am in Armory Square 
 Hospital, Washington, and very comfortable — feel drowsy 
 just now and unable to write much. Am well-used here 
 and there is nothing to worry about. I ' " — a slight hesita- 
 tion; then the voice went evenly on — "'shall soon be all 
 right. I wanted you to know, and I hope you are all right, 
 too. Have heard some black stories about things in New 
 Orleans since its capture last year; not hearing from you, 
 have been often anxious but have trusted you were all the 
 while safe and well and fairly provided for. Many Yanks 
 I have met were good-hearted people, though having dif- 
 ferent manners; a little hard to get used to them and know 
 them. If you get this letter you might try writing me. The 
 Virginia Randolphs can perhaps help, my friend Eustis Ran- 
 dolph's family, if you need anything. I am, with much 
 love, 
 
 " ' Your brother. 
 
 The pencil took a moment longer to catch up, at the 
 close. 
 
 "All right, Hippolyte." 
 
 " Mme. Floride Dumouriez — D-u-m-o-u-r-i-e-z, Maison 
 Dumouriez, Royal Street, New Orleans." 
 
 Walt repeated the address. He seemed to himself to 
 
326 THE ANSWERER 
 
 whisper it, but the young man beside him, soothed by 
 morphia, caught or thought he caught the repetition satis- 
 factorily. He said, " That's . . . correct " ; the lids 
 dropped gently over his eyes, and remained there, as if 
 curtaining the placid flow of his thoughts. . . . 
 
 With the still unfolded letter in his hand, Walt sat and 
 gave no outward evidence of a frightful struggle within him. 
 Should he add a few words on this letter which might be 
 read by this boy's sister? Oh, Floride! ... oh, how piti- 
 ful! ... he remembered her own wrung words of anguished 
 acceptiveness: 
 
 " II jaut . . .il jaut . . .. souffrir." 
 
 The surprising, deep vibrancy of her voice in pronounc- 
 ing the word " suffer." One had to suffer. . . . 
 
 " It is my turn to suffer," he whispered to himself. Ah! 
 let me suffer; let me not throw off any of it on her. 
 
 He folded the letter; moistened the flap of the envelope; 
 sealed. His glance, as he rose to go, fell for one last in- 
 stant on that only living relative of Floride when he had 
 known her — ^how many years ago? Fifteen. And she had 
 been lonely, then. Fifteen years. Now she loses this boy. 
 But perhaps she has lost the capacity any longer to suffer. 
 . . . Floride t 
 
 12 
 
 The young brother of Floride Dumouriez, after lingering 
 under heavy dosage of morphia for three da}^, died with- 
 out ever again regaining the lucid clearness of mind which 
 might have permitted him to answer the questions Walt 
 yearned to ask him. Yearned to ask, yet dreaded to ask; 
 
THE ANSWERER 327 
 
 would certainly have asked though assured that the answers 
 could yield him nothing. It is not certain, thought Walt, 
 I should feel anything, no matter what he could tell me. 
 . . . The strong river of feeling scours continually new 
 channels; deserts the old ones and never returns to them; 
 and now all the rush of my love spreads itself out over 
 the wide plain of these thousands who are hurt and dying. 
 In its tiniest ripple, it would creep out and reach them 
 all. ... 
 
 For better, for worse (though who shall pronounce what 
 is better and what is worse?) I am not as other men and 
 women. Something there is in me which prevents a final 
 concentration of feeling. I guess the true channel was ob- 
 structed, fatally snagged; I guess that could I at tweilty- 
 one have had the love of Esther Terry, all would have 
 been different. Denied a sufficient outlet, the river in 
 me has traveled subterraneously jetting up in places far 
 apart and expending itself on objects great and little. It 
 has watered the roots of things, it has even tried to moisten 
 every inch of a continent and manifest itself to every in- 
 habitant of These States; it has grown leaves of grass. 
 
 But of the effect on individual lives I am not so sure. 
 To whom can I point and say: He owes me something? 
 Or: She owes me something? Look back to those early 
 Long Island days and ask if the boy Joel Skidmore owed 
 me anything or the boy Selah Mulford. What had I to 
 do with Joel compared with his Jenny, or with Selah com- 
 pared with his Sarah? I guess it is too little for any com- 
 parative reckoning — a spark of feeling, not anything beyond 
 the spark. I served them no more than the chance words, 
 
328 THE ANSWERER 
 
 or maybe the preordained words, of Herman Melville and 
 Margaret Fuller served me. Poor Joel, killed in the Mex- 
 ican War! and poor Selah, dead at first Bull Run! Poor? 
 A foolish, a wicked word; they were not poor; it is I who 
 have been secretly poor. To be poor is to have riches 
 and to be denied the squandering of them, the lavishing 
 forth of them on a supremely-loved other person, to have to 
 fling them chancily all about, seed wasted on stony acres. 
 . . . Melville, whom I heard utter the bitterness of one 
 with the cup of frustration pressed to his lips, has lived 
 and lives yet to enjoy satisfactions rich and deep. These 
 satisfactions, or ones yet greater, Margaret Fuller also 
 knew, she and her young lover-husband, in death not parted. 
 How well I remember her moving letter to her brother 
 Eugene, which I read in New Orleans! How, oh, how 
 much I would give to have known Margaret then and 
 thereafter! To have been with her in the Roman hospi- 
 tals, to have observed her in the rustic village of Rieti with 
 the child in her arms, to have seen her, if only from the 
 bleak shore, when she met death in that shipwreck off 
 Long Island . . . my own Paumanok, sounding sea and 
 white sands and mutable sky. " The life of thought ... 
 and the life of action." 
 
 Well, I have exchanged the life of thought for the life 
 of action, have I not? Or perhaps it is that I now lead 
 parallel lives. But if I had to choose, knowing what I 
 know now, I would be the wound-dresser at the sacrifice 
 of being the poet. The only reality, to such souls as Mar- 
 garet Fuller and myself and certain others, is in what we 
 feel. That which excites our feeling is real — or rather, 
 
THE ANSWERER 329 
 
 the feeling is real and therefore the thing which causes it. 
 And so I say: No reality approaches this ministration to 
 the sick and dying. No reality except one . . . long ago 
 . . . lost. 
 
 Lost? No! No! I clutch it with my hands, lash it 
 fast with my heartstrings; have never lost, can never . . . 
 lose or loose it. Esther! You were some part of me; 
 flesh and blood and spirit; a caress that was also a brand- 
 ing; a kiss that was also a sword; an embrace ... I feel 
 yet; a look which, like the lilac, flowers forever. 
 
 Dear madam, Walt began on a fresh sheet of paper, after 
 spoiling his first trial. No doubt you and Peter's friends 
 have heard the sad fact of his death in hospital here, through 
 his uncle, or the lady from Cincinnati, who took his things. 
 (/ have not seen them, only heard of them visiting Peter.) 
 I will write you a few lines — as a casual friend that sat by 
 his death-bed. Your son. Corporal Peter A. Jackson, was 
 wounded at Chancellor sville May 1, 1863 — the wound was 
 in the left knee, pretty bad. He was sent up to Washingtbn, 
 was receiv'd in ward C, Armory-square hospital, May 8th — 
 the wound became worse, and on the 13th of May the leg 
 was amputated a little above the knee — the operation was 
 perform'd by Dr. Bliss, one of the best surgeons in the army 
 — he did the whole operation himself — there was a good 
 deal of bad matter gather'd — the bullet was found in the 
 knee. For a couple of weeks afterwards Peter was doing 
 pretty well. I visited and sat by him frequently, as he was 
 fond of having me. The last ten or twelve days of May I 
 
330 THE ANSWERER 
 
 saiv that his case was critical. He previously had somd 
 fever, with cold spells. The last week in May he was rmich 
 of the time flighty — but always mild and gentle. He died 
 first of June. The actual came of death was pyemia (the 
 absorption of the matter in the system instead of its dis- 
 charge). Peter, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in 
 surgical treatment, nursing, etc. He had watches much of 
 the time. He was so good and well-behaved and affection- 
 ate, I myself liked him very much. I was in the habit of 
 coming in afternoons and sitting by him, and soothing him, 
 and he liked to have me — liked to put his arm out and lay 
 his hand on my knee — would keep it so a long while. To- 
 ward the last he was more restless and flighty at night — ; 
 often fancied himself with his regiment — by his talk some- 
 times seem'd as if his feelings were hurt by being blamed 
 by his officers for something he was entirely innocent of — 
 said, " I never in my life was thought capable of such dj 
 thing, and never was." At other times he would fancy him- 
 self talking as it seem'd to children or such like, his rela- 
 tives I suppose, and giving them good advice; would talk 
 to them a long while.. All the time he was out of his head 
 not one single bad word or idea escaped him. It was re- 
 mark'd that many a man's conversation in his senses was 
 not half as good as Peter's delirium. He seem'd quite will- 
 ing to die — he had become very weak and had suffer'd a good 
 deal, and was perfectly resign'd, poor boy. I do not know 
 Ms past life, but I feel as if it must have been good. At 
 any rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying cir- 
 cumstances, with a painful wound, and among strangers, I 
 can say that he behaved so brave, so composed, and so sweet 
 
THE ANSWERER 331 
 
 and affectionate, it could not be surpass'd. And now like 
 many other noble and good men, after serving his country as^ 
 a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at the very outset 
 in her service. Such things are gloomy — yet there is a text, 
 " God doeth all things well " — the meaning of which, after 
 due time, appears to the soul. 
 
 I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, 
 about your son, from one who was with him at the last, might 
 be worth while — for I loved the young man, though I but 
 saw him immediately to lose him. I am merely a friend 
 visiting the hospitals occasionally to cheer the wounded and 
 sick. W. W. 
 
 On his way to mail this letter Walt exchanged, as was 
 becoming their habit, cordial bows with a man dressed in 
 black (somewhat rusty and dusty black) who rode an easy- 
 going gray horse and was escorted by cavalrymen in yellow- 
 striped tunics. The man's face, of a dark brown, had lines 
 deeply cut and the eyes, though the expression was latent 
 only, seemed to Walt always to hold a tragical sadness. In 
 subtlety, in indirectness, in powerful reticence and reticent 
 power, the face of Abraham Lincoln surpassed any coun- 
 tenance Walt had ever seen — and I have studied faces if I 
 have studied anything, he reflected. None of the portraits of 
 him has caught the underlying character of these lineaments. 
 . . . Can I read them? I would give all I have to read 
 them . . . and some day, God willing, I shall. . . . 
 
 The splendor of that May of '63, bringing him to four- 
 and-forty amid a spread of human havoc that began to seem 
 
332 THE ANSWERER 
 
 perpetual, had pressed so hard upon Walt as to cause him, 
 for the first time in years, definite physical distress of a 
 type more than transitory. His friends — O'Connor, Bur- 
 roughs, Hay: the two Johns and the one William — yrer^ 
 led to utter their several remonstrances. It was this inces- 
 sant ministry to the wounded and dying, of course; and if 
 Walt were not more reasonable he would suffer an ultimate 
 breakdown. 
 
 "Especially," O'Connor harangued him, "you mustn't 
 help in dressing these bad, these gangrened hurts! Will you 
 please bear in mind, Walt, you are doing what the physi- 
 cians and nurses cannot do? and the only result of doing ^ 
 their work will be a disability preventing you from doing 
 your own? " 
 
 " ' All things had to be done by Caesar,' " murmured Hay. 
 " Who do you think you are, Walt, anyway? Oh, I know! " 
 He quoted Walt's own line: " / am he bringing help for the 
 sick as they pant on their backs." 
 
 Said Burroughs: "To think, Walt, that you wrote that 
 over eight years ago! " 
 
 " Yes," added O'Connor, " and he also wrote, over eight 
 years ago, these lines immediately preceding: 
 
 ' To any one dying — thither I speed, and twist the knob of the 
 door; 
 Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed; 
 Let the physician and the priest go home. 
 
 I seize the descending man, and raise him with resistless will. 
 
 O despairer, here is my neck; 
 
 By God! you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight 
 upon me. 
 
THE ANSWERER 333 
 
 / dilate you with tremendous breath — I buoy you up; 
 Every room of the house do I fill with an armd force. 
 Lovers of me, bafflers of graves." 
 
 Into the recitation O'Connor put all the surprising natural 
 mimetic gift of his voice and the resistless ardor of his tem- 
 perament. At the close, he broke down; tears streamed 
 from his fine eyes and he said: 
 
 " Little Philip ... my little son . , ." 
 
 15 
 
 Fifth Month had passed; Walt was now forty-four. Sixth 
 Month was closing and the last of spring's lilacs had per- 
 ished, the roses, white tand dark-stained red were blossom- 
 ing, when the poet and the President, through the ingenuity 
 of young Hay, had their first meeting. Their first meeting; 
 let it be said, rather, the first handclasp and exchange of 
 words face to face. 
 
 The young secretary noiselessly closed the double doors 
 behind them at the White House, taking himself from the 
 room and barring their solitude from intrusion. Mr. Lin- 
 coln, who had been sitting at a table with a finger pressing 
 upon a map, unjointed himself with alertness and advanced 
 toward the broader-shouldered, clear-faced, equally-bearded 
 man whom Hay had just ushered in. The President ex- 
 tended his hand; Walt took it, and they gripped each other 
 heartily. Mr. Lincoln said: 
 
 " First time I had a good look at you, Mr. Whitman, I 
 said to the person I was talking with: 'Well, he looks like 
 a man.^ " 
 
 This in a voice of quiet heartiness with a special timbre. 
 
334 THE ANSWERER 
 
 Walt thought: His raciness, tang, is in the voice, after all, 
 like the juice of a good apple; 'tisn't in any accent or pecu- 
 liar words. 
 
 " My first sight of you, Mr. President, was when you 
 came to New York in February, '6i ; must have been about 
 the 1 8th or 19th. You got out of a barouche, paused on the 
 sidewalk and looked upward at the fagade of the Astor 
 House, unkinked your arms and legs with a relieving stretch 
 and then looked out, slowly and good-humoredly over that 
 vast, silent crowd of people. I'll never forget that. I re- 
 member, as a small child, seeing Lafayette in that neighbor- 
 hood in 1825. I had also seen New York welcome Andrew 
 Jackson, Clay, Webster, Kossuth of Hungary, the Prince 
 of Wales — a dozen or more celebres — and each of them with 
 a noise like Niagara. But this! You and those thousands, 
 eyeing each other with an unconcealed curiosity — in silence, 
 in a blend of excitement and doubt. I wondered how you 
 must feel; you seemed at ease; yet I am sure, for a few 
 seconds, the thousands held their breath. It lasted only a 
 minute and then the comedy, almost farce of it, mixed with 
 an indescribable feeling of drama, of verging tragedy, passed. 
 You walked with moderate pace up the steps, passed under 
 the portico, entered the hotel." 
 
 " Yes," responded Abraham Lincoln, " they suspended 
 judgment on me, as Tim Modders did on his newly-acquired 
 mule. You have more spread than I, Mr. Whitman; we'll 
 see who's tallest." They measured, then, standing back to 
 back, a full-length mirror against the wall giving the ver- 
 dict to the tail of Mr. Lincoln's eye. 
 
 " I overtop you by close on three inches. Now, that's 
 
THE ANSWERER 335 
 
 very satisfactory. Hay tells me you have some Holland 
 blood, which runs to breadth. I think I ought to tell you 
 that you are no stranger to me. When your book first came 
 out, when Leaves of Grass appeared in '55, my law partner 
 in Springfield, Herndon, got hold of a copy and left it lying 
 on the office table. Rankin and tiie other boys in the office 
 had been reading it some and one day I heard them discuss- 
 ing the poems. I guess likely they thought I didn't hear 
 them, or wasn't paying attention. Well, their talk would 
 have amused you. They did or they did not allow your 
 stuff to be poetry, to begin with, and they didn't allow each 
 other's views at all, to end with. Some criticized particular 
 lines; from that they fell to finding fault with each other's 
 literary taste in general and totally rejecting each other's 
 moral character. To hear them, after about half an hour, 
 you'd have been forced to the conclusion the world must 
 stop until their differences were somehow composed. . . . 
 But it was they who stopped, finally, and not this planet in 
 its revolutions. One or two went out on errands and the 
 others fell to work. I thought this a good opportunity to 
 look into the source of so much wrangling; we hadn't had so 
 much disagreement in that office in my memory; I was anx- 
 ious to judge for myself whether you were as profound as 
 Shakespeare or as outspoken as the Bible or as funny as 
 Artemus Ward." 
 
 " Were you terribly disappointed, Mr. President? " 
 
 "No, I wasn't. You were nearer Shakespeare, to my 
 
 mind, than Mr. Emerson was arriving and your outspoken- 
 
 nras didn't bother me very much more than parts of the 
 
 Song of Solomon. I missed a kinship to Artemus Ward but 
 
336 THE ANSWERER 
 
 didn't feel uncomfortable over it; if all men are brothers, 
 what's the use lamenting the absence of the family harelip 
 in second cousins? After I'd browsed in your book some 
 time I turned back to the beginning and commenced read- 
 ing aloud; I believe I can even now recall the opening lines: 
 
 / celebrate myself. 
 
 And what I assume you shall assume, 
 
 For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 
 
 Yes, those were the words; but they needed all that followed 
 to make them plain. The boys seemed surprised when I 
 commenced reading aloud; I suppose because they were 
 used to hearing me read out only newspaper extracts, -gen- 
 erally political in character. Herndon and Bateman, who 
 had taken part in the argumentation over the book but had 
 then gone back to their offices, came in and listened. Sev- 
 eral spoke up at the close to the effect that, as I read it, the 
 book seemed to them much more like poetry — different from 
 the usual thing but decidedly alive and here and there, at 
 least, quite beautiful." 
 
 " Tell me frankly, Mr. President, your own feeling as 
 expressed at the time — if you will." 
 
 "Almost unqualifiedly favorable; I thought a few of the 
 words and phrases doubtful, not because there should be 
 any objection to calling a spade a spade but because it is 
 sometimes more forceful, as emphasizing its use, to call the 
 spade an implement. It may happily chance, now and again, 
 that the truest and therefore the most poetic expression of 
 a thought will also be an expression less likely to offend the 
 literal-minded. But I believe you made some changes after- 
 ward? " 
 
THE ANSWERER 337 
 
 " A few, but only for the reason you speak of. Sweeping 
 changes seemed to me to involve a denial, a recantation, fun- 
 damentally dishonest. When Emerson thrashed it out with 
 me, though I couldn't answer him, I felt I could retract 
 nothing; for all that, I continue to make alterations and 
 shall keep on making them, doubtless, as long as I live — ad- 
 ditions, too, as well as excisions." 
 
 " You change your mind; well, so do I, and I don't think 
 much of the man who isn't wiser to-day than he was yester- 
 day. To finish the tale of our first encounter: After I had 
 stopped reading we had another discussion in the Spring- 
 field office — a little more temperate, I think. The others 
 asked me what I found in you, and my answer was that, 
 first off, what I didn't find in you mattered. I didn't find 
 any cheap, base thoughts; I didn't find somebody else's 
 thoughts in hand-me-down phrases. When I considered 
 what I did find, I had to report: Manliness, frankness, toler- 
 ance and the strong, natural impulses of youth and man- 
 hood; all these I liked. I liked not less the mingling of ab- 
 stract ideas and natural objects, for a man ought to be able 
 to make his mind and his senses work together with the 
 aptitude of his two hands. You took your comparisons 
 from the fields and sky and the faces of men and women 
 and from our common body; this pleased me and wonder- 
 fully freshened me by making those usual sights mean more 
 than they had before. I thought also you found, oftener 
 than not, words that were sponge-like, absorbing the rich 
 sap of your feeling and allowing it readily to be squeezed, 
 out again." 
 _" My book has had a reader! " 
 
338 THE ANSWERER 
 
 "Herndon's copy narrowly escaped perishing half-read. 
 I took it home that night. . . . When, in the morning, I 
 laid it down on Bateman's table, it was impossible to for- 
 bear telling him I had barely saved it from being purified in 
 fire by the women." 
 
 The President smiled, in the way he had, sometimes, of 
 smiling without seeming to; a whimsical gleam was advanced 
 for a moment to the front of the eyes under the deep pro- 
 scenium arch of the forehead; for a trifle high comedy held 
 the stage customarily given to a half-disclosed drama of re- 
 flective sadness. The ill-nourished black hair which, to 
 please a capricious little girl, he had allowed to mutilate a 
 face of tenderly-graven dignity and beauty, left to inference 
 whether in such flashes the plowed cheeks turned new fur- 
 rows or remained soberly inflexible. But Walt's own eyes 
 regarded without disfavor the poorly-fitting drapery of 
 whisker. ... He said: 
 
 " I have lately had one or two letters from women who 
 grasped essential meanings; realized no offense was meant, 
 and took none." 
 
 " Such women there will increasingly be. But I meant, 
 Mr. Whitman, to wind up only by adding that at my re- 
 quest Herndon left your book on the office table and there- 
 after, time and again, as I was entering or about to leave, n^r 
 eye falling on the volume I would pick it up and find my- 
 self soon caught in the firm clutch of your poems . . . they 
 and my mood would interweave until I would have been 
 hard put to it to tell what was yours, what mine, believ- 
 ingly, on the subjects we dwelt on. It always ended with 
 my reading some passage aloud; and though I seldom found 
 
THE ANSWERER 339 
 
 any of the others to agree with me, yet they liked you more 
 and more, I think. Now I have talked enough about my- 
 self." 
 
 " Yourself! » 
 
 "Well, ourself, then! I want particularly to hear about 
 you and your visits to the wounded men." 
 
 A gentle rap was followed immediately by the opening of 
 the folding doors. John Hay stood framed between them. 
 His blond boy's face ejdiibited two spots of high color. He 
 spoke to the President. 
 
 " Sir, Meade is fighting Lee at Gettysburg." 
 
 Mr. Lincoln changed instantaneously. He seized and 
 pressed Walt's hand. 
 
 " You must come again in a day or two and tell me. God 
 speed you! " 
 
 He returned to the table and the map. The wound- 
 dresser, passing out, heard that high-pitched yet pleasant 
 voice calling: 
 
 "Hay! Will you send to Stanton for a detail of the 
 ground? The scale here isn't large enough." 
 
 16 
 
 Walt went forth from his talk with Abraham Lincoln 
 in a mood more exalted than he had felt for months or years; 
 there has been nothing like it, he told himself, in my 
 life since '55 and my book's horning. ... If I felt I were 
 not to see him again, a depression such as I have rarely 
 known would fall upon me; he is so patently the man of my 
 ideal and more even than I have been able to idealize; he is 
 a transcension of America, shapen for these fluxing hours 
 
340 THE ANSWERER 
 
 and days, and we may go for another century patiently mold- 
 ing ourselves to his grand, large-contoured character and 
 need no more spacious model. ... Do I declare this be- 
 cause he was among those first few to read my book and 
 embrace it? If that were my vanity, might I be, damned 
 to the littleness of my puffed-up contentment. No, I de^ 
 clare this because the man face to face and eye to eye, in 
 closest scrutiny and uninterrupted audience, signally con- 
 firms the impression derived from his public words and 
 acts. 
 
 What that impression is, in anything like totality, I shall 
 not find it easy to say to myself; yet I must manage that 
 not only but must somehow convey the correct impression 
 to others. Nor will it be excused me, nor very greatly ex- 
 tenuated, if I fail. If I am a poet, then I am a prophet; 
 if I or any other would prophesy, he must — What must 
 he? 
 
 Milton stated as his object: To justify the ways of God 
 to man; but that was not the rock on which Christ built His 
 church that the gates of hell should not prevail against. 
 Rather is it a quicksand in which through repeated cen- 
 turies the theologians have mired themselves; on the one 
 hand asserting that God's way remained a mystery forever 
 and on the other constantly attempting to explain God's 
 purposes. The object which Milton truly set for himself 
 he actually misconceived. He was, contrariwise, attempt- 
 ing to justify the ways of man (that is, the mind of man) to 
 God, by showing how loftily our mortal mind could conceive 
 of God's purposes and how, without understanding them, our 
 human mind could accept them, to its own magnification. 
 
THE ANSWERER 341 
 
 . . . Collect, deploying thoughts of mine; assemble and 
 order yourselves for the future sure and powerful execution 
 of a formidably difficult design! (My poor brain yet buzzes 
 and sings with the wealth and force of my impression. How 
 recondite, farreaching and delicate is that fresh impression; 
 still not the faintest traced line of it can be spared.) 
 
 This, then, has been the role of the greatest poets and 
 prophets (the two are interchangeable; they foretell the fu- 
 ture simply to the extent they reveal the present or rekindle 
 the past): To show the greatness, magnitude of Man in 
 his relation to the Universe; and this magnitude can be 
 shown in two ways only, first, by the sweep of his under- 
 standing, and second, by the largeness of his acceptance of 
 that which he cannot understand. The poet-prophet, or 
 prophet-poet, perpetually, joyously confronts two tasks. 
 The first is the task of chanting Man's loftiest conceptions 
 and the second is the task of chanting Man's sublime ac- 
 ceptation. . . . Out of the fusion of these purposes arises 
 his last achievement, the one he can approach but indirectly; 
 namely, showing that in the very act of acceptation, in the 
 very moment of confessing non-understanding, Man most 
 truly understands. . . . 
 
 Is this mystical? but the universe is mystical and I, Walt 
 Whitman, am supremely a mystic; not less so than the great 
 dead. For greatness or littleness are not in the realm of 
 the mystic who knows only the union of the pure heart and 
 the fierce intention; to conscience he allows a directive sway, 
 a firm hand on the reins of his yoke-fellows, but he knows 
 full well the wreck piled up if conscience drives with whip 
 in hand. What heart and soul do not wilfully accomplish, 
 
342 THE ANSWERER 
 
 conscience shall not whip out of them; lest her lash (the 
 Three Furies, twined) take right of way from the hearts 
 and souls of others and drive, in a puritan, a fanatical gal- 
 lopade, straight to destruction. , . , 
 
 Where Milton and Dante architectured single poems, I 
 am building a book with the same poetic-prophetic inten- 
 tion. My book is not complete (I may never be able to 
 complete it) ; but this I know, it must pay tribute to Abra- 
 ham Lincoln. By showing the loftiness of his conceptions, I 
 will show the altitude attainable by men in their concep- 
 tions; by showing the immensity of his acceptance, I will 
 show how grandly men may accept. . . . Perhaps, achievipg 
 these or partially achieving these, I may show that in ac- 
 ceptation he somehow imderstood . . . and is to be imder- 
 stood. 
 
 . . , The burst of music came from the mounted band 
 heading a large cavalry detachment; bugles, drums and cym- 
 bals played mad martial airs. Sabers clanked, the hoofs of 
 horses made an electric tramping on the pavement; young, 
 healthy, strong men sat erectly with bright, impassive faces 
 (their bodies rigid yet resilient). Walt saw them and a 
 salvo within him saluted the symbol they carried. 
 
 Raise the mighty mother mistress. 
 Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress, 
 
 {bend your heads all.) 
 Raise the fang'd and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon'd 
 mistress. 
 Pioneers! O pioneers! 
 
 He hastened on to his lodgings, went without delay to 
 his room and seated himself at the table, snatching sheets 
 of paper. 
 
THE ANSWERER 343 
 
 Come, my tan-faced children, 
 Follow well in order, get your weapons ready; . . , 
 Swift! to the head of the army! — swifti spring to your places. 
 
 Pioneers! O pioneersl 
 
 The alpha and the omega of a poem were here, with one of 
 the intervening stanzas. ... He worked steadily for three 
 hours, at the end of which he was not finished but had, at 
 least, perfected this: 
 
 Have the elder races halted? 
 Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied, over there beyond 
 
 the seas? 
 We take up the task eternal, and the burden, and the lesson. 
 
 Pioneers! O pioneersl 
 
 For so I read the faces of those young men, he thought. 
 ... The feet of the young men. ... I must refresh my- 
 self and go forth among the young men, Father Abraham's 
 tan-faced children. . . . 
 
 Walt went through the hospital slowly that evening, sit- 
 ting by a half-dozen bedsides and talking mostly of the 
 memorable visit he had paid that afternoon; a little of the 
 effect upon him of those cavalrymen riding into Washing- 
 ton out of the sunset, children of the West which was Amer- 
 ica. . . . The men listened gravely to his description of Mr. 
 Lincoln's face and voice and to each Walt told the Presi- 
 dent's request to know about them — about them as well as 
 about their comrades xmwounded and fighting. Of the main 
 part of the President's discourse Walt said nothing. I am 
 not a poet to these boys, he had long since instructed him- 
 self, but simply a friend and a helper. . , , 
 
344 THE ANSWERER 
 
 In one ward a Catholic priest was administering the rite 
 of extreme unction to a dying soldier; it was not the first 
 time Walt had witnessed this scene, yet he foimd its im- 
 pressiveness strengthened with each observation. . . . Have 
 I made light of ceremonials, any place? he interrogated him- 
 self; and though unable to recollect distinctly such a passage 
 he took a resolution to make amends if he should find one. 
 For what is a rite of any sort, Walt, but the demand for 
 utterance? the " outer and visible sign of an inner and 
 spiritual grace? " and who shall say that the virtue which 
 has once bodied itself forth in the sign may not flow back 
 from the sign into an aching and empty spirit? 
 
 A sound from the bedside by which he was sitting put a 
 stop to the brief meditation. 
 
 " What is it, Oscar? " 
 
 " Please, Walt, read me a bit from the Bible, a chapter 
 from the New Testament." 
 
 Walt felt in his pocket. 
 
 " What passage wotild you like, Oscar? " 
 
 "You . . . choose." 
 
 The Book happening to open at the close of one of the 
 Gospels, Walt read the chapters describing the last hours of 
 Christ and the scenes attending the Crucifixion. Poor, 
 wasted Oscar Wilber then asked for the succeeding chapter, 
 how Christ rose again. Walt read with careful slowness so 
 that the much-enfeebled boy, listening with strained at- 
 tention, might miss nothing. 
 
 " Are you pleased with that, Oscar? " 
 
 " Oh, yes! " He was in tears, but repeated, very ear- 
 
THE ANSWERER 345 
 
 nestly: "Yes! Would you tell me: Do you enjoy reli- 
 gion? " 
 
 " Perhaps not, my dear, in the way you mean . , . and 
 yet, maybe 'tis the same thing," 
 
 " It is my chief reliance." 
 
 He fell silent; dabbed at his eyes a little, and finally 
 said: 
 
 " I somehow have no fear of death." 
 
 " Why, Oscar, don't you think you will get well? " Walt 
 put a special encouragement into his tone. 
 
 " I may, but it is not probable." 
 
 Walt was silent, feeling the boy to be even then the same 
 as dying. A bad, bad wound; fetid; and settled diarrhea. 
 . . . Yet he behaved very manly and affectionate. 
 
 Across the aisle the priest of God dipped his thumb in 
 the oil. 
 
 Suddenly bending over the dying boy, Walt kissed him. 
 The thinned arms reached up and clasped him about the 
 neck, drew him down, and the boy's lips returned the kiss 
 fourfold. . . . 
 
 18 
 
 " That is how they meet death, Mr. Lincoln," 'said Walt, 
 as he finished a simple narrative of things seen with the 
 behavior of Oscar Wilber. " If death ended all, they could 
 not meet death better." 
 
 The President's distress had been so sharp and so evident 
 , that Walt had several times desisted, saying: 
 
346 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " You have enough to sustain, Mr. Lincoln, without hear- 
 ing these incidents." 
 
 " I am eager to hear them," was the unhesitating answer. 
 "I have found, Mr. Whitman, that knowledge painfully 
 come by teaches me personally better than any other. I 
 think it is well to know how to die since few of us live lives 
 that cannot be redeemed by the manner of their closing." 
 Again, when Walt would have stopped the recital, he was 
 told: " Please keep on." A third time the President, con- 
 trolling a sob, motioned him to continue. At Walt's words: 
 " If death ended all, they could not meet death better," Mr. 
 Lincoln took his hand, held it a moment and then let it go 
 with the words: " Thank you. . . ." 
 
 The pause was broken by the repetition, in Mr. Lincoln's 
 tenderest voice, of the words: " If death ended all . . ." 
 And after a shorter interval, the President re-commenced 
 with: 
 
 " I coax Hay to read to me sometimes. Usually a passage 
 of Shakespeare, or a whole act or particular scenes. Since 
 your call the other day and our talk, I have had him read 
 me once or twice from your book. These concluding lines 
 of the 'SS edition stay with me: 
 
 Great is life . . . and real and mystical . . . wherever and who- 
 ever, 
 
 Great is death . . . Sure as life holds all parts together, death 
 holds all parts together; 
 
 Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, death 
 is great as life. 
 
 I believe that, Mr. Whitman; yes, I believe! . . . Tell me, 
 do you put faith in dreams? " 
 
THE ANSWERER 347 
 
 " One dream I had, years ago, has lately explained itself 
 to me in terms of America at war." 
 
 " One dream I have had, too, but recurrently and always 
 presaging good news. It has come to mean to me the an- 
 nunciation of victory. I had it before Antietam and before 
 Murfreesbcrough and before Gettysburg, just terminated. 
 Last night I was visited with it again; I greatly hope this 
 was no idle mirage of the nights before; to look for another 
 success so soon seems more than we can dare. But perhaps 
 you will be curious to know the dream itself. In it I find 
 myself sailing on a ship of strange build. The ship herself 
 I cannot describe for I am never able to make out her lines 
 distinctly; but I suppose an interior person such as I am 
 would be incapable of telling wherein the difference from 
 other vessels lay. But no matter; she is always the same, 
 in spite of her pronounced oddity. And she bears me with 
 great speed toward a dark and undefined shore. Now that 
 is the whole of it; what would you make of the meaning? " 
 
 " Might not the ship be a symbol of the Union? " 
 
 "No, I shouldn't venture to take so great a conceit to 
 explain the business, Mr. Whitman. . . . After all, this is 
 a trifle. Only the coincidence of the dream with our suc- 
 cesses interests me; makes me hope, since last night's fresh 
 experience of it — Gettysburg has been terribly costly; 
 we have lost somewhere around 23,000 men out of 93,000; 
 Lee and Longstreet have had equal losses from a total force 
 of just under 80,000 ; so the sacrifice of Antietam has been 
 doubled. I pray to more purpose! If Meade will but fol- 
 low up Lee with boldness, as McClellan ought to have done 
 and did not. . . ." 
 
348 THE ANSWERER 
 
 " The victory, I take it, is incomplete in your judgment? " 
 " My judgment borrows heavily from my hopes, Mr. 
 Whitman; too heavily, it may be. Gettysburg is our great- 
 est victory so far; but only in the negative sense of the dan- 
 ger from which it has freed us. Lee's planned invasion of 
 the North was this time not aimed at Washington but at 
 industrial Pennsylvania, at our forge, our smithy, without 
 which we could not equip or weapon our armies. The threat 
 has been annulled and the menace removed. What I could 
 wish with all my heart to see is the extermination of any 
 such menace in the future. We ought not to be content to 
 repel Lee; we ought to put him out of the fighting; to dis-- 
 able him effectually should be our sole cherished objective. 
 I have made it clear to General Meade, I think, how anxious 
 a faith I place in him to do that ; he must not let Lee recross 
 the Potomac; he must not let Lee get clean away! " 
 
 Walt had picked up a book lying on the table. The Presi- 
 dent, observing this, exchanged the insistent cares of the 
 hour for a refreshment of recollection. " That is a volume 
 sent me a while ago by James H. Hackett. I am sorry to 
 add that I have not got around to acknowledging its receipt. 
 When I do so I must explain that for one of my age I have 
 seen very little of the drama. Mr. Hackett, last winter, was 
 my first sight of Falstaff; I would give something to see him 
 again in the role. To be honest, there are plays of Shake- 
 speare's I have never read; certain ones I suppose I have 
 read as frequently as any unprofessional reader, among thefti 
 Lear, Richard III., Henry VIII., Hamlet, and espe- 
 cially Macbeth. I think Macbeth wonderful; nothing 
 to me quite equals it. No doubt it is a defect in my taste, 
 
THE ANSWERER 349 
 
 but in Hamlet I think the King's soliloquy commencing 
 ' O, my offense is rank,' surpasses the favorite ' To be or not 
 to be.' " He quoted, with slow, appreciative relish. 
 " ' There is no shufHing, there the action lies in his true na- 
 ture.' " 
 
 Any allusion to the drama was enough to kindle Walt; he 
 spoke with vivid memory and enthusiasm of plays and play- 
 ers, chiefly those who, fifteen to twenty-five years earlier^ 
 had made luminous New York's Bowery. With an effort 
 Walt finally gave over a favorite topic, and said: 
 
 " Mr. President, I had it in mind to ask you to-day, in 
 case you have given it any thought or would be willing to 
 repose in me any confidence on the subject, what your pres- 
 ent feeling is regarding the policy to be pursued toward the 
 South in the event of a final victory for the Union? Briefly, 
 how would you treat them? " 
 
 " Treat them? " was the response in a voice of warmth 
 and extraordinary sweetness. " Mr. Whitman, I would treat 
 them as though they had never drawn away." 
 
 The tears welled up and Walt could not see very plainly; 
 there was a blurring of everything and he found he had not 
 the use of his voice at all. In a manner he could not have 
 explained (yet it seemed almost visual) the uncouth and 
 gangling figure facing him took on a character of transfigura- 
 tion. The sound and gentle sweetness of Abraham Lincoln 
 was fully revealed; could positively be felt like the emana- 
 tion of an abiding force or vital principle — ^which I doubt 
 not it is! Walt's heart cried out within him, fervently and 
 thankfully. ... He finally managed: 
 
 "Would you permit me, Mr. President, to express that 
 
350 THE ANSWERER 
 
 intention — oh, generous! noble! worthy of you! — to some of 
 the rebel wounded? as a small means of reassurance, con- 
 solation? with the plainly-added warning that the Executive 
 may influence but cannot, of course, control the Congress." 
 
 Mr. Lincoln's forehead showed deep vertical lines. 
 
 " As person to person, for the comfort of individuals, I 
 think you may say it. I should be loath to have it miscon- 
 strued. An absolute and unqualified surrender is the in- 
 dispensable preliminary to treating with them at all. . . . 
 But were the surrender before me, that would be my policy. 
 A day will come when, remembering that for which we have 
 fought, the sacredness of the Union, we shall realize that no 
 Union can exist without harmony, and that to secure and 
 perpetuate harmony we must extinguish resentments as you 
 would stamp out the smolder of a creeping fire. May God 
 grant me to see that day! " 
 
 " Mr. President, you have great faith — the sublimest 
 faith of any of us! Beside yours, mine is a very small 
 thing. And yet I have had, have still, my rapt visions of 
 the futmre of America. Can you throw into words your 
 ideas as to the form that future will likeliest take? " 
 
 " It used to be a subject of speculation with me, Mr. Whit- 
 man, but, alas! under the heavy weight of responsibilities I 
 think no more about the future except in terms of the tor- 
 tured present. . . . We have freed the slaves. We did it 
 as a military necessity and thus has been accomplished what 
 was right to be done, as I believe, but not in that way. Un- 
 der Providence, I acted as light was given me; but a gradual 
 emancipation in a peaceful society seemed to me, and yet 
 seems, more merciful to the negro himself. With a sentiment 
 
THE ANSWERER 351 
 
 to enfranchise the black immediately I am not in sympathy; 
 far less do I agree Avith those who find an innate equality 
 of black man and white and would not merely proclaim but 
 enforce it. It was once my destiny to defend against a 
 political opponent, Senator Douglas, the declaration that ' all 
 men are created equal '; but I was at some pains to specify 
 then and I should specify, under like circumstances to-day, 
 that in my opinion, while the authors of that statement in- 
 tended to include all men, they did not intend to declare all 
 men equal in all respects. No one pretends all white men are 
 equals in color, size, intellect or moral or social capacities. 
 But the assertion that ' all men are created, equal ' was fol- 
 lowed by other words in which, with tolerable distinctness, 
 it was stated in what respects all men were deemed equals, 
 namely, equally endowed with ' certain inalienable rights, 
 among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' 
 This our fathers said; this they meant. Their purpose was 
 to safeguard the future; for the assertion was of no prac- 
 tical use or bearing in a struggle for separation from Great 
 Britain. I have only one word of advice for those who are 
 concerned lest the negro fail immediately to secure political 
 and social equality with the white man: Let them watch 
 closely for the maintenance, among both whites and blacks, 
 of the exact equality our fathers specified. Let them do 
 everything in their power to see that to every man and 
 woman, now and henceforth, white or black, security of life, 
 security of personal liberty, and a secure opportunity toward 
 happy pursuits is assured! " 
 
 " Ahl Years back, a friend pointed out to me that with 
 its defeat in the political form, tyranny would reassert itself 
 
352 THE ANSWERER 
 
 in newer, more insidious forms. He foresaw the possibility 
 of a vast system of industrial slavery from which emancipa- 
 tion would be long and difficult, and not possible by any fiat 
 like yours unshackling the negro! " 
 
 " " Your friend saw clearly, Mr. Whitman. There is a 
 power of money in our country which will bear all the 
 vigilance, and I think engage all the strength in grapple, of 
 our equalitarians." 
 
 " I am struck by one thing. You do not see the real 
 American future in terms of territorial expansion, teeming 
 wealth, material riches and prosperity." 
 " God forbid! " 
 
 " I can never express my sense of how right you are. . . ." 
 " The future of America is no more predominantly a ques- 
 tion of lands, goods and chattels than the future of an in- 
 dividual. If we permit the acquisition of territory or wealth 
 to enslave us, what can we hope for beyond the fate of Car- 
 thage or Rome? The health and hardihood of the race, the 
 safening of life, the continual re-assertion of liberty, the 
 study of what constitutes our happiness — only these make a 
 beckoning future on this continent or any other continent. 
 And now I must bid you farewell with an injunction not 
 to be too long in coming again." 
 
 " I shall think of your dream and hope it may not fail 
 you." 
 
 Walt was not down the steps of the White House when 
 the telegraph wires brought the news that Vicksburg had 
 fallen on Saturday. He did not hear of it, however, until 
 that night when newspaper extras were shouted through 
 the streets. Hearing it, on his way to the hospitals, he felt 
 
THE ANSWERER 353 
 
 momentarily dazed by the immensity of this success — no 
 battle, this, but a siege, a victorious campaign. ... In the 
 enfolding darkness under the trees that July evening there 
 rose up before him the mirage of a strangely-molded vessel 
 on the deck of which stood, vd\h sparse, blown hair, a soli- 
 tary voyager. The ship rushed through a cold and spray- 
 less ocean, through multitudinous seas incarnadine whose 
 green became one red. O, fearful Dream! what do you por- 
 tend? and what is the distant shore with people all a-crowd- 
 ing? . . . Here Captain! dear father! . . . It is some dream 
 that on the deck you've fallen cold and dead. . . . 
 
 Something familiar in the boy's face attracted Walt; some- 
 thing arresting; something which slowed the beat of the 
 leart and then allowed a double-beat {t-h-r-o-b . . . 
 th-throb!) in tardy compensation. 
 
 " Hopeless," whispered the nurse. " Not expected to re- 
 cover consciousness. Transferred case from the field hos- 
 pital near Culpepper. We have his father's name and ad- 
 dress, if you want to write." 
 
 "I'll copy it off before I go." 
 
 He stood with fascinated gaze looking down at the youth's 
 face . . . features, coloring, so disturbingly, so almost 
 shockingly familiar. The eyes were closed. At length, with 
 gently retracting lids (no other slightest stir or movement) 
 they were opened and the limpid glance from their gold- 
 flecked irises struck full upon Walt's. 
 
 Recognition. . . . 
 
 He saw the blue irises of her eyes marked just so with 
 
354 THE ANSWERER 
 
 brown and golden; saw the slight roundedness of her shoul- 
 ders that yearned for pillowing on a firm young breast; saw 
 the smooth shapeliness of her forearm made for clasping her 
 lover's bared throat. . . . Saw her coiled, saddle-colored 
 hair amid the blossoming lilacs. Saw . . . 
 
 " Dear boy, has your mother — ? " 
 
 The whole ward was becoming dim; dissolving. 
 
 " I never knew her." Not much more than a whisper. 
 " I was her firstborn; she died giving birth to me." 
 
 (God, if You would but give me to change places with 
 him! God, cannot it somehow be compassed? God, You 
 had a Son; have mercy upon me who have none . . . whose 
 son this lad might have been. O, dear God, at the very 
 smallest spare this child of hers!) 
 
 A faint quiver shook the boy's body; the blue eyes starred 
 with gold and brown remained open, but the light left them. 
 
 " He was going to copy the father's name and address. 
 I've scribbled it all on this slip of paper. Tuck it in his 
 pocket. See? ' David Sayre, Jr., pvt., 51st N. Y. Volun- 
 teers: notify father, D. Sayre, Smithtown, L. I., N. Y.' . . . 
 I never saw old Walt keel over like that before. This work 
 is beginning to tell on him. Better put some stuff on that 
 scratched place on his hand; the case was badly gangrened. 
 Did you call the ambulance? ... All right, then." 
 
 20 
 
 " I observed at once, you were not looking well. Would 
 it be of any avail if yon were to pour it all out to me in 
 
THE ANSWERER 35s 
 
 confidence? Now it may just so be, I can give the relief 
 that comes from having a sympathetic listener. If it will 
 help, tell me, Mr. Whitman— Walt! " 
 
 Mr. Lincoln's caller reached a hand for the back of a 
 chair. 
 
 " You had no business standing! Here. . . ." 
 
 The gaunt President, with a kind of supple, wiry strength 
 in his awkward figure clothed in a rusty, funereal black, 
 hooked one hand under Walt's arm and lowered him to his 
 seat. Then, drawing up another chair, seating himself with 
 back bent forward and large hands on his unaccommodating 
 knees, Mr. Lincoln repeated, in a kind tone: 
 
 " Tell me. ... In your own time. . . ." 
 
 For a few moments the two men sat looking directly at 
 each other, tears issuing from Walt's eyes. The President's 
 own were misted. 
 
 " Mr. Lincoln . . . once there was a woman who loved 
 me and detained me for love of me. It was my lot to find 
 dying here in Washington her young brother — all she had 
 in the world. It was my lot to write his letter to her, for 
 him. . . . There was also and earlier, when I was a youth 
 of twenty-one, a woman I loved. Her I could not have — 
 and yet I think I had something of her love. This I know, 
 Esther Terry had some essential portion of me; you will 
 not ask me to explain what cannot be explained beyond say- 
 ing: I feel our oneness forever. That sacred feeling I have 
 kept . . . and keep. The other night, after a separation 
 of many years, I looked again into her eyes ; and they were 
 the eyes of her son, her firstborn for whom she gave her 
 
356 THE ANSWERER 
 
 life; and he was dying. , , . Myself saw him go to join 
 her. . . . O, Esther! Wife, mother, gliding near with soft 
 feet . . ." 
 
 The paroxysm passed; Abraham Lincoln waited until it 
 had passed to say: 
 
 " There was once something in my own life, known to not 
 many and to no one (I include myself in the ' no one ') 
 with perfect insight except, perhaps, to her . . . and she, 
 too, is dead. At somewhat past your age in that first en- 
 counter, my friend, I had to endure what you endured and 
 tell me of; but it all swooped down on me at once — ^like a 
 great hawk, beak and talons both — for in the space of three 
 days I lost the promise of her as my wife and she died." 
 
 In Walt an easily-aroused sympathy, much magnified 
 by his great admiration of, love for Lincoln, began the hard 
 task of stemming his flooding grief. He was unable to say 
 anything but the President perceived from his eyes his com- 
 plete attention. 
 
 " Her name was Ann Rutledge. Her father kept a store 
 and tavern and boarded me. I was twenty-four or -five. 
 She was such a mite of a little woman, alongside my inches; 
 I guess there was more than a foot's difference. I believe 
 she was rated a beauty by many; but her kindness was what 
 first touched me; you would scarcely understand, Friend 
 Whitman, what a lonely and miserable existence I led in 
 those days. The young man whose homeliness marks him 
 out is likely to have a nervous dread of women, especially 
 young women. I had. When ladies were staying at my 
 boarding house, I victualed myself elsewhere. You see, I 
 was without nice manners, wore distressed clothes, and 
 
THE ANSWERER 357 
 
 ■wasn't used to any comforts, let alone elegancies. There 
 was something wonderfully dainty about Mr. Rutledge's 
 daughter, with her coppery-gold hair. She had blue eyes, 
 too, and the whitest, prettiest skin. Well, I remember 
 chiefly how kind and gentle she was to me, first off." 
 
 The lover of Ann Rutledge shone in the eyes of Abraham 
 Lincoln, curiously dark for eyes of gray. Walt respected 
 the pause of silence. 
 
 " I couldn't tell you all of it, nor anybody. But she had 
 been promised to a young man who had unexpectedly gone 
 back to his home in the East after explaining to her that 
 he'd been passing under another name than was rightfully 
 his. What his account of it was she did not tell me and I 
 never asked; but she was convinced by it as told. She ex- 
 pected him back. 
 
 " When he did not write for some time she thought noth- 
 ing of it, but when at length he did write his letters gave 
 her a good deal of puzzlement and anxiety. Meanwhile her 
 friends, to whom she had been obliged to give the gist of 
 his explanation, were skeptical and kept talking to her. . . . 
 She stoutly defended him, of course, but his absence dragged 
 itself out; the time came when she had nothing to adduce 
 against her friends' arguments and conclusions but her own 
 implicit faith in his Tightness. That was fatally weakened 
 by his behavior in continuing to stay East and affording no 
 satisfactory or comprehensible reasons — in fact, failing after 
 a while to write her at all or to answer her pitiful letters. 
 So she gave him up; and shortly afterward she met me. 
 
 " We were not long promised to marry when she fell seri- 
 ously ill and then demanded to see me privately. You must 
 
3S8 THE ANSWERER 
 
 not suppose she had failed in frankness toward me; I knew 
 all that was essential for me to know about the other man; 
 I was now to know more; I was now to understand that 
 he had killed her. Mr. Whitman, she died of grief, as much 
 as, or more than, anything else! " 
 
 Walt's heart went out to the man in whom this memory, 
 after thirty years and in the midst of crushing outside 
 stresses, kindled such fresh suffering. 
 
 " She had at last, after long silence, after promising her- 
 self to me, received from him a letter completely explaining 
 all circumstances. Briefly they were that he had at home 
 stood accused of a crime of which he was innocent. A mis- 
 taken impulse had led him to assume another name and go 
 West. A warning reached him that he had been traced un- 
 der his disguise; but it also appeared that developments 
 East were tending to clear him of the wrongful charge. He 
 returned, resumed his proper name, and waited hopefully 
 for the proof he was innocent; but something miscarried, it 
 was not forthcoming, and he was tried, convicted and sent 
 to prison. When imprisoned, wishing to conceal this last 
 shock from one who still perfectly believed in him, he ceased 
 to write. Then the once-expected tardily came to pass; 
 new evidence showed his innocence beyond any question, 
 and he was freed from prison after serving just under a 
 year of a five years' sentence. You know how scanty was 
 the flow of news in the '30s and how unlikely it was that in 
 Springfield, Illinois, anything should be heard of a minor 
 trial and its result in Vermont. On being released, the ex- 
 traordinary circumstances caused something to be printed 
 about the affair, I understand, but his joyful letter explain- 
 
THE ANSWERER 359 
 
 ing to her and renewing his claim upon her was the first in- 
 telligence she, or any of us, received. 
 
 " That was the acute cause of her illness, and that was 
 what she called me in, alone, to listen to. I cannot describe 
 what I went through; you will have some idea from your 
 own experience. I finally offered to release her but this 
 seemed only to make her suffering more extreme. It was 
 now plain to her that though she had once loved him, she 
 now loved me; we equally loved her and equally had an 
 honorable claim. The situation was beyond her; she was 
 near crazed with her grief and remorse. ... I cannot tell 
 you about it. . . . Nothing was solved. ... In two days, 
 the fever taking her, she died. . . ." 
 
 Lincoln.'s back went against the back of his chair, his 
 head drooped forward, his large knotted hands gripped and 
 the fingers kneaded the upthrust and awkward knees; after 
 a moment the hands fell to his side but the fingers continued 
 to close and imclose in an irregular, tautened fashion as 
 though the joints were stifily rheumatic; observing, one half- 
 expected him to cry out with the sharp pain of their flexing. 
 But he cried out not at all; the only sound was the sharp 
 intake of breath mastering a convulsive sob. . . . When 
 Walt could speak, he said: 
 
 " I had heard you early had a great grief in your life. 
 How great and how pitiful ... out of my fresh experience 
 and my old, God gives me somewhat to understand." 
 
 " To a few good friends, I owe my life to-day," Lincoln 
 answered. " To Bowline Greene, who bore me away to a 
 secluded house, his own home, and watched me night and 
 day. The thought that the snows and rains fell upon her 
 
36o THE ANSWEREk 
 
 grave filled me with indescribable anguish. As long as two 
 years afterward, serving in the IlHnois Legislature, though I 
 doubtless seemed to others to enjoy life raptiirously, yet 
 when alone I was so overcome by mental depression, I never 
 dared carry even a pocket-knife. . . . The time came when 
 I could look upon her grave without breaking down utterly 
 and confess aloud: ' My heart lies buried there.' But when 
 Greene died and I was expected to speak over his fresh-made 
 grave, I could not do it. Then, long, long afterward, as we 
 measure time when young, the tears ran down my face as 
 I looked at the loam and gravel resting on him who had 
 saved me from myself. ... I made repeated efforts to say 
 something, but at the last could only stride away, sobbing. 
 . . . The effect of that grief, of a melancholy that my friends 
 admitted bordered on insanity, has been permanent upon 
 me. Those who know me well have shown me a forbearance 
 and indulgence I shall never be able to repay. . . ." 
 
 " Forgive me for saying: Yet you are happily-married 
 and a father. . . ." 
 
 " For which I owe an everlasting debt to Joshua Speed. 
 ... I am painfully conscious of my own shortcomings and 
 have much to be thankful for in being granted a degree of 
 domestic happiness beyond my deserts — beyond my limited 
 power to have earned without Mrs. Lincoln's true help." 
 
 " I would give everything," Walt said brokenly, " to be 
 able to utter an equivalent of that." 
 
 " Speed a second time saved me. Greene had saved my 
 life and Speed, by his advice and example, made it possible 
 for me to go some way toward the construction of a reason- 
 
THE ANSWERER 361 
 
 able happiness. In the year following my great loss, in my 
 upset condition, I was involved with a woman slightly older 
 than myself — long since happily married and now living 
 and, I think, feeling friendly toward me. There is no need 
 to speak of her further, as she wisely discovered we were not 
 suited to each other. A year or two passed before I met my 
 wife. We had agreed to marry when I one day wrote a 
 letter to break it off." 
 
 Lincoln hesitated a moment, continuing: 
 
 " I don't know whether you will quite grasp what I mean 
 when I tell you: The prospect of marriage had always 
 filled me with strange perturbation ; the idea, the conception 
 of the married state, was a subject of wonder and dread and 
 anxiety to me in a manner I could not then have explained 
 and cannot even now. In contemplating what, it seemed 
 to me, must be a happiness nothing short of heavenly or a 
 horror not to be painted, I had not always a very good con- 
 trol of myself. In such a mood, at last apparently settled 
 and persistent, I composed this letter and showed it to 
 Speed. 
 
 " He told me, what I saw was true, that if I had the 
 courage of a man I would not write her on such a subject, 
 but see her and speak. This I did. When she cried it 
 seemed natural to kiss and try to comfort her; but it took 
 Speed to point out to me that in so doing I had as good as 
 retracted my words and renewed my promise to marry. 
 
 " But on the first of the year, on New Year's, 1841, I 
 seemed to go utterly to pieces. For weeks afterward it was 
 uncertain to me whether I should die or grow better; my 
 
362 THE ANSWERER 
 
 foreboding was I should not live; my only certainty was, 
 I could not remain as I was; and must either be better or 
 die. 
 
 " The thing which saved me was Speed's own experience, 
 which began shortly with the prospect of marriage for him. 
 Beginning to suffer the searchings and anxieties I had suf- 
 fered — that we had somewhat shared in our nervous dread 
 on the matter — ^he confided in me, as before, and it became 
 my task to reassure him. I had to tell him his painful, re- 
 curring apprehension — that he did not love Fanny as he 
 should — was nonsense; and I had further to prove it non- 
 sense by showing him that as an insufficient lover he could 
 never have courted her. When he thought he had reasoned 
 himself into that, I asked him to consider whether, in fact, 
 he had not found himself unable to reason his way out of it. 
 I asked him to judge what earthly consideration he would 
 take to find her despising him . . . and so, by degrees, it 
 was given me to bring him into an honest perception of the 
 actual _case. I was helped by Fanny's illness fqr a short time 
 — nothing serious. Speed was dreadfully worried; I wrote 
 him his present anxieties ought to banish iorever his doubts 
 as to the truth of his affection; I suspect they did. It was 
 my conviction, expressed in a letter written him a few days 
 after he became Fanny's husband, that all his nervous ter- 
 ror and self-torture would vanish in a few months, leaving 
 him as happy as any man alive. 
 
 " I was right. In less than two months he wrote me that 
 he was far happier than ever he had expected to be. As I 
 well knew his expectations, like my own, were probably ex- 
 travagant, I exclaimed joyfully: 'Enough, dear Lord! ' 
 
THE ANSWERER 363 
 
 For I had long believed it our peculiar misfortune, his and 
 mine, to dream dreams of a felicity exceeding anything that 
 earth could realize. . . . That was in the spring of '42. In 
 the fall I wrote Speed again, somewhat as follows: 
 
 " ' The severe suffering you endured for the six months 
 till your marriage-day, you never tried to hide from me; I 
 understood it well. You have now been the husband of a 
 dear woman about eight months; I know you to be happier 
 than the day you married her, but I want to ask a close 
 question! Are you now in feeling as well as in judgment 
 glad you are married as you are? I think you will pardon 
 from me this question which, from any one else alive, you 
 would very properly not tolerate.' 
 
 " Mr. Whitman, I had his answer which naturally I should 
 have no right to repeat even to you; I must make my own 
 confidences but cannot include another's. You will draw 
 the correct conclusion from the fact that a month after thus 
 writing him I was married." 
 
 The look of imhappiness on Walt's face greatly moved the 
 President. 
 
 " You are thinking," said Lincoln, " that in some such 
 fashion, with the aid of some such friendly example, you 
 might have been able to construct a happiness similar to 
 mine. . . . Walt, it is an every-day sort of happiness, a 
 * working ' happiness as one would say; ' practicable ' is the 
 phrase I think employed on the stage to describe such sets 
 and scene-shifts as are not merely background but can be 
 used — a door you can walk through, a door that is not 
 merely painted on the backdrop, is a 'practicable' door. 
 ... In a world where a good deal is simply painted on the 
 
364 THE ANSWERER 
 
 backdrop, I found a practicable door. That is ray married 
 happiness. . . ." 
 
 " Could it have been mine? Oh, could it have been 
 mine! " An unanswerable question; an unfulfillable wish. 
 
 Walt's last words were: 
 
 " Never think of me without also thinking of her. Think 
 of me as standing outside the whitewashed palings, close to 
 a lilac-bush tall-growing, held by its mastering odor, while 
 her dear figure moves across the dooryard fronting the farm- 
 house. Look for a great star that droops in the western 
 sky; listen for the voice of a hermit thrush. ... In the 
 swamp, in secluded recesses, a shy and hidden bird, in notes 
 bashful and tender, singing by himself a song. . . ." 
 
 He went forth to the hospitals, to the spreading floors 
 where lay so many boys, so many motherless, so many gently 
 -welcoming a Dark Mother, gliding near with soft feet. . . . 
 
 END OF PAST THREE 
 
PART FOUR 
 THE ANSWERER 
 
 Very early in the morning of April 15, 1865, word came to 
 the Whitman household (as to the thousands of other Brook- 
 lyn households; and shortly to the million of American 
 households) that Abraham Lincoln had surrendered his life 
 in the service of a united America. 
 
 Walt was home with his mother. Though the usual hearty 
 breakfast was placed steaming on the table, it went un- 
 touched. The mother and sons swallowed a little coffee, 
 but none was able to drain the cup. 
 
 The day was a silent succession of newspaper extras, 
 rapidly and feverishly scanned; then read and re-read and 
 read minutely, iteratively, mechanically one time more. 
 
 The mother alone exerted herself. In a dazed way she 
 went about the preparation of dinner and supper; at inter- 
 vals, stopping and throwing her apron over her head, she 
 would break into weak sobbing. When the food was ready 
 she put it on the table. But she did not seat herself at the 
 table; her sons did not come to the table; she had not the 
 heart to summon them, and after an uncertain wait, trance- 
 like, she bore the food away again. 
 
 Walt scarcely stirred the day long. At night, when the 
 others had moved drearily to bed, he sat looking straight 
 
 36s 
 
366 THE ANSWERER 
 
 before him. My book, Drum Taps, hymns of the war, is 
 nearly ready to put on the press. My book is now worth- 
 less. . . . Stop the press; tear up the book. . . . Him I 
 love lies murdered. The sweetest, wisest soul of all my days 
 and lands . . . 
 
 The Brookljm house had a little yard; on this unusually 
 warm Fourth Month evening, Walt sat beside an open win- 
 dow through which came with sudden stealth, like a wistful 
 caress, the sharp scent of flowering lilacs. . . . There was a 
 bush of purple lilac in the yard which had blossomed for the 
 first time that day, but he had not noticed the cluster; he 
 had noticed nothing. . . . 
 
 Lilac, on the breath of the night (a dark night with but a 
 single star; a tearful night that lowered over a desolated 
 country). Lilac . . . the ever-living memory of the 
 dead. . . . 
 
 The faint, sweet and terrible intoxication of the odor crept 
 into his blood. No man but Lincoln had ever known . . . 
 
 None but Lincoln ever should know. A secret shared with 
 the dead was beautiful ... a secret of love, a secret of 
 death, a secret of immortality, which is the perpetual 
 triumph of love over death . . . 
 
 He lifted up a transfigured countenance and spoke to the 
 dead. 
 
 " You shall not go unsung to your burial," he whispered. 
 
 In the still house, the lamp freshly lighted, he set to work. 
 
 I one time thought to compose on the theme of you an 
 
 epic of all that should make America imperishable; I one 
 
THE ANSWERER 367 
 
 time thought you should become for me the incomparable 
 subject of work to set beside Milton's or Dante's. Once I 
 dreamed of proclaiming your greatness of stature and your 
 nobility in action and your grandeur as a human soul. 
 
 But I heard, as few or none can have heard, from your 
 own lips the story of your life, its early tragedy and your 
 fought-for happiness. ... I heard how tenderly you had 
 loved and how irretrievably you had lost; I know, for you 
 told me, the pitifully-measured whole of the human love 
 that should have been overflowingly yours. To me you are 
 no longer the subject of heroic poetry but the theme of a 
 lament such as the still-living lines to Lycidas. ... A bu- 
 rial hymn, a threnody, I compose for you. A few simple 
 pictures, the simple expression of an xmrestrained emotion, 
 I offer you. . . . 
 
 When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom'd . . . 
 
 (Dear, dead friend; you will not have forgotten.) 
 
 When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom'd. 
 
 And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night, 
 
 I mourn'dr—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. 
 
 This spring night is like that other how many years ago. 
 The same star . . . alone. I think that star is become 
 you. 
 
 O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring; 
 Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west, 
 And thought of him I love. 
 
 I have sounded the first strain. Now I write down, with- 
 out plan as to what it shall contain: 
 
368 THE ANSWERER 
 
 n 
 
 Lilac! Oh, this grief is too much for me. It must burst 
 out, utter itself, in a flood of pitiful-pale words. I must 
 give way to it, else I can go no farther. . . . 
 
 O powerful, western, fallen star! 
 
 O shades of night! O moody, tearful night! 
 
 O great star disappeared! O the blacli murk that hides the star! 
 
 O cruel hands that hold me powerless! O helpless soul of me! 
 
 harsh surrounding cloud, that will not free my soul! 
 
 ... I must, MUST control this. . . . There is one way, 
 and one only, I can do that. Without further prelude, let 
 me conjure up the lasting memory of my own life. Let me 
 make a simple picture — all, all but her shall be included. • 
 Let me pay you this as my dearest tribute after all. Let me 
 share with you in death the secret, wounding yet delicious, 
 
 1 shared with you, and with you only, in life. . . . Others 
 may read, will read, and innocently suspect nothing; will not 
 guess the presence of her of whom you will know. . . . 
 
 Isolated, by itself, without further preluding: 
 
 in 
 
 In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white- 
 
 wash'd palings, 
 Stands the lilac hush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of 
 
 rich green. 
 With many a pointed blossom, rising, delicate, with the perfume 
 
 strong I love. 
 With every leaf a miracle (a Fourth or Fifth Month miracle) 
 
 . . . and from this hush in the door-yard. 
 With delicate-colored blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich 
 
 green, 
 A sprig, with its flower, I break. 
 
 The lilac for her, the western star for you . . . and mine 
 be the throat of the hermit thrust, a throat that bleeds as it 
 
THE ANSWERER 369 
 
 sings, a throat that, could it not sing, would bleed to death 
 silently. . . . 
 
 IV 
 
 In the swamp, in secluded recesses, 
 
 A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song. 
 
 Solitary, the thrush, 
 
 The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements. 
 
 Sings by himself a song. 
 
 Song of the bleeding throat I 
 
 Death's outlet song of life — {for well, dear brother, I know 
 
 If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would' st surely die). 
 
 In this inadequate symphony, I have finished the first 
 movement. I have stated all three of my themes — lilac and 
 star and thrush. The lamenting largo stands complete. 
 Now must I sing maestoso, with beauty and majesty, my 
 funeral march — niy second movement a funeral march as in 
 Beethoven's Third Symphony, composed to the memory and 
 honoring of the Hero. 
 
 3 
 
 He wrote steadily, with few pauses and almost no altera- 
 tions, the fifth and sixth sections, each an intricate, un- 
 broken melodic ciurve, from. Over the breast of the spring, 
 the land, amid cities to. Night and day journeys a coffin; 
 and from. Coffin that passes through lanes and streets to, / 
 give you my sprig of lilac. After some hesitation, he set 
 down, at the opening of VII. the words: 
 
 {Nor for you, for one, alone . . . 
 
 But his final feeling was that this, by itself, left unguarded 
 the door of their secret; and so, rather than erase anything 
 
370 THE ANSWERER 
 
 so true, he felt to enlarge it beyond the possibility of prjning 
 detection by the smooth (yet honest) sequent line: 
 
 Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring . . .) 
 
 Yes! that was honest! Blossoms and branches to her 
 coffin, and her son's ; to the coffin that enclosed the body of 
 Floride's brother ; to Joel Skidmore's coffin and to Selah Mul- 
 ford's; to Oscar Wilber's; to each and to all. To the in- 
 numerable boxes of pine boards freshly cut that had been 
 interred daily, North and South, and were interring now. 
 
 The confidence reposed in him by Lincoln tempted him 
 to a dozen lines, which he numbered VIII., in which, with 
 the symbol of the western star, he could recall their in- 
 timacy, their secret-sharing. ... He set down a tentative IX. 
 
 In all this, he told himself, I am truly two persons; there 
 is the Whitman who sings the stainless dead and there is 
 the human person whom Lincoln trusted and tried to help; 
 did so wonderfully help! And I am torn, this moment, be- 
 tween the two. ... He wrote: 
 
 Sing on, there in the swamp! 
 
 singer, bashful and tender! I hear your notes^-I hear your 
 
 call; 
 
 1 hear — I come presently — I understand you; 
 
 ^But a moment 1 linger — for the lustrous star has_ detain'd me; 
 The star, my comrade departing, holds and detains me. 
 
 4 
 
 Following in his thought the musical analogy, the sym- 
 phonic structure, or, condensed in form, the method of the 
 sonata, he decided upon a re-statement and variation of his 
 principal theme, the dead Lincoln. He did it, at the same 
 
THE ANSWERER 371 
 
 time enlarging the scope of his possible re-statement, by 
 three lines, questioning: 
 
 O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? 
 And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soitl that has 
 
 gone? 
 And what shall my perfume he, for the grave of him I love? 
 
 And, resorting to inversion, with an immediate spontaneous 
 echo he answered his last question first. 
 
 Sea winds . . . 
 
 . . . with these, and the breath of my chant, 
 
 I perfume the grave of him I love. 
 
 The merit of the loose analogy to music was in the freedom 
 it gave; a freedom and looseness and largeness which could 
 not be compassed in the imitation of any accepted model of 
 verse. He would take advantage of this for the widest pos- 
 sible effect; at once; and with a variation so original as 
 partly to constitute a new motif, a fourth theme: 
 
 O what shall I hang on the chamber walls? . , . 
 To adorn the burial-house of him I love? 
 
 At last, he had it! the full sweep of America, the splendor 
 of all outdoors, the eternal cycle of day and night, to be 
 fitly introduced as the sole worthy adornment of that burial- 
 house, most consecrated of the nation. Now his mood 
 changed to a sunny transport at the glimpse of wide horizons. 
 
 In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a 
 wind-dapple here and there; 
 
 The ecstacy, the exaltation such as he had never in com- 
 position before known, culminated in six lines which seemed 
 
372 THE ANSWERER 
 
 to him, as he re-read them, miraculous (I feel so quite hiun- 
 bly; I camiot conceive how I came to set down such a pic- 
 ture in so few strokes; but if I overvalue it, something may 
 be forgiven me for the intensity with which I was moved 
 as I wrote the words) : 
 
 Lo! the most excellent sun, so calm and haughty; 
 
 The violet and purple morn, with just-felt breezes; 
 
 The gentle, soft-born, measureless light; 
 
 The miracle, spreading, bathing all — the fulflll'd noon; 
 
 The coming eve, delicious — the welcome night, and the stars. 
 
 Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land. 
 
 ... He stopped and sat motionless for an hour, from 
 sheer exhaustion. 
 
 At length, resuming, he progressed with an interweaving 
 of his material already present, venturing, however, another 
 direct allusion to Esther — the most daring of all, it struck 
 him, but he let it stand and even amplified it. 
 
 Then, with the knowledge of death as walking one side of 
 me, All will understand this to be Lincoln. 
 
 And the thought of death close-walking the other side of 
 me, May not some day, with finger pointing to that veiled 
 and shadowy figure of you, Esther — ^may not some day there 
 come one who will ask: " Who is that? "... But, no; he 
 will not ask; something within him will give him the answer, 
 unasked. . . . 
 
 And I, in the middle, as with companions, and as holding the 
 hands of companions . . . 
 
 One last, cautious, identifying-revealing touch he permitted 
 himself — the coincidence of his chant with the song of the 
 thrush: 
 
 And the voice of my Spirit tallied the song of the bird. 
 
THE ANSWERER 373 
 
 He was ready to compose the Death Carol, to be followed 
 by a short passage, allegro fttrioso, depicting the wreck.at,e 
 of the battlefields. A brief coda, or closing section, would 
 complete the poem; my superbest, he said to himself in a 
 weary whisper. 
 
 As a preliminary — for he could not finish now, but must 
 have rest; though to hope for dreamless sleep was probably 
 vain — ^he set down certain guiding lines. The Death Carol 
 would begin with: 
 
 Come, lovely and soothing Death, 
 
 Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving. 
 
 In the day, in the night . . . 
 
 Embodied in this chant would be the line (initial line of 
 one stanza, it was likely) : 
 
 Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet . . . 
 
 And, perhaps as the last line of all; anyway, very nearly 
 the last line of the whole poem: 
 
 Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul. 
 
 5 
 
 He hid away the sheets of paper and went out into the 
 yard. The Fourth Month dawn was breaking. 
 
 On the lilac bush had blossomed only the single purple 
 cluster. 
 
 He went to the bush and stood there, inhaling the fra- 
 grance. He lifted his face to the sky and cried out, shak- 
 enly: 
 
 " Oh, my dead! I try to answer! "