The Debatable Land

"Hinter die Kirche blühe die blaue Blume der Zufriedenheit."-Meister Eckhart.

Widow Bourn's house stood behind the church, and blue flowers grew contentedly on the sloping green, shy fancies of a maiden spring that never lasted out a summer's experience. New England churches have not that air of nestling comfort which seemed to Meister Eckhart so sweet a symbol. They crown the hills with square frames and sharpened steeples, churches militant, plate-mailed in clapboards, with weather-vane aimed defiantly into the wind. Their doors are closed, their windows shuttered against all days of the week saving one. But Widow Bourn found the proximity comfortable. The church militant faced the issues of the spirit for her, and subdued them. She plodded through her Bible, drawing contentment from texts that meant no such matter, seeing in the ecclesiast's despondency only reflections connected here and there with sermons. "It is a pleasant thing to stand on the shore when other people are in the floods," the melancholy Roman poet remarked, meaning that it would be, because it was something his ever-journeying spirit in the waste seas of thought rendered impracticable for himself.

A gate opened from the widow's garden on the sloping green. Heavy-scented lilacs, purple and white, hung over it, and followed the fence at fragrant intervals. Lilacs crowded along the garden walls, pushed against green pillars of the porch and drooped luxurious heads at the windows. Lilacs are tropical and anti-puritan; they belong with the chuckle of lutes over low casements, and liquid voices speaking a vowelled tongue. Widow Bourn was pleasant-tempered, placid, possessed of a stillness, a certain dignity, and a frame not overpadded, but comfortable.

The Bourns were early settlers in Hagar. The settlers were still feeling their way in the wilderness beyond the Connecticut, sensible farmers who bargained for whole mountain ranges and valleys of the magnificent savage, and recorded the transaction in minutes of the town-meeting. The magnificent savage commonly declared that his heart was great; he would sell the lands from the crooked lake to the joining of swift rivers to his white brothers, who marked the boundaries inferred from the sachem's oratory, and omitted to comment on the humor of it in minutes of the town-meeting. When the first Simon Bourn piled hewn beams for his cabin and ran his plough around stumps of trees that had furnished the beams there were few cabins in the neighborhood, and the town-meeting was held fifteen miles away. The last Simon Bourn ran his plough along the same hill-side, not dodging the same stumps, but the hill-side still drew up stones out of its inner perversity to check his plough. He found the slope of his life, like the slope of his ancestral fields, unfertile, shallow-soiled. The five generations of Bourns had accumulated and transmitted this opinion of their lives and hilly fields, that on the whole they were not justified.

Simon died in the early fifties and was buried in Hagar's hemlocked graveyard. Oddly enough, he seemed to regret it. Widow Bourn associated herself with this regret, but regret has commonly an element of interrupted possibilities in it, and these must have lain the rather in Nellie, a yellow-headed, long-limbed, swift-footed maiden whose level gray eyes had in them a certain challenge and accusation, and whose years were ten.

"Don't let Nellie forget me," he said, and the graver carved on his tombstone, "Remember Me." Simon perhaps intended it only for Nellie, but that did not prevent its forcing the passer to "remember" him, who never knew him and did not care about it. "Simon Bourn-Born --, Died --. Remember," in raised letters on a white tombstone, stared out of the green gloom of the hemlocks. So the Elder Hamlet desired, "Remember Me." "Remember thee, poor ghost?" Why remember? Go your ways, Simon Bourn, and trouble us not. It might have struck the public as egotistic, which was only a pathetic impulse pointing to Nellie, if the public had not been in the habit of accepting epitaphs of all kinds with a tolerance born of experience.

One could understand the exception Simon made in favor of Helen from his opinion and feeling about the world he left-that it was not on the whole justified-could understand it in this way, that there was something in her young gravity and impetuous faith which seemed to isolate whatever she looked at. To be considered and remembered by her seemed important. It lifted one out of triviality. In Hagar she was a pronounced, a separate person. Hagar itself was compact of varieties, but Helen was intense in conception and direct in action to surprise Hagar. She ran away with Morgan Map to the Hamilton County Fair, and came back in the gray dawn, white-lipped with weariness. A neighbor or two had sat up with Widow Bourn to prevent her worrying. It was a gratifying success. The widow slept by the fire. Morgan was eighteen then, but the Maps were somewhat out of the reach of Hagar's opinion. She smote Mr. Paulus with a paint-brush across the face for interfering with her painting designs on cows and cats. They were not his cows and cats. That question in ethics threw Hagar into excited division, and it was not remembered whose cows and cats they were. She was sent to Miss Savage's School in Wimberton; muttering rumors of her crossed the Cattle Ridge. At sixteen she was thrown by one of the Sanderson horses, a red-eyed, ugly breed of racers; and Joe Sanderson, then aged nine, ran at the horse and shot a barbed arrow into its hide, out of his bitter wrath and love of Nellie; and Nellie lay a twelvemonth and more on her back to cure her spine. These are but instances of enterprise. Whatever stood the challenge or test of worth and reality in her eyes was apt to be a cause of sudden valor or unreckoned devotion.

The accident was in 1858, the year after Squire Map's wife died, whose name was once Edith Lorn. There was a great funeral in Hagar, and carriages from down the Wyantenaug Valley as far as Hamilton. There was an explosion then, too, in the Map family regarding property. Gerald and Morgan were supposed to have announced their independence on the strength of their majority and inheritance. The squire took to himself a grudge against the world where sons are unfilial, friends betray, and love falls from negation to negation, and began that lonely life which lasted twenty years, shut in and brooding in the square house on the hill half a mile out on the Cattle Ridge road. Gerald Map came no more to Hagar, but Morgan was seen at times. He rode up from Hamilton the day after Helen's fall, talked with the doctor, went up-stairs and kissed her cheek, and departed, silent to Widow Bourn's murmured remonstrance. He shouldn't do that!"

Helen said: "Oh, that's all right," indifferently, and Widow Bourn fell to extracting comfort from the situation. If a honey-bee extracts anything from anywhere, it is honey; she may not extract anything. There was a comfort in knowing where Helen was the day long; not that the widow's comfort had ever been seriously long disturbed, but Helen quiescent was more comfortable than Helen active, in process of silent loading or sudden discharge. One could consider her clothes at leisure, not in heated endeavor to have one dress for Sunday without a lateral or perpendicular rip. Everything in the balm of the widow's temperament took the soft flow of slow waters, as Simon's plaintive discontent had long before to her ears come to resemble Ecclesiastes. Helen was more difficult to adapt herself to, because Helen grew and changed. Now, the growth and change seemed for the time to have ceased. She was no less mysterious; but a mystery which is constant and presents the same inscrutable face, and not always another and another, is more comfortable. Helen's life, after cataracts and restless seeking, seemed to have flowed into a dark pool, and lay there reflecting clouds, patches of stars, and the edges of dim forests.

The similitudes of young maidens and varied flowers, the happy possibilities in that comparison, were discovered of earliest poets. Out of the best of intentions there has come to us so far only the conviction that Helen did not resemble the blue violets growing behind the church in Hagar. As for Simon's epitaph, it outlasts the story and is still to be read. One may lean over the wall of the cemetery, say, at twilight, when the shadow of Windless Mountain is wide over Hagar, and read it to-day, note its stiff insistence, and suit one's self with reflections on man and nature and the purport of things. An issue will be observed to lie between Simon's epitaph and the solemn, fading mountain, an issue distinct and inclusive.