Paul Patoff | Page 2

maidens of Hindustan have gone forth to
greet the new moon, and I am full of their soft prayers and gentle
thoughts, for I am come from them. But the north, whither I go, is cold
and cruel, full of snow and darkness and gloom. Along the lands where
I will pass I shall see men and women dying in the frost, and little
children, too, poor and hungry, and shivering out the last breathings of
a wretched life; and some of them I will take with me this night, to my
journey's end among the ice-floes and the brown, driving mists of the
uttermost north. Dost thou wonder that I am sad?
"That is thy life. Thou art come from the sweet-scented gardens of thy
youth, thou must go to the ice desert of thine old age; and now thou art
full of strength and boastfulness, and thinkest thou shalt perchance be
the first mortal who shall cheat death. Go to! Thou shalt die like the
rest, the more miserably that thou lovest life more than the others."
The wind is in an ill humor to-night; I should not have thought he could
say such hard things. But he is a hopeless old cynic, even when he
blows warm from the south; he has seen so much and done so much,
and has furnished so many metaphors to threadbare poets, that he
believes in nothing good, or young, or in any way fresh. He is bad
company, and I have shut the window again. You asked me for a story,
and you are beginning to wonder why I do not tell you one. Do you like
long stories or short stories? Sad or gay? True or fanciful? What shall it
be? My true stories are all sad, but the ones I imagine are often merry.
Could I not think of one true, and gay as well? There was once a bad
old man who said that when the truth ceased to be solemn it became

dull. Between solemnity and dullness you would not find what you
want, which, I take it, is a little laughter, a little sadness, and, when it is
done, the comfortable assurance of your own senses that you have been
amused, and not bored. The bad old gentleman was right. When our
lives are not filled with great emotions they are crammed with
insignificant details, and one may tell them ever so well, they will be
insignificant to the end. But the fancy is a great store-house, filled with
all the beautiful things that we do not find in our lives. My dear friend,
if true love were an every-day phenomenon, experienced by everybody,
it would cease to be in any way interesting; people would be so familiar
with it that it would bore them to extinction; they would have it for
breakfast, dinner, and supper as a matter of course, and would be as
fastidious of its niceties as an Anglo-Indian about the quality of the
pepper. It is because only one man or woman in a hundred thousand is
personally acquainted with the sufferings of true-love fever that the
other ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine take delight in
observing the contortions and convulsions of the patient. It is a great
satisfaction to them to compare the slight touch of ague they once had
when they were young with the raging sickness of a breaking heart; to
see a resemblance between the tiny scratch upon themselves, which
they delight in irritating, and the ghastly wound by which the tortured
soul has sped from its prison.
To tell the truth, they are not so very much to blame. Even the
momentary reflection of love is a good thing; at least, it is better than to
know nothing of it. One can fancy that a violin upon which no one had
ever played would yet be glad to vibrate faintly in unison with the
music of a more favored neighbor; it would bring a sensation of the
possibility of music. The stronger harmony is caught up and carried on
forever in endless sound waves, but the slight responsive murmur of the
passive strings is lost and forgotten.
And now you will tell me that I am making phrases. That is my
profession: I am a twister of words; I torture language by trade. You
know it, for you have known me a long time, and, if you will pardon
my vanity, or rudeness, I observe that my mode of putting the
dictionary on the rack amuses you. The fact that you ask for a story

shows that well enough. I am a plain man, and there never was any
poetry in me, but I have seen it in other people, and I understand why
some persons like