Violets and Other Tales | Page 7

or love, no
doubting question of heaven or hell, no strife for carnal needs,--only
rest, content, peace--happiness, perfect, whole, complete, sublime.
And thus passed ages and ages, æons and æons. The great earth there in
the dim distance above the ocean has toiled wearily about the sun, until
its mechanism was failing, and the warm ardor of the lover's eye was
becoming pale and cold from age, while the air all about the fast
dwindling sphere was heavy and thick with the sorrows and heartaches
and woes of the humans upon its face. Heavy with the screams and roar
of war; with the curses of the deceived of traitors; with the passionate
sighs of unlawful love; with the crushing unrest of blighted hopes.
Knowledge and contempt of all these things permeated even to the
inmost depths of time, as I lay in the halls of rest and smiled at the web
floating through my white fingers.
* * * * *
But hark! discord begins. There is a vague fear which springs from an
unknown source and drifts into the depths of rest; fear, indefinable,
unaccountable, unknowable, shuddering. Pain begins, for the heart
springs into life, and fills the silence with the terror of its beatings,
thick, knifing, frightful in its intense longing. Power of mind over soul,
power of calm over fear avail nothing; suspense and misery, locked
arm in arm, pervade æonic stillness, till all things else become
subordinate, unnoticed.

Centuries drift away, and the giddy, old reprobate--earth, dying a
hideous, ghastly death, with but one solitary human to shudder in
unison with its last throes, to bask in the last pale rays of a cold sun, to
inhale the last breath of a metallic atmosphere; totters, reels, falls into
space, and is no more. Peal out, ye brazen bells, peal out the requiem of
the sinner! Roll your mournful tones into the ears of the saddened
angels, weeping with wing-covered eyes! Toll the requiem of the sinner,
sinking swiftly, sobbingly into the depths of time's ocean. Down, down,
until the great groans which arose from the domes and Ionic roofs
about me told that the sad old earth sought rest in eternity, while the
universe shrugged its shoulders over the loss of another star.
And now, the great invisible fear became apparent, tangible, for all the
sins, the woes, the miseries, the dreads, the dismal achings and
throbbings, the dreariness and gloom of the lost star came together and
like a huge geni took form and hideous shape--octopus-like--which
slowly approached me, erstwhile happy--and hovered about my couch
in fearful menace.
* * * * *
Oh, shining web of hair, burst loose your bonds and bid me move! Oh,
time, cease not your calculations, but speed me on to deliverance! Oh,
silence, vast, immense, infuse into your soul some sound other than the
heavy throbbing of this fast disintegrating heart! Oh, pitiless stone
arches, let fall your crushing weight upon this Stygian monster!
I pray to time, to eternity, to the frozen æons of the past. Useless. I am
seized, forced to open my cold lips; there is agony,--supreme, mortal
agony of nerve tension, and wrenching of vitality. I struggle, scream,
and clutching the monster with superhuman strength, fling him aside,
and rise, bleeding, screaming--but triumphant, and keenly mortal in
every vein, alive and throbbing with consciousness and pain.
* * * * *
No, it was not opium, nor night-mare, but chloroform, a dentist, three
obstinate molars, a pair of forceps, and a lively set of nerves.

TITEE.
It was cold that day; the great sharp north wind swept out Elysian
Fields Street in blasts that made men shiver, and bent everything in its
track. The skies hung lowering and gloomy; the usually quiet street was
more than deserted, it was dismal.
Titee leaned against one of the brown freight cars for protection against
the shrill norther, and warmed his little chapped hands at a blaze of
chips and dry grass. "May be it'll snow," he muttered, casting a glance
at the sky that would have done credit to a practised seaman. "Then
won't I have fun! Ugh, but the wind blows!"
It was Saturday, or Titee would have been in school--the big yellow
school on Marigny Street, where he went every day when its bell
boomed nine o'clock. Went with a run and a joyous
whoop,--presumably to imbibe knowledge, ostensibly to make his
teacher's life a burden.
Idle, lazy, dirty, troublesome boy, she called him, to herself, as day by
day wore on, and Titee improved not, but let his whole class pass him
on its way to a higher grade. A practical joke he relished infinitely
more than a practical problem, and a good game at pinsticking was far
more entertaining than a language lesson. Moreover,