Success. Samuel Hopkins Adams

I’m not responsible for the sage-blossom between the pages.”

      “Ah, the sage! That’s for wisdom,” she paraphrased lightly.

      “Do you think Rossetti so wise a preceptor?”

      “It isn’t often that he preaches. When he does, as in that sonnet—well, the inspiration may be a little heavy, but he does have something to say.”

      “Then it’s the more evident that you marked it for some special reason.”

      “What supernatural insight,” she mocked. “Can you read your name between the lines?”

      “What is it that you want me to do?”

      “You mean to ask what it is that Mr. Rossetti wants you to do. I didn’t write the sonnet, you know.”

      “You didn’t fashion the arrow, but you aimed it.”

      “Am I a good marksman?”

      “I suppose you mean that I’m wasting my time here.”

      “Surely not!” she gibed. “Forming a link of transcontinental traffic. Helping to put a girdle ’round the earth in eighty days—or is it forty now?—enlightening the traveling public about the three-twenty-four train; dispensing time-tables and other precious mediums of education—”

      “I’m happy here,” he said doggedly.

      “Are you going to be, always?”

      His face darkened with doubt. “Why shouldn’t I be?” he argued. “I’ve got everything I need. Some day I thought I might write.”

      “What about?” The question came sharp and quick.

      He looked vaguely around the horizon.

      “Oh, no, Ban!” she said. “Not this. You’ve got to know something besides cactuses and owls to write, these days. You’ve got to know men. And women,” she added, in a curious tone, with a suspicion of effort, even of jealousy in it.

      “I’ve never cared much for people,” he said.

      “It’s an acquired taste, I suppose for some of us. There’s something else.” She came slowly to a sitting posture and fixed her questioning, baffling eyes on his. “Ban, don’t you want to make a success in life?”

      For a moment he did not answer. When he spoke, it was with apparent irrelevance to what she had said. “Once I went to a revival. A reformed tough was running it. About every three minutes he’d thrust out his hands and grab at the air and say, ‘Oh, brothers; don’t you yearn for Jesus?’ ”

      “What has that to do with it?” questioned Io, surprised and impatient.

      “Only that, somehow, the way you said ‘success in life’ made me think of him and his ‘yearn for Jesus.’ ”

      “Errol Banneker,” said Io, amused in spite of her annoyance, “you are possessed of a familiar devil who betrays other people’s inner thoughts to you. Success is a species of religion to me, I suppose.”

      “And you are making converts, like all true enthusiasts. Tell, tell me. What kind of success?”

      “Oh, power. Money. Position. Being somebody.”

      “I’m somebody here all right. I’m the station-agent of the Atkinson and St. Philip Railroad Company.”

      “Now you’re trying to provoke me.”

      “No. But to get success you’ve got to want it, haven’t you?” he asked more earnestly. “To want it with all your strength.”

      “Of course. Every man ought to.”

      “I’m not so sure,” he objected. “There’s a kind of virtue in staying put, isn’t there?”

      She made a little gesture of impatience.

      “I’ll give you a return for your sonnet,” he pursued, and repeated from memory:

      “What else is Wisdom? What of man’s endeavor Or God’s high grace, so lovely and so great? To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait; To hold a hand uplifted over Hate. And shall not Loveliness be loved forever?”

      “I don’t know it. It’s beautiful. What is it?”

      “Gilbert Murray’s translation of ‘The Bacchae.’ My legal mentors had a lapse of dry-as-dustness and sent it to me.”

      “ ‘To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait,’ ” murmured the girl. “That is what I’ve been doing here. How good it is! But not for you,” she added, her tone changing from dreamy to practical. “Ban, I suspect there’s too much poetry in your cosmos.”

      “Very probably. Poetry isn’t success, is it?”

      Her face grew eager. “It might be. The very highest. But you’ve got to make yourself known and felt among people.”

      “Do you think I could? And how does one get that kind of desire?” he asked lazily.

      “How? I’ve known men to do it for love; and I’ve known them to do it for hate; and I’ve known them to do it for money. Yes; and there’s another cause.”

      “What is it?”

      “Restlessness.”

      “That’s ambition with its nerves gone bad, isn’t it?”

      Again she smiled. “You’ll know what it is some day.”

      “Is it contagious?” he asked solicitously.

      “Don’t be alarmed. I haven’t it. Not now. I’d love to stay on and on and just ‘breathe and wait,’ if the gods were good.”

      "Dream that the gods are good,’ ” he echoed. “The last thing they ever think of being according to my reading.”

      She capped his line;

      “We twain, once well in sunder, What will the mad gods do—’ ”

      she began; then broke off, jumping to her feet. “I’m talking sheer nonsense!” she cried. “Take me for a walk in the woods. The desert glares to-day.”

      “I’ll have to be back by twelve,” he said. “Excuse me just a moment.”

      He disappeared into the portable house. When he rejoined her, she asked:

      “What did you go in there for? To get your revolver?”

      “Yes.”

      “I’ve carried one since the day you told me to. Not that I’ve met a soul that looked dangerous, nor that I’d know how to shoot or when, if I did.”

      “The sight of it would be taken as evidence that you knew how to use it,” he assured her.

      For a time, as they walked, she had many questions to put about the tree and bird life surrounding them. In the midst of it he asked her:

      “Do you ever get restless?”

      “I haven’t, here. I’m getting rested.”

      “And at home I suppose you’re too busy.”

      “Being busy is no preventive. Somebody has said that St. Vitus is the patron saint of New York society.”

      “It must take almost all the time those people have to keep up with the theaters and with the best in poetry and what’s being done and thought, and the new books and all that,” he surmised.

      “I beg your pardon; what was that about poetry and books?”

      “Girls like you—society girls, I mean—read everything there is, don’t they?”

      “Where