THE RULING PASSION
by Henry van Dyke

A WRITER'S REQUEST OF HIS MASTER

Let me never tag a moral to a story, nor tell a story without a 
meaning.  Make me respect my material so much that I dare not slight 
my work.  Help me to deal very honestly with words and with people 
because they are both alive.  Show me that as in a river, so in a 
writing, clearness is the best quality, and a little that is pure is 
worth more than much that is mixed.  Teach me to see the local 
colour without being blind to the inner light.  Give me an ideal 
that will stand the strain of weaving into human stuff on the loom 
of the real.  Keep me from caring more for books than for folks, for 
art than for life.  Steady me to do my full stint of work as well as 
I can: and when that is done, stop me, pay what wages Thou wilt, and 
help me to say, from a quiet heart, a grateful AMEN.

PREFACE

In every life worth writing about there is a ruling passion,--"the 
very pulse of the machine."  Unless you touch that, you are groping 
around outside of reality.

Sometimes it is romantic love: Natures masterpiece of interested 
benevolence.  In almost all lives this passion has its season of 
empire.  Therefore, and rightly, it is the favourite theme of the 
storyteller.  Romantic love interests almost everybody, because 
almost everybody knows something about it, or would like to know.

But there are other passions, no less real, which also have their 
place and power in human life.  Some of them come earlier, and 
sometimes they last longer, than romantic love.  They play alongside 
of it and are mixed up with it, now checking it, now advancing its 
flow and tingeing it with their own colour.

Just because love is so universal, it is often to one of the other 
passions that we must look for the distinctive hue, the individual 
quality of a life-story.  Granted, if you will, that everybody must 
fall in love, or ought to fall in love, How will he do it?  And what 
will he do afterwards?  These are questions not without interest to 
one who watches the human drama as a friend.  The answers depend 
upon those hidden and durable desires, affections, and impulses to 
which men and women give themselves up for rule and guidance.

Music, nature, children, honour, strife, revenge, money, pride, 
friendship, loyalty, duty,--to these objects and others like them 
the secret power of personal passion often turns, and the life 
unconsciously follows it, as the tides in the sea follow the moon in 
the sky.

When circumstances cross the ruling passion, when rocks lie in the 
way and winds are contrary, then things happen, characters emerge, 
slight events are significant, mere adventures are transformed into 
a real plot.  What care I how many "hair-breadth 'scapes" and 
"moving accidents" your hero may pass through, unless I know him for 
a man?  He is but a puppet strung on wires.  His kisses are wooden 
and his wounds bleed sawdust.  There is nothing about him to 
remember except his name, and perhaps a bit of dialect.  Kill him or 
crown him,--what difference does it make?

But go the other way about your work:

     "Take the least man of all mankind, as I;
      Look at his head and heart, find how and why
      He differs from his fellows utterly,"--

and now there is something to tell, with a meaning.

If you tell it at length, it is a novel,--a painting.  If you tell 
it in brief, it is a short story,--an etching.  But the subject is 
always the same: the unseen, mysterious, ruling passion weaving the 
stuff of human nature into patterns wherein the soul is imaged and 
revealed.

To tell about some of these ruling passions, simply, clearly, and 
concretely, is what I want to do in this book.  The characters are 
chosen, for the most part, among plain people, because their 
feelings are expressed with fewer words and greater truth, not being 
costumed for social effect.  The scene is laid on Nature's stage 
because I like to be out-of-doors, even when I am trying to think 
and learning to write.

"Avalon," Princeton, July 22, 1901.

CONTENTS

I.  A Lover of Music

II.  The Reward of Virtue

III.  A Brave Heart

IV.  The Gentle Life

V.  A Friend of Justice

VI.  The White Blot

VII.  A Year of Nobility

VIII.  The Keeper of the Light

A LOVER OF MUSIC

I

He entered the backwoods village of Bytown literally on the wings of 
the wind.  It whirled him along like a big snowflake, and dropped 
him at the door of Moody's "Sportsmen's Retreat," as if he were a 
New Year's gift from the North Pole.  His coming seemed a mere 
chance; but perhaps there was something more in it, after all.  At 
all events, you shall hear, if you will, the time and the manner of 
his arrival.

It was the last night of December, some thirty-five years ago.  All 
the city sportsmen who had hunted the deer under Bill Moody's 
direction had long since retreated to their homes, leaving the 
little settlement on the border of the Adirondack wilderness wholly 
under the social direction of the natives.

The annual ball was in full swing in the dining-room of the hotel.  
At one side of the room the tables and chairs were piled up, with 
their legs projecting in the air like a thicket of very dead trees.

The huge stove in the southeast corner was blushing a rosy red 
through its thin coat of whitewash, and exhaling a furious dry heat 
flavoured with the smell of baked iron.  At the north end, however, 
winter reigned; and there were tiny ridges of fine snow on the 
floor, sifted in by the wind through the cracks in the window-
frames.

But the bouncing girls and the heavy-footed guides and lumbermen who 
filled the ball-room did not appear to mind the heat or the cold.  
They balanced and "sashayed" from the tropics to the arctic circle.  
They swung at corners and made "ladies' change" all through the 
temperate zone.  They stamped their feet and did double-shuffles 
until the floor trembled beneath them.  The tin lamp-reflectors on 
the walls rattled like castanets.

There was only one drawback to the hilarity of the occasion.  The 
band, which was usually imported from Sandy River Forks for such 
festivities,--a fiddle, a cornet, a flute, and an accordion,--had 
not arrived.  There was a general idea that the mail-sleigh, in 
which the musicians were to travel, had been delayed by the storm, 
and might break its way through the snow-drifts and arrive at any 
moment.  But Bill Moody, who was naturally of a pessimistic 
temperament, had offered a different explanation.

"I tell ye, old Baker's got that blame' band down to his hotel at 
the Falls now, makin' 'em play fer his party.  Them music fellers is 
onsartin; can't trust 'em to keep anythin' 'cept the toon, and they 
don't alluz keep that.  Guess we might uz well shet up this ball, or 
go to work playin' games."

At this proposal a thick gloom had fallen over the assembly; but it 
had been dispersed by Serena Moody's cheerful offer to have the 
small melodion brought out of the parlour, and to play for dancing 
as well as she could.  The company agreed that she was a smart girl, 
and prepared to accept her performance with enthusiasm.  As the 
dance went on, there were frequent comments of approval to encourage 
her in the labour of love.

"Sereny's doin' splendid, ain't she?" said the other girls.

To which the men replied, "You bet!  The playin' 's reel nice, and 
good 'nough fer anybody--outside o' city folks."

But Serena's repertory was weak, though her spirit was willing.  
There was an unspoken sentiment among the men that "The Sweet By and 
By" was not quite the best tune in the world for a quadrille.  A 
Sunday-school hymn, no matter how rapidly it was rendered, seemed to 
fall short of the necessary vivacity for a polka.  Besides, the 
wheezy little organ positively refused to go faster than a certain 
gait.  Hose Ransom expressed the popular opinion of the instrument, 
after a figure in which he and his partner had been half a bar ahead 
of the music from start to finish, when he said:

"By Jolly! that old maloney may be chock full o' relijun and po'try; 
but it ain't got no DANCE into it, no more 'n a saw-mill."

This was the situation of affairs inside of Moody's tavern on New 
Year's Eve.  But outside of the house the snow lay two feet deep on 
the level, and shoulder-high in the drifts.  The sky was at last 
swept clean of clouds.  The shivering stars and the shrunken moon 
looked infinitely remote in the black vault of heaven.  The frozen 
lake, on which the ice was three feet thick and solid as rock, was 
like a vast, smooth bed, covered with a white counterpane.  The 
cruel wind still poured out of the northwest, driving the dry snow 
along with it like a mist of powdered diamonds.

Enveloped in this dazzling, pungent atmosphere, half blinded and 
bewildered by it, buffeted and yet supported by the onrushing 
torrent of air, a man on snow-shoes, with a light pack on his 
shoulders, emerged from the shelter of the Three Sisters' Islands, 
and staggered straight on, down the lake.  He passed the headland of 
the bay where Moody's tavern is ensconced, and probably would have 
drifted on beyond it, to the marsh at the lower end of the lake, but 
for the yellow glare of the ball-room windows and the sound of music 
and dancing which came out to him suddenly through a lull in the 
wind.