The yellow book, an illustrated quarterly. Vol. 2, July 1894
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Title: The yellow book, an illustrated quarterly. Vol. 2, July 1894
Editor: Henry Harland
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE YELLOW BOOK, AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY. VOL. 2, JULY 1894 ***
Produced by Charlene Taylor, Carol Brown, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
THE YELLOW BOOK
An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume II July 1894
[Illustration: Magazine Cover]
London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane
Boston: Copeland & Day Price 5/- Net
Contents
Literature
I. The Gospel of Content By Frederick Greenwood _Page_ 11
II. Poor Cousin Louis Ella D'Arcy 34
III. The Composer of "Carmen" Charles Willeby 63
IV. Thirty Bob a Week John Davidson 99
V. A Responsibility Henry Harland 103
VI. A Song Dollie Radford 116
VII. Passed Charlotte M. Mew 121
VIII. Sat est Scripsisse Austin Dobson 142
IX. Three Stories V., O., C.S. 144
X. In a Gallery Katharine de Mattos 177
XI. The Yellow Book, } Philip Gilbert Hamerton,
criticised } LL.D. 179
XII. Dreams Ronald Campbell Macfie 195
XIII. Madame Réjane Dauphin Meunier 197
XIV. The Roman Road Kenneth Grahame 211
XV. Betrothed Norman Gale 227
XVI. Thy Heart's Desire Netta Syrett 228
XVII. Reticence in Literature Hubert Crackanthorpe 259
XVIII. My Study Alfred Hayes 275
XIX. A Letter to the Editor Max Beerbohm 281
XX. An Epigram William Watson 289
XXI. The Coxon Fund Henry James 290
Art
I. The Renaissance of By Walter Crane _Page_ 7
Venus
II. The Lamplighter A. S. Hartrick 60
III. } The Comedy-Ballet }
IV. } of }
V. } Marionettes }
}
VI. Garçons de Café } Aubrey Beardsley 85
}
VII. The Slippers of }
Cinderella }
}
VIII. Portrait of Madame }
Réjane }
IX. A Landscape Alfred Thornton 117
X. Portrait of Himself }
}
XI. A Lady } P. Wilson Steer 171
}
XII. A Gentleman }
XIII. Portrait of Henry John S. Sargent, A.R.A. 191
James
XIV. A Girl Resting Sydney Adamson 207
XV. The Old Bedford Music }
Hall }
}
XVI. Portrait of Aubrey } Walter Sickert 220
Beardsley }
}
XVII. Ada Lundberg }
XVIII. An Idyll W. Brown Mac Dougal 256
XIX. The Old Man's Garden }
} E. J. Sullivan 270
XX. The Quick and the Dead }
XXI. A Reminiscence of Francis Forster 278
"The Transgressor"
XXII. A Study Bernhard Sickert 285
XXIII. For the Backs of Playing By Aymer Vallance 361
Cards
The Yellow Book
Volume II July, 1894
The Editor of THE YELLOW BOOK can in no case hold himself
responsible for rejected manuscripts; when, however, they are
accompanied by stamped addressed envelopes, every effort will be
made to secure their prompt return.
The Yellow Book
An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume II July, 1894
[Illustration: sketch of a woman in a park]
London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane
Boston: Copeland & Day
Agents for the Colonies: Robt. A. Thompson & Co.
The Renaissance of Venus
By Walter Crane
_By kind permission of G. F. Watts, Esq., R.A._
[Illustration: The Renaissance of Venus]
The Gospel of Content
By Frederick Greenwood
I
How it was that I, being so young a man and not a very tactful one,
was sent on such an errand is more than I should be able to explain.
But many years ago some one came to me with a request that I should go
that evening to a certain street at King's Cross, where would be found
a poor lady in great distress; that I should take a small sum of money
which was given to me for the purpose in a little packet which
disguised all appearance of coin, present it to her as a "parcel"
which I had been desired to deliver, and ask if there were any
particular service that could be done for her. For my own information
I was told that she was a beautiful Russian whose husband had barely
contrived to get her out of the country, with her child, before his
own arrest for some deep political offence of which she was more than
cognisant, and that now she was living in desperate ignorance of his
fate. Moreover, she was penniless and companionless, though not quite
without friends; for some there were who knew of her husband and had a
little help for her, though they were almost as poor as herself. But
none of these dare approach her, so fearful was she of the danger of
their doing so, either to themselves or her husband or her child, and
so ignorant of the perfect freedom that political exiles could count
upon in England. "Then," said I, "what expectation is there that she
will admit me, an absolute stranger to her, who may be employed by the
police for anything she knows to the contrary?" The answer was: "Of
course that has been thought of. But you have only to send up your
name, which, in the certainty that you would have no objection, has
been communicated to her already. Her own name, in England, is Madame
Vernet."
It was a Saturday evening in November, the air thick with darkness and
a drizzling rain, the streets black and shining where lamplight fell
upon the mud on the paths and the pools in the roadway, when I found
my way to King's Cross on this small errand of kindness. King's Cross
is a most unlovely purlieu at its best, which must be in the first
dawn of a summer day, when the innocence of morning smiles along its
squalid streets, and the people of the place, who cannot be so
wretched as they look, are shut within their poor and furtive homes.
On a foul November night nothing can be more miserable, more
melancholy. One or two great thoroughfares were crowded with
foot-passengers who bustled here and there about their Saturday
marketings, under the light that flared from the shops and the stalls
that lined the roadway. Spreading on every hand from these
thoroughfares, with their noisy trafficking so dreadfully eager and
small, was a maze of streets built to be "respectable" but now run
down into the forlorn poverty which is all for concealment without any
rational hope of success. It was to one of these that I was
directed--a narrow silent little street of three-storey houses, with
two families at least in every one of them.
Arrived at No. 17, I was admitted by a child after long delay, and by
her conducted to a room at the top of the house. No voice responded to
the knock at the room door, and none to the announcement of the
visitor's name; but before I entered I was aware of a sound which,
though it was only what may be heard in the grill-room of any
coffee-house at luncheon time, made me feel very guilty and ashamed.
For the last ten minutes I had been gradually sinking under the fear
of intrusion--of intrusion upon grief, and not less upon the wretched
little secrets of poverty which pride is so fain to conceal; and now
these splutterings of a frying-pan foundered me quite. What worse
intrusion could there be than to come prying in upon the cooking of
some poor little meal?
Too much embarrassed to make the right apology (which, to be right,
would have been without any embarrassment at all) I entered the room,
in which everything could be seen in one straightforward glance: the
little square table in the centre, with its old green cover and the
squat lamp on it, the two chairs, the dingy half carpet, the bed
wherein a child lay asleep in a lovely flush of colour, and the pale
woman with a still face, and with the eyes that are said to resemble
agates, standing before the hearth. Under the dark cloud of her hair
she looked the very picture of Suffering--Suffering too proud to
complain and too tired to speak. Beautiful as the lines of her face
were, it was white as ashes and spoke their meaning; but nothing had
yet tamed the upspringing nobility of her tall, slight, and yet
imperious form.
Receiving me with the very least appearance of curiosity or any other
kind of interest, but yet with something of proud constraint (which I
attributed too much, perhaps, to the untimely frying-pan), she waved
her hand toward the farther chair of the two, and asked to be excused
from giving me her attention for a moment. By that she evidently meant
that otherwise her supper would be spoiled. It is not everything that
can be left to cook unattended; and since this poor little supper was
a piece of fish scarce bigger than her hand, it was all the more
likely to spoil and the less could be spared in damage. So I quietly
took my seat in a position which more naturally commanded the view out
of window than of the cooking operations, and waited to be again
addressed.
On the mantel-board a noisy little American clock ticked as if its
mission was to hurry time rather than to measure it, the frying-pan
fizzed and bubbled without any abatement of its usual habit or any
sense of compunction, now and then the child tossed upon the bed from
one pretty attitude to another; and that was all that could be heard,
for Madame Vernet's movements were as silent as the movements of a
shadow. In almost any part of that small room she could be seen
without direct looking; but at a moment when she seemed struck into a
yet deeper silence, and because of it, I ventured to turn upon her
more than half an eye. Standing rigidly still, she was staring at the
door in an intensity of listening that transfigured her. But the door
was closed, and I with the best of hearing directed to the same place
could detect no new sound: indeed, I dare swear that there was none.
It was merely accidental that just at this moment the child, with
another toss of the lovely black head, opened her eyes wide; but it
deepened the impressiveness of the scene when her mother, seeing the
little one awake, placed a finger on her own lips as she advanced
nearer to the door. The gesture was for silence, and it was obeyed as
if in understood fear. But still there was nothing to be heard
without, unless it were a push of soft drizzle against the
window-panes. And this Madame Vernet herself seemed to think when,
after a little while, she turned back to the fire--her eyes mere
agates again which had been all ablaze.
Stooping to the fender, she had now got her fish into one warm plate,
and had covered it with another, and had placed it on the broad
old-fashioned hob of the grate to keep hot (as I surmised) while she
spoke with and got rid of me, when knocking was heard at the outer
door, a pair of hasty feet came bounding up the stair, careless of
noise, and in flashed a splendid radiant creature of a man in a thin
summer coat, and literally drenched to the skin.
It was Monsieur Vernet, whose real name ended in "ieff." By daring
ingenuity, by a long chain of connivance yet more hazardous, by
courage, effrontery, and one or two miraculous strokes of good
fortune, he had escaped from the fortress to which he had been
conveyed in secret and without the least spark of hope that he would
ever be released. For many months no one but himself and his jailers
knew whether he was alive or dead: his friends inclined to think him
the one thing or the other according to the brightness or the
gloominess of the hour. Smuggled into Germany, and running thence into
Belgium, he had landed in England the night before; and walking the
whole distance to London, with an interval of four hours' sleep in a
cartshed, he contrived to bring home nearly all of the four shillings
with which he started.
But these particulars, it will be understood, I did not learn till
afterwards. For that evening my visit was at an end from the moment
(the first of his appearance) when Vernet seized his wife in his arms
with a partial resemblance to murder. Unobserved, I placed my small
packet on the table behind the lamp, and then slipped out; but not
without a last view of that affecting "domestic interior," which
showed me those two people in a relaxed embrace while they made me a
courteous salute in response to another which was all awkwardness,
their little daughter standing up on the bed in her night-gown,
patiently yet eagerly waiting to be noticed by her father. In all
likelihood she had not to wait long.
This was the beginning of my acquaintance with a man who had a greater
number of positive ideas than any one else that ever I have known,
with wonderful intrepidity and skill in expounding or defending them.
However fine the faculties of some other Russians whom I have
encountered, they seemed to move in a heavily obstructive atmosphere;
Vernet appeared to be oppressed by none. His resolutions were as
prompt as his thought; whatever resource he could command in any
difficulty, whether the least or the greatest, presented itself to his
mind instantly, with the occasion for it; and every movement of his
body had the same quickness and precision. His pride, his pride of
aristocracy, could tower to extraordinary heights; his sensibility to
personal slights and indignities was so trenchant that I have seen him
white and quivering with rage when he thought himself rudely jostled
by a fellow-passenger in a crowded street. And yet any comrade in
conspiracy was his familiar if he only brought daring enough into the
common business; and wife, child, fortune, the exchange of ease for
the most desperate misery, all were put at stake for the sake of the
People and at the call of their sorrows and oppressions. And of one
sort of pride he had no sense whatever--fine gentleman as he was, and
used from his birth to every refinement of service and luxury: no
degree of poverty, nor any blameless shift for relieving it, touched
him as humiliating. Privation, whether for others or himself, angered
him; the contrast between slothful wealth and toiling misery enraged
him; but he had no conception of want and its wretched little
expedients as mortifying.
For example. It was in November, that dreary and inclement month, when
he began life anew in England with a capital of three shillings and
sevenpence. It was a bleak afternoon in December, sleet lightly
falling as the dusk came on and melting as it fell, when I found him
gathering into a little basket what looked in the half-darkness like
monstrous large snails. With as much indifference as if he were
offering me a new kind of cigarette, Vernet put one of these things
into my hand, and I saw that it was a beautifully-made miniature
sailor's hat. The strands of which it was built were just like twisted
brown straw to the eye, though they were of the smallness of
packthread; and a neat band of ribbon proportionately slender made all
complete. But what were they for? How were they made? The answer was
that the design was to sell them, and that they were made of the
cords--more artistically twisted and more neatly waxed than
usual--that shoemakers use in sewing. As for the bands, Madame Vernet
had amongst her treasures a cap which her little daughter had worn in
her babyhood; and this cap had close frills of lace, and the frills
were inter-studded with tiny loops of ribbon--a fashion of that time.
There were dozens of these tiny loops, and everyone of them made a
band for Vernet's little toy hats. Perhaps in tenderness for the
mother's feelings, he would not let her turn the ribbons to their new
use, but had applied them himself; and having spent the whole of a
foodless day in the manufacture of these little articles, he was now
about to go and sell them. He had selected his "pitch" in a flaring
bustling street a mile away; and he asked me ("I must lose no time,"
he said) to accompany him in that direction. I did so, with a cold and
heavy stone in my breast which I am sure had no counterpart in his
own. As he marched on, in his light and firm soldierly way, he was
loud in praise of English liberty: at such a moment _that_ was his
theme. Arrived near his "pitch," he bade me good-night with no
abatement of the high and easy air that was natural to him; and though
I instantly turned back of course, I knew that at a few paces farther
the violently proud man moved off the pathway into the gutter, and
stood there till eleven o'clock; for not before then did he sell the
last of his little penny hats. Another man, equally proud, might have
done the same thing in Vernet's situation, but not with Vernet's
absolute indifference to everything but the coldness of the night and
the too-great stress of physical want.
But this Russian revolutionist was far too capable and versatile a man
to lie long in low water. He had a genius for industrial chemistry
which soon got him employment and from the sufficiently comfortable
made him prosperous by rapid stages. But what of that? Before long
another wave of political disturbance rose in Europe; Russia, Italy,
France, 'twas all one to Vernet when his sympathies were roused; and
after one or two temporary disappearances he was again lost
altogether. There was no news of him for months; and then his wife,
who all this while had been sinking back into the pallid speechless
deadness of the King's Cross days, suddenly disappeared too.
II
For more than thirty years--a period of enormous change in all that
men do or think--no word of Vernet came to my knowledge. But though
quite passed away he was never forgotten long, and it was with an
inrush of satisfaction that, a year or two ago, I received this letter
from him:
"... I have been reading the ---- _Review_, and it determines
me to solicit a pleasure which I have been at full-cock to ask
for many times since I returned to England in 1887. Let us meet.
I have something to say to you. But let us not meet in this
horrifically large and noisy town. You know Richmond? You know
the Star and Garter Hotel there? Choose a day when you will go to
find me in that hotel. It shall be in a quiet room looking over
the trees and the river, and there we will dine and sit and talk
over our dear tobacco in a right place.
"To say one word of the past, that you may know and then forget.
Marie is gone--gone twelve years since; and my daughter, gone. I
do not speak of them. And do not you expect to find in me any
more the Vernet of old days."
Nor was he. The splendidly robust and soldierly figure of thirty-five
had changed into a thin, fine-featured old man, above all things
gentle, thoughtful, considerate. Except that there was no suggestion
of a second and an inner self in him, he might have been an
ecclesiastic; as it was, he looked rather as if he had been all his
life a recluse student of books and state affairs.
It was a good little dinner in a bright room overlooking the garden;
and it was served so early that the declining sunshine of a June day
shone through our claret-glasses when coffee was brought in. Our first
talk was of matters of the least importance--our own changing fortunes
over a period of prodigious change for the whole world. From that
personal theme to the greater mutations that affect all mankind was a
quick transition; and we had not long been launched on this line of
talk before I found that in very truth nothing had changed more than
Vernet himself. It was the story of Ignatius Loyola over again, in
little and with a difference.
"Yes," said he, my mind filling with unspoken wonder at this during a
brief pause in the conversation, "Yes, prison did me good. Not in the
rough way you think, perhaps, as of taking nonsense out of a man with
a stick, but as solitude. Strict Catholics go into retreat once a
year, and it does them good as Catholics: whether otherwise I do not
know, but it is possible. You have a wild philosopher whom I love; and
wild philosophers are much the best. In them there is more philosophic
sport, more surprise, more shock; and it is shock that crystallises.
They startle the breath into our own unborn thoughts--thoughts formed
in the mind, you know, but without any ninth month for them: they wait
for some outer voice to make them alive. Well, once upon a time I
heard this philosopher, your Mr. Ruskin, say that only the most noble,
most virtuous, most beautiful young men should be allowed to go to the
war; the others, never. And he maintained it--ah! in language from
some divine madhouse in heaven. But as to that, it is a great
objection that your army is already small. Yet of this I am nearly
sure; it is the wrong men who go to gaol. The rogues and thieves
should give place to honest men--honest _reflective_ men. Every
advantage of that conclusive solitude is lost on blackguard persons
and is mostly turned to harm. For them prescribe one, two, three
applications of your cat-o'-nine tails----"
"There is knout like it!" said I, intending a severity of retort which
I hoped would not be quite lost in the pun.
"----and then a piece of bread, a shilling, and dismissal to the most
devout repentance that brutish crime is ever acquainted with,
repentance in stripes. Imprisonment is wasted on persons of so
inferior character. Waste it not, and you will have accommodation for
wise men to learn the monk's lesson (did you ever think it _all_
foolishness?) that a little imperious hardship, a time of seclusion
with only themselves to talk to themselves, is most improving. For
statesmen and reformers it should be an obligation."
"And according to your experience what is the general course of the
improvement? In what direction does it run?"
"At best? In sum total? You know me that I am no monk nor lover of
monks, but I say to you what the monk would say were he still a man
and intelligent. The chief good is rising above petty irritation,
petty contentiousness; it is patience with ills that _must_ last long;
it is choosing to build out the east wind instead of running at it
with a sword."
"And, if I remember aright, you never had that sword out of your
hand."
"From twenty years old to fifty, never out of my hand. But there were
excuses--no, but more than excuses; remember that that was another
time. Now how different it is, and what satisfaction to have lived to
see the change!"
"And what is the change you are thinking of!"
"One that I have read of--only he must not flatter himself that he
alone could find it out--in some Review articles of an old friend of
Vernet's whose portrait is before me now." And then, a little to my
distress, but more to my pleasure, he quoted from two or three
forgotten papers of mine on the later developments of social humanity,
the "evolution of goodness" in the relations of men to each other, the
new, great and rapid extension of brotherly kindness; observations and
theories which were welcomed as novel when they were afterwards taken
up and enlarged upon by Mr. Kidd in his book on "Social Evolution."
"For an ancient conspirator and man of the barricades," continued
Vernet, by this time pacing the room in the dusk which he would not
allow to be disturbed, "for a blood-and-iron man who put all his hopes
of a better day for his poor devils of fellow-creatures on the
smashing of forms and institutions and the substitution of others, I
am rather a surprising convert, don't you think? But who could know in
those days what was going on in the common stock of mind by--what
shall we call it? Before your Darwin brought out his explaining word
'evolution' I should have said that the change came about by a sort of
mental chemistry; that it was due to a kind of chemical ferment in
the mind, unsuspected till it showed entirely new growths and
developments. And even now, you know, I am not quite comfortable with
'evolution' as the word for this sudden spiritual advance into what
you call common kindness and more learned persons call 'altruism.' It
does not satisfy me, 'evolution.'"
"But you can say why it doesn't, perhaps."
"Nothing, more, I suppose, than the familiar association of
'evolution' with slow degrees and gradual processes. Evolution seems
to speak the natural coming-out of certain developments from certain
organisms under certain conditions. The change comes, and you see it
coming; and you can look back and trace its advance. But here? The
human mind has been the same for ages; subject to the same teaching;
open to the same persuasions and dissuasions; as quick to see and as
keen to think as it is now; and all the while it has been staring on
the same cruel scenes of misery and privation: no, but very often
worse. And then, presto! there comes a sudden growth of fraternal
sentiment all over this field of the human mind; and such a growth
that if it goes on, if it goes on straight and well, it will transform
the whole world. Transform its economies?--it will change its very
aspect. Towns, streets, houses will show the difference; while as to
man himself, it will make him another being. For this is neither a
physical nor a mere intellectual advance. As for that, indeed, perhaps
the intellectual advance hasn't very much farther to go on its own
lines, which are independent of morality, or of goodness as I prefer
to say: the simple word! Well, do you care if evolution has pretty
nearly done with intellect? Would you mind if intellect never made a
greater shine? Will your heart break if it never ascends to a higher
plane than it has reached already?"
"Not a bit; if, in time, nobody is without a good working share of
what intellect there is amongst us."
"No, not a bit! Enough of intellect for the good and happiness of
mankind if we evolve no more of it. But this is another thing! This is
a _spiritual_ evolution, spiritual advance and development--a very
different thing! Mark you, too, that it is not shown in a few amongst
millions, but is common, general. And though, as you have said, it may
perish at its beginnings, trampled out by war, the terrible war to
come may absolutely confirm it. For my part, I don't despair of its
surviving and spreading even from the battle-field. It is your own
word that not only has the growth of common kindness been more urgent,
rapid and general this last hundred years than was ever witnessed
before in the whole long history of the world, but it has come out as
strongly in making war as in making peace. It is seen in extending to
foes a benevolence which not long ago would have been thought
ludicrous and even unnatural. Why, then, if that's so, the feeling may
be furthered and intensified by the very horrors of the next great
war, such horrors as there _must_ be; and--God knows! God knows!--but
from this beginning the spiritual nature of man may be destined to
rise as far above the rudimentary thing it is yet (I think of a
staggering blind puppy) as King Solomon's wits were above an
Eskimo's."
"Still the same enthusiast," I said to myself, "though with so great a
difference." But what struck me most was the reverence with which he
said "God knows!" For the coolest Encyclopedist could not have denied
the existence of God with a more settled air than did "the Vernet of
old days."
"And yet," so he went on, "were the human race to become all-righteous
in a fortnight, and to push out angels' wings from its shoulders,
every one! every one! all together on Christmas Day, it would still be
the Darwinian process. Yes, we must stick to it, that it is evolution,
I suppose, and I'm sure it contents me well enough. What matter for
the process! And yet do you know what I think?"
Lights had now been brought in by the waiter--a waiter who really
could not understand why not. But we sat by the open window looking
out upon the deepening darkness of the garden, beyond which the river
shone as if by some pale effulgence of its own, or perhaps by a little
store of light saved up from the liberal sunshine of the day.
"Do you know what I think?" said Vernet, with the look of a man who is
about to confess a weakness of which he is ashamed. "I sometimes think
that if I were of the orthodox I should draw an argument for
supernatural religion, against your strict materialists, from this
sudden change of heart in Christian countries. For that is what it is.
It is a change of heart; or, if you like to have it so, of spirit; and
the remarkable thing is that it is _nothing else_. Whether it lasts or
not, this awakening of brotherliness cannot be completely understood
unless that is understood. What else has changed, these hundred years?
There is no fresh discovery of human suffering, no new knowledge of
the desperate poverty and toil of so many of our fellow-creatures: nor
can we see better with our eyes, or understand better what we hear and
see. This that we are talking about is a heart-growth, which, as we
know, can make the lowliest peasant divine; not a mind-growth, which
can be splendid in the coldest and most devilish man. Well, then, were
I of the orthodox I should say this. When, after many generations, I
see a traceless movement of the spirit of man like the one we are
speaking of--a movement which, if it gains in strength and goes on to
its natural end, will transfigure human society and make it infinitely
more like heaven--I think the divine influence upon the development of
man as a spirit may be direct and continuous; or, it would be better
to say, not without repetition."
Vernet had to be reminded that the intellectual development of man had
also shown itself in sudden starts and rushes toward perfection--now
in one land, now in another; and never with an appearance of gradual
progress, as might be expected from the nature of things. And
therefore nothing in the spiritual advance which is declared by the
sudden efflorescence of "altruism" dissociates it from the common
theory of evolution. This he was forced to admit. "I know," he
replied; "and as to intellectual development showing itself by starts
and rushes, it is very obvious." But though he made the admission, I
could see that he preferred belief in direct influence from above. And
this was Vernet!--a most unexpected example of that Return to Religion
which was not so manifest when we talked together as it is to-day.
"You see, I am a soldier," he resumed, "and a soldier born and bred
does not know how to get on very long without feeling the presence of
a General, a Commander. That I find as I grow old; my youth would have
been ashamed to acknowledge the sentiment. And for its own sake, I
hope that Science is becoming an old gentleman too, and willing to see
its youthful confidence in the destruction of religious belief quite
upset. For upset it certainly will be, and very much by its own hands.
Most of the new professors were sure that the religious idea was to
perish at last in the light of scientific inquiry. None of them seemed
to suspect what I remember to have read in a fantastic magazine
article two or three years ago, that unbelief in the existence of a
providential God, the dissolution of that belief, would not retard but
probably draw on more quickly the greater and yet unfulfilled triumphs
of Christ on earth. Are you surprised at that? Certainly it is not the
general idea of what unbelief is capable of. 'And what,' says some one
in the story, 'what are those greater triumphs?' To which the answer
is: 'The extension of charity, the diffusion of brotherly love, greed
suppressed, luxury shameful, service and self-sacrifice a common
law'--something like what we see already between mother and child, it
was said. Now what do you think of that as a consequence of settled
unbelief? As for Belief, we must allow that _that_ has not done much
to bring on the greater triumphs of Christianity."
"And how is Unbelief to do this mighty work?" said I.
"You would like to know! Why, in a most natural way, and not at all
mysterious. But if you ask in how long a time----! Well, it is thus,
as I understand. What the destruction of religious faith might have
made of the world centuries ago we cannot tell; nothing much worse,
perhaps, than it was under Belief, for belief can exist with little
change of heart. But these are new times. Unbelief cannot annihilate
the common feeling of humanity. On the contrary, we see that it is
just when Science breaks religion down into agnosticism that a new day
of tenderness for suffering begins, and poverty looks for the first
time like a wrong. And why? To answer that question we should remember
what centuries of belief taught us as to the place of man on earth in
the plan of the Creator. This world, it was 'a scene of probation.'
The mystery of pain and suffering, the burdens of life apportioned so
unequally, the wicked prosperous, goodness wretched, innocent weakness
trodden down or used up in starving toil--all this was explained by
the scheme of probation. It was only for this life; and every hour of
it we were under the eyes of a heavenly Father who knows all and
weighs all; and there will be a future of redress that will leave no
misery unreckoned, no weakness unconsidered, no wrong uncompensated
that was patiently borne. Don't you remember? And how comfortable the
doctrine was! How entirely it soothed our uneasiness when, sitting in
warmth and plenty, we thought of the thousands of poor wretches
outside! And it was a comfort for the poor wretches too, who believed
most when they were most miserable or foully wronged that in His own
good time God would requite or would avenge.
"Very well. But now, says my magazine sermoniser, suppose this idea of
a heavenly Father a mistake and probation a fairy tale; suppose that
there is no Divine scheme of redress beyond the grave: how do we
mortals stand to each other then? How do we stand to each other in a
world empty of all promise beyond it? What is to become of our
scene-of-probation complacency, we who are happy and fortunate in the
midst of so much wrong? And if we do not busy ourselves with a new
dispensation on their behalf, what hope or consolation is there for
the multitude of our fellow-creatures who are born to unmerited misery
in the only world there is for any of us? It is clear that if we must
give up the Divine scheme of redress as a dream, redress is an
obligation returned upon ourselves. All will not be well in another
world: all must be put right in this world or nowhere and never.
Dispossessed of God and a future life, mankind is reduced to the
condition of the wild creatures, each with a natural right to ravage
for its own good. If in such conditions there is a duty of forbearance
from ravaging, there is a duty of helpful surrender too; and unbelief
must teach both duties, unless it would import upon earth the hell it
denies. 'Unbelief is a call to bring in the justice, the compassion,
the oneness of brotherhood that can never make a heaven for us
elsewhere.' So the thing goes on; the end of the argument being that
in this way unbelief itself may turn to the service of Heaven and do
the work of the believer's God. More than that: in the doing of it the
spiritual nature of man must be exalted, step by step. That may be its
way of perfection. On that path it will rise higher and higher into
Divine illuminations which have touched it but very feebly as yet,
even after countless ages of existence.
"Do you recognise these speculations?" said Vernet, after a silence.
I recognised them well enough, without at all anticipating that so
much of them would presently re-appear in the formal theory of more
than one social philosopher.
There was a piano in the little room we dined in. For a minute or two
Vernet, standing with his cigar between his lips, went lightly over
the keys. The movement, though extremely quick, was wonderfully soft,
so that he had not to raise his voice in saying:
"I have an innocent little speculation of my own. How long will it be
before this spiritual perfectioning is pretty near accomplishment? Two
thousand years? One thousand years? Twenty generations at the least!
Ah, that is the despair of us poor wretches of to-day and to-morrow.
Well, when the time comes I fancy that an entirely new literature will
have a new language. There will certainly be a new literature if ever
spiritual progress equals intellectual progress. The dawning of
conceptions as yet undreamt of, enlightenments higher than any yet
attained to, may be looked for, I suppose, as in the natural order of
things; and even _without_ extraordinary revelations to the spirit,
the spiritual advance must have an enormous effect in disabusing,
informing and inspiring mental faculty such as we know it now. And
meanwhile? Meanwhile words are all that we speak with, and how weak
are words? Already there are heights and depths of feeling which they
are hardly more adequate to express than the dumbness of the dog can
express his love for his master. Yet there is a language that speaks
to the deeper thought and finer spirit in us as words do not--moving
them profoundly though they have no power of articulate response. They
heave and struggle to reply, till our breasts are actually conscious
of pain sometimes; but--no articulate answer. Do you recognise----?"
I pointed to the piano with the finger of interrogation.
"Yes," said Vernet, with a delicate sweep of the keyboard, "it is
this! It is music; music, which is felt to be the most subtle, most
appealing, most various of tongues even while we know that we are
never more than half awake to its pregnant meanings, and have not
learnt to think of it as becoming the last perfection of speech. But
that may be its appointed destiny. No, I don't think so only because
music itself is a thing of late, speedy and splendid development,
coming just before the later diffusion of spiritual growth. Yet there
is something in that, something which an evolutionist would think
apposite and to be expected. There is more, however, in what music
is--a voice always understood to have powerful innumerable meanings
appealing to we know not what in us, we hardly know how; and more,
again, in its being an exquisite voice which can make no use of
reason, nor reason of it; nor calculation, nor barter, nor anything
but emotion and thought. The language we are using now, we two, is
animal language by direct pedigree, which is worth observation don't
you think? And, for another thing, when it began it had very small
likelihood of ever developing into what it has become under the
constant addition of man's business in the world and the accretive
demands of reason and speculation. And the poets have made it very
beautiful no doubt; yes, and when it is most beautiful it is most
musical, please observe: most beautiful, and at the same time most
meaning. Well, then! A new nature, new needs. What do you think? What
do you say against music being wrought into another language for
mankind, as it nears the height of its spiritual growth?"
"I say it is a pretty fancy, and quite within reasonable speculation."
"But yet not of the profoundest consequence," added Vernet, coming
from the piano and resuming his seat by the window. "No; but what is
of consequence is the cruel tedium of these evolutionary processes. A
thousand years, and how much movement?"
"Remember the sudden starts towards perfection, and that the farther
we advance the more we may be able to help."
"Well, but that is the very thing I meant to say. Help is not only
desirable, it is imperatively called for. For an unfortunate offensive
movement rises against this better one, which will be checked, or
perhaps thrown back altogether, unless the stupid reformers who
confront the new spirit of kindness with the highwayman's demand are
brought to reason. What I most willingly yield to friend and brother I
do not choose to yield to an insulting thief; rather will I break his
head in the cause of divine Civility. Robbery is no way of
righteousness, and your gallant reformers who think it a fine heroic
means of bringing on a better time for humanity should be taught that
some devil has put the wrong plan into their heads. It is his way of
continuing under new conditions the old conflict of evil and good."
"But taught! How should these so-earnest ones be taught?"
"Ah, how! Then leave the reformers; and while they inculcate their
mistaken Gospel of Rancour, let every wise man preach the Gospel of
Content."
"Content--with things as they are?"
"Why, no, my friend; for that would be preaching content with
universal uncontent, which of course cannot last into a reign of
wisdom and peace. But if you ask me whether I mean content with a very
very little of this world's goods, or even contentment in poverty, I
say yes. There will be no better day till that gospel has found
general acceptance, and has been taken into the common habitudes of
life. The end may be distant enough; but it is your own opinion that
the time is already ripe for the preacher, and if he were no Peter the
Hermit but only another, another----"
"Father Mathew, inspired with more saintly fervour----"
"Who knows how far he might carry the divine light to which so many
hearts are awakening in secret? This first Christianity, it was but
'the false dawn.' Yes, we may think so."
Here there was a pause for a few moments, and then I put in a word to
the effect that it would be difficult to commend a gospel of content
to Poverty.
"But," said Vernet, "it will be addressed more to the rich and
well-to-do, as you call them, bidding them be content with enough. Not
forbidding them to strive for more than enough--that would never do.
The good of mankind demands that all its energies should be
maintained, but not that its energies should be meanly employed in
grubbing for the luxury that is no enjoyment but only a show, or that
palls as soon as it is once enjoyed, and then is no more felt as
luxury than the labourer's second pair of boots or the mechanic's
third shirt a week. For the men of thousands per annum the Gospel of
Content would be the wise, wise, wise old injunction to plain living
and high thinking, only with one addition both beautiful and wise:
kind thinking, and the high and the kind thinking made good in deed.
And it would work, this gospel; we may be sure of it already. For
luxury has became _common_; it is being found out. Where there was one
person at the beginning of the century who had daily experience of its
fatiguing disappointments, now there are fifty. Like everything else,
it loses distinction by coming abundantly into all sorts of hands; and
meanwhile other and nobler kinds of distinction have multiplied and
have gained acknowledgment. And from losing distinction--this you must
have observed--luxury is becoming vulgar; and I don't know why the
time should be so very far off when it will be accounted shameful.
Certain it is that year by year a greater number of minds, and such as
mostly determine the currents of social sentiment, think luxury _low_;
without going deeper than the mere look of it, perhaps. These are
hopeful signs. Here is good encouragement to stand out and preach a
gospel of content which would be an education in simplicity, dignity,
happiness, and yet more an education of heart and spirit. For nothing
that a man can do in this world works so powerfully for his own
spiritual good as the habit of sacrifice to kindness. It is so like a
miracle that it is, I am sure, the one way--the one way appointed by
the laws of our spiritual growth.
"Yes, and what about preaching the gospel of content to Poverty? Well,
there we must be careful to discriminate--careful to disentangle
poverty from some other things which are the same thing in the common
idea. Say but this, that there must be no content with squalor, none
with any sort of uncleanness, and poverty takes its own separate place
and its own unsmirched aspect. An honourable poverty, clear of
squalor, any man should be able to endure with a tranquil mind. To
attain to that tranquillity is to attain to nobleness; and persistence
in it, though effort fail and desert go quite without reward,
ennobles. Contentment in poverty does not mean crouching to it or
under it. Contentment is not cowardice, but fortitude. There is no
truer assertion of manliness, and none with more grace and sweetness.
Before it can have an established place in the breast of any man, envy
must depart from it--envy, jealousy, greed, readiness to take
half-honest gains, a horde of small ignoble sentiments not only
disturbing but poisonous to the ground they grow in. Ah, believe me!
if a man had eloquence enough, fire enough, and that command of
sympathy that your Gordon seems to have had (not to speak of a man
like Mahomet or to touch on more sacred names), he might do wonders
for mankind in a single generation by preaching to rich and poor the
several doctrines of the Gospel of Content. A curse on the mean
strivings, stealings, and hoardings that survive from our animal
ancestry, and another curse (by your permission) on the gaudy vanities
that we have set up for objects in life since we became reasoning
creatures."
* * * * *
In effect, here the conversation ended. More was said, but nothing
worth recalling. Drifting back to less serious talk, we gossiped till
midnight, and then parted with the heartiest desire (I speak for
myself) of meeting soon again. But on our way back to town Vernet
recurred for a moment to the subject of his discourse, saying:
"I don't make out exactly what you think now of the prospect we were
talking of."
My answer pleased him. "I incline to think," said I, "what I have long
thought: that if there is any such future for us, and I believe there
is, we of the older European nations will be nowhere when it comes. In
existence--yes, perhaps; but gone down. You see we are becoming
greybeards already; while you in Russia are boys, with every mark of
boyhood on you. You, you are a new race--the only new race in the
world; and it is plain that you swarm with ideas of precisely the kind
that, when you come to maturity, may re-invigorate the world. But
first, who knows what deadly wars?"
He pressed his hand upon my knee in a way that spoke a great deal. We
parted, and two months afterwards the Vernet whose real name ended in
"ieff" was "happed in lead."
Poor Cousin Louis
By Ella D'Arcy
There stands in the Islands a house known as "Les Calais." It has
stood there already some three hundred years, and to judge from its
stout walls and weather-tight appearance, promises to stand some three
hundred more. Built of brown home-quarried stone, with solid stone
chimney-stacks and roof of red tiles, its door is set in the centre
beneath a semi-circular arch of dressed granite, on the keystone of
which is deeply cut the date of construction:
J V N I
1 6 0 3
Above the date straggle the letters, L G M M, initials of the
forgotten names of the builder of the house and of the woman he
married. In the summer weather of 1603 that inscription was cut, and
the man and woman doubtless read it with pride and pleasure as they
stood looking up at their fine new homestead. They believed it would
carry their names down to posterity when they themselves should be
gone; yet there stand the initials to-day, while the personalities
they represent are as lost to memory as are the builders' graves.
At the moment when this little sketch opens, Les Calais had belonged
for three generations to the family of Renouf (pronounced Rennuf), and
it is with the closing days of Mr. Louis Renouf that it purposes to
deal. But first to complete the description of the house, which is
typical of the Islands: hundreds of such homesteads placed singly, or
in groups--then sharing in one common name--may be found there in a
day's walk, although it must be added that a day's walk almost
suffices to explore any one of the Islands from end to end.
Les Calais shares its name with none. It stands alone, completely
hidden, save at one point only, by its ancient elms. On either side of
the doorway are two windows, each of twelve small panes, and there is
a row of five similar windows above. Around the back and sides of the
house cluster all sorts of outbuildings, necessary dependencies of a
time when men made their own cider and candles, baked their own bread,
cut and stacked their own wood, and dried the dung of their herds for
extra winter fuel. Beyond these lie its vegetable and fruit gardens,
which again are surrounded on every side by its many rich vergées of
pasture land.
Would you find Les Calais, take the high road from Jacques-le-Port to
the village of St. Gilles, then keep to the left of the schools along
a narrow lane cut between high hedges. It is a cart track only, as the
deep sun-baked ruts testify, leading direct from St. Gilles to
Vauvert, and, likely enough, during the whole of that distance you
will not meet with a solitary person. You will see nothing but the
green running hedgerows on either hand, the blue-domed sky above, from
whence the lark, a black pin-point in the blue, flings down a gush of
song; while the thrush you have disturbed lunching off that succulent
snail, takes short ground flights before you, at every pause turning
back an ireful eye to judge how much farther you intend to pursue him.
He is happy if you branch off midway to the left down the lane leading
straight to Les Calais.
A gable end of the house faces this lane, and its one window in the
days of Louis Renouf looked down upon a dilapidated farm- and
stable-yard, the gate of which, turned back upon its hinges, stood
wide open to the world. Within might be seen granaries empty of grain,
stables where no horses fed, a long cow-house crumbling into ruin, and
the broken stone sections of a cider trough dismantled more than half
a century back. Cushions of emerald moss studded the thatches, and
lilliputian forests of grass blades sprang thick between the cobble
stones. The place might have been mistaken for some deserted grange,
but for the contradiction conveyed in a bright pewter full-bellied
water-can standing near the well, in a pile of firewood, with chopper
still stuck in the topmost billet, and in a tatterdemalion troop of
barn-door fowl lagging meditatively across the yard.
On a certain day, when summer warmth and unbroken silence brooded over
all, and the broad sunshine blent the yellows, reds, and greys of tile
and stone, the greens of grass and foliage, into one harmonious whole,
a visitor entered the open gate. This was a tall, large young woman,
with a fair, smooth, thirty-year-old face. Dressed in what was
obviously her Sunday best, although it was neither Sunday nor even
market-day, she wore a bonnet diademed with gas-green lilies of the
valley, a netted black mantilla, and a velvet-trimmed violet silk
gown, which she carefully lifted out of dust's way, thus displaying a
stiffly starched petticoat and kid spring-side boots.
Such attire, unbeautiful in itself and incongruous with its
surroundings, jarred harshly with the picturesque note of the scene.
From being a subject to perpetuate on canvas, it shrunk, as it were,
to the background of a cheap photograph, or the stage adjuncts to the
heroine of a farce. The silence too was shattered as the new comer's
foot fell upon the stones. An unseen dog began to mouth a joyous
welcome, and the fowls, lifting their thin, apprehensive faces towards
her, flopped into a clumsy run as though their last hour were visible.
The visitor meanwhile turned familiar steps to a door in the wall on
the left, and raising the latch, entered the flower garden of Les
Calais. This garden, lying to the south, consisted then, and perhaps
does still, of two square grass-plots with a broad gravel path running
round them and up to the centre of the house.
In marked contrast with the neglect of the farmyard was this
exquisitely kept garden, brilliant and fragrant with flowers. From a
raised bed in the centre of each plot standard rose-trees shed out
gorgeous perfume from chalices of every shade of loveliness, and
thousands of white pinks justled shoulder to shoulder in narrow bands
cut within the borders of the grass.
Busy over these, his back towards her, was an elderly man, braces
hanging, in coloured cotton shirt. "Good afternoon, Tourtel," cried
the lady, advancing. Thus addressed, he straightened himself slowly
and turned round. Leaning on his hoe, he shaded his eyes with his
hand. "Eh den! it's you, Missis Pedvinn," said he; "but we didn't
expec' you till to-morrow?"
"No, it's true," said Mrs. Poidevin, "that I wrote I would come
Saturday, but Pedvinn expects some friends by the English boat, and
wants me to receive them. Yet as they may be staying the week, I did
not like to put poor Cousin Louis off so long without a visit, so
thought I had better come up to-day."
Almost unconsciously, her phrases assumed apologetic form. She had an
uneasy feeling Tourtel's wife might resent her unexpected advent;
although why Mrs. Tourtel should object, or why she herself should
stand in any awe of the Tourtels, she could net have explained.
Tourtel was but gardener, the wife housekeeper and nurse, to her
cousin Louis Renouf, master of Les Calais. "I sha'n't inconvenience
Mrs. Tourtel, I hope? Of course I shouldn't think of staying tea if
she is busy; I'll just sit an hour with Cousin Louis, and catch the
six o'clock omnibus home from Vauvert."
Tourtel stood looking at her with wooden countenance, in which two
small shifting eyes alone gave signs of life. "Eh, but you won't be no
inconvenience to de ole woman, ma'am," said he suddenly, in so loud a
voice that Mrs. Poidevin jumped; "only de apple-gôche, dat she was
gain' to bake agen your visit, won't be ready, dat's all."
He turned, and stared up at the front of the house; Mrs. Poidevin, for
no reason at all, did so too. Door and windows were open wide. In the
upper storey, the white roller-blinds were let down against the sun,
and on the broad sills of the parlour windows were nosegays placed in
blue china jars. A white trellis-work criss-crossed over the façade,
for the support of climbing rose and purple clematis which hung out a
curtain of blossom almost concealing the masonry behind. The whole
place breathed of peace and beauty, and Louisa Poidevin was lapped
round with that pleasant sense of well-being which it was her chief
desire in life never to lose. Though poor Cousin Louis--feeble,
childish, solitary--was so much to be pitied, at least in his
comfortable home and his worthy Tourtels he found compensation.
An instant after Tourtel had spoken, a woman passed across the wide
hall. She had on a blue linen skirt, white stockings, and shoes of
grey list. The strings of a large, bibbed, lilac apron drew the folds
of a flowered bed-jacket about her ample waist; and her thick
yellow-grey hair, worn without a cap, was arranged smoothly on either
side of a narrow head. She just glanced out, and Mrs. Poidevin was on
the point of calling to her, when Tourtel fell into a torrent of words
about his flowers. He had so much to say on the subject of
horticulture; was so anxious for her to examine the freesia bulbs
lying in the tool-house, just separated from the spring plants; he
denounced so fiercely the grinding policy of Brehault the middleman,
who purchased his garden stuff to resell it at Covent Garden--"my
good! on dem freesias I didn't make not two doubles a bunch!"--that
for a long quarter of an hour all memory of her cousin was driven from
Mrs. Poidevin's brain. Then a voice said at her elbow, "Mr. Rennuf is
quite ready to see you, ma'am," and there stood Tourtel's wife, with
pale composed face, square shoulders and hips, and feet that moved
noiselessly in her list slippers.
"Ah, Mrs. Tourtel, how do you do?" said the visitor; a question which
in the Islands is no mere formula, but demands and obtains a detailed
answer, after which the questioner's own health is politely inquired
into. Not until this ceremony had been scrupulously accomplished, and
the two women were on their way to the house, did Mrs. Poidevin beg to
know how things were going with her "poor cousin."
There lay something at variance between the ruthless, calculating
spirit which looked forth from the housekeeper's cold eye, and the
extreme suavity of her manner of speech.
"Eh, my good! but much de same, ma'am, in his health, an' more fancies
dan ever in his head. First one ting an' den anudder, an' always
tinking dat everybody is robbin' him. You rem-ember de larse time you
was here, an' Mister Rennuf was abed? Well, den, after you was gone,
if he didn't deck-clare you had taken some of de fedders of his bed
away wid you. Yes, my good! he tought you had cut a hole in de tick,
as you sat dere beside him an' emptied de fedders away into your
pocket."
Mrs. Poidevin was much interested. "Dear me, is it possible?... But
it's quite a mania with him. I remember now, on that very day he
complained to me Tourtel was wearing his shirts, and wanted me to go
in with him to Lepage's to order some new ones."
"Eh! but what would Tourtel want wid fine white shirts like dem?" said
the wife placidly. "But Mr. Louis have such dozens an' dozens of 'em
dat dey gets hidden away in de presses, an' he tinks dem stolen."
They reached the house. The interior is quite as characteristic of the
Islands as is the outside. Two steps take you down into the hall,
crossing the further end of which is the staircase with its balustrade
of carved black oak. Instead of the mean painted sticks, known
technically as "raisers," and connected together at the top by a
vulgar mahogany hand-rail--a fundamental article of faith with the
modern builder--these old Island balustrades are formed of wooden
panels, fretted out into scrolls, representing flower, or leaf, or
curious beaked and winged creatures, which go curving, creeping, and
ramping along in the direction of the stairs. In every house you will
find the detail different, while each resembles all as a whole. For in
the old days the workman, were he never so humble, recognised the
possession of an individual mind, as well as of two eyes and two
hands, and he translated fearlessly this individuality of his into his
work. Every house built in those days and existing down to these, is
not only a confession, in some sort, of the tastes, the habits, the
character, of the man who planned it, but preserves a record likewise
of every one of the subordinate minds employed in the various parts.
Off the hall of Les Calais are two rooms on the left and one on the
right. The solidity of early seventeenth-century walls is shown in the
embrasure depth (measuring fully three feet) of windows and doors. Up
to fifty years ago all the windows had leaded casements, as had every
similar Island dwelling-house. To-day, to the artist's regret, you
will hardly find one. The showy taste of the Second Empire spread from
Paris even to these remote parts, and plate-glass, or at least oblong
panes, everywhere replaced the mediæval style. In 1854, Louis Renouf,
just three and thirty, was about to bring his bride, Miss Marie
Mauger, home to the old house. In her honour it was done up
throughout, and the diamonded casements were replaced by guillotine
windows, six panes to each sash.
The best parlour then became a "drawing-room"; its raftered ceiling
was whitewashed, and its great centre-beam of oak infamously papered
to match the walls. The newly married couple were not in a position to
refurnish in approved Second Empire fashion. The gilt and marble, the
console tables and mirrors, the impossibly curved sofas and chairs,
were for the moment beyond them; the wife promised herself to acquire
these later on. But later on came a brood of sickly children (only one
of whom reached manhood); to the consequent expenses Les Calais owed
the preservation of its inlaid wardrobes, its four-post bedsteads with
slender fluted columns, and its Chippendale parlour chairs, the backs
of which simulate a delicious intricacy of twisted ribbons. As a
little girl, Louisa Poidevin had often amused herself studying these
convolutions, and seeking to puzzle out among the rippling ribbons
some beginning or some end; but as she grew up, even the simplest
problem lost interest for her, and the sight of the old Chippendale
chairs standing along the walls of the large parlour scarcely stirred
her bovine mind now to so much as reminiscence.
It was the door of this large parlour that the housekeeper opened as
she announced, "Here is Mrs. Pedvinn come to see you, sir," and
followed the visitor in.
Sitting in a capacious "berceuse," stuffed and chintz-covered, was the
shrunken figure of a more than seventy-year-old man. He was wrapped in
a worn grey dressing-gown, with a black velvet skull-cap, napless at
the seams, covering his spiritless hair, and he looked out upon his
narrow world from dim eyes set in cavernous orbits. In their
expression was something of the questioning timidity of a child,
contrasting curiously with the querulousness of old age, shown in the
thin sucked-in lips, now and again twitched by a movement in unison
with the twitching of the withered hands spread out upon his knees.
The sunshine, slanting through the low windows, bathed hands and
knees, lean shanks and slippered feet, in mote-flecked streams of
gold. It bathed anew rafters and ceiling-beam, as it had done at the
same hour and season these last three hundred years; it played over
the worm-eaten furniture, and lent transitory colour to the faded
samplers on the walls, bringing into prominence one particular
sampler, which depicted in silks Adam and Eve seated beneath the fatal
tree, and recorded the fact that Marie Hochedé was seventeen in 1808
and put her "trust in God"; and the same ray kissed the check of that
very Marie's son, who at the time her girlish fingers pricked the
canvas belonged to the enviable myriads of the unthought-of and the
unborn.
"Why, how cold you are, Cousin Louis," said Mrs. Poidevin, taking his
passive hand between her two warm ones, and feeling a chill strike
from it through the violet kid gloves; "and in spite of all this
sunshine too!"
"Ah, I'm not always in the sunshine," said the old man; "not always,
not always in the sunshine." She was not sure that he recognised her,
yet he kept hold of her hand and would not let it go.
"No; you are not always in de sunshine, because de sunshine is not
always here," observed Mrs. Tourtel in a reasonable voice, and with a
side glance for the visitor.
"And I am not always here either," he murmured, half to himself. He
took a firmer hold of his cousin's hand, and seemed to gain courage
from the comfortable touch, for his thin voice changed from complaint
to command. "You can go, Mrs. Tourtel," he said; "we don't require you
here. We want to talk. You can go and set the tea-things in the next
room. My cousin will stay and drink tea with me."
"Why, my cert'nly! of course Mrs. Pedvinn will stay tea. P'r'aps you'd
like to put your bonnet off in the bedroom, first, ma'am?"
"No, no," he interposed testily, "she can lay it off here. No need for
you to take her upstairs."
Servant and master exchanged a mute look; for the moment his old eyes
were lighted up with the unforeseeing, unveiled triumph of a child;
then they fell before hers. She turned, leaving the room with
noiseless tread; although a large-built, ponderous woman, she walked
with the softness of a cat.
"Sit down here close beside me," said Louis Renouf to his cousin,
"I've something to tell you, something very important to tell you." He
lowered his voice mysteriously, and glanced with apprehension at
window and door, squeezing tight her hand. "I'm being robbed, my dear,
robbed of everything I possess."
Mrs. Poidevin, already prepared for such a statement, answered
complacently, "Oh, it must be your fancy, Cousin Louis. Mrs. Tourtel
takes too good care of you for that."
"My dear," he whispered, "silver, linen, everything is going; even my
fine white shirts from the shelves of the wardrobe. Yet everything
belongs to poor John, who is in Australia, and who never writes to his
father now. His last letter is ten years old--ten years old, my dear,
and I don't need to read it over, for I know it by heart."
Tears of weakness gathered in his eyes, and began to trickle over on
to his check.
"Oh, Cousin John will write soon, I'm sure," said Mrs. Poidevin, with
easy optimism; "I shouldn't wonder if he has made a fortune, and is on
his way home to you at this moment."
"Ah, he will never make a fortune, my dear, he was always too fond of
change. He had excellent capabilities, Louisa, but he was too fond of
change.... And yet I often sit and pretend to myself he has made
money, and is as proud to be with his poor old father as he used to be
when quite a little lad. I plan out all we should do, and all he would
say, and just how he would look ... but that's only my make-believe;
John will never make money, never. But I'd be glad if he would come
back to the old home, though it were without a penny. For if he don't
come soon, he'll find no home, and no welcome.... I raised all the
money I could when he went away, and now, as you know, my dear, the
house and land go to you and Pedvinn.... But I'd like my poor boy to
have the silver and linen, and his mother's furniture and needlework
to remember us by."
"Yes, cousin, and he will have them some day, but not for a great
while yet, I hope."
Louis Renouf shook his head, with the immovable obstinacy of the very
old or the very young.
"Louisa, mark my words, he will get nothing, nothing. Everything is
going. They'll make away with the chairs and the tables next, with the
very bed I lie on."
"Oh, Cousin Louis, you mustn't think such things," said Mrs. Poidevin
serenely; had not the poor old man accused her to the Tourtels of
filching his mattress feathers?
"Ah, you don't believe me, my dear," said he, with a resignation which
was pathetic; "but you'll remember my words when I am gone. Six dozen
rat-tailed silver forks, with silver candlesticks, and tray, and
snuffers. Besides odd pieces, and piles and piles of linen. Your
cousin Marie was a notable housekeeper, and everything she bought was
of the very best. The large table-cloths were five guineas apiece, my
dear, British money--five guineas apiece."
Louisa listened with perfect calmness and scant attention.
Circumstances too comfortable, and a too abundant diet, had gradually
undermined with her all perceptive and reflective powers. Though, of
course, had the household effects been coming to her as well as the
land, she would have felt more interest in them; but it is only human
nature to contemplate the possible losses of others with equanimity.
"They must be handsome cloths, cousin," she said pleasantly; "I'm sure
Pedvinn would never allow me half so much for mine."
At this moment there appeared, framed in the open window, the hideous
vision of an animated gargoyle, with elf-locks of flaming red, and an
intense malignancy of expression. With a finger dragging down the
under eyelid of either eye, so that the eyeball seemed to bulge
out--with a finger pulling back either corner of the wide mouth, so
that it seemed to touch the ear--this repulsive apparition leered at
the old man in blood-curdling fashion. Then catching sight of Mrs.
Poidevin, who sat dumfounded, and with her "heart in her mouth," as
she afterwards expressed it, the fingers dropped from the face, the
features sprang back into position, and the gargoyle resolved itself
into a buxom red-haired girl, who, bursting into a laugh, impudently
stuck her tongue out at them before skipping away.
The old man had cowered down in his chair with his hands over his
eyes; now he looked up. "I thought it was the old Judy," he said, "the
old Judy she is always telling me about. But it's only Margot."
"And who is Margot, cousin?" inquired Louisa, still shaken from the
surprise.
"She helps in the kitchen. But I don't like her. She pulls faces at
me, and jumps out upon me from behind doors. And when the wind blows
and the windows rattle she tells me about the old Judy from Jethou,
who is sailing over the sea on a broomstick, to come and beat me to
death. Do you know, my dear," he said piteously, "you'll think I'm
very silly, but I'm afraid up here by myself all alone? Do not leave
me, Louisa; stay with me, or take me back to town with you. Pedvinn
would let me have a room in your house, I'm sure? And you wouldn't
find me much trouble, and of course I would bring my own bed linen,
you know."
"You had best take your tea first, sir," said Mrs. Tourtel from
outside the window; she held scissors in her hand, and was busy
trimming the roses. She offered no excuse for eavesdropping.
The meal was set out, Island fashion, with abundant cakes and sweets.
Louisa saw in the silver tea-set another proof, if need be, of her
cousin's unfounded suspicions. Mrs. Tourtel stood in the background,
waiting. Renouf desired her to pack his things; he was going into
town. "To be sure, sir," she said civilly, and remained where she
stood. He brought a clenched hand down upon the table, so that the
china rattled. "Are you master here, or am I?" he cried; "I am going
down to my cousin Pedvinn's. To-morrow I shall send my notary to put
seals on everything, and to take an inventory. For the future I shall
live in town."
His senility had suddenly left him; he spoke with firmness; it was a
flash-up of almost extinct fires. Louisa was astounded. Mrs. Tourtel
looked at him steadily. Through the partition wall, Tourtel in the
kitchen heard the raised voice, and followed his curiosity into the
parlour. Margot followed him. Seen near, and with her features at
rest, she appeared a plump touzle-headed girl, in whose low forehead
and loose-lipped mouth, crassness, cruelty, and sensuality were
unmistakably expressed. Yet freckled cheek, rounded chin, and bare red
mottled arms, presented the beautiful curves of youth, and there was a
certain sort of attractiveness about her not to be gainsaid.
"Since my servants refuse to pack what I require," said Renouf with
dignity, "I will do it myself. Come with me, Louisa."
At a sign from the housekeeper, Tourtel and Margot made way. Mrs.
Poidevin would have followed her cousin, as the easiest thing to
do--although she was confused by the old man's outbreak, and incapable
of deciding what course she should take--when the deep vindictive
baying of the dog ushered a new personage upon the scene.
This was an individual who made his appearance from the kitchen
regions--a tall thin man of about thirty years of age, with a pallid
skin, a dark eye and a heavy moustache. His shabby black coat and tie,
with the cords and gaiters that clothed his legs, suggested a
combination of sportsman and family practitioner. He wore a bowler
hat, and was pulling off tan driving gloves as he advanced.
"Ah my good! Doctor Owen, but dat's you?" said Mrs. Tourtel. "But we
wants you here badly. Your patient is in one of his tantrums, and no
one can't do nuddin wid him. He says he shall go right away into town.
Wants to make up again wid Doctor Lelever for sure."
The new comer and Mrs. Poidevin were examining each other with the
curiosity one feels on first meeting a person long known by reputation
or by sight. But now she turned to the housekeeper in surprise.
"Has my cousin quarrelled with his old friend Doctor Lelever?" she
asked. "I've heard nothing of that."
"Ah, dis long time. He tought Doctor Lelever made too little of his
megrims. He won't have nobody but Dr. Owen now. P'r'aps you know
Doctor Owen, ma'am? Mrs. Pedvinn, Doctor; de master's cousin, come up
to visit him."
Renouf was heard moving about overhead; opening presses, dragging
boxes.
Owen hung up his hat, putting his gloves inside it. He rubbed his lean
discoloured hands lightly together, as a fly cleans its forelegs.
"Shall I just step up to him?" he said. "It may calm him, and distract
his thoughts."
With soft nimbleness, in a moment he was upstairs. "So that's Doctor
Owen?" observed Mrs. Poidevin with interest. "A splendid-looking
gentleman! He must be very clever, I'm sure. Is he beginning to get a
good practice yet?"
"Ah, bah, our people, as you know, ma'am, dey don't like no strangers,
specially no Englishmen. He was very glad when Mr. Renouf sent for
him.... 'Twas through Margot there. She got took bad one Saturday
coming back from market from de heat or de squidge" (crowd), "and
Doctor Owen he overtook her on the road in his gig, and druv her home.
Den de master, he must have a talk with him, and so de next time he
fancy hisself ill, he send for Doctor Owen, and since den he don't
care for Dr. Lelever no more at all."
"I ought to be getting off," remarked Mrs. Poidevin, remembering the
hour at which the omnibus left Vauvert; "had I better go up and bid
cousin Louis good-bye?"
Mrs. Tourtel thought Margot should go and ask the Doctor's opinion
first, but as Margot had already vanished, she went herself.
There was a longish pause, during which Mrs. Poidevin looked uneasily
at Tourtel; he with restless furtive eyes at her. Then the housekeeper
reappeared, noiseless, cool, determined as ever.
"Mr. Rennuf is quiet now," she said; "de Doctor have given him a
soothing draught, and will stay to see how it acts. He tinks you'd
better slip quietly away."
On this, Louisa Poidevin left Les Calais; but in spite of her easy
superficiality, her unreasoning optimism, she took with her a sense of
oppression. Cousin Louis's appeal rang in her ears: "Do not leave me;
stay with me, or take me back with you. I am afraid up here, quite
alone." And after all, though his fears were but the folly of old age,
why, she asked herself, should he not come and stay with them in town
if he wished to do so? She resolved to talk it over with Pedvinn; she
thought she would arrange for him the little west room, being the
furthest from the nurseries; and in planning out such vastly important
trifles as to which easy-chair and which bedroom candlestick she would
devote to his use, she forgot the old man himself and recovered her
usual stolid jocundity.
When Owen had entered the bedroom, he had found Renouf standing over
an open portmanteau, into which he was placing hurriedly whatever
caught his eye or took his fancy, from the surrounding tables. His
hand trembled from eagerness, his pale old face was flushed with
excitement and hope. Owen, going straight up to him, put his two hands
on his shoulders, and without uttering a word, gently forced him
backwards into a chair. Then he sat down in front of him, so close
that their knees touched, and fixing his strong eyes on Renouf's
wavering ones, and stroking with his finger-tips the muscles behind
the ears, he threw him immediately into an hypnotic trance.
"You want to stay here, don't you?" said Owen emphatically. "I want to
stay here," repeated the old man through grey lips. His face was
become the colour of ashes, his hands were cold to the sight. "You
want your cousin to go away and not disturb you any more?
Answer--answer me." "I want my cousin to go away," Renouf murmured,
but in his staring, fading eye were traces of the struggle tearing him
within.
Owen pressed down the eyelids, made another pass before the face, and
rose on his long legs with a sardonic grin. Margot, leaning across a
corner of the bed, had watched him with breathless interest.
"I b'lieve you're de Evil One himself," she said admiringly.
Owen pinched her smooth chin between his tobacco-stained thumb and
fingers.
"Pooh! nothing but a trick I learned in Paris," said he; "it's very
convenient to be able to put a person to sleep now and again."
"Could you put any one to sleep?"
"Any one I wanted to."
"Do it to me then," she begged him.
"What use, my girl? Don't you do all I wish without?"
She grimaced, and picked at the bed-quilt laughing, then rose and
stood in front of him, her round red arms clasped behind her head. But
he only glanced at her with professional interest.
"You should get married, my dear, without delay. Pierre would be ready
enough, no doubt?"--"Bah! Pierre or annuder--if I brought a weddin'
portion. You don't tink to provide me wid one, I s'pose?"--"You know
that I can't. But why don't you get it from the Tourtels? You've
earned it before this, I dare swear."
It was now that the housekeeper came up, and took down to Louisa
Poidevin the message given above. But first she was detained by Owen,
to assist him in getting his patient into bed.
The old man woke up during the process, very peevish, very determined
to get to town. "Well, you can't go till to-morrow den," said Mrs.
Tourtel; "your cousin has gone home, an' now you've got to go to
sleep, so be quiet." She dropped all semblance of respect in her
tones. "Come, lie down!" she said sharply, "or I'll send Margot to
tickle your feet." He shivered and whimpered into silence beneath the
clothes.
"Margot tells him 'bout witches, an ogres, an scrapels her fingures
'long de wall, till he tinks dere goin' to fly 'way wid him," she
explained to Owen in an aside. "Oh, I know Margot," he answered
laconically, and thought, "May I never lie helpless within reach of
such fingers as hers."
He took a step and stumbled over a portmanteau lying open at his feet.
"Put your mischievous paws to some use," he told the girl, "and clear
these things away from the floor;" then remembering his rival Le
Lièvre; "if the old fool had really got away to town, it would have
been a nice day's work for us all," he added.
Downstairs he joined the Tourtels in the kitchen, a room situated
behind the living-room on the left, with low green glass windows,
rafters and woodwork smoke-browned with the fires of a dozen
generations. In the wooden racks over by the chimney hung flitches of
home-cured bacon, and the kettle was suspended by three chains over
the centre of the wide hearth, where glowed and crackled an armful of
sticks. So dark was the room, in spite of the daylight outside, that
two candles were set in the centre of the table, enclosing in their
circles of yellow light the pale face and silver hair of the
housekeeper, and Tourtel's rugged head and weather-beaten countenance.
He had glasses ready, and a bottle of the cheap brandy for which the
Island is famous. "You'll take a drop of something, eh, Doctor?" he
said as Owen seated himself on the joncière, a padded settle--green
baize covered, to replace the primitive rushes--fitted on one side of
the hearth. He stretched his long legs into the light, and for a
moment considered moodily the old gaiters and cobbled boots. "You've
seen to the horse?" he asked Tourtel.
"My cert'nly; he's in de stable dis hour back, an' I've given him a
feed. I tought maybe you'd make a night of it?"
"I may as well for all the work I have to do," said Owen with
sourness; "a damned little Island this for doctors. Nothing ever the
matter with anyone except the 'creeps,' and those who have it spend
their last penny in making it worse."
"Dere's as much illness here as anywhere," said Tourtel, defending the
reputation of his native soil, "if once you gets among de right class,
among de people as has de time an' de money to make dereselves ill.
But if you go foolin' roun' wid de paysans, what can you expec'? We
workin' folks can't afford to lay up an' buy ourselves doctors'
stuff."
"And how am I to get among the right class?" retorted Owen, sucking
the ends of his moustache into his mouth and chewing them savagely. "A
more confounded set of stuck-up, beggarly aristocrats I never met than
your people here." His discontented eye rested on Mrs. Tourtel. "That
Mrs. Pedvinn is the wife of Pedvinn the Jurat, I suppose?"--"Yes, de
Pedvinns of Rohais." "Good people," said Owen thoughtfully; "in with
the de Càterelles, and the Dadderney (d'Aldenois) set. Are there
children?"--"Tree."
He took a drink of the spirit and water; his bad temper passed. Margot
came in from upstairs.
"De marster sleeps as dough he'd never wake again," she announced,
flinging herself into the chair nearest Owen.
"It's 'bout time he did," Tourtel growled.
"I should have thought it more to your interest to keep him alive?"
Owen inquired. "A good place, surely?"
"A good place if you like to call it so," the wife answered him; "but
what, if he go to town, as he say to-night? and what, if he send de
notary, to put de scellés here?--den he take up again wid Dr. Lelever,
dat's certain." And Tourtel added in his surly key, "Anyway, I've been
workin' here dese tirty years now, an' dat's 'bout enough."
"In fact, when the orange is sucked, you throw away the peel? But are
you quite sure it is sucked dry?"
"De house an' de lan' go to de Pedvinns, an' all de money die too, for
de little he had left when young John went 'crost de seas, he sunk in
a 'nuity. Dere's nuddin' but de lining, an' plate, an' such like, as
goes to de son."
"And what he finds of that, I expect, will scarcely add to his
impedimenta?" said Owen grinning. He thought, "The old man is well
known in the island, the name of his medical attendant would get
mentioned in the papers at least; just as well Le Lièvre should not
have the advertisement." Besides, there were the Poidevins.
"You might say a good word for me to Mrs. Pedvinn," he said aloud, "I
live nearer to Rohais than Lelever does, and with young children she
might be glad to have some one at hand."
"You may be sure you won't never find me ungrateful, sir," answered
the housekeeper; and Owen, shading his eyes with his hand, sat
pondering over the use of this word "ungrateful," with its faint yet
perceptible emphasis.
Margot, meanwhile, laid the supper; the remains of a rabbit-pie, a big
"pinclos" or spider crab, with thin, red knotted legs, spreading far
over the edges of the dish, the apple-gôche, hot from the oven, cider,
and the now half-empty bottle of brandy. The four sat down and fell
to. Margot was in boisterous spirits; everything she said or did was
meant to attract Owen's attention. Her cheeks flamed with excitement;
she wanted his eyes to be perpetually upon her. But Owen's interest in
her had long ceased. To-night, while eating heartily, he was absorbed
in his ruling passion: to get on in the world, to make money, to be
admitted into Island society. Behind the pallid, impenetrable mask,
which always enraged yet intimidated Margot, he plotted incessantly,
schemed, combined, weighed this and that, studied his prospects from
every point of view.
Supper over, he lighted his meerschaum; Tourtel produced a short clay,
and the bottle was passed between them. The women left them together,
and for ten, twenty minutes, there was complete silence in the room.
Tourtel let his pipe go out, and rapped it down brusquely upon the
table.
"It must come to an end," he said, with suppressed ferocity; "are we
eider to spen' de whole of our lives here, or else be turned off at de
eleventh hour after sufferin' all de heat an' burden of de day? Its
onreasonable. An' dere's de cottage at Cottu standin' empty, an' me
havin' to pay a man to look after de tomato houses, when I could get
fifty per cent. more by lookin' after dem myself.... An' what profit
is such a sickly, shiftless life as dat? My good! dere's not a man,
woman, or chile in de Islan's as will shed a tear when he goes, an'
dere's some, I tells you, as have suffered from his whimsies dese
tirty years, as will rejoice. Why, his wife was dead already when we
come here, an' his on'y son, a dirty, drunken, lazy vaurien too, has
never been near him for fifteen years, nor written neider. Dead most
likely, in foreign parts.... An' what's he want to stay for,
contraryin' an' thwartin' dem as have sweated an' laboured, an' now,
please de good God, wan's to sit 'neath de shadow of dere own fig-tree
for de short time dat remains to dem?... An' what do we get for
stayin'? Forty pound, Island money, between de two of us, an' de
little I makes from de flowers, an' poultry, an' such like. An' what
do we do for it? Bake, an' wash, an' clean, an' cook, an' keep de
garden in order, an' nuss him in all his tantrums.... If we was even
on his testament, I'd say nuddin. But everything goes to Pedvinns, an'
de son John, and de little bit of income dies wid him. I tell you 'tis
'bout time dis came to an end."
Owen recognised that Destiny asked no sin more heinous from him than
silence, perhaps concealment; the chestnuts would reach him without
risk of burning his hand. "It's time," said he, "I thought of going
home. Get your lantern, and I'll help you with the trap. But first,
I'll just run up and have another look at Mr. Rennuf."
For the last time the five personages of this obscure little tragedy
found themselves together in the bedroom, now lighted by a small lamp
which stood on the wash-hand-stand. Owen, who had to stoop to enter
the door, could have touched the low-pitched ceiling with his hand.
The bed, with its slender pillars, supporting a canopy of faded
damask, took up the greater part of the room. There was a fluted
headpiece of the damask, and long curtains of the same material,
looped up, on either side of the pillows. Sunken in these lay the head
of the old man, crowned with a cotton nightcap, the eyes closed, the
skin drawn tight over the skull, the outline of the attenuated form
indistinguishable beneath the clothes. The arms lay outside the
counterpane, straight down on either side; and the mechanical playing
movement of the fingers showed he was not asleep. Margot and Mrs.
Tourtel watched him from the bed's foot. Their gigantic shadows thrown
forward by the lamp, stretched up the opposite wall, and covered half
the ceiling. The old-fashioned mahogany furniture, with its fillets of
paler wood, drawn in ovals, upon the doors of the presses, their
centrepieces of fruit and flowers, shone out here and there with
reflected light; and the looking-glass, swung on corkscrew mahogany
pillars between the damask window curtains, gleamed lake-like amidst
the gloom.
Owen and Tourtel joined the women at the bedfoot; though each was
absorbed entirely in his own egotisms, all were animated by the same
secret desire. Yet, to the feeling heart, there was something
unspeakably pleading in the sight of the old man lying there, in his
helplessness, in the very room, on the very bed, which had seen his
wedding-night fifty years before; where as a much-wished-for and
welcomed infant, he had opened his eyes to the light more than seventy
years since. He had been helpless then as now, but then the child had
been held to loving hearts, loving fingers had tended him, a young and
loving mother lay beside him, the circumference of all his tiny world,
as he was the core and centre of all of hers. And from being that
exquisite, well-beloved little child, he had passed thoughtlessly,
hopefully, despairfully, wearily, through all the stages of life,
until he had come to this--a poor, old, feeble, helpless, worn-out
man, lying there where he had been born, but with all those who had
loved him carried long ago to the grave: with the few who might have
protected him still, his son, his cousin, his old friend Le Lièvre, as
powerless to save him as the silent dead.
Renouf opened his eyes, looked in turn at the four faces before him,
and read as much pity in them as in masks of stone. He turned himself
to the pillow again and to his miserable thoughts.
Owen took out his watch, went round to count the pulse, and in the
hush the tick of the big silver timepiece could be heard.
"There is extreme weakness," came his quiet verdict.
"Sinking?" whispered Tourtel loudly.
"No; care and constant nourishment are all that are required; strong
beef-tea, port wine jelly, cream beaten up with a little brandy at
short intervals, every hour say. And of course no excitement; nothing
to irritate, or alarm him" (Owen's eye met Margot's); "absolute quiet
and rest." He came back to the foot of the bed and spoke in a lower
tone. "It's just one of the usual cases of senile decay," said he,
"which I observe every one comes to here in the Islands (unless he has
previously killed himself by drink), the results of breeding in. But
Mr. Renouf may last months, years longer. In fact, if you follow out
my directions there is every probability that he will."
Tourtel and his wife shifted their gaze from Owen to look into each
other's eyes; Margot's loose mouth lapsed into a smile. Owen felt cold
water running down his back. The atmosphere of the room seemed to
stifle him; reminiscences of his student days crowded on him: the
horror of an unperverted mind, at its first spectacle of cruelty,
again seized hold of him, as though no twelve callous years were
wedged in between. At all costs he must get out into the open air.
He turned to go. Louis Renouf opened his eyes, followed the form
making its way to the door, and understood. "You won't leave me,
doctor? surely you won't leave me?" came the last words of piercing
entreaty.
The man felt his nerve going all to pieces.
"Come, come, my good sir, do you think I am going to stay here all
night?" he answered brutally.... Outside the door, Tourtel touched his
sleeve. "And suppose your directions are not carried out?" said he in
his thick whisper.
Owen gave no spoken answer, but Tourtel was satisfied. "I'll come an'
put the horse in," he said, leading the way through the kitchen to the
stables. Owen drove off with a parting curse and cut with the whip
because the horse slipped upon the stones. A long ray of light from
Tourtel's lantern followed him down the lane. When he turned out on to
the high road to St. Gilles, he reined in a moment, to look back at
Les Calais. This is the one point from which a portion of the house is
visible, and he could see the lighted window of the old man's bedroom
plainly through the trees.
What was happening there? he asked himself; and the Tourtel's cupidity
and callousness, Margot's coarse cruel tricks, rose before him with
appalling distinctness. Yet the price was in his hand, the first step
of the ladder gained; he saw himself to-morrow, perhaps in the
drawing-room of Rohais, paying the necessary visit of intimation and
condolence. He felt he had already won Mrs. Poidevin's favour. Among
women, always poor physiognomists, he knew he passed for a handsome
man; among the Islanders, the assurance of his address would pass for
good breeding; all he had lacked hitherto was the opportunity to
shine. This his acquaintance with Mrs. Poidevin would secure him. And
he had trampled on his conscience so often before, it had now little
elasticity left. Just an extra glass of brandy to-morrow, and to-day
would be as securely laid as those other episodes of his past.
While he watched, some one shifted the lamp ... a woman's shadow was
thrown upon the white blind ... it wavered, grew monstrous, and
spread, until the whole window was shrouded in gloom.... Owen put the
horse into a gallop ... and from up at Les Calais, the long-drawn
melancholy howling of the dog filled with forebodings the silent
night.
The Lamplighter
By A. S. Hartrick
[Illustration: The Lamplighter]
The Composer of "Carmen"
By Charles Willeby
What little has been written about poor Bizet is not the sort to
satisfy. The men who have told of him cannot have written with their
best pen. Even those who, one can see, have started well, albeit
impelled rather than inspired by a profound admiration for the artist
and the man, have fallen all too short of the mark, and ultimately
drifted into the dullest of all dull things--the compilation of mere
dates and doings. I know of no pamphlet devoted to him in this
country. He was much misunderstood in life; he has been, I think, as
much sinned against in death. The symbol of posthumous appreciation
which asserts itself to the visitor to Père Lachaise, is exponential
of compliment only when reckoned by avoirdupois. Neglected in life,
they have in death weighed him down with an edifice that would have
been obnoxious to every instinct in his sprightly soul--a memorial
befitting perhaps to such an one as Johannes Brahms, but repugnant as
a memento of the spirit that created "Carmen." It is an emblem of
French formalism in its most determined aspect. And in truth--as
Sainte-Beuve said of the Abbé Galiani--"they owed to him an
honourable, choice, and purely delicate burial; _urna brevis_, a
little urn which should not be larger than he." The previous
inappreciation of his genius has given place to posthumous laudation,
zealous indeed, but so indiscriminating as to be vulgar. Like many
another man, he had to take "a thrashing from life"; and although he
stood up to it unflinchingly, it was only in his death certificate
that he acquired passport to fame.
Just eighteen years before it was that Bizet had written from Rome:
"We are indeed sad, for there come to us the tidings of the death of
Léon Benouville. Really, one works oneself half crazy to gain this
Prix de Rome; then comes the huge struggle for position; and after
all, perchance to end by dying at thirty-eight! Truly, the picture is
the reverse of encouraging." Here was his own destiny, _nu comme la
main_, save that the fates begrudged him even the thirty-eight years
of his brother artist--called him when he could not but
"contrast
The petty done--the undone vast."
But his early life was not unhappy. He had no pitiful struggle with
poverty in childhood, at all events. Some tell us he was
precocious--terribly so; but I had rather take my cue from his own
words, "Je ne me suis donné qu'à contre-coeur à la musique," than
dwell upon his precocity, real or fictional. It was only hereditarily
consistent that he should have a musical organisation. His father was
a teacher of music, not without repute; his mother was a sister of
François Delsarte, who, although unknown to Grove, has two columns and
more devoted to him by Fetis, by whom he is described as an "artiste
un peu étrange, quoique d'un mérite incontestable, doué de facultés
très diverses et de toutes les qualités nécessaires à l'enseignement."
What there was of music in their son the parents sought to encourage
assiduously, and Bizet himself has shown us in his work, more clearly
than aught else could, that the true dramatic sense was innate in him.
And that he loved his literature too, was well proved by a glance at
the little _appartement_ in the Rue de Douai, which he continued to
occupy until well-nigh the end.
In 1849--he was just over his tenth year--Delsarte took him to
Marmontel of the Conservatoire. "Without being in any sense of the
word a prodigy," says the old pianoforte master, "he played his Mozart
with an unusual amount of taste. From the moment I heard him I
recognised his individuality, and I made it my object to preserve it."
Then Zimmerman, with whom _l'enseignement_ was a disease, heard of him
and sought him for pupil. But Zimmerman seems to have tired of him as
he tired of so many and ended by passing him on to Gounod. From entry
to exit--an interval of eight years--Bizet's academic career was a
series of _premiers et deuxièmes prix_. They were to him but so many
stepping-stones to the coveted Grand Prix de Rome. He longed to secure
this--to fly the crowded town and seek the secluded shelter of the
Villa Medici. And in the end he had his way. In effect, he commenced
to live only after he had taken up his abode on the little Pincian
Hill. Even there life was a trifle close to him, and some time passed
before he really fixed his focus.
In Italy, more than in any other part of the world, the life of the
present rests upon the strata of successive past lives. And although
Bizet was no student, carrying in his knapsack a superfluity of
culture, this place appealed to him from the moment that he came to
it, and the memory of it lingered long in after days.
The villa itself was a revelation to him. The masterpiece of
Renaissance façade over which the artist would seem to have exhausted
a veritable mine of Greek and Roman bas-reliefs; the garden with its
lawns surrounded by hedges breast-high, trimmed to the evenness of a
stone-wall; the green alleys overshadowed by ilex trees; the marble
statues looking forlornly regretful at Time's defacing treatment; the
terrace with its oaks gnarled and twisted with age; the fountains; the
roses; the flower-beds; and in the distance, "over the dumb
Campagna-sea," the hills melting into light under the evening sky--all
these made an _intaglio_ upon him such as was not readily to be
effaced, and which he learned to love. Perhaps because, after all,
Italy is even more the land of beauty than of what is venerable in
art, he did not feel the want of what Mr. Symonds calls the
"mythopoeic sense." It is a land ever young, in spite of age. Its
monuments, assertive as they are, so blend with the landscape, are so
in harmony with the surroundings, that the yawning gulf of years that
would separate us from them is made to vanish, and they come to live
with us.
And the place was teeming with tradition. From the time, 1540, when it
had been designed by Hannibal Lippi for Cardinal Ricci, passing thence
into the hands of Alexandro de' Medici, and later into those of Leo
XI., it had been the home of art; and then, on its acquisition by the
French Academy in 1804, it became the home of artists. Here had lived
and worked and dreamed David, Ingres, Delaroche, Vernet, Hérold,
Benoist, Halévy, Berlioz, Thomas, Gounod, and the minor host of them.
In truth the list awed Bizet not a little, and had he needed an
incentive here it was. For the rest, he was supremely content. As a
_pensionnaire_ of the Academy he had two hundred francs a month, and
he apportioned them in this wise: _Nourriture_, 75fr.; _vin_, 25fr.;
_retenue_, 25fr.; _location de piano_, 15fr.; _blanchissage_, 5fr.;
_bois_, _chandelles_, _timbre-poste_, _&c._, 10fr.; _gants_, 5fr.;
_perte sur le change de la monnaie,_ 5fr. Even then he wrote: "I have
more than thirty francs _pour faire le grand garçon_." In another
letter he says: "I seem to cling to Rome more than ever. The longer I
know it, the more I love it. Everything is so beautiful. Each
street--even the filthiest of them--has its own charm for me. And
perhaps what is most astonishing of all, is that those very things
which startled me most on my arrival, have now become a part of and
necessary to my very existence--the madonnas with their little lamps
at every corner; the linen hanging out to dry from the windows; the
very refuse of the streets; the beggars--all these things really
divert me, and I should cry out if so much as a dung-heap were
removed.... More too, every day, do I pity those imbeciles who have
not been more fully able to appreciate their good fortune in being
_pensionnaires_ of the Academy. But then one cannot help observing
that they are the very ones who have achieved nothing. Halévy, Thomas,
Gounod, Berlioz, Massé--they all loved and adored their Rome."
Then on the last day of the same year: "I seem to incline more
definitely towards the theatre, for I feel a certain sense of drama,
which, if I possessed it, I knew not of till now. So I hope for the
best. But that is not all. Hitherto I have vacillated between Mozart
and Beethoven, between Rossini and Meyerbeer, and suddenly I know upon
what, upon whom to fix my faith. To me there are two distinct kinds of
genius: the inspirational and the purely rational, I mean the genius
of nature and the genius of erudition; and whilst I have an immense
admiration for the second, I cannot deny that the first has all my
sympathies. So, _mon cher_, I have the courage to prefer, and to say I
prefer, Raphael to Michael Angelo, Mozart to Beethoven, Rossini to
Meyerbeer, which is, I suppose, much the same as saying that if I had
heard Rubini I would have preferred him to Duprez. Do not think for a
moment that I place one above the other--that would be absurd. All I
maintain is that the matter is one of taste, and that the one
exercises upon my nature a stronger influence than does the other.
When I hear the 'Symphonie Héroïque,' or the fourth act of the
'Huguenots,' I am spell-bound, aghast as it were; I have not eyes,
ears, intelligence, enough even to admire. But when I see 'L'École
D'Athènes,' or 'La Vierge de Foligno,' when I hear 'Les Noces de
Figaro,' or the second act of 'Guillaume Tell,' I am completely happy;
I experience a sense of comfort, a complete satisfaction: in effect, I
forget everything."
This, then, is what Rome did for Bizet; but, be it said, for Bizet
_très jeune encore_. For a time the result is patent in his work, but
afterwards there comes, although no revulsion, a distinct variation of
feeling, which has in it something of compromise. The genius innate in
him was inspirational before it was--if it ever was--erudite. Even in
his later days there was for him no cowering before his culture. In
1867 he wrote in the _Revue Nationale_--the only critique, by the way,
he ever wrote--under the pseudonym of Gaston de Betzi: "The artist has
no name, no nationality. He is inspired or he is not. He has genius or
he has not. If he has, we welcome him; if he has not, we can at most
respect him, if we do not pity and forget him."
He was the same in all things: "I have no comrades," he said, "only
friends." And there is one sentence that he wrote from Rome that might
well be held up to the _gamins_ of the French Conservatoire. "Je ne
veux rien faire _de chic_; je veux avoir des _idées_ avant de
commencer un morceau."
In August of his second year Bizet left Rome on a visit to Naples. He
carried a letter to Mercadente. On his return good news and bad
awaited him. Ernest Guiraud, his good friend and quondam
fellow-student in the class of Marmontel, has just been proclaimed
Prix de Rome. And this at the very moment Bizet was to leave the
Villa; for the Academy would have it that their musical
_pensionnaires_ should pass the third year in Germany. The prospect
was entirely repugnant to Bizet. So he went to work against it,
directing his energies in the first place against Schnetz, "the dear
old director" as they called him. Schnetz, owning to a soft spot for
his young _pensionnaire_, was overcome, and through him I fancy the
powers that were in Paris. However, Bizet was permitted to remain in
his beloved Rome. Delighted, he wrote off to Marmontel: "I am daily
expecting Guiraud, and words cannot express how glad I shall be to see
him. Would you believe it, it is two years since I have spoken with an
intelligent musician? My colleague Z---- bores me frightfully. He
speaks to me of Donizetti, of Fesca even, and I reply to him with
Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Gounod."
This last year spent with Guiraud was perhaps the happiest of his
life. At the close of it the two set off together on a ramble through
the land, with fancy for their only guide. They had got so far as
Venice when news of his mother's dangerous illness called Bizet to her
side. He arrived in time to say farewell, and he never returned to
Italy.
Of work done at the Villa, "Vasco de Gama" is the only tangible
sample; "but I have not wasted my time," he wrote, "I have read a good
many volumes of history, and ever so much more literature of all
kinds. I have travelled, I have learned something of the history of
art, and I really am a bit of a connoisseur in painting and sculpture.
All I want now, on my return, are _trois jolis actes_ for the Théâtre
Lyrique."
And shortly we find him in full swing with "Les Pêcheurs des Perles."
It was produced on the 30th September of 1863, and had some eighteen
representations. "La Jolie Fille de Perth," which followed it four
years later, had, I think, twenty-one. In between these two works, we
are told, Bizet, in a fit of violent admiration for Verdi, strove to
emulate him in an opera entitled "Ivan le Terrible." It is said to
have been completed and handed to the management of the Théâtre
Lyrique. Then Bizet, recognising as suddenly that he had made a
mistake, withdrew the score and burned it.
M. Charles Pigot, who is chiefly responsible for this story, goes on
to say that the libretto was the work of MM. Louis Gallet and Edouard
Blau. But in that he is not correct, for Gallet himself tells us that
he knew Bizet only ever so slightly at the time, and that neither to
him nor to Blau is due a single line of this "Ivan."
Then there were "Griselidis," of which, in a letter dated February of
1871, Bizet speaks as _très avancée_; "Clarisse Harlowe"; and the
"Calendal" of M. Sardou, to each of which he referred in the same year
as _à peine commencée_. There was also an opera in one act written by
M. Carvalho, and actually put into rehearsal at the Opéra Comique. But
none of these saw the light, and I have little doubt they all met
their fate on a certain eventful day, shortly before he died, when
Bizet remorselessly destroyed a whole pile of manuscript. And in truth
these early works had little value of themselves. They were but so
many rungs of the ladder by which he climbed to the heights of
"Djamileh," of "L'Arlésienne," and of "Carmen." No musician ever took
longer to know himself than did Georges Bizet. His period of
hesitation, of vacillation, was unduly protracted. For why, it is hard
to tell; but one cannot help feeling that the terrible _lutte pour la
vie_ had a deal to do with it. Those early years in Paris were very
hard ones. "Believe me," he wrote from le Vésinet (always a favourite
spot with him), "believe me, it is exasperating to have one's work
interrupted for days to write _solos de piston_. But what would you? I
must live. I have just rushed off at a gallop half-a-dozen melodies
for Heugel. I trust you may like them. At least I have carefully
chosen the verses. ... My opera and my symphony are both of them _en
train_. But when, oh when, shall I finish them? Yet I do nothing but
work, and I come only once a week to Paris. Here I am well out of the
way of all _flaneurs_, _raseurs_, _diseurs de riens_, _du monde
enfin_, _hélas_." Then a few days later: "I am completely prostrate
with fatigue. I can do nothing. I have even been obliged to give up
orchestrating my symphony; and now I feel it will be too late for this
winter. I am going to lie down, for I have not slept for three nights,
and all seems so dark to me. To-morrow, too, I have _la musique gaie_
to write."
Just then time was pressing him hard. He was under contract to produce
"La Jolie Fille de Perth" by the end of the year, and he was already
well into October. It became a matter of fifteen and sixteen hours
work a day; for there were lessons to be given, proofs to be
corrected, piano transcriptions to be made, and the rest. And, truth
to tell, he was terribly lacking in method. He was choke-full of
ideas, he was indeed borne along by a very torrent of them; and if
only he could have stopped to collect himself it would have been well
for him. But no; before he realised it, "La Jolie Fille" was finished
and in rehearsal. Then for the time he was able to put enough distance
between himself and his work to value it. And it seems to have pleased
him. "The final rehearsal," he writes to Galabert (by this time his
confidant in most things), "has produced a great effect. The piece is
really highly interesting, the interpretation is excellent, and the
costumes are splendid. The scenery is new and the orchestra and the
artists are full of enthusiasm. But more than all this, _cher ami_,
the score of 'La Jolie Fille' is _une bonne chose_. The orchestra
lends to all a colour and relief for which, I confess, I never dared
to hope. I think I have arrived this time. Now, _il faut monter,
monter, monter, toujours_."
Shortly after this he married Geneviève Halévy, the daughter of the
composer of "La Juive," and lived almost exclusively at le Vésinet.
There, at 8, Rue des Cultures, a rustic place enough, one might find
Georges Bizet, seated in his favourite corner of the lovely garden,
_en chapeau de canotier_, smoking his pipe and chatting to his
friends. It had been the home of Jacques Halévy, and Bizet had been
wont to do his courting there. Now the old man was no more, and in the
long summer days, the daughter and the son--for Halévy had been as a
father to Bizet--missed sorely the familiar figure hard at work with
rake or hoe at his beloved flower-beds. They were the passion of his
later days, and they well repaid his care. Even in the middle of a
lesson--and he taught up to well-nigh the last weeks of his
life--would he rush out to uproot a noxious weed that might chance to
catch his eye. "How well I remember my first day there," says Louis
Gallet. "The war was not long finished, and the traces of it were with
us yet. True, Paris had resumed her lovely girdle of green; but
beneath this verdure reflected in the tardy waters of the Seine, there
was enough still to tell the terrible tale of ruin. One could not go
to Pecq or le Vésinet without some difficulty. Bizet, to save me
trouble, had taken care to meet me at Rueil, whence we made for the
little place where he was staying for the summer. The day was lovely,
and 'Djamileh' made great strides as we talked and paced the pretty
garden walks. This habit of discussing while walking, what was
uppermost in his mind, was always, to me, a powerful characteristic of
Georges Bizet. I do not remember any important discussion between us
that did not take place during a stroll, or at all events whilst
walking, if only to and from his study. We talked long that
afternoon--of the influence of Wagner on the future of musical art, of
the reception in store for 'Djamileh,' both by the public and by the
Opéra Comique itself. This latter, indeed, was no light matter. The
Direction was then undertaken by two parties: that of Du Locle,
tending towards advancement in every form; that of De Leuven, clinging
with all the force of tradition to the past.
"Then in the evening nothing would do but Bizet should see me well on
my way to Paris. The bridges were not yet restored. So we set off on
foot, in company with Madame Bizet, to find the ferry-boat. How
delicious was that walk by the little islets in the cool of the
twilight; along the towing-path so narrow and overrun with growth that
we were obliged to proceed in Indian file. And how merry we were,
until perchance we stumbled on the fragment of a shell lying hidden in
the grass, or came face to face with some majestic tree, still
smarting from its wounds, when there would rise before us in all its
vividness the terrible scene so recently enacted on that spot. Then we
talked of the war and all its sorrows; and we tried to descry there on
the right, in the shade of Mount Valerien, the spot where Henri
Regnault fell.
"At length we found the ferry, and reached the other bank. There at
the end of the path we could see the lights of the station; so we
separated. And although I made many after visits, none remained so
firmly fixed in my memory, or left me so happy an impression as did
this, my first to Bizet's summer home."
During the siege itself, he had been forced to remain in Paris. But it
was much against his will, and he seems to have chafed sorely at it.
Yet it is difficult to picture Bizet bellicose. "Dear friend," he
writes to Guiraud, who was stationed at some outpost, "the description
you give of the palace you are living in makes us all believe that
luck is with you. But every day we think of the cold, the damp, the
ice, the Prussians, and all the other horrors that surround you. As
for me, I continue to reproach myself with my inaction, for in truth
my conscience is anything but at rest; but you know well what keeps me
here. We really cannot be said to eat any longer. Suzanne has just
brought in some horse bones, which I believe are to form our meal.
Geneviève dreams nightly of chickens and lobsters."
Not till the following year, during the days of the Commune, do we
find him at le Vésinet. Then he writes (also to Guiraud): "Here we are
without half our things, without our books, without anything in fact,
and absolutely there are no means of getting into Paris.... So, dear
friend, if you have any news, do, I pray you, let us have it. I read
the Versailles papers, but they tell their wretched readers (and
expect them to believe it) that France is 'très tranquille,' Paris
alone excepted (_sic_). The day before yesterday was anything but
tranquil. For twelve hours there was nothing but a continuous
cannonade.... But _we_ are safe enough, for although the Prussian
patrols continue to increase in number we are not inconvenienced by
them, and they will not, in all probability, occupy le Vésinet. But it
seems quite impossible to say how all this is going to end. I am
absolutely discouraged, and what is more, I fear, dear friend, there
is worse trouble ahead of us. I am off now to the village to look at a
piano; I must work and try to forget it all."
He finished "Djamileh" at le Vésinet. It was produced at the Opéra
Comique in May of 1872. Gallet tells us that he did not write the book
specially for Bizet. Under the title of "Namouna," it had been given
by M. du Locle to Jules Duprato, a musician and a "prix de Rome." But
Duprato _paressait agréablement_, and never got much further with it
than the composition of a certain _air de danse_ to the verses
commencing: "Indolente, grave et lente," which are to be found also in
Bizet's score. Then there came a time when the Opéra Comique, truly
one of the most good-natured of institutions in its own peculiar way,
so far belied its reputation as to tire of this idling on the part of
M. Duprato. So the work passed on to Bizet. He suggested change of
title, and "Namouna" became "Djamileh." But it remained nevertheless
the poem of Musset.
"Je vous dirais qu' Hassan racheta Namouna
* * * * *
Qu'on reconnut trop tard cette tête adorée
Et cette douce nuit qu'elle avait espérée
Que pour prix de ses maux le ciel la lui donna.
Je vous dirais surtout qu' Hassan dans cette affaire
Sentit que tôt ou tard la femme avait son tour
Et que l'amour de soi ne vaut pas l'autre amour."
There you have the whole story. It is but an _état d'âme_--a little
love scene, simple enough in a way, yet so delicate and so full of
colour. It was a matter of "atmosphere," not of structure, a
masterpiece of style rather than of situation; and from its first
rehearsal as an opera it was doomed. In truth, these rehearsals were
amusing. There was old Avocat--they used to call him Victor--the
typical _régisseur_ of tradition; a man who could tell of the
_premières_ of "Pré-aux-Clercs" and "La Dame Blanche," and, what is
more, expected to be asked to tell of them. From his corner in the
wings he listened to the music of this "Djamileh," his face expressive
of a pity far too keen for words. But it was a matter of minutes only
before his pity turned to rage, and eventually he stumped off to his
sanctum, banging his door behind him with a vehemence that augured
badly for poor Bizet. As for De Leuven, his co-director: had he not
written. "Postillon de Lonjumeau"? and was it not the most successful
work of Boiledieu's successor? The fact had altered his whole life.
Ever after, all he sought in opera was some similarity with Le
Postillon. And there was nothing of Adam in this music, still less
anything of De Leuven in the poem. That was sufficient for him.
"Allons," said he one day to Gallet, who arrived at rehearsal just as
Djamileh was about to sing her _lamento_: "allons, vous arrivez pour
le De Profundis."
As for the public, they understood it not at all, this charming
miniature. "C'est indigne," cried one; "c'est odieux," from another;
"c'est très drôle," said a third. "Quelle cacophonie, quelle audace,
c'est se moquer du monde. Voilà, où mène le culte de Wagner à la
folie. Ni tonalité, ni mesure, ni rythme; ce n'est plus de la
musique," and the rest. The press itself was no better, no whit more
rational. Yet this "Djamileh" was rich in premonition of those very
qualities that go to make "Carmen" the immortal work it is. It so
glows with true Oriental colour, is so saturate with the true Eastern
spirit, as to make us wonder for the moment--as did Mr. Henry James
about Théophile Gautier--whether the natural attitude of the man was
not to recline in the perfumed dusk of a Turkish divan, puffing a
chibouque. Here the tints are stronger, mellower, and more carefully
laid on than in "Les Pêcheurs des Perles." There is, too, all the
_bizarrerie_, as well as all the sensuousness of the East. Yet there
is no obliteration of the human element for sake of the picturesque.
Wagnerism was the cry raised against it on all sides; yet, if it be
anything but Bizet, it is surely Schumann. It was, in effect, all too
good for the public--too fine for their vulgar gaze, their
indiscriminating comment. And Reyer, farseeing amongst his fellows,
spoke truth when he said in the _Débats_: "I feel sure that if M.
Bizet knows that his work has been appreciated by a small number of
musicians--being _cognoscenti_--he will be more proud of that fact
than he would be of a popular success. 'Djamileh,' whatever be its
fortunes, heralds a new epoch in the career of this young master."
Then came "L'Arlésienne," as all the world knows, a dismal failure
enough. It was to Bizet a true labour of love. From the day that
Carvalho came to him proposing that he should add _des mélodrames_ to
this tale of fair Provence, to the day of its production some four
months later, he was absorbed in it. The score as it now stands
represents about half the music that he wrote. The prelude to the
third act of "Carmen," and the chorus, "Quant aux douaniers," both
belonged originally to "L'Arlésienne," The rest was blue pencilled at
rehearsal. And of all the care he lavished on it, perhaps the finest,
certainly the fondest, was given to his orchestra. Every instrument is
ministered to with loving care. Luckily for him, fortunately too for
us, he knew not then what sort of lot awaited this scrupulous score of
his. He knew he wrote for Carvalho--for the Vaudeville; but that was
all. And they gave him twenty-five musicians--a couple of flutes and
an oboe (this latter to do duty too for the cor-anglais); one
clarinet, a couple of bassoons, a saxophone, two horns, a kettle-drum,
seven violins, one solitary alto, five celli, two bass, and his choice
of one other. The poor fellow chose a piano; but they never saw the
irony of it. All credit to his little band, they did their best. But
the most that they could do was to cull the tunes from out his score.
The consolation that we have is, that, so far as the piece as a piece
is concerned, no orchestra in the world could have saved it. It was
doomed to failure for all sorts of reasons. Daudet himself goes very
near the mark when he says that "it was unreasonable to suppose that
in the middle of the boulevard, in that coquettish corner of the
Chaussée d'Antin, right in the pathway of the fashions, the whims of
the hour, the flashing and changing vortex of all Paris, people could
be interested in this drama of love taking place in the farmyard in
the plain of Camargue, full of the odour of well-plenished granaries
and lavender in flower. It was a splendid failure; clothed in the
prettiest music possible, with costumes of silk and velvet in the
centre of comic opera scenery." Then he goes on to tell us: "I came
away discouraged and sickened, the silly laughter with which the
emotional scenes were greeted still ringing in my ears; and without
attempting to defend myself in the papers, where on all sides the
attack was led against this play, wanting in surprises--this painting
in three acts of manners and events of which I alone could appreciate
the absolute fidelity. I resolved to write no more plays, and heaped
one upon the other all the hostile notices as a rampart around my
determination."
At this time Bizet seems to have come a good deal into contact with
Jean Baptiste Faure. They met frequently at the Opéra. "You really
must do something more for Bizet," said the baritone to Louis Gallet.
"Put your heads together, you and Blau, and write something that shall
be _bien pour moi_." "Lorenzaccio," perhaps the strongest of De
Musset's dramatic efforts, first came up. But Faure was not at all in
touch with it. The rôle of Brutus--fawning Judas that he is--revolted
him. He had no fancy to distort as _menteur à triple étage_; so the
subject was put by. Then came Bizet one morning with an old issue of
_Le Journal pour tous_ in his pocket. "Here is the very thing for us:
'Le Jeunesse du Cid' of Guilhem de Castro; not, mark you, the Cid of
Corneille alone, but the inceptive Cid in all the glory of its
pristine colour--the Cid, Don Rodrigue de Bivar, in the words of
Sainte-Beuve 'the immortal flower of honour and of love.'" _The scène
du mendiant_ held Bizet completely. It was to him simple, touching,
and great. It showed Don Rodrigue in a new light. Those--and there
were many of them--who had already cast their choice upon this legend,
had recognised--but recognised merely--in their hero, the son prepared
to sacrifice his love for filial duty, and to yield his life for love.
But they had not seen in him the Christian, the true and godly soul,
the Good Samaritan that De Castro represents. The scene of Rodrigue
with the leper, disdained and done away with by Corneille, with which
De Castro too was so reproached, was full of attraction for Bizet. His
whole interest centred round it. He was impatient and hungered to get
at it; and "Carmen," on which he was already well at work, was even
laid aside the while. Faure, too, had expressed a sound approval and a
hearty interest, and this alone meant much. So Bizet once again was
full of hope. There follows a long and detailed correspondence on the
subject with Gallet, with which I have not space to deal; but it shows
up splendidly the extreme nicety of the musician's dramatic sense.
In the summer of 1873 "Don Rodrigue" was really finished, and one
evening Bizet called his friends to come and listen. Around the piano
were Edouard Blau, Louis Gallet, and Jean Faure. Bizet had his score
before him--to common gaze a skeleton thing enough, for of
"accompaniment" there was but little. But to its creator it was well
alive, and he sang--in the poorest possible voice, it is true--the
whole thing through from beginning to end. Chorus, soprano, tenor,
bass, yea, even the choicer "bits" for orchestra--all came alike to
him; all were infused with life from the spirit that created them. It
was long past midnight when he ceased, and then they sat and talked
till dawn. All were enthusiastic, and in the opinion of Faure (given
three years later) this score was more than the equal of "Carmen." His
word is all we have for it, but it carries with it something of
conviction. He was no bad judge of a work. Anyway, no sooner had he
heard it than he set about securing its speedy production at the
Opéra. And he succeeded in so far that it was put down early on the
list. But Fate had yet to be reckoned with. She was not thus to be
baulked of her prey: she had dogged the footsteps of poor Bizet far
too zealously for that; and on the 28th October (less than a week
after he had put _finis_ to his work), she stepped in. On that day the
Opéra was burned down.
As for the score, it was laid aside, and of its ultimate lot we are in
ignorance. Inquiry on the part of Gallet seems to have elicited
nothing more definite than a courteous letter from M. Ludovic Halévy,
to the effect that he was quite free to dispose of the book to another
composer. "It was George's favourite," wrote his brother-in-law, "and
he had great hopes for it; but it was not to be."
Perhaps of all his powers Bizet's greatest was that of recuperation.
It would be wrong to say he did not know defeat; he knew it all too
well, but he never let it get the better of him. He was never without
his irons upon the fire, never without a project to fall back upon.
And perhaps it is not too much to say that he had no life outside his
art. This too may in truth be told of him: that in all the struggle
and the scramble, in all his fight with fortune, it was the sweeter
qualities of his nature that came uppermost. His strength of purpose
stood on a sound basis--a basis of confidence in, though not arrogance
of, his own power. Where he was most handicapped was in carrying on
his artistic progress _coram populo_. Had it been as gradual as most
men's--had it been but the acquiring of an ordinary experience--all
might have been well; he would probably have been accorded his niche
and would have occupied it. But he progressed by leaps and bounds, and
even then his ideal kept steadily miles ahead of his achievement. It
was for long a very will-o'-the-wisp for him. Now and again he caught
it, and it is at such moments that we have him at his best; but he can
be said only to have captured it completely--so far as we are in a
position to tell--in "L'Arlésienne" and certain parts of "Carmen." His
faculty of self-criticism was developed in such an extraordinary
degree as to baulk him. He loved this Don Rodrigue and thought it was
his masterwork, and that too at the time when "Carmen" must have been
well forward. We know then that the loss is not a small one.
It had not been alone the fate of the Opéra House that had stood in
the way. That institution had in course taken up its quarters at the
Salle Ventadour, and once installed there had proceeded with the
_répertoire_. But Bizet's "Rodrigue," although well backed by Fauré,
was pushed aside for others. The three names that it bore were all too
impotent; and when a new work was announced, it was "L'Esclave" of
Membrée that was seen to grace the bills, and not "Don Rodrigue."
Poor Bizet, disappointed and sore at heart, vanished to hide himself
once more by his beloved Seine. This time it was to Bougival he went.
M. Massenet had recently produced his "Marie Madeleine" and, curiously
enough, it had been successful. This seems to have spurred Bizet on to
emulation. With his usual happy knack of hitting on a subject, he
wrote off to Gallet, requesting him to do a book with Geneviève de
Paris--the holy Geneviève of legendary lore--for heroine. And Gallet,
accommodating creature that he was, forthwith proceeded to construct
his tableaux. Together they went off to Lamoureux and read the
synopsis to him. He approved it heartily, and Bizet got to work.
"Carmen" was then finished and was undergoing the usual stage of
adjournment _sine die_. Three times it had been put into rehearsal,
only to be withdrawn for apparently no reason, and poor Bizet was
wearying of opera and its ways. This sacred work was relief to him.
But hardly had he settled down to it when up came "Carmen" once again,
this time in good earnest. He was forced to leave "Geneviève" and come
to Paris for rehearsals. It was much against his inclination that he
did so, for his health was failing fast. For long he had suffered from
an abscess which had made his life a burden to him. Nor had his
terrible industry been without its effect upon his physique. He did
not know it, but he had sacrificed to his work the very things he had
worked for. He felt exhausted, enfeebled, shattered. Probably the
excitement of rehearsing "Carmen" kept him up the while; but it had
its after-effect, and the strain proved all the more disastrous. A
profound melancholy, too, had come over him; and do what he would he
could not beat it off. A young singer (some aspirant for lyric fame)
came one day to sing to him. "Ich grölle nicht" and "Aus der Heimath"
were chosen. "Quel chef d'oeuvre," said he, "mais quelle désolation,
c'est à vous donner la nostalgie de la mort." Then he sat down to the
piano and played the "Marche Funèbre" of Chopin. That was the frame of
mind he was in.
In his gayer moments he would often long for Italy. He had never
forgotten the happy days passed there with Guiraud. "I dreamed last
night" (he is writing to Guiraud) "that we were all at Naples,
installed in a most lovely villa, and living under a government purely
artistic. The Senate was made up by Beethoven, Michael Angelo,
Shakespeare, Giorgione, _e tutti quanti_. The National Guard was no
more. In place of it there was a huge orchestra of which Litolff was
the conductor. All suffrage was denied to idiots, humbugs, schemers,
and ignoramuses--that is to say, suffrage was cut down to the smallest
proportions imaginable. Geneviève was a little too amiable for Goethe,
but despite this trifling circumstance the awakening was terribly
bitter."
"Carmen" was produced at last, on the 3rd of March in that year
(1875). The Habanera--of which, by the way, he wrote for Mme.
Galli-Marié no less than thirteen versions before he came across, in
an old book, the one we know--the prelude to the second act, the
toreador song, and the quintett were encored. The rest fell absolutely
flat.
The blow was a terrific one to Bizet. He had dreamed of such a
different lot for "Carmen." Arm in arm with Guiraud he left the
theatre, and together they paced the streets of Paris until dawn.
Small wonder he felt bitter; and in vain the kindly Guiraud did his
best to comfort him. Had not "Don Juan," he argued, been accorded a
reception no whit better when it was produced in Vienna? and had not
poor Mozart said "I have written 'Don Juan' for myself and two of my
friends"? But he found no consolation in the fact. The press, too, cut
him to the quick. This "Carmen," said they, was immoral, _banale_; it
was all head and no heart; the composer had made up his mind to show
how learned he was, with the result that he was only dull and obscure.
Then again, the gipsy girl whose liaisons formed the subject of the
story was at best an odious creature; the actress's gestures were the
very incarnation of vice, there was something licentious even in the
tones of her voice; the composer evidently belonged to the school of
_civet sans lièvre_; there was no unity of style; it was not dramatic,
and could never live; in a word, there was no health in it.
Even Du Locle--who of all men should have supported it--played him
false. A minister of the Government wrote personally to the director
for a box for his family. Du Locle replied with an invitation to the
rehearsal, adding that he had rather that the minister came himself
before he brought his daughters.
Prostrate with it all, poor Bizet returned to Bougival. When forced to
give up "Geneviève," he had written to Gallet: "I shall give the whole
of May, June, and July to it." And now May was already come, and he
was in his bed. "Angine colossale," were the words he sent to Guiraud,
who was to have been with him the following Sunday. "Do not come as we
arranged; imagine, if you can, a double pedal, A flat, E flat,
straight through your head from left to right. This is how I am just
now."
He never wrote more than a few pages of "Geneviève." He got worse and
worse. But even so, the end came all too suddenly, and on the night of
the 2nd of June he died--died as nearly as possible at the exact
moment when Galli-Marié at the Opéra Comique was singing her song of
fate in the card scene of the third act of his "Carmen." The
coincidence was true enough. That night it was with difficulty that
she sung her song. Her nervousness, from some cause or another, was so
great that it was with the utmost effort she pronounced the words: "La
carte impitoyable; répétera la mort; encore, toujours la mort." On
finishing the scene, she fainted at the wings. Next morning came the
news of Bizet's death. And some friends said--because it was not meet
for them to see the body--that the poor fellow had killed himself.
Small wonder if it were so!
Six Drawings
By Aubrey Beardsley
I. II. III. The Comedy-Ballet of Marionnettes,
as performed by the troupe of the Théâtre-Impossible,
posed in three drawings
IV. Garçons de Café
V. The Slippers of Cinderella
_For you must have all heard of the Princess Cinderella with her
slim feet and shining slippers. She was beloved by Prince ----,
who married her, but she died soon afterwards, poisoned
(according to Dr. Gerschovius) by her elder sister Arabella, with
powdered glass. It was ground I suspect from those very slippers
she danced in at the famous ball. For the slippers of Cinderella
have never been found since. They are not at Cluny._
_HECTOR SANDUS_
VI. Portrait of Madame Réjane
[Illustration: First Comedy-Ballet]
[Illustration: Second Comedy Ballet]
[Illustration: Third Comedy Ballet]
[Illustration: Garçons de Café]
[Illustration: The Slippers of Cinderella]
[Illustration: Portrait of Madame Réjane]
Thirty Bob a Week
By John Davidson
I couldn't touch a stop and turn a screw,
And set the blooming world a-work for me,
Like such as cut their teeth--I hope, like you--
On the handle of a skeleton gold key.
I cut mine on leek, which I eat it every week:
I'm a clerk at thirty bob, as you can see.
But I don't allow it's luck and all a toss;
There's no such thing as being starred and crossed;
It's just the power of some to be a boss,
And the bally power of others to be bossed:
I face the music, sir; you bet I ain't a cur!
Strike me lucky if I don't believe I'm lost!
For like a mole I journey in the dark,
A-travelling along the underground
From my Pillar'd Halls and broad suburban Park
To come the daily dull official round;
And home again at night with my pipe all alight
A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.
And it's often very cold and very wet;
And my missis stitches towels for a hunks;
And the Pillar'd Halls is half of it to let--
Three rooms about the size of travelling trunks.
And we cough, the wife and I, to dislocate a sigh,
When the noisy little kids are in their bunks.
But you'll never hear _her_ do a growl, or whine,
For she's made of flint and roses very odd;
And I've got to cut my meaning rather fine
Or I'd blubber, for _I'm_ made of greens and sod:
So p'rhaps we are in hell for all that I can tell,
And lost and damned and served up hot to God.
I ain't blaspheming, Mr. Silvertongue;
I'm saying things a bit beyond your art:
Of all the rummy starts you ever sprung
Thirty bob a week's the rummiest start!
With your science and your books and your the'ries about spooks,
Did you ever hear of looking in your heart?
I didn't mean your pocket, Mr.; no!
I mean that having children and a wife
With thirty bob on which to come and go
Isn't dancing to the tabor and the fife;
When it doesn't make you drink, by Heaven, it makes you think,
And notice curious items about life!
I step into my heart and there I meet
A god-almighty devil singing small,
Who would like to shout and whistle in the street,
And squelch the passers flat against the wall;
If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,
He would take it, ask for more, and eat it all.
And I meet a sort of simpleton beside--
The kind that life is always giving beans;
With thirty bob a week to keep a bride
He fell in love and married in his teens;
At thirty bob he stuck, but he knows it isn't luck;
He knows the seas are deeper than tureens.
And the god-almighty devil and the fool
That meet me in the High Street on the strike,
When I walk about my heart a-gathering wool,
Are my good and evil angels if you like;
And both of them together in every kind of weather
Ride me like a double-seated "bike."
That's rough a bit and needs its meaning curled;
But I have a high old hot un in my mind,
A most engrugious notion of the world
That leaves your lightning 'rithmetic behind:
I give it at a glance when I say "There ain't no chance,
Nor nothing of the lucky-lottery kind."
And it's this way that I make it out to be:
No fathers, mothers, countries, climates--none!--
Not Adam was responsible for me;
Nor society, nor systems, nary one!
A little sleeping seed, I woke--I did indeed--
A million years before the blooming sun.
I woke because I thought the time had come;
Beyond my will there was no other cause:
And everywhere I found myself at home
Because I chose to be the thing I was;
And in whatever shape, of mollusc, or of ape,
I always went according to the laws.
_I_ was the love that chose my mother out;
_I_ joined two lives and from the union burst;
My weakness and my strength without a doubt
Are mine alone for ever from the first.
It's just the very same with a difference in the name
As "Thy will be done." You say it if you durst!
They say it daily up and down the land
As easy as you take a drink, it's true;
But the difficultest go to understand,
And the difficultest job a man can do,
Is to come it brave and meek with thirty bob a week,
And feel that that's the proper thing for you.
It's a naked child against a hungry wolf;
It's playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It's walking on a string across a gulf
With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck:
But the thing is daily done by many and many a one....
And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.
A Responsibility
By Henry Harland
It has been an episode like a German sentence, with its predicate at
the end. Trifling incidents occurred at haphazard, as it seemed, and I
never guessed they were by way of making sense. Then, this morning,
somewhat of the suddenest, came the verb and the full stop.
Yesterday I should have said there was nothing to tell; to-day there
is too much. The announcement of his death has caused me to review our
relations, with the result of discovering my own part to have been
that of an accessory before the fact. I did not kill him (though, even
there, I'm not sure I didn't lend a hand), but I might have saved his
life. It is certain that he made me signals of distress--faint, shy,
tentative, but unmistakable--and that I pretended not to understand:
just barely dipped my colours, and kept my course. Oh, if I had
dreamed that his distress was extreme--that he was on the point of
foundering and going down! However, that doesn't exonerate me: I ought
to have turned aside to find out. It was a case of criminal
negligence. That he, poor man, probably never blamed me, only adds to
the burden on my conscience. He had got past blaming people, I dare
say, and doubtless merely lumped me with the rest--with the sum-total
of things that made life unsupportable. Yet, for a moment, when we
first met, his face showed a distinct glimmering of hope; so perhaps
there was a distinct disappointment. He must have had so many
disappointments, before it came to--what it came to; but it wouldn't
have come to that if he had got hardened to them. Possibly they had
lost their outlines, and merged into one dull general disappointment
that was too hard to bear. I wonder whether the Priest and the Levite
were smitten with remorse after they had passed on. Unfortunately, in
this instance, no Good Samaritan followed.
The bottom of our long _table d'hôte_ was held by a Frenchman, a
Normand, a giant, but a pallid and rather flabby giant, whose name, if
he had another than Monsieur, I never heard. He professed to be a
painter, used to sketch birds and profiles on the back of his
menu-card between the courses, wore shamelessly the multi-coloured
rosette of a foreign order in his buttonhole, and talked with a good
deal of physiognomy. I had the corner seat at his right, and was
flanked in turn by Miss Etta J. Hicks, a bouncing young person from
Chicago, beyond whom, like rabbits in a company of foxes, cowered Mr.
and Mrs. Jordan P. Hicks, two broken-spirited American parents. At
Monsieur's left, and facing me, sat Colonel Escott, very red and
cheerful; then a young man who called the Colonel Cornel, and came
from Dublin, proclaiming himself a barr'ster, and giving his name as
Flarty, though on his card it was written Flaherty; and then Sir
Richard Maistre. After him, a diminishing perspective of busy
diners--for purposes of conversation, so far as we were concerned,
inhabitants of the Fourth Dimension.
Of our immediate constellation Sir Richard Maistre was the only member
on whom the eye was tempted to linger. The others were obvious--simple
equations, soluble "in the head." But he called for slate and pencil,
offered materials for doubt and speculation, though it would not have
been easy to tell wherein they lay. What displayed itself to a cursory
inspection was quite unremarkable: simply a decent-looking young
Englishman, of medium stature, with square-cut plain features,
reddish-brown hair, grey eyes, and clothes and manners of the usual
pattern. Yet, showing through this ordinary surface, there was
something cryptic. For me, at any rate, it required a constant effort
not to stare at him. I felt it from the beginning, and I felt it till
the end: a teasing curiosity, a sort of magnetism that drew my eyes in
his direction. I was always on my guard to resist it, and that was
really the inception of my neglect of him. From I don't know what
stupid motive of pride, I was anxious that he shouldn't discern the
interest he had excited in me; so I paid less ostensible attention to
him than to the others, who excited none at all. I tried to appear
unconscious of him as a detached personality, to treat him as merely a
part of the group as a whole. Then I improved such occasions as
presented themselves to steal glances at him, to study him _à la
dérobée_--groping after the quality, whatever it was, that made him a
puzzle--seeking to formulate, to classify him.
Already, at the end of my first dinner, he had singled himself out and
left an impression. I went into the smoking-room, and began to wonder,
over a cup of coffee and a cigarette, who he was. I had not heard his
voice; he hadn't talked much, and his few observations had been
murmured into the ears of his next neighbours. All the same, he had
left an impression, and I found myself wondering who he was, the young
man with the square-cut features and the reddish-brown hair. I have
said that his features were square-cut and plain, but they were small
and carefully finished, and as far as possible from being common. And
his grey eyes, though not conspicuous for size or beauty, had a
character, an expression. They _said_ something, something I couldn't
perfectly translate, something shrewd, humorous, even perhaps a little
caustic, and yet sad; not violently, not rebelliously sad (I should
never have dreamed that it was a sadness which would drive him to
desperate remedies), but rather resignedly, submissively sad, as if he
had made up his mind to put the best face on a sorry business. This
was carried out by a certain abruptness, a slight lack of suavity, in
his movements, in his manner of turning his head, of using his hands.
It hinted a degree of determination which, in the circumstances,
seemed superfluous. He had unfolded his napkin and attacked his dinner
with an air of resolution, like a man with a task before him, who
mutters, "Well, it's got to be done, and I'll do it." At a hazard, he
was two- or three-and-thirty, but below his neck he looked older. He
was dressed like everybody, but his costume had, somehow, an effect of
soberness beyond his years. It was decidedly not smart, and smartness
was the dominant note at the Hôtel d'Angleterre.
I was still more or less vaguely ruminating him, in a corner of the
smoking-room, on that first evening, when I became aware that he was
standing near me. As I looked up, our eyes met, and for the fraction
of a second fixed each other. It was barely the fraction of a second,
but it was time enough for the transmission of a message. I knew as
certainly as if he had said so that he wanted to speak, to break the
ice, to scrape an acquaintance; I knew that he had approached me and
was loitering in my neighbourhood for that specific purpose. I _don't_
know, I have studied the psychology of the moment in vain to
understand, why I felt a perverse impulse to put him off. I was
interested in him, I was curious about him; and there he stood,
testifying that the interest was reciprocal, ready to make the
advances, only waiting for a glance or a motion of encouragement; and
I deliberately secluded myself behind my coffee-cup and my cigarette
smoke. I suppose it was the working of some obscure mannish vanity--of
what in a woman would have defined itself as coyness and coquetry. If
he wanted to speak--well, let him speak; I wouldn't help him. I could
realise the processes of _his_ mind even more clearly than those of my
own--his desire, his hesitancy. He was too timid to leap the barriers;
I must open a gate for him. He hovered near me for a minute longer,
and then drifted away. I felt his disappointment, his spiritual shrug
of the shoulders; and I perceived rather suddenly that I was
disappointed myself. I must have been hoping all along that he would
speak _quand même_, and now I was moved to run after him, to call him
back. That, however, would imply a consciousness of guilt, an
admission that my attitude had been intentional; so I kept my seat,
making a mental rendezvous with him for the morrow.
Between my Irish _vis-à-vis_ Flaherty and myself there existed no such
strain. He presently sauntered up to me, and dropped into conversation
as easily as if we had been old friends.
"Well, and are you here for your health or your entertainment?" he
began. "But I don't need to ask that of a man who's drinking black
coffee and smoking tobacco at this hour of the night. I'm the only
invalid at our end of the table, and I'm no better than an amateur
meself. It's a barrister's throat I have--I caught it waiting for
briefs in me chambers at Doblin."
We chatted together for a half-hour or so, and before we parted he had
given me a good deal of general information--about the town, the
natives, the visitors, the sands, the golf-links, the hunting, and,
with the rest, about our neighbours at table.
"Did ye notice the pink-faced bald little man at me right? That's
Cornel Escott, C.B., retired. He takes a sea-bath every morning, to
live up to the letters; and faith, it's an act of heroism, no less, in
weather the like of this. Three weeks have I been here, and but wan
day of sunshine, and the mercury never above fifty. The other fellow,
him at me left, is what you'd be slow to suspect by the look of him,
I'll go bail; and that's a bar'net, Sir Richard Maistre, with a place
in Hampshire, and ten thousand a year if he's a penny. The young lady
beside yourself rejoices in the euphonious name of Hicks, and trains
her Popper and Mommer behind her like slaves in a Roman triumph.
They're Americans, if you must have the truth, though I oughtn't to
tell it on them, for I'm an Irishman myself, and its not for the pot
to be bearing tales of the kettle. However, their tongues bewray them;
so I've violated no confidence."
The knowledge that my young man was a baronet with a place in
Hampshire somewhat disenchanted me. A baronet with a place in
Hampshire left too little to the imagination. The description seemed
to curtail his potentialities, to prescribe his orbit, to connote
turnip-fields, house-parties, and a whole system of British
commonplace. Yet, when, the next day at luncheon, I again had him
before me in the flesh, my interest revived. Its lapse had been due to
an association of ideas which I now recognised as unscientific. A
baronet with twenty places in Hampshire would remain at the end of
them all a human being; and no human being could be finished off in a
formula of half a dozen words. Sir Richard Maistre, anyhow, couldn't
be. He was enigmatic, and his effect upon me was enigmatic too. Why
did I feel that tantalising inclination to stare at him, coupled with
that reluctance frankly to engage in talk with him? Why did he attack
his luncheon with that appearance of grim resolution? For a minute,
after he had taken his seat, he eyed his knife, fork, and napkin, as a
labourer might a load that he had to lift, measuring the difficulties
he must cope with; then he gave his head a resolute nod, and set to
work. To-day, as yesterday, he said very little, murmured an
occasional remark into the ear of Flaherty, accompanying it usually
with a sudden short smile: but he listened to everything, and did so
with apparent appreciation.
Our proceedings were opened by Miss Hicks, who asked Colonel Escott,
"Well, Colonel, have you had your bath this morning?"
The Colonel chuckled, and answered, "Oh, yes--yes, yes--couldn't
forego my bath, you know--couldn't possibly forego my bath."
"And what was the temperature of the water?" she continued.
"Fifty-two--fifty-two--three degrees warmer than the air--three
degrees," responded the Colonel, still chuckling, as if the whole
affair had been extremely funny.
"And you, Mr. Flaherty, I suppose you've been to Bayonne?"
"No, I've broken me habit, and not left the hotel."
Subsequent experience taught me that these were conventional modes by
which the conversation was launched every day, like the preliminary
moves in chess. We had another ritual for dinner: Miss Hicks then
inquired if the Colonel had taken his ride, and Flaherty played his
game of golf. The next inevitable step was common to both meals.
Colonel Escott would pour himself a glass of the _vin ordinaire_, a
jug of which was set by every plate, and holding it up to the light,
exclaim with simulated gusto, "Ah! Fine old wine! Remarkably full rich
flavour!" At this pleasantry we would all gently laugh; and the word
was free.
Sir Richard, as I have said, appeared to be an attentive and
appreciative listener, not above smiling at our mildest sallies; but
watching him out of the corner of an eye, I noticed that my own
observations seemed to strike him with peculiar force--which led me to
talk _at_ him. Why not to him, with him? The interest was reciprocal;
he would have liked a dialogue; he would have welcomed a chance to
commence one; and I could at any instant have given him such a chance.
I talked _at_ him, it is true; but I talked _with_ Flaherty or Miss
Hicks, or _to_ the company at large. Of his separate identity he had
no reason to believe me conscious. From a mixture of motives, in which
I'm not sure that a certain heathenish enjoyment of his embarrassment
didn't count for something, I was determined that if he wanted to know
me he must come the whole distance; I wouldn't meet him halfway. Of
course I had no idea that it could be a matter of the faintest real
importance to the man. I judged _his_ feelings by my own; and though I
was interested in him, I shall have conveyed an altogether exaggerated
notion of my interest if you fancy it kept me awake at night. How was
I to guess that his case was more serious--that he was not simply
desirous of a little amusing talk, but starving, starving for a little
human sympathy, a little brotherly love and comradeship?--that he was
in an abnormally sensitive condition of mind, where mere negative
unresponsiveness could hurt him like a slight or a rebuff?
In the course of the week I ran over to Pau, to pass a day with the
Winchfields, who had a villa there. When I came back I brought with me
all that they (who knew everybody) could tell about Sir Richard
Maistre. He was intelligent and amiable, but the shyest of shy men. He
avoided general society, frightened away perhaps by the British Mamma,
and spent a good part of each year abroad, wandering rather listlessly
from town to town. Though young and rich, he was neither fast nor
ambitious: the Members' entrance to the House of Commons, the
stage-doors of the music halls, were equally without glamour for him;
and if he was a Justice of the Peace and a Deputy Lieutenant, he had
become so through the tacit operation of his stake in the country. He
had chambers in St. James's Street, was a member of the Travellers
Club, and played the violin--for an amateur rather well. His brother,
Mortimer Maistre, was in diplomacy--at Rio Janeiro or somewhere. His
sister had married an Australian, and lived in Melbourne.
At the Hôtel d'Angleterre I found his shyness was mistaken for
indifference. He was civil to everybody, but intimate with none. He
attached himself to no party, paired off with no individuals. He
sought nobody. On the other hand, the persons who went out of their
way to seek him, came back, as they felt, repulsed. He had been polite
but languid. These, however, were not the sort of persons he would be
likely to care for. There prevailed a general conception of him as
cold, unsociable. He certainly walked about a good deal alone--you met
him on the sands, on the cliffs, in the stiff little streets, rambling
aimlessly, seldom with a companion. But to me it was patent that he
played the solitary from necessity, not from choice--from the
necessity of his temperament. A companion was precisely that which
above all things his heart coveted; only he didn't know how to set
about annexing one. If he sought nobody, it was because he didn't know
how. This was a part of what his eyes said; they bespoke his desire,
his perplexity, his lack of nerve. Of the people who put themselves
out to seek him, there was Miss Hicks; there were a family from Leeds,
named Bunn, a father, mother, son, and two redoubtable daughters, who
drank champagne with every meal, dressed in the height of fashion,
said their say at the tops of their voices, and were understood to be
auctioneers; a family from Bayswater named Krausskopf. I was among
those whom he had marked as men he would like to fraternise with. As
often as our paths crossed, his eyes told me that he longed to stop
and speak, and continue the promenade abreast. I was under the control
of a demon of mischief; I took a malicious pleasure in eluding and
baffling him--in passing on with a nod. It had become a kind of game;
I was curious to see whether he would ever develop sufficient
hardihood to take the bull by the horns. After all, from a
conventional point of view, my conduct was quite justifiable. I always
meant to do better by him next time, and then I always deferred it to
the next. But from a conventional point of view my conduct was quite
unassailable. I said this to myself when I had momentary qualms of
conscience. Now, rather late in the day, it strikes me that the
conventional point of view should have been re-adjusted to the special
case. I should have allowed for his personal equation.
My cousin Wilford came to Biarritz about this time, stopping for a
week, on his way home from a tour in Spain. I couldn't find a room for
him at the Hôtel d'Angleterre, so he put up at a rival hostelry over
the way; but he dined with me on the evening of his arrival, a place
being made for him between mine and Monsieur's. He hadn't been at the
table five minutes before the rumour went abroad who he was--somebody
had recognised him. Then those who were within reach of his voice
listened with all their ears--Colonel Escott, Flaherty, Maistre, and
Miss Hicks, of course, who even called him by name: "Oh, Mr. Wilford."
"Now, Mr. Wilford," &c. After dinner, in the smoking-room, a cluster
of people hung round us; men with whom I had no acquaintance came
merrily up and asked to be introduced. Colonel Escott and Flaherty
joined us. At the outskirts of the group I beheld Sir Richard Maistre.
His eyes (without his realising it perhaps) begged me to invite him,
to present him, and I affected not to understand! This is one of the
little things I find hardest to forgive myself. My whole behaviour
towards the young man is now a subject of self-reproach: if it had
been different, who knows that the tragedy of yesterday would ever
have happened? If I had answered his timid overtures, walked with him,
talked with him, cultivated his friendship, given him mine,
established a kindly human relation with him, I can't help feeling
that he might not have got to such a desperate pass, that I might have
cheered him, helped him, saved him. I feel it especially when I think
of Wilford. His eyes attested so much; he would have enjoyed meeting
him so keenly. No doubt he was already fond of the man, had loved him
through his books, like so many others. If I had introduced him? If we
had taken him with us the next morning, on our excursion to Cambo?
Included him occasionally in our smokes and parleys?
Wilford left for England without dining again at the Hôtel
d'Angleterre. We were busy "doing" the country, and never chanced to
be at Biarritz at the dinner-hour. During that week I scarcely saw Sir
Richard Maistre.
Another little circumstance that rankles especially now would have
been ridiculous, except for the way things have ended. It isn't easy
to tell--it was so petty, and I am so ashamed. Colonel Escott had been
abusing London, describing it as the least beautiful of the capitals
of Europe, comparing it unfavourably to Paris, Vienna, and St.
Petersburg. I took up the cudgels in its defence, mentioned its
atmosphere, its tone; Paris, Vienna, St. Petersburg were lyric, London
was epic; and so forth and so forth. Then, shifting from the æsthetic
to the utilitarian, I argued that of all great towns it was the
healthiest, its death-rate was lowest. Sir Richard Maistre had
followed my dissertation attentively, and with a countenance that
signified approval; and when, with my reference to the death-rate, I
paused, he suddenly burned his ships. He looked me full in the eye,
and said, "Thirty-seven, I believe?" His heightened colour, a nervous
movement of the lip, betrayed the effort it had cost him; but at last
he had _done_ it--screwed his courage to the sticking-place, and
spoken. And I--I can never forget it--I grow hot when I think of
it--but I was possessed by a devil. His eyes hung on my face, awaiting
my response, pleading for a cue. "Go on," they urged. "I have taken
the first, the difficult step--make the next smoother for me." And
I--I answered lackadaisically, with just a casual glance at him, "I
don't know the figures," and absorbed myself in my viands.
Two or three days later his place was filled by a stranger, and
Flaherty told me that he had left for the Riviera.
All this happened last March at Biarritz. I never saw him again till
three weeks ago. It was one of those frightfully hot afternoons in
July; I had come out of my club, and was walking up St. James's
Street, towards Piccadilly; he was moving in an opposite sense; and
thus we approached each other. He didn't see me, however, till we had
drawn rather near to a conjunction: then he gave a little start of
recognition, his eyes brightened, his pace slackened, his right hand
prepared to advance itself--and I bowed slightly, and pursued my way!
Don't ask why I did it. It is enough to confess it, without having to
explain it. I glanced backwards, by and by, over my shoulder. He was
standing where I had met him, half turned round, and looking after me.
But when he saw that I was observing him, he hastily shifted about,
and continued his descent of the street.
That was only three weeks ago. Only three weeks ago I still had it in
my power to act. I am sure--I don't know why I am sure, but I _am_
sure--that I could have deterred him. For all that one can gather from
the brief note he left behind, it seems he had no special, definite
motive; he had met with no losses, got into no scrape; he was simply
tired and sick of life and of himself. "I have no friends," he wrote.
"Nobody will care. People don't like me; people avoid me. I have
wondered why; I have tried to watch myself, and discover; I have tried
to be decent. I suppose it must be that I emit a repellent fluid; I
suppose I am a 'bad sort.'" He had a morbid notion that people didn't
like him, that people avoided him! Oh, to be sure, there were the
Bunns and the Krausskopfs and their ilk, plentiful enough: but he
understood what it was that attracted _them_. Other people, the people
_he_ could have liked, kept their distance--were civil, indeed, but
reserved. He wanted bread, and they gave him a stone. It never struck
him, I suppose, that they attributed the reserve to him. But I--I knew
that his reserve was only an effect of his shyness; I knew that he
wanted bread: and that knowledge constituted my moral responsibility.
I didn't know that his need was extreme; but I have tried in vain to
absolve myself with the reflection. I ought to have made inquiries.
When I think of that afternoon in St. James's Street--only three weeks
ago--I feel like an assassin. The vision of him, as he stopped and
looked after me--I can't banish it. Why didn't some good spirit move
me to turn back and overtake him?
It is so hard for the mind to reconcile itself to the irretrievable. I
can't shake off a sense that there is something to be done. I can't
realise that it is too late.
Song
By Dollie Radford
I could not through the burning day
In hope prevail,
Beside my task I could not stay
If love should fail.
Nor underneath the evening sky,
When labours cease,
Fold both my tired hands and lie
At last in peace.
Ah! what to me in death or life
Could then avail?
I dare not ask for rest or strife
If love should fail.
A Landscape
By Alfred Thornton
[Illustration: A Landscape]
Passed
By Charlotte M. Mew
"Like souls that meeting pass,
And passing never meet again."
Let those who have missed a romantic view of London in its poorest
quarters--and there will romance be found--wait for a sunset in early
winter. They may turn North or South, towards Islington or
Westminster, and encounter some fine pictures and more than one aspect
of unique beauty. This hour of pink twilight has its monopoly of
effects. Some of them may never be reached again.
On such an evening in mid-December, I put down my sewing and left tame
glories of fire-light (discoverers of false charm) to welcome, as
youth may, the contrast of keen air outdoors to the glow within.
My aim was the perfection of a latent appetite, for I had no mind to
content myself with an apology for hunger, consequent on a warmly
passive afternoon.
The splendid cold of fierce frost set my spirit dancing. The road rung
hard underfoot, and through the lonely squares woke sharp echoes from
behind. This stinging air assailed my cheeks with vigorous severity.
It stirred my blood grandly, and brought thought back to me from the
warm embers just forsaken, with an immeasurable sense of gain.
But after the first delirium of enchanting motion, destination became
a question. The dim trees behind the dingy enclosures were beginning
to be succeeded by rows of flaring gas jets, displaying shops of new
aspect and evil smell. Then the heavy walls of a partially demolished
prison reared themselves darkly against the pale sky.
By this landmark I recalled--alas that it should be possible--a church
in the district, newly built by an infallible architect, which I had
been directed to seek at leisure. I did so now. A row of cramped
houses, with the unpardonable bow window, projecting squalor into
prominence, came into view. Robbing these even of light, the
portentous walls stood a silent curse before them. I think they were
blasting the hopes of the sad dwellers beneath them--if hope they
had--to despair. Through spattered panes faces of diseased and dirty
children leered into the street. One room, as I passed, seemed full of
them. The window was open; their wails and maddening requirements sent
out the mother's cry. It was thrown back to her, mingled with her
children's screams, from the pitiless prison walls.
These shelters struck my thought as travesties--perhaps they were
not--of the grand place called home.
Leaving them I sought the essential of which they were bereft. What
withheld from them, as poverty and sin could not, a title to the
sacred name?
An answer came, but interpretation was delayed. Theirs was not the
desolation of something lost, but of something that had never been. I
thrust off speculation gladly here, and fronted Nature free.
Suddenly I emerged from the intolerable shadow of the brickwork,
breathing easily once more. Before me lay a roomy space, nearly
square, bounded by three-storey dwellings, and transformed, as if by
quick mechanism, with colours of sunset. Red and golden spots wavered
in the panes of the low scattered houses round the bewildering
expanse. Overhead a faint crimson sky was hung with violet clouds,
obscured by the smoke and nearing dusk.
In the centre, but towards the left, stood an old stone pump, and some
few feet above it irregular lamps looked down. They were planted on a
square of paving railed in by broken iron fences, whose paint, now
discoloured, had once been white. Narrow streets cut in five
directions from the open roadway. Their lines of light sank dimly into
distance, mocking the stars' entrance into the fading sky. Everything
was transfigured in the illuminated twilight. As I stood, the dying
sun caught the rough edges of a girl's uncovered hair, and hung a
faint nimbus round her poor desecrated face. The soft circle, as she
glanced toward me, lent it the semblance of one of those mystically
pictured faces of some mediæval saint.
A stillness stole on, and about the square dim figures hurried along,
leaving me stationary in existence (I was thinking fancifully), when
my mediæval saint demanded "who I was a-shoving of?" and dismissed me,
not unkindly, on my way. Hawkers in a neighbouring alley were calling,
and the monotonous ting-ting of the muffin-bell made an audible
background to the picture. I left it, and then the glamour was already
passing. In a little while darkness possessing it, the place would
reassume its aspect of sordid gloom.
There is a street not far from there, bearing a name that quickens
life within one, by the vision it summons of a most peaceful country,
where the broad roads are but pathways through green meadows, and your
footstep keeps the time to a gentle music of pure streams. There the
scent of roses, and the first pushing buds of spring, mark the
seasons, and the birds call out faithfully the time and manner of the
day. Here Easter is heralded by the advent in some squalid mart of
air-balls on Good Friday; early summer and late may be known by
observation of that unromantic yet authentic calendar in which
alley-tors, tip-cat, whip- and peg-tops, hoops and suckers, in their
courses mark the flight of time.
Perhaps attracted by the incongruity, I took this way. In such a
thoroughfare it is remarkable that satisfied as are its public with
transient substitutes for literature, they require permanent types
(the term is so far misused it may hardly be further outraged) of Art.
Pictures, so-called, are the sole departure from necessity and popular
finery which the prominent wares display. The window exhibiting these
aspirations was scarcely more inviting than the fishmonger's next
door, but less odoriferous, and I stopped to see what the
ill-reflecting lights would show. There was a typical selection.
Prominently, a large chromo of a girl at prayer. Her eyes turned
upwards, presumably to heaven, left the gazer in no state to dwell on
the elaborately bared breasts below. These might rival, does wax-work
attempt such beauties, any similar attraction of Marylebone's
extensive show. This personification of pseudo-purity was sensually
diverting, and consequently marketable.
My mind seized the ideal of such a picture, and turned from this
prostitution of it sickly away. Hurriedly I proceeded, and did not
stop again until I had passed the low gateway of the place I sought.
Its forbidding exterior was hidden in the deep twilight and invited no
consideration. I entered and swung back the inner door. It was papered
with memorial cards, recommending to mercy the unprotesting spirits
of the dead. My prayers were requested for the "repose of the soul
of the Architect of that church, who passed away in the True
Faith--December,--1887." Accepting the assertion, I counted him beyond
them, and mentally entrusted mine to the priest for those who were
still groping for it in the gloom.
Within the building, darkness again forbade examination. A few lamps
hanging before the altar struggled with obscurity.
I tried to identify some ugly details with the great man's complacent
eccentricity, and failing, turned toward the street again. Nearly an
hour's walk lay between me and my home. This fact and the atmosphere
of stuffy sanctity about the place, set me longing for space again,
and woke a fine scorn for aught but air and sky. My appetite, too, was
now an hour ahead of opportunity. I sent back a final glance into the
darkness as my hand prepared to strike the door. There was no motion
at the moment, and it was silent; but the magnetism of human presence
reached me where I stood. I hesitated, and in a few moments found what
sought me on a chair in the far corner, flung face downwards across
the seat. The attitude arrested me. I went forward. The lines of the
figure spoke unquestionable despair.
Does speech convey intensity of anguish? Its supreme expression is in
form. Here was human agony set forth in meagre lines, voiceless, but
articulate to the soul. At first the forcible portrayal of it assailed
me with the importunate strength of beauty. Then the Thing stretched
there in the obdurate darkness grew personal and banished delight.
Neither sympathy nor its vulgar substitute, curiosity, induced my
action as I drew near. I was eager indeed to be gone. I wanted to
ignore the almost indistinguishable being. My will cried: Forsake
it!--but I found myself powerless to obey. Perhaps it would have
conquered had not the girl swiftly raised herself in quest of me. I
stood still. Her eyes met mine. A wildly tossed spirit looked from
those ill-lighted windows, beckoning me on. Mine pressed towards it,
but whether my limbs actually moved I do not know, for the imperious
summons robbed me of any consciousness save that of necessity to
comply.
Did she reach me, or was our advance mutual? It cannot be told. I
suppose we neither know. But we met, and her hand, grasping mine,
imperatively dragged me into the cold and noisy street.
We went rapidly in and out of the flaring booths, hustling little
staggering children in our unpitying speed, I listening dreamily to
the concert of hoarse yells and haggling whines which struck against
the silence of our flight. On and on she took me, breathless and
without explanation. We said nothing. I had no care or impulse to ask
our goal. The fierce pressure of my hand was not relaxed a breathing
space; it would have borne me against resistance could I have offered
any, but I was capable of none. The streets seemed to rush past us,
peopled with despair.
Weirdly lighted faces sent blank negations to a spirit of question
which finally began to stir in me. Here, I thought once vaguely, was
the everlasting No!
We must have journeyed thus for more than half an hour and walked far.
I did not detect it. In the eternity of supreme moments time is not.
Thought, too, fears to be obtrusive and stands aside.
We gained a door at last, down some blind alley out of the deafening
thoroughfare. She threw herself against it and pulled me up the
unlighted stairs. They shook now and then with the violence of our
ascent; with my free hand I tried to help myself up by the broad and
greasy balustrade. There was little sound in the house. A light shone
under the first door we passed, but all was quietness within.
At the very top, from the dense blackness of the passage, my guide
thrust me suddenly into a dazzling room. My eyes rejected its array of
brilliant light. On a small chest of drawers three candles were
guttering, two more stood flaring in the high window ledge, and a lamp
upon a table by the bed rendered these minor illuminations unnecessary
by its diffusive glare. There were even some small Christmas candles
dropping coloured grease down the wooden mantel-piece, and I noticed a
fire had been made, built entirely of wood. There were bits of an
inlaid workbox or desk, and a chair-rung, lying half burnt in the
grate. Some peremptory demand for light had been, these signs denoted,
unscrupulously met. A woman lay upon the bed, half clothed, asleep. As
the door slammed behind me the flames wavered and my companion
released my hand. She stood beside me, shuddering violently, but
without utterance.
I looked around. Everywhere proofs of recent energy were visible. The
bright panes reflecting back the low burnt candles, the wretched but
shining furniture, and some odd bits of painted china, set before the
spluttering lights upon the drawers, bore witness to a provincial
intolerance of grime. The boards were bare, and marks of extreme
poverty distinguished the whole room. The destitution of her
surroundings accorded ill with the girl's spotless person and
well-tended hands, which were hanging tremulously down.
Subsequently I realised that these deserted beings must have first
fronted the world from a sumptuous stage. The details in proof of it I
need not cite. It must have been so.
My previous apathy gave place to an exaggerated observation. Even some
pieces of a torn letter, dropped off the quilt, I noticed, were of
fine texture, and inscribed by a man's hand. One fragment bore an
elaborate device in colours. It may have been a club crest or
coat-of-arms. I was trying to decide which, when the girl at length
gave a cry of exhaustion or relief, at the same time falling into a
similar attitude to that she had taken in the dim church. Her entire
frame became shaken with tearless agony or terror. It was sickening to
watch. She began partly to call or moan, begging me, since I was
beside her, wildly, and then with heart-breaking weariness, "to stop,
to stay." She half rose and claimed me with distracted grace. All her
movements were noticeably fine.
I pass no judgment on her features; suffering for the time assumed
them, and they made no insistence of individual claim.
I tried to raise her, and kneeling, pulled her reluctantly towards me.
The proximity was distasteful. An alien presence has ever repelled me.
I should have pitied the girl keenly perhaps a few more feet away. She
clung to me with ebbing force. Her heart throbbed painfully close to
mine, and when I meet now in the dark streets others who have been
robbed, as she has been, of their great possession, I have to remember
that.
The magnetism of our meeting was already passing; and, reason
asserting itself, I reviewed the incident dispassionately, as she lay
like a broken piece of mechanism in my arms. Her dark hair had come
unfastened and fell about my shoulder. A faint white streak of it
stole through the brown. A gleam of moonlight strays thus through a
dusky room. I remember noticing, as it was swept with her involuntary
motions across my face, a faint fragrance which kept recurring like a
subtle and seductive sprite, hiding itself with fairy cunning in the
tangled maze.
The poor girl's mind was clearly travelling a devious way. Broken and
incoherent exclamations told of a recently wrung promise, made to
whom, or of what nature, it was not my business to conjecture or
inquire.
I record the passage of a few minutes. At the first opportunity I
sought the slumberer on the bed. She slept well: hers was a long rest;
there might be no awakening from it, for she was dead. Schooled in one
short hour to all surprises, the knowledge made me simply richer by a
fact. Nothing about the sternly set face invited horror. It had been,
and was yet, a strong and, if beauty be not confined to youth and
colour, a beautiful face.
Perhaps this quiet sharer of the convulsively broken silence was
thirty years old. Death had set a firmness about the finely controlled
features that might have shown her younger. The actual years are of
little matter; existence, as we reckon time, must have lasted long. It
was not death, but life that had planted the look of disillusion
there. And romance being over, all good-byes to youth are said. By the
bedside, on a roughly constructed table, was a dearly bought bunch of
violets. They were set in a blue bordered tea-cup, and hung over in
wistful challenge of their own diviner hue. They were foreign, and
their scent probably unnatural, but it stole very sweetly round the
room. A book lay face downwards beside them--alas for parochial
energies, not of a religious type--and the torn fragments of the
destroyed letter had fallen on the black binding.
A passionate movement of the girl's breast against mine directed my
glance elsewhere. She was shivering, and her arms about my neck were
stiffly cold. The possibility that she was starving missed my mind. It
would have found my heart. I wondered if she slept, and dared not
stir, though I was by this time cramped and chilled. The vehemence of
her agitation ended, she breathed gently, and slipped finally to the
floor.
I began to face the need of action and recalled the chances of the
night. When and how I might get home was a necessary question, and I
listened vainly for a friendly step outside. None since we left it had
climbed the last flight of stairs. I could hear a momentary vibration
of men's voices in the room below. Was it possible to leave these
suddenly discovered children of peace and tumult? Was it possible to
stay?
This was Saturday, and two days later I was bound for Scotland; a
practical recollection of empty trunks was not lost in my survey of
the situation. Then how, if I decided not to forsake the poor child,
now certainly sleeping in my arms, were my anxious friends to learn my
whereabouts, and understand the eccentricity of the scheme?
Indisputably, I determined, something must be done for the
half-frantic wanderer who was pressing a tiring weight against me. And
there should be some kind hand to cover the cold limbs and close the
wide eyes of the breathless sleeper, waiting a comrade's sanction to
fitting rest.
Conclusion was hastening to impatient thought, when my eyes let fall a
fatal glance upon the dead girl's face. I do not think it had changed
its first aspect of dignified repose, and yet now it woke in me a
sensation of cold dread. The dark eyes unwillingly open reached mine
in an insistent stare. One hand lying out upon the coverlid, I could
never again mistake for that of temporarily suspended life. My watch
ticked loudly, but I dared not examine it, nor could I wrench my sight
from the figure on the bed. For the first time the empty shell of
being assailed my senses. I watched feverishly, knowing well the
madness of the action, for a hint of breathing, almost stopping my
own.
To-day, as memory summons it, I cannot dwell without reluctance on
this hour of my realisation of the thing called Death.
A hundred fancies, clothed in mad intolerable terrors, possessed me,
and had not my lips refused it outlet, I should have set free a cry,
as the spent child beside me had doubtless longed to do, and failed,
ere, desperate, she fled.
My gaze was chained; it could not get free. As the shapes of monsters
of ever varying and increasing dreadfulness flit through one's dreams,
the images of those I loved crept round me, with stark yet well-known
features, their limbs borrowing death's rigid outline, as they mocked
my recognition of them with soundless semblances of mirth. They began
to wind their arms about me in fierce embraces of burning and
supernatural life. Gradually the contact froze. They bound me in an
icy prison. Their hold relaxed. These creatures of my heart were
restless. The horribly familiar company began to dance at intervals in
and out a ring of white gigantic bedsteads, set on end like
tombstones, each of which framed a huge and fearful travesty of the
sad set face that was all the while seeking vainly a pitiless
stranger's care. They vanished. My heart went home. The dear place was
desolate. No echo of its many voices on the threshold or stair. My
footsteps made no sound as I went rapidly up to a well-known room.
Here I besought the mirror for the reassurance of my own reflection.
It denied me human portraiture and threw back cold glare. As I opened
mechanically a treasured book, I noticed the leaves were blank, not
even blurred by spot or line; and then I shivered--it was deadly cold.
The fire that but an hour or two ago it seemed I had forsaken for the
winter twilight, glowed with slow derision at my efforts to rekindle
heat. My hands plunged savagely into its red embers, but I drew them
out quickly, unscathed and clean. The things by which I had touched
life were nothing. Here, as I called the dearest names, their echoes
came back again with the sound of an unlearned language. I did not
recognise, and yet I framed them. What was had never been!
My spirit summoned the being who claimed mine. He came, stretching out
arms of deathless welcome. As he reached me my heart took flight. I
called aloud to it, but my cries were lost in awful laughter that
broke to my bewildered fancy from the hideously familiar shapes which
had returned and now encircled the grand form of him I loved. But I
had never known him. I beat my breast to wake there the wonted pain of
tingling joy. I called past experience with unavailing importunity to
bear witness the man was wildly dear to me. He was not. He left me
with bent head a stranger, whom I would not if I could recall.
For one brief second, reason found me. I struggled to shake off the
phantoms of despair. I tried to grasp while it yet lingered the
teaching of this never-to-be-forgotten front of death. The homeless
house with its indefensible bow window stood out from beneath the
prison walls again. What had this to do with it? I questioned. And the
answer it had evoked replied, "Not the desolation of something lost,
but of something that had never been."
The half-clad girl of the wretched picture-shop came into view with
waxen hands and senseless symbolism. I had grown calmer, but her
doll-like lips hissed out the same half-meaningless but pregnant
words. Then the nights of a short life when I could pray, years back
in magical childhood, sought me. They found me past them--without the
power.
Truly the body had been for me the manifestation of the thing called
soul. Here was my embodiment bereft. My face was stiff with drying
tears. Sickly I longed to beg of an unknown God a miracle. Would He
but touch the passive body and breathe into it the breath even of
transitory life.
I craved but a fleeting proof of its ever possible existence. For to
me it was not, would never be, and had never been.
The partially relinquished horror was renewing dominance. Speech of
any incoherence or futility would have brought mental power of
resistance. My mind was fast losing landmarks amid the continued quiet
of the living and the awful stillness of the dead. There was no sound,
even of savage guidance, I should not then have welcomed with glad
response.
"The realm of Silence," says one of the world's great teachers, "is
large enough beyond the grave."
I seemed to have passed life's portal, and my soul's small strength
was beating back the noiseless gate. In my extremity, I cried, "O God!
for man's most bloody warshout, or Thy whisper!" It was useless. Not
one dweller in the crowded tenements broke his slumber or relaxed his
labour in answer to the involuntary prayer.
And may the 'Day of Account of Words' take note of this! Then, says
the old fable, shall the soul of the departed be weighed against an
image of Truth. I tried to construct in imagination the form of the
dumb deity who should bear down the balances for me. Soundlessness was
turning fear to madness. I could neither quit nor longer bear company
the grim Presence in that room. But the supreme moment was very near.
Long since, the four low candles had burned out, and now the lamp was
struggling fitfully to keep alight. The flame could last but a few
moments. I saw it, and did not face the possibility of darkness. The
sleeping girl, I concluded rapidly, had used all available weapons of
defiant light.
As yet, since my entrance, I had hardly stirred, steadily supporting
the burden on my breast. Now, without remembrance of it, I started up
to escape. The violent suddenness of the action woke my companion. She
staggered blindly to her feet and confronted me as I gained the door.
Scarcely able to stand, and dashing the dimness from her eyes, she
clutched a corner of the drawers behind her for support. Her head
thrown back, and her dark hair hanging round it, crowned a grandly
tragic form. This was no poor pleader, and I was unarmed for fight.
She seized my throbbing arm and cried in a whisper, low and hoarse,
but strongly audible:
"For God's sake, stay here with me."
My lips moved vainly. I shook my head.
"For God in heaven's sake"--she repeated, swaying, and turning her
burning, reddened eyes on mine--"don't leave me now."
I stood irresolute, half stunned. Stepping back, she stooped and began
piecing together the dismembered letter on the bed. A mute protest
arrested her from a cold sister's face. She swept the action from her,
crying, "No!" and bending forward suddenly, gripped me with fierce
force.
"Here! Here!" she prayed, dragging me passionately back into the room.
The piteous need and wild entreaty--no, the vision of dire
anguish--was breaking my purpose of flight. A fragrance that was to
haunt me stole between us. The poor little violets put in their plea.
I moved to stay. Then a smile--the splendour of it may never be
reached again--touched her pale lips and broke through them,
transforming, with divine radiance, her young and blurred and
never-to-be-forgotten face. It wavered, or was it the last uncertain
flicker of the lamp that made me fancy it? The exquisite moment was
barely over when darkness came. Then light indeed forsook me. Almost
ignorant of my own intention, I resisted the now trembling figure,
indistinguishable in the gloom, but it still clung. I thrust it off me
with unnatural vigour.
She fell heavily to the ground. Without a pause of thought I stumbled
down the horrible unlighted stairs. A few steps before I reached the
bottom my foot struck a splint off the thin edge of one of the rotten
treads. I slipped, and heard a door above open and then shut. No other
sound. At length I was at the door. It was ajar. I opened it and
looked out. Since I passed through it first the place had become quite
deserted. The inhabitants were, I suppose, all occupied elsewhere at
such an hour on their holiday night. The lamps, if there were any, had
not been lit. The outlook was dense blackness. Here too the hideous
dark pursued me and silence held its sway. Even the children were
screaming in more enticing haunts of gaudy squalor. Some, whose good
angels perhaps had not forgotten them, had put themselves to sleep.
Not many hours ago their shrieks were deafening. Were these too in
conspiracy against me? I remembered vaguely hustling some of them with
unmeant harshness in my hurried progress from the Church. Dumb the
whole place seemed; and it was, but for the dim stars aloft, quite
dark. I dared not venture across the threshold, bound by pitiable
cowardice to the spot. Alas for the unconscious girl upstairs. A
murmur from within the house might have sent me back to her. Certainly
it would have sent me, rather than forth into the empty street. The
faintest indication of humanity had recalled me. I waited the summons
of a sound. It came.
But from the deserted, yet not so shamefully deserted, street. A man
staggering home by aid of friendly railings, set up a drunken song. At
the first note I rushed towards him, pushing past him in wild
departure, and on till I reached the noisome and flaring thoroughfare,
a haven where sweet safety smiled. Here I breathed joy, and sped away
without memory of the two lifeless beings lying alone in that shrouded
chamber of desolation, and with no instinct to return.
My sole impulse was flight; and the way, unmarked in the earlier
evening, was unknown. It took me some minutes to find a cab; but the
incongruous vehicle, rudely dispersing the haggling traders in the
roadway, came at last, and carried me from the distorted crowd of
faces and the claims of pity to peace.
I lay back shivering, and the wind crept through the rattling glass in
front of me. I did not note the incalculable turnings that took me
home.
My account of the night's adventure was abridged and unsensational. I
was pressed neither for detail nor comment, but accorded a somewhat
humorous welcome which bade me say farewell to dying horror, and even
let me mount boldly to the once death-haunted room.
Upon its threshold I stood and looked in, half believing possible the
greeting pictured there under the dead girl's influence, and I could
not enter. Again I fled, this time to kindly light, and heard my
brothers laughing noisily with a friend in the bright hall.
A waltz struck up in the room above as I reached them. I joined the
impromptu dance, and whirled the remainder of that evening gladly
away.
Physically wearied, I slept. My slumber had no break in it. I woke
only to the exquisite joys of morning, and lay watching the early
shadows creep into the room. Presently the sun rose. His first smile
greeted me from the glass before my bed. I sprang up disdainful of
that majestic reflection, and flung the window wide to meet him face
to face. His splendour fell too on one who had trusted me, but I
forgot it. Not many days later the same sunlight that turned my life
to laughter shone on the saddest scene of mortal ending, and, for one
I had forsaken, lit the ways of death. I never dreamed it might. For
the next morning the tragedy of the past night was a distant one, no
longer intolerable.
At twelve o'clock, conscience suggested a search. I acquiesced, but
did not move. At half-past, it insisted on one, and I obeyed. I set
forth with a determination of success and no clue to promise it. At
four o'clock, I admitted the task hopeless and abandoned it. Duty
could ask no more of me, I decided, not wholly dissatisfied that
failure forbade more difficult demands. As I passed it on my way home,
some dramatic instinct impelled me to re-enter the unsightly church.
I must almost have expected to see the same prostrate figure, for my
eyes instantly sought the corner it had occupied. The winter twilight
showed it empty. A service was about to begin. One little lad in
violet skirt and goffered linen was struggling to light the
benediction tapers, and a troop of school children pushed past me as I
stood facing the altar and blocking their way. A grey-clad sister of
mercy was arresting each tiny figure, bidding it pause beside me, and
with two firm hands on either shoulder, compelling a ludicrous
curtsey, and at the same time whispering the injunction to each
hurried little personage,-- "always make a reverence to the altar."
"Ada, come back!" and behold another unwilling bob! Perhaps the good
woman saw her Master's face behind the tinsel trappings and flaring
lights. But she forgot His words. The saying to these little ones that
has rung through centuries commanded liberty and not allegiance. I
stood aside till they had shuffled into seats, and finally kneeling
stayed till the brief spectacle of the afternoon was over.
Towards its close I looked away from the mumbling priest, whose
attention, divided between inconvenient millinery and the holiest
mysteries, was distracting mine.
Two girls holding each other's hands came in and stood in deep shadow
behind the farthest rows of high-backed chairs by the door. The
younger rolled her head from side to side; her shifting eyes and
ceaseless imbecile grimaces chilled my blood. The other, who stood
praying, turned suddenly (the place but for the flaring altar lights
was dark) and kissed the dreadful creature by her side. I shuddered,
and yet her face wore no look of loathing nor of pity. The expression
was a divine one of habitual love.
She wiped the idiot's lips and stroked the shaking hand in hers, to
quiet the sad hysterical caresses she would not check. It was a page
of gospel which the old man with his back to it might never read. A
sublime and ghastly scene.
Up in the little gallery the grey-habited nuns were singing a long
Latin hymn of many verses, with the refrain "Oh! Sacred Heart!" I
buried my face till the last vibrating chord of the accompaniment was
struck. The organist ventured a plagal cadence. It evoked no "amen." I
whispered one, and an accidentally touched note shrieked disapproval.
I repeated it. Then I spit upon the bloodless cheek of duty, and
renewed my quest. This time it was for the satisfaction of my own
tingling soul.
I retook my unknown way. The streets were almost empty and thinly
strewn with snow. It was still falling. I shrank from marring the
spotless page that seemed outspread to challenge and exhibit the
defiling print of man. The quiet of the muffled streets soothed me.
The neighbourhood seemed lulled into unwonted rest.
Black little figures lurched out of the white alleys in twos and
threes. But their childish utterances sounded less shrill than usual,
and sooner died away.
Now in desperate earnest I spared neither myself nor the incredulous
and dishevelled people whose aid I sought.
Fate deals honestly with all. She will not compromise though she may
delay. Hunger and weariness at length sent me home, with an assortment
of embellished negatives ringing in my failing ears.
* * * * *
I had almost forgotten my strange experience, when, some months
afterwards, in late spring, the wraith of that winter meeting appeared
to me. It was past six o'clock, and I had reached, ignorant of the
ill-chosen hour, a notorious thoroughfare in the western part of this
glorious and guilty city. The place presented to my unfamiliar eyes a
remarkable sight. Brilliantly lit windows, exhibiting dazzling wares,
threw into prominence the human mart.
This was thronged. I pressed into the crowd. Its steady and opposite
progress neither repelled nor sanctioned my admittance. However, I had
determined on a purchase, and was not to be baulked by the unforeseen.
I made it, and stood for a moment at the shop-door preparing to break
again through the rapidly thickening throng.
Up and down, decked in frigid allurement, paced the insatiate
daughters of an everlasting king. What fair messengers, with streaming
eyes and impotently craving arms, did they send afar off ere they thus
"increased their perfumes and debased themselves even unto hell"? This
was my question. I asked not who forsook them, speaking in farewell
the "hideous English of their fate."
I watched coldly, yet not inapprehensive or a certain grandeur in the
scene. It was Virtue's very splendid Dance of Death.
A sickening confusion of odours assailed my senses; each essence a
vile enticement, outraging Nature by a perversion of her own pure
spell.
A timidly protesting fragrance stole strangely by. I started at its
approach. It summoned a stinging memory. I stepped forward to escape
it, but stopped, confronted by the being who had shared, by the
flickering lamplight and in the presence of that silent witness, the
poor little violet's prayer.
The man beside her was decorated with a bunch of sister flowers to
those which had taken part against him, months ago, in vain. He could
have borne no better badge of victory. He was looking at some
extravagant trifle in the window next the entry I had just crossed.
They spoke, comparing it with a silver case he turned over in his
hand. In the centre I noticed a tiny enamelled shield. The detail
seemed familiar, but beyond identity. They entered the shop. I stood
motionless, challenging memory, till it produced from some dim corner
of my brain a hoarded "No."
The device now headed a poor strip of paper on a dead girl's bed. I
saw a figure set by death, facing starvation, and with ruin in torn
fragments in her hand. But what place in the scene had I? A brief
discussion next me made swift answer.
They were once more beside me. The man was speaking: his companion
raised her face; I recognised its outline,--its true aspect I shall
not know. Four months since it wore the mask of sorrow; it was now but
one of the pages of man's immortal book. I was conscious of the
matchless motions which in the dim church had first attracted me.
She was clothed, save for a large scarf of vehemently brilliant
crimson, entirely in dull vermilion. The two shades might serve as
symbols of divine and earthly passion. Yet does one ask the martyr's
colour, you name it 'Red' (and briefly thus her garment): no
distinctive hue. The murderer and the prelate too may
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