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Title: In a Canadian Canoe
The Nine Muses Minus One and Other Stories
Author: Barry Pain
Release Date: February 4, 2022 [eBook #67322]
Language: English
Produced by: David E. Brown and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN A CANADIAN CANOE ***
IN A CANADIAN CANOE
IN A CANADIAN
CANOE
THE NINE MUSES MINUS ONE
_AND OTHER STORIES_
BY
BARRY PAIN
[Illustration]
London and New York
HARPER AND BROTHERS
45, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1898
TO
A. N. L.
PREFACE.
My thanks are due to the Editor of “The Granta” for permission to
reprint “In a Canadian Canoe,” “The Nine Muses Minus One,” and “The
Celestial Grocery.” They have been carefully revised, and considerable
additions have been made. The rest of the volume has not appeared
before, so far as I know.
Although this book appears in a “Library of Wit and Humour,” I have not
tried to make it _all_ witty and humorous: I wanted there to be some
background. I am not sure that I have not made it _all_ background.
B. P.
CLEMENT’S INN,
_July 1891_.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
IN A CANADIAN CANOE--
I. On Art and Sardines,--but more especially Sardines 1
II. On Exaltation: together with an Anecdote from the
“Entertainments” of Kapnides 8
III. On Self-Deception: together with the Dream of the
Dean’s Preparations 15
IV. On Reflection: to which is added the Story of the Tin
Heart 22
V. A Storm on the Backs; and a Story of Three 29
VI. On Loafing: together with a Second Anecdote from the
“Entertainments” of Kapnides 37
VII. On Causes: with an Excursus on Luck 44
VIII. On Solitude: with a Third Anecdote from the
“Entertainments” of Kapnides 51
IX. On Associations: together with a Last Anecdote from the
“Entertainments” of Kapnides 58
THE NINE MUSES MINUS ONE--
I. Clio’s Story: Charles Marius 66
II. Euterpe’s Story: The Girl and the Minstrel 75
III. Terpsichore’s Story: The Under-Study 83
IV. Melpomene’s Story: The Cursed Pig 90
V. Polymnia’s Story: An Hour of Death 97
VI. Calliope’s Story: The Last Straw 105
VII. Thalia’s Story: The Camel who never got started 113
VIII. Urania’s Story: Number One hundred and Three 121
THE CELESTIAL GROCERY: A FANTASIA 129
“BILL” 150
THE GIRL AND THE BEETLE: A STORY OF HERE AND HEREAFTER 164
IN A CANADIAN CANOE.
I.
ON ART AND SARDINES--BUT MORE ESPECIALLY SARDINES.
There is no pleasanter, sweeter, healthier spot than the Backs of the
Colleges.
Get into your canoe at Silver Street. Put into that canoe:--
(1) The cushions of three other boats.
(2) Two pipes, in order that one may be always cool, and tobacco.
(3) One dozen boxes of matches, in order that one box may be always
handy.
(4) The spiritual part of your nature, which will not take up much
room, but is useful to talk to.
But do not take another man with you. I may frankly say, my reader,
that you are absolutely the only man I know who has the keen
appreciativeness, the capacity for quiet meditation, the dreaminess,
the listlessness, the abominable laziness, that a Canadian canoe
requires.
The man who would attempt to get pace on in a Canadian canoe probably
would analyse the want of harmony in the death-song which a swan never
sings--or worse than that.
The man who would try to make a Canadian canoe go where he wanted would
be angry, because the inspiration of a poet does not always disappoint
the expectations of a commonplace nature. You must go where the boat
wants to go; and that depends upon wind and current, and on the number
of other boats that run into you, and the way they do it, and the
language of their occupants.
* * * * *
What a beautiful thing it is to lie at full length on the cushions, and
see the sky through the trees--only the angels see the trees through
the sky. My boat has taken me round to the back of Queen’s, and stopped
just short of that little bridge. It is all old and familiar. The fowls
coo as they cooed yesterday. The same two men in the same tub have the
same little joke with one another in getting under the low bridge.
Farther up, there is precisely the same number of flies on the same
dead and putrescent animal. My boat went up to look at it, but could
not stay. The recoil sent it back here; and here, apparently, it means
to stop. You may take my word for it that a Canadian canoe knows a
thing or two.
I wish I could paint the song of the birds and set the beauty of
the trees to music. But there is a prejudice against it. Music is
masculine, Art is feminine, and Poetry is their child. The baby Poetry
will play with any one; but its parents observe the division of sexes.
That is why Nature is so decent and pleasant. I would treat her to
some poetry if I did but know the names of things. For instance, I
have no idea what that bird is, and asparagus is the only tree which I
recognise at sight.
I suppose you know that Art and Music are separated now. They sometimes
meet, but they never speak. In the vacation I met them both one night
by the edge of the sea; but they did not notice me. Art was busy in
catching the effect of the moonlight and the lights on the pier. She
did it well, and made it more beautiful than the reality seemed. Music
listened to the wash of the waves, the thin sound of the little pebbles
drawn back into the sea, and the constant noise of a low wind. He
sat at a big organ, which was hidden from my sight by dark curtains
of cloud; and as he played the music of all things came out into a
song which was better than all things: for Art and Music are not only
imitative, but creative. At present they are allowed to create only
shadows, by the rules of the game. But I have been told that the
old quarrel between them--I have no conception what the quarrel was
about--will be made up one day, and they will love one another again.
Their younger child, who will then be born, will take unto himself the
strength and beauty of Art and Music and Poetry. He will be different
from all three, and his name is not fixed yet.
Oh, confound the boat! I wish I’d tied it up. It’s just taken the
painter between its teeth, and whipped sharp round and bolted. Woa, my
lass, steady! It’s a little fresh, you see, not having been out before
this week. I _beg_ your pardon, sir--_entirely_ my fault.
I don’t think he need have been so offensively rude about it. It’s not
as if I’d upset him.
A fish jumped.
I know not the names of fishes, but it was not salmon steak or filleted
soles, of that I’m sure. My boat goes waggling its silly old bows as if
it knew but would not tell me. Can it have been a sardine?
No; the sardine is a foreign fish. It comes from Sardinia, where the
Great Napoleon was exiled, as likely as not. It cannot swim in fresh
water, but is brought to us in tins, which are packed in crates on
trucks. It comes _en huiles_, in fact. Hence the inscription.
I cannot help thinking of the sad story of those two historical
sardines--a buck-sardine and a doe-sardine--that lived on opposite
sides of an island, which happened to be in the Ægean Sea.
They loved one another dearly; but they never, never told their love.
He had no self-confidence, and she had too much self-respect. They met
but once before their last day. It was at a place of worship in the
neighbourhood of the Goodwin Sands. She caught his eye, and the umpire
gave it out, and he had to go out. “Am I a hymn?” he said, just a
little bitterly, “that I should be given out?” He was not a hymn, but
he was a he, and had a tender heart.
All day long he sat on a stone, tail uppermost, and felt his position
acutely. “Ah, if she only knew!” he sighed to himself.
And she was the life and soul of a select party in the roaring
Adriatic. She quipped, and quirked; she became so brilliant that the
surface of the sea grew phosphorescent. And no one guessed that beneath
that calm exterior the worm was gnawing at the heart of the poor
doe-sardine. No one would have been so foolish. For is it not well
known that when a worm and a fish meet it’s mostly the fish that does
the gnawing? Still, the doe-sardine did feel a trifle weary. Why might
she not tell her love? Why must she suffer?
“Il faut souffrir pour être belle,” as the gong said when the butler
hit it.
About this time a young man, who was dancing attendance on Queen
Cleopatra, happened to be passing on a P.N.O. steamer. This was
in the republican era, when Duilius introduced the P.N.O. line.
The Carthaginian merchants, with a keen eye for business, always
used P.T.O. steamers, which were insured far beyond their value by
unsuspecting offices in the less tutored parts of Spain. These wild
tribes did not know what P.T.O. signified, but the steamers did; so did
the crews of low Teutonic slaves, who were thus saved all the worry and
expense of burial.
But let us return to our sardines. The young man on the P.N.O. steamer
was reading a novel of Ouida’s; and, misliking the book, he flung it
into the ocean. The attendants of the doe-sardine brought it to their
mistress, and she read it with avidity, and after that she became very
elegant, and very French.
She sat in the rose-tinted boudoir, with a sad smile on her gills,
dreaming of her love. “Ah!” she murmured faintly, “Si vous saviez.”
She could not sleep! No sooner had she closed her eyes than she was
haunted by an awful vision of a man soldering up tins of fish. The
doctors prescribed narcotics. When she had taken the morphia of the
doctors she had no more fear of the dream. But she took too much of it.
She took all there was of it. Then the doctors prescribed coral, and
she took any amount of coral. She would have taken in a reef; but the
auctioneer was away for his Easter holidays, and consequently there
were no sales. So she took in washing instead. Then, and not till then,
she knew that she must die.
A fishing-net was passing, and a conductor stood on the step. “’Ere
yer are, lyedy!” he called out. “Hall the way--one penny! Benk, Benk,
Gritty Benk!” He used to say this so quickly that he was called the
lightning conductor. She entered the net, and as she did so she saw the
buck-sardine seated there. She staggered, and nearly fell!
“Moind the step, lyedy,” cried the conductor.
And so they were brought to the gritty bank of the Mediterranean, and
received temporary accommodation without sureties or publicity--on
note-of-hand simply. As they came in with the tide, they were naturally
paid into the current account.
They were preserved in the same tin, and served on the same piece of
buttered toast.
As the man consumed the bodies of the buck-sardine and the doe-sardine,
the two spiritualities of the two fishes walked down the empyrean, and
cast two shadows.
When he had gulped down the last mouthful, the two shadows melted into
one.
So they found peace at last; and I do not refer to buttered toast. But
the queerest part of it is that they were both sprats.
* * * * *
It has turned chilly. No one but myself is left on the river, and the
solitary end of the afternoon is good to look at. The thing that you
and I want most is a power of expression. When I say you, I mean the
sympathetic reader who can enter into the true spirit of loafing: the
loafing of the body in the wayward Canadian canoe that does what it
likes, and the loafing of the mind that does not take the nauseous
trouble to think straight. I want the younger child who is to be born
when Art and Music are reconciled again, who will never take aim and
yet never miss the mark, who will be quite careless but quite true.
That child will know all about the sympathy which exists between one
man and one scene in which he finds himself, and may perhaps reveal it
to us.
But I am sorry for poor Art. She is a woman, and, though her beauty
will not leave her, she desires reconciliation and love.
I am taken with a sudden verse or two. Kindly excuse them:--
O Art, that lives not in the studio,
That has no special love for northern light!
Unto no studies from the nude I owe
Sense of my weakness, knowledge of thy might.
And to no stippling from the good antique,
My shame and joy before the joyous Greek.
For I have walked in galleries oftentimes,
And shaded with one hand a longing eye;
And found no touch of love to soften times
As hard as nails, as dead to ecstasy;
And nothing in the gallery was fair,
But the worn face of the commissionaire.
So in despair I wax a trifle coarse,
And eat a hearty steak, and drink my beer;
And twenty thousand million rifle-corps
Of evil spirits enter in and jeer.
“She’s dead and rotten!” cries my angry heart,
And sleeps--and sees the living face of Art.
II.
ON EXALTATION: TOGETHER WITH AN ANECDOTE FROM THE ENTERTAINMENTS OF
KAPNIDES.
On quiet days, when no wind blows, my canoe is particularly restful.
It has perfect sympathy with the weather. It creeps down slowly to
King’s, leans itself against the bank, and thinks. Then, later in the
afternoon, it bears the organ humming in the chapel--a faint, sweet
sound which produces religious exaltation; and it becomes necessary to
wrestle with the canoe, because it desires to fly away and be at rest.
It is owing to this rhythmic alternation of laziness and spirituality
in the boat that I have given it the name which is blazoned on its
bows--_Zeitgeist_.
I have said the boat has sympathy with the weather. It also has
sympathy with me, or I have sympathy with it, which is the same thing.
There was a time when I suffered only from rhythmic alternations of
two kinds of laziness. Now exaltation is beginning to enter in as
well, and I do not know the reason, unless I have caught it from the
boat. Materialistic friends have told me that too much pudding will
cause exaltation. I have not so much as looked upon pudding this
day. An unknown poet comes swiftly past me. I hail him, and ask him
for information. He tells me that he had been that way himself, and
that with him it is generally caused by the scent of gardenias, or
hyacinths, or narcissus.
I am glad he has gone away. I think if he had stayed a moment longer I
should have been a little rude.
Anyway, I have got it. When one suffers from it, memory-vignettes come
up quickly before the mental eye, and the mental eye has a rose-tinted
glass stuck in it.
O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem.
That is a memory-vignette. I am back again at school in a low form, and
I am asked to parse “passi,” and I parse it humorously, and there is
awful silence; and then one sharp click, because the master in nervous
irritation snaps in two the cedar pencil in his hand. I hate him, and
he hates me. For the meaning of the words I care nothing. Now I think
over them again, and I see that Virgil is very intimate with me, and
that he knows the way I feel.
Up comes another quotation, this time from a more modern author:--
The sun was gone now; the curled moon
Was like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf; and now
She spoke through the still weather:
Her voice was like the voice the stars
Had when they sang together.
Yes, and if he had said that the curled moon was like a bitten biscuit
thrown out of window in a high wind, it would not have been much
less true. But there is no poetry in a biscuit, and precious little
sustenance. The gentle fall of a feather is full of poetry:--
The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.
Edgar Allan Poe quoted those lines in his lecture on The Poetic
Principle, and remarked on their insouciance. Well, he’s dead.
There are no more memory-vignettes. I have no more exaltation left.
For a certain young woman crossed the bridge, and she had a baby with
her, and a young man behind her. And she had the impertinence to call
the baby’s attention to my canoe. Then she spoke winged words to the
infant, and these are the exact winged words she used:--
“Chickey-chickey-chickey, boatey-boatey-boatey, o-o-m! Do you love
auntey?”
And she called to the young man, saying, “’Enry, cummere. ’Ere’s a
boat.”
Then they staggered slowly away, and took my exaltation with them. Just
as I was getting a little better, the wind set in the wrong direction,
and I heard her say some of it over again.
There is magic in the words. They set a man thinking of his past, his
bills, and things which he has done and wishes he had left undone.
All at once it seems as if it were going to rain. The wind turns
colder. The cushions of the canoe change to brickbats. Somebody nearly
runs into me, and I drop my pipe, and remember I never posted that
letter after all. I look at my watch, and, of course, it’s stopped.
Mainspring broken, probably. The way that woman talked was enough to
destroy the works of a steam-engine. And I have a twinge in my side
which I am quite sure is heart disease. I had not hoped for Westminster
Abbey quite so soon. “Deeply lamented. No flowers, by request.”
And all this is due to the fearful words which that woman spoke, or
it may be merely reaction. If one gets too high, or too low, one pays
for it afterwards; and the commonplace praises of _aurea mediocritas_
are properly founded. The quietist never pays, because he incurs no
debts. All the rest pay, and there is no dun like a Natural Law. It may
agree to renew for a short time, on the consideration of that small
glass of brandy, perhaps, or a week’s rest; but one has to pay for the
accommodation, and the debt must be discharged in the end.
Do you remember that quaint old story told by Kapnides in his third
book of Entertainments? Well, Kapnides is not enough read at Oxford or
Cambridge. I doubt if he is read at all. He is a little artificial,
perhaps, but he has his points. It is the story of a Greek boy.
No; it is not the story of the Spartan boy who lied about a fox, and
subsequently died of the lies which were told about himself.
It is the story of an Athenian boy, who in the month of June sat quite
alone in a thin tent by night. And the tent was pitched under the
shadow of the long wall, and the night was hot and stifling.
He sat alone, for dead men are no company. His father and his eldest
brother were in the tent with him; but he was alone. He had not been
afraid to tend them in their sickness, for he had himself recovered
from the pestilence; but it had taken away from him his beauty and his
memory. He had been very beautiful, and his mind had been very full of
fair memories. All were gone now. He kept only the few bare facts which
his dying father had told him, that his mother had died long before;
that they had lived in the country and had been ordered into the city;
that Pericles had made a remarkably fine speech in the preceding year;
and that his only surviving relation was his twin-brother, who had gone
away into Eubœa with the sheep. On these few poor facts, and on the two
dead manly bodies before him, he pondered as he sat. And the night grew
late, and yet he could hear outside the tent people passing busily, and
quarrels, and long horrible cries.
And suddenly the poor Greek boy, with the ghost of an old beauty
haunting his dull eyes and scarred cheeks, looked up, because he was
conscious of the presence of a deity; and there before him sat an old
gentleman in a silk hat, a frock-coat worn shiny under the fore arm,
pepper-and-salt trousers, with a pen stuck at the back of his ear.
“I perceive a divine fragrance,” the boy said. The fragrance was
gin-and-water, but he knew it not. “And about thy neck there is
a circle of brightness.” In this he was correct, because the old
gentleman was wearing an indiarubber dickey covered with luminous
paint, which saves washing and makes it possible to put in a stud in
the dark. “And thy dress is not like unto mine. It cannot be but that
thou art some god. And at the right time art thou come; for my heart
is heavy, and none but a god can comfort me. And due worship have I
ever rendered to the gods, but they love me not, and they have taken
all things from me; and only my twin-brother is left, and he keeps the
sheep in Eubœa. And what name dost thou most willingly hear?”
“Allow me,” said the old gentleman, and produced a card from his
pocket, handing it to the boy. On it was printed:--
THE PROLEPTICAL CASHIER.
(_Agent for Zeus & Co., Specialists in Punishments._)
“The tongue is barbarian,” said the boy, “and thy spoken words
are barbarian, and yet I understand them; and now I know that the
gods are kinder to me, because already I have greater wisdom than
my fathers, and, perhaps, somewhat greater remains. Give to me, O
cashier, the power to stay this pestilence.”
“For a young ’un,” said the cashier, “that’s pretty calm, seeing
that I _made_ that pestilence. I just want to go into your little
account. Your great-grandpapa, my boy, incurred a little debt, and
Zeus & Co. want the thing settled before they dissolve partnership.
They’ve just taken those two lives.” He touched the body of the boy’s
father lightly with his foot. “They’ve taken your beauty and your
memory. How sweet the girls used to be on you, my lad! but you can’t
recollect it, and you won’t experience it again. You _are_ a bad
sight. Now we shall just kill your brother, and give the sheep the
rot, and then the thing will be square. Now then, it’s a hot night,
and you’d better burn these two. I’ll show you how to do it on the
cheap, without paying for it. As long as Zeus & Co. are paid I don’t
care about the rest.”
The boy sat dazed, and did not speak.
“There’s a rich man built a first-class pyre twenty yards from your
tent. They’ve gone to fetch his dead daughter to burn on it. We’ll
collar it before they get back. I’ll take the old man, because he’s
the lightest. You carry your brother. He was a hoplite, wasn’t he,
one of them gentlemen that do parasangs? Oh, I know all about it.”
Still the boy did not speak. They took up the two bodies, passed out
of the tent, and laid their burden on the pyre.
“You look as if something had hurt you,” said the old gentleman. “I
like these shavings miles better than newspaper.” He pulled a box
of matches from his pocket, and set light to the pyre. It flared up
brightly.
Then the boy touched him on the shoulder, and pointed first in the
direction of Eubœa, and then at himself. A word came into him from a
future civilisation.
“Swop?” he said gently.
“All right,” grumbled the cashier. “I don’t mind. It gives a lot
of trouble--altering the books. But I don’t mind, I’m sure. It’s a
thirsty night.”
For a moment the boy stood motionless; then, with a little cry, leapt
into the flames. And his life went to join his beauty and his memory
in a land of which we know too little.
* * * * *
It’s begun to rain. I think I’ll be off. I do hate anachronisms.
III.
ON SELF-DECEPTION: TOGETHER WITH THE DREAM OF THE DEAN’S PREPARATIONS.
This morning, because the air was fresh, and the sun was bright, and
I had eaten too much breakfast, it seemed to be an excellent thing to
cut all lectures and to loaf in the Backs. Few boats are there in the
morning, and I have found, when my canoe takes me out, that the fewer
the boats the less the unpleasantness. I can run into a bridge, but
a bridge cannot run into me; and a bridge always takes my apologies
in a nice spirit. The afternoon loafers on the river are not yet
sufficiently educated to understand that a Canadian canoe must go its
own way, and that any attempt to control it is a baseness.
The other afternoon my canoe got a little humorous. It saw a man on in
front of us working hard in one of those vessels that went a thousand
miles down the Jordan--or something to that effect. I knew what my
canoe would do. It broke into a canter, caught the absolute stranger
in the back of the neck, and knocked him into the water. You would
have expected the absolute stranger to have come up, breathing the
Englishman’s Shortest Prayer. He did not. He apologised for having been
in my way, said that it was entirely his own fault, and hoped that he
had not inconvenienced me. I shrugged my shoulders and forgave him,
with considerable hauteur.
But my boat got Remorse badly. It did not want to live any more, and
tried to knock its brains out against Clare Bridge. I soothed it, and
tied it up. Canadian canoes are such sensitive things.
This sort of incident cannot happen when one cuts lectures to go on the
river in the morning. And one does more work. You take your Plato’s
“Phædo,” and you really enjoy it. If there’s any word you don’t know,
you leave it; if there’s any sentence you can’t understand, you don’t
worry about it; and if there’s any word you _can_ understand, it goes
home to you more. That’s the right spirit. That’s the way the ancient
Greeks took their language. What did they know about dictionaries and
grammars and cribs? And then, after a couple of minutes, one pitches
the “Phædo” into the bows of the boat, and a great Peace falls on one’s
soul.
My Better Self does not agree with me on these points; but I had words
with my Better Self this morning, and since then we have not been
on speaking terms. I find it impossible to convince my Better Self
of great truths; I could deceive my Better Self, which is a common
practice, but I will not do it. I have seen men do it; and I have been
very, very sorry for them. I have known a man, who had previously been
honest, commence to keep an average of the amount of work he did _per
diem_. The way he faked that average would have brought a blush to the
cheek of the chartered libertine, and made the chartered accountant
moan for humanity. The first week gave a daily average of 2 hours
20·5 minutes. In the second week we were asked to believe that he
had done rather more than ten hours a day. That man drives a cab now:
self-deception never pays. Another man, who was quite a friend of
mine, liked pork chops. He pretended that he didn’t, and made himself
believe that he didn’t. Why? Simply and solely because he once wrote a
poem--and published it--which began:
Darling, thy hot kiss lingers on my lips.
Before he wrote that poem, he used to feed almost entirely on pork
chops. After it was published, he pretended that a little ripe
fruit was all he needed. What’s become of him? What do you suppose?
Trichinosis, of course. It’s much better to be perfectly honest. The
worst case of all was last May. A man made himself believe that he
loved Bradelby’s sister, and he never got any better. He just pined
away and married her. Perhaps you don’t realise what that means, but
you never met Bradelby’s sister.
I met her. She sat down at the piano, and stroked it as if it were a
lap-dog. She was quite tender in her movements, and she sang:
Once in the deeeeer dead dyes beyond recall.
Shortly afterwards she said that she wanted to live a useful life. That
sort of thing stamps a woman.
* * * * *
I suppose I must have been going to sleep when I thought that last
sentence. For I suddenly found myself in the centre of Epping Forest,
and before me was a college dean in full academicals. He was a leathery
old dean to look at, and yet he had some nervousness of manner. Of
course he was not a real dean, but only a dream dean. The real deans--I
cannot say it too emphatically--are _not_ leathery, and are _not_
nervous.
When he saw me, he began to rub his hands gently and to smile, until I
thought my heart would break.
“This is a little unusual,” he said; “a little irregular, is it not?
Have you permission, may I ask, from the University authorities, to
drive a Canadian canoe tandem through Epping Forest?”
“No, sir,” I said politely; “but I was not aware that permission was
required.”
“Epps’s Forest,” he retorted inanely, “contains absolutely no fatty
matter. Applicants are therefore assured, if they cannot borrow here,
it would be futile to apply elsewhere. Personal visit invited.”
“But, sir,” I urged, “this is a personal----”
“Stop!” he interrupted me, tapping the palm of one hand with the
forefinger of the other. “That’s not the point, and you know it’s not
the point. I have come here to practise my part--Titania--in _Midsummer
Night’s Dream_, with real fairies. I do not do it because I like it. I
do it because I wish to entertain and interest some young ladies who
will be staying with me during the June festivities. You interrupt my
preparations, you frighten the fairies, you annoy me exceedingly, and
your attendance in college chapel is not what it should be. You’ve been
smoking, and you smell. Where no allotment is made the deposit will be
returned in full.”
I could not quite make it out, because the dean did not seem as if he
would make up into a good Titania. But that was the only thing that
surprised me. I promised to sit quite still, and not to frighten the
fairies, and entreated him to go on with the rehearsal.
“Very well,” he said, seating himself on a camp-stool. “You will not
see the fairies; but you will hear them. We are now commencing Act II.,
Scene iii. I give them their cue:--
Sing me now asleep;
Then to your offices, and let me rest.
Now, then they sing--
You spotted snakes with double tongue.
You know it?”
I knew it very well; but what the fairies really sang was this:--
FIRST FAIRY.
You potted slates, disguised as tongue,
Cornèd oxen be not seen;
Such things never put him wrong,
Never hurt the college dean.
CHORUS.
Fill him up with mayonnaise,
Made in several different ways;
(Salmon, chicken mayonnaise; also lobster mayonnaise);
Never fear,
’Twill keep him queer,
Shocking queer for several days;
He _can’t_ work on mayonnaise.
SECOND FAIRY.
Curried rabbits, come not nigh;
Hence, tomato-tinners, hence!
He can eat what you or I
Wouldn’t for a hundred pence.
(_Chorus as before._)
“There,” exclaimed the dean, turning to me, “that goes pretty well, I
think. Shakespeare would be pleased. I shall play _Midsummer Night’s
Dream_ on the first night of the visit of my lady friends. On the
second night I am going to sing them some songs. On the third night I
shall give a conjuring entertainment.” He suddenly stopped, and burst
into tears. “And on the fourth night,” he sobbed, “their funeral will
take place, and they are so young and fair!”
“Couldn’t you fix their funeral for the first night?” I asked. “They’d
suffer less so.”
“No,” said the dean firmly, “they must be amused first--amused and
interested and entertained. And I must amuse them, and I never amused
any one in my life before. I can’t take them to the races, because
there are undergraduates about. I can’t take them to dances for similar
reasons. I’m going to do it all myself.” He burst out sobbing again.
“And I know it will kill them. The fairies won’t play out of Epping
Cocoa, so I shall have to undertake every character in the piece. Now I
must go back, and practise my songs. I am _so_ anxious to be amusing.
It quite weighs on my mind. You don’t know anything that would do
for the conjuring entertainment, do you? Card-tricks, you know, or
think-of-any-number-you-like, or something of that sort?”
As he said these words he got into my boat, which started down a river
that flowed into a drawing-room. We got out. Then the boat changed into
a piano, and the dean sat down to it, and began to play the symphony.
“It’s one of those simple, touching songs, and it’s called ‘Papa.’”
Then he sang:
Take my head on your shoulders, papa,
Let’s have it back when you’ve done;
I only unscrewed it in jest, papa--
Only unscrewed it in fun.
And it’s pleasant to lie and to think, papa,
You can give it me back all right;
My head, though it’s screwed, is loose, papa,
And you, when you’re screwed, are tight.
“You can’t possibly sing that to the ladies,” I said.
“No,” he answered; “I’ve kept the words a little too long, and the
weather’s been hot. I’ll try another--a fervent and passionate one.”
“No, you won’t,” I said firmly, and jumped into the piano, which
changed into the canoe again, and started away down the river.
“That’s the wrong ’bus!” the dean shrieked after me. He shrieked so
loudly that he woke me. At least, he half woke me. I was so full of the
idea that I was in the wrong ’bus that I got out. The canoe was in the
middle of the river at the time. You will find an excellent edition of
Plato’s “Phædo,” a copy of last week’s _Review_, and my nicest pipe at
the bottom of the river in King’s. At any rate, you may go and dive for
them if you like.
IV.
ON REFLECTION; TO WHICH IS ADDED THE STORY OF THE TIN HEART.
I like to watch those trees reflected in the water. They are so
suggestive, by reason of their being reflected wrong way up. All
objective, outside facts are as trees, and the mind of man is as a
river, and he consequently reflects everything in an inverted way.
That is the reason why, if I try to guess a coin and say heads, it is
always tails. That is the reason why, if I go to get a spoon out of my
plate-basket in the dark, I always take out thirteen successive forks
before I find one. It explains nearly everything. Probably the correct
way to dine is really to begin with the fruit and end with the oysters.
Itinerant musicians should begin by making a collection and leave out
the other part. Anything that _can_ be done backwards is better done
backwards. When I leave for a moment the presence of royalty I am
always required to walk backwards. That shows that royalty, together
with Her Privy Council, which is the collected wisdom of the nation,
thinks that it is best to walk backwards. And so it is. It is not only
happier and holier, but it is also more piquant. You can never tell
until you’ve kicked it whether you have backed into a policeman or a
lamp-post. New possibilities are open to you. Anything may happen, and
generally does. So, too, in skating. A good skater told me that the
only enjoyable method of progression is the outside edge backwards.
“It makes you feel like a bird,” he said; “and I don’t believe you can
get that sensation of flight any other way.” He simply seemed to float
on the ice. You see, he was a good skater. At last he galumphed into a
snow-heap, flew just like a bird for a few yards, then came down hard
and hurt a lady. Look at these railway collisions, too. We all know
what an awful thing a railway collision is: and how does it always
happen? It happens from two trains wanting to go to the same spot and
arriving there simultaneously. If both trains had respectively reversed
their directions, no collision could have happened. A train should
never be allowed to go anywhere, but only to _back_ to the place whence
it came. But, as I should like these pages to be of solid, material use
to any young men who are really trying to lead the philosophical life,
and are quite earnest in their desire to avoid the Scylla of action
without falling into the Charybdis of thought, I will put my facts and
deductions clearly and briefly. The facts are two:--
(1) That a tree is reflected in the water wrong way up.
(2) That the reflection of such a reflection would be right way up.
From No. 2 we deduce that the best literary method is to crib some
other man’s ideas or reflections; and this is what I always do when I
write an article.
From No. 1 we deduce that as all reflection is the reverse of the thing
reflected, it is best to act altogether without reflection; and this is
what the editor always does when he prints my articles; and what you
yourselves do when you pay two-and-sixpence for this volume in spite
of it.
In the meanwhile, my dear old sympathetic canoe has been going slowly
backwards on its own account, and must be stopped.
* * * * *
It was only the other night that I took my canoe out in the moonlight,
when the river is solitary and quiet. I shall not take it by night any
more, because it is too sympathetic. A man came and leaned over one of
the bridges and watched the reflection of the spangled skies in the
ripple. He sighed, and said, “Pree lil starsh!” Then he swore hard at
them. Then he sighed again, and his cap tumbled off into the water.
“Ish all over now,” he said solemnly, and walked wearily away. My boat
simply shuddered. I could feel it shudder.
After that it got absurdly sentimental. Now I hate and I despise
sentiment. I suppose it was the effect of the moonlight. It made some
verses. At least I suppose the boat made them. I found them in my
blazer pocket afterwards, and I’m sure I recognised the handwriting. So
I will give them in full. (You will do nothing of the kind.--ED.)
I’m not going to discuss the merit of those verses. There may be
something in them which the world will one day learn to cherish, or
there may not be; but I deprecate the weakness and sentimentality
which cause verse. We want to be strong, really strong. We want more
of the spirit of that Gallic chieftain who wanted a tin heart made
for himself. The story is well enough known, and you will find it in
Livy: it is in one of the lost books; but I give it for the benefit
of readers who are not classical. I do not scorn such readers. I can
remember the time when I had not the finished scholarship, the critical
insight, the almost insolent familiarity with the more recondite parts
of history, which--with all modesty be it spoken--I know that I now
possess.
I have forgotten some of the names, all the dates, and a few of the
facts. But these are not the essentials. Such things are but the dry
bones of history. We want the flesh and blood and sinews--the words,
the large, beautiful, vague words that smudge over a difficulty until
you can’t see it.
To understand why the Gallic Chieftain wanted a tin heart, we must
first of all appreciate the man’s character.
When the Gallic tribe, to which he belonged, formed one of their sudden
plans (_Gallorum subita sunt consilia_), he was always in the front of
the battle; but when he was at home he used to smoke his pipe in the
back yard, because his wife and her mother would not allow it in the
house. He had plenty of fighting courage, but no domestic courage. And
there were other points in which he saw that he was weak. Sometimes,
for instance, he found some aged veteran in the streets, in a state
of destitution, with a card on his breast to say that he had lost his
wife in a colliery explosion, selling _sulfura_, or playing on the
_tuba telescopica_, an instrument resembling the trombone, but more
deleterious. Whenever this happened, he would buy the matches, or give
the man money. It was weak of him, but he couldn’t help it.
The tribe to which he belonged was transcendental, heterodox,
habitually untruthful, and characterised by a belief that the
affections resided in the heart. So, when this poor chieftain found
that he was getting too good and kind (ah, how many of us have felt
like that!--I often have), he concluded that something must be wrong
with his heart, and went to a medicine man or _fakir_. And he said: “O
fakir, would you fake me up a tin heart? For the heart which I have is
too unpleasantly soft, and I want a metal one.” The fakir agreed to
make the change for twelve ducats. But just at this time an accident
happened to the budget of this tribe, and a tax of ten ducats per pound
was put on _plumbum album_--no, my boy, not white lead: it means tin.
So it was quite clear to the fakir that he could not afford to give the
man a tin heart, and yet he had signed the document. Besides, he wanted
those twelve ducats.
So he gave the man chloroform, removed his heart, and then proceeded to
do his best with a cheap substitute. But the cheap substitute refused
to be faked, and the fakir was still hard at work trying to make
something which should do quite as well as a tin heart and last longer,
when he noticed signs of reviving consciousness in the chieftain.
He had no more chloroform to give him, and no time to lose. So he
hurriedly sewed up the incision, and left the man with no heart at all,
neither of flesh, nor of tin, nor of cheap substitute.
Then the chieftain started off home, and he looked very cheerful
indeed. He tripped up two blind men, and threw their _sulfura_ down
a grating. Then he went into a public-house, and spent his week’s
_stipendium_. Finally, he reeled home, kicked his wife, smoked two
cigars in the drawing-room, broke his mother-in-law’s head, forgot to
wipe his boots, said he wanted some tea, and went to sleep with his
feet on the crimson plush mantelpiece.
Now, next day another Gaul was going down the street when he saw two
goats being harnessed to a milk-cart. It at once occurred to him
that it would be as well to throw off the Roman yoke. So another
insurrection was started, and the Gallic chieftain who had no heart was
put in the forefront of the battle.
Just as the trumpets sounded for a charge, this Gallic chieftain
remembered that he had left his handkerchief in the tent, and went
to look for it in a hurry, and got himself disliked. But as the rest
of the tribe were mostly killed in the charge, he did not mind that
much. The survivors said: “Our noble chief has begun to be a coward.”
But he was not afraid of his wife, and used bad language in her
presence during mealtimes. One of the survivors went so far as to run
a lance through the place where the chieftain’s heart ought to have
been. The chieftain smiled, and said sarcastically that he was not an
umbrella-stand.
Death is connected with the stoppage of the heart’s action;
consequently this chieftain never died, and it is argued that during
the Syro-Phœnician attempt to----
* * * * *
Here there is a hiatus in the manuscript. A scribe has added a note in
the margin _pallido atramento_, “The chieftain is still alive. I have
seen him. I have written his name at the foot of the manuscript.” I
have looked there, and simply found the words “_Venditus iterum_.”
But the other day I bought a cigar which was all case and no inwards.
The tobacconist who sold it me said it was a Regalia Gallica; and he
looked as if he had been in this world a long time, and had seen the
wickedness of it. I simply mention this as a coincidence. There may be
nothing in it, like the cigar. But it is a curious case, if nothing
else--also like the cigar.
V.
A STORM ON THE BACKS; AND A STORY OF THREE.
I have often considered it as one of my misfortunes that I simply do
not know what fear is. As a boy I was so brave and bright that every
one loved me; in my manhood my courage appals me. I feel that one day
it will carry me too far.
As I climbed hand-over-hand up the side of the _Zeitgeist_ at the
Silver Street Docks, an old, old sailor stepped up to me. “Young
stranger,” he said, “you will not attempt to make King’s Bridge on such
a day as this? It would be madness. The boldest of us dare not.”
“Avaunt!” I cried; “where honour calls I follow. England expects. _Per
ardua ad astra._”
He turned away to hide his emotion. I gave him my hand, which he wrung
and knocked twice. There was no answer.
With one wild, exultant leap the vessel burst from its moorings,
churning the iron-bound waves to sheer desperation, foaming at the
mouth, and sobbing piteously. Through the driving rain, the blinding
fog, the dazzling lightning, the impenetrable mist, and the other
atmospheric phenomena which Mr. Clark Russell had lent for the
occasion, loomed a hideous dark object. I consulted the chart, the
compass, the telescope, the ship’s biscuits, everything I could lay my
hands on; but it was too late. Nearer and nearer it loomed. I could see
that it was Silver Street Bridge, _and that it was coming my way_. Oh,
the horror of it!
I shrieked to it to save itself and go away. But my voice was drowned
in the fury of the elements. It loomed nearer--it never stopped looming
once--and I knew that I should be unable to avoid it, that I should
destroy it.
Bump! From the top of the bridge there came the voice of a small boy,
asking if I was insured. He seemed hysterical, and fear had probably
sapped his reason. I was swept on by the fury of the elements. No, I’ve
just had that--swept on by the elemental fury--well, that’s much the
same.
At any rate, I was swept on. The wind whistled in the rigging, until
it got sick of being conventional. Then it went and whistled in the
taffrail. At last it got so nastily original that it sang “Since first
I saw your Face” in the binnacle. A hasty glance backward showed me
that Silver Street Bridge was yet standing. My resolution was also
unshaken.
The fierce old Berserker spirit fired my blood. Chanting aloud the
grand old Latin hymn of the Crusaders--
A, ab, absque, coram, de,
Palam, clam, cum, ex and e--
I dashed forward. My speed may be guessed from the fact that by this
time I was under Queen’s Bridge. Before me, or close behind me, or at
any rate on one side or the other, lowered in thick banks of cloud an
angry sun, red as the blood of an orange that the thunder had pealed!
The waves were mountain high.
The light of the unbroken Viking was in my eyes. I could not see them,
but I knew that it must be so. The waves were mounting higher now.
Suddenly the wind shifted. It became semicircular, with a pendulum
action. It swung my boat round to the left, then swung it round to the
right. It kept on doing this. A horrible thought flashed across me that
I should never make King’s Bridge at this rate. I said “Excelsior” to
the boat to encourage it, but it only went on wagging. I smote it on
the bows with the flat of my paddle, and that had no effect. Lastly, I
raised myself about four inches, and sat down again with the energy and
directness of the wild Norsemen. The jerk started it on again. We went
so fast that a sparrow seemed to be literally flying past me. I believe
that was what it actually _was_ doing. By this time the waves were
quite extraordinary.
We were now but a few yards from home. There was another change in the
weather. The sun was like a crystal chalice brimming with crimson wine,
borne by an unseen Ganymede to his lord across the sapphire pavement
of cloud. (Poetry is cheap to-day.) Had his white feet slipped on the
wondrous far-off way? For of a sudden the crimson flood suffused the
sapphire floor, and the gasp of the dying wind was as of one who cried,
“Come away in my ’and, sir, and it was cracked before, and you didn’t
ought to have left it there, and I never touched it, and ’ow was I
to know yer didn’t want it broke?” Then the wind sank. My boat was
motionless. I was becalmed within sight of my goal.
So I waited in the middle of the river. The storm was passed, and the
waves were perfectly calm and collected, like a bad halfpenny in an
offertory bag. There was not a breath of wind, and consequently the
first two matches which I lit were blown out at once. The third match
did what was expected of it, and then I attempted to blow _it_ out.
Finding this impossible, I threw it in the water. It floated on the
top, and burnt with a clear steady flame for ten consecutive minutes.
While I was watching it I let my pipe out, and had to strike a fourth
match. The head came off it, and nestled lovingly in the palm of my
hand. Then it walked away, and burned two holes in my blazer. How such
little incidents as this make one wish that the nature of things was
otherwise!
I may own that I never did make King’s Bridge that afternoon. My canoe
did not seem to care about going there of its own accord, and I did
not like to paddle it there because I hate unnecessary fuss; so I just
stopped where I was and read a little.
What was I reading?
Well, I had his book, you know, after his death. Some of it interests
me; but this is chiefly because I knew the man. He wrote it as a
remedy, and he died as a remedy; but I have a notion that he is not
quite cured yet. I take the book here to read sometimes. You may see a
page or two of it. I am not pretending that it has any literary value
But try to think you knew the man who wrote it.
* * * * *
She shivered a little as she sat there in her nightdress. In the small
hours of the morning in early summer it is always cold. She would have
been much warmer in bed; she really ought to have been in bed; but the
bed had not been slept in. It stood there in one corner of the room,
looking white and restful. It seemed to be calling her, “Come to me;
sleep and forget it--sleep and forget it.” On the little table at the
foot of the bed was the pile of books and newspapers that had slowly
accumulated. She had always been interested in the world and in the
things others did and thought.
A little impulse that came to her from nowhere made her pick up the
newspaper that lay on the top of the pile. It would do to fill her mind
and to keep her thoughts steady until the morning came. Her eyes ached,
and the candles flickered on the dressing-table. Her brain seemed to
her as a pool into which some thoughtless child that did what he liked
had flung a stone, starting circle after circle, circles that grew and
grew, spreading to the farther edge, and sobbing away into nothing
because they could go no farther. Yet she read, and knew nothing of
what she read, till one sentence seemed to shine brighter than the rest.
“The body had probably been in the water for several days.”
She stood up quickly, with a little gasp, and let the newspaper fall to
the ground. For her brain, burning with torture and want of sleep, had
suddenly flashed out a merciless, truthful, coloured illustration to
that sentence. She steadied herself in a moment. Then she held up her
hands and looked at them. “Will they turn like that?” she was asking
herself. She shivered, and the muscles of her face contracted a little.
She was bending now over the mantelpiece. Her arms and her burning
forehead rested upon it, and her thoughts went stealing away through
the passages and rooms of the quiet old house. In the room next to hers
slept stolid respectability. She loved him and her, as the accident of
parentage makes love. But she must leave them. How she hated to hurt
those two, those kind, misunderstanding parents, with their old ideas,
and their love for her ever fresh! No, she could not leave them, she
could not leave them. “You will leave them at dawn,” said the thing
that was stronger than herself.
And her thoughts stood mutely listening outside the door of the room
where Claud lay. “Are you asleep?” she whispered. Or was he lying awake
and thinking, as she thought, of the night before? It all came back
to her so easily,--the wistful refrain that lingered softly on the
strings, the brilliant lights and the brilliant crowd, and suddenly the
dim garden outside the ball-room. She could see him standing there; she
could hear him speaking. No, she could never, never leave him. “You
will leave him at dawn,” said the thing that was stronger than herself.
And the dawn had come now.
She drew up the blind, and opened the window softly. The sky was one
dull grey but for the beauty in the east. A fresh, cool wind had
awakened; and she could hear the chirrup, chirrup of waking birds. And
she looked down the valley and saw the hurrying, winding river, with
the grey mists hovering upon it. “River,” she said in a whisper, “take
me to the sea. Take me to a sea that has no shores, that will flow for
ever, bearing me farther and farther away from this.”
She crept down the stairs, bare-footed, and into the drawing-room. She
drew back the heavy curtains from the windows that opened down to the
ground. Outside was the terraced garden that sloped down to the edge of
the river. Her hand was on the bolt of the window.
Suddenly she heard quick footsteps coming down the passage. In a
moment she had hidden herself behind the screen that stood against the
door. She knew those footsteps. Involuntarily her hands linked tightly
together, and her breath came quickly.
He was not so careful as she had been; he came boldly into the room,
opened the window noisily, and went out into the garden. As he went out
she caught one glimpse of his face, and she knew what he would do. She
sprang from behind the screen. “Claud, Claud!” she called. He stopped
with a sudden start, and came towards her. “What are you doing here?”
he asked, in a voice that was not like his voice.
“I,” she panted--“I came to save you, Claud. Oh, go back again!”
He would have taken her hands, but she shrank away from him. They only
stayed there for a few minutes. She talked to him and pleaded with him.
There was little need for such pleading, for he had yielded to her from
the first. He gave her the only promise that she would let him make,
and then he went back to his room.
She quietly closed the windows, and drew the curtains again. She seemed
to herself both sad and happy now, and very tired.
And Fate had an approving smile upon her bitter face. “They are two
obedient children,” she said. “They were going to take matters into
their own hands, and they resisted the temptation. Very well, they
shall be rewarded.”
So Fate sent the girl a present of a beautiful brain-fever with
pictures in it. And when it was over she fell asleep, and dreamed that
she was floating on a sea that had no shores and flowed for ever,
bearing her farther and farther away from this. And she woke no more.
And Fate thought that she should then do something for Claud. So she
killed another woman, and killed her with thirty other people in a
railway accident, thereby escaping any charge of impartial justice.
They both had loved him, and they were both dead, and he got much
happier. In the unprepared passages of this life a glimpse at the
context would be useful.
* * * * *
Poor stuff--isn’t it?
VI.
ON LOAFING; TOGETHER WITH A SECOND ANECDOTE FROM THE ENTERTAINMENTS OF
KAPNIDES.
I took my canoe the other day up that part of the river where only
Masters of Arts are allowed to drown themselves without a certificate.
None of them were doing it on the day I was there, and it was rather
dull, and the boat went to sleep with its cold nose resting on the soft
grass that edged the river.
So I just stopped there and lazed, and watched other boats go past.
There is a prevalent notion apparently that nothing which is said in
one boat can possibly be heard in another. As each boat went past,
its occupants made humorous and uncomplimentary remarks upon me. The
waiters in some of the inferior London restaurants have a similar
notion that nobody understands French. Without these little delusions
we should not be as happy as we are. In my case there seemed to be an
idea that I had got stuck in the bank and couldn’t get out again. The
impression was wrong. My boat was a little tired, and went to sleep. It
had come a long way, and I was not brute enough to wake it up again.
I watched the other boats go past. There were very fine and noble
people in some of them, but I did not see one proper loafer, and
hardly any one who had elementary notions of the right way to loaf.
There is no subject which is less understood. The spirit of asceticism,
the spirit of extravagance for its own sake, and the spirit of
utilitarianism are fast spoiling us.
The popular idea that loafing is in some way connected with laziness
should be removed. Loafing is the science of living without trouble.
There may be a time when it is easier to work than to laze. A man,
when suffering badly from Tripos, may find it less trouble to read
Thucydides than to stifle his conscience. The condition of mind is
unhealthy and morbid; but, where it exists, it would certainly be
better loafing to work than to laze. And no one objects more than the
well-trained loafer to enforced laziness. When he is in London he will
have his hat ironed at the barber’s rather than at the maker’s. In the
first case he will have to pay for it, but he will be shaved while it
is being done; in the second case no charge is made, but more than
sixpennyworth of vitality is consumed in the irritation of having to
wait. It is not the waiting which the loafer minds: it is the _having_
to wait.
There are many who would loaf, but fail from want of a little thought.
They do not take enough trouble to avoid trouble. They arrive at some
result, and half a loaf is better than no bread; but nevertheless they
do not get the perfect life.
Here is a problem in loafing.
There were four men--A, B, C, D--who rose one morning, and all found
they wanted shaving.
A was too lazy, left his chin as it was, was miserable all that day,
and simply _had_ to shave next day.
B half-way through the morning got shaved at a barber’s.
C conquered his inclinations and shaved himself at once.
D, knowing that it was impossible to grow a beard at Cambridge, and
being too lazy to shave or be shaved, had his things packed up, and
“went down.”
The vanity of the man, the strength of the beard, and the distance from
a barber are the same in each case; and it is supposed that the price
of a shave is so small that it may be disregarded: which was the best
loafer of the four?
There was not a perfect loafer among them, but the best was undoubtedly
C, and the next best was D. This will seem strange to any one who has
not studied the effect of anticipation on happiness and the reverse.
Nothing is real to us except our imagination of it. What would the
perfect loafer have done? I know; and you, my sympathetic reader, know.
But I do not think any of the others do. And it would be of no use to
tell them, because they would not believe it. The answer is too long
and elaborate to be given in any case.
It should be remembered that loafing is not the science of living for
pleasure, which is foolishness, but the science of living without
trouble. We may believe, as it is said in “The New Republic,” that
one of the two most lasting pleasures is the pleasure of saying
a neat thing neatly; yet the perfect loafer will never become a
conversationalist.
But it is of little use to preach. After all I have said about the
quantity of cushions necessary for comfort in a Canadian canoe, I
constantly see men going out with far too few. I am always hearing
complaints that we are not taught engineering or some other horribly
useful thing. But why are we not taught the art of perfect living,
which is loafing?
* * * * *
Only a few out of my many books do I ever bring on the water. Some of
the best would seem quite out of place. To-day I’ve got that curious
old translation of the “Entertainments of Kapnides” with me. I was
reminded of it by seeing those children going along in the meadow,
picking flowers. Of course you know the story well enough, but I cannot
be bothered to be original in every chapter. It is the story of the
Child Siren.
Ligeia never cared about the child from the first. It interfered with
business. It absolutely refused to play her accompaniments, and said
it could not bear to see the sailors tempted to their death. On this
particular day it had interrupted Ligeia just as she reached the most
tender, pathetic, touching part of her song. The sob of the child broke
into the sloppy waltz refrain, and spoiled the spell. And the helmsman
had turned the ship’s prow out again from the coast, and there was
another crew gone.
“You sinful little beast,” said Ligeia. “Get out of my sight.”
The child was not sorry to go. She climbed up the cliff, and then
wandered on away from the sea, where the long grass came up to her
waist. And as she wandered, the sun shone brightly, and the cool wind
blew into her hair, and the birds sang above her, and only a little
distance away sounded the drowsy murmurs of the waves.
And then for the first time in her life the passion for song came into
her. She felt that she _must_ sing. Always before she had shuddered at
the thought of song, for the song of Ligeia and others had ever brought
death with it. But now she felt that she _must_ sing, and she knew not
why; for a study of hereditary tendencies was not included in the Board
School education of that period. She had reached an open space now. The
ground was sandy, with here and there a stunted clump of grass, and in
one place a beautiful golden poppy.
“No one will hear me,” she thought, “and if I do not sing my heart will
break.” So she sang, standing there white and naked, with the sunlight
upon her, holding a lyre in her little hands.
And the music came out of her soul, but she knew not whence the words
came.
She sang that it was not sweet for the golden poppy to bloom there
alone, though the sun made it warm, and the wind was fragrant about it.
It was sweeter that she should pluck it in her little hands, which were
warm with a better life than the life of the sun, and more fragrant
than the west wind with its burden of the breath of the flowers. She
paused, and her fingers rested lightly on the lyre. Her eyes were
strained in looking up to the east, and she did not see that the poppy
had bowed its golden head and withered away.
“And it is not sweet,” she sang again, “for you, white bird, to fly on
and on, and never to rest. It is better to lie here, and let me touch
you, and fondle you, and love you.”
And out from the eastern sky flew the white bird, and it nestled for
one moment at the child’s breast, and then fell dead on the sand.
And the child saw what she had done, and she flung herself down beside
the dead bird and the withered flower, and sobbed in the foolishest way.
So the afternoon wore on, and the sea still murmured, and she still lay
there. And when it was evening a new wind sprang up from the south, and
it whispered to her,--
“A girl’s voice for a bird’s life.”
She stood up, erect, with eyes that flashed brightly, though the tears
still stood in them. She held the white bird in her little hands. “I’ll
give you my voice,” she said, as she kissed it. And the bird flew far
away from her, and the girl was dumb.
For a little while she stood there, and the old passion of song came
back to her, and tore at her heart; but she could not sing, for she was
dumb.
“And I have nothing else left,” she thought, “with which I may give
back the life to the golden poppy.”
“Crimson for golden,” the south wind called softly in her ear.
So she lay down once more, and put her pretty mouth to the dead
bloom of the poppy, and she could not speak, but she thought the
words--“Drink my blood! Drink my life, and live!”
And the dead flower drained out her life, and she grew white and
whiter, and when the moonlight fell upon her, not a tint of colour was
in her cheeks.
Out of the forest the south wind crept, and he seemed a little excited
as he saw the dead girl lying there.
“I’ll never do it again,” he swore; “if they want such things done,
they must do them themselves. Curse them!” Then he howled, for his
masters had overheard him and chastised him.
He went back to the forest, and brooded all day over what had happened.
And that night he went mad, and came forth to do one or two things on
his own account. There was the tall poppy growing by the head of the
dead girl, and it had become crimson.
The south wind gave one puff, and blew it out of the ground into the
sea.
And over the child’s body it blew the finest white sand that it could
find, until a heavy drift lay over it.
And it went away to a lonely place where a solitary tree was standing,
and in the tree sat the white bird in her nest. And he blew down the
tree, and broke the nest, and chased the bird for days and days over
the water, till at last the bird sank.
And still the wind was not satisfied. He had a faint idea that he had
not been doing much good. He ought, by rights, to have killed his
masters. He knew that, but his masters could not be killed. How they
smiled as they sat up in cloudland, and watched their angry servant
snarling over a child, a bird, and a flower! “He’s not satisfied,”
said the first. “Very few people are,” grunted a second. “You’re right
there,” snorted a third. Their conversation rarely rose above the
intellectual level of a market ordinary; but they had the power, and
could afford to be a little dull at times.
VII.
ON CAUSES; WITH AN EXCURSION ON LUCK.
I have just been lunching with a man. He is either a Socialist or a
Vegetarian--I forget which. On second thoughts, he cannot have been a
Vegetarian, because he ate cutlets. He may have been a Philatelist;
but I doubt it, and I do not fancy that it really matters. He was
something--one of those things that make a man want to lead a higher
life, and collar most of the conversation. He told me a good deal about
it, and I know that at the time I thought it was a fine thing and an
interesting thing; and I wondered why more of us did not do it; and yet
I’ve forgotten what it was. The main point, however, is not what he
was, but the fact that he was something. He had a Cause, an Enthusiasm;
something that lifted him above the common ruck, something he could
brag about, something that made it necessary for him to fill up papers,
and sign declarations, and feel as if the nation had purchased him at
his own price.
The jilted are bitter on the subject of women; the fox was malicious
about the grapes that he could not reach; Tantalus was often heard to
remark that undiluted water was not worth drinking. If a man sneer at
Causes, it is because he himself has not any Cause; and the sneer is
idle, because he might have many Causes if he liked. A man may be so
poor that he has no effects; but he may still have a Cause. Some of
them require a subscription of one shilling; but with more it suffices
that a man shall bother half a crown out of his friend. So, as the
sneer is not required for the consolation of the sneerer, it must
therefore be quite pointless and unprejudiced.
Personally, I must own that I have no Cause at present. I loaf. I am
utterly selfish. But I am going to select one soon, because I feel
sure that it will elevate me. Besides, I do not see why I should be
bored to death by those of my friends who happen to be cracked--quite
cracked--about some glorious ideal, and never be able to return their
unkindness. Reciprocity is the rule of life. You brag to me about your
picture gallery for the starving poor, and I feel at once that I must
lie to you about thought-transference. It is partly because I am just
about to ruin a Cause by my support that I feel so angry with those
selfish, flippant, trivial people who sneer at Causes. The worst point
in the sneer is its impartiality. We do not want cold, hard, uncoloured
criticism with its shameful want of bias. We want warm, tender,
muddle-headed enthusiasm, that does not quibble about merit or demerit,
that tinges the mere critical faculty with good feeling or bad feeling
as the case may be, that is full of humanity which is pigheadedness.
But no amount of sneers will prevent me from selecting a Cause to
which I may devote my life. The only thing which is likely to prevent
me is the difficulty of selection. There are so many Causes, and they
are all so good. Shall I be a Philanthropist? Help the poor, and you
help yourself. The Philanthropist is the mainstay of the nation. Or
shall I be a Dipsomaniac? Help yourself, and pass the bottle. The
Dipsomaniac is the mainstay of the Budget. It would be difficult to
choose even between these two. The Dipsomaniac sacrifices more than
the Philanthropist, and he is less self-conscious; but, on the other
hand, the Philanthropist is more popular and less truthful. If it be a
fine thing to help the poor, is it not an equally fine thing to help
the dear Budget? Perhaps the main distinction between the two is that
the Dipsomaniac accounts for most of the rum, and the Philanthropist is
mostly rum in his accounts. But who can possibly decide the difference
in their merits? And these are but two: there are thousands of others.
There once was a cuckoo-clock bird; and after the manner of cuckoos it
did not lay wind-eggs in its own nest. It deposited them in a mare’s
nest, and a stuffed phœnix hatched them dead on the Greek Kalends of
April. It was thought at the time that the mechanical, the impossible,
and the futile had never been so beautifully combined. Yet I have seen
a man repeat the lessons that the last pamphlet had wound him up to
say, deposit a handsome donation of his father’s money in the society
that published it, crow to all his friends and expect to see the world
regenerated. The combination was quite as beautiful, and yet people
sneer at Causes! What great general ever lived who had not this, or a
similar faculty for combination? And though the things combined may be
utterly bad in themselves, we should never forget how very much of them
we get for our money--or our father’s money, as the case may be.
But it is of little use to speak. There are few men in the world who
have a Cause. We are not serious enough. We give our minds to all
manner of trifles. With the exception of yourself, perhaps, I believe
that I am the only man left who really wants a Cause and is unable to
find one. With the rest it is sheer selfishness.
See me hit that fly on my boat’s nose. Flop. Missed it. All right, you
wait till it comes back again.
It seems to have aggravated that fly. It has left the boat’s nose and
gone for mine. I wonder if it knows that I do not like to hit my own
nose hard: instinct is a marvellous thing in insects. Or it may simply
be luck: luck is quite as marvellous.
I knew a man once who wanted to do serious good until luck spoilt him.
He was fond of whist, and he played a good--University-good--rubber;
but he felt that it was not profiting the world, and that he should
like to feel that he was working for humanity when he was playing for
sixpenny points.
And, firstly, it struck him that it would be a good thing to put a
small tax on trumps, and help the dear Budget. He wrote to his uncle
about it, because his uncle was in the House, and had once picked an
earwig off Mr. Gladstone’s coat, and had a good deal of influence. His
uncle wrote back to say that it was a good idea, and that he had given
it his earnest consideration; but that it was impracticable, because
the tax would be too difficult to collect.
And, at the same time, his aunt sent him a collecting-box for the
Servants’ Home in Tasmania, and asked him to place it in a prominent
position in his rooms and do his best for it.
So it occurred to him that here was a chance for him to impose a
voluntary tax upon himself, and make his whist do some serious good. He
made a vow, and repeated it aloud in these words:--“I vow that the next
time I have five trumps I will put half a crown in the collecting-box
for the Servants’ Home in Tasmania.” He told me afterwards that if
the experiment had turned out well he had intended to repeat it, and
do a good deal in one way or another for the Tasmanian servants. He
also called my attention to the wording of the vow, which he said was
important. That very night he sat down to a rubber, and started by
dealing himself five trumps. They were the five lowest trumps; but
my friend was surprised and pleased at the coincidence, stole softly
from his place, dropped half a crown into the collecting-box on the
mantelpiece, and returned without saying anything.
As it happened, one of his opponents had the remaining eight trumps,
and not one of my friend’s five made a trick. Ultimately he lost two
trebles and the rub. It was then that he recalled the exact wording of
his vow. Of course it is not an easy thing to break the bottom out of a
collecting-box for the Servants’ Home in Tasmania with a common brass
poker; but it had to be done, and he did it.
He lost his money by gambling, which shows how wrong and foolish
gambling is, and the other man won it, which proves---- What beautiful
weather it was on Bank Holiday, wasn’t it?
Still, it was a curious piece of luck.
A man once took out his purse in Fleet Street to buy a newspaper, and
out rolled a golden sovereign. He did not see that he had dropped it.
He only discovered his loss that night, and then he remembered the
exact spot where he had taken out his purse. Next day he was ill in
bed; but on the day after he said he should walk back to Fleet Street
and look for that sovereign. His friends laughed at him. They pointed
out that in so crowded a thoroughfare the coin must have been snapped
up in a moment. But the man was obstinate, and went back. He did not
find the whole coin, but he found twelve shillings and sixpence of it,
and an I.O.U. for the remainder.
Yes, that story’s a lie. Stories about luck generally are.
That wretched, silly little fly has just perched itself on my boat’s
nose again. Well, I shall hit it next time--the third time.
Have you ever noticed how luck is connected with the number three--one
of the religious numbers? The dream which comes true is always dreamed
three times. At the cocoanuts, too, you can have three shies for a
penny. There’s a mystery about these things.
There once was an adopted father, and the son who had adopted him died
without leaving a will, and the poor father was sonless and penniless.
He felt sure that his adoptive son would never have been thoughtless
enough to omit so important an arrangement as the making of a will.
However, no will was found, and the property of the rich son was put up
to auction. The poor father watched the sale with a gloomy face. There
was the Broadwood grand-piano, on which his son had taught him his
scales: he saw it disposed of to a stranger, and turned away to weep.
Then a copper coal-scuttle was put up to auction, and the poor father
fancied he heard a voice within him saying, “Buy the coal-scuttle! Buy
the coal-scuttle!”
He had but a few pounds left, and it was a Louis XIV. coal-scuttle; but
he bid for it, and ultimately secured it. With trembling hands he bore
it off to the little cottage, which now was all that he had to call a
home. Eagerly he opened the lid, and saw inside some small coal and a
pair of broken braces.
That shows luck just as much as the other stories; but luck is like the
moon--we see only one side of it. At any rate, it is quite as true as
the other two stories.
That fly again! This is the third time. I feel that it is fated. I
raise my paddle on high, and bring it down with one mighty whack and a
murmured “Bismillah!”
I have missed the fly, and split the paddle, and could do with
_something shorter_ than “Bismillah!”
Now I’m going home.
VIII.
ON SOLITUDE: WITH A THIRD ANECDOTE FROM THE “ENTERTAINMENTS” OF
KAPNIDES.
If I have gone some distance to seek solitude, it is not because I am
sulky. But I never feel quite certain at this time of the year that
there may not be penny steamers plying between Silver Street Bridge and
Chesterton, or a Lockhart’s tea and cocoa palace erected in King’s.
And I should hardly like to see it. Of course I did not find absolute
solitude even here. The other day an apple fell on my head while I was
like a child picking up pebbles on the shores of the ocean of life. I
saw that there was no help for it; so I just followed precedent and
discovered a natural law--that I never get anything I want. I am quite
contented, consequently, that I did not find any solitude at first, and
am pleasantly surprised that a large picnic party, who came and sniffed
all round me suspiciously, as if they wondered why I was not muzzled,
have finally decided to defile some other part of the river scenery
with their happy laughter and packets of lukewarm comestibles.
I like a crowd immensely. Ditton Corner is good for the soul. So is the
Strand at noon or midnight. But every one who really likes a crowd,
really likes solitude.
It is pleasant enough to lie here in the hot sun, to have a pipe that
does its work properly, and to wonder what the time is, but not to be
enough distressed about it to take the trouble to consult one’s watch.
I am finishing the “Entertainments” of Kapnides now, and I am not quite
clear about the last story but one in his book. I give it, in case you
have not read it.
* * * * *
It was a most beautiful cloud. Two highly respectable Athenians looked
at it for a long time, and they understood beauty in Athens.
“Now, if any one were to paint that,” said the first, “every one would
say that it was not natural.” He felt there was depth in the remark.
“I am not so sure of that,” said the second, intending to be thought
judicious but not disagreeable.
If the cloud had been painted, its chiefest beauty would have been
omitted. For in the centre of the cloud sat the unborn soul of a
girl-child. To all mortals it had no visible appearance. But the stars,
as they crept slowly up for a night’s work, saw with smiling eyes a
graceful figure seated in the vapour, leaning a little backward, white
against the crimson pillows of mist, with slender hands clasped behind
a shapely head, and long dark hair and closed eyes. For it lived,
but did not think, after the manner of unborn souls, which have ways
distinctly of their own.
And as the sun poised over the cool, lighted sea that sang to welcome
it, a noise of little tinkling silver bells was heard all down the sky;
and there was some hurry and confusion amid Powers which were usually
calm with the unjust, irritating, excessive calmness of a natural law.
When it was all over, no one exactly knew whose fault it was. But the
Manager was summoned before the great Zeus, and reprimanded severely.
“It’s carelessness,” said Zeus, “and that’s what I can’t stand. You
ought to have been ready, and there are no two ways about it. You sit
there in the office, wondering how long it will be before you can
sneak out to your beastly lunch, and you forget that you’re paid to be
managing my business for me all that time.”
Whether it was the Manager’s fault or not, the fact remained. Down in
the world, in the beautiful country just outside Athens, a boy-child
had been born, and he had been born with the soul of a girl-child
inside him.
“Such a piece of bungling!” grumbled Zeus, and went off to play at
making orphans.
To play this game you have to be a god, and possess thunderbolts; every
time you kill a father or mother you score one; if you miss, it counts
nothing; if you kill anything else by mistake, you lose one.
Before the boy was grown Zeus had forgotten all about it. Perhaps this
was as well for the boy, for Zeus had intended only to give him five
years’ life; and perhaps it was not as well.
At the age of twelve he was tall and straight. But his face was too
delicate, and his eyes were the eyes that had slumbered a dreamless
slumber under the closed lids of the unborn soul of a girl. And
about his ways there was some sweet shyness and tenderness, or
softness--names do not matter--although in courage and spirit and
endurance he had no equal among his comrades. And with all his comrades
he was gentle, and they loved him; but he, having no care for them nor
for the parents who bore him, and angry with himself because he could
feel no such care, went long, wandering walks alone, and heard strange
stories told him by flowers and birds and winds.
And the years passed, and there was no change until the boy was
sixteen, and then no one knew why he was so unhappy and quiet; he
himself hardly knew. But now his wanderings would take him away for
days at a time. A spirit of longing possessed him, for which he had
no name, and the fulfilment of it was as a dim, dancing light before
him, baffling and dazzling him, and leaving him no peace. And of this
neither winds, nor birds, nor flowers told him anything. And the
longing drove him to climb where no others had dared to climb, or to
swim far out into the cool waters of the bay, that he might come back
tired and sleep through the warm fragrant night in the long grass. And
ever in sleep there came one dream and told him all; and ever when he
awoke, the dream was gone from his memory. So he never knew, but always
knew that he had known.
Comely maidens, with an intimate knowledge of their own best points,
met him sometimes in his wanderings. And for them he cared nothing at
all, and wondered why one or two of their number looked shyly at him as
he passed them. They said nothing, for maidens are secretive animals;
but one with shapely arms took to herself a new bracelet; and one
with pretty pearly teeth got up a new sigh which just parted the lips
without being ungraceful, and sounded extremely interesting. However,
they might have painted themselves blue, and have had no effect
whatever on the sorrowful youth. But they were not thus minded; and,
seeing that this sad youth neither loved nor hated them, they looked
out for those who understood love and hatred, and were married.
The boy’s father thought it necessary to consult a physician about this
strange melancholy. Besides, the youth was growing paler every day,
and was listless, and cared for nothing but to lie asleep, or almost
asleep, with the feathery grass rustling in a gentle whisper over him.
So the physician came, and asked several impertinent questions. Then he
delivered himself upon this wise:
“It is well known that much exercise and weariness consume the spirits
and substance, refrigerate the body; and such humours which nature
would have otherwise concocted and expelled, it stirs up and makes them
rage; which, being so enraged, diversely affect and trouble the body
and mind.”
“Those are comforting words,” said the boy’s father, who couldn’t
understand them.
“Keep it vague,” murmured the boy softly.
“It is to the immoderate use of gymnastics,” said the physician, “that
I ascribe your son’s melancholy. Wherefore, let him drink of a syrup
of black hellebore, confected with the boiled seeds of anise, endive,
mallow, fermitory, diacatholicon, hierologodium----”
“Half-time----change ends,” said the boy under his breath.
“Cassia and sweet almonds,” continued the physician. “And in the
meantime he may drink of a broth of an exenterated chicken.”
He had heard the youth’s last remark. “And,” he added severely, “let
him beware of intempestive laughter.”
So the physician went away.
“What did he say?” asked the mother of the youth.
“Well,” said the father, “he said that the boy had been growing too
fast, at least he implied that, and he prescribed hierolo----French for
chicken broth, you know.”
But while the doctor’s prescription was being prepared, the boy went
off to the cliffs; and he stretched himself at full length on the
thyme, and went to sleep, and dreamed the old sweet dream, and the sun
drew near to its setting, and in his pleasant sleep the boy died.
Never had there been a happier and more desirable death.
And under the burning sun a cloud was stretched like a cloth of gold.
And the two highly respectable Athenians came out to look at it. “If I
were to paint that exactly as it is,” said the first, “every one would
say that my picture was intensely unnatural.”
“Great Zeus!” ejaculated the second, for the first had made the remark
nearly every night for rather more than sixteen years, and still
thought there was a certain insight about it.
In the golden heart of the cloud were together the soul of a youth and
the soul of a young girl, two souls that had done their work and were
resting. He sat in careless happiness looking down at her: for she
was stretched at his feet, making a daisy-chain with the souls of the
daisies that were to bloom next year. And ever she would look up from
her work into his eyes; and the eyes of the two were strangely alike,
and soft and bright.
Into the cloud came the Manager. He was in a terrible hurry; for there
had been great doings in Sicily, and an army had been cut to pieces,
and consequently there was a press of business.
“I’ve called to take your numbers,” he said.
They both gave the same number.
He seemed a little startled, then recovered himself, and jotted it
down in his note-book. “I remember now,” he said, half apologetically.
“It was not entirely my fault. I had slipped out to get a glass of
beer, and I told the boy to send for me if anything happened. But he
thought he could manage it himself, and he blundered, and I was blamed.
So you both were born in the same body. I hope you were not crowded.
Zeus had intended you to be born in different bodies, and fall in love
with one another down below. But you can do it up here, you know. It’s
not the same thing, but some people think it’s better: it’s much more
spiritual. You will have this cloud all to yourselves for as long as
you like. At any rate it was not so hard on you as it was on the girl’s
body, which had to be born without any soul at all--but I am told that
she made money out of it. Well, I must be off; good evening.”
So the Manager departed, and they were alone, and they floated away
into the night when the night came. And the sea sang beneath them, and
the wind was warm and perfumed with flowers.
“I love you for ever and ever,” he said.
The same remark had just occurred to her--not strikingly original,
perhaps, but both were satisfied with it.
IX.
ON ASSOCIATIONS: TOGETHER WITH A LAST ANECDOTE FROM THE
“ENTERTAINMENTS” OF KAPNIDES.
I think _Zeitgeist_ has grown lazy; I had meant to take it a long way
to-day, but it simply stopped at the first shady spot it could find,
and stretched itself there. One has to smoke a little brown tobacco
to keep off the midges, but otherwise I do not mind much. I would not
make use of my superior strength to force a tired boat to do more than
it wanted to do. Besides, _Zeitgeist_ has earned some consideration.
It has behaved excellently; in fact, it has almost been morbid in
the politeness with which it has avoided running into other boats
lately. Somebody, I see, has put a bottle of cider into the canoe. How
thoughtless of him! There are a corkscrew and a drinking-horn as well.
Perhaps it’s all for the best.
The taste of cider should be full of associations. It should recall
orchards in Devonshire; and rustic inns with porches, and honeysuckle,
and earwigs; and the simple village maiden who got to be rather fond of
the stranger artist, and cried a little in her simple village way when
he went back again to civilisation. I am starving for dreamy poetry and
pleasant memories this morning; I wish this cider had such beautiful
associations for me. But it has not. To me cider is cider, and it is
nothing more. I have never been in a Devonshire orchard; and I am not
an artist; I have never drawn anything.
Except corks. By the way, I may as well put that bottle of cider in the
shallow water here. It will cool it. Then, afterwards, I may be able to
forgive the person who put it into my canoe.
I am not sure that people do not set too much store by associations.
There is an old tune that most people have forgotten, I dare say;
perhaps it is not very good music; in fact, I would take an affidavit
that it is the nastiest, tuniest tune I ever heard, and yet it has
associations for me. It recalls to me my landlady’s daughter; it was
the tune she loved most and played most frequently; she was rather an
ugly girl, too. But I do not value the tune any more on that account; I
believe it makes me hate it more bitterly.
I should think that cider must be almost cool by now, but I will give
it another minute or two.
I suppose it is for the sake of associations that people have their
dead pets stuffed, or have portions of them made into tobacco-pouches
or paper-knives. I never had any pet myself except one solitary, evil
dog; he was an original dog, and was perfectly good-tempered with
everybody except his master. I am thankful to say that I possess
absolutely nothing which reminds me of him. The smell of tar has
curious associations for me. It reminds me of a day when I drove
frantically in the direction of Liverpool Street, with the intention of
catching the 10.30. I had offered my cabby vast sums to get me there in
time, and he certainly did his best. I did not stop to take a ticket,
but dashed across the platform, and entered the train just as it was
moving out. I sank back on the cushions with a sigh of relief. One gets
so much pleasure out of _just_ doing a thing. Then I found out that the
train which I had entered was not the 10.30, was not going to the same
place, and was not thinking of stopping anywhere for some considerable
time. Perhaps you wonder why the smell of tar should remind me of this.
So do I. I have not the least notion why it is.
One must not expect to see the reason for the connection always. Why
are the girls with the biggest feet always devoted to quite inferior
works of fiction? Why are clean-shaven men always cynical?
Then of course there are the tender, romantic associations. A good deal
might be said about them. In the meantime I can’t think where I’ve put
that corkscrew. Ah! here it is, sitting under one of the cushions and
laughing at me. Now for the cider, with a golden glow in it like the
curls of the love-god himself.
And flat--miserably flat.
* * * * *
As I said, _Zeitgeist_ does not care to move about much. So I have
amused myself with reading the last anecdote in the “Entertainments” of
Kapnides. Here it is:--
A general feeling of content prevailed in the house of Zeus & Co. “We
shall declare,” said Zeus, “such a dividend as never was.”
“We shall,” said Co.
Zeus & Co. occupied the two thrones at the back of the large hall.
During the last spring-cleaning, Zeus had ordered his own throne to
be regilded. Nothing had been done to the other throne, which was
occupied by Co. But Co. was quite humble. As a general rule he merely
echoed the sentiments of Zeus. If he felt the difference between the
two thrones, he had never mentioned it. Perhaps it might be as well
to notice that all the shares were in the hands of Zeus & Co. They
were the directors, and also the shareholders. By this arrangement
much unpleasantness was avoided.
But at this moment an old gentleman in a very shiny coat rose from
the desk at the farther end of the hall, and stepped towards the
thrones. He looked at Zeus, coughed a little nervously, and began:
“Mr. Zeus, and also Mr. Co., you will excuse me, but I’ve a little
matter to bring before you, in my position as Chief Agent in the
Punishment Department.”
“By all means,” said Zeus kindly. “There’s nothing wrong, I hope.
It’s a good department.”
“A very good and profitable department,” echoed Co.
“Well, Mr. Zeus, you will probably remember that you assigned to me a
young subordinate, a mere boy, called Eros.”
“I remember,” said Zeus. “He was not to draw any regular salary.”
“Precisely so,” replied the Agent. “He just took his small commission
on every broken heart. Well, up to the present I’ve had no complaint
to make of him. He did his work well and cheerfully. The Suicide
Section used to send me in most favourable reports of him. I had even
intended to recommend him for promotion.”
“But without increase of salary, I hope,” said Zeus. “The
shareholders would never stand that, you know.”
“They simply wouldn’t tolerate it for a minute,” echoed Co. It was
not supposed to be generally known that Zeus & Co. were the only
shareholders.
“No, sir,” answered the Agent. “I should have left the question of
salary to you. I hope I know my place, sir. But, if you will believe
it, that boy actually wants to resign the post he holds already. He
got mixed up in that Psyche business a good deal, you know. I never
knew the rights of the case exactly; but I do know that he’s not been
the same boy since, and takes no pleasure in his work at all.”
“Well, show him in,” said Zeus irritably, “and I’ll have a word or
two to say to him.”
“I wonder,” suggested Co., “if the Agent can have been fool enough to
let the boy know that he was a punishment and not a blessing?”
At this moment the Agent, who had retired, reappeared with Eros.
He was a handsome boy, but it was evident that he was very angry.
His eyes flashed, and tears stood in them. He made no obeisance to
Zeus, but with a rapid movement unslung his bow and quiver from his
shoulders, and snapt bow and arrows, one after another, across his
knee, flinging them down on the floor of the hall.
“I’ve had enough of that,” he said shortly, setting his lips tight.
“Are you aware,” said Co. solemnly, “that what you have just broken
is the property of the shareholders?”
“And are you aware,” thundered Zeus, “what the dickens you’re talking
about? Explain yourself.”
The boy burst into tears. “I _won’t_ do it any more,” he sobbed. “I
_won’t_. I’m not a blessing; I’m a curse. And I’m not going to be
your servant, because you hate everybody.”
“No,” said Co. quietly; “we love them.”
“Then what does your first rule mean?” asked the boy fiercely.
“The first rule,” replied Co., “is that twenty years shall not be
enough to make a life, and ten minutes shall be more than enough to
spoil it. We made that rule to stop people spoiling their lives.”
Zeus rubbed his hands softly together, and smiled, and said nothing.
“I did not mind once,” the boy went on, “when I made women weep and
men rave. I do now. It’s always the same thing. They long, and long,
and cannot obtain; and then the weaker sort kill themselves, and the
stronger sort grow cruel. Or, if they obtain, misery in one form or
another follows. I resign my post.”
“Just pass me that thunderbolt,” said Zeus, in an unpleasant voice.
“Oh, you can kill me,” the boy exclaimed, contemptuously, “I care
nothing for that. I wish I had never lived.”
“But you mistake,” said Co., suavely, “you mistake; Mr. Zeus had no
intention of killing you. You have a right to resign your post if you
like. He was going to kill a young girl named Psyche.”
“What for?” gasped Eros.
“Oh, for sport.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Eros spoke in a hard, unnatural
voice. “I will go back to my work, Zeus, and do it better than ever,
if you will not kill Psyche.”
“Very well,” said Zeus kindly. “I don’t want to be disagreeable; as
long as I kill somebody, it doesn’t matter. Now, trot along to your
work, my boy, and I won’t kill Psyche.”
So the boy went back to his work, and did it better than ever.
“That was a good idea of yours, Co.,” said Zeus, after a moment’s
pause.
“Very much may be done by kindness,” replied Co. “Don’t you think
this throne of mine looks a little shabby beside yours?”
“I’ll give the order to have it regilded,” said Zeus affably.
But, if things go on like this, it will be “Co. & Zeus” soon.
It’s getting late; time for me to take _Zeitgeist_ home again.
A curate was once complaining to me about certain hardships that he
suffered at the hands of his vicar. “And, above all,” he said, “I am
never allowed to preach an evening sermon. I get no chances. The vicar
always preaches the evening sermons.” There was a good deal of justice
in the complaint; we are all naturally more righteous in the evening.
When the light dies behind the stained windows, and the music speaks,
and through the open doors you can smell the syringa-bushes, then--for
some reason that I know not--it is more easy to think oneself a sinner
and to wish one were not. Preaching would naturally be more effective
at such a time.
It is evening now, and I have been thinking about the different things
that I am going to eat shortly. I do not know what is wrong with me
that I should be so low. But external circumstances that suggest one
line of thought are always liable to suggest the exact opposite. It has
been proved by statistics that two-thirds of the best English jokes
are invented, but not necessarily spoken, at funerals. Perhaps this
accounts for the depression one always has to conceal when one hears of
the joy or success of a dear friend.
_Zeitgeist_ will have a long rest now--until my return. I could wish
for some reasons that I had a more complete control over that boat;
that, when I started out with it, I could be more definitely sure where
it was going; that, in short, its nature was less petulant. However,
there is a charm in uncertainty. I forgive it everything.
THE NINE MUSES MINUS ONE.
I.
CLIO’S STORY: CHARLES MARIUS.
On a beautiful summer night of last long vacation a cloud sailed slowly
out of the west. The sun was going down; the honest worker had fallen
asleep over his books, and in his dream was standing before a booking
office in the Bay of Tarentum and asking for a second aorist return to
Clapham; the jubilant whist player, holding the situation in his hand,
had exhausted the trumps, and was bringing in the rest of a long suit;
the mere conversationalist had worked in that epigram again, and the
mere athlete, who did not believe in that fancy kind of talk, had gone
away to drink a little good beer; the fiery bedmaker had just gone
round to the kitchens, to tell the men precisely what she thought about
them: in fact, everything--except the cloud--was much as usual. But the
cloud was extraordinary.
It was granted to me to see that cloud close at hand, to stand in its
midst, to hear what was spoken there, while I remained unseen and
unheard. I do not wish to speak of myself much, because it seems to me
vain and immodest; but I must say that I believe the real reason why I
was permitted to behold the Muses, and to hear the stories which they
told to one another to while away the summer night, is that my nature
is singularly pure, and good, and spiritual, and free from grossness,
and beautiful. So, I feel sure, is your nature, my dear reader,
although in a less degree.
In the front of the cloud hung a rosy curtain of some delicate tissue,
and behind this curtain was the rose-lit room in which the Muses were
grouped. Clio was standing erect. She wore a long and ample robe; her
figure was stately; her look was the look of a handsome, learned woman,
who is on the brink of her thirtieth year. In one hand was an open roll
of paper, on which gilt letters were blazoned. She was looking down
upon the towers, and steeples, and house-tops of Cambridge, and on
the slow river winding like a reluctant silver corkscrew through the
beautiful meadows of Grantchester.
Behind her, seven of her sisters, picturesquely grouped, reclined on a
low divan at the farther end of the room. They all were beautiful in
different ways. Their robes, snow-white and pearly-grey, golden and
crimson and deep-sea blue, made a poem of colour.
And on the mosaic floor, kneeling on one knee, bending over a little
tripod that supported a brazier, was one who wore no robe, but the long
night of her beautiful hair. Mockery was on her lips, but dreams were
in her eyes. She seemed a young girl of seventeen. She was Erato, who
sings to us of love. The picture of her in the classical dictionaries
is absurdly wrong. Beside her on the floor lay her lyre and a curious
golden casket. From the brazier a thin, wandering line of fragrant
smoke came up, and hovered in the room.
There was a moment’s silence. Then Clio turned round to her sisters.
“We will stay here,” she said, “for a little while. This is Granta; and
here are gathered young men who are truly gymnasts and yet follow the
Muses. For they do all of them seek after culture, and love naught but
the reading of many learned books, and the hearing of the wisdom of
their teachers; and they all strive to lead the higher life.”
Terpsichore gave a curious little cough. I have no certain idea what
it meant; but it seemed to imply in some way that she had been there
before. The grave and stately Clio never noticed it.
“Yes, we will stay, and tell to one another improving stories,” she
went on. “Cupid! Cupid!” she called.
A curtain at the side of the room was flung aside, and in came a little
winged boy, with laughing eyes, naked but for the quiver that hung from
the shoulders. He does a good deal for the Muses, but not in a menial
way. They all smiled when he came in. He stood by the side of Erato,
who evidently petted him a good deal, drawing one strand of her dark
hair through his little rosy fingers--but he was looking at Clio.
“Cupid,” said the grave Muse, “we would stay here: let the wind blow
our cloud no farther.” He nodded his head, turned to go, and then
lingered, still playing with Erato’s hair.
“Erato,” he whispered in her ear, “my bow-string is frayed. Let me make
a bow-string of your hair.”
“No--perhaps--not now. You wicked little boy!” she said, looking up in
his face and laughing.
“Then soon,” he whispered again, and passed once more behind the
curtain. I do not know what he did, but the wind ceased, and the cloud
remained still. Clio took her place on the divan. “Who shall begin?”
she asked.
“Oh, you!” they all cried together.
“You’re the eldest, you know,” added Erato, a little maliciously. Erato
had taken a cushion from the divan, and stretched herself very lazily
on the floor. I am afraid the other Muses were all anxious to get
Clio’s story over as soon as possible. History was her province, and
she was so exceedingly historical as to be sometimes almost dull.
“Very well, then. I will begin,” said Clio. “The number of temporal
lords summoned by writ to the parliaments of the House of Plantagenet
was exceedingly various.”
Clio paused. There was a sly, mischievous look on Erato’s face; she
stretched out one hand to the golden casket, and took from it a little
powder, which she dropped into the brazier. A strange, pungent odour
came up from it. I do not know what it was, but it had a curious effect.
“I think I will begin again,” said Clio. “That’s the wrong story.”
Then she told the story which follows. I am afraid the powder had a
little to do with it.
* * * * *
With the battle of Waterloo the last hope of Charles was humbled in
the dust. Three years afterwards he was found by the lictors seated
in a poor third-class compartment in the railway junction which was
erected on the site of that scene of carnage, and still retains the
name of Waterloo. Charles surveyed them from the window, calmly and
unflinchingly. “Go,” he said, “and tell the Carthaginians that you have
seen Marius seated in the South-Eastern Express for Charing Cross.”
His request was never carried out. It was almost impossible to book
through to Carthage, and it was too far to walk. With tears in their
eyes, the lictors walked sorrowfully away to the refreshment-room.
The train steamed out of the station and arrived a week later at
Charing Cross, a little tired, but in fairly good condition. Charles
Marius levied two benevolences on the arrival platform, and conferred
a monopoly on the bookstall; but he was not looking at all well. The
marshes of Minturnæ, and a rooted dislike to being called a man of
blood, had preyed on his mind, and made him appear haggard and anxious.
He was met under the clock by the aged Menenius Agrippa, Socrates,
John Bradshaw, the Spanish Ambassador, and others. John Bradshaw was
naturally the first to speak.
“As Serjeant-at-Law and President of the High Court of Justice, it is
my painful duty to----”
“Stay,” interrupted Menenius Agrippa. “I once told a fable to the
Plebeians, and it did good. It is not generally known, and it may be of
service in the present critical juncture. Charles Marius, you man of
blood, listen. Once upon a time the members refused to work any longer
for the Belly, which led a lazy life, and grew fat upon----”
“Don’t, my dear friend, don’t,” said the Spanish Ambassador piteously.
“We know it by heart. It’s all in little Smith.”
“But it may do good,” said the aged Menenius. “How far had I got?
Oh yes--and grew fat upon their toils. But receiving no longer any
nourishment from the Belly, they soon began to----”
At this moment a cheerful porter, with a merry cry of “Now then,
stoopid!” ran a heavy truckful of luggage into the aged Menenius and
bowled him over. This gave John Bradshaw an opportunity to resume his
remarks:
“It seemeth to me that the time hath now gone by when the telling of
fables might serve the body politick; and seeing what grave charges
have been exhibited against you, Charles Marius, you man of blood, and
duly proven before me, it behoveth us rather to inquire into the method
which shall be deemed most suitable for your execution.”
He went on to point out that there were many methods of execution, but
that it was most agreeable to the sense of the nation that Charles
Marius should be taken to a very small, very cheap, very dirty, very
Italian restaurant; and that he should drink there one bottle of that
sound dinner-wine Raisonola at eleven shillings the dozen.
“We hereby give our royal word,” said Charles Marius; but he was
sternly checked by the Serjeant-at-Law.
“We need nothing of your royal word, having in former times had too
much of it. I myself will walk first, accompanied by the Spanish
Ambassador and Menenius Agrippa. You, Socrates, will accompany that man
of blood, Charles Marius, and administer to him the consolations of
your philosophy. You others will remain.”
The sad procession filed out of Charing Cross Station. Menenius Agrippa
looked a little angry, and was brushing the dust from his toga; but
the Spanish Ambassador and John Bradshaw were intensely stately and
dignified. Behind them walked Socrates and Charles Marius. Socrates
began at once:
“Seeing, my friend, that you are about to be executed, let us speak of
execution. For it is well to speak always of the thing which is the
present thing. So, setting aside your misconduct under H. Metellus
Stanleius in Africa, let us discuss this execution. Now, I have often
wondered why to the many it always seems an evil to be executed. For
if a will be duly executed, it takes force therefrom. Now, to acquire
force is plainly to be reckoned among the good things. Therefore to be
executed must be good and desirable. Or shall we say rather that words
have no meaning?”
“Go to the deuce!” said Charles Marius sulkily. “We offered John
Bradshaw our royal word, and he refused to take it. So we won’t talk at
all.”
And he never said another word until they were all five seated at
one table in the Italian restaurant. A melancholy waiter of no
nationality brought a soiled bill of fare; he also added two forks and
a mustard-pot as a kind of after-thought.
“Bring,” said John Bradshaw, “one bottle of Raisonola and one glass.”
“Ver’ well,” said the waiter sadly, flicking a dead fly off the table
with one end of his napkin. “It will be a shilling, if you please.”
“Pay afterwards,” said John Bradshaw sharply.
The waiter shrugged his shoulders. “I am ver’ sorry, but we mos’ always
ask for ze monny before we bring ze Raisonola. We haf our orders. You
see we haf often had a trouble to get ze monny afterwards from ze
heirs. Tree weeks ago two gemmens kom in and order ze Raisonola. They
trink it, and die all over ze floor.” (An expressive shrug of shoulders
came in again here.) “We sweep ’em up, and throw ’em away, and they
pay us nossin--nossin at all. It is all so moch loss.” His hands were
turned outward, deprecatingly.
“Look here, my man,” said Menenius Agrippa quickly. “Once upon a time
the members refused to work any longer for the Belly, which----”
“Dry up,” thundered John Bradshaw. “We must pay,” he added. “And it so
befalleth that I have not my purse, but the Spanish Ambassador----”
The Ambassador explained that he had only Spanish coins with him, which
would not be accepted. Socrates hastily added the information that he
always took his money straight home to Xantippe, and that if he was
short that night there would be unpleasantness.
Menenius said that he had no money, but would be glad to continue his
fable. “Let’s see. Where was I? Oh, I know--any longer for the Belly,
which----”
“Do drop it,” sighed the Spanish Ambassador pathetically.
“Silence,” said John Bradshaw. “Charles, be a man, and pay for your own
execution.”
Charles offered his note-of-hand and his royal word.
He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene.
But the waiter refused them. And the five were compelled to leave the
restaurant. There was a crowd round the door. When they had got clear
of the crowd, one of their number was missing. It was Charles Marius.
The rest of the story is well known. Charles Marius escaped to St.
Helena, and spent the rest of his life in collaborating with Dr. Gauden
on a novel called “Eikon Basilike.” The failure of the execution
preyed upon John Bradshaw’s mind, and in a fit of madness he wrote the
time-tables which bear his name. Menenius Agrippa became a diner-out,
and acquired the surname of “History,” because he always repeated
himself. The Ambassador still lives in his castle in Spain.
* * * * *
Clio had finished. “Thank you so much,” said the other Muses.
II.
EUTERPE’S STORY: THE GIRL AND THE MINSTREL.
There was silence for a few moments. Erato, stretched lazily on the
floor, looking up at the dim-lit roof of the cloud-chamber, let her
pretty lips curve half-way to a smile, when she checked herself
suddenly; she never could keep her thoughts still for a moment,--they
flew from poor Clio’s story to a story of her own. She was thinking
now of a hot summer night in Sicily, and of one who walked across
the low hills, with flocks pattering softly after him, and seen but
indistinctly in those fragrant moments when the evening touches the
darkness. She thought of him. As he went, he piped a melody--a simple
strain enough, but with one of those quaint refrains that nestle down
in the memory of a man. Ah--and afterwards!
“Clio,” she said, drawing a long breath, “I have a story, sweet and fit
for a summer night, a story of the joyousness, and rapture, and sorrow
of Love. Will you hear it?”
“Ah, yes, Clio!” said Terpsichore. “Erato once told me a story, and it
was so lovely and dreamy. It had the temper of soft valse music. One’s
heart throbbed to it: one lived to it, as it were. Let us hear Erato’s
story.”
“Not just yet, I think,” answered Clio. “We must not forget that
Granta lies beneath us. Far down below our feet, one sits--a young
man with red hair--amid many dictionaries. He is turning into Latin
elegiacs those beautiful lines--I quote from memory--
His head was bare, his matted hair
Was shaved to keep him cool.
Already he has seven feet in his hexameter, and knows it not, because
the gods do not like him. If we let thoughts of love stray forth from
our cloud-chamber, and flutter down into that young man’s red head, I
fear that he would never get the pentameter at all. No, Erato, to these
young men love is a disturbing influence; they avoid the maidens, and
care only for a surer knowledge of Greek accentuation. When they have
all gone to bed, you shall tell your story; great personages in history
have fallen in love; I myself have no prejudice against it. But you may
choose which of us shall tell the next story.”
Erato sighed, and glanced round the room. When her eyes fell on Euterpe
her face brightened. And truly Euterpe was good to see: she had a
wonderful grace of body, and fresh gladness in her eyes; yet there
was a depth in the look of her; it was the look of one not easily
understood, of one who could feel a sorrow.
“I choose Euterpe, because she is so beautiful.”
A little flush came into Euterpe’s cheeks; her lips parted, showing her
small white teeth. She was ever shy and quiet.
“I would sooner sing to you,” she said. “I am more used to singing.”
“No, dear, it must be a story,” said Clio firmly.
“And perhaps a song will come into it,” added Erato sweetly.
Then Euterpe told this story. And all the time that she was telling it
Erato sat gazing upward into Euterpe’s eyes.
* * * * *
The child came through the forest. The big trees grew close together,
and creeping plants hung like heavy serpents from their boughs. The sun
found its way through, here and there, among the broad, smooth leaves,
and made splashes of light on the red gold of the child’s hair. One
bird called to another; every now and then there was a flutter among
the leaves, or the quick rustle of some small live thing in the tall
grasses and brushwood below, and a scented wind kept singing of a land
of rest where the good winds go when they die. From far away one could
hear the low roar of a lion, as he stood by the margin of the distant
morass, looking over stretches of sand and spaces of still water to the
line of grey hills that seemed to be the end of the world.
The child was very fair. Her hair was glorious; her eyes were blue; her
young limbs were white, and strong, and graceful. Yet one might see a
fierce look in the blue eyes, and splashes of crimson here and there on
the white limbs, and her breath came quickly; for it was in her nature
to torture and to kill, and she knew no better thing. In one hand
she dragged along the body of a young wild cat, scarcely more than a
kitten. She lived ever in the open air, and she was fleet and fearless.
All the morning she had chased it, until it was weary; yet, although
it was young, it had fought long and fiercely. On the hand that
dragged it along were the marks of its claws and teeth; thick drops of
blood fell slowly on to its body, and its fur was wet and stained. The
child wore a living, tortured, fluttering necklace. She had caught the
butterflies one by one, choosing those which were brightest in colour,
and had threaded a spiked tendril through the soft bodies to make
herself the necklace. She liked the tickling fuss and flutter that the
butterflies made against her smooth skin, as they hung there and died
slowly.
A great purple flower, that grew low down on the ground, lifted its
brightness towards her as she passed: “And, oh!” sighed the flower,
“she is fair, and sweet would it be if she would take me and wear me
gently at her breast.” The child did not know the voice of flowers; but
she stooped down and tore off the purple petals one by one. From the
cup of the flower rolled a big golden bee: he had been sleeping there.
For one second he buzzed on the ground, trying to remember where he
was and to understand what had happened. In that second the child had
swiftly seized a stone, and so she crushed most of the bee, leaving it
enough life to let it feel the agony of death. She flung down the body
of the wild cat, and ran on for a few steps, with a laugh on her red
mouth. Then she stopped again where a nest was built in a bush with
very dark leaves and little white globes of flowers. In the nest were
three young birds: two of these she cast to the ground and killed at
once: she held the third in her small hot hands for a second, and a
kind of frenzy came on her, and she made her firm teeth meet in its
neck. For a little while she stood shuddering, and then she passed
onwards, but more slowly. Slowly she came through the forest in her
fairness and cruelty, caring nothing for her own beauty, and knowing
nothing better than her cruelty.
And it chanced that she came to the place where the minstrel sat in
pleasant shade on a mossy curve of a tree’s root. In his hands was his
lyre, and music came from it like falling water. The child crept into
the brushwood, and hid herself, and listened. And the minstrel sang:
Far away is the land where all things go,
The rest of the winds that have ceased to blow,
The peace of the rose whose leaves lie low,
Scattered and dead, where roses grow.
Far away! far away!
There the dead bird takes a song again,
And the steed has rest from the spur and rein,
And the dead man learns that all were vain--
All the old struggles, and joys, and pain.
Far away! far away!
And the light on their eyes is a wondrous light,
Where there is not day and there is not night,
Where the fallen star once more grows bright
That fell into darkness out of the height--
Far away! far away!
Let me win there ere the break of day,
Ere the first faint light o’er the hills grows grey,
I am tired of my work and tired of my play,
And I’ll make better songs in the land far away,--
Far away! far away!
The voice ceased; but the music of the lyre still flowed on, and the
minstrel looked upwards towards the sky. No word of cruelty had been in
the song; but through the music her first knowledge of gentleness came
to the child, and she saw that she had been cruel. She crouched there
amid the tall rank grasses; her face had grown whiter and whiter; her
eyes were strained and piteous, but there was no tear in them. With
trembling fingers she unfastened the living fluttering necklace, and
gently killed all the butterflies to spare them torture. Then she flung
herself prone on the ground, with her forehead on her linked hands; her
red lips quivered a little, but the relief of tears came not. “Ah!” she
moaned, “why was I so cruel? Why did I never know?” The wind played
with her hair, moving it caressingly.
As the child lay there, and the minstrel played on and on, the sky
above grew darker. There was no need now for pleasant shade. Over the
line of grey hills that seemed to be the end of the world rested the
storm-clouds, black and purple. Suddenly the air became quite still, as
if it were waiting for something. Was it the roar of the lion or the
voice of the storm that sounded dimly afar off?
Once more the minstrel raised his voice to song, and anger was in his
eyes:
The pure white flower grew up in the way
Where the wild cat’s whelp went forth to play.
And the whelp rent the flower for the gold within,
And a child slew the whelp for its soft warm skin.
And the lion slew the child for a draught of blood,
And the river swept the lion away in its flood.
And the gods dried the river in its deep stone bed,
And all from the flower to the stream were dead.
We are things that the gods make sport upon:
We shall have no peace till the gods are gone.
The child had raised herself to watch the minstrel. As he sang the
last words the skies seemed to snap overhead; a quick flash shot
downwards, like the thrust of ghostly steel. For a moment the child’s
eyes were dazzled; then the loud roar of thunder seemed to fill the
forest and the sky. When she looked again she saw that the minstrel had
fallen forward on his face; by his side was his lyre, with the strings
broken and smouldering; from his body, charred by the lightning,
delicate strays of smoke curled up. The child came, and knelt by the
side of the dead minstrel. She raised his head, and looked piteously
upon it, for the beauty had all gone out of it now; then she pressed
her little red lips to the blackened lips of the dead man, and went on
her way. It was the first kiss she had ever given.
And still she did not weep; but the blood in her veins seemed to be as
fire, and strange voices were sounding in her head. When the evening
fell she stood by the edge of the swamp. Out of a dim cavern crept an
old lion, and looked at her with green, hungry eyes. His lips curled
a little backward. The child called to him: “Come, then! I have been
seeking for you! Torture me, and then let me die!”
The lion turned swiftly round, and fled with a howl back into the
cavern.
The child wandered on. She ate the black poison berries, but they would
not hurt her. At last, when the moon was up, she saw a dark, deep pool,
and flung herself into it; but the pool cast her back again on to the
shore. She was fain to die, and to atone; but the gods knew their
business better than to allow it.
And still she walks through the forest, seeking rest and finding it
not, and she speaks to none. Only sometimes at night, when the golden
moon comes up behind the low grey hills, she sings in a sweet child’s
voice a few lines of a remembered song:
Let me win there ere the break of day,
Ere the first faint light o’er the hills grows grey!
I am tired of my work and tired of my play,
And I’ll make better songs in the land far away,--
Far away! far away!
And the gods are immensely amused.
* * * * *
“Thanks,” said Thalia, “though I don’t care much for those fanciful
high-toned stories.”
But Erato rose, and seated herself on the divan by Euterpe’s side, and
wound one arm round her waist, and kissed her on the lips. I thought
they looked rather pretty and poetical; but I don’t go in much for that
kind of thing myself.
III.
TERPSICHORE’S STORY: THE UNDER-STUDY.
A short pause, and then Erato spoke, addressing Clio:
“Clio, my dear, and reverend sister, do you think these young men below
us, in the colleges, have gone to bed yet?”
“My dear child,” said Clio, “you could hardly expect me to----well, as
far as I can judge, some of them are still up and at work. The young
red-headed man is stamping up and down his room, as if he were angry.
He has discovered that his hexameter would not do, for
His head was bare, his matted hair,
and he has been trying it a different way. Now he moans: ‘“Caput erat
nudum”--and the “a” ’s short, and I wish I was dead!”’
“I asked the question,” said Erato, “because a story has just occurred
to me, which I should like to tell you. I read it in the French. I
don’t think it would hurt the young men, even if they could hear it.
I’ll tone it down a little, of course. There’s one splendid part where
the husband----” She paused suddenly.
“Yes,” said Thalia drily. “In those pretty French stories there
generally is one splendid part where the husband----” and she also
paused suddenly. She looked at Erato, and they both smiled.
“Certainly not! Most certainly not!” said Clio at once. “You must
remember, Erato, that this is not the Greek civilisation. The English
have got beyond that: they have advanced; they sweep through the deep
while the stormy winds do blow, and hearts of oak are their men, and
they’d take a cup o’ kindness yet on the place where the old hoss died.
I make these last remarks on the authority of their own favourite
songs, of which I have made a special study for my book on National
Misfortunes. I assure you, Erato, that any University paper which
printed your story would be ruined.”
“Ah, well!” answered Erato. “I have heard it said that Love’s a lost
art nowadays.” She paused a second, and then added: “Perhaps--perhaps
they are happier without it.”
“I don’t think so,” said Terpsichore. “Everything depends on the way
you take it. Some take their love laughing, and some take it crying. I
always take it laughing myself. Either way, you’re happier for it.”
“Really, Terpsichore,” murmured Clio reprovingly.
Terpsichore did not heed her. “Where they are so wrong nowadays is in
taking their love commercially; in other words, they do not _love_;
they simply acquire all rights in a cheap housekeeper or an expensive
table ornament. They are so much too judicious. Yet sometimes--well,
there was a man--shall I go on?”
“Yes, do,” said Erato.
And this is the way that Terpsichore went on:--
* * * * *
There was a man once--not very long ago--who was poor, but artistic;
and during his life he had rather more than his share of coincidences.
It happened one autumn that he was amusing himself by wandering about
a country that was good enough for an artist, but failed to attract
many tourists because it did not boast enough places where you had
to pay for admission. He had stayed a few days in a little village,
where there was one street that went tumbling downhill, sometimes with
cottages on each side, sometimes through clumps of stunted trees,
sometimes with the open heath all round it. It happened one night that
he was wandering down this street, and had reached one of those places
where the street turned into a country lane for a time, or rather for a
space. He was smoking, and humming to himself a song that he had heard
Viola sing a few months before.
Viola had taken very fair hold of the town that season. It was not only
that she sang divinely; she was beautiful, and a little mysterious.
The numerous stories told about her were rendered probable by her
beauty, which was rather wicked; but no one could be certain about
them because she was so mysterious. Besides, many of the stories were
self-contradictory.
On one side of the road was a cottage, standing by itself, and partly
screened by the shrubs which grew in the small garden in front of it.
Here the man stopped short, for the lower windows of the cottage were
open, and from within he could hear some one singing the very song
which he had just been humming. Some one? Why, it could be no other
than Viola herself who was singing it like that! He had always been
interested in Viola, although he had seen her only on the stage. It
was her reputation that she loved splendour and luxury. What could she
be doing in this quiet, out-of-the-way village?
He leaned over the low garden gate, resting his elbows on the top of
it, and listened until the song’s conclusion. The room in the cottage
was brightly lighted, and the curtains were not drawn over the window;
he had heard rightly; it _was_ Viola. He could see her distinctly. She
was standing with her face towards the garden; and the man watched her
attentively. The mystery increased. Her dress was brilliant, not the
dress that a woman would put on in solitude and in a country village.
She was wearing her diamonds too--those diamonds about which every
story had been told except the true one. What was the reason for it
all? Was this simply her passion for splendour, existing even when the
splendour was to have no witnesses. The little, shabby, taciturn old
woman who acted as her companion in London was seated at the piano, and
had been playing the music for her song. But surely Viola would not
have made herself so magnificent simply on her account.
It suddenly dawned on him that he was doing rather a mean thing by
watching Viola in this way. He would not look any more, but he would
wait, in case she should be going to sing again. That was love of
music--not curiosity.
But even as he was making this decision the door of the cottage opened,
and Viola came out. She walked straight up the pathway towards the gate
on which the man was leaning; there was not the least hesitation about
her.
“I wonder how on earth she managed to see me in this darkness?” he
thought. “Well, I’m not going to run away. I will wait, and make my
apologies to her. I expect she will be angry with me. Well, she should
not leave the windows open when she sings, if she does not want people
to stop and listen.”
As she drew near to him she murmured a few words in Italian, as if she
were pleased about something; he conjectured that much, for he could
not understand Italian. Then she astonished him by placing her hands on
his shoulders, and kissing him, once, passionately.
It flashed across him for an instant that she had been expecting some
one else, and had made a mistake. Now he understood the dress, the
diamonds--everything.
“Excuse me, my dear lady,” he said, “but you are kissing the wrong
face--are you not?” He afterwards thought that he might have expressed
himself better, but he was agitated.
She, on the other hand, never lost her composure for a second. She
spoke in English, with the faintest possible stammer:
“Yes, th--thanks; it _is_ the wrong face. Would you t--take it away?”
He retired at once, walked twenty yards down the road, and then met
the full humour of the situation. He laughed a long, suppressed laugh.
He went on and on, away from the village, out over the heath, away
from the haunts of men. And, as he walked, the humour of the situation
vanished again; but the night was full of her music, her queenliness,
the fragrant charm of her presence. “Viola,” he said softly, “Viola,
what a heavenly mistake!”
Three years passed away. The poor but artistic man grew slowly wealthy
in those years. The exaltation of that night never left him; he was
full of brightness and happiness; his work was all light and strength.
He grew popular--partly by reason of his excellent spirits, and partly
because of his finer qualities. His luck was proverbially good; but
he had enough hope, optimism, and vigour to have carried him safely
through the most trying fortunes. His reputation was at its brightest
when his death came.
He was in an accident--a commonplace railway accident--an accident
that passed over a dishonest commercial traveller in one compartment,
and killed the artist in the next. There was a short period, however,
chiefly occupied by delirium, between the accident and the man’s death.
It was at the end of the delirium that he turned to the friend who was
by his bedside, and asked abruptly:
“Have I been speaking of Viola?”
“Yes; of course I wouldn’t----”
“Of course. All the time?”
“All the time.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Well, I have known you most of your life, and I never heard you speak
of her before--not in that way at all. I did not know that you had been
her lover.”
“I was not. But once, before she left England, I was--I was her lover’s
under-study. I have lived on it ever since,” he added, after a pause.
Then, through some queer freak of the brain, the humour of the mistaken
kiss appealed to him again, and he began to laugh--uncontrollably, as
if the thing had just happened.
Laughter was the worst thing possible for him in that state. He died
laughing.
* * * * *
“I suppose she--Viola--didn’t care,” said Erato thoughtfully, when
Terpsichore had finished her story.
“You forget that she had some one else to think about. Did you ever
know a woman yet that thought twice, by way of pity, about a man she
did _not_ love, when she had a man that she _did_ love to think about?”
“N--no,” Erato replied.
There was a moment’s pause. “Personally I don’t mind,” said Clio,
“but--considering where we are--do you think that last story
quite--quite judicious?”
IV.
MELPOMENE’S STORY: THE CURSED PIG.
“I’m rather thirsty,” said Erato to Clio. Erato had stretched herself
once more on the mosaic floor of the cloud-room, with enough cushions
to make herself comfortable. “So am I,” said Terpsichore.
“Well, considering how very hot the night is, I am not surprised.
Cupid!”
The little petulant boy came laughing into the room, and nodded his
head in reply to the order which Clio gave him. Then he brought in a
silver tray covered with fragile glasses of nectar. All the Muses drank
nectar except Melpomene. She had a look of intense gloom, and she drank
blood-and-seltzer from a very large tumbler with a very bad curse cut
in Greek characters on the margin of it. Before Cupid handed her glass
to Erato, he just touched it with his own lips. Then he sat down by
Erato’s side, playing with her long hair. “Erato,” he said, “I would
like to wrap your beautiful dark hair all around me, and go to sleep.
There’s a faint scent of those yellow roses about it, and it’s awfully
soft and warm. I love you, Erato.”
“You ought to love all of us,” said Clio reprovingly.
“I try to,” said Cupid, very soberly, “and it’s tough work with some of
them,” he added under his breath.
“Cupid, darling,” whispered Erato to him, “to-morrow I will give you
the bow-string that you wanted.”
“Thanks awfully,” said Cupid, “and you must tell the next story, you
know, and I will lie here and listen to it. Tell me the story again
about that shepherd in Sicily who----”
“Hush! hush!” interrupted Erato, “some of the sisters hardly like that
kind of story; and they say that the young students at work in the
colleges below us never think of love, and would not care to hear about
it.”
“Well,” replied Cupid, with some assumption of importance, “I was there
last June week on business, and I bagged three hundred and forty-two
brace. That looks rather different, I fancy. Every man that I hit
is engaged. They write long letters to Her. They keep faded flowers
which She wore. They are beginning to drop all their bachelor friends.
One of them has made a kind of little shrine on his mantelpiece, in
which he keeps one tiny white satin slipper that She wore, and also
a large photograph of Her. Unfortunately the virus--I mean the sweet
influence--is not always permanent. Only too often the June week of one
year undoes the work of the previous June. I feel sure they would like
to hear the story about the Sicilian shepherd, and how he got to the
cave, and found----”
“Hush!” said Erato quickly, “that’s the most dangerous part of all.
We’ll see about it though. Clio,” she added, raising her voice, “Cupid
tells me that you must be a little mistaken about those young students;
he says that----”
“I am sorry to have to interrupt you,” remarked Clio, “but I have
asked Melpomene to tell us a soul-moving story, and she is going to
commence.”
“I am not going to listen to that bloodthirsty hag,” whispered Cupid to
Erato. He kissed her and passed out of the room. Erato was busy with
the curious little silver brazier, from which the smoke began to ascend
more quickly.
Melpomene took a draught of her blood-and-seltzer, and began in a deep
and husky voice:--
* * * * *
A watchman stood on a lonely tower, looking eastward, and whistling
“Wait till the clouds roll by,” shredding it in as a remedy against
impatience. And that watchman was nothing if he was not classical.
He pondered upon the history of the house. For the master was away
from home, having gone to a lonely place not marked on the maps, in
order to make atonement for his crime. Ten years before he had eaten
a veal-and-ham pie, in which, owing to the inadvertence of the cook,
his eldest daughter had taken the place of the veal-and-ham. And the
cook’s carelessness had been entirely due to absence of mind: he was
distraught because his son had just murdered his aunt, and the son
had murdered the aunt because his mind was unhinged owing to a sudden
depreciation in nitrates, which he had bought largely. And the gods had
caused the nitrates to depreciate because one of the directors hadn’t
sacrificed anything except one thigh slice, rather fat, for the last
two years. And the director hadn’t sacrificed anything else, because
he got his butcher’s meat under contract and the butcher had bilked
him. And the butcher had been compelled to bilk him, because the gods
had sent a murrain on all the cattle in the world, to punish one pig
that they had a spite against. This was not quite the ordinary curse,
descending from father to son with the silver spoons and the mortgages.
It went zigzag, like a snipe. Many people had taken snap-shots at
it with sacrifices, but they hadn’t been able to stop it. Nobody
knew where that curse was going to next; so a general interest in it
prevailed. Teiresias had taken a long prayer at it, just as it was
hopping from the director to the cook’s family, and missed badly. And
now the master of the watchman’s house--by name Eustinkides--had fired
a ten-years’ penance at it. Some thought he’d hit it; others said it
was lying low, and would get up again in a minute.
This distressed the watchman. He felt uneasy. It was one of those
frisky curses, with an everlasting ricochet about it, going on like
sempiternal billiards with a bad cushion. He did not think it probable,
of course, that it would hit him. He was in such a very humble position
in life. But still he would have felt more comfortable if he could have
seen that curse getting to work somewhere else. It was not a pleasant
thing to have hanging about the house. In the meantime he awaited the
coming of Eustinkides. The master had ordered that at the moment when
he appeared in sight the hot water should be turned into the bath.
For, during the ten years’ penance in the place not recognised by the
Atlas, he had carefully abstained from all manner of washing, and had
not so much as breathed the name of soap. Suddenly the watchman removed
his eye from the telescope, and cried: “Listen, ye that are within
the house. For on the road is a curious geological formation that
walks, and a staff is stuck in a projecting portion of one of its upper
strata.” When it came nearer, and within hearing, the watchman called
out to it:
“What ho! old alluvial deposit. How’s your ammonites?”
A deep voice answered: “I am thy master, Eustinkides.”
“Oh! sorry!” gasped the watchman, and disappeared abruptly. Whish! The
hot water poured into the bath.
An hour afterwards Eustinkides lay in that bath, and soaked. As
fragments of other climates slowly detached themselves from him, he
thought of his penance and of his journey home. He had stopped at
Delphi and put himself in communication with Zeus. “Could you tell me
how to stop this curse, Mr. Zeus?” he called up the communication tube.
He waited for some little time, and then a hollow voice replied:
“One pork chop and mashed. Two in order.” At this Eustinkides had
at first been angry; but afterwards it seemed to him that it might
be a mystery. He thought of writing to Zeus to ask for a further
explanation, but there was the difficulty about the address. He felt
sure it would not do to write:
----ZEUS, ESQ.,
Up Top, R.S.O.
So he dried himself slowly, and went into the study. As he sat there,
his French cook was announced, to consult with him on the question of
dinner. While they were talking, a smell came out of the kitchen and
walked slowly upstairs; it was a strong young smell, but it was lazy.
It lounged into the study, and sat down under the King’s nose.
“Ah!” said Eustinkides, “that is very pleasant. What is that you are
cooking downstairs?”
“Pork chops for myself and the watchman,” said the cook.
In a moment the words of the oracle flashed across into the mind of
Eustinkides. “I also will eat pork chops, but they must not be cut from
the animal whereof my servants eat. So go out, and catch another pig,
and kill him, and chop him, and cook him, and bring me the result.”
So the cook went out, and caught a butcher who was very careless, and
demanded a pig. And the careless butcher remembered that he had killed
a pig a month or two before, but he had entirely forgotten what he had
done with it. At last he found it in the coal-cellar, and brought it to
the cook. “It’s a bit dusty,” he remarked, “but that’ll all wash off.”
“There’s something wrong with that pig,” said the cook as he prepared
dinner for Eustinkides.
“There’s something deuced wrong with these chops,” remarked Eustinkides
as he worked his way slowly through them. However, he felt sure that he
was doing the right thing, and carrying out the commands of Zeus, so he
did not much mind at the time.
A quarter of an hour afterwards he staggered into a Chemist’s. “Give us
two-pennyworth of any quick sort of death, will you?” he gasped faintly.
“What are you suffering from?”
“Cursed pork,” he murmured.
That was precisely it. The pig from which those chops had been taken
was the very pig which the gods had such a spite against. Eustinkides
was carried home to fulfil his destiny. His last words were: “Apple
sauce!”
So the front end of the curse run into the hinder end, and that smashed
the thing up. Wherefore let us all reverence the name of Eustinkides,
and refrain from soap and sin.
* * * * *
Melpomene fainted, and squirmed on the floor. I cannot say that
I was surprised. They picked her up, and gave her a little more
blood-and-seltzer, and she recovered gradually.
“Tragedy _does_ take it out of one,” she explained.
“There isn’t any more of the story, is there?” asked Thalia.
“No, that’s all.”
“Thank Zeus!” all the sisters ejaculated fervently, but in a whisper.
V.
POLYMNIA’S STORY: AN HOUR OF DEATH.
Clio was toying with the delicate little glass from which she had
been drinking. “Before we have the next story, one of you might sing
something,” she said. “I shall be glad to play the accompaniment on the
sackbut, which is a historical instrument. We first hear of it as being
in use about the latter end of the----”
“Let’s see,” said Erato, shamelessly interrupting, “I was to tell the
next story, I think.”
“Well, let’s have the song first.”
“I like music at night,” said Erato. “At night it has a speaking voice,
and one understands it better. And it would be a good introduction
to my story; but it must not be a drawing-room song. They are called
drawing-room songs because they are whistled in the street. No, my song
must be good. There mustn’t be any--
Love me! love me forrever!
Till the years shall porse awye
Beside the flowin’ river
You ’ear the words I sye.
Love me! love me forrever!
Love, though the world grows cold,
Till no more we roam, and they call us ’ome.
And there’s tew more lambs in the fold.
That sort of thing couldn’t possibly make anybody love anybody, you
know. It’s rather queer,” she continued meditatively, “but one goes out
at night all alone, and it’s quiet, and a lot of little stars show you
how big the darkness is. You’re thinking just about ordinary things;
and without any reason there comes into your head a bit of one of the
Nocturnes--Chopin’s, the eleventh, I think--and straightway you feel as
if you’ll die unless you kiss somebody you’re awfully fond of. And, of
course, being alone, you can’t. And so you get sorrowful. It’s queer,
because there’s nothing about love in all that--the music, and quiet,
and darkness--to make one think about it; but one always does--at least
I do.”
“My dear Erato!” remonstrated Clio.
“Well, I do. Euterpe shall sing to us now. I don’t mind a song that can
be sung in a drawing-room--it’s the drawing-room song that I hate. But
Euterpe knows all about it, and she sings beautifully, and she’s very
pretty--and yet she’s shy.”
Erato was quite shameless in her favouritism. But she had chosen
well. Euterpe was shy and quiet, but she loved singing. She smiled
at Erato, and seated herself at a cottage piano in one corner of the
cloud-room. I had not noticed before that there was a piano. She
refused Clio’s offer to accompany her on the sackbut, and another offer
from Terpsichore to accompany her on the banjo. She was quiet, but when
it came to music she was firm. The music of her song was beautiful,
but owing to the expense of printing music it is cheaper to give the
words:--
Down the dusty road together
Homeward pass the hurrying sheep,
Stupid with the summer weather,
Too much grass and too much sleep.
I, their shepherd, sing to thee
That summer is a joy to me.
Down the shore rolled waves all creamy
With the flecked surf yesternight;
I swam far out in starlight dreamy,
In moving waters, cool and bright.
I, the shepherd, sing to thee
I love the strong life of the sea.
And upon the hillside growing,
Where the fat sheep dozed in shade,
Bright red poppies I found blowing,
Drowsy, tall, and loosely made.
I, the shepherd, sing to thee
How fair the bright red poppies be.
To the red-tiled homestead bending
Winds the road, so white and long;
Day and work are near their ending,
Sleep and dreams will end my song.
I, the shepherd, sing to thee;
In the dream-time answer me.
“Dear Euterpe,” said Erato, “you must have been thinking of Sicily. It
brings it all back to my mind, how he and I----” Erato paused. “Clio,”
she said at last, “I don’t want to tell the next story. Let one of
the others tell it. Perhaps I sha’n’t listen very much, but you must
forgive me. I want to lie here, and think, and think, with music in my
head.”
“Perhaps Polymnia has a story to tell us,” suggested Clio.
Polymnia wore a long robe of pearly-grey; her face was pale, and her
eyes were deep and thoughtful.
“Yes,” she said, in a low musical voice, “I remember a story.”
And this is the story which she remembered:--
* * * * *
It happened one day that Zeus was in a bad temper--a thoroughly bad
temper. When this took place the whole of Olympus knew it. John
Ganymede knew it. He had grown respectable and middle-aged. He was
inclined to be portly, and still more inclined to give his views on
anything to anybody. Just at present he was standing in his pantry,
polishing glasses, and talking to the Deputy Cloud-controller.
“There’s no pleasin’ of him, when he’s like that,” said Ganymede,
shaking his bald respectable head. “Last night he was suthin’ awful.
‘Ganymede,’ he says to me, when I brings him his whisky last thing
afore he goes to bed, ‘you can pour it out for me.’ So I does. ‘And you
can put hot water in it.’ So I does again. ‘I think a couple of lumps
of sugar would improve it--and a little bit of lemon peel--don’t you,
Ganymede?’ ‘Yessir, suttinly sir,’ I says, and puts ’em in. ‘Grate a
little nutmeg on the top.’ I were surprised, o’ course, but I did it.
‘Stick a couple of spoonfuls of Maraschino into it.’ All this time he’s
lookin’ as quiet and gentle as a hangel. There wasn’t no Maraschino,
and I had to go down to the cellar and fetch it. I measures it out
careful, and says nothing. ‘I’ll have a large lump of ice in it, and
two straws.’ I thought his poor ’ead must be going, but it wasn’t my
place to make no remarks. I just carries out the horder. ‘Have you
done all that, Ganymede?’ he asks, drowsy-like. ‘Yessir, suttinly
sir,’ says I. ‘Well, there,’ says he, ‘you--several blanks--now you can
run round, and see if you can find a dog that’s such a Zeus-forsaken
fool as to drink it--because I ain’t going to.’ And with that he goes
off into his bedroom, screamin’ an’ laughin’ an’ swearin’ like a
maniac. Now that ain’t no way to be’ave.”
The Deputy Cloud-controller could sympathise. That very morning Zeus
had sent for him, and demanded:
“How’s the wind?”
“Due East,” said the Deputy.
“Then make it due West.”
The Deputy bowed, retired, and made it due West. In ten minutes’ time
he was summoned before Zeus again.
“Make it East and West and South and North all at once,” said Zeus.
“I can’t,” said the Deputy.
“Then consider yourself discharged,” roared Zeus.
“Then consider _yourself_ a blighted idiot,” replied the Deputy
indiscreetly, getting ready to dodge a thunderbolt.
“So I do,” said Zeus, who never was very expected. “Go away, and send
me some one else to be angry with. You’re stale.”
The Deputy Cloud-controller had found some difficulty in getting any
one to go.
“What am I to do, Mr. Ganymede?” said the Deputy despairingly. “They
all say that it’s more than their lives are worth. And the females
won’t stand his language. I must send some one, or I shall get
discharged in real earnest.”
“Well, pussonally,” said Ganymede, “I should be very glad to oblige
you, but leave this ’ere glass and plate I can’t. Now, there’s the
Clerk of the Curses. He’s pretty tough. Why don’t you send him?”
“So I would,” said the Deputy, “but he’s away on his holiday.”
“Then there’s the Earth-child,” suggested Ganymede, looking a little
ashamed of himself.
No one quite knew how the Earth-child had come among the gods. There
must have been a mistake somewhere; it was pretty generally known that
she was to have been born in Arcadia. There was something of a scandal
about it, too. But there she was, generally petted and liked, and happy
enough among the gods.
“Yes, there’s the Earth-child,” said the Deputy, and he too looked a
little ashamed of himself. They talked together a little while longer,
and then the Deputy went away, suffering badly from conscience.
A few minutes afterwards the Earth-child walked fearlessly into the
hall where Zeus was seated. She had red hair, and an intelligent face.
She was bright, and affectionate, and twelve years old, and not afraid
of anything.
“I heard you wanted to be angry with me, Zeus,” said the child.
Zeus looked at her grimly. “I should prefer something rather bigger.”
“Why do you want to be angry?” the child asked.
“Because I’ve done everything, and know almost everything, and I’m
quite sick of everything.”
“Music?” suggested the child.
“Sick of it!”
“Love?”
“Everything--everything, I tell you,” said Zeus hastily. “I’m tired
of eating, drinking, loving, hating, sleeping, walking, talking,
killing--everything.”
“I’m sorry for you, Zeus,” said the child, with a sigh. “Couldn’t you
die?” she suggested afterwards, seriously.
Zeus frowned. “No, no--not that,” he said. There was a moment’s pause.
Zeus was thinking; and, as he thought, his face grew very ugly. He was
immortal, but to a certain extent his immortality was conditioned. He
might die at any moment he chose, and remain dead for an hour. If at
the end of that hour any one would put his lips on the lips of Zeus,
and draw in his breath, then Zeus would come back to life, and he
that so drew in his breath would die. But if no one did that, then
Zeus himself would be dead for ever. Zeus had never ventured on the
experiment; he knew that no one loved him enough. But he might play on
the simplicity of the child. And take her life? No, he could not do
that. But he would ask her.
“Earth-child,” he said, “will you do something for me?”
“Yes, Zeus--anything that will make you happy again.”
It was horribly tempting. Should he try this one thing of which he knew
nothing, of which he was not tired? Yes, he must.
“I am going to sleep,” he said rapidly. “I will turn this hour-glass
here, and when the last grain of sand is running out, you must put your
lips to mine and draw in your breath. Then I shall wake up again, and
be happy.”
The child stared at him with wondering eyes. “I will do it,” she said.
A minute afterwards Zeus was lying dead, and the child was watching
him, and in the hour-glass the sand was running out slowly. Time
passed, and the child, as she watched, saw that his face was changing
queerly. It was not quite like the face of one who slept. Suddenly she
crept to his side, and put one hand over his heart. It was motionless.
“Zeus!” she called, in a loud whisper. He did not answer, and she knew
then that he was dead.
“But shall I wake him?” she said, watching the running sand.
As the last grains ran out, she bent over him, and did what he had
said. He sat up with a gasp, and a look of horror died slowly out of
his face. And the child lay prone on the floor, face downwards.
Zeus hardly thought of her. “Take that away,” he said to Ganymede, who
entered the hall just then. Ganymede went pale to the lips, but he
lifted the white burden in his arms, and carried her out. “I wish we
hadn’t sent her,” he sighed to the Deputy Cloud-controller; “I would
have gone myself, if I’d known.”
“I wish you had,” said the Deputy. “Both of us together are not worth
her.”
Zeus had forgotten her. He could think only of the things he had known
in that horrible hour. “I will never die again,” he said to himself;
and for many nights he could not sleep.
* * * * *
“The weather’s rainy,” said the Muse of Astronomy, who had drawn a
curtain back and was looking out.
“Yes, but Urania,” murmured Terpsichore, knowing it was wrong, but
quite unable to help it.
VI.
CALLIOPE’S STORY: THE LAST STRAW.
If Euterpe had happened to have been born a pronoun, she would not have
been demonstrative or personal. She would have been self-possessive.
With all her shyness, she had herself perfectly in hand. She always
was a little in love with somebody, but that was a secret she never
told herself. Some gentle reason guided all that she did. And now for
some little time she had been watching Erato, who was stretched in her
favourite attitude on the floor of the cloud-chamber.
Now Erato had not even pretended to pay the slightest attention to
Polymnia’s story. She was thinking--and thinking. She thought easiest
when she was lying on her back. Her hands were clasped behind her
head, and she looked upwards with wide-opened eyes. You never saw such
eyes. They told one half the story, how--with all her waywardness and
petulance and laughter--love was the life of her. And now, as she lay
dreaming, it seemed that it was noon in Sicily, and the flocks were
sleeping; and he rested in the shade--he, the shepherd--singing. And
now, again, the noon had passed and the night had fallen; in the dim
cavern the air was fragrant and cool; one heard no footsteps on the
thin white sand; she said nothing to him, nor he to her, for all was
said and sleep was near; only for a little while they listened, and
heard the great sea singing its song eternal. And it all was over
and gone. For the gods are dead, and the steam-roller goes about the
streets; and we are all either brutes or prigs, and most of us are
both, and there is no more love-making. I, of course--a spiritual
nature, very highly civilised--can see that we live in an age of
progress and omnibuses, and can be thankful for it. But Erato, poor
child, did not take many things seriously--only love and the service
of it. And it happened, every now and then, that some such fit of
despondency or fierce sorrow would capture her as had captured her
now. Of late this had been happening too often. To-night it was the
song which Euterpe had sung that had set her pondering--now thrilling
her with some exquisite recollection, now saddening her as she
thought of the present time, the epoch of the brute and the prude. It
was half-pitiful to watch, as Euterpe was watching, and to see the
laughter all die away from those red lips, and the eyes grow liquid and
suddenly close, and the tightening of the little hands, and the hurried
breathing.
Euterpe was not demonstrative. So it was the more to her credit that
she left her place, and sat down on the cushions by Erato’s side. She
did not say anything to her. She only did one or two of those gentle
things that a girl will do--a touch of the hand--a caress. And suddenly
Erato buried her head in Euterpe’s lap, and clung to her and sobbed
quietly. I suppose Euterpe had the sympathetic way. Some dogs have it:
you are sitting before your fire, alone, smoking, thinking of your
bills or your badness, or anything unpleasant, and you murmur a few
bad words; the big dog gets up, shakes himself, and thrusts his cold
nose into your hand and whines dejectedly. Then you have to slap his
back genially, to make him see that it is not his fault.
I do not think Clio can have noticed what had happened, for she said
briskly:
“And now, Erato, we will have your story. The young men in Cambridge
must be all in bed and asleep, so it won’t hurt them. You must not
spoil it by leaving anything out. Let it be the story of you and the
shepherd, you know--and don’t----”
“Clio, Clio,” said Euterpe quickly, “can’t you see that Erato is ill?
Please go on quickly, and let Calliope tell her story. When that is
finished, Erato will be all right again. She has been worrying herself.”
It was not often that Euterpe said so much, and so authoritatively. Her
eyes were bright: almost there were tears in them.
“I should be glad to recite to you,” said Calliope, “a poem in
thirty-five cantos, with two thousand stanzas to the canto, heroic
metre, classical subject----”
“Swivel-action and no escapement,” Thalia went on, under her breath.
“I am afraid,” said Clio, “that we shall not have time for all that,
much as we should like to.”
“Oh, quite so,” added Terpsichore, a little maliciously.
“If you would read us the synopsis now,” suggested Clio.
“Or the index,” said Thalia.
“Or even the advertisements at the end,” Terpsichore proposed.
“I will read you no poem whatever,” said Calliope severely. “_You are
not--not yet ripe for it._”
“Yes, we are very crude,” sighed Thalia to Terpsichore.
“I will tell you instead a perfectly true story, quite unadorned and
not at all epic. When you get a little riper, I will read you one of
my own poems, but not to-night. To-night you have to put up with the
following drivel.”
This is the drivel which they had to put up with:--
* * * * *
There was once a man, an Athenian, who was the opposite of all that he
wanted to be. The gods had made him for a joke, and a very good joke he
was; but as a man he was a failure.
To start with, he desired to have a perfect body and then to despise
it. He wanted to be beautiful, and strong, and think nothing of it.
Yet he thought a good deal of the bent piece of ugliness which was the
nearest he could do to a perfect body. For he had nothing he wanted,
and could do nothing he wanted. Sometimes he made good resolutions
and tried to lead a fine life; then the gods dug one another in the
ribs, and rolled about Olympus gasping with laughter. They knew very
well that they had taken unusual pains about that man’s physical
composition; they had afflicted him with several hereditary taints;
they knew that he might make enough good resolutions to pave the whole
of--well, Westminster Abbey, and that it was a physical impossibility
that he should keep any of them. “Let this man,” one of the gods had
said to Zeus, shortly before the failure was born, “be cowardly,
sensual, and brutal.” Then Zeus said that he was tired of making that
sort. “Oh,” the other god urged, “but we’ll give him at the same time
the emotions and aspirations of a noble mind. Then we shall see soul
and body fighting, and the soul will get thrashed every time.” “Now,
that _is_ something like sport,” Zeus had remarked, as he gave the
necessary order.
So this man went on providing amusement for gods and men until he was
twenty-five years of age. Sometimes he, unfortunately, was quite unable
to laugh at himself. Then he wrote verses. At other times he laughed at
himself very well--often in self-defence, because it made other men let
him off easier--and then he would tear his verses up.
On that last day he lay in bed in the morning and shivered. He had
slept for a little while--he had seen to that before he went to
bed--but he was wide awake now, and his head was burning, and his
thoughts were of the kind that tighten the muscles of the body and are
likely nowadays to lead on to padded rooms. For the day before he had
been found out; one act of fatal cowardice on his part--such cowardice
as no one could forgive--had cost a girl her life, and this girl was
the sister of his own familiar friend. There was plenty of variety
about his thoughts. Sometimes he felt like a murderer. Sometimes
he heard the dead girl’s brother speaking awful things to him,
contemptuous, heart-broken words. There was no hope of concealment,
no pretty story that he could tell. It had all been seen and known.
In his dreams that night he had been through the whole scene again,
but his own part had been altered. In his dream he had been equal to
the occasion--taken the plunge, rescued the girl, and been welcomed
with praise and honour, and he had walked back through the streets of
Athens feeling more happy than a god. Suddenly he awoke and recalled
the facts. The girl whom he had loved was dead--dead through his own
cowardice. It was such loathly cowardice that he shuddered to think of
it. All men would hate him, and yet their hatred would be nothing to
his own hatred for himself. Every thought was a torture, a knife that
went into his heart and brain, fiercely and with regular beat, stabbing
and stabbing.
He sprang from his bed, and dressed himself hurriedly. The house seemed
to him to be strangely quiet. He called--in a parched, husky voice--and
no one answered. All had left him: the very slaves had run away from
such a master, and he was alone. No one, he thought, would come near
him now. He had served as a laughing-stock for his friends: he was now
too despicable to be laughed at. If you wish the villain of your drama
to be hissed as villain was never hissed before, make him during the
first two acts the low comedian of the piece.
The man was trembling and shuddering. He made a small fire, and
crouched down by it. Ah, if he only had it to do again! A million
deaths were better than such torture as this. An impulse--irresistible
almost--came over him to shriek aloud and to tear with his hands at
something. Could he be going mad? The thought horrified him. He fetched
wine, and drank it, and tried to calm himself, crouching down by the
fire again. Suddenly he heard footsteps, and presently one of his old
companions--and the worst man in Athens--stood before him.
“You cur!” said his old companion.
“Leave me alone!” gasped the crouching figure. “Leave me alone, or I
will kill you.”
“You know that you dare not touch me.”
The coward knew it. It was true. The long knife which he had grasped
fell from his fingers. “Leave me,” he cried again piteously; “you can
say nothing of me which I have not said of myself. You cannot hate me
as I hate myself. Leave me! leave me!”
Then, with a gesture of disgust and contempt, the worst man in Athens
left him. And now the strength of the wine mastered the coward, and he
slept. This time dream followed dream, and every dream was cruel. It
was late in the evening when he awoke. The only light in the room was
that which came from the dying embers of the fire. By that light he
saw to his horror the figure of a child standing there--a white-faced
child, with awe in her eyes--the younger sister of the girl whose death
his cowardice had caused.
“I have a message for you,” she said. “As I slept this afternoon she
came to me, and bade me tell you that she knows all about it, and that
you could not help it; the gods made you so; for the gods are strong,
and it is fitting that we should be very patient.”
The crouching coward said nothing.
Then the child came quickly to him and kissed his ugly face. “I am very
sorry, very sorry for you,” she whispered gently; and then she crept
gently away.
The coward burst into tears, and, grasping the long knife once more,
staggered into an inner chamber, and drew the curtain behind him. The
child’s kiss was the thing that had just turned the balance. From the
inner chamber there was the sound of one who fell heavily, and then all
was still--very still indeed.
“The worst of making that sort,” Zeus remarked, with a jerk of his
thumb in the direction of that inner chamber, “is that they so seldom
last. But they are certainly funny. Personally, I sha’n’t sleep for
laughing to-night.”
* * * * *
“Would you mind,” said Euterpe quietly, “drawing back that curtain from
the front of the room? A few minutes ago Erato fainted, and I can’t
bring her round again. I think the cool night air might revive her.”
Terpsichore drew back the curtain, grumbling to herself. “Just like
her--we shall have the whole place turned into a regular hospital
again, I expect.”
VII.
THALIA’S STORY: THE CAMEL WHO NEVER GOT STARTED.
Erato soon recovered consciousness, although she did not regain the
spirit which she had shown at the commencement of the evening. She
leaned, white and listless, on a pile of cushions. Cupid had brought
her water to drink; and now he waited, seated on the floor, his knees
drawn up to his chin and his hands clasped over them, gazing lovingly
and sadly at his dear Erato, or downward in sheer dejection at the
mosaic. Euterpe, at Erato’s request, had gone to the piano. For some
time she sat playing nothing in particular with great feeling and much
expression; but she went songwards in the end, as she always did. As
far as I can remember the words, they were something like this--it is
called “Malcontent”:
At Somerset House in the noontide hour, and close to the roar of the
Strand,
The kind policeman looks to the sky with a piece of bread in his hand,
And the pigeons all come fluttering down, because they understand.
Would that I might a pigeon be,
For some one on earth to care for me!
Heigh-ho!
And when they’ve had enough of crumbs they turn and fly away,
Upward and onward through the smoke, and they see the city grey,
Like a rotten peach that is stuffed with flies on a stifling summer’s
day.
Had I but wings I would fly afar,
Where no disgusting cities are.
Heigh-ho!
But the waiter brings the bill of fare and spreads it in front of me,
And pigeon-pie at one-and-four’s the first thing that I see;
Imagine what the effect of this on my young soul must be.
Almost I would that I had died,
And were under the crust with my feet outside!
Waly! Waly! Waly!
“These verses,” said Euterpe in apology, “were written by a young man
in London, who was forced to live in town, but would have preferred to
have driven the cows to pasture, and to have made wreaths of buttercups
to twine in his beautiful hair.”
“Had he beautiful hair?” asked Erato softly.
“N-no; that was the difficulty,” answered Euterpe.
Then she came and sat by Erato again, blushing at having spoken so
much. And Erato made a good deal of her, as she always did.
“I am quite well again now, Euterpe,” she said.
“Ah!” sighed Euterpe, “but this happens every night.”
“Every night you swoon away,” added Cupid.
“But I am quite well now, and I will never be ill any more.”
“Then,” said Clio, “perhaps you would tell us your story now. Love
stories suit the small hours.”
I am afraid Clio had wanted to hear that story all the time. But she
was the incarnation of outward propriety, and had struggled against her
wishes. And now it was Erato who was unwilling.
“I can’t,” she said in a low voice. “I could have done it
before--earlier in the night--but now it reminds me of too many things.”
“Then,” said Clio rather snappishly, “I will ask Thalia.”
Thalia had a good-humoured smile, and a very pleasant voice, but her
story was nothing more than the following:--
* * * * *
There was once a camel who had got sick of the menagerie business. And
this was pardonable, because the menagerie had now been on tour for six
weeks, and the trombone in the band had been out of tune all the time.
There were other things that made the camel weary. The untamed tigress
had a bad cough, and kept him awake at night. The showman had called
him the ship of the desert at each performance, and he wanted to be
called something else for a change. On one occasion he had been lying
in motionless dignity, and a little boy in a tight suit had asked if
he was stuffed. He had been kicked by his keeper, ridden by children,
starved by the manager, and jested upon by young men with penny cigars,
who sucked intermittent oranges and called one another Chollie. He was
sick of the menagerie business, and he wanted to get out of it. So he
made himself disagreeable. As he was passing the band-stand one night,
he reached out his great neck and ate the trombone part to “Nancy
Lee.” This made him want to be a sailor and sing “heave-ho” during the
rest of the term of his natural life. But where was the sea? He’d got
no sea. He hadn’t an notion, as people say. So he gave up his mind
to being disagreeable again. He knocked down a beautiful child with
golden hair, and trod on her, so that she died; and the management had
to send her parents a gratis admission before they’d stop grumbling.
Then the camel took up his position in front of the lion’s den, and
said sarcastic things to the lioness. This enraged her; and not being
able to reach the camel, she ate a portion of the lion-tamer, to show
her spirit. Finally he walked up to one of the elephants who had a
dummy tusk, and did a little comic dentist business, insomuch that the
audience jeered at the showman, and the showman said several things
which were not set down in the printed guide to the show. That night
the camel kicked his keeper, out of reciprocity, and then talked very
high talk indeed in the still midnight hours to a hyena who had seen
the world.
“I am going away,” the camel said, with a pathetic gasp which was
the nearest he could do to a sigh. “My soul is being stifled--quite
stifled--in this place.”
“That’s the bread,” said the hyena decidedly. “We get nothing but
bread.”
“It’s _not_ the bread,” snapped the camel. “It’s the smell, and the low
social status of the audience. I am going to seek peace and culture in
another clime. I am not happy here; there can be no true happiness in a
tent which smells of thirty-four distinct species, and penny cigars on
the top of them.”
“Well, I hope you’ll find them--the peace and culture. I’m not much
on pilgrimages myself, but I believe the first thing to do is to get
started. Start away.”
“I will,” said the camel. So he wandered slowly out of the tent, and
was fetched quickly back again, and tied up, and treated with ignominy.
He tried it again on the following night, and was kicked till he was
more grieved than he could express. He tried it a third time, and then
the menagerie management sold him to a circus.
Now, at the circus, the camel was at first exceedingly proud, because
he walked in the procession, and cab-horses shied at him; but
afterwards he grew very lonely, for want of other wild beasts with whom
he might converse. But at last the circus people bought an ostrich that
was very cheap because it had consumption, and the camel’s heart was
lightened. Now the ostrich was a great romancer, and told stories of
passion and bulbuls, of rivers and deserts. And the camel listened to
all these stories with glowing eyes.
“I once,” he said confidingly, “was going to start on a pilgrimage to
find culture, but I was prevented. And after all it would surely be
better to return to my old home in the desert and taste the sweets of
domesticity.” Now the camel had been born in the menagerie, and knew
nought of the desert, but he was nothing if he was not a talker.
“I shall lie under the palm-trees, and crop the cocoanuts; plunge into
the hot white sands for air and exercise; and I shall take a wife, and
she shall build herself a nest, and sit in it, and lay eggs in it.”
“My dear sir!” said the ostrich with a blush.
“And then my family will gather round me in the winter evenings, and
we shall play round games, and go to bed early, and regularly enjoy
ourselves.”
“When do you start on your pilgrimage in search of domesticity?”
“I shall start, wind and weather permitting, to-morrow at one pm.”
But he did not start then, because he ate of circus bread, which was so
exceedingly diseased that he fell on a bed of sickness. And the circus
company saw that he would die, and advertised him for sale very cheap.
And he was bought by an ardent young curate who had an enthusiastic but
indistinct idea that the poor beast might be utilised to illustrate a
lecture on the Holy Land.
Now the curate was a very humane man, and lodged the camel meanwhile at
a livery stable. And while he was writing a sermon against all manner
of pride, that night a message came to him from the livery stable to
say that the camel had very bad spasms, and had kicked a large hole in
the ostler. The curate, from force of habit, sent the poor quadruped a
pound of tea, a bottle of port, and a tract called, “Mother’s Mangle;
or, Have you a Penny for the Ticket?” The ostler drank the port, and
the camel ate the tea. So much tea made him very nervous, and out of
compassion they put a cat in the stable to keep him company.
“Pleased to meet you,” said the cat. “Will you sing something?” The
cat knew perfectly well, of course, that camels cannot sing; it wanted
to make the animal return the polite inquiry, and so get a chance of
letting off an erotic song which it had learned in the stables. But the
camel was not such a fool as that.
“I dislike music,” he said. “I went in search of culture, and never got
started. I also went in search of domesticity, and never got started.
I am now going on a third pilgrimage,--but it will not be in search of
music.”
“Do you like milk?” said the cat rather inconsequently.
“No,” said the camel.
“Do you like being scratched under the left ear?”
“No,” said the camel.
“Can you catch mice and kill them slowly?”
“Look here,” said the camel, now justly irritated, “you’re not the
Catechism, and you’re not the Census; what’s the point of all these
questions?”
“I was going,” replied the cat, rather aggrieved, “to suggest some
object for your pilgrimage, and I wished to see what you liked.”
“Well, if that’s all,” said the camel, “I’ve quite made up my mind. I
am going to search for death. I shall start, if the tide serves, at six
a.m. to-morrow morning.”
But he didn’t, because he died that night. And as he arrived without
ever starting, it has been argued by some that he must have been a
genius. If he had stuck half-way without ever arriving, he would have
been only a camel of considerable talent.
But these things may be otherwise. Things generally are.
* * * * *
“Has that story got an inner meaning?” asked Terpsichore.
“Yes,” said Thalia.
“What is it?”
“Don’t know,” said Thalia.
“If you do know, you ought to say,” remarked Clio.
“I do not think the story is quite--quite--well, you know.”
“No, I don’t,” said Thalia.
“Nor do I,” said Terpsichore.
They were just going to quarrel a little more, when Euterpe exclaimed:
“Look, Erato, the dawn is breaking; it is already a little lighter in
the East.” She added gently, after a pause, “Don’t you think you had
better go to bed now, Cupid?”
“No, no,” said Cupid, “I want to stay with my darling Erato. I love
you, too, Euterpe, but I love Erato more than anything else in the
whole world.”
“Then come and kiss me--again, and again,” said Erato.
VIII.
URANIA’S STORY: NUMBER ONE HUNDRED AND THREE.
“Yes,” said Clio, “it will soon be morning. There will be time only for
one more story. Urania shall tell it to us. Do you not think that you
had better go and rest now, Erato? You look so tired.”
“I am tired,” answered Erato, “but it is not the tiredness that wants
sleep. And I should like to hear Urania’s story.” She was very pale;
dark shadows lay under her burning eyes; her face seemed spiritualised.
Her ways and her voice were subdued and gentle now. The brightness and
vivacity were gone. Sometimes she would look lovingly up into Euterpe’s
eyes, or touch caressingly Cupid’s curly hair. For the most part she
lay motionless, and seemed to be looking fixedly at something--some
vision unseen by her sisters.
But Cupid never ceased to look earnestly at her, with trouble on his
pretty, boyish face. And all of them felt the strange nervous tension
of those who have watched far into the night; an excited tremor came
over them, bringing with it flashing, vivid imaginings. There was a
pause, a silence that was like a prayer to the dawning light. Then
Terpsichore arose, with no merriment, as of old, upon her face, but
a look of eager penitence. And she knelt down by Erato’s side, and
whispered--so softly that only Erato might hear it--“Forgive me,
Erato, forgive me! I did not love you once as well as I love you now.
I was half jealous because you seemed to like Euterpe better than you
liked me, and because you were so beautiful. But I do love you now--I
love you more than I can say. Oh, forgive me, Erato!”
Erato kissed her on the lips, and Terpsichore went back to her place,
crying a little, for no particular reason, and hoping that no one
noticed it, after the manner of maidens.
Suddenly Urania spoke, with a deep thrill in her voice. This was her
story:--
* * * * *
There was once a man who was very careful. He saluted the sun, spoiled
a good floor by making libations, sacrificed freely, and learned by
heart what enabled him to remember the distinction between the _dies
fastus_ and the _dies nefastus_. In fact, he did all that could be
done. And his number in the books was number one hundred and three.
Now, at the end of the quarter, Zeus & Co. were going through their
books. It was wearying work and dry work. Ganymede was in and out of
the office all day with liquors, and Mercury had been run off his legs
with messages to the different departments. The clerk was reading out
the items in a dreary monotone.
“Number one hundred and one. Dead. Cholera.”
“That was a capital cholera,” murmured Co., “and did its work well. Go
on, clerk.”
“Used to live in Eubœa. Killed to spite his sister, because she----”
“That’ll do,” said Zeus hurriedly; “I remember that case--a stupid
woman, a very stupid woman--but pretty. Next, please.”
“Number one hundred and two. Philosopher still living because he wants
to die.”
“Say ‘usual formula’ when we come to that. It’s no good wasting time.
Has number one hundred and two got anything unpleasant the matter with
him?”
“No, sir.”
“Ah, then--let me see--we’ll give him a couple of ulcers. Mercury,
just look in at the Punishment Department, and order a couple of large
ulcers to be sent to number one hundred and two, and look sharp back.
Next, please.”
“Number one hundred and three. Living and prosperous. Regular in his
righteousness. Further details at the Virtue Record Department.”
“We ought to give that man some other reward,” said Zeus, who sometimes
suffered from a slight twinge of justice in damp weather.
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Co., who was very healthy, and
never got a touch of justice in any weather. “I hate a man who does
everything right. It’s so infernally hypocritical. Besides, it shows
a commercial mind. He only does it in order to get something by it.
I hate a commercial mind. I’ll guarantee he doesn’t do it out of
affection for us.”
Zeus sniggered. “Well, well,” he said, “affection, you know,
affection----” But here he was interrupted by the arrival of Mercury.
“Just look in at the Virtue Record,” said Co., “and bring the detailed
list for number one hundred and three.”
Mercury was back again in a minute. “The Virtue Record office is shut,
sir, nobody ever virtuous after lunch, sir--shuts at one, sir. The
clerk’s gone home and taken the keys.”
“Well,” said Co., “it doesn’t matter. The man is obviously a hypocrite,
and he’s got no business to try and make bargains with us. I don’t mind
it so much myself, Zeus, but it _is_ such an insult to _your_ dignity.”
“Do you think so?” said Zeus quickly. “Then he shall repent it. I’ll
teach him to call ME a pettifogging huckster. I’ll teach him to try
to bribe ME. I’ll give him a lesson. Pass me those thunderbolts. I’ll
scorch, and blight, and blast----”
“Gently, gently,” said Co. “We may just as well try and get a little
fun out of it. We’ll see who can torture best--killing barred. You
shall go first.”
So Zeus, who had plenty of force but very little skill, went to work in
the old-fashioned way. He killed the man’s relations, burned down his
house, destroyed his crops, wrecked his ships, reduced him to poverty,
and afflicted him with the most distressing disease that the Punishment
Department had in stock. And yet the man continued cheerful, saying
that the gods were just and would yet send him prosperity.
“Oh, this is sickening,” said Zeus; “I can’t do anything with him. Now,
Co., you try.”
“You’ve not left me much to work on,” said Co.; “you’ve taken away all
the man has, except his baby son and his belief in us. I will give
him something--a little accident--fever--cerebral disorder. See? Then
he kills his child--you observe?--the child whom he loves more than
himself. Then I restore him to his senses again. Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Zeus, a little sulkily, “you’ve won, Co. What made you
think of that?”
“I don’t know,” said Co. modestly. “It was just an idea. He could not
be tortured any worse than that?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” objected Zeus. “You let me try again.” Number
one hundred and three still lay moaning on the floor of the room.
“You can try, of course,” said Co.
Zeus still stuck to the old-fashioned plan of punishing by deprivation.
There was only one thing left to take away--the man’s belief in the
gods. So he took that.
Suddenly number one hundred and three arose. There was a chill smile
on his face, and he walked out into the courtyard, and looked at the
rising sun. “I was mistaken,” he said. “There are no gods. All is as it
chances. Good is chance and bad is chance. Nothing matters any more.
I would die if I thought anything mattered. There are no more values.
It is the same thing whether I murder my son, who is dearer than life
to me, or whether I give alms, or whether I eat my breakfast. I shall
never be sorry or happy any more. Sorrow and happiness are vain and
foolish.”
So he went back to his house again, and washed his hands calmly, and
broke his fast.
“Well, I never!” said Zeus.
“Ah!” said Co., “you must learn the new ways. You’re behind the times.”
“Very well,” retorted Zeus snappishly; “you needn’t say it so loudly.
I don’t want all Olympus to know that.”
* * * * *
“The dawn is here!”
It was Terpsichore who spoke. She had drawn back the curtain that
formed the front of the cloud. Below them lay the flat fen country,
with dykes, and waste places, and gaunt lonely trees. The sunrise was
beautiful as a fair dream, sprigs of light snapping on the surface of
the marshy pools and slow streams, where the cool dawn-wind shook the
water’s surface.
“And now I will go to my rest,” said Clio.
“And I,” said the others. “And I too.” Only Erato strove to rise and
could not, and fell back, breathing quickly.
“I have grown weak,” she said, and her voice was low, so that it could
hardly be heard. “I will stay here, and rest here, in the warm light of
the sun: I am cold, strangely cold.”
Euterpe and Cupid stayed with Erato. The rest all went into an inner
room, far within the cloud. Each as she passed Erato had some gentle
word to say to her. They had bidden Cupid come with them; he had
replied with an angry look and a shake of the head, not trusting
himself to words.
So these three were left alone in the cloud-chamber. Erato stretched
out her little hands to the sun, and watched the light come flickering
over them. Cupid had drawn a little apart, still watching her. At last
her eyes closed. “Euterpe,” she whispered, “sing to me--sing the last
song. I am drowsy, and would sleep now.” So Euterpe went to the piano.
She did not sing very well, for something seemed to be wrong with her
voice--a kind of huskiness:
All’s over: fall asleep.
There is no more to say,
There are no more tears to shed, and no more longings dead,
And the watch ends with the day.
Wherefore wish or weep?
Close your eyes, and fall asleep;
And happy are the dead who sleep alway.
In the fair sunlight lie;
And let your sad thoughts stray
Through the golden gleams of the gate of dreams
At the breaking of the day
Wherefore wish or weep?
Close your eyes, and fall asleep;
And happy----
Suddenly Euterpe stopped, and for a moment there was an awful silence
in the room. Then putting restraint aside, she burst into sobs, weeping
as if her heart were broken, and flung herself down by Erato’s side.
“Dead? Erato, my darling!”
And Erato did not move or speak; her face was very beautiful as
the sunlight fell upon it. There was no sound in the room but the
passionate sobbing of Euterpe.
Cupid had risen. His face, for all its boyishness, was firm, unmoved;
only a little drop of blood was on his lip where he had bitten it
through. He looked once at his dead Erato; then walked to the front of
the cloud-chamber, and stared vacantly outwards. It seemed to him that
rings of iron were growing tighter round his chest, and stopping his
breath. A humming sound was in his ears. He did not quite know what
was happening. Flecks of light seemed to dart before his hot, dry eyes.
He had stood there a long time--he knew not how long--when he heard a
voice behind him.
“Cupid! Cupid! you loved her too.”
It was Euterpe, standing there pale and sweet, looking at him,
stretching her hands towards him, the tears trembling still in her eyes.
And then, at last, flinging himself into her arms and clinging to her,
he wept. “Loved her! loved her!” he cried.
So Erato lay there dead, and beautiful in death, and the sun shone
fiercely, because it was now day, and men were going forth to their
work.
THE CELESTIAL GROCERY.
_A FANTASIA._
It is precisely one year to-day since the incidents happened which I am
going to record. Since that time I have been waiting for developments.
But no developments have taken place. I find myself, in consequence,
so completely at a loss what to do or what to think, that I venture to
state the case plainly, and to ask for advice.
Thomas Pigge, my old college friend, had sent me a stall-ticket for the
play. It was not often that I went to a theatre at all; and I had never
sat in the stalls before. Pigge said in his letter that he had been
meaning to come with me, but had been prevented by a sprained ankle.
I found afterwards that this was quite untrue. Pigge, as a matter of
fact, had bought the ticket by a mistake. He had been told that _The
Dark Alley_ was having a great success. About a week afterwards he saw
the advertisement of _Fair Alice_, and as his memory is notoriously
weak, he confused the two plays, and ordered a ticket for the wrong
one. Soon afterwards he discovered what he had done, and learning that
_Fair Alice_ was a dismal failure, he offered his ticket first to his
aunt and then to his tailor, both of whom refused it. It was then--and
only then--that he sent it on to me. I do not think this was very
nice of Thomas Pigge. I half suspected something of the kind at the
time, and I was careful to make the few words of thanks that I sent him
rather cold. I do not suppose he noticed it.
When I had dressed for the evening, I rang the bell--partly to tell
my landlady that she need not sit up for me, but also with the
intention of letting her see that, although I lived in inexpensive
lodgings, I was familiar with the mode of life of English gentlemen.
She surveyed me admiringly, and asked me if I would like a flower for
my button-hole. “No, thank you,” I said, with a smile: “they are not
worn.” I noticed with pleasure that these few authoritative words had
their proper effect. However, as I was walking down the Strand on my
way to the theatre I saw a man, in evening dress, who was wearing
a rose in his coat, and thinking that it would be safe to follow
his example, I spent sixpence on a gardenia with some maidenhair.
The circumstance would be trivial were it not for its bearing on
after-events.
I cannot say that I enjoyed the piece altogether. The house was by
no means full. The few young men in the stalls seemed mostly to know
one another, and none of them knew me. The two who came in after me
had those hats that shut up; mine was an ordinary silk hat that I had
worn for a year. This fact served to make me feel more lonely. My fine
sensibilities render me peculiarly liable to this sort of thing; but
they also do me good service by making me notice for imitation slight
shades in the manners of the best people, which those of a coarser mind
entirely miss. For instance, I had observed that the habitués of the
stalls generally look a little careless,--not reckless precisely,--but
with an air of taking everything for granted. I copied this expression
throughout the evening.
A man’s surroundings have a great effect upon his character; I felt
myself perceptibly refined by my presence in the stalls. My position as
an under-master in a private school seemed unworthy of me. “It is not,”
so I thought, “the profession for a gentleman. I shall change it.” I
must have known perfectly well that it was impossible to change it; but
it pleased me to say so to myself. My old tendencies towards economy
vanished. I felt that I must have a cab to take me home. It would cost
two shillings probably, but that would be better than an incongruity.
My æsthetic principles positively forbade me to walk home after having
sat in the stalls. So I hired a four-wheeler, as I always mistrust
hansoms. “After all,” I said to myself as I put up the window, “what is
money? We assign a value to it, but it is relative and transitory. We
don’t know what anything’s really worth. What is money? What is money?”
The words repeated themselves over and over again, in time with the
rattling of the cab,--“What is money?” Such a repetition is liable to
send one off to sleep. I am not sure that I might not have fallen into
a doze myself, if I had not suddenly been startled into wakefulness by
the stopping of the cab. I felt certain that the man could not have
driven to my lodgings in the time, but I jumped out. To my amazement
I found myself in an empty street. On one side of it ran a low stone
wall, on the other there were houses; the darkness hid them to a great
extent; but the house at which my cab had stopped was brightly lighted
up, and appeared to be some kind of a shop. There was nothing set out
in the windows, but over the door were the words “Joseph, Grocer.” The
street itself was paved with blocks of crystal, and in the air there
sounded the wildest music. I turned to my cabby, utterly at a loss as
to where I was, or why I was there. He sat absolutely motionless; his
hands still held the reins, but his eyes were shut. “Now then, cabby!”
I cried, “where have you taken me to?”
He made no answer, and gave no sign of having heard me; but the horse
turned its head and looked at me. As it did so, the music ceased.
“You’re starring,” the horse remarked.
I remember perfectly well that one of the young men with the shut-up
hats had made the same remark about some actress, and I had then
wondered what he meant. “This is very confusing,” I said. “It was the
cabman that my remarks were addressed to.”
“Look over that parapet,” answered the horse.
I could not help thinking how extraordinary it was to hear a horse
speak. All my life long I had been accustomed to regard a horse as a
poor dumb animal. It might, of course, be all very well in fables to----
“Shut up!” shrieked the horse.
“I never said anything,” I replied, indignantly.
“No, but you thought.”
“Well, I can’t help thinking.”
“Can’t you? If you think like that again, I’ll kick this cab to
splinters. I was shod yesterday. Why can’t you look over the parapet,
and do as you’re told?”
I gave in. I had an indistinct idea that I was going mad, but I walked
carefully across the polished street, and leaned over the low stone
wall. Certainly it was a marvellous and beautiful sight. Far down, as
far as my eye could reach, there was darkness; and the darkness was
strewn with myriad golden stars. I heard the horse’s voice behind me:
“The smallest of those is the world you’ve just left, and this is the
world you’ve come to.”
I knew perfectly well that this was impossible and quite unscientific,
and as I leaned over the wall I formed my conclusions. I had been
terribly overworked lately, and probably part of my brain had given
way----
“Never had any!” yelled the horse, and went into a roar of unmannerly
laughter.
I took no notice whatever of this, but went on thinking. These
delusions must have arisen from some such partial failure of
brain-power. It was to be hoped that it was only temporary. Probably
rest and medical advice would soon set me up again. I would step across
to the grocer’s, and inquire where the nearest doctor lived. As I
crossed the street, I noticed that the horse was humming the National
Anthem. I pushed open the door of the grocery and entered. There were
counters and shelves, but nothing on them. After waiting a little while
I ventured to tap on the floor with my foot. A voice from the other
side of the counter said:--
“What may we have the pleasure of doing for you?”
I looked, but I could not see any one, and I ventured to say so.
“No, you can’t see me. It doesn’t really matter, but I think I left it
downstairs. James,” the voice called to some invisible person at the
farther end of the shop, “what did I do with my body? I had it only
this morning.”
The answer came in a boyish voice: “You left it in the cellar, Joseph,
when you were packing up the nightmares.”
“So I did, so I did. You’re right, James.”
“But,” I said, “I can’t see James’s body either.”
“No, you see James has only got one. You’re very inquisitive. If you
must know, his body’s gone to the wash. You wouldn’t have him wear it
dirty?”
“I generally wash my own,” I said mildly.
“Well, we don’t. This is a grocery, not a laundry.”
“You must excuse me,” I pleaded, “I’m quite a stranger in these parts.”
I saw it was no good to inquire for a doctor. If the grocery was part
of the delusion, as it seemed to be, it would be absurd to make the
inquiry there. If, on the other hand, the grocery really existed, then
probably I did not require the doctor’s services. But I felt very
muddled about it. “I suppose you’re Mr. Joseph?” I said.
“I am Joseph, and I should take it as a favour if you would tell me
with what I can serve you.”
“Well,” I said, “judging from the state of your counter and shelves, I
don’t see anything you can serve me with.”
“Of course you don’t see,” he answered, a little snappishly. “You can’t
see the abstract. I’m not a grocer in the concrete. Kindly shut that
door. There’s a draught keeps coming down the back of the place where
my neck would have been, and that’s a thing I can’t stand.”
As I shut the door I felt more bewildered than ever. An abstract grocer
was beyond me, and I said so. “What, for instance, is abstract sugar?”
I asked.
“Sugar’s concrete,” was the reply, “and if you abstract it, you
get spanked. We’ve got no sugar here. If you’d like a Pure White,
Crystallised, Disinterested Love, we keep that, although there’s not
much demand. They mostly use the coarser kinds. They say they’re
sweeter.”
“Ah!” I cried, “you deal in abstract nouns then.”
“That’s more like it. It’s a clumsy way of putting it, but it’s fairly
right. We supply, or, to speak more accurately, we groce, all the
Emotions to the Solar System, and trade’s very slack just now in that
branch. We are doing rather better in States of Being, and we’ve just
got a new assortment of Deaths. Now, once for all, do you intend to buy
anything?”
I remembered with joy that I had a couple of sovereigns and some loose
silver in my pocket. All my life long I had suffered from want of
emotional experiences. I had always regretted the want of variety, the
general flatness and dulness. If the delusion or reality--I neither
knew nor cared now which it was--would only last, I was determined to
gratify to the full my fine perceptions. Especially was I struck with
the mention of the Pure White Love. I may confess at once that I never
got on much with women. I have a natural dignity and reserve that is
sometimes mistaken for nervousness. I fancy it sets women against me.
Somehow I am never able to say to them quite what I want to say. I
have often looked at a young girl, and thought that if she could only
know me as I really was--if she could once regard me as apart from
wretched circumstances, my poverty, my shabby clothes, my unfortunate
reserve--she might abate something of her pretty scorn.
“Certainly, I intend to buy something,” I said. “To commence with, I
should like to see some samples of that peculiar Love you mentioned.”
“Dear me!” broke in Mr. Joseph. “How many more times am I to tell you?
You can’t _see_ samples. You can feel them if you like. James!”
“Yes, Joseph,” answered the boyish voice from the further end of the
shop.
“Let’s have some of the ‘Pure White,’--look sharp.”
“Right.”
“Now then,” continued Mr. Joseph. “Take that chair. Adopt an easy,
natural position. Don’t cross the legs. If you find the light too
strong, you can blink the eyes once or twice, it won’t make any
difference. Head a little more this way. You’re frowning. That’s
better. Now then, we’re ready. Steady, please.”
The light certainly was too strong. A sudden flash blinded me, and when
I recovered my sight I was apparently no longer in the Grocery. I was
in a dimly-lighted conservatory and the middle of a sentence. I have
never been able to find out what could have been the beginning of it.
“... which it is not, and never was,” I was saying. “I am content only
to have told you, and now I relinquish you. Let this be my farewell, my
good-bye to you before I sail from England. In books that we read, a
man would have asked you for one clasp of the hands, or even one kiss,
but I neither ask nor wish for that.”
I looked up, and saw the girl to whom I was speaking. I had certainly
never seen her before, but yet the figure was familiar. She sat in her
white dress, shaded from the light by some tropical plant. It was with
passionate and hopeless adoration that I looked at her, and yet I was
full of a strange content; it seemed to be enough to have loved her. I
saw that her head was slightly turned away from me, and that she was
sobbing.
“I am sorry,” I went on, “that I have made you cry. I want you to be
happy, and I know there is only one way.”
“I never knew it was going to be like this,” she said tremulously.
For the matter of that, neither had I when I first ordered the first
sample pure white. But it struck me as being all quite natural. Some of
that peace which must come to men of a great soul, had come to me.
“Good-bye,” I said. “I am not going to do anything desperate, anything
that could cause you regret. It is enough for me to have loved you, and
to feel that in comparison the rest of my life is one....”
Just as I had begun in the middle of a sentence so I ended in the
middle of a sentence. The dim-lit conservatory and the maiden vanished,
and I found myself once more in the Celestial Grocery.
“Do you like it?” asked Mr. Joseph’s voice.
“Yes,” I said, hesitatingly, “it is grand, it is sublime. But I don’t
think I could stand very much of it. How much is it a pound?”
“We don’t sell it by the pound; we sell it by the spasm.”
“Then,” I said, “I’ll take six spasms.”
“James, six of the pure white.”
“Right,” said the voice of James.
For a moment I tried to recall the beautiful girl in white whom I had
just seen. I wondered how my first sentence began and how my last
sentence would have ended. I seemed to have walked for a while upon
those heights of love that reach beyond the fires of passion, and on
which lie the snows of perpetual purity. I felt that my self-respect
had considerably increased in consequence. Here I was interrupted by
Mr. Joseph.
“What will be the next order?”
“I have often longed,” I replied, “for a little real happiness.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Joseph. “But that is a blend. You buy the ingredients
and you blend them yourself. Unfortunately, we do not provide
Incomes. We have a Literary Fame which gives great satisfaction.
‘Political Success’ is in considerable demand. Then there’s ‘Religious
Exaltation’--not much asked for lately, I’m afraid. ‘Requited Love’ is
not expensive, but we’ve had complaints that it doesn’t wear well. Of
course there’s Death by Drowning, Death by----”
“Stop, Mr. Joseph,” I cried, “I have no desire to die.” I had already
decided what should be my next experiment; for even under-masters have
their ambitions. “I think,” I said, “that I should rather like to try
the ‘Political Success.’”
Mr. Joseph took my order with alacrity, and the same process as before
was repeated. Once more I seemed to have left the grocery. I was
standing on a balcony, my hat in my hand, and below me in the street
there was a surging mass of people. As far as my sight could reach
I could see eager, excited faces upturned. I was just concluding a
speech, and, as before, was in the middle of a sentence.
“... not derogatory to the national sense--(cheers)--of what is the
fittest, the truest, and the best way--(renewed applause)--of proving
to those who at one time may have thought otherwise, that, in spite
of all preconceived opinions, which, if they are not praiseworthy--and
I do not say they are so--yet may with some show of justice--(hear,
hear)--be asserted to have had their origin in a sentiment felt by
humanity at large, and more especially by the English-speaking races,
and to which we to-night, with the generosity of the conquerors
towards the conquered--(loud cheers)--can well afford to extend our
fullest indulgence. It is not only in the family but in a man’s public
capacity; not only by the fireside, but also beneath that fiercer light
that beats upon the high offices of this nation--(loud and prolonged
cheering)--not only with the....”
I would have given anything to have gone on a little further. I do not
even know what my politics were, although I am inclined to form an
opinion from internal evidences in my speech. But I never in all my
life felt such a delightful sense of exhilaration, triumph, and power.
When I came to, I found myself seated on the floor of the grocery,
perspiring profusely.
“Oh, that was good,” I exclaimed, “very good!” I picked myself up, and
inquired eagerly what the price was, and how it was sold.
“It is expensive,” said Mr. Joseph, solemnly, “very expensive; and we
sell it in bursts.”
I did not like to ask for further details. I expected that Mr. Joseph
would give me a reasonable amount of credit, and with the literary fame
that I intended to buy I thought that I should soon be able to pay
for everything. But I thought it wise to order only two bursts of the
“Political Success.”
“Mr. Joseph,” I said, “I hardly know what to order next. I should
like to have a price-list, and a week to think it over. I never bought
anything abstract before. At present I’ve got only some ‘Disinterested
Love’ and some ‘Political Success’; do you think you could let me have
some Literary Fame, Musical Ability, Personal Charm, Popularity, and
Contentment?”
“It’s a large order,” said Mr. Joseph, “but we will do our best to
execute it. James, will you see about those articles?”
“I will,” said James.
“And when shall I have them?”
There was no answer.
“I should like to know when I can have them,” I continued. “I don’t
want to hurry you. Any time in the course of a year would do. I can
give you a reference if you like. The master of St. Cecilia’s knows all
about me. But as I did not imagine I was coming here to-night, I have
brought hardly any money with me. However, if you would not object to
taking two pounds on account----”
I pulled out my two sovereigns, and laid them on the counter. As I did
so I looked up. I had ceased to be capable of surprise, or I think
I should have been surprised. Before me, on the other side of the
counter, stood a young girl. Perhaps I should more accurately describe
her as a young angel, except that she had no wings or halo. She was
dressed in some loose, white garment, which looked like the apotheosis
of a night-gown. I could not say within a year or two how old she was,
but she seemed to be on the verge of womanhood. Her figure was tall and
slight. Her small white hands were clasped before her. Her face was,
perhaps, a little wan and pale, but full of the most spiritual beauty.
The expression upon it was one of sweet, calm seriousness. Her eyes
seemed to be looking sadly at something far off. Her hair was long and
dark, and fell loosely about her shoulders. I gazed at her a long time
before I could speak.
“Mr. Joseph?” I stammered out, questioningly.
“Joseph and James,” she said, in a low musical voice, “have gone
downstairs to feed Joseph’s body. They sent me up here to wait on you.
What are these?”
She took up the two sovereigns I had placed on the counter.
“A mere trifle,” I said. “I thought that, perhaps, it would be better
to pay a trifle on account. If I had known that I was coming here, I
would have brought more--I would, indeed.”
“Will you please put them away?” she said, slowly. “They have no value.
I will tell you about it soon. I have known you for a long time--known
you so well.”
I was entranced by her beauty, and could hardly find words to speak,
but I muttered the usual commonplaces. It was very stupid of me, but I
did not seem to recall her face. I did not even remember her name.
“No,” she replied, “you have never seen me before. You will know my
name one day, but not yet. I have watched you for years, and sometimes
I have been with you. I am glad that you came here to-night, for I have
often wished to speak with you.”
It is possible that I may have looked a little incredulous, for
she fixed her eyes full upon mine, leaning across the counter, and
whispered something to me. I do not see that I am called upon to write
down what she said. It was quite personal and private. If I did record
it, it would probably be misunderstood. But it answered its purpose.
It made me feel that she knew me indeed, that here I had no impression
to make and none to mar. There was no longer any barrier of reserve
between us.
“And at last you have come to me,” she said. “No one can overhear us;
we are quite alone.”
My cheeks were flushed and my voice trembled. “You do not talk,” I
said, “as the women I met on earth, nor as Joseph and James did. No
earthly woman that I know would have whispered to me the things that
you did.”
“You are not angry with me for it?” she said.
I loved her for it, but I could not tell her so. For a moment or two I
gazed at her in a kind of rapture. “You are very beautiful,” I said at
last.
“Yes; but that is not of any real consequence here. Here the body is
always beautiful, because the spirit never spoils it. Would that I
could alter your nature and make it like ours! But they told me that
you would look at me as on your earth a man looks at a woman. I do not
understand that. I do not know your way--ah, do not look at me so.”
“I cannot help it; you draw my eyes towards you.”
“Do not say that!” she cried, in a distressed voice. “Do not think
of it. I can think, and speak, and love when I am not in the body. I
almost wish that I had not come to you like this. If I had been only a
voice I should still have desired you.”
Like most people of a shy disposition, I have an occasional access
of boldness. “Do you mean that you do not understand the kind of
attraction that a woman has for a man? Do you not know what flushed
cheeks, and longing looks, and trembling voice mean? And yet I could
believe that the earthly love would be possible to you.”
“The lower is always possible for the higher,” she said. “But that is
not what I want. I long to-night to teach you the other love. But now
that I am face to face with you I have no words. There are none in any
language that will tell you. I want names for things of which you know
nothing--things which with men and women of your world do not exist. I
should feel no shame in speaking to you of it, for there is no shame in
our love. Your love is full of shame. That was why at first I whispered
to you. That was why I told you that no one could hear us. It was for
your sake, not mine.” She stopped and sighed.
“Why do you sigh?” I asked.
“Because I cannot say what I want.”
“Try,” I said.
“No, it is no use now. What have you been buying?”
I gave her a list of my purchases, and she went over them, as it seemed
to me, a little sadly. “You have not bought the best things,” she said.
“But they will cost you all that you have here, one gardenia and a
sprig of maidenhair.”
“Is that flower really worth more than the two sovereigns that I
offered you?”
“Yes, we have none here, and flowers are the only purity on your earth.”
“But this will die in an hour.”
“No,” she said, “it would have died there, but here it will never die.”
As I laid it on the counter I noticed that even the maidenhair was
quite fresh.
“If I had only known,” I said, “I would have loaded my cab with
flowers. Can I not come back again?”
“No--never.”
“Then let me change the things that I have bought. They seemed high and
noble, especially the White Love.”
“Yes, you shall change them. You did not value the Love because it was
noble, but because it made you feel noble.”
“And what shall I buy for myself?”
“Nothing. If you had kept the goods that you ordered, you would have
made a little flutter on an indescribably small portion of a rather
insignificant world. You would have been called the great poet, the
eminent statesman, and it would not have helped you any further--it
would not have raised you any higher. Your nature would still have
been bounded on the earth by earthly possibilities. No, you shall buy
nothing for yourself. There is only one step that you can take that
will bring you nearer me. There is only one thing that you can do that
has a real value.”
“You mean self-denial,” I said. “I will obey you. I surrender all that
I had bought. You shall give me instead the best thing for some one
else--for whom?”
“For your own father.”
I bent my head in shame. It was a subject of which I could hardly bear
to speak; but she with great tenderness, laying one of her little hands
softly and caressingly on mine, dropped her voice almost to a whisper.
“Yes, for your father. My poor boy, there are no secrets between you
and me. There is to be no shame between you and me. I know all. In
the same asylum where your grandfather died your father now lies. His
reason is gone. A horrible darkness has come over his mind. He lies
there moaning and----”
“Stop!” I cried. “For pity’s sake say no more. You are right. Give me
the best thing for him.”
“It shall be so,” she said. “And now the end of your time here grows
near. But you have taken the first step. You and I have advanced a
little further towards the sacred unity of the new love. Come, let us
go and look down at the stars, and I will tell you about them.”
She came round to my side of the counter, and we passed through the
door together. Her bare feet trod lightly on the crystal blocks with
which the street was paved. I gazed at her in an ecstasy of adoration.
The cab was still standing there, and the horse looked round at us. He
grinned horribly, showing his yellow fangs.
“Oh my! ain’t it sweet!” he called out.
“You vulgar beast!” I said to him angrily, “if you say another word,
I’ll take that whip and simply flay you.”
“You needn’t distress yourself,” he answered, “because you’ll be asleep
in two minutes.”
I saw that she had taken no notice of the unmannerly animal. She had
crossed the street, and was leaning over the low stone wall, with her
beautiful head supported on one hand; I saw that my most dignified
course was to follow her, and I did so.
“Yes,” she said, pointing downwards with her finger, “those are
the other worlds. They were put there to be a heating and lighting
apparatus for the most insignificant of them--at least that is the
prevalent creed, for the most insignificant. Do not believe it. On each
one there is life, and for each one there is a purpose; all are part
of one scheme that----”
The horse was quite right. At this point, I rested my head on my arms
as I leaned over the parapet, and went fast asleep. I can never forgive
myself for it, but I was powerless to prevent it. I do not know how
long I slept, but I woke suddenly. She was no longer leaning over the
parapet; she stood on the pathway, gazing upwards, with a strange light
in her eyes. Of course she was in the middle of a sentence. That was
only part of the generally unsatisfactory nature of everything.
“----would get new experiences, new data. You would think and imagine
new things. You would know what the new love means. I can only speak to
you as a woman to a man, but I do not look at you as a woman would. She
would see only a poor little schoolmaster, not very beautiful, rather
sleepy-headed, in a dress-suit much too tight for him. I too can see
that. But I see also a life that long ago came out into the darkness
hand-in-hand with mine. Had you been placed in this world, you would
have known as I know; but I came here, and you were sent elsewhere. Out
of the same clay the potter makes two vessels, one to honour and one to
dishonour.”
“And that is extremely unjust,” I said.
“It would be quite impossible for you to think otherwise; but you are
wrong. You will soon know that you are wrong.”
“When?” I asked.
“On the day that you know my name, when the earthly love that you feel
for me is changed to the new love of which it is the shadow, when we
come back together, you and I, out of the darkness into the light.”
“Where is the light?”
“Look upwards. There are no more stars, and above all seems dark. And
the darkness flows on like a river, on and on. But the river will run
dry at the last, the darkness will have passed at the last, and then we
shall enter into the light.”
“And now,” said the voice of the unconscionable cab-horse behind us, “I
will ask you to join with me in singing the last hymn on the paper.”
“What on earth,” I exclaimed testily, “is the point of making that
perfectly idiotic remark?”
“Mere absent-mindedness,” the brute answered. “I thought from the
general style of the conversation that I was at some missionary
meeting. That’s all.”
“At any rate,” I said, “you need not interrupt a--a lady.”
“Lady! S’help me! That high-toned, female grocer’s assistant, a lady!”
The beast positively shrieked with laughter. “Get into the cab, you
little fool, and let’s get home. There’s no place like home.”
I sprang at the cab, seized the whip, and determined to take my
revenge. But I never got it. The agile beast waltzed round and round
with amazing rapidity in the middle of the street. I struck out wildly;
but though I occasionally hit the cab, I never succeeded in hitting the
horse. All this time the cabman remained motionless. Suddenly the brute
stopped, and backed the cab right into me. I fell down on the pavement
by the low wall. I picked myself up and gazed around.
She was no longer there.
I staggered across the road. The lights were out in the grocery. I
tried the door, but it was locked. I shook it, and called loudly, but
no answer came. Once more I turned savagely on the horse, but at the
first stroke the whip broke in my hands.
“Now then,” he yelled, “you little fool, get into the cab, and let’s
enter into the Light!”
For a moment I stood there helpless. I felt weak and sick with my fall.
Then I flung down the broken whip, and got into the cab, which started
instantly at full speed. I buried my face in my hands, and burst into
tears.
When, after a moment, I looked up again, there was the roar of the
London streets about me, and we were within a hundred yards of my
lodgings. The cab stopped at them, and I got out. It was evident that
the cabman knew nothing about what had happened; he looked cheery,
comfortable, and commonplace. I saw that there would be no use in
speaking to him about it. I merely paid him three times his proper
fare, to compensate him for the loss of his whip, which, by the way, he
did not seem to have noticed.
I was very tired, and soon went off to sleep. I had lost fame, and
I had gained for my father a return to sanity. It was worth the
sacrifice. He should come to London, and live with me. It was years
since I had been able to speak to him. Then slumber interrupted my
thoughts.
As soon as I woke in the morning I sprang from my bed, and took up my
dress-coat. No, it was no dream. The gardenia and maidenhair were gone,
and my father had regained his reason. Would that I could see her once
more, and thank her.
There came a tap at my door.
“All right, Mrs. Smith,” I cried. “I’m getting up.”
“There’s a telegram for you, sir.”
It was pushed under the door. I opened it. It was from the doctor at
the asylum where my father was placed, and it read as follows:--
“Your father died suddenly early this morning. Please come at once.”
There have been no further developments, and I do not know what to do.
I feel that I must see her, and ask her. I cannot understand. And,
alas! I cannot get to her.
* * * * *
Since writing the above, I have had a letter from my Principal.
He wants my resignation. He says something about “strangeness of
manner--medical advice--real kindness to me--hope for recovery.” Mrs.
Smith has asked me, with tears in her eyes, to leave my apartments.
She says that I have been most regular in my payments, and in every
way showed myself to be a perfect gentleman; but the other lodgers are
frightened of me, and I frighten her sometimes. She can feel for me,
because she had a cousin who once went off like that; but would I mind
going?
Well, I have resigned my post, and to-night I leave my lodgings. I am
very lonely.
“BILL.”
_THE STORY OF A BOY WHOM THE GODS LOVED._
Bill came slowly up the steps from a basement flat in Pond Buildings,
crossed the pavement, and sat down on the kerb-stone in the sunshine,
with his feet in a delightful puddle. He was reflecting.
“All that fuss about a dead byeby!” he said to himself.
He was quite a little boy, with a dirty face, gipsy eyes, and a love
for animals. He had slept the deep sleep of childhood the night before,
and had heard nothing of what was happening. In the early morning,
however, he had been enlightened by his father--a weak man, with a
shuffling gait, who tried to do right and generally failed.
“Bill, cummere. Larst night there were a byeby come to be your sister
if she’d grow’d. But she didn’t live more’n hour. An’ that’s why your
awnt’s ’ere, an’ mind yer do whort she tells yer, an’ don’t go inter
the other room, an’ don’t do nothin’ ’cep’ whort yer told, or I’ll
break yer ’ead for yer, sure’s death, I will!”
Then Bill’s father had gone away to his work, being unable to afford
the loss of a day; and Bill’s vehement, red-haired aunt had come into
the kitchen, and shaken him, and abused him, and given him some
breakfast. Bill’s aunt was one of those unfortunate people who cannot
love one person without hating three others to make up for it. Just
at present she was loving Bill’s mother, her sister, very much, and
retained her self-respect by being very strict with Bill’s father, with
Bill himself, and with the doctor. She instructed Bill that he was not
to go to school that morning. He was to remain absolutely quiet in the
kitchen, because he might be wanted to run errands and do odd jobs. For
some time Bill had obeyed her, and then monotony tempted him to include
the little yard at the back in his definition of the kitchen. All the
basement flats in Pond Buildings have little yards at the back. Most
of the inhabitants use them as drying-grounds. In some of them there
is a dead shrub or the remains of a sanguine geranium that failed; in
all of them there are cinders and very old meat-tins. Now, when Bill
went out into the yard, he found the black cat, which he called Simon
Peter, asleep in the sun on the wall. Simon Peter did not belong to any
one; she roamed about at the back of Pond Buildings, dodged anything
that was thrown at her, and ate unspeakable things. She had formed a
melancholy and unremunerative attachment to Bill; her name had been
suggested to him by stray visits to a Sunday-school, forced on him
during a short season when his father, to use his own phrase, had got
religion. “Siming Peter,” said Bill, as he scratched her gently under
the ear, “Siming Peter, my cat, come in ’ere along o’ me and ’ave some
milk.”
It is not at all probable that Simon Peter was deceived by this. She
must have known that, with the best intentions in the world, Bill
could not do so much as this for her. Yet she blinked at him with her
lazy green eyes, and followed him from the yard into the kitchen. Bill
filled a saucer with water, and put it down on the ground before her.
“There yer are, Siming Peter,” he said; “an’ that’s better for yer nor
any milk.” Simon Peter put up her back slowly, mewed contemptuously,
and trotted out into the yard again. Bill, dashing after her, trod on
the saucer and broke it, and overturned a chair. In another moment he
was in the clutches of his fierce aunt.
“Do you want to kill your blessed mother, you devil? Didn’t I tell yer
to sit quoite? An’ a good saucer broke, with the poor dead corpse of
your byeby sister lyin’ in the next room. Go hout! You’re more nuisance
nor you’re wuth. See ’ere. Don’t you show your ugly ’ead ’ere agin
afore night. An’ when yer comes back I’ll tell your father of yer, an’
’e ’ll skin yer alive. Dinner? Not for such as you. Hout yer git.”
So Bill had been turned out, and now sat with his feet in a delightful
puddle, reflecting for a minute or two on dead babies, injustice,
puddles, and other things. It was a larger puddle, as far as Bill
could see, than any other in the street, and it was this which made
it so charming. But a puddle is of no use to any one who has not got
something to float on it. If you have something to float on it you can
imagine boats, and races, and storms, and it becomes a magnificent
playground for the imagination; otherwise the biggest puddle is simply
a puddle, and it is nothing more. So Bill started down the street to
look for something which would float, a scrap of paper or a straw. He
was stopped by a lanky unkempt girl with yellow hair, who was leaning
on a broom that was almost bald, outside an open door. She was four or
five years older than Bill, and she was very fond of him. The girls
of the wretched neighbourhood for the most part rather petted Bill;
they did so, without knowing their reason, because he was quaint, and
pretty, and little. He was rather dirty it was true, but then so were
they; and for the most part they were not so pretty.
“Bill,” said the yellow-haired girl, “why awnt yer at school? You’ll
ketch it, Bill.”
“No, I ’ont. They kep’ me, ’cos we’ve got a byeby, an’ the byeby’s
dead. Then they tunned me out for breakin’ a saucer when I was goin’
after Siming Peter what I were feedin’, an’ I ain’t to ’ave no dinner,
and I ain’t to come back afore night, and when I do come back I’m goin’
to be walloped. I wish I was dead!”
“Oh, Bill, you _are_ a bad boy; what are yer goin’ to do?”
“Play ships at that puddle. I was lookin’ for sutthin’ what ’ud do for
ships, an’ can’t find nothin’.”
“An’ what’ll yer do about dinner?”
“I ain’t goin’ to ’ave no dinner,” said Bill, solemnly, “I’m goin’ to
starve. They don’t keer. Dead byebies is what _they_ like.”
The lanky girl leaned her broom against the wall, sat down on the
doorstep, and commenced the research of a pocket; the pocket yielded
her one penny.
“Look ’ere, Bill,” she said, “you take this and git yourself sutthin’
to eat.”
Bill shook his head, and pressed his lips together. He was much moved.
“I ’ad it give me a week ago, and I sived it ’cos there warn’t nothin’
what I wanted. So you take it. I don’t want it. If yer like, yer can
give us a kiss for it.” She pressed it into his hand. “There ain’t
no other little boy I know what I’d give it to,” she added rather
inconsistently.
Bill nodded his head, and the lips grew a little tremulous. He had been
treated cruelly all the morning, and this sudden change to sympathy and
generosity was almost too much for him. He kissed the yellow-haired
girl--once timidly and then suddenly with great affection.
“Why, Bill,” she said, “I ain’t done nothin’ to ’urt yer, yer look
ommust as if yer was goin’ to cry.”
“No, I ain’t,” replied Bill, finding words with difficulty, “but--but I
’ate ev’rybody in the world ’cep’ you.”
Then he walked away with great dignity, and every nerve in his
excitable little body quivering. He felt on the whole rather more
wretched than before. The contrast made him feel both sides of it
more deeply. He had forgotten now about the beautiful puddle and his
intention to play ships. He wandered down the main street, and then
down a side street which led behind a grim, frowning church. And here
he found something which attracted his attention. It was a dirty little
shop which a small tobacconist and an almost microscopical grocer
had used successively as a last step before bankruptcy. It had then
remained for some time unoccupied. But now the whole of the window was
occupied with one great bright picture, before which a small crowd had
gathered. It represented a beautiful mermaid swimming in a beautiful
sea, accompanied by a small octopus and some boiled shrimps. Her hair
was very golden and very long; her eyes were very blue; she was very
pink and very fat. Underneath was the announcement--
THE MERMAID OF THE WESTERN PACIFIC!
Positively to be Seen Within!!
FOR A FEW DAYS ONLY.
ADMISSION ONE PENNY
An old man was standing in the doorway, with a tattered red curtain
behind him, supplying further details of the history and personal
appearance of the mermaid. He looked slightly military, distinctly
intemperate, and very unfortunate, yet he was energetic.
“What it comes to is this--for a few days only I am offering two
’igh-class entertainments at the price of one. The performance
commences with an exhibition by that most marvellous Spanish conjurer,
Madumarsell Rimbini, and concludes with that unparalleled wonder of
the world, the mermaid of the Western Pasuffolk. I have been asked
frequent if it pays me to do this. No, it does _not_ pay me. I am
doing it entirely as an advertisement. Kindly take notice that this
mermaid is not a shadder, faked up with lookin’ glasses. She is
real--solid--genuine--discovered by an English officer while cruisin’
in the Western Pasuffolk, and purchased direct from ’im by myself. The
performance will commence in one minute. If any gentleman is not able
to stay now, I may remark that the performances will be repeated agin
this evenin’ from seven to ten. What it comes to is this--for a few
days only, etc.”
Of course Bill had seen shows of a kind before. He had seen a ’bus
horse stumble, and almost pick itself up, and stumble again, and
finally go down half on the kerb-stone. That had been attractive, but
there had been nothing to pay for it. Again, in his Sunday-school days,
he had been present at an entertainment where the exhilaration of solid
buns and dissolving views had been gently tempered by a short address.
That too was attractive, but it had been free. And now it would not
be possible to see this beautiful buoyant creature swimming in clear
shrimp-haunted waters unless he paid a penny for it, the only penny
that he possessed. Never before had he paid anything to go anywhere.
The temptation was masterful. It gripped him, and drew him towards the
tattered red curtain that hung over the entrance. In another minute he
had paid his penny, and stood within.
At one end of the shop a low stage had been erected. On the stage was
something which looked like a large packing-case with a piece of red
baize thrown over it. There was a small table, on which were two packs
of playing-cards and a brightly coloured pill-box, and a tired fat
woman in a low dress of peculiar frowziness. As the audience entered
she put a smile on her face, where it remained fixed as if it had
been pinned. The performance commenced with three clumsy card-tricks.
Then she requested some one in the audience to put a halfpenny in the
painted pill-box and see it changed into a shilling. The audience felt
that they had been weak in paying a penny to see the show, and on
this last point they were adamant. They would put no halfpennies in no
pill-boxes. They were now firm. So also was the Spanish conjurer, and
this trick was omitted. She intimated that she would now proceed to
the second part of the entertainment, the exhibition of the mermaid of
the Western Pacific. She removed, dramatically, the red-baize cover,
disclosing a glass case. The audience pressed forward to examine its
contents. The case was filled for the most part with those romantic
rocks and grasses which conventionality has appointed to be a suitable
setting for stuffed canaries, or stuffed dogs, or anything that is
stuffed. There was a background of painted sky and sea; and in the
front there was a small, most horrible figure, looking straight
at Bill out of hideous, green, glassy eyes. It was not the lovely
creature depicted in the window outside. It was a monstrous thing,
a contemptible fraud to the practised intelligence, but to Bill’s
childish, excitable mind a thing of unspeakable horror and fascination.
The lower half was a wilted, withered fish; then came a girdle of
seaweed, and then something which was near to being human, yellow and
waxy, with a ghastly face, a bald head, and those eyes that would keep
looking at Bill. He shut his own eyes for a second; when he opened them
again the monstrous thing was still looking at him.
There were two men standing near to Bill. One of them was a very young
and very satirical carpenter, with a foot-rule sticking out of his
coat-pocket. “So that’s a mermaid!” he remarked. “Yer call that a
mermaid--oh!--indeed, a mermaid--oh, yes!”
“Seems to me,” said the other man, middle-aged, cadaverous, and
dressed in rusty black, “that it’s a sight more like a dead byeby.”
“Well, you _ought_ to know,” replied the satirical carpenter, grinning.
Bill heard this. So in that basement flat in Pond Buildings, Bill’s
home, there was something lying quite still and waiting for him, to
frighten him. He had never thought what a dead baby would be like. His
mind began to work in flashes. The first flash reminded him of some
horrible stories which his red-haired, vehement aunt had told him, to
terrify him into being good. He had objected at the close of one story
that dead people could not walk about.
“You don’t know,” his aunt had replied, “nobody knows, what dead people
can do.” In the second flash he imagined that he had gone home, had
been lectured by his aunt, and beaten by his father, and had cried
himself to sleep. He would wake up at night, when all was quiet--he
felt sure of it--and the room would not be quite dark. He would see
by the white moonlight a horrible, yellow, waxy thing crawling across
the floor. It would not go to the right or to the left, but straight
towards him. It would be his dead baby sister, and it would have a face
like the face of the mermaid, and it would stare at him. He would be
unable to call out. It would come nearer and nearer, and at last it
would touch him. Then he would die of fright.
No, he would not go home, not until the dead baby had been taken away.
As the audience crowded out through the narrow doorway, Bill touched
the man in shabby black:
“Please, sir, ’ow long is it afore they bury dead babies?”
The man stared at him searchingly. “What do yer want to know that for?
Depends on the weather partly, and on the inclinations of the bereaved
party. ‘Soon as possible’ ’s allus my advice, but they let it go for
days frequent.”
Bill thanked him, and walked aimlessly away. He could not get the
terror out of his mind. He walked through street after street, so
absorbed in horrible thoughts that he hardly noticed what direction he
was taking, and only just escaped being run over. He had been wandering
for over an hour when he came across two boys, whom he knew, playing
marbles. This was companionship and diversion for his thoughts. For
some time he watched the game with interest, and then one of the
players pulled from his pocket two large marbles of greenish glass, and
set them rolling. Bill turned away at once, for he had been reminded
of those green eyes. He imagined that they were still looking at him;
but, in his imagination, they belonged not to the mermaid, but to the
dead baby. He wished again and again that he had never been to that
show. He was growing almost desperate with terror. Of course, his state
of mind was to some extent due to the fact that he had eaten nothing
for eight hours. But then, Bill did not know this. Suddenly he gave
a great start, and a gasp for breath, for he had been touched on the
shoulder. He looked up and saw his father. Now Bill’s father had drunk
two glasses of bad beer during his dinner hour, and in consequence he
was feeling somewhat angry and somewhat self-righteous, for his head
was exceedingly weak and poor. He addressed Bill very solemnly--
“Loit’rin’ in the streets! loit’rin’ and playin’ in the streets!
What’s the good o’ my bringing of yer up in the fear o’ Gawd?”
Bill had no answer to make; so his father aimed a blow at him, which
Bill dodged.
“All right,” his father continued, “I’m sent out on a jorb, and I ain’t
got the time to wallup yer now. But you mark my words--this very night,
as sure as my name’s what it is, I’ll knock yer blawstid ’ead off.”
At any other time this would have frightened Bill. But now it came as a
positive relief. There is no fear so painful, so maddening, as the fear
of the supernatural. The promise that he should have his head knocked
off had in itself but little charm or attraction. But in that case he
knew what to fear and from whence to fear it. It took his thoughts away
for a few minutes from the horror of that dead baby, whose ghastly face
he pictured to himself so clearly. But it was only for a few minutes;
the face came back again to his mind and haunted him. He could not
escape from it. He was more than ever determined that he would not go
home; he dared not spend a night in the next room to it. Already the
afternoon was closing in, and Bill had no notion where he was to go for
the night. For the present he decided to make his way to the green; he
would probably meet other boys there that he knew.
The green to which he went is much frequented by the poor of the
south-west. The railway skirts one side of it, and gives it an
additional attraction to children. Bill was tired out with walking.
He flung himself down on the grass to rest. His exhaustion at last
overcame his fears, and he fell asleep. He slept for a long time, and
in his sleep he had a dream.
It was, so it seemed to him in his dream, late in the evening, and he
was standing outside the door of the basement flat. He had knocked,
and was waiting to be admitted. Suddenly he noticed that the door was
just ajar. He pushed it open and entered. He called, but there was no
answer. All was dark. The outer door swung to with a bang behind him.
He thought that he would wait in the kitchen by the light of the fire
until some one came. He felt his way to the kitchen and sat down in
front of the fire.
It had burnt very low, and the furniture was only just distinguishable
by the light of it. As he was waiting he heard very faintly the sound
of breathing. It did not frighten him; but he could not understand it,
because as far as he could see there was no living thing in the room
except himself. He thought that he would strike a light and discover
what it was. The matches were in a cupboard on the right-hand side of
the fireplace. He could only just reach the fastening, and it took him
some little time to undo it. The moment the fastening was undone the
door flew open, and something yellowish-white fell or rather leapt
out upon him, fixing little quickly-moving fingers in his hair. With
a scream he fell to the floor. He had shut his eyes in horror, but he
felt compelled to open them again to see what this thing was that clung
to him, writhing and panting. A little spurt of flame had shot up, and
showed him the face. Its eyes were blinking and rolling. Its mouth
moved horribly and convulsively, and there was foam on the white lips.
The face was close to his own; it drew nearer; it touched him. It was
wet.
Bill suddenly woke and sprang to his feet, shivering and maddened
with terror. The green was dark and deserted. A cold, strong wind
had sprung up, and he heard it howling dismally. An impulse seized
him to run--to run for his life. For a moment he hesitated; and then,
under the shadow of the wall, slinking along in the darkness, he saw
something white coming towards him, and with a quick gasp he turned and
ran. He paid no heed to the direction in which he was going; he dared
not look behind, for he felt sure that the nameless horror was behind
him; he ran until he was breathless, and then walked a few paces, and
ran again. As he crossed the road on the outer edge of the green, a
policeman stopped and looked at him suspiciously. Bill did not even see
the policeman. His one idea was escape.
It happened that he ran in the direction of the river. He had left the
road now, and was following a muddy track that led through some grimy,
desolate market-gardens. All around him there was horror. It screamed
in the screaming wind with a voice that was half human; it took shape
in the darkness, and lean, white arms, convulsively active, seemed to
be snatching at him as he passed; the pattering of blown leaves was
changed by it into the pattering of something ghastly, coming very
quickly after him. For one second he paused on the river’s brink; and
then, pressing both his hands tightly over his eyes, he flung himself
into the water.
And the river went on unconcerned, and the laws of Nature did not
deviate from their regular course. So the boy was drowned. It was
a pity; for he was in some ways a lovable boy, and there were
possibilities in him.
* * * * *
Bill’s aunt was putting the untidy bedroom straight when his mother,
opening her eyes and turning a little on the bed, said, in a low, tired
voice--
“I want Bill. Wheer’s Bill?”
“I sent ’im out, dearie; ’e’ll be back d’rectly. Don’t you worry
yourself about Bill. Why, that drattid lamp’s a-shinin’ strite onto
your eyes. I’ll turn it down.”
There was a moment’s pause, while the vehement woman--quiet enough
now--arranged the lamp and took her place by the bedside. She smoothed
the young mother’s faded hair with one hand. “Go to sleep, dearie,” she
said.
Then she began to sing in a hushed, quavering voice. It was a favourite
hymn, and for devotional purposes she rarely used more than one
vowel-sound--
“Urbud wuth me! Fust fulls thur uvvun-tud.”
THE GIRL AND THE BEETLE.
_A STORY OF HERE AND HEREAFTER._
On the brushwood and groups of trees that here and there broke the
monotony of the flat and sandy common were the marks of autumn. The
wind was soft and mild, and the leaves fell gently, and the white
clouds sailed away into the distance steadily and unquestioningly. Far
off the glint of sunlight fell on the narrow, sluggish river. Winds and
leaves, clouds and river--all were going home, with a calm meekness
that aggravated the dying beetle. It was a good day to die on, and the
beetle knew it; but yet he was dissatisfied.
Above him there hovered two unkempt birds, tormented by a sense of
what in all the circumstances was the correct thing to do. Each bird
had sighted the beetle, and neither would come and take it; for each
thought that the other would suppose him to be greedy. Of these two
birds the one was magnanimous and the other was nervous, and both were
hungry.
“There’s a large beetle down there,” the first remarked, “but I don’t
know that I care about it particularly. Won’t you take it?”
There was nothing that his companion would have liked better, but his
unfortunate nervousness prevented him from availing himself of the
generous offer. “No, thanks,” he stammered, “I couldn’t deprive you.”
“But I really don’t want it,” said Magnanimity.
“Nor do I,” replied Nervousness. “Let’s go for a little fly.”
So they flew slowly away, feeling empty and mistaken, with a sense that
the world must be out of joint where there were nearly always two birds
to one beetle, and both the birds understood etiquette. And the beetle
went on dying.
He had not during his previous life been a good beetle. He was strongly
built, and his constitution, which had now given way, had always been
considered robust. Female beetles had thought him uncommonly handsome;
yet with all these gifts he had not been a good beetle; on the contrary
he had been extremely immoral. He lay stretched on the sand by the edge
of the pathway, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sunlight.
“Mary,” he called, a little querulously, “come out.”
It is difficult to understand how the beetle could call without making
any noise. It should be remembered, however, that sound is to beetles
very much what silence is to us. A certain kind of silence, on the
other hand, answers to what we call conversation, and can be varied so
as to express all that we can do by changing the tone of the voice.
The small female of depressed appearance, who hurried from the shelter
of a stone in answer to this summons, quite understood that she had
been called querulously. The two unkempt birds should undoubtedly have
waited.
“Thomas,” said the beetle who had been addressed as Mary, “I think you
called me?”
“Have you stopped crying?”
“Yes, dear; I won’t cry any more, if you don’t like it.”
“You know I don’t like it. Have you got any new ideas?”
“Well, Thomas, nothing that could be absolutely called new, perhaps;
but I remember a little story that my poor dear mother used to----”
“Stop!” said Thomas, “you’re a stale, heavy-minded female, and you can
get back under the stone. I was going to let you see me die. I shan’t
now!”
“Do let me stop!” pleaded Mary.
“No, I won’t!--stay, what’s that pestilential insect creeping towards
us?”
“It’s the Dear Friend. He looks small and meagre, but we must not judge
from looks, Thomas. Beauty fades.”
Thomas surveyed Mary slowly. “It does,” he said.
The Dear Friend was so named from his habit of calling indiscriminately
on other beetles, and excusing himself on the ground that he wanted to
be their dear friend. He lived a very good life, and he wanted other
beetles to be good. The want was noble, but he had not sufficient tact
to conceal it. Some beetles thought him a bore, and did not care to
hear him discuss their sins in his plain way. Others, seeing that he
knew so little about this life, thought that he might have unusual
knowledge of the next. Beetles, as a class, have a tendency towards
mysticism. Mary had a firm belief in the goodness and spirituality of
the Dear Friend, although she was dimly conscious that he was not
clever. She was very anxious that he should have a few words with the
dying Thomas.
“You will see him, dear, won’t you?” she said. “You’re drawing near to
your end, you know, and it would do you good to experience a word in
season. You have been such a bad beetle.”
“I have,” said Thomas, with a chuckle of intense self-satisfaction,
“I’ve been a devilish bad beetle.”
The thought of his own exceeding immorality seemed quite to have
restored his good temper. “Heavy-minded female, you are become
brilliant. Never before have I experienced a word in season. You may
stop, and we’ll interview the Dear Friend.”
Mary, like some females of higher organisations, was rarely able to
understand the precise value of a satirical silence. Everything was
cloudy in her brain, and nothing precise. She had vague ideas that she
ought to be good, and that served her for aspirations. She had at least
three decided opinions--that her mother had been very good and very
kind to her, that Thomas was horribly bad and very unkind to her, and
that of the two she infinitely preferred Thomas. She was emotional and
rather self-seeking. At present she was very pleased at being praised,
and welcomed the little visitor kindly as he crept across towards them.
They formed an extraordinary trio even for beetles. It is not generally
known that the lower the physical organisation the more complicated is
the character. A beetle is as a rule much more contrary and difficult
than a man. The character of a tubercular bacillus is so complex as to
absolutely defy analysis.
“Mr. Thomas,” the Dear Friend began solemnly, “I am pleased to see
you--in fact, I have come a long way with that intention. I had heard
that you were very ill and like to die, and I had also heard--you will
excuse me--of your past life.”
“Quite right,” said Thomas encouragingly, “I am guilty of having had
a past life. Oh, sir, you can’t think how many beetles of my age have
had a past of some kind or other. It is true that it was my own life--I
have not taken any one else’s, not yet--but still I’ve had it. I feel
that deeply.”
At this the Dear Friend warmed to his work, but made a fatal
mistake--he grew slightly enthusiastic. Now Thomas could stand no
manner of enthusiasm, because it always seemed to him to show an
exaggerated conception of the value of things.
“Oh, Mr. Thomas, I am so very glad to hear you talk like that. This is
indeed no time for idle compliments, and you recognise the fact. You
have the sense of guilt. You see how disgusting, and loathsome, and
abominable the whole of your life has----”
Here he was interrupted by a curious stridulating noise which Thomas
made, thereby rendering it impossible to catch the remainder of the
Dear Friend’s silence. The poor little insect cooled down again at
once. He saw that enthusiasm would not do; that he had been taking
matters too fast, and that Thomas was a beetle who required to be
treated with a good deal of tact. The Dear Friend himself was unable
to stridulate, and had sometimes felt the want of it; but it is not a
gift which belongs to every kind of beetle. Perhaps it would be as well
to show some interest in the process, and then gradually to lead up to
more serious subjects. He waited till the last whir had died away, and
then he said:
“May I inquire how you make that noise? It is most interesting.”
Thomas knew all about it.
“It is caused,” he answered drily, “by the friction of a transversely
striated elevation on the posterior border of the hinder coxa against
the hinder margin of the acetabulum, into which it fits.”
“Ah!” gasped the Dear Friend; but he speedily recovered himself. “That
is indeed interesting--really, extremely interesting.” He was trying
to think in what way it would be possible to connect this with more
important matters. “Talking about fits,” he said, “I have just come
away from such a sad case, quite a young----”
“I was not talking about fits, sir,” interrupted Thomas, a little
irritably. The Dear Friend hastened to agree with him.
“No, Mr. Thomas, you were not. I see what you mean, and it’s very good
of you to correct me. I was wrong. I was quite wrong. But you happened
to use the word fits, and that suggests----”
“And talking about jests,” retorted Thomas severely, “I don’t think
this is the time for them. When you’re calmer, my friend, and have got
over your inclination to make sport of serious subjects, you will see
this. Please don’t get excited; I’m not equal to it. You come to see
me on my death-bed, and when I try to talk about my past life, you wax
ribald, and begin to make puns that a school-girl would be ashamed of.
I’m sorry for you, sir,--very sorry. Mary, show that bug out. I want
to think of my latter end, and he interrupts me.”
“Oh, dear, dear!” said the poor, well-meaning little insect, almost
whimpering, “I’m afraid I’ve made a very bad beginning. I didn’t intend
to offend you, and I do hope you’ll make allowances. I know I’m not
very clever, and I’m very young, and I’ve never had any education to
speak of, because I’ve always been going about in my humble way trying
to teach others. But I do want to be your really dear friend, and my
heart does yearn to----”
“Mary,” said the exasperated Thomas, “I asked you to show that bug
out. Will you kindly go away, sir, and drown yourself? I insist upon
thinking of my latter end, and I simply cannot do it when you are here.”
“I will go away, if you wish it, Mr. Thomas, but you will let me come
back this evening?”
“You won’t be able to come back, if you drown yourself.”
“But I’m not going to drown myself.”
“Well, you said you were, and you ought to, any way.”
“Oh, Mr. Thomas, I never, never----”
“Don’t contradict. It’s excessively rude, especially in a young bug
like yourself. You promised to drown yourself, if I’d bequeath Mary to
you in my will. You can take her now, if you like, and you may both go
away and drown yourselves. I shall be dead before this evening; and if
I am quite dead, you may come back. Now go.”
The Dear Friend turned slowly and sadly away.
“Are you going to take Mary?” Thomas called after him. “You can if
you like. She’s nearly as fat-headed as yourself, and you’d get on
splendidly together. Pray take her. I’m nearly dead, and I don’t want
her.”
The Dear Friend made no reply. The wretched Mary was crying again.
Thomas had worked himself up to the climax of fury, and was now lapsing
from it into a series of chuckles. “Moist one,” he said, turning to
Mary, “you don’t love me.”
“Indeed I do,” sobbed Mary. “I love you ever so much too well--but
you’re so cruel--and you make fun of a good cause--and you’re going to
die.”
“Let us,” said Thomas, drily, “be categorical. You, like most other
females, say too much at once. Your remarks must be sifted and answered
categorically. Firstly, you state that you love me. Yet you display a
lot of wet, horrible emotion, in order to hasten my end. Don’t speak;
you know you did;--and you asked the Dear Friend to come and bore me in
my last moments; and you refused to sit on his head, or show him out,
or stop him in any way. Consequently I had to stop him myself. I had to
be almost rude to him. Perhaps you’d better go after him if you’re so
fond of him. He’s only half-way across the path, and you’ll be able to
catch him up.”
“Oh, Thomas! I’m sure I never----”
“_Will_ you keep quiet? Can’t you see that I’m being categorical?
Secondly, you say that I’m cruel. I am, and it’s not my fault. If you
and other people were not so abominably heavy-minded, I should not be
cruel. You provoke me. You needn’t tell me that you can’t help being
heavy-minded. I know that, and I never said that it was your fault;
but it certainly isn’t mine. Nothing that I know of ever is anybody’s
fault. Thirdly, you said that I made fun of a good cause. You muddler!
I love most causes, and hate most of their promoters. Most causes are
noble, and most promoters are presumptuous. So far from making fun of
the good cause, I did it the greatest service by asking the Dear Friend
to seek an early death. That reminds me--you said that I was going to
die. So I am, if you don’t mind waiting ten minutes. Why this unseemly
haste?”
At this point Mary became all tears and disclaimers. “If you do that,”
said Thomas, “you really will have to go. I am about to die, and I
intend to die my own way, without any weeping females or dear friends.
It’s much the same with you that it is with man and the other lower
organisms. The good heart generally goes with a bad head; and if you
have a good head, you probably--there, I thought so. Do you see? The
Dear Friend on the further side of the path has just been trodden on
by a passing labourer. If he’d had a little more head, he would have
kept out of the way, and then he would not have died. Intellect is
practical: spirituality is not. Now that is very curious, for although
I have always been a most practical beetle, I have frequently had
strong spiritual desires. For instance, I often after supper yearn
to leave this gross and uncomely world, and bask in an impossible
hereafter.”
“Ah!” cried Mary. (She liked the ring of his last sentence.) “Those are
beautiful words. If only you would always talk like that, instead of
insulting those who only come to do you good. I know the Dear Friend
made you angry; but then it’s not so much what he said as what he
wanted to say that we must think of.”
“Ah, yes, my dear Mary, most moist and muddle-headed, and it is not so
much what I am as what I want to be that the deceased bug should have
considered. You were born with a wrong head, and so you form wrong
judgments. It’s not your fault; nothing’s anybody’s fault. The Dear
Friend was good, but it doesn’t matter. I am bad, and that doesn’t
matter either. Nothing matters, and I can’t understand anything, and I
want to die.”
Thomas threw himself on his back and kicked petulantly. Mary entreated
him not to give way to temper; however, he declared that he was
doing no such thing: that he was trying to think very fast, and that
the action of kicking made it possible to think faster. Suddenly he
stopped, and recovered his normal position. “Mary,” he said, “it is
clear to me, and I will make it clear to you, that nothing matters.
Suppose something had an optical delusion, and the optical delusion
died, and had a ghost----”
“But it couldn’t, Thomas.”
“I know that. I am only asking you to suppose it--and the ghost went to
sleep, and dreamed that he was dreaming, that he was dreaming----”
“Oh, don’t go on! you’ll only make your poor head ache!”
“Do you think the something would care very much what happened in its
optical delusion’s ghost’s dream’s dream’s dream? Yet the innermost
of the three dreams would seem to be perfectly real, and the apparent
reality would be due to part of the previous experience of the
something, which would be filtered--or, rather, reflected--through the
whole series.”
“That will do. Please don’t go on. I don’t understand a word of it, and
it’s no use. Oh, _do_ let us talk good.”
“You are going to understand it, fat-headed one. You think that you
exist; that everything is real. How do you know that it is so? When
you dream, you imagine that the dream is quite real; but you wake up
and find that you are wrong. Now suppose the something one day had
a thought, that went through a million optical delusions, a billion
ghosts, and a trillion dreams----”
“It’s not a bit of good,” interpolated Mary. “I can’t imagine numbers
like that.”
“That thought might ultimately take the form of this world, of which I,
Thomas, the beetle, am a considerable part. There is nothing impossible
about that. It may be so, and I am inclined to think that it is so,
because something inside me seems to be struggling to get back to its
origin. But if it is so it must be perfectly clear to you that nothing
matters, because nothing is real, and nothing will be real till it gets
back again to the--the something!”
“I don’t understand it,” said Mary; “are you quite sure that it doesn’t
confuse you at all to think that way?”
“Absolutely sure,” said Thomas, which was untrue.
“And how do you get back again to the something?”
“That,” said Thomas drily, “I will show you in a few minutes if, as I
said before, you do not mind waiting.”
For a short time neither of them spoke. The sun, like the spoiled child
who promises to be so good if you will only let him stop, was growing
more beautiful than ever as the time drew near for his departure.
He had nothing but vapour and light with which to work, and yet he
produced some very pretty effects. The gravel path, near which Thomas
and Mary were lying, led into the road which skirted the edge of the
common; along this road was a line of detached villas. The sun did
the best that he could with them, but felt that he could not do much.
The last house in the line was much larger than the rest, and stood
in much larger grounds. The advertisement had described them as being
park-like, and they certainly contained quite enough trees almost to
hide the house from the views of those who passed on the road. The sun
had found out one of the windows through the foliage and was making
it blaze. He liked doing that. He could see a good deal of the house
and grounds; in point of height he had the advantage of passers-by. He
could see two tennis-courts, the players, groups who had gathered to
look on, others who strayed aimlessly about and tried to prove they
were not suburban. It was all cup and conversation, and it rather
bored the sun, who has a masculine mind. None of the people in that
garden were aware that rather less than half a mile from the house a
remarkably fine beetle was dying in his sins; if they had known it,
they might possibly not have cared.
When Thomas began to talk again, he appeared to be continuing a line
of thought of which he had not considered it worth while to give the
beginning.
“So the truth of the matter is that a beetle did once get there--right
up beyond the stars, but he never carried a man there. Aristophanes
said he did, but that was an ætiological myth. He made up the story to
account for a prevalent belief that man could rise to higher things.”
“That was what the Dear Friend always said,” murmured Mary
reflectively. “Cows, and pigs, and men, and fowls can never get up
there--only beetles. It’s all kept for them.”
“And it’s not what I say,” retorted Thomas sharply. “I’ve got better
things to do in my last moments than to waste them in agreeing with
anybody. The mistake the man made was not in supposing that he could
rise. All beasts can rise, as much as we can. His mistake was in
rejecting the supernatural, and thinking that he could be raised only
by a beetle. We may have more spirituality than men. That is quite
possible: they are a lower organism. We may perhaps find it easier to
soar than they do. But I am sure that all are going there, just as we
are, beyond the stars.”
“That may be true,” said Mary, plucking up a little spirit; “but it
certainly was not the opinion of the Dear Friend. Only beetles can
rise.”
“Do you prefer the opinions of the Dear Friend to absolute truth?”
“I do,” said Mary proudly.
“Oh, blind and fat of temperament!” [This does not read quite right,
but it is a fairly literal translation. There are no polite English
words that exactly express the silence which Thomas used on this
occasion.] “A few days ago I was down in the grass by the river. It
looks sweet and green from here. It grows long, and it makes a pleasant
shade above one; but at the roots it’s all mud and muck. That is the
way of the world; instead of grumbling at the mud we might just as
well be thankful for the grass; however, that’s not my point. The cows
came down to drink while I was there. They are nasty, lumpy animals;
you can see their slobbering mouths and great yellow teeth as they
bend over one to crop the grass. Some beetles get nervous, but I
don’t fancy there’s any danger. As one of those brutes stooped down,
I looked up and saw right into its eyes. It was like looking into
immeasurable distance. They were sad, humble, trustful eyes; but there
was something in them which signified the consciousness of a purpose in
being. That is my point. A poor devil of a cow! it couldn’t have told
any one why it existed, it could not even have put the reason clearly
in its own mind; but it _knew_. I am much like the beast. I know, but I
cannot say, not even to myself, the reason for my existence. Sometimes
I think that if all sounds were in my power, I could get the whole
thing out in music. It is a thing which defies ordinary processes and
all logical connexion. I see the fading sunlight writing something on
the under edge of a cloud; the intellectual part of me cannot read that
language, but something else in me reads it, and understands it, and
answers it almost piteously. ‘Oh that I might fly away and be at rest!’
And suddenly the conviction is strong in me that I know why I am here,
and what I shall be hereafter. In the awful silence of the night that
conviction comes dropping down my dark mind like a falling star. In
moments of acute dyspepsia I always feel it.”
He grinned pleasantly. He had spoiled his own poetry, and that pleased
him. In his former life he had always been trying to make pretty
things, and had always broken them up again. The grin passed from him,
and he continued:
“Cows, therefore, have souls. You needn’t contradict me, and thrust
that omniscient Dear Friend down my throat, because I won’t stand it.
I tell you that I saw into their eyes, and I know. If you want to
get at the bottom of things, you must leave all ordinary processes,
all logical processes. You can’t crawl down that way: you must jump.
The people who dare not jump see that you have got to the bottom of
things, and comfort themselves with saying that you must have hurt your
poor head terribly. Have I hurt my head, Mary? For my intellect is all
gone, and the light is fading very quickly. You hate men, I think.
Never despise them any more; for they have souls. They cut down the
grass, and it dies. They pull the flowers, and they die. They tread on
the beetles, and they die. They kill the animals, cut down the trees,
and poison the rivers. Where a man comes, death always follows. They
are murderers; they are hideously ugly; they make unpleasant noises,
and do not understand silences; they are the very lowest of all
creatures, but they are on their way to a hereafter. Nothing’s wasted:
the very strictest economy is practised.”
“I can’t understand you, Thomas; and I am afraid that you are getting
worse. It tries you to talk. Why did you say the light was fading? The
sun is still shining all over us. Oh, Thomas, you’ll be gone soon--may
I cry now? I must.”
Thomas did not seem to have heard her. “I have been wicked, and yet not
I,” he said. “It was something bad in me that will pass. And the world
did provoke me terribly; it would be so emotional and stupid.”
Mary was crying unreservedly, but Thomas did not notice it.
“Something,” he said, “has come into my head which wants thinking out,
but I will not bother myself. I have the easier way. Good-bye--for the
sake of old times--Mary, darling. I am going to know everything.”
Then he curled up his legs quietly, and died.
Mary stopped crying, and examined the body. Yes, he was quite dead.
Then she started away on a journey.
Thomas had been a wicked beetle, and he had talked wrongly in his last
moments, and she was afraid to be near his body. Besides, she had heard
of a vacancy.
The sun had quite finished with the window of that villa now, and
the park-like grounds were nearly empty. On one of the courts a few
enthusiasts were still playing, and would continue to play until they
went in to dress. Out through the gate a young man sauntered into
the road. The look of an escaped animal was on his face. He had been
talking to a number of people whom he neither knew nor wanted to know.
He had seen nothing of Marjorie, his host’s daughter, a child who
always pleased and generally amused him. He felt that he had done much
for his hostess; he had suffered privations. And now he was glad that
the bulk of the visitors--all who were not staying in the house--had
gone. He took the path across the common, pausing to light a pipe with
a wax match and an air of relief. He walked in the direction of the
spot where the dead body of Thomas was lying.
One of the two unkempt birds came slowly flying back again. It was he
to whom the surname of Magnanimity has been given. He had got rid of
his companion by some pretext of an appointment, and he had come back
again to look for that beetle. He swooped down close beside the dead
body of the insect, and turned it over with his beak.
“That’s just my luck,” he murmured softly. “I never could stand cold
meat.” But that was affectation.
At this moment a small stone struck the ground within a foot of where
the unkempt bird was standing. He hopped away in an aggrieved fashion.
“I won’t fly away yet,” he said sulkily, “it would only make the man
conceited. They’re always chucking stones, these fools of men, and they
hardly ever hit anything. They like to think that we’re afraid of them,
and I’m not the least bit afraid.”
Another stone missed by a sixteenth of an inch the bird’s
tail-feathers, and Magnanimity with one scream of bad language flew
upwards. When he got there, he found that his nervous and unkempt
companion had come back again, and had been watching him all the time.
Then the magnanimous fowl swore worse than ever. There was no doubt
that the nervous one would have a pretty story to tell about that
pretended appointment.
The young man, who had thrown the stones, sauntered slowly up and
surveyed the dead beetle, taking it in his hand to examine it more
closely. He knew something about beetles--he had collected them in his
school-days--and he saw that this was a large one of its kind, a fine
specimen. He slipped it into one of his coat pockets, and strolled
slowly back again to the house. He had originally meant to go further,
but he had changed his intention. He was comparing in his own mind
his favourite Marjorie, a child not quite fifteen, with the finished
and ordinary girl as turned out in large numbers for the purposes of
suburban tennis. He was also wondering casually why there were any
beetles in the world, and why he had once been so interested in them.
When he got back to the house he paused in the hall for a second, and
then went slowly upstairs to a room at the top of the house, used as a
schoolroom by Marjorie and her governess, Miss Dean.
Marjorie was seated at the table writing. She had a large French
dictionary by her side. She was dressed in dark blue serge. Her long
hair had become a little untidy in her struggle to be idiomatic. She
had a pale, intelligent face. She looked up as the young man entered.
“I’m awfully glad you’ve come,” she said, smiling. “It was getting
rather dull, being all alone. Did you have some good setts?”
“No, not particularly--didn’t play much. I talked, and made myself
useful, and ate ices, and drank things most of the time. You can’t see
like that.” He struck a match, and lit the gas, and then he seated
himself at the piano. “Where’s Miss Dean?”
“Oh, she went away as usual at half-past five, and left me this stuff
to do for to-morrow. I’m doing it now, because I am going to be down in
the drawing-room to-night. Only three more days to the holidays!”
“Have you got any tea?”
Marjorie nodded her head towards a table at the side of the room. “They
brought it up about an hour ago,” she said. “It’s quite cold--will you
ring for some more?”
“No, thanks,” he answered, as he got up and helped himself. “This will
do very well. I am not really thirsty, because, as I said, I have been
drinking during the whole of the afternoon--more or less. But I never
feel absolutely sociable unless I am either smoking or drinking. Have
you got much more to do for the estimable one?”
“Oh, no, only a few words. It was a shorter bit than usual, and I
expected to have got it finished ever so long ago. But when it came to
doing it, there were a lot of words that I’d never seen before. I know
the French for a plate, or a glass, or a horse, or a hat, or anything
like that. But I always have to look up words like buttercup or
gridiron. Now here’s a word of that kind. What’s the French for beetle?”
“Escarbot, I believe, but I wouldn’t swear to it.”
“Look here, Maurice,” Marjorie said very earnestly, leaning her pretty
little chin on one hand, “I’ll tell you what I’ve noticed. When a
thing’s different in one way, it’s always different in another. If a
piece for translation is extra short, there are always more words to
look up. If I have an awfully bad morning, and Miss Dean is savage,
and Aunt Julia patronises me, and Miss Matthieson makes me kiss
her--bah!--I’m always glad at the end of it, because I know I am going
to have a specially good afternoon or evening.”
“Marjorie, I believe you’re right. You’ll have a bad morning to-morrow
if that wretched piece about the gridirons and beetles isn’t done for
the inestimable Dean.”
“Well, I’ll finish in less than two minutes. Play something while I’m
doing it.”
He opened the piano and took down the first piece that came. It was a
drawing-room piece, and had the entire absence of soul which always
appealed to the corresponding vacuum in the chilly Miss Dean. It was
moderately difficult, and sounded _very_ difficult. Miss Dean well
knew that when a girl like Marjorie, not yet fifteen, played that
piece properly, it would be acknowledged to reflect great credit on
her teacher. Maurice Grey opened the piece, looked at it suspiciously,
skipped the introduction, played a few bars from the first page,
glanced at the fifth page, then shut it up, and put it back again on
the top of the piano with a sigh.
“I hate that too,” said Marjorie. “Play the thing you played to them
last night in the drawing-room.”
“You weren’t in the drawing-room last night.”
“No, but my bedroom’s just above, and I could hear it. It went like
this.” She hummed a few bars.
Maurice began to play once more. It was a mischievous, tender,
eccentric little dance that went laughing about the piano as if it were
mad. Marjorie had finished her work, and rose from the table and stood
beside him, watching him with dark, attentive eyes as he played. She
was thinking that she liked Maurice. He knew the right way to treat
her. Aunt Julia treated her like a baby, and other visitors often
appeared to be under the impression that children like inanity. Her
father was rather an apathetic man, yet he had the sincerest affection
for his wife, his only daughter, and young Maurice Grey. He had many
acquaintances, but no other friends. He had been “Meyner and Sons,” who
did great things in iron, but he disposed of his business to a company
soon after his marriage. He was absorbed in the study of psychology,
and made many curious experiments upon himself. In one or two of these
young Maurice had been of some service to him. But in his family
affections, his studies, or his experiments, he showed very little
enthusiasm. He never expected to get great results. “The evidence is so
bad,” he said to Maurice once, speaking of his favourite pursuit. “On
my subject men lie often intentionally; and often deceive themselves
and lie unintentionally, and rarely speak the truth. Also I find out
more and more that I cannot even trust my own senses. The human brain
is a shockingly defective instrument.” He was a little sensitive, and
to visitors in his house--with the exception of Maurice--he would
talk of anything but psychology. Psychology, he found, was a thing
they never understood at all, and at which they generally laughed.
Marjorie’s mother, Mrs. Meyner, was not so apathetic or so pessimistic,
but then her horizon was not extended. The circle of her friends and
relations gave her enough to think about and to make life worth living.
She was a very gentle, unselfish woman, and had a provoking knack of
sincerely liking nearly everybody. Her half-sister, Julia, had the
opposite knack of hating nearly everybody. Julia was old and unmarried,
and had a wonderful tongue; she dressed perfectly, had snowy hair,
a kind face, a sweet smile, gentle ways, and a perfectly venomous
disposition. Marjorie did not like her Aunt Julia. She did not like
Miss Matthieson much better--a sentimental woman. Miss Dean was too
chilly a person to like exactly; Marjorie respected her sometimes. But
she did like Maurice, and she liked the music that he was playing now.
“That is awfully nice,” she said, when the piece was finished. “What is
it?”
Marjorie’s aunt Julia had asked the same question of him the night
before in the drawing-room, and he had told her that the piece was by
Grieg, which was untrue, and which he knew to be untrue. He was not
aware that that cheerful, spiteful, and horribly intellectual old lady
also knew that he was lying. He had felt it better to blaspheme the
name of Grieg than to give her a chance by owning that he had composed
the thing himself. He was a young man of dangerously diverse talents.
He was just at the end of his first year at Cambridge, and was reading
for the Classical Tripos. Now the Classical Tripos is a jealous
mistress, and admits of no rivals. Nevertheless, he had become a very
fair oar, was socially popular, and had devoted much time to psychology
and more to music. The end of such a course is generally failure. He
did not mind telling Marjorie about the little dance he had just been
playing.
“Well,” he said, “I have a general impression that it is mine; but
there’s a touch of Grieg about it. In fact, I risked telling your aunt
Julia last night that it was Grieg’s. I daren’t tell her it was mine.”
“Yes,” said Marjorie sadly, “she is awful. She pats me gently on the
head, and tells me I’m a good little child, and that I may run away to
the nursery and play. It’s perfectly maddening. She knows as well as
I do that I’m nearly fifteen, and that it’s absolute nonsense to talk
like that. She does it on purpose to make me angry, and I hate being
angry.”
Maurice took a long sip at his cold tea.
“Yes,” he said, “the people in this world want sorting. Have you
finished your piece about the beetle and the gridirons?”
“Oh, yes! There’s nothing in it really about gridirons, but a beetle
comes into it--a dead beetle----”
“By Jove!” said Maurice suddenly, thrusting his hand into his pocket,
“that reminds me!” He pulled out the dead body of Thomas, and laid it
carefully on the table.
“There,” he said, “what do you think of that?”
“It’s perfectly horrible,” said Marjorie. “Where did you get it? What
did you do it for?”
“I strolled on to the common after tennis for a smoke, and I happened
to find it. I used to collect these things when I was at school. I
suppose I picked it up from force of habit, but I’m sure I don’t
know. You ought not to call it horrible, you know. It’s really a fine
specimen of its kind.”
Marjorie looked at it more closely, turning it over with the end of a
penholder.
“Do you remember saying just now,” said Maurice, “that things which
were different in one way were generally different in another? Beetles
are different from us; they can’t do the same things; we despise them;
they haven’t as good a time. Perhaps they can do things we don’t know
anything about; perhaps they despise us; perhaps they are going to have
a better time in some other world. What are all the stars for?”
Marjorie wrinkled her brows, and kicked one tiny slipper half off.
“I almost think I see what you mean----”
“I am not at all sure I meant anything,” said Maurice. “It was just a
suggestion.”
Marjorie had thrown down the penholder, and taken the body of Thomas in
her hand.
“Beetles might have some secrets that we know nothing about. But Miss
Dean says that all insects were sent into the world for the birds to
eat.”
Maurice was silent for a moment. He was remembering that Miss Dean had
remarked to him the day before that she considered that the birds had
been created to kill the insects. “I should like to talk the question
over with a beetle. Now I must be off and dress.”
When he had gone an old trick of Marjorie’s younger days came back to
her. She had often, in her babyhood, held conversations with voiceless
or inarticulate things, such as dolls or cats, and on one occasion,
after a stormy music lesson, she had made the piano promise to _make_
the music come out right next time. She had always to do the speaking
for them, so it was not quite convincing; but it was helpful and
consolatory in its way. And now she began to talk to the beetle aloud,
holding it on the palm of one little white hand--
“Beetle, tell me your secrets. Tell me all your secrets.”
There was silence.
“I want to know if beetles are as good as men. Are they? Are they
better than men? Are there better things than we ever think of doing,
which we might do if it was only possible to think of them? _Do_ tell
me. I won’t tell anybody, except Maurice and mamma, if she asks me, but
she won’t. You _might_ tell me--it’s quite safe.”
There was only silence; but then it has been proved already that
silence is a beetle’s method of speech. Perhaps the spirit of Thomas
was there and answered her; perhaps it was elsewhere; perhaps Thomas
never had a spirit.
Marjorie put the beetle down again on the table, with a laugh at
herself for her silliness.
In the drawing-room that night, she saw very little of Maurice. Aunt
Julia looked as perfect and sweet and gentle an old lady as ever; and
her conversation was just as poisonous as usual. Her temper must even
have been a little worse than normal. She commenced to talk about
psychology with Mr. Meyner, because she knew that he hated discussing
it with the uninitiated. She insisted that he was joking--the poor man
never joked; he was half earnestness and half apathy--and she told him
untrue stories. When he escaped, she fastened on to Miss Matthieson,
who was a sentimental and ignorant woman, with a desire to love art.
She invented an entirely fictitious picture of Turner, described it,
and gave its precise position in the National Gallery; she finally made
Miss Matthieson talk about it, become enraptured about it, and confess
what her sensations were when she first saw it. She did not enlighten
her; that would have been too crude an enjoyment for Aunt Julia. Her
smile became just a little sweeter, and she assured Miss Matthieson
that she had learned much from her. Maurice Grey had, for reasons of
his own, been playing Chopin’s Funeral March. “And is that also by
Grieg?” she asked him, looking interested.
“No, it is not,” he said shortly. He knew very well that Aunt Julia
knew very well what he had been playing; and he saw what she meant by
her question.
“Oh, please don’t be angry with me,” she said. “I’m no musician, you
know, Mr. Grey,”--her knowledge of music was, as Maurice was aware,
considerably above the average--“and I make stupid mistakes. Last night
you played a little dance which you told me was by Grieg. Now, I never
should have known it; I thought it was pretty enough, but just a little
weak and--well, almost amateurish, you know. You played it again in the
schoolroom this afternoon, and you altered the last part of it. What
_is_ that thing you played just now?”
“Chopin’s Funeral March.”
“Are you going to make any--any improvements in it, as you did in the
Grieg? And why did you play a funeral march? I suppose the sight of
an old woman like myself, among so many young people, suggested the
thought of death. Ah, yes--very natural.”
This was absolutely intolerable, but Maurice was not allowed to protest
or escape.
“It is a great mistake,” said Aunt Julia, earnestly, “to give one’s
self up to trivialities. We must all die. It is always better to think
about death, even in the drawing-room after dinner. I mean that it’s
better for the aged, like myself. To the young it might perhaps seem a
little gloomy and morbid, but I like it--I enjoy it. I shall be going
to bed directly. Won’t you play a few hymn tunes, Mr. Grey, before I
go? You might play the Dies Iræ.”
She did not go to bed until she had maddened about half the people in
the room. Even Mrs. Meyner found it difficult at times to make excuses
for Aunt Julia. Maurice Grey managed to be moderately polite to her
as a rule; he generally shammed stupidity, and refused to see the
point of any of her sarcasms. He found afterwards that this style of
treatment had impressed Miss Julia Stone. When Marjorie came round to
say good-night to Maurice, she spoke to him about the beetle.
“Do you want that dead beetle?” she asked. “Shall I keep it for you?”
“Yes, keep it.”
“Are you going on collecting again then?”
“No, I don’t think so--but it is too good a specimen to throw away just
anywhere. How would you like to be thrown away?”
“It’s not quite the same thing, you know, Maurice. I’m more important.
But we’ll treat this beetle very well--you’ve just played a funeral
march for it--and then, perhaps, its ghost will come and tell us all
about beetles, and what beetles think about men, and if they know
anything that we don’t.”
“Yes, treat it kindly,” said Maurice, smiling. “Much can always be done
by kindness.”
Marjorie went out of the room laughing; but on the following morning,
when she appeared at breakfast, she was very quiet and subdued.
A note came from Miss Dean, regretting that--“owing to a slight
indisposition”--she was unable to come to teach Marjorie that morning.
Even the prospect of a day’s holiday did not seem to cheer her up.
Maurice found her alone in the garden about an hour afterwards.
“What’s up, Marjorie?” he said. “Aren’t you well?”
“Oh, yes, I’m always well--I’ve got something to tell you though. I saw
it last night.”
“Saw what?”
“The beetle.”
Maurice was a little startled. He too had had a curious dream in which
the beetle had figured. “Look here, Marjorie,” he said; “I’ve nothing
particular to do this morning, and I believe you’d be the better for a
walk. We’ll go over to Weyford, and then go up to St. Margaret’s, if
you don’t mind climbing the hill.”
“Oh, that would be lovely! That’s just the thing. We shan’t get back to
lunch, you know.”
“That’s all right. We’ll lunch in Weyford. I’ll go in and talk to Mrs.
Meyner about it, and you go and get ready.”
The morning sunlight and the cool wind made walking pleasant. That
unkempt bird, whom we have called Magnanimity, was taking out quite a
young bird for a little exercise. They saw Maurice and Marjorie walking
together.
“Those are men,” said the young bird. “Bless your heart--I’ve seen lots
of ’em.”
“Just drop that,” said Magnanimity, sternly. “There’s nothing more
sickening than to hear a mere chick like yourself setting up to be a
complete bird of the world. Fancy taking any notice of contemptible,
ugly men!”
“That young she-man,” said the mere chick, “isn’t at all ugly. I often
wish I were a man.”
“You’d soon wish you were a bird again,” retorted Magnanimity. “Are
you aware that men can’t fly, or lay eggs, or talk our language, or do
anything really worth doing? Are you aware that we old birds lead them
the very devil of a life?”
“How do you do it?” asked the mere chick, quite unable to keep the
wonder and admiration out of the tone of its voice.
“Why, we mock at ’em--sneer at ’em till they can’t bear themselves.”
Marjorie and Maurice walked on, talking of indifferent things. They
climbed the hill, resting occasionally in the shade of the plantations
that grew on its sides. They reached the summit at last, a solitary
place where the ruined chapel of St. Margaret stood in a little
deserted grave-yard. The wind was fresh and cool. They could see far
away into the distance; they could see the river winding along down the
valley, until it was a mere thread of silver; they could see the smoke
curling up from low, red-roofed cottages and farm-buildings, scattered
here and there. Maurice stretched himself at full length on the grass,
and endeavoured to light a cigarette. There was just enough wind to
blow a match out. There always is.
“Now then, Marjorie, you had a dream last night.”
“Yes!”
“And it frightened you.”
“No--no--well, it didn’t exactly frighten me--it made me think. It was
all nonsense, you know, and yet it was the realest dream I ever had in
my life.”
“Stop a minute. You had some coffee in the drawing-room, and that kept
you awake for a long time, you turned about from side to side, and
thought about the beetle. Your bedroom seemed hot and stifling.”
“Yes, that’s all true--how did you know, Maurice?--but it has not got
anything to do with it.”
“Marjorie, if you’d never had that coffee, you’d have never had that
dream. Now, then, let’s hear it. I’ll try to keep awake, but walking
always makes me sleepy.”
“After I had said good-night to everybody, I went up into the
schoolroom and got the beetle, because I was afraid the servants might
throw it away in the morning, and you said you wanted it. I took it
into my own room, and put it down on a table. All the while I was
undressing, I kept thinking about it and wondering if beetles and other
things could really understand, or if it were only men and women who
knew about things, and if all the world were just made for us alone.
Before I got into bed I picked the beetle up, and said to it, ‘Beetle,
you’ve got to come into my dream to-night, and tell me all about it.
Don’t forget.’ Of course that was just a fancy. I didn’t really think
it could understand what I said, or that it would come. I’m not a
baby, though Aunt Julia treats me like one sometimes. Well, for a long
time I couldn’t get to sleep, but at last I did.”
“And then the beetle came and suffocated you, or threw you over a
precipice,” remarked Maurice, drowsily.
“No, that’s not a bit like it. I don’t know how long I had been asleep,
but I dreamed that I woke up suddenly, and that the moonlight was
streaming in at the window. Right in the middle of the moonlight was
the beetle, standing up on his hind legs. He had grown ever so much
bigger, and was as tall as I am. ‘Come on, now,’ he said. ‘How much
longer are you going to keep me waiting? I’m late, as it is.’
“I didn’t feel the least bit afraid of him. I just asked him where we
were going. He opened the window, and pointed upwards. ‘Well,’ I said,
‘you must wait till I’m dressed, else I shall catch cold.’ However, he
wouldn’t wait, and so I got out of bed. We climbed up on to the table
in front of the window. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘you must keep hold of my
fore-leg, or you’ll fall.’ We didn’t fly or walk; we floated out of the
window, and then upwards, going very quickly and steadily, as if a wind
were blowing us. As we were floating up, the beetle’s head changed till
it became just like Aunt Julia’s. ‘Marjorie’s an unnatural child,’ it
said in Aunt Julia’s voice. ‘She doesn’t care for dolls--doesn’t care
for anything except music and Maurice.’”
Maurice had an unworthy and needless impression that the girl was
making some of this up. He looked at her curiously, as though he were
going to say something; but he refrained, and she continued her dream--
“I didn’t quite know what to say, but I told the beetle that he was
entirely wrong--that I liked papa and mamma very much indeed, and
rather liked almost everybody. Then I asked him how he managed to
speak, being a beetle, and how he could hear me speak. He told me that
neither of us had spoken a word: when I contradicted him, he said that
if I had gone back to my own room I should have found that my real
body was still lying asleep in bed. ‘Now,’ he pointed out, ‘you can’t
speak without your body--so that is proved.’ Then he said that beetles
never spoke, and that as a matter of fact we were not speaking, but
just understanding each other’s silence. Still, it seemed just like
speaking. We must have moved very quickly, because by this time we had
got quite beyond the moon. I could see it ever so far beneath my feet,
and the stars all scattered about the darkness; yet I didn’t remember
passing them on our way up. I didn’t feel at all cold. As the beetle
went on talking--it was just like real talking, so it doesn’t matter
whether it was real or not--he stopped being like Aunt Julia. He got
his own head back again, and his own voice--except that sometimes it
began to be rather like yours. You haven’t gone to sleep, have you?”
Maurice had not gone to sleep, and said so.
“The strangest thing was that although his body had not really
changed--except that it was so much bigger--it didn’t seem at all ugly
now. In fact, I liked to look at it, and didn’t at all mind keeping
hold of its fore-leg. I think the beetle must have known what I was
thinking about, for all of a sudden he said, as if he were sorry for
me: ‘Poor Marjorie! Poor little Marjorie! They’ve taught you all wrong,
and they taught me all wrong. But I had a glimpse of the right thing:
I always knew that human beings were not half as ugly as they seemed to
be. I said as much, but it was of no use to talk to the Dear Friend.
As for Mary--that fat-headed female had believed so many other things
that she had no capacity left for believing any more. I, however, had
got plenty of room left--oh, yes, plenty of room.’ When he said that
he chuckled in the most horrible way you ever heard. ‘Now I come to
think of it,’ he went on, ‘I believe I did _say_ that the human breed
were ugly. It was such a tame thing to believe anything that one said;
it was a thing that Mary always did, and so I didn’t. Marjorie, if the
good people hadn’t been good, I should have liked goodness.’”
“But who were Mary and the Dear Friend?” asked Maurice.
“I don’t know any more than you do. I don’t think he liked the Dear
Friend very much; sometimes he seemed to hate Mary, and sometimes he
seemed to love her and pity her. Now do you know what he told me? He
said positively that all beetles believed that they had souls which
never died, and that the sun, and stars, and everything were made for
them alone. They believed that men, and other animals, had no souls at
all. I told him how very absurd that was, and tried to explain to him
what was really the case; but he only chuckled horribly again. But as
we went up higher and higher he got more grave, and he didn’t laugh
any more; and once or twice he said to me quite sadly, ‘Poor little
Marjorie, you are very young to bother yourself about these things. You
only know part--only part--and I cannot tell you the rest--I may not!’
I began to get quite sorry for him, because it seemed to trouble him;
I think he really wanted to tell me some more things. Just then I saw
up above us a River of Light. It was flowing very swiftly and smoothly,
and looked like melted gold. I don’t know why, but I wanted to plunge
into the River. It seemed to be the only thing worth doing, or that
ever had been worth doing. I never wanted anything so much before in
my life, but the beetle would not let me go. Last of all I began to
cry; I really did, and you know, Maurice, that I hardly ever cry. But
it was of no use; he still kept tight hold of my hand. The darkness
was all grey darkness, except one black piece which stuck up like a
mountain. We stopped on the top of it, and looked down at the River. I
kept on crying--I do not know why, but I think it was because it all
seemed strange and awful. I may have been frightened a little, but it
was not quite like being frightened. There was a long pause, and then
the beetle said, ‘Ah, if you only knew now, Marjorie! And if I had only
known then!’
“Just then out of the grey darkness came a thread of light, like a
little snake, moving very quickly and curling about as if it were glad;
it hurried towards the great River of Light, and melted into it and
was gone. I was eager about it, and asked the beetle what it was. ‘I
may tell you that,’ he replied. ‘It was a soul going home!’ I stopped
crying then; I felt something the way I feel at an evening service in
a church in summer time, when they are singing one of the hymns I like
best. It was a sort of quiet happiness; I can’t explain it properly,
but I never felt so happy as I did then. ‘Beetle,’ I said, ‘you must
tell me the rest now.’
“‘I will tell you one thing,’” he said.
“What was it?” asked Maurice quickly.
For a few seconds Marjorie did not answer. There was a queer dreamy
look in her eyes. At last she said,--
“Maurice, I’m afraid you’ll think now that I have been making all this
up, but I haven’t. I can’t tell you what the beetle said, because I
_don’t know_. It was about you, and it was very important. I don’t
even know whether it was good or bad. It has gone straight out of my
memory, and I _can’t_ get it back again. I’d give anything to be able
to remember it. I’ve been thinking about it all the morning.”
“I believe you entirely,” said Maurice thoughtfully. “I have had much
the same kind of thing happen to me in a dream.”
He did not add that much the same thing had happened to him on the same
night. “How did the dream end?” he went on.
“I awoke directly after the beetle told me that thing that I have
forgotten. It was broad daylight. But when I got up, the beetle was not
on the table where I had put it. I could not find it anywhere.”
“You probably moved it in your sleep. Did you ever walk in your sleep?”
“Once, when I was quite little--almost a baby. I had got out into the
garden, and my nurse found me there.”
Maurice rose, and the two went down the hill together. “I wouldn’t
trouble about all that if I were you,” said Maurice. “These things can
generally be explained in the simplest way when one goes through them
carefully. Coffee, the action of the heart, the position of the body in
bed, the sounds that one hears while asleep, all help to explain a good
deal, you know.”
He did not tell her his own dream. He thought, perhaps rightly, that a
young girl, unacquainted with the study of mathematics, might be unduly
impressed by coincidences which were unusual but did not require a
supernatural explanation. He did not want to frighten her, or let her
grow superstitious. Yet during the day he thought a good deal about the
two dreams.
He had dreamed that he was seated on the one side of the fireplace in
his rooms at Cambridge, and that the beetle, with the same exaggerated
dimensions with which Marjorie had seen him, was seated in a lounge
chair on the other side. They were discussing Maurice’s psychological
studies, and Maurice was describing to him some of the curious
experiments which he had made in conjunction with Mr. Meyner. Every
difficulty that Maurice propounded the beetle made clear at once. He
even suggested fresh problems which had not occurred to Maurice before,
and was equally ready with their solution. His last words before
Maurice awoke were: “There are many things besides which you ought to
know, and of which you have not realised your own ignorance. You will
know them all one day.”
This was all that Maurice could remember of his dream. The difficulties
propounded and the explanations given had passed completely out of his
recollection. He was only conscious that during his dream he had felt
an exhilarating sensation of having known for certain things which he
had thought it impossible that any one, at least in this life, could
know at all.
Shortly afterwards he returned to Cambridge. By this time Marjorie
seemed to have recovered her normal spirits. She made no further
allusion to her dream. She was unaffectedly sorry at the departure of
Maurice.
Maurice had not been long at Cambridge before he received news of the
sudden death of Mr. Meyner. Apart from the friendship he had always
felt for Mr. Meyner, the death seemed to him peculiarly distressing and
pathetic. The man had worked hard at a study which fascinated him, not
from any desire for gain, or fame to be derived from it, but with the
most genuine devotion to the study itself; and he had died before his
work was done, before he had arrived at any large and definite result.
Yet Maurice felt assured that Meyner’s patience, and judgment, and
freedom from prejudice, would, if he had but lived longer, have brought
him some reward, some light. He had always distrusted and undervalued
himself; his humility was genuine, but almost irritating. He had been
at school, and subsequently at college, with Maurice’s guardian, and
had first met Maurice when he was a boy of fifteen; the friendship
between the boy and the middle-aged man had formed slowly, but surely,
since then; yet, although he gave every sign of his liking for Maurice,
he never seemed to expect Maurice to like him in return; he certainly
never realised the admiration which Maurice had for his knowledge and
attainments. So too he loved his wife and only child dearly, and he
knew that they loved him; but he had never realised how much they loved
him, and would very possibly have thought such love almost irrational.
To some extent, perhaps, his studies had spoiled him; he had been
groping in the darkness after great things, and the one result that he
seemed to have found there was a sense of his own insignificance. Yet,
illogically enough, he had never thought others insignificant; he had
never reached the cynical conclusion that nobody matters very much.
If his friends and his sympathies were so few, it was not because the
outside world did not matter to him, but because he could not believe
that he mattered to the outside world. He had died without ever having
learned his own value.
A parcel which was forwarded to Maurice from Mrs. Meyner shortly
afterwards contained the many note-books which her husband had filled
with the evidence he had collected, and the work he had done, until
death interrupted him. With them was a simple and pathetic letter that
he had written to Maurice on the day before he died. “Look through
them,” the letter said, in reference to the note-books. “You will see
and understand what I was aiming at. If you think it worth while, carry
on the investigation which I began; I own that it is some pleasure to
me to think that it is possible that you may do so; that one who was
intimate with my views, and who shared some of my opinions, which are
not generally held, may be able to give those views and opinions their
justification. But I do not want you to pledge yourself in any way, nor
do I ask you to give up your tripos or your career at college for the
purpose.”
Maurice paused as he read this last sentence. How often he had
thought, as he turned English verse into indifferent alcaics, that
this classical work could only lead, was only educative, could never
be considered as an end. But he came to no final decision until he
had spent nearly a month in a rapid survey of those note-books. They
startled him; the minute accuracy and patience shown in the collection
of evidence were only what he expected from such a man as Meyner, but
the brilliant audacity of his theories, the almost savage independence
of an original mind, looked far different when plainly stated in black
and white, than when they had fallen humbly and almost hesitatingly
from the man’s own lips. The romantic side in Maurice’s character was
touched most by what was worst in Meyner’s books; the finished and
unprejudiced scholar would have shaken his head over much that looked
like vain imagining, that was extravagant, and, so far, unsupported.
Maurice was younger; Meyner’s fierce opposition of an accepted view
attracted him, and awoke his pugnacity. He would linger over page
after page of what seemed to him splendid conjecture, of what might
have seemed to others very useless stuff, and say to himself: “If
only one could prove that this _is_ so, instead of longing that it
_may_ be so!” The air of conviction with which Meyner wrote down his
own views on his own subject gained immeasurably in Maurice’s eyes
from the personal knowledge which Maurice had of Meyner’s perpetual
tendency to undervalue himself, and to distrust himself in all other
matters. Even with these views in his mind, he had expected no great
results; he had been too honest to support them with any evidence that
was not thoroughly tested. They seemed to Maurice to be the guess of
genius; the air of conviction had for him the strange attraction of
a religious, not wholly rational, faith. He decided to abandon his
University career, and to devote his time to a further prosecution of
Meyner’s investigations.
His guardian, who was also his uncle, made very little opposition.
Maurice had given so much evidence that he was stable. He had an
unusually large allowance for a young man at Cambridge, and yet he had
not run into debt. At Cambridge the wealthy are the most in debt,
because they have most credit and most temptations. As a matter of
fact, Maurice never had considered the financial side of anything;
it had simply happened that he had never wanted more than he could
well afford. But this weighed very much in Maurice’s favour with his
guardian. He felt that his nephew was a man who understood value, and
could be trusted. The property to which Maurice would succeed, when he
came of age, made it unnecessary for him to adopt any profession; nor
did it bring with it any of those special responsibilities for which a
special training is supposed to be necessary.
Maurice, therefore, spent the next two years abroad, for the most part
in Paris. He had carried with him an introduction to a physician at one
of the Paris hospitals, who sympathised with him in his work, and was
able to be of great assistance to him. In this man he gained a friend;
in other respects these were years, it seemed to him, of disillusion.
One by one the great, beautiful theories had to go; a tiny meagre fact
would start up, a fact that meant but little to the ordinary observer,
and it would be strong enough to overthrow years of work, and send
the conjecture on which they were founded to some limbo for lost
absurdities. He had long ago been aghast when he had tried to realise
how vast is the amount of the things that no man knows. And now for
“knows” he put “can know.”
Mrs. Meyner and Marjorie had also been abroad, but he had seen them
very seldom in those two years. Marjorie seemed to be slowly changing;
he was no longer the recipient of childish confidences. She was grave
and more beautiful, perhaps, than she had been; and she was also more
quiet and reserved; she was friendly with him, up to a limit; she told
him news, of a kind; she sympathised with his disappointments in his
work, within decent bounds. At the end of the second year, when Mrs.
Meyner and Marjorie were staying for a few days in Paris, and Maurice
was at last awakening to the fact that he could not expect childish
confidences from one who was no longer a child, Marjorie told him some
news which surprised him.
“Aunt Julia has changed very much. I like her now.”
“She must certainly have changed then,” said Maurice smiling.
“I don’t mean,” Marjorie explained, “that she is different to other
people--only to mamma and myself. Her servants are in terror of her,
and her tenants hate her, and so on; but she has been really kind to
me. I think she likes me. We were staying with her a few weeks ago.
You’ll be surprised to hear that she likes you too.”
“Of course,” said Maurice, “it is surprising that any one likes me, as
you say.”
“I don’t think I said that. She told me quite suddenly once that she
liked Maurice Grey, because he was the cleverest man she knew in one
respect. Mamma suggested that it was because you understood her. ‘No,
my dear,’ said Aunt Julia, ‘the village people do that, because I
speak plainly, and they try to pay me back again for it. He always
misunderstood me. I like him. He will not do much, because he can’t
concentrate himself on one thing; but I like Maurice Grey all the
same.’”
Marjorie did not repeat any more of Aunt Julia’s conversation; but the
old lady had gone on to say that Maurice, however, would probably
concentrate himself on one person. She added, in her point-blank way,
that she intended him ultimately to marry Marjorie. She did not appear
to think that Marjorie, or Maurice, or Mrs. Meyner, could have a voice
in the matter; the marriage was one of the things that the perverse old
woman had made up her mind to arrange.
“I’m glad that dear old lady likes me,” said Maurice. “I always liked
her--I really did. She was full of such striking and impressive
contrasts--the soft, purring voice and the ill-tempered words--her
gentle, peaceful face and her fearful pugnacity. And I like her more
because she has been good to you, you say.”
“Did you ever,” asked Marjorie, hurriedly going to another subject,
“find out anything new about the intelligence of the brute creation?”
“I think I used to tell some lies about a favourite terrier of mine
once, and made myself believe them. No, Marjorie, that has not been my
line. It has been quite enough to find out that I and you, and all the
rest of us, have got no intelligence worth mentioning, none that will
do a thousandth part of what we want it to do. What made you ask that?”
“I was thinking about that beetle you found on the common when you were
stopping with us once, and about the dream I had.”
“Ah! I remember that.”
“I never found the dead beetle, although I hunted everywhere for it,
and I never remembered what it told me about you.”
“I did not tell you at the time, Marjorie, but I had a dream about
the beetle that same night. It came to me that night and told me
everything I wanted to know--the things I have been working at for the
last two years. Of course, they were all gone when I awoke, but I can
remember it saying that I should know them all one day. I am afraid
that dead beetle lied.”
“Maurice,” said Marjorie suddenly, “sometimes a thought flashes across
my mind that in a minute I may be dead. I don’t know even what life
and death mean; yet I have to live and die. There are stars above me,
but I do not know why they are there. There are beasts, and birds, and
insects everywhere, and I do not know how important they are. I feel
lost and horrible. No, I feel like a prisoner beating against an iron
wall. For a few moments it is torture to be like that; I should kill
myself or go mad if it went on. But it always passes away, and three
minutes afterwards I am wondering if I will do my hair a different
way----”
“Don’t!” murmured Maurice, softly.
“Or I can be really angry because my maid knocks something over, or
does something clumsy; when one speaks of it, it seems absurd enough.
Speaking spoils everything. Lovers--in books, I mean--talk the worst
nonsense, and yet that nonsense is the expression of a very fine
thing. I do not think that silence is enough appreciated. I want, for
instance, to let you know what I am thinking. Well, when I put the
thought into words, I lose some of it, or add something to it, or I
alter it by an accident with the tone of my voice. Now if I could just
look at you and you at me, and we could understand one another exactly
through silence, it would be splendid.”
Maurice agreed with her. After two years of disappointment silence
seemed to him almost the only thing left. There was, however, one
thing even more consolatory. About a year after this conversation with
Marjorie the two met once more, and Maurice put his failures behind him
and told Marjorie that he loved her. So they both spoke the nonsense
which they deprecated. We all believe that in affairs of the heart
we are not as the others, and we are all mistaken. With him there
was an iteration of “I love you,” with a deep tremble in the voice;
and with her there was a sighing echo of the same words, coming up
between blushes. The expression of the feeling was almost ludicrous;
the feeling itself was so sacred that the lightest touch of thought
seemed to soil it, and a writer, after turning over his vocabulary in
disgust, can find nothing explanatory which at all matches it. But when
it took place, it seemed to Maurice the only important thing that ever
had happened to him; the psychological studies, which had brought him
so much disappointment, appeared in a new light as a plaything that had
seemed to amuse him until love came.
This did not happen at Paris. Maurice had returned to England, and
all of them--Mrs. Meyner, Marjorie, and Maurice--were staying in Aunt
Julia’s house. It was a lonely old house, much too big for that one
wicked old lady; it stood outside a North Yorkshire village, just
where a grand, dignified old hill drew back its skirts, with a sharp
sweep, from contamination with human dwelling-places. Aunt Julia owned
quarries at the foot of the hill, and got therefrom more money than
was good for her. The time was December, and the moors looked bleak
and cold. But it was a comfortable house. Aunt Julia had devoted her
many years to the study of comfort--her own comfort. “There is nothing
to shoot,” she explained to Maurice, “except my tenants down in the
village. You can shoot them, if you like. There’s the library, though,
which is good, and you can smoke anywhere you like----”
“But you used to hate smoking?” said Maurice.
“My dear Maurice, there are two of me, and you used to know the wrong
one. Down in the village they mostly know the wrong one, and they call
her, I am told, the hell-cat, which is rude of them. Yes, you can smoke
anywhere. If you and Marjorie want to go out of the house--which is a
thing I never do in December--I believe there are some horses round
at the back. If there is anything wrong about the horses, or Pilkin,
or anything that is his, just tell me, and I will say a word or two.
I believe the man presumes on my ignorance. You can go and see my
quarries, or my cottages; but you had better not go to the cottages,
because they have no drains. I should like to give them some drains,
but the tenants won’t let me. They are poor people, and a strong smell
makes a difference to their colourless existence.”
So Maurice did a certain amount of reading, riding, and smoking.
But, of course, Marjorie made for him the chief charm of the house.
Mrs. Meyner had willingly consented to the engagement; even if she
had desired to oppose it, her more strenuous half-sister would have
reasoned her out of it; or, to use her own gentle euphemism, would have
said a word or two. The days passed quietly enough. To Maurice they
were a pleasant rest after his three years of wasted laboriousness.
“Marjorie,” he said to her one afternoon, when they had wandered over
the dignified hill, and as they came back saw the bare boughs of the
trees in the plantation black against a red blot of sunset, “Marjorie,
I have done with all questions. I am here, and you are here, and that
is enough for me. I am going to live and love, and enjoy. Blessed be
my fate that has saved me from the sordid worry of life. (Just wait
a second, will you? can’t get a match to light in this wind.) We
will make a beautiful house, with beautiful things in it, with good
books on shelves, and good wine in the cellar, and a good cook in the
kitchen. And no one shall enter into that house who is not either very
beautiful, or very clever, or too good for this world.”
“But I shall be so lonely there without you,” said Marjorie, gently,
with her sparkling eyes looking groundwards.
Maurice laughed. “Ah, Marjorie, you and I will be one, and you are more
beautiful, and clever, and better than any one in the world. That is
how I shall have a right to come into my own beautiful house. We will
trouble ourselves with no theories about anything. We will not get
excited about anything; an excited man always has been, or will be,
dull. We will make life one long, gentle enjoyment.”
He spoke half in jest and half in earnest, telling his soul of
beautiful things laid up in that house for many years; bidding himself
to eat, and drink, and enjoy judiciously.
Perhaps it was because Marjorie at that moment looked towards the
sunset. It seemed so far away from her, and yet so desirable. She had
the fancy, common among children and poets, that the dying light looked
the gate of some wonderful place to be seen hereafter.
“Maurice, Maurice!” she cried. “Look at that. I have the lost,
prisoned feeling again when I look at it. It is too far away.”
That night ended all. There were beautiful things to come, so it seemed
to both of them, such poetry and love as never had been before; and all
was stopped by an accident, one commonplace accident, almost too poor
to be put into a story.
Marjorie had been subdued, almost depressed; she had talked but little
at dinner or afterwards. Mrs. Meyner and Marjorie both went to bed
rather early. Maurice, restless from his love-passion, had gone to walk
and smoke for an hour on the fell-side. Aunt Julia sat before the fire
in the drawing-room, waiting for Maurice to return, reading a favourite
chapter of Gibbon.
For some time one would have said that Marjorie was sleeping quietly
and peacefully. Then suddenly she sat up in bed, her eyes still closed.
She began talking in her sleep. “Tell me! Come back again and tell me.
I _will_ know. I am on the verge, and--and----.” She stopped talking;
quickly she moved from the bed to the dressing-table, and her fingers
fumbled impatiently with the opening of her dressing-case. She had
drawn up the blind, and the moonlight shone straight upon her. Her lips
were still moving, but no sound came. She opened the dressing-case and
took from it a glass jar which was filled with old dead rose leaves.
She had filled it herself long before, when she was a child. She
unscrewed the silver top, and began to take out the rose leaves very
carefully. At the bottom of the jar she found the thing for which she
had been looking, and laid it on the palm of her little white hand. It
was the withered body of a large dead beetle.
For a moment she stood thus. And then she drew a long breath, and
opened her eyes wide. She was awake, and she had remembered the
horrible thing which she had heard in a dream and had forgotten.
Quivering and almost breathless she hurried from the room, just as she
was.
Aunt Julia had good nerves, but she was a little startled when the
door of the drawing-room was flung open, and she saw, standing in the
doorway, the figure of Marjorie, white-robed, bare-footed, with both
hands stretched out, and struggling in vain, as it seemed, to speak.
“Marjorie! What is it?” cried Aunt Julia in a shaking voice.
She found words at last.
“Maurice is dead--dead! He fell--I saw him fall--over there, against
the plantation, down into the quarry. He is dead!”
There followed a burst of hysterical laughter, more bitter than any
tears, and then she fainted away.
* * * * *
Aunt Julia stood in the porch, looking out. She was white to the lips.
By the moonlight she could see the procession coming nearer--two men
carrying lanterns, four men carrying a hurdle with a burden upon it,
covered up altogether because it was broken and ghastly.
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