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.