through the course of study at the Benedictentiary of Mesdames
---- has led the proprietors to add another wing to this
popular institution. The buildings are situated in park-like
grounds, far from any disturbing influences. The lecturers
are ladies of personal attraction with wide experience, and
the discipline of the establishment is of the severest kind
compatible with comfort. A special feature of this institution
is the means afforded for healthy recreation of all kinds, the
object being to make the students attractive in every sense.
Gentlemen over fifty years of age are only admitted on terms
which can be learnt by application to the Principal. These
terms will vary according to the character of the applicant.
During the last season twenty-five of Mesdames ---- pupils made
brilliant marriages, and the most flattering testimonials are
constantly being received from the wives of former students.
There are only a few vacancies, and application should be made
at once to the Principal.
That is the sort of thing. Do you know any experienced lady in want
of a vocation that might combine profit with highly interesting
employment? You can give her this suggestion, but advise her to be
careful in her choice of lecturers, and let the ladies combine the
wisdom of the serpent with the gentle cooing of the dove; otherwise,
some possible husbands might be spoilt in the making.
XIII
HER FIANCÉ
You say that my opinions are very unorthodox, that my views on human
constancy are cynical, and that it is wicked to sympathise with
children who oppose their inclinations to the behests of their parents.
Do you forget that I said we should not agree, and will you be angry if
I venture to suggest that you have not read my letters very carefully,
or that your sense of justice is temporarily obscured? If I dared, I
would ask you to look again at the letters, and then tell me exactly
wherein I have sinned. I maintained that all are not gifted with that
perfect constancy which distinguished Helen and Guinevere, and a few
other noble ladies whose names occur to me. I notice that, as regards
yourself, you disdain to answer my question, and we might safely
discuss the subject without reference to personal considerations.
My regrets over the strained relations which sometimes exist between
parents and children could hardly be construed into an incitement to
rebellion. They did not amount to more than a statement of lamentable
facts, and a diagnosis of the causes of the trouble. When you add that
truth is often disagreeable and better left unspoken, I will subscribe
to the general principle, but fail to see its application here. Nor can
I agree with you that problems of this sort are lacking in interest. To
be able to construct a geometrical figure, and prove that the method
is correct, does not sound very interesting; but architects, who have
knowledge of this kind, have achieved results that appeal to those who
look at the finished work, without thought of the means by which the
end was gained.
With your permission, I will move the inquiry to new ground; and do not
think I am wavering in my allegiance, or that my loyalty is open to
doubt, if I say one word on behalf of man, whose unstable affections
are so widely recognised that no sensible person would seek to dispute
the verdict of all the ages. He is represented as loving a sex rather
than an individual; is likened to the bee which sucks where sweetness
can be found and only whilst it lasts; he shares with the butterfly
the habit of never resting long on any flower, and, like it, he is
drawn by brilliant colouring and less clean attractions. Virtuous
affection and plain solid worth do not appeal to him.
These are articles of popular belief, and must not be questioned;
but I may say to you, that they do the poor man somewhat less than
justice. As a bachelor, he has few opportunities of examining virtuous
affection, on his own account; the experiences of his friends are
not always encouraging; and, if he has to work, other things absorb
most of his attention at this stage of his existence. If he marries,
especially if he marries young, he is often enthusiastic, and usually
hopelessly ignorant of feminine methods, inclinations, and fastidious
hesitation. He feels an honest, blundering, but real and passionate
affection. He shows it, and that is not seldom an offence. He looks
for a reciprocation of his passion, and when, as often happens, he
fully realises that his transports awaken no responsive feeling, but
rather a scarcely veiled disgust, his enthusiasm wanes, he cultivates
self-repression, and assumes a chilly indifference that, in time,
becomes the true expression of his changed feelings. From this keen
disappointment, this sense of his own failure in his own home, the
transition to a state of callousness, and thence, to one of deep
interest in another object where his advances are met in a different
spirit, is not very difficult.
You see, I am taking for granted that the popular conception of his
shortcomings in regard to the affections is correct, and I only want
to suggest some of the reasons which have earned for him such a bad
reputation. First, it is the fault of his nature, for which he is not
altogether responsible; it is different to yours. In this respect he
starts somewhat unfairly handicapped, if his running is tried by the
same standard as that fixed for the gentler sex. Then his education,
not so much in the acquirement of book-knowledge as in the ways of the
world, is also different. His physical robustness is thought to qualify
him, when still a boy, to go anywhere, to see everything at close
quarters, and without a chaperone. He is thrown into the maelstrom of
life, and there he is practically left to sink or swim; and whether
he drown or survive, he must pass through the deep water where only
his own efforts will save him. A few disappear altogether, and, while
all get wet, some come out covered with mud, and others are maimed, or
their constitutions permanently injured by the immersion.
That is the beginning, and I think you will admit that, except in a
few very peculiar cases, the boy’s early life is more calculated to
smirch than to preserve his original innocence.
Then he settles down to work for a living or for ambition, and, in
either case, he is left but little time to study the very complex
complement of his life, woman. If he does not incontinently fall in
love with what appeals to his eye, he deliberately looks about for some
one who may make him a good, a useful, and, if possible, an ornamental
wife. In the first case he is really to be pitied; but his condition
only excites amusement. The man is treated as temporarily insane,
and every one looks to the consummation of the marriage as the only
means to restore him to his right mind. That, indeed, is generally
the result, but not for the reason to which the cure is popularly
ascribed. The swain is very much in love, whereas the lady of his
choice is entering into the contract for a multitude of reasons, where
passionate affection, very probably, plays quite an inferior part. The
man’s ardour destroys any discretion he may have. He digs a pit for
himself and falls into it, and, unless he has great experience, unusual
sympathy, or consummate tact, he misunderstands the signs, draws false
conclusions, and nurses the seeds of discontent which will sooner or
later come up and bear bitter fruit.
If, on the other hand, he deliberately enters the matrimonial market
and makes his choice with calm calculation, as he would enter the mart
to supply any other need, he may run less risk of disappointment. But
the other party to the bargain will, in due time, come to regret the
part she has undertaken to play, and feel that what the man wanted
was less a wife than a housekeeper, a hostess, a useful ally, or an
assistant in the preservation of a family name. Very few women would
fail to discover the truth in such a case, and probably none would
neglect to mention it. Neither the fact, the discovery, nor the mention
of it will help to make a happy home.
With husbands and wives, if neither have any need to work, it ought
to be easy to avoid boredom (the most gruesome of all maladies), and
to accommodate themselves to each other’s wishes. They, however,
constitute a very small proportion of society. A man usually has
to work all day, and, if he is strong and healthy, it is hardly
reasonable to suppose that his only thought, when his work is over,
should be how he can best amuse his wife. If he sets that single object
before him as his duty or his pleasure, and his wife accepts the
sacrifice, the man’s health is almost certain to suffer, unless there
is some form of exercise which they can enjoy together.
Husbands and wives take a good deal for granted, and it is more curious
that lovers, who are bound by no such tie, often meet with shipwreck on
exactly the same sort of dangers. To be too exacting is probably, of
all causes, the most fertile in parting devoted lovers.
But enough of speculation. Pardon my homily, and let me answer your
question. You ask me what has become of the man we used to see so
constantly, sitting in the Park with a married lady who evidently
enjoyed his society. I will tell you, and you will then understand
why it is that you have not seen him since that summer when we too
found great satisfaction in each other’s company. He was generally
“about the town,” and when not there seemed rather to haunt the river.
Small blame to him for that; there is none with perceptions so dead
that the river, on a hot July day, will not appeal to them. I cannot
tell how long afterwards it was, but the man became engaged to a girl
who was schooling or travelling in France. She was the sister of the
woman we used to see in the Park. _Un bel giorno_ the man and his
future sister-in-law started for the Continent, to see his _fiancée_.
Arrived at Dover, the weather looked threatening, or the lady wanted
rest, or it was part of the arrangement--details of this kind are
immaterial--anyhow, they decided to stay the night in an hotel and
cross the following morning. In the grey light which steals through
darkness and recoils from day, some wanderer or stolid constable saw a
white bundle lying on the pavement by the wall of the hotel. A closer
examination showed this to be the huddled and shattered body of a man
in his night-dress; a very ghastly sight, for he was dead. It was the
man we used to see in the Park, and several storeys above the spot
where he was found were the windows, not of his room, but of another.
I do not know whether the lady continued her journey; but, if she did,
her interview with her sister must have been a bad experience.
XIV
BY THE SEA
You asked me to paint you a picture--a picture of a wonderful strand
half-circling a space of sunlit sea; an island-studded bay, girt,
landwards, by a chain of low blue hills, whose vesture of rich foliage
is, through all the years, mirrored in the dazzling waters that bathe
those rocky feet. The bay is enclosed between two headlands, both
lofty, both rising sheer out of the sea, but that on the north juts
out only a little, while the southern promontory is much bolder, and
terminates a long strip of land running at right angles to the shore
out into very deep water.
The beach between these headlands forms an arc of a circle, and the
cord joining its extremities would be about seven miles in length,
while following the shore the distance is nearly ten miles.
One might search east or west, the Old World or the New, and find
in them few places so attractive as this little-known and sparsely
inhabited dent in a far Eastern coast.
Here the sky is nearly always bright; a day which, in its thirteen
hours of light, does not give at least half of brilliant, perhaps too
brilliant sunshine, is almost unknown. Then it is the sunshine of
endless summer, not for a month or a season, but for ever.
Except on rare occasions, the winds from the sea are softest zephyrs,
the land breezes are cool and fragrant, sufficient only to stir the
leaves of trees and gently ruffle the placid surface of the bay.
The waters of the bay are green--green like a yellow emerald--but
in some few places, near the shore, this changes into a warm brown.
The beach is a wide stretch of sand broken by rocks of dark umber or
Indian red. The sand is, in some places, so startlingly white that
the eye can hardly bear the glare of it, while in others it is mixed
with fine-broken grains of the ironstone called laterite, and this
gives a burnt-sienna colour to the beach. When the tide is high, the
great stretches of hard, clean sand are covered with water to a depth
of between five and ten feet, and, owing to the absence of mud,
mangroves, and mankind, the waters of the bay are of an extraordinary
limpidity. The beach in many places dips steeply, so that, at high
tide, there are six feet of water within two or three yards of the
trees, shrubs, ferns, and creepers that clothe the shore in an
abandonment of wild and graceful luxuriance. The sand shines beneath
the waters of the sea like powdered diamonds, and all the myriads of
pebbles and shells glisten and scintillate, with a fire and life and
colour which they lose when the tide falls and leaves the sands dry,
but for the little pools that fill the depressions of a generally even
surface.
Then, however, is the time to see strange shells moving slowly about,
and crabs, of marvellous colour and unexpected instincts, scampering
in hundreds over the purple rocks, that here and there make such a
striking contrast to the brilliant orange and red, or the startling
whiteness of the sand in which they lie half-embedded.
And how positively delightful it is to paddle with bare feet between
and over these rounded stones, while the tireless waters make
continents and oceans in miniature, and the strange denizens of this
life-charged summer sea destroy each other, in the ceaseless struggle
to preserve an existence for which they are no more responsible than
we are. Here is an army of scarlet-backed crabs, hunting in battalions
for something smaller and weaker than its own tiny, fragile units.
The spider-like legion, alarmed by the approach of your naked feet,
scuttles hurriedly towards a new Red Sea, and, dashing recklessly into
the two inches of water, which are running between banks of sandy
desert, disappears as completely as Pharaoh and his host. Unlike the
Egyptian king, however, the crabs, which have only burrowed into the
sand, will presently reappear on the other shore and scour the desert
for a morning meal.
And then you are standing amongst the rocks, on a point of a bay within
the bay; and, as the rippling wavelets wash over your feet, you peer
down into the deeper eddies and pools in search of a sea-anemone.
Again, you exclaim in childish admiration of the marvellous colouring
of a jelly-fish and his puzzling fashion of locomotion, or your
grown-up experience allows you an almost pleasurable little shudder
when you think of the poisonous possibilities of this tenderly-tinted,
gauzily-gowned digestive system.
The land is not less rich in life than the sea. Nature has fringed the
waters with a garden of graceful trees, flowering shrubs, brilliantly
blossomed creepers, and slender ferns, far more beautiful in their
untrained luxuriance than any effort of human ingenuity could have made
them. There are magnolias, sweeping the waters with their magnificent
creamy blossoms, made more conspicuous by their background of great,
dark green leaves. There are gorgeous yellow alamanders, each blossom
as large as a hand; soft pale pink myrtles, star-flowered jasmines,
and the delicate wax-plant with its clusters of red or white blossoms.
These and a multitude of others, only known by barbarous botanical
names, nestle into each other’s arms, interlace their branches, and
form arbours of perfumed shade. Close behind stand almond and cashew
trees, tree-ferns, coconuts, and sago palms, and then the low hills,
clothed with the giants of a virgin forest, that shut out any distant
view.
Groups of sandpipers paddle in the little wavelets that lovingly caress
the shore; birds of the most gorgeous plumage flit through the jungle
with strange cries; and, night and morning, flocks of pigeons, plumed
in green and yellow, in orange and brown, flash meteor-like trails of
colour, in their rapid flight from mainland to island and back again.
The bay is studded with islets, some near, some far, tiny clusters of
trees growing out of the water, or a mass of stone, clothed from base
to summit with heavy jungle, except for a narrow band of red rocks
above the water’s edge.
Sailing in and out the islands, rounding the headlands, or standing
across the bay, are boats with white or brown or crimson sails; boats
of strange build, with mat or canvas sails of curious design, floating,
like tired birds, upon the restful waters of this “changeless summer
sea.”
But you remember it all: how we sat under the great blossoms and
shining leaves of the magnolias, and, within arm’s length, found
treasures of opal-tinted pebbles, and infinite variety of tiny shells,
coral-pink and green and heliotrope,--and everything seemed very good
indeed.
A mass of dark-red boulders, overlying a bed of umber rock, ran out
into the water, closing, as with a protecting arm, one end of the
little inlet, while the forest-clad hill, rising sheer from the point,
shut out everything beyond. And then the road! bright _terra cotta_,
winding round the bluff through masses of foliage in every shade of
green,--giant trees, a maze of undergrowth, and the dew-laden ferns
and mosses, blazing with emerald fires under the vagrant shafts of
sunlight;--_dies cretâ notanda_.
Do you remember how, when the sun had gone, and the soft, fragrant,
Eastern night brought an almost tangible darkness, lighted only by the
stars, we returned across the bay in a little boat, with two quaintly
coloured paper lanterns making a bright spot of colour high above the
bow? The only sound to break the measured cadence of the oars was the
gentle whisper of the land-wind through the distant palm leaves, and
the sighing of the tide as it wooed the passive beach.
And then, as we glided slowly through the starlit darkness, you, by
that strange gift of sympathetic intuition, answered my unspoken
thought, and sang the _Allerseelen_, sang it under your breath, “soft
and low,” as though it might not reach any ears but ours--yes, that was
All Souls’ Day.
There was only the sea and the sky and the stars, only the perfection
of aloneness, “_Le rêve de rester ensemble sans dessein_.”
And then, all too soon, we came to a space of lesser darkness, visible
through the belt of trees which lined the shore; far down that
water-lane twinkled a light, the beacon of our landing-place. Do you
remember?----
XV
AN ILLUMINATION
After an absence which cannot be measured by days--not at least days
of twenty-four hours, but rather by spaces of longing and regret,--I
am back again in a house where everything suggests your presence so
vividly that I hardly yet realise that I cannot find you, and already,
several times, hearing, or fancying I heard, some sound, I have looked
up expecting to see you. It is rather pitiful that, waking or sleeping,
our senses should let us be so cruelly fooled.
It seems years ago, but, sitting in this room to-night, memory carries
me back to another evening when you were also here. It had rained
heavily, and the sun had almost set when we started to ride down the
hill, across the river, and out into the fast-darkening road that
strikes through the grass-covered plain, and leads to the distant
hills. The strangely fascinating transformation of day into night, as
commonly seen from that road, cannot fail to arrest the attention and
awaken the admiration of the most casual observer; but for us, I think,
it possessed the special charm which comes from the contemplation of
nature in harmony with the mood of the spectator,--or seen, as with
one sight, by two persons in absolute sympathy of body and soul. Then
nothing is lost--no incident, no change of colour, no momentary effect
of light or shade; the scene is absorbed through the eyes, and when the
sensation caused finds expression through the voice of one, the heart
of the other responds without the need of words.
I see the picture now; a string of waggons, the patient oxen standing
waiting for their drivers, picturesquely grouped before a wayside
booth; a quaintly fashioned temple, with its faint altar-light shining
like a star from out the deep gloom within the portal; tall, feathery
palms, whose stems cast long, sharp shadows across the dark-red road;
on either side a grass-covered, undulating plain, disappearing into
narrow valleys between the deep blue hills; behind all, the grey,
mist-enshrouded mountains, half hidden in the deepening twilight.
The last gleams of colour were dying out of the sky as we left the
main road, and, turning sharp to the left, urged our horses through
the gathering darkness. At last we were obliged to pull up, uncertain
of our bearings, and even doubtful, in the now absolute blackness of
tropical night, whether we were in the right way. Carefully avoiding
the deep ditches, more by the instinct of the horses than any guidance
of ours, we struck into another road and set our faces homewards.
It was still intensely dark, but growing clearer as the stars shone
out, and we gradually became more accustomed to the gloom; dark yet
delightful, and we agreed that this was the time of all others to
really enjoy the East, with a good horse under you and a sympathetic
companion to share the fascination of the hour.
Riding through the groves of trees that lined both sides of the road,
we caught occasional glimpses of illuminated buildings, crowning the
steep hill which forms one side of the valley. Traversing the outskirts
of the town, we crossed a river and came out on a narrow plain, above
which rose the hill. I shall never forget the vision which then rose
before us. How we exclaimed with delight! and yet there was such an air
of glamour about the scene, such unrealness, such a savour of magic
and enchantment as tied our tongues for a while.
The heights rose in a succession of terraces till they seemed to almost
pierce the clouds, each terrace a maze of brilliantly illuminated
buildings to which the commanding position, the environment, the
style of architecture, and the soft, hazy atmosphere lent an imposing
grandeur.
The buildings which crowned the summit of the spur, lined the terraces,
and seemed to be connected by a long flight of picturesque stone steps,
were all of a dazzling whiteness. Low-reaching eaves, supported on
white pillars, formed wide verandahs, whose outer edges were bordered
by heavy balustrades. Every principal feature of every building, each
door and window, each verandah, balustrade, and step, was outlined by
innumerable yellow lights that shone like great stars against the soft
dark background of sky and hill. It is impossible to imagine the beauty
of the general effect: this succession of snow-white walls, rising from
foot to summit of a mist-enveloped hill, suggested the palace-crowned
heights of Futtepur Síkri, illuminated for some brilliant festival. The
effect of splendour and enchantment was intensified by the graceful
but indistinct outlines of a vast building, standing in unrelieved
darkness by the bank of the river we had just crossed. In the gloom
it was only possible to note the immense size of this nearer palace,
and to realise its towers and domes, its pillars and arches, and the
consistently Moorish style of its architecture.
As we approached the lowest of the series of illuminated buildings
that, step by step, rose to the summit of the heights, we beheld
a sheet of water beneath us on our right, and in this water were
reflected the innumerable lights of a long, low temple, standing fifty
feet above the opposite bank of the lake. Fronds of the feathery bamboo
rose from the bank, and, bending forwards in graceful curves, cast deep
shadows over the waters of this little lake, from the depths of which
blazed the fires of countless lights.
We stood there and drank in the scene, graving it on the tablets of
our memories as something never to be forgotten. Then slowly our
horses passed into the darkness of the road, which, winding round the
hillside, led up into the open country, a place of grass-land and wood,
lying grey and silent under a starlit sky.