During five years of an almost daily association with Michael Garth,
in a solitude of Chili, which threw us, men of common speech, though
scarcely of common interests, largely on each other's tolerance, I had
grown, if not into an intimacy with him, at least into a certain
familiarity, through which the salient feature of his history, his
character reached me. It was a singular character, and an history rich
in instruction. So much I gathered from hints, which he let drop long
before I had heard the end of it. Unsympathetic as the man was to me,
it was impossible not to be interested by it. As our acquaintance
advanced, it took (his character I mean) more and more the aspect of a
difficult problem in psychology, that I was passionately interested in
solving: to study it was my recreation, after watching the fluctuating
course of nitrates. So that when I had achieved fortune, and might
have started home immediately, my interest induced me to wait more
than three months, and return in the same ship with him. It was
through this delay that I am enabled to transcribe the issue of my
impressions: I found them edifying, if only for their singular irony.
From his own mouth indeed I gleaned but little; although during our
voyage home, in those long nights when we paced the deck together
under the Southern Cross, his reticence occasionally gave way, and I
obtained glimpses of a more intimate knowledge of him than the whole
of our juxtaposition on the station had ever afforded me. I guessed
more, however, than he told me; and what was lacking I pieced together
later, from the talk of the girl to whom I broke the news of his
death. He named her to me, for the first time, a day or two before
that happened: a piece of confidence so unprecedented, that I must
have been blind, indeed, not to have foreseen what it prefaced. I had
seen her face the first time I entered his house, where her photograph
hung on a conspicuous wall: the charming, oval face of a young girl,
little more than a child, with great eyes, that one guessed, one knew
not why, to be the colour of violets, looking out with singular
wistfulness from a waving cloud of dark hair. Afterwards, he told me
that it was the picture of his _fiancée_: but, before that, signs had
not been wanting by which I had read a woman in his life.
Iquique is not Paris; it is not even Valparaiso; but it is a city of
civilisation; and but two days' ride from the pestilential stew, where
we nursed our lives doggedly on quinine and hope, the ultimate hope of
evasion. The lives of most Englishmen yonder, who superintend works in
the interior, are held on the same tenure: you know them by a certain
savage, hungry look in their eyes. In the meantime, while they wait
for their luck, most of them are glad enough when business calls them
down for a day or two to Iquique. There are shops and streets, lit
streets through which blackeyed Senoritas pass in their lace mantilas;
there are _cafés_ too; and faro for those who reck of it; and bull
fights, and newspapers younger than six weeks; and in the harbour,
taking in their fill of nitrates, many ships, not to be considered
without envy, because they are coming, within a limit of days to
England. But Iquique had no charm for Michael Garth, and when one of
us must go, it was usually I, his subordinate, who being delegated,
congratulated myself on his indifference. Hard-earned dollars melted
at Iquique; and to Garth, life in Chili had long been solely a matter
of amassing them. So he stayed on, in the prickly heat of Agnas
Blancas, and grimly counted the days, and the money (although his
nature, I believe, was fundamentally generous, in his set
concentration of purpose, he had grown morbidly avaricious) which
should restore him to his beautiful mistress. Morose, reticent,
unsociable as he had become, he had still, I discovered by degrees, a
leaning towards the humanities, a nice taste, such as could only be
the result of much knowledge, in the fine things of literature. His
infinitesimal library, a few French novels, an Horace, and some well
thumbed volumes of the modern English poets in the familiar edition of
Tauchnitz, he put at my disposal, in return for a collection, somewhat
similar, although a little larger, of my own. In his rare moments of
amiability, he could talk on such matters with _verve_ and
originality: more usually he preferred to pursue with the bitterest
animosity an abstract fetish which he called his "luck." He was by
temperament an enraged pessimist; and I could believe, that he
seriously attributed to Providence, some quality inconceivably
malignant, directed in all things personally against himself. His
immense bitterness and his careful avarice, alike, I could explain,
and in a measure justify, when I came to understand that he had felt
the sharpest stings of poverty, and, moreover, was passionately in
love, in love _comme on ne l'est plus_. As to what his previous
resources had been, I knew nothing, nor why they had failed him; but I
gathered that the crisis had come, just when his life was complicated
by the sudden blossoming of an old friendship into love, in his case,
at least, to be complete and final. The girl too was poor; they were
poorer than most poor persons: how could he refuse the post, which,
through the good offices of a friend, was just then unexpectedly
offered him? Certainly, it was abroad; it implied five years' solitude
in Equatorial America. Separation and change were to be accounted;
perhaps, diseases and death, and certainly his 'luck,' which seemed to
include all these. But it also promised, when the term of his exile
was up, and there were means of shortening it, a certain competence,
and very likely wealth; escaping those other contingencies, marriage.
There seemed no other way. The girl was very young: there was no
question of an early marriage; there was not even a definite
engagement. Garth would take no promise from her: only for himself, he
was her bound lover while he breathed; would keep himself free to
claim her, when he came back in five years, or ten, or twenty, if she
had not chosen better. He would not bind her; but I can imagine how
impressive his dark, bitter face must have made this renunciation to
the little girl with the violet eyes; how tenderly she repudiated her
freedom. She went out as a governess, and sat down to wait. And
absence only rivetted faster the chain of her affection: it set Garth
more securely on the pedestal of her idea; for in love it is most
usually the reverse of that social maxim, _les absents ont toujours
tort_, which is true.
Garth, on his side, writing to her, month by month, while her picture
smiled on him from the wall, if he was careful always to insist on her
perfect freedom, added, in effect, so much more than this, that the
renunciation lost its benefit. He lived in a dream of her; and the
memory of her eyes and her hair was a perpetual presence with him,
less ghostly than the real company among whom he mechanically
transacted his daily business. Burnt away and consumed by desire of
her living arms, he was counting the hours which still prevented him
from them. Yet, when his five years were done, he delayed his return,
although his economies had justified it; settled down for another term
of five years, which was to be prolonged to seven. Actually, the
memory of his old poverty, with its attendant dishonours, was grown a
fury, pursuing him ceaselessly with whips. The lust of gain, always
for the girl's sake, and so, as it were, sanctified, had become a
second nature to him; an intimate madness, which left him no peace.
His worst nightmare was to wake with a sudden shock, imagining that he
had lost everything, that he was reduced to his former poverty: a cold
sweat would break all over him before he had mastered the horror. The
recurrence of it, time after time, made him vow grimly, that he would
go home a rich man, rich enough to laugh at the fantasies of his luck.
Latterly, indeed, this seemed to have changed; so that his vow was
fortunately kept. He made money lavishly at last: all his operations
were successful, even those which seemed the wildest gambling: and the
most forlorn speculations turned round, and shewed a pretty harvest,
when Garth meddled with their stock.
And all the time he was waiting there, and scheming, at Agnas Blancas,
in a feverish concentration of himself upon his ultimate reunion with
the girl at home, the man was growing old: gradually at first, and
insensibly; but towards the end, by leaps and starts, with an
increasing consciousness of how he aged and altered, which did but
feed his black melancholy. It was borne upon him, perhaps, a little
brutally, and not by direct self-examination, when there came another
photograph from England. A beautiful face still, but certainly the
face of a woman, who had passed from the grace of girlhood (seven
years now separated her from it), to a dignity touched with sadness: a
face, upon which life had already written some of its cruelties. For
many days after this arrival, Garth was silent and moody, even beyond
his wont: then he studiously concealed it. He threw himself again
furiously into his economic battle; he had gone back to the
inspiration of that other, older portrait: the charming, oval face of
a young girl, almost a child, with great eyes, that one guessed one
knew not why, to be the colour of violets.
As the time of our departure approached, a week or two before we had
gone down to Valparaiso, where Garth had business to wind up, I was
enabled to study more intimately the morbid demon which possessed him.
It was the most singular thing in the world: no man had hated the
country more, had been more passionately determined for a period of
years to escape from it; and now that his chance was come the emotion
with which he viewed it was nearer akin to terror than to the joy of a
reasonable man who is about to compass the desire of his life. He had
kept the covenant which he had made with himself; he was a rich man,
richer than he had ever meant to be. Even now he was full of vigour,
and not much past the threshold of middle age, and he was going home
to the woman whom for the best part of fifteen years he had adored
with an unexampled constancy, whose fidelity had been to him all
through that exile as the shadow of a rock in a desert land: he was
going home to an honourable marriage. But withal he was a man with an
incurable sadness; miserable and afraid. It seemed to me at times that
he would have been glad if she had kept her troth less well, had only
availed herself of that freedom which he gave her, to disregard her
promise. And this was the more strange in that I never doubted the
strength of his attachment; it remained engrossing and unchanged, the
largest part of his life. No alien shadow had ever come between him
and the memory of the little girl with the violet eyes, to whom he at
least was bound. But a shadow was there; fantastic it seemed to me at
first, too grotesque to be met with argument, but in whose very lack
of substance, as I came to see, lay its ultimate strength. The notion
of the woman, which now she was, came between him and the girl whom he
had loved, whom he still loved with passion, and separated them. It
was only on our voyage home, when we walked the deck together
interminably during the hot, sleepless nights, that he first revealed
to me without subterfuge, the slow agony by which this phantom slew
him. And his old bitter conviction of the malignity of his luck, which
had lain dormant in the first flush of his material prosperity,
returned to him. The apparent change in it seemed to him just then,
the last irony of those hostile powers which had pursued him.
'It came to me suddenly,' he said, 'just before I left Agnas, when I
had been adding up my pile and saw there was nothing to keep me, that
it was all wrong. I had been a blamed fool! I might have gone home
years ago. Where is the best of my life? Burnt out, wasted, buried in
that cursed oven! Dollars? If I had all the metal in Chili, I couldn't
buy one day of youth. Her youth too; that has gone with the rest;
that's the worst part!'
Despite all my protests, his despondency increased as the steamer
ploughed her way towards England, with the ceaseless throb of her
screw, which was like the panting of a great beast. Once, when we had
been talking of other matters, of certain living poets whom he
favoured, he broke off with a quotation from the 'Prince's Progress'
of Miss Rossetti:
'Ten years ago, five years ago,
One year ago,
Even then you had arrived in time;
Though somewhat slow;
Then you had known her living face
Which now you cannot know.'
He stopped sharply, with a tone in his voice which seemed to intend,
in the lines, a personal instance.
'I beg your pardon!' I protested. 'I don't see the analogy. You
haven't loitered; you don't come too late. A brave woman has waited
for you; you have a fine felicity before you: it should be all the
better, because you have won it laboriously. For heaven's sake, be
reasonable!' He shook his head sadly; then added, with a gesture of
sudden passion, looking out over the taffrail, at the heaving gray
waters: 'It's finished. I haven't any longer the courage.' 'Ah!' I
exclaimed impatiently, 'say once for all, outright, that you are tired
of her, that you want to back out of it.' 'No,' he said drearily, 'it
isn't that. I can't reproach myself with the least wavering. I have
had a single passion; I have given my life to it; it is there still,
consuming me. Only the girl I loved: it's as if she had died. Yes, she
is dead, as dead as Helen: and I have not the consolation of knowing
where they have laid her. Our marriage will be a ghastly mockery: a
marriage of corpses. Her heart, how can she give it me? She gave it
years ago to the man I was, the man who is dead. We, who are left, are
nothing to one another, mere strangers.'
One could not argue with a perversity so infatuate: it was useless to
point out, that in life a distinction so arbitrary as the one which
haunted him does not exist. It was only left me to wait, hoping that
in the actual event of their meeting, his malady would be healed. But
this meeting, would it ever be compassed? There were moments when his
dread of it seemed to have grown so extreme, that he would be capable
of any cowardice, any compromise to postpone it, to render it
impossible. He was afraid that she would read his revulsion in his
eyes, would suspect how time and his very constancy had given her the
one rival with whom she could never compete; the memory of her old
self, of her gracious girlhood, which was dead. Might not she too,
actually, welcome a reprieve; however readily she would have submitted
out of honour or lassitude, to a marriage which could only be a parody
of what might have been?
At Lisbon, I hoped that he had settled these questions, had grown
reasonable and sane, for he wrote a long letter to her which was
subsequently a matter of much curiosity to me; and he wore, for a day
or two afterwards, an air almost of assurance which deceived me. I
wondered what he had put in that epistle, how far he had explained
himself, justified his curious attitude. Or was it simply a _résumé_,
a conclusion to those many letters which he had written at Agnas
Blancas, the last one which he would ever address to the little girl
of the earlier photograph?
Later, I would have given much to decide this, but she herself, the
woman who read it, maintained unbroken silence. In return, I kept a
secret from her, my private interpretation of the accident of his
death. It seemed to me a knowledge tragical enough for her, that he
should have died as he did, so nearly in English waters; within a few
days of the home coming, which they had passionately expected for
years.
It would have been mere brutality to afflict her further, by lifting
the veil of obscurity, which hangs over that calm, moonless night, by
pointing to the note of intention in it. For it is in my experience,
that accidents so opportune do not in real life occur, and I could not
forget that, from Garth's point of view, death was certainly a
solution. Was it not, moreover, precisely a solution, which so little
time before he had the appearance of having found? Indeed when the
first shock of his death was past, I could feel that it was after all
a solution: with his 'luck' to handicap him, he had perhaps avoided
worse things than the death he met. For the luck of such a man, is it
not his temperament, his character? Can any one escape from that? May
it not have been an escape for the poor devil himself, an escape too
for the woman who loved him, that he chose to drop down, fathoms down,
into the calm, irrecoverable depths of the Atlantic, when he did,
bearing with him at least an unspoilt ideal, and leaving her a memory
that experience could never tarnish, nor custom stale?