ACCOUNTS RENDERED
Nothing strikes one more in looking back, either on our own lives or on
those of others, than how little we assimilate from the greatest
experiences; in nothing is Nature's apparent wastefulness of means more
ironically impressive. A great love comes and sets one's whole being
singing like a harp, fills high heaven with rainbows, and makes our
dingy alleys for awhile bright as the streets of the New Jerusalem; and
yet, if five years after we seek for what its incandescence has left us,
we find, maybe, a newly helpful epithet, maybe a fancy, at most a
sonnet. Nothing strikes one more, unless, perhaps, the obverse, when we
see some trifling pebble-cast ripple into eternity, some fateful second
prolific as the fly aphis. And so I find it all again exampled in these
old accounts. The books that mean most for Narcissus to-day could be
carried in the hand without a strap, and could probably be bought for a
sovereign. The rest have survived as a quaint cadence in his style, have
left clinging about his thought a delicate incense of mysticism, or are
bound up in the retrospective tenderness of boyish loves long since gone
to dream.
Another observation in the same line of reflection also must often
strike one:--for what very different qualities than those for which we
were first passionate do we come afterwards to value our old
enthusiasms. In the day of their bloom it was the thing itself, the
craze, the study, for its own sake; now it is the discipline, or any
broad human culture, in which they may have been influential. The boy
chases the butterfly, and thinks not of the wood and the blue heaven;
but those only does the man remember, for the mark of their beauty upon
him, so unconsciously impressed, for the health of their power and
sweetness still living in his blood--for these does that chase seem
alone of worth, when the dusty entomological relic thereof is in limbo.
And so that long and costly shelf, groaning beneath the weight of Grose
and Dugdale, and many a mighty slab of topographical prose; those
pilgrimages to remote parish churches, with all their attendant ardours
of careful 'rubbings'; those notebooks, filled with patient data; those
long letters to brother antiquaries--of sixteen; even that famous
Exshire Tour itself, which was to have rivalled Pennant's own--what
remains to show where this old passion stood, with all the clustering
foliage of a dream; what but that quaint cadence I spoke of, and an
anecdote or two which seemed but of little import then, with such
breathless business afoot as an old font or a Roman road?
One particular Roman road, I know, is but remembered now, because, in
the rich twilight of an old June evening, it led up the gorsy stretches
of Lancashire 'Heights' to a solemn plateau, wide and solitary as
Salisbury Plain, from the dark border of which, a warm human note
against the lonely infinite of heath and sky, beamed the little
whitewashed 'Traveller's Rest,' its yellow light, growing stronger as
the dusk deepened, meeting the eye with a sense of companionship
becoming a vague need just then.
The seeming spiritual significance of such forlorn wastes of no-man's
land had, I know, a specially strong appeal for Narcissus, and, in some
moods, the challenge which they seem to call from some 'dark tower' of
spiritual adventure would have led him wandering there till star-light;
but a day of rambling alone, in a strange country, among unknown faces,
brings a social hunger by evening, and a craving for some one to speak
to and a voice in return becomes almost a fear. A bright
kitchen-parlour, warm with the health of six workmen, grouped round a
game of dominoes, and one huge quart pot of ale, used among them as
woman in the early world, was a grateful inglenook, indeed, wherein to
close the day. Of course, friend N. joined them, and took his pull and
paid his round, like a Walt Whitman. I like to think of his slight
figure amongst them; his delicate, almost girl-like, profile against
theirs; his dreamy eyes and pale brow, surmounted by one of those dark
clusters of hair in which the fingers of women love to creep--an
incongruity, though of surfaces only, which certain who knew him but 'by
sight,' as the phrase is, might be at a loss to understand. That was one
of the surprises of his constitution. Nature had given him the dainty
and dreamy form of the artist, to which habit had added a bookish touch,
ending in a _tout ensemble_ of gentleness and distinction with little
apparent affinity to a scene like that in the 'Traveller's Rest.' But
there are many whom a suspicion of the dilettante in such an exterior
belies, and Narcissus was one of them. He had very strongly developed
that instinct of manner to which sympathy is a daily courtesy, and he
thus readily, when it suited him, could take the complexion of his
company, and his capacity of 'bend' was well-nigh genius. Of course, all
this is but to say that he was a gentleman; yet is not that in itself a
fine kind of originality? Besides, he had a genuine appetite for the
things of earth, such as many another delicate thing--a damask
rose-bush, for example--must be convicted of too; and often, when some
one has asked him 'what he could have in common with so-and-so,' I have
heard him answer: 'Tobacco and beer.' Samuel Dale once described him as
Shelley with a chin; and perhaps the chin accounted for the absence of
any of those sentimental scruples with regard to beefsteaks and certain
varieties of jokes, for which the saint-like deserter of Harriet
Westbrook was distinguished.
A supremely quaint instance of this gift of accommodation befell during
that same holiday, which should not pass unrecorded, but which I offer
to the Reader with an emphatic _Honi soit qui mal y pense_. Despairing
of reaching a certain large manufacturing town on foot in time to put up
there, one evening, he was doing the last mile or two by rail, and, as
the train slackened speed he turned to his companions in the carriage to
enquire if they could tell him of a good hotel. He had but carelessly
noticed them before: an old man, a slight young woman of perhaps thirty,
and a girl about fifteen; working people, evidently, but marked by that
air of cleanly poverty which in some seems but a touch of ascetic
refinement. The young woman at once mentioned _The Bull_, and thereupon
a little embarrassed consultation in undertone seemed to pass between
her and the old man, resulting in a timid question as to whether
Narcissus would mind putting up with them, as they were poor folk, and
could well do with any little he cared to offer for his accommodation.
There was something of a sad winningness in the woman which had
predisposed him to the group, and without hesitation he at once
accepted, and soon was walking with them to their home, through streets
echoing with Lancashire 'clogs.' On the way he learnt the circumstances
of his companions. The young woman was a widow, and the girl her
daughter. Both worked through the day at one of the great cotton mills,
while the old man, father and grandfather, stayed at home and 'fended'
for them. Thus they managed to live in a comfort which, though
straitened, did not deny them such an occasional holiday as to-day had
been, or the old man the comfort of tobacco. The home was very small,
but clean and sweet; and it was not long before they were all sat down
together over a tea of wholesome bread and butter and eggs, in the
preparation of which it seemed odd to see the old man taking his share.
That over, he and Narcissus sat to smoke and talk of the neighbouring
countryside; N. on the look-out for folk-lore, and especially for any
signs in his companion of a lingering loyalty of belief in the
traditions thereabout, a loyalty which had something in it of a sacred
duty to him in those days. Those were the days when he still turned to
the east a-Sundays, and went out in the early morning, with Herrick
under his arm, to gather May-dew, with a great uplifting of the spirit,
in what indeed was a very real act of worship.
But to my story! As bedtime approached Narcissus could not but be aware
of a growing uneasiness in the manner of the young woman. At last it was
explained. With blushing effort she stammered out the question: Would he
object to share his bed with--the old man? 'Of course not,' answered N.
at once, as though he had all the time intended doing that very thing,
and indeed, thought it the most delightful arrangement in the world.
So up to bed go the oddly consorted pair. But the delicious climax was
yet to come. On entering the room, Narcissus found that there were two
beds there! Why should we leave that other bed empty?--he had almost
asked; but a laughing wonder shot through him, and he stopped in time.
The old man was soon among the blankets, but Narcissus dallied over
undressing, looking at this and that country quaintness on the wall; and
then, while he was in a state of half man and half trousers, the voice
of the woman called from the foot of the stairs: Were they in bed yet?
'Surely, it cannot be! it is too irresistibly simple,' was his thought;
but he had immediately answered, 'In a moment,' as if such a question
was quite a matter of course.
In that space he had blown the candle out, and was by the old man's
side: and then, in the darkness, he heard the two women ascending the
stairs. Just outside his door, which he had left ajar, they seemed to
turn off into a small adjoining room, from whence came immediately the
soft delicious sounds of female disrobing. They were but factory women,
yet Narcissus thought of Saint Agnes and Madeline, we may be sure. And
then, at last--indeed, there was to be no mistake about it--the door was
softly pushed open, and two dim forms whispered across to the adjoining
bed, and, after a little preliminary rustle, settled down to a rather
fluttered breathing.
No one had spoken: not even a Goodnight; but Narcissus could hardly
refrain from ringing out a great mirthful cry, while his heart beat
strangely, and the darkness seemed to ripple, like sunlight in a cup,
with suppressed laughter. The thought of the little innocent deception
as to their sleeping-room, which poverty had caused them to practise,
probably held the breath of the women, while the shyness of sex was a
common bond of silence--at least, on the part of the three younger. It
was long before Narcissus was able to fall asleep, for he kept picturing
the elder woman with burning cheek and open eyes in a kind of 'listening
fear' beneath the coverlet; and the oddity of the thing was so original,
so like some _conte_ of a _Decameron_ or _Heptameron_, with the
wickedness left out. But at last wonder gave place to weariness, and
sleep began to make a still odder magic of the situation. The difficulty
of meeting at breakfast next morning, which had at once suggested itself
to N.'s mind, proved a vain fear; for, when he arose, that other bed was
as smooth as though it had lain untouched through the night, and the
daughters of labour had been gone two hours. But it was not quite
without sign that they had gone, for Narcissus had a dreamlike
impression of opening his eyes in the early light to find a sweet
woman's face leaning over him; and I am sure he wanted to believe that
it had bent down still further, till it had kissed his lips--' for his
mother's sake,' she had said in her heart, as she slipped away and was
seen no more.
'If this were fiction, instead of a veracious study from life,' to make
use of a phrase which one rarely finds out of a novel, it would be
unfitting to let such an incident as that just related fall to the
ground, except as the seed of future development; but, this being as I
have stated, there is nothing more to say of that winning _ouvrière_.
Narcissus saw her no more.
But surely, of all men, he could best afford that one such pleasant
chance should put forth no other blossom save that half-dreamed
kiss;--and how can one ever foresee but that our so cherishable spray of
bloom may in time add but another branch to that orchard of Dead Sea
fruit which grows inevitably about all men's dwellings?
I do not suppose that Narcissus was really as exceptional in the number
and character of his numerous boyish loves as we always regarded him as
being. It is no uncommon matter, of course and alas! for a youth between
the ages of seventeen and nineteen to play the juggler at keeping three,
or even half-a-dozen, female correspondents going at once, each of whom
sleeps nightly with copious documentary evidence of her sole and
incontrovertible possession of the sacred heart. Nor has Narcissus been
the only lover, I suspect, who, in the season of the waning of the moon,
has sent such excuses for scrappy epistolary make-shifts as 'the
strident din of an office, an air so cruelly unsympathetic, as frost to
buds, to the blossoming of all those words of love that press for
birth,' when, as a matter of fact, he has been unblushingly eating the
lotus, in the laziest chair at home, in the quietest night of summer.
Such insincerity is a common besetting sin of the young male;
invariably, I almost think, if he has the artistic temperament. Yet I do
not think it presents itself to his mind in its nudity, but comes
clothed with that sophistry in which youth, the most thoroughgoing of
_philosophes_, is so ingenious. Consideration for the beloved object, it
is called--yes! beloved indeed, though, such is the paradox in the order
of things, but one of the several vestals of the sacred fire. One cannot
help occasional disinclination on a lazy evening, confound it! but it
makes one twinge to think of paining her with such a confession; and a
story of that sort--well, it's a lie, of course; but it's one without
any harm, any seed of potential ill, in it. So the letter goes, maybe to
take its place as the 150th of the sacred writings, and make poor
Daffodilia, who has loved to count the growing score, happy with the
completion of the half-century.
But the disinclination goes not, though the poor passion has, of
course, its occasional leapings in the socket, and the pain has to come
at last, for all that dainty consideration, which, moreover, has been
all the time feeding larger capacities for suffering. For, of course, no
man thinks of marrying his twelfth love, though in the thirteenth there
is usually danger; and he who has jilted, so to say, an earl's daughter
as his sixth, may come to see
'The God of Love, ah! benedicite,
How mighty and how great a lord is he'
in the thirteenth Miss Simpkins.
But this is to write as an outsider: for that thirteenth, by a mystical
process which has given to each of its series in its day the same primal
quality, is, of course, not only the last, but the first. And, indeed,
with little casuistry, that thirteenth may be truly held to be the
first, for it is a fact determined not so much by the chosen maid as by
him who chooses, though he himself is persuaded quite otherwise. To him
his amorous career has been hitherto an unsuccessful pursuit, because
each followed fair in turn, when at length he has caught her flying
skirts, and looked into her face, has proved not that 'ideal'--
'That not impossible she
That shall command my heart and me'--
but another, to be shaken free again in disappointment. In truth,
however, the lack has been in himself all this time. He had yet to learn
what loving indeed meant: and he loves the thirteenth, not because she
is pre-eminent beyond the rest, but because she has come to him at the
moment when that 'lore of loving' has been revealed. Had any of those
earlier maidens fallen on the happy conjunction, they would, doubtless,
have proved no less loveworthy, and seemed no less that 'ideal' which
they have since become, one may be sure, for some other illuminated
soul.
Of course, some find that love early--the baby-love, whom one never
marries, and then the faithful service. Probably it happens so with the
majority of men; for it is, I think, especially to the artist nature
that it comes thus late. Living so vividly within the circle of its own
experience, by its very constitution so necessarily egoistic, the
latter, more particularly in its early years, is always a Narcissus,
caring for nought or none except in so much as they reflect back its own
beauty or its own dreams. The face such a youth looks for, as he turns
the coy captured head to meet his glance, is, quite unconsciously, his
own, and the 'ideal' he seeks is but the perfect mirror. Yet it is not
that mirror he marries after all: for when at last he has come to know
what that word--one so distasteful, so 'soiled' to his ear 'with all
ignoble' domesticity--what that word 'wife' really expresses, he has
learnt, too, to discredit those cynical guides of his youth who love so
well to write Ego as the last word of human nature.
But the particular Narcissus of whom I write was a long way off that
thirteenth maid in the days of his antiquarian rambles and his
Pagan-Catholic ardours, and the above digression is at least out of
date.
A copy of Keats which I have by me as I write is a memorial of one of
the pretty loves typical of that period. It is marked all through in
black lead--not so gracefully as one would have expected from the 'taper
fingers' which held the pencil, but rather, it would appear, more with
regard to emphasis than grace. Narcissus had lent it to the queen of the
hour with special instructions to that end, so that when it came to him
again he might ravish his soul with the hugging assurance given by the
thick lead to certain ecstatic lines of _Endymion,_ such as--
'My soul doth melt
For the unhappy youth;'
'He surely cannot now
Thirst for another love;'
and luxuriate in a genial sense of godship where the tremulous pencil
had left the record of a sigh against--
'Each tender maiden whom he once thought fair.'
But it was a magnanimous godship; and, after a moment's leaning back
with closed eyes, to draw in all the sweet incense, how nobly would he
act, in imaginative vignette, the King Cophetua to this poor suppliant
of love; with what a generous waiving of his power--and with what a
grace!--did he see himself raising her from her knees, and seating her
at his right hand. Yet those pencil-marks, alas! mark but a secondary
interest in that volume. A little sketch on the fly-leaf, 'by another
hand,' witness the prettier memory. A sacred valley, guarded by smooth,
green hills; in the midst a little lake, fed at one end by a singing
stream, swallowed at the other by the roaring darkness of a mill; green
rushes prosperous in the shallows, and along the other bank an old
hedgerow; a little island in the midst, circled by silver lilies; and in
the distance, rising from out a cloud of tangled green, above the little
river, an old church tower. Below, though not 'in the picture,' a quaint
country house, surrounded by a garden of fair fruit-trees and wonderful
bowers, through which ran the stream, free once again, and singing for
joy of the light. In the great lone house a solitary old man, cherished
and ruled by--'The Miller's Daughter.' Was scene ever more in need of a
fairy prince? Narcissus sighed, as he broke upon it one rosy evening,
to think what little meaning all its beauty had, suffering that lack;
but as he had come thither with the purpose, at once firm and vague, of
giving it a memory, he could afford to sigh till morning's light
brought, maybe, the opportunity of that transfiguring action. He was to
spend an Easter fortnight there, as the guest of some farmer-relatives
with whom he had stayed years before, in a period to which, being
nineteen, he already alluded as his 'boyhood.'
And it is not quite accurate to say that it had no memory for him, for
he brought with him one of that very miller's daughter, though, indeed,
it was of the shadowiest silver. It had chanced at that early time that
an influx of visitors to the farm had exceeded the sleeping room, and he
and another little fellow had been provided with a bed in the miller's
house. He had never quite forgotten that bedroom--its huge old-fashioned
four-poster, slumbrous with great dark hangings, such as Queen Elizabeth
seems always to have slept in; its walls dim with tapestry, and its
screen of antique bead-work. But it was round the toilet table that
memory grew brightest, for thereon was a crystal phial of a most
marvellous perfume, and two great mother-of-pearl shells, shedding a
mystical radiance--the most commonplace Rimmel's, without doubt, and the
shells 'dreadful,' one may be sure. But to him, as he took a reverent
breath of that phial, it seemed the very sweetbriar fragrance of her
gown that caught his sense; and, surely, he never in all the world found
scent like that again. Thus, long after, she would come to him in
day-dreams, wafted on its strange sweetness, and clothed about with that
mystical lustre of pearl.
There were five years between him and that memory as he stepped into
that enchanted land for the second time. The sweet figure of young
womanhood to which he had turned his boyish soul in hopeless worship,
when it should have been busied rather with birds' nests and
rabbit-snares, had, it is true, come to him in dimmer outline each
Spring, but with magic the deeper for that. As the form faded from the
silver halo, and passed more and more into mythology, it seemed, indeed,
as if she had never lived for him at all, save in dreams, or on another
star. Still, his memory held by those great shells, and he had come at
last to the fabled country on the perilous quest--who of us dare venture
such a one to-day?--of a 'lost saint.' Enquiry of his friends that
evening, cautious as of one on some half-suspected diplomacy, told him
that one with the name of his remembrance did live at the
mill-house--with an old father, too. But how all the beauty of the
singing morning became a scentless flower when, on making the earliest
possible call, he was met at the door with that hollow word, 'Away'--a
word that seemed to echo through long rooms of infinite emptiness and
turn the daylight shabby--till the addendum, 'for the day,' set the
birds singing again, and called the sunshine back.
A few nights after he was sitting at her side, by a half-opened window,
with his arm about her waist, and her head thrillingly near his. With
his pretty gift of recitation he was pouring into her ear that sugared
passage in _Endymion_, appropriately beginning, 'O known unknown,'
previously 'got up' for the purpose; but alas! not too perfectly to
prevent a break-down, though, fortunately, at a point that admitted a
ready turn to the dilemma:--
'Still
Let me entwine thee surer, surer ...'
Here exigency compelled N. to make surety doubly, yea, trebly, sure; but
memory still forsaking him, the rascal, having put deeper and deeper
significance into his voice with each repetition, dropped it altogether
as he drew her close to him, and seemed to fail from the very excess of
love. An hour after, he was bounding into the moonlight in an
intoxication of triumph. She was won. The beckoning wonder had come down
to him. And yet it was real moonlight--was not that his own grace in
silhouette, making a mirror even of the hard road?--real grass over
which he had softly stept from her window, real trees, all real,
except--yes! was it real love?
In the lives of all passionate lovers of women there are two
broadly-marked periods, and in some a third: slavery, lordship, and
service. The first is the briefest, and the third, perhaps, seldom
comes; the second is the most familiar.
Awakening, like our forefather, from the deep sleep of childish things,
the boy finds a being by his side of a strange hushing fairness, as
though in the night he had opened his eyes and found an angel by his
bed. Speech he has not at all, and his glance dare not rise beyond her
bosom; till, the presence seeming gracious, he dares at length stretch
out his hand and touch her gown; whereon an inexplicable new joy
trembles through him, as though he stood naked in a May meadow through
the golden rain of a summer shower. Should her fingers touch his arm by
chance, it is as though they swept a harp, and a music of piercing
sweetness runs with a sudden cry along his blood. But by and by he comes
to learn that he has made a comical mistake about this wonder. With his
head bent low in worship, he had not seen the wistfulness of her gaze on
him; and one day, lo! it is she who presses close to him with the timid
appeal of a fawn. Indeed, she has all this time been to him as some
beautiful woodland creature might have seemed, breaking for the first
time upon the sight of primitive man. Fear, wonder inexpressible,
worship, till a sudden laughing thought of comprehension, then a lordly
protectiveness, and, after that--the hunt! At once the masculine
self-respect returns, and the wonder, though no less sweet in itself,
becomes but another form of tribute.
With Narcissus this evolution had taken place early: it was very long
ago--he felt old even then to think of it--since Hesperus had sung like
a nightingale above his first kiss, and his memory counted many trophies
of lordship. But, surely, this last was of all the starriest; perhaps,
indeed, so wonderful was it, it might prove the very love which would
bring back again the dream that had seemed lost for ever with the
passing of that mythical first maid so long ago, a love in which worship
should be all once more, and godship none at all. But is not such a
question all too certainly its own answer? Nay, Narcissus, if indeed you
find that wonder-maid again, you will not question so; you will forget
to watch that graceful shadow in the moonlight; you will but ask to sit
by her silent, as of old, to follow her to the end of the world. Ah me!
'How many queens have ruled and passed
Since first we met;
How thick and fast
The letters used to come at first,
How thin at last;
Then ceased, and winter for a space!
Until another hand
Brought spring into the land,
And went the seasons' pace.'
That Miller's Daughter, although 'so dear, so dear,' why, of course, she
was not that maid: but again the silver halo has grown about her; again
Narcissus asks himself, 'Did she live, or did I dream?'; again she comes
to him at whiles, wafted on that strange incense, and clothed about in
that mystical lustre of pearl.
Doubtless, she lives in that fabled country still: but Narcissus has
grown sadly wise since then, and he goes on pilgrimage no more.