Hadria said nothing more about her project, and when Henriette alluded
to it, answered that it was still unfurnished with detail. She merely
wished to know, for certain, Henriette's views. She admitted that there
had been some conversation on the subject between Hubert and herself,
but would give no particulars. Henriette had to draw her own conclusions
from Hadria's haggard looks, and the suppressed excitement of her
manner.
Henriette always made a point of being present when Professor Fortescue
called, as she did not approve of his frequent visits. She noticed that
he gave a slight start when Hadria entered. In a few days, she had grown
perceptibly thinner. Her manner was restless. A day or two of rain had
prevented the usual walks. When it cleared up again, the season had
taken a stride. Still more glorious was the array of tree and flower,
and their indescribable freshness suggested the idea that they were
bathed in the mysterious elixir of life, and that if one touched them,
eternal youth would be the reward. Professor Theobald gazed at Hadria
with startled and enquiring eyes, when they met again.
"You look tired," he said.
"I am, rather. The spring is always a little trying."
"Especially _this_ spring, I find."
The gardens of the Priory were now at the very perfection of their
beauty. The supreme moment had come of flowing wealth of foliage and
delicate splendour of blossom, yet the paleness of green and tenderness
of texture were still there.
Professor Theobald said suddenly, that Hadria looked as if she were
turning over some project very anxiously in her mind--a project on which
much depended.
"You are very penetrating," she replied, after a moment's hesitation,
"that is exactly what I _am_ doing. When I was a girl, my brothers and
sisters and I used to discuss the question of the sovereignty of the
will. Most of us believed in it devoutly. We regarded circumstance as an
annoying trifle, that no person who respected himself would allow to
stand in his way. I want to try that theory and see what comes of it."
"You alarm me, Mrs. Temperley."
"Yes, people always do seem to get alarmed when one attempts to put
their favourite theories in practice."
"But really--for a woman----"
"The sovereignty of the will is a dangerous doctrine?"
"Well, as things are; a young woman, a beautiful woman."
"You recall an interesting memory," she said.
"Ah, that is unkind."
Her smile checked him.
"When you fall into a mocking humour, you are quite impracticable."
"I merely smiled," she said, "sweetly, as I thought."
"It is really cruel; I have not had a word with you for days, and the
universe has become a wilderness."
"A pleasant wilderness," she observed, looking round.
"Nature is a delightful background, but a poor subject."
"Do you think so? I often fancy one's general outlook would be nicer, if
one had an indistinct human background and a clear foreground of
unspoiled Nature. But that may be a jaundiced view."
Hadria went off to meet Lady Engleton, who was coming down the avenue
with Madame Bertaux. Professor Theobald instinctively began to follow
and then stopped, reddening, as he met the glance of Miss Temperley. He
flung himself into conversation with her, and became especially animated
when he was passing Hadria, who did not appear to notice him. As both
Professors were to leave Craddock Dene at the end of the week, this was
the last meeting in the Priory gardens.
Miss Temperley found Professor Theobald entertaining, but at times a
little incoherent.
"Why, there is Miss Du Prel!" exclaimed Henriette. "What an erratic
person she is. She went to London the day before yesterday, and now she
turns up suddenly without a word of warning."
This confirmed Professor Theobald's suspicions that something serious
was going on at the Red House.
Valeria explained her return to Hadria, by saying that she had felt so
nervous about what the latter might be going to attempt, that she had
come back to see if she could be of help, or able to ward off any rash
adventure.
There was a pleasant open space among the shrubberies, where several
seats had been placed to command a dainty view of the garden and lawns,
with the house in the distance, and here the party gradually converged,
in desultory fashion, coming up and strolling off again, as the fancy
inspired them.
Cigars were lighted, and a sense of sociability and enjoyment suffused
itself, like a perfume, among the group.
Lady Engleton was delighted to see Miss Du Prel again. She did so want
to continue the hot discussion they were having at the Red House that
afternoon, when Mr. Temperley _would_ be so horridly logical. He smiled
and twisted his moustache.
"We were interrupted by some caller, and had to leave the argument at a
most exciting moment."
"An eternally interesting subject!" said Temperley; "what woman is, what
she is not."
"My dread is that presently, the need for dissimulation being over, all
the delightful mystery will have vanished," said Professor Theobald. "I
should tire, in a day, of a woman I could understand."
"You tempt one to enquire the length of the reign of a satisfactory
enigma," cried Lady Engleton.
"Precisely the length of her ability to mystify me," he replied.
"Your future wife ought to be given a hint."
"Oh! a wife, in no case, could hold me: the mere fact that it was my
duty to adore her, would be chilling. And when added to that, I knew
that she had placed it among the list of her obligations to adore
_me_--well, that would be the climax of disenchantment."
Hubert commended his wisdom in not marrying.
"The only person I could conceivably marry would be my cook; in that
case there would be no romance to spoil, no vision to destroy."
"I fear this is a cloak for a poor opinion of our sex, Professor."
"On the contrary. I admire your sex too much to think of subjecting them
to such an ordeal. I could not endure to regard a woman I had once
admired, as a matter of course, a commonplace in my existence."
Henriette plunged headlong into the fray, in opposition to the
Professor's heresy. The conversation became general.
Professor Theobald fell out of it. He was furtively watching Hadria,
whose eyes were strangely bright. She was sitting on the arm of a seat,
listening to the talk, with a little smile on her lips. Her hand clasped
the back of the seat rigidly, as if she were holding something down.
The qualities and defects of the female character were frankly
canvassed, each view being held with fervour, but expressed with
urbanity. Women were _always_ so and so; women were absolutely _never_
so and so: women felt, without exception, thus and thus; on the
contrary, they were entirely devoid of such sentiments. A large
experience and wide observation always supported each opinion, and
eminent authorities swarmed to the standard.
"I do think that women want breadth of view," said Lady Engleton.
"They sometimes want accuracy of statement," observed Professor
Theobald, with a possible second meaning in his words.
"It seems to me they lack concentration. They are too versatile," was
Hubert's comment.
"They want a sense of honour," was asserted.
"And a sense of humour," some one added.
"They want a feeling of public duty."
"They want a spice of the Devil!" exclaimed Hadria.
There was a laugh.
Hubert thought this was a lack not likely to be felt for very long. It
was under rapid process of cultivation.
"Why, it is a commonplace, that if a woman _is_ bad, she is always
_very_ bad," cried Lady Engleton.
"A new and intoxicating experience," said Professor Fortescue. "I
sympathize."
"New?" his colleague murmured, with a faint chuckle.
"You distress me," said Henriette.
Professor Fortescue held that woman's "goodness" had done as much harm
in the world as men's badness. The one was merely the obverse of the
other.
"This is strange teaching!" cried Lady Engleton.
The Professor reminded her that truth was always stranger than fiction.
"To the best men," observed Valeria, "women show all their meanest
qualities. It is the fatality of their training."
Professor Theobald had noted the same trait in other subject races.
"Pray, don't call us a subject race!" remonstrated Lady Engleton.
"Ah, yes, the truth," cried Hadria, "we starve for the truth."
"You are courageous, Mrs. Temperley."
"Like the Lady of Shallott, I am sick of shadows."
"The bare truth, on this subject, is hard for a woman to face."
"It is harder, in the long run, to waltz eternally round it with averted
eyes."
"But, dear me, why is the truth about ourselves hard to face?" demanded
Valeria.
"I am placed between the horns of a dilemma: one lady clamours for the
bare truth: another forbids me to say anything unpleasing."
"I withdraw my objection," Valeria offered.
"The ungracious task shall not be forced upon unwilling chivalry," said
Hadria. "If our conditions have been evil, some scars must be left and
may as well be confessed. Among the faults of women, I should place a
tendency to trade upon and abuse real chivalry and generosity when they
meet them: a survival perhaps from the Stone Age, when the fittest to
bully were the surviving elect of society."
Hadria's eyes sparkled with suppressed excitement.
"Freedom alone teaches us to meet generosity, generously," said
Professor Fortescue; "you can't get the perpendicular virtues out of any
but the really free-born."
"Then do you describe women's virtues as horizontal?" enquired Miss Du
Prel, half resentfully.
"In so far as they follow the prevailing models. Women's love,
friendship, duty, the conduct of life as a whole, speaking very roughly,
has been lacking in the quality that I call perpendicular; a quality
implying something more than _upright_."
"You seem to value but lightly the woman's acknowledged readiness for
self-sacrifice," said Lady Engleton. "That, I suppose, is only a
despised horizontal virtue."
"Very frequently."
"Because it is generally more or less abject," Hadria put in. "The
sacrifice is made because the woman is a woman. It is the obeisance of
sex; the acknowledgment of servility; not a simple desire of service."
"The adorable creature is not always precisely obeisant," observed
Theobald.
"No; as I say, she may be capricious and cruel enough to those who treat
her justly and generously" (Hadria's eyes instinctively turned towards
the distant Priory, and Valeria's followed them); "but ask her to
sacrifice herself for nothing; ask her to cherish the selfishness of
some bully or fool; assure her that it is her duty to waste her youth,
lose her health, and stultify her mind, for the sake of somebody's whim,
or somebody's fears, or somebody's absurdity, _then_ she needs no
persuasion. She goes to the stake smiling. She swears the flames are
comfortably warm, no more. Are they diminishing her in size? Oh no--not
at all--besides she _was_ rather large, for a woman. She smiles
encouragement to the other chained figures, at the other stakes. Her
reward? The sense of exalted worth, of humility; the belief that she has
been sublimely virtuous, while the others whom she serves have
been--well the less said about them the better. She has done her duty,
and sent half a dozen souls to hell!"
Henriette uttered a little cry.
"Where one expects to meet her!" Hadria added.
Professor Theobald was chuckling gleefully.
Lady Engleton laughed. "Then, Mrs. Temperley, you _do_ feel rather
wicked yourself, although you don't admire our nice, well-behaved,
average woman."
"Oh, the mere opposite of an error isn't always truth," said Hadria.
"The weather has run to your head!" cried Henriette.
Hadria's eyes kindled. "Yes, it is like wine; clear, intoxicating
sparkling wine, and its fumes are mounting! Why does civilisation never
provide for these moments?"
"What would you have? A modified feast of Dionysius?"
"Why not? The whole earth joins in the festival and sings, except
mankind. Some frolic of music and a stirring dance!--But ah! I suppose,
in this tamed England of ours, we should feel it artificial; we should
fear to let ourselves go. But in Greece--if we could fancy ourselves
there, shorn of our little local personalities--in some classic grove,
on sunlit slopes, all bubbling with the re-birth of flowers and alive
with the light, the broad all-flooding light of Greece that her children
dreaded to leave more than any other earthly thing, when death
threatened--could one not imagine the loveliness of some garlanded
dance, and fancy the naïads, and the dryads, and all the hosts of Pan
gambolling at one's heels?"
"Really, Mrs. Temperley, you were not born for an English village. I
should like Mrs. Walker to hear you!"
"Mrs. Walker knows better than to listen to me. She too hides somewhere,
deep down, a poor fettered thing that would gladly join the revel, if it
dared. We all do."
Lady Engleton dwelt joyously on the image of Mrs. Walker, cavorting,
garlanded, on a Greek slope, with the nymphs and water-sprites for
familiar company.
Lady Engleton had risen laughing, and proposed a stroll to Hadria.
Henriette, who did not like the tone the conversation was taking,
desired to join them.
"I never quite know how far you are serious, and how far you are just
amusing yourself, Hadria," said Lady Engleton. "Our talking of Greece
reminds me of some remark you made the other day, about Helen. You
seemed to me almost to sympathize with her."
Hadria's eyes seemed to be looking across miles of sea to the sunny
Grecian land.
"If a slave breaks his chains and runs, I am always glad," she said.
"I was talking about Helen."
"So was I. If a Spartan wife throws off her bondage and defies the laws
that insult her, I am still more glad."
"But not if she sins?" Henriette coughed, warningly.
"Yes; if she sins."
"Oh, Hadria," remonstrated Henriette, in despair.
"I don't see that it follows that Helen _did_ sin, however; one does not
know much about her sentiments. She revolted against the tyranny that
held her shut in, enslaved, body and soul, in that wonderful Greek world
of hers. I am charmed to think that she gave her countrymen so much
trouble to assert her husband's right of ownership. It was at _his_
door that the siege of Troy ought to be laid. I only wish elopements
always caused as much commotion!" Lady Engleton laughed, and Miss
Temperley tried to catch Hadria's eye.
"Well, that _is_ a strange idea! And do you really think Helen did not
sin? Seriously now."
"I don't know. There is no evidence on that point." Lady Engleton
laughed again.
"You do amuse me. Assuming that Helen did not sin, I suppose you would
(if only for the sake of paradox) accuse the virtuous Greek matrons--who
sat at home, and wove, and span, and bore children--of sinning against
the State!"
"Certainly," said Hadria, undismayed. "It was they who insidiously
prepared the doom for their country, as they wove and span and bore
children, with stupid docility. As surely as an enemy might undermine
the foundations of a city till it fell in with a crash, so surely they
brought ruin upon Greece."
"Oh, Hadria, you are quite beside yourself to-day!" cried Henriette.
"A love of paradox will lead you far!" said Lady Engleton. "We have
always been taught to think a nation sound and safe whose women were
docile and domestic."
"What nation, under those conditions, has ever failed to fall in with a
mighty crash, like my undermined city? Greece herself could not hold
out. Ah, yes; we have our revenge! a sweet, sweet revenge!"
Lady Engleton was looking much amused and a little dismayed, when she
and her companions rejoined the party.
"I never heard anyone say so many dreadful things in so short a space of
time," she cried. "You are distinctly shocking."
"I am frank," said Hadria. "I fancy we should all go about with our hair
permanently on end, if we spoke out in chorus."
"I don't quite like to hear you say that, Hadria."
"I mean no harm--merely that every one thinks thoughts and feels
impulses that would be startling if expressed in speech. Don't we all
know how terrifying a thing speech is, and thought? a chartered
libertine."
"Why, you are saying almost exactly what Professor Theobald said the
other day, and we were so shocked."
"And yet my meaning has scarcely any relation to his," Hadria hastened
to say. "He meant to drag down all belief in goodness by reminding us of
dark moments and hours; by placarding the whole soul with the name of
some shadow that moves across it, I sometimes think from another world,
some deep under-world that yawns beneath us and sends up blackness and
fumes and strange cries." Hadria's eyes had wandered far away. "Are you
never tormented by an idea, an impression that you know does not belong
to you?"
Lady Engleton gave a startled negative. "Professor Fortescue, come and
tell me what you think of this strange doctrine?"
"If we had to be judged by our freedom from rushes of evil impulse,
rather than by our general balance of good and evil wishing, I think
those would come out best, who had fewest thoughts and feelings of any
kind to record." The subject attracted a small group.
"Unless goodness is only a negative quality," Valeria pointed out, "a
mere _absence_, it must imply a soul that lives and struggles, and if it
lives and struggles, it is open to the assaults of the devil."
"Yes, and it is liable to go under too sometimes, one must not forget,"
said Hadria, "although most people profess to believe so firmly in the
triumph of the best--how I can't conceive, since the common life of
every day is an incessant harping on the moral: the smallest, meanest,
poorest, thinnest, vulgarest qualities in man and woman are those
selected for survival, in the struggle for existence."
There was a cry of remonstrance from idealists.
"But what else do we mean when we talk by common consent of the world's
baseness, harshness, vulgarity, injustice? It means surely--and think of
it!--that it is composed of men and women with the best of them killed
out, as a nerve burnt away by acid; a heart won over to meaner things
than it set out beating for; a mind persuaded to nibble at edges of dry
crust that might have grown stout and serviceable on generous diet, and
mellow and inspired with noble vintage."
"You really are shockingly Bacchanalian to-day," cried Lady Engleton.
Hadria laughed. "Metaphorically, I am a toper. The wonderful clear
sparkle, the subtle flavour, the brilliancy of wine, has for me a
strange fascination; it seems to signify so much in life that women
lose."
"True. What beverage should one take as a type of what they gain by the
surrender?" asked Lady Engleton, who was disposed to hang back towards
orthodoxy, in the presence of her uncompromising neighbour.
"Oh, toast and water!" replied Hadria.
Part III.
CHAPTER XXXII.
The speed was glorious. Back flashed field and hill and copse, and the
dear "companionable hedgeways." Back flew iterative telegraph posts with
Herculean swing, into the Past, looped together in rhythmic movement,
marking the pulses of old Time. On, with rack and roar, into the
mysterious Future. One could sit at the window and watch the machinery
of Time's foundry at work; the hammers of his forge beating, beating,
the wild sparks flying, the din and chaos whirling round one's
bewildered brain;--Past becoming Present, Present melting into Future,
before one's eyes. To sit and watch the whirring wheels; to think "Now
it is thus and thus; presently, another slice of earth and sky awaits
me"--ye Gods, it is not to be realized!
The wonder of the flying land--England, England with her gentle
homesteads, her people of the gentle voices; and the unknown wonder of
that other land, soon to change its exquisite dream-features for the
still more thrilling, appealing marvel of reality--could it all be true?
Was this the response of the genius of the ring, the magic ring that we
call _will_? And would the complaisant genius always appear and obey
one's behests, in this strange fashion?
Thoughts ran on rhythmically, in the steady, flashing movement through
verdant England. The Real! _that_ was the truly exquisite, the truly
great, the true realm of the imagination! What imagination was ever born
to conceive or compass it?
A rattle under a bridge, a roar through a tunnel, and on again, through
Kentish orchards. A time of blossoming. Disjointed, delicious
impressions followed one another in swift succession, often
superficially incoherent, but threaded deep, in the stirred
consciousness, on a silver cord:--the unity of the creation was as
obvious as its multiplicity.
Images of the Past joined hands with visions of the Future. In these
sweet green meadows, men had toiled, as thralls, but a few lifetimes
ago, and they had gathered together, as Englishmen do, first to protest
and reasonably demand, and then to buy their freedom with their lives.
Their countrywoman sent a message of thanksgiving, backward through the
centuries, to these stout champions of the land's best heritage, and
breathed an aspiration to be worthy of the kinship that she claimed.
The rattle and roar grew into a symphony--full, rich, magnificent, and
then, with a rush, came a stirring musical conception: it seized the
imagination.
Oh, why were they stopping? It was a little country station, but many
passengers were on the platform. A careworn looking woman and a little
girl entered the carriage, and the little girl fixed her eyes on her
fellow-traveller with singular persistence. Then the more practical
features of the occasion came into view, and all had an enthralling
quality of reality--poetry. The sound of the waiting engine breathing
out its white smoke into the brilliant air, the powerful creature
quiescent but ready, with the turn of a handle, to put forth its
slumbering might; the crunching of footsteps on the gravel, the
wallflowers and lilacs in the little station garden, the blue of the
sky, and ah! the sweetness of the air when one leant out to look along
the interminable straight line of rails, leading--whither? Even the very
details of one's travelling gear: the tweed gown meet for service, the
rug and friendly umbrella, added to the feeling of overflowing
satisfaction. The little girl stared more fixedly than ever. A smile and
the offer of a flower made her look down, for a minute, but the gaze was
resumed. Wherefore? Was the inward tumult too evident in the face?
Well, no matter. The world was beautiful and wide!
The patient monster began to move again, with a gay whistle, as if he
enjoyed this chase across country, on the track of Time. He was soon at
full speed again, on his futile race: a hapless idealist in pursuit of
lost dreams. The little girl watched the dawn of a smile on the face of
the kind, pretty lady who had given her the flower. A locomotive
figuring as an idealist! Where would one's fancy lead one to next?
Ah the sea! heaving busily, and flashing under the morning radiance.
Would they have a good crossing? The wind was fresh. How dreamy and
bright and windy the country looked, and how salt was the sea-breeze!
Very soon they would arrive at Folkestone. Rugs and umbrellas and
handbags must be collected. The simple, solid commonplace of it all,
touched some wholesome spring of delight. What a speed the train was
going at! One could scarcely stand in the jolting carriage. Old Time
must not make too sure of his victory. One felt a wistful partisanship
for his snorting rival, striving for ever to accomplish the impossible.
The labouring visionary was not without significance to aspiring
mortals.
The outskirts of the town were coming in sight; grey houses bleakly
climbing chalky heights. It would be well to put on a thick overcoat at
once. It was certain to be cold in the Channel.
Luckily Hannah had a head on her shoulders, and could be trusted to
follow the directions that had been given her.
The last five minutes seemed interminable, but they did come to an end.
There was an impression of sweet salt air, of wind and voices, of a
hurrying crowd; occasionally a French sentence pronounced by one of the
officials, reminiscent of a thousand dreams and sights of foreign lands;
and then the breezy quay and waiting steamboat.
The sound of that quiet, purposeful hiss of the steam sent a thrill
along the nerves. Hannah and her charge were safely on board; the small
luggage followed, and lastly Hadria traversed the narrow bridge,
wondering when the moment would arrive for waking up and finding herself
in her little bedroom at Craddock Dene? What was she thinking of? Dream?
_This_ was no dream, this bold, blue, dancing water, this living
sunshine, this salt and savour and movement and brilliancy!
The _other_ was the dream; it seemed to be drifting away already. The
picture of the village and the house and the meadows, and the low line
of the hills was recalled as through a veil; it would not stand up and
face the emphatic present. At the end of a few months, would there be
anything left of her connexion with the place where she had passed
six--seven years of her life? and such years! They had put scars on her
soul, as deep and ghastly as ever red-hot irons had marked on tortured
flesh. Perhaps it was because of this rabid agony undergone, that now
she seemed to have scarcely any clinging to her home,--for the present
at any rate. And she knew that she left only sorrow for conventional
disasters behind her. The joy of freedom and its intoxication drowned
every other feeling. It was sheer relief to be away, to stretch oneself
in mental liberty and leisure, to look round at earth and sky and the
hurrying crowds, in quiet enjoyment; to possess one's days, one's
existence for the first time, in all these long years! It was as the
home-coming of a dispossessed heir. This freedom did not strike her as
strange, but as obvious, as familiar. It was the first condition of a
life that was worth living. And yet never before had she known it.
Ernest and Fred and even Austin had enjoyed it from boyhood, and in far
greater completeness than she could ever hope to possess it, even now.
Yet even this limited, this comparative freedom, which a man could
afford to smile at, was intoxicating. Heavens! under what a leaden cloud
of little obligations and restraints, and loneliness and pain, she had
been living! And for what purpose? To make obeisance to a phantom
public, not because she cared one iota for the phantom or its opinions,
but because husband and parents and relations were terrified at the
prospect of a few critical and disapproving remarks, that they would not
even hear! How mad it all was! It was not true feeling, not affection,
that prompted Hubert's opposition; it was not care for his real
happiness that inspired Henriette with such ardour in this cause; they
would both be infinitely happier and more harmonious in Hadria's
absence. The whole source of their distress was the fear of what people
would say when the separation became known to the world. That was the
beginning and the end of the matter. Why could not the stupid old world
mind its own business, in heaven's name? Good people, especially good
women of the old type, would all counsel the imbecile sacrifice. They
would all condemn this step. Indeed, the sacrifice that Hadria had
refused to make, was so common, so much a matter of course, that her
refusal appeared startling and preposterous: scarcely less astonishing
than if a neighbour at dinner, requesting one to pass the salt, had been
met with a rude "I shan't."
"A useful phrase at times, of the nature of a tonic, amidst our
enervating civilisation," she reflected.
There was a tramping of passengers up and down the deck. People walked
obliquely, with head to windward. Draperies fluttered; complexions
verged towards blue. Only two ladies who had abandoned hope from the
beginning, suffered from the crossing. The kindly sailors occupied their
leisure in bringing tarpaulins to the distressed.
"Well, Hannah, how are you getting on?"
Hannah looked forward ardently to the end of the journey, but her charge
seemed delighted with the new scene.
"Have you ever been to France before, ma'am?" Hannah asked, perhaps
noticing the sparkle of her employer's eye and the ring in her voice.
"Yes, once; I spent a week in Paris with Mr. Temperley, and we went on
afterwards to the Pyrenees. That was just before we took the Red House."
"It must have been beautiful," said Hannah. "And did you take the
babies, ma'am?"
"They were neither of them in existence then," replied Mrs. Temperley. A
strange fierce light passed through her eyes for a second, but Hannah
did not notice it. Martha's shawl was blowing straight into her eyes,
and the nurse was engaged in arranging it more comfortably.
The coast of France had become clear, some time ago; they were making
the passage very quickly to-day. Soon the red roofs of Boulogne were to
be distinguished, with the grey dome of the cathedral on the hill-top.
Presently, the boat had arrived in the bright old town, and every detail
of outline and colour was standing forth brilliantly, as if the whole
scene had been just washed over with clear water and all the tints were
wet.
The first impression was keen. The innumerable differences from English
forms and English tones sprang to the eye. A whiff of foreign smell and
a sound of foreign speech reached the passengers at about the same
moment. The very houses looked unfamiliarly built, and even the letters
of printed names of hotels and shops had a frivolous, spindly
appearance--elegant but frail. The air was different from English air.
Some _bouillon_ and a slice of fowl were very acceptable at the
restaurant at the station, after the business of examining the luggage
was over. Hannah, evidently nourishing a sense of injury against the
natives for their eccentric jargon, and against the universe for the
rush and discomfort of the last quarter of an hour, was disposed to
express her feelings by a marked lack of relish for her food. She
regarded Hadria's hearty appetite with a disdainful expression. Martha
ate bread and butter and fruit. She was to have some milk that had been
brought for her, when they were _en route_ again.
"_Tout le monde en voiture!_" Within five minutes, the train was
puffing across the wastes of blowing sand that ran along the coast,
beyond the town. The child, who had become accustomed to the noise and
movement, behaved better than had been expected. She seemed to take
pleasure in looking out of the window at the passing trees. Hannah was
much struck with this sign of awakening intelligence. It was more than
the good nurse showed herself. She scarcely condescended to glance at
the panorama of French fields, French hills and streams that were
rushing by. How pale and ethereal they were, these Gallic coppices and
woodlands! And with what a dainty lightness the foliage spread itself to
the sun, French to its graceful finger-tips! That grey old house, with
high lichen-stained roof and narrow windows--where but in sunny France
could one see its like?--and the little farmsteads and villages, full of
indescribable charm. One felt oneself in a land of artists. There was no
inharmonious, no unfitting thing anywhere. Man had wedded himself to
Nature, and his works seemed to receive her seal and benediction.
English landscape was beautiful, and it had a particular charm to be
found nowhere else in the world; but in revenge, there was something
here that England could not boast. Was it fanciful to see in the
characteristics of vegetation and scenery, the origin or expression of
the difference of the two races at their greatest?
"Ah, if I were only a painter!"
They were passing some fields where, in the slanting rays of the sun,
peasants in blue blouses and several women were bending over their toil.
It was a subject often chosen by French artists. Hadria understood why.
One of the labourers stood watching the train, and she let her eyes rest
on the patient figure till she was carried beyond his little world. If
she could have painted that scene just as she saw it, all the sadness
and mystery of the human lot would have stood forth eloquently in form
and colour; these a magic harmony, not without some inner kinship with
the spirit of man at its noblest.
What was he thinking, that toil-bent peasant, as the train flashed by?
What tragedy or comedy was he playing on his rural stage? Hadria sat
down and shut her eyes, dazzled by the complex mystery and miracle of
life, and almost horrified at the overwhelming thought of the millions
of these obscure human lives burning themselves out, everywhere, at
every instant, like so many altar-candles to the unknown God!
"And each one of them takes himself as seriously as I take myself:
perhaps more seriously. Ah, if one could but pause to smile at one's
tragic moments, or still better, at one's sublime ones. But it can't be
done. A remembrancer would have to be engaged, to prevent lapses into
the sublime,--and how furious one would be when he nudged one, with his
eternal: 'Beware!'"
It was nearly eight o'clock when the train plunged among the myriad
lights of the great city. The brilliant beacon of the Eiffel Tower sat
high up in the sky, like an exile star.
Gaunt and grim was the vast station, with its freezing purplish electric
light. Yet even here, to Hadria's stirred imagination, there was a
certain quality in the Titanic building, which removed it from the
vulgarity of English utilitarian efforts of the same order.
In a fanciful mood, one might imagine a tenth circle of the Inferno,
wherein those stern grey arches should loftily rise, in blind and
endless sequence, limbing an abode of horror, a place of punishment for
those, empty-hearted, who had lived without colour and sunshine, in
voluntary abnegation, caring only for gain and success.
The long delay in the examination of the luggage, the fatigue of the
journey, tended to increase the disposition to regard the echoing
edifice, with its cold hollow reverberations, as a Circle of the Doomed.
It was as if they passed from the realm of the Shades through the Gates
of Life, when at length the cab rattled out of the courtyard of the
station, and turned leftwards into the brilliant streets of Paris. It
was hard to realize that all this stir and light and life had been going
on night after night, for all these years, during which one had sat in
the quiet drawing-room at Craddock Dene, trying wistfully, hopelessly,
to grasp the solid fact of an unknown vast reality, through a record
here and there. The journey was a long one to the Rue Boissy d'Anglas,
but tired as she was, Hadria did not wish it shorter. Even Hannah was
interested in the brilliantly lighted shops and _cafés_ and the
splendour of the boulevards. Now and again, the dark deserted form of a
church loomed out, lonely, amidst the gaiety of Parisian street-life.
Some electric lamp threw a distant gleam upon calm classic pillars,
which seemed to hold aloof, with a quality of reserve rarely to be
noticed in things Parisian. Hadria greeted it with a feeling of
gratitude.
The great Boulevard was ablaze and swarming with life. The _cafés_ were
full; the gilt and mirrors and the crowds of _consommateurs_ within, all
visible as one passed along the street, while, under the awning outside,
crowds were sitting smoking, drinking, reading the papers.
Was it really possible that only this morning, those quiet English
fields had been dozing round one, those sleepy villagers spreading their
slow words out, in expressing an absence of idea, over the space of time
in which a Parisian conveyed a pocket philosophy?
The cabman directed his vehicle down the Rue Royale, passing the stately
Madeleine, with its guardian sycamores, and out into the windy
spaciousness of the Place de la Concorde.
A wondrous city! Hannah pointed out the electric light of the Eiffel
Tower to her charge, and Martha put out her small hands, demanding the
toy on the spot.
The festooned lights of the Champs Elysées swung themselves up, in
narrowing line, till they reached the pompous arch at the summit, and
among the rich trees of those Elysian fields gleamed the festive lamps
of _cafés chantants_.
"_Si Madame désire encore quelque chose?_" The neat maid, in picturesque
white cap and apron, stood with her hand on the door of the little
bedroom, on one of the highest storeys of the _pension_. Half of one of
the long windows had been set open, and the sounds of the rolling of
vehicles over the smooth asphalte, mingled with those of voices, were
coming up, straight and importunate, into the dainty bedroom. The very
sounds seemed nearer and clearer in this keen-edged land. The bed stood
in one corner, canopied with white and blue; a thick carpet gave a sense
of luxury and deadened the tramp of footsteps; a marble mantel-piece was
surmounted by a mirror, and supported a handsome bronze clock and two
bronze ornaments. The furniture was of solid mahogany. A nameless French
odour pervaded the atmosphere, delicate, subtle, but unmistakeable. And
out of the open window, one could see a series of other lighted windows,
all of exactly the same tall graceful design, opening in the middle by
the same device and the same metal handle that had to be turned in order
to open or close the window. Within, the rooms obviously modelled
themselves on the one unvarying ideal. A few figures could be seen
coming and going, busy at work or play. Above the steep roofs, a
blue-black sky was alive with brilliant stars.
"_Merci;_" Madame required nothing more.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
"... Rushes life on a race
As the clouds the clouds chase;
And we go,
And we drop like the fruits of the tree,
Even we,
Even so."
Just at first, it was a sheer impossibility to do anything but bask and
bathe in the sunny present, to spend the days in wandering incredulously
through vernal Paris, over whose bursting freshness and brilliancy the
white clouds seemed to be driven, with the same joy of life. The city
was crammed; the inhabitants poured forth in swarms to enjoy, in true
French fashion, the genial warmth and the universal awakening after the
long capricious winter. It was actually hot in the sun, and fresh light
clothing became a luxury, like a bath after a journey. The year had
raised its siege, and there was sudden amity between man and Nature.
Shrivelled man could relax the tension of resistance to cold and damp
and change, and go forth into the sun with cordial _insouciance_. In
many of the faces might be read this kindly amnesty, although there were
some so set and fixed with past cares that not even the soft hand of a
Parisian spring could smooth away the lines, or even touch the spirit.
These Hadria passed with an aching pity. Circumstance had been to them a
relentless taskmaster. Perhaps they had not rubbed the magic ring of
will, and summoned the obedient genius. Perhaps circumstance had
forbidden them even the rag wherewith to rub--or the impulse.
Sallying forth from the _pension_, Hadria would sometimes pause, for a
moment, at the corner of the street, where it opened into the Place de
la Concorde, irresolute, because of the endless variety of possible ways
to turn, and places to visit. She seldom made definite plans the day
before, unless it were for the pleasure of changing them. The letter of
introduction to Madame Vauchelet had remained unpresented. The sense of
solitude, combined for the first time with that of freedom, was too
delightful to forego. One must have time to realize and appreciate the
sudden calm and serenity; the sudden absence of claims and obstructions
and harassing criticisms. Heavens, what a price people consented to pay
for the privilege of human ties! what hard bargains were driven in the
kingdom of the affections! Thieves, extortionists, usurers--and in the
name of all the virtues!
"Yes, solitude has charms!" Hadria inwardly exclaimed, as she stood
watching the coming and going of people, the spouting of fountains, the
fluttering of big sycamore leaves in the Champs Elysées.
Unhappily, the solitude made difficulties. But meanwhile there was a
large field to be explored, where these difficulties did not arise, or
could be guarded against. Her sex was a troublesome obstruction. "One
does not come of centuries of chattel-women for nothing!" she wrote to
Algitha. Society bristled with insults, conscious and unconscious. Nor
had one lived the brightest, sweetest years of one's life tethered and
impounded, without feeling the consequences when the tether was cut.
There were dreads, shrinkings, bewilderments, confusions to encounter;
the difficulties of pilotage in unknown seas, of self-knowledge, and
guidance suddenly needed in new ranges of the soul; fresh temptations,
fresh possibilities to deal with; everything untested, the alphabet of
worldly experience yet to learn.
But all this was felt with infinitely greater force a little later, when
the period of solitude was over, and Hadria found herself in the midst
of a little society whose real codes and ideas she had gropingly to
learn. Unfamiliar (in any practical sense) with life, even in her own
country, she had no landmarks or finger-posts, of any kind, in this new
land. Her sentiment had never been narrowly British, but now she
realized her nationality over-keenly; she felt herself almost
grotesquely English, and had a sense of insular clumsiness amidst a
uprightly, dexterous people. Conscious of a thousand illusive, but very
real differences in point of view, and in nature, between the two
nations, she had a baffled impression of walking among mysteries and
novelties that she could not grasp. She began to be painfully conscious
of the effects of the narrow life that she had led, and of the
limitations that had crippled her in a thousand ways hitherto scarcely
realized.
"One begins to learn everything too late," she wrote to Algitha. "This
ought all to have been familiar long ago. I don't know anything about
the world in which I live. I have never before caught so much as a
distant glimpse of it. And even now there are strange thick wrappings
from the past that cling tight round and hold me aloof, strive as I may
to strip off that past-made personality, and to understand, by touch,
what things are made of. I feel as if I would risk anything in order to
really know that. Why should a woman treat herself as if she were
Dresden china? She is more or less insulted and degraded whatever
happens, especially if she obeys what our generation is pleased to call
the moral law. The more I see of life, the more hideous seems the
position that women hold in relation to the social structure, and the
more sickening the current nonsense that is talked about us and our
'missions' and 'spheres.' It is so feeble, so futile, to try to ornament
an essentially degrading fact. It is such insolence to talk to us--good
heavens, to _us!_--about holiness and sacredness, when men (to whom
surely a sense of humour has been denied) divide their women into two
great classes, both of whom they insult and enslave, insisting
peremptorily on the existence of each division, but treating one class
as private and the other as public property. One might as well talk to
driven cattle in the shambles about their 'sacred mission' as to women.
It is an added mockery, a gratuitous piece of insolence."
Having been, from childhood, more or less at issue with her
surroundings, Hadria had never fully realized their power upon her
personality. But now daily a fresh recognition of her continued
imprisonment, baffled her attempt to look at things with clear eyes. She
struggled to get round and beyond that past-fashioned self, not merely
in order to see truly, but in order to see at all. And in doing so, she
ran the risk of letting go what she might have done better to hold. She
felt painfully different from these people among whom she found herself.
Her very trick of pondering over things sent her spinning to hopeless
distances. They seemed to ponder so wholesomely little. Their
intelligence was devoted to matters of the moment; they were keen and
well-finished and accomplished. Hadria used to look at them in
astonishment. How did these quick-witted people manage to escape the
importunate inquisitive demon, the familiar spirit, who pursued her
incessantly with his queries and suggestions? He would stare up from
river and street and merry gardens; his haunting eyes looked mockingly
out of green realms of stirring foliage, and his voice was like a
sardonic echo to the happy voices of the children, laughing at their
play under the flickering shadows, of mothers discussing their cares and
interests, of men in blouses, at work by the water-side, or solemn, in
frock-coats, with pre-occupations of business and bread-winning. The
demon had his own reflections on all these seemingly ordinary matters,
and so bizarre were they at times, so startling and often so terrible,
that one found oneself shivering in full noontide, or smiling, or
thrilled with passionate pity at "the sad, strange ways of men."
It was sweet to stretch one's cramped wings to the sun, to ruffle and
spread them, as a released bird will, but it was startling to find
already little stiff habits arisen, little creaks and hindrances never
suspected, that made flight in the high air not quite effortless and
serene.
The Past is never past; immortal as the Gods, it lives enthroned in the
Present, and sets its limits and lays its commands.
Cases have been known of a man blind from birth being restored to sight,
at mature age. For a time, the appearance of objects was strange and
incomprehensible. Their full meaning was not conveyed to him; they
remained riddles. He could not judge the difference between near and
far, between solid and liquid; he had no experience, dating from
childhood, of the apparent smallness of distant things, of the connexion
between the impression given to the touch by solids and their effect on
the eye. He had all these things to learn. A thousand trifling
associations, of which those with normal senses are scarcely conscious,
had to be stumblingly acquired, as a child learns to connect sound and
sight, in learning to read.
Such were the changes of consciousness that Hadria found herself going
through; only realising each phase of the process after it was over, and
the previous confusion of vision had been itself revealed, by the newly
and often painfully acquired co-ordinating skill.
But, as generally happens, in the course of passing from ignorance to
knowledge, the intermediate stage was chaotic. Objects loomed up large
and indistinct, as through a mist; vague forms drifted by, half
revealed, to melt away again; here and there were clear outlines and
solid impressions, to be deemed trustworthy and given a place of honour;
thence a disproportion in the general conception; it being almost beyond
human power to allow sufficiently for that which is unknown.
For some time, however, the dominant impression on Hadria's mind was of
her own gigantic ignorance. This ignorance was far more confusing and
even misleading than it had been when its proportions were less defined.
The faint twinkle of light revealed the dusky outline, bewildering and
discouraging the imagination. Intuitive knowledge was disturbed by the
incursion of scraps of disconnected experience. This condition of mind
made her an almost insoluble psychological problem. Since she was
evidently a woman of pronounced character, her bewilderment and
tentative attitude were not allowed for. Her actions were regarded as
deliberate and cool-headed, when often they would be the outcome of
sheer confusion, or chance, or perhaps of a groping experimental effort.
The first three weeks in Paris had been given up to enjoying the new
conditions of existence. But now practical matters claimed consideration.
The _pension_ in the Rue Boissy d'Anglas was not suitable as a permanent
abode. Rooms must be looked for, combining cheapness with a good situation,
within easy distance of the scene of Hadria's future musical studies, and
also within reach of some park or gardens for Martha's benefit.
This ideal place of abode was at last found. It cost rather more than
Hadria had wished to spend on mere lodging, but otherwise it seemed
perfect. It was in a quiet street between the Champs Elysées and the
river. Two great thoroughfares ran, at a respectful distance, on either
side, with omnibuses always passing. Hadria could be set down within a
few minutes' walk of the School of Music, or, if she liked to give the
time, could walk the whole way to her morning's work, through some of
the most charming parts of Paris. As for Martha, she was richly provided
with playgrounds. The Bois could be quickly reached, and there were
always the Champs Elysées or the walk beneath the chestnuts by the
river, along the Cours de la Reine and the length of the quays. Even
Hannah thought the situation might do. Hadria had begun her studies at
the School of Music, and found the steady work not only a profound,
though somewhat stern enjoyment, but a solid backbone to her new
existence, giving it cohesion and form. Recreation deserved its name,
after work of this kind. Any lurking danger of too great speculative
restlessness disappeared. There had been a moment when the luxurious joy
of mere wandering observation and absorption, threatened to become
overwhelming, and to loosen some of the rivets of the character.
But work was to the sum-total of impulse what the central weight was to
one of Martha's toys: a leaden ballast that always brought the balance
right again, however wildly the little tyrant might swing the creature
off the perpendicular. When Hadria used to come in, pleasantly tired
with her morning's occupation, and the wholesome heat of the sun, to
take her simple _déjeuner_ in the little apartment with Martha, a
frivolous five minutes would often be spent by the two in endeavouring
to overcome the rigid principles of that well-balanced plaything. But
always the dead weight at its heart frustrated their attempts. Martha
played the most inconsiderate pranks with its centre of gravity, but
quite in vain. When a little French boy from the _étage_ above was
allowed to come and play with Martha, she proceeded to experiment upon
_his_ centre of gravity in the same way, and seemed much surprised when
Jean Paul Auguste not only howled indignantly, but didn't swing up again
after he was overturned. He remained supine, and had to be reinstated by
Hadria and Hannah, and comforted with sweetmeats. Martha's logic
received one of its first checks. She evidently made up her mind that
logic was a fallacious mode of inference, and determined to abandon it
for the future. These rebuffs in infancy, Hadria conjectured, might
account for much!
About three weeks passed in almost pure enjoyment and peace; and then it
was discovered that the cost of living, in spite of an extremely simple
diet, was such as might have provided epicurean luxuries for a family of
ten. Hadria's enquiries among her acquaintances elicited cries of
consternation. Obviously the landlady, who did the marketing, must be
cheating on a royal scale, and there was nothing for it but to move.
Hadria suggested to Madame Vauchelet, whose advice she always sought in
practical matters, that perhaps the landlady might be induced to pursue
her lucrative art in moderation; could she not put it honestly down in
the bill "Peculation--so much per week?"
Madame Vauchelet was horrified. "Impossible!" she cried; one must seek
another apartment. If only Hannah understood French and could do the
marketing herself. But Hannah scorned the outlandish lingo, and had a
poor opinion of the nation as a whole.
It was fatiguing and somewhat discouraging work to begin, all over
again, the quest of rooms, especially with the difficulty about the
landlady always in view, and no means of ascertaining her scale of
absorption. It really seemed a pity that it could not be mentioned as
an extra, like coal and lights. Then one would know what one was about.
This uncertain liability, with an extremely limited income, which was
likely to prove insufficient unless some addition could be made to it,
was trying to the nerves.
In order to avoid too great anxiety, Hadria had to make up her mind to a
less attractive suite of rooms, farther out of town, and she found it
desirable to order many of the comestibles herself. Madame Vauchelet was
untiring in her efforts to help and advise. She initiated Hadria into
the picturesque mysteries of Parisian housekeeping. It was amusing to go
to the shops and markets with this shrewd Frenchwoman, and very
enlightening as to the method of living cheaply and well. Hadria began
to think wistfully of a more permanent _ménage_ in this entrancing
capital, where there were still worlds within worlds to explore. She
questioned Madame Vauchelet as to the probable cost of a _femme de
ménage_. Madame quickly ran through some calculations and pronounced a
sum alluringly small. Since the landlady difficulty was so serious, and
made personal superintendence necessary, it seemed as if one might as
well have the greater comfort and independence of this more home-like
arrangement.
Madame Vauchelet recommended an excellent woman who would cook and
market, and, with Hannah's help, easily do all that was necessary. After
many calculations and consultations with Madame Vauchelet, Hadria
finally decided to rent, for three months, a cheerful little suite of
rooms near the Arc de Triomphe.
Madame Vauchelet drank a cup of tea in the little _salon_ with quiet
heroism, not liking to refuse Hadria's offer of the friendly beverage.
But she wondered at the powerful physique of the nation that could
submit to the trial daily.
Hadria was brimming over with pleasure in her new home, which breathed
Paris from every pore. She had already surrounded herself with odds and
ends of her own, with books and a few flowers. If only this venture
turned out well, how delightful would be the next few months. Hadria did
not clearly look beyond that time. To her, it seemed like a century. Her
only idea as to the farther future was an abstract resolve to let
nothing short of absolute compulsion persuade her to renounce her
freedom, or subject herself to conditions that made the pursuit of her
art impossible. How to carry out the resolve, in fact and detail, was a
matter to consider when the time came. If one were to consider future
difficulties as well as deal with immediate ones, into what crannies and
interstices were the affairs of the moment to be crammed?
There has probably never been a human experience of even a few months of
perfect happiness, of perfect satisfaction with conditions, even among
the few men and women who know how to appreciate the bounty of Fate,
when she is generous, and to take the sting out of minor annoyances by
treating them lightly. Hadria was ready to shrug her shoulders at
legions of these, so long as the main current of her purpose were not
diverted. But she could not steel herself against the letters that she
received from England.
Everyone was deeply injured but bravely bearing up. Her family was a
stricken and sorrowing family. Being naturally heroic, it said little
but thought the more. Relations whose names Hadria scarcely remembered,
seemed to have waked up at the news of her departure and claimed their
share of the woe. Obscure Temperleys raised astounded heads and
mourned. Henriette wrote that she was really annoyed at the way in which
everybody was talking about Hadria's conduct. It was most uncomfortable.
She hoped Hadria was able to be happy. Hubert was ready to forgive her
and to receive her back, in spite of everything. Henriette entreated her
to return; for her own sake, for Hubert's sake, for the children's. They
were just going off to school, poor little boys. Henriette, although so
happy at the Red House, was terribly grieved at this sad misunderstanding.
It seemed so strange, so distressing. Henriette had thoroughly enjoyed
looking after dear Hubert and the sweet children. They were in splendid
health. She had been very particular about hygiene. Hubert and she had
seen a good deal of the Engletons lately. How charming Lady Engleton was!
So much tact. She was advanced in her ideas, only she never allowed them
to be intrusive. She seemed just like everybody else. She hated to make
herself conspicuous; the very ideal of a true lady, if one might use the
much-abused word. Professor Fortescue was reported to be still far from
well. Professor Theobald had not taken the Priory after all. It was too
large. It looked so deserted and melancholy now.
Henriette always finished her letters with an entreaty to Hadria to
return. People were talking so. They suspected the truth; although, of
course, one had hoped that the separation would be supposed to be
temporary--as indeed Henriette trusted it would prove.
Madame Bertaux, who had just returned from England to her beloved Paris,
reported to Hadria, when she called on the latter in her new abode, that
everyone was talking about the affair with as much eagerness as if the
fate of the empire had depended on it. Madame Bertaux recommended
indifference and silence. She observed, in her sharp, good-natured,
impatient way, that reforming confirmed drunkards, converting the
heathen, making saints out of sinners, or a silk purse out of a sow's
ear, would be mere child's play compared with the task of teaching the
average idiot to mind his own business.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
The new _ménage_ went well. Therése was a treasure, and Martha's willing
slave. Expenses were kept fairly reasonable by her care and knowledge.
Still it must not be forgotten that the little income needed supplementing.
Hadria had been aware of this risk from the first, but had faced it,
regarding it as the less perilous of the alternatives that she had to
choose between. The income was small, but it was her own absolutely, and
she must live on that, with such auxiliary sums as she could earn. She
hoped to be able to make a little money by her compositions. The future
was all vague and unknown, but one thing was at least certain: it cost
money to live, and in some way or other it had to be made. She told her
kind friend, Madame Vauchelet, of her plan. Madame Vauchelet consulted her
musical friends. People were sympathetic, but rather vague in their advice.
It was always difficult, this affair. The beginning was hard. M. Thillard,
a kindly, highly-cultivated man of about sixty, who had heard Hadria play,
took great interest in her talent, and busied himself on her behalf.
He said he would like to interest the great Jouffroy in this work. It
had so distinct and remarkable an individuality that M. Thillard was
sure Jouffroy would be enchanted with it. For himself, he held that it
shewed a development of musical form and expression extremely
remarkable. He could not quite understand it. There was, he knew not
what, in it, of strange and powerful; a music of the North; something of
bizarre, something of mysterious, even of terrible, "_une emotion
épouvantable_," cried M. Thillard, working himself to a climax as the
theme inspired him, "There is genius in that work, but certainly
genius." Madame Vauchelet nodded gravely at this pronouncement. It ought
to be published, she said. But this supreme recompense of genius was
apparently hard to achieve. The score was sent from publisher to
publisher: "from pillar to post," said Hadria, "if one might venture on
a phrase liable to misconstruction on the lips of disappointed
ambition."
But at the end of a long and wearisome delay, the little packet was
returned in a tattered condition to its discouraged author. M. Thillard
made light of this. It was always thus at first. One must have patience.
"One must live," said Hadria, "or at least such is the prejudice under
which one has been brought up."
"All will come," said M. Thillard. "You will see."
On one sunny afternoon, when Hadria had returned, thrilled and inspired
by a magnificent orchestral performance at the Châtelet, she found
Madame Vauchelet, M. Thillard, and the great Jouffroy waiting in her
_salon_. Jouffroy was small, eccentric, fiery, with keen eager eyes,
thick black hair, and overhanging brows. M. Thillard reminded Madame
Temperley of her kind permission to present to her M. Jouffroy. Madame
Temperley was charmed and flattered by Monsieur's visit.
It was an exciting afternoon. Madame Vauchelet was eager to hear the
opinion of the great man, and anxious for Hadria to make a good
impression.
The warm-hearted Frenchwoman, who had lost a daughter, of whom Hadria
reminded her, had been untiring in her kindness, from the first. Madame
Vauchelet, in her young days, had cherished a similar musical ambition,
and Jouffroy always asserted that she might have done great things, as a
performer, had not the cares of a family put an end to all hope of
bringing her gifts to fruition.
The piano was opened. Jouffroy played. Madame Vauchelet, with her large
veil thrown back, her black cashmere folds falling around her, sat in
the large arm-chair, a dignified and graceful figure, listening gravely.
The kindly, refined face of M. Thillard beamed with enjoyment; an
occasional cry of admiration escaping his lips, at some exquisite touch
from the master.
The time slipped by, with bewildering rapidity.
Monsieur Thillard asked if they might be allowed to hear some of
Madame's compositions--those which she had already been so amiable as to
play to him.
Jouffroy settled himself to listen; his shaggy eyebrows lowering over
his eyes, not in severity but in fixity of attention. Hadria trembled
for a moment, as her hands touched the keys. Jouffroy gave a nod of
satisfaction. If there had been no such quiver of nerves he would have
doubted. So he said afterwards to M. Thillard and Madame Vauchelet.
After listening, for a time, without moving a muscle, he suddenly sat
bolt upright and looked round at the player. The character of the music,
always individual, had grown more marked, and at this point an effect
was produced which appeared to startle the musician. He withdrew his
gaze, after a moment, muttering something to himself, and resumed his
former attitude, slowly and gravely nodding his head. There was a long
silence after the last of the lingering, questioning notes had died
away.
"Is Madame prepared for work, for hard, faithful work?"
The answer was affirmative. She was only too glad to have the chance to
work.
"Has Madame inexhaustible patience?"
"In this cause--yes."
"And can she bear to be misunderstood; to be derided for departure from
old rules and conventions; to have her work despised and refused, and
again refused, till at last the dull ears shall be opened and all the
stupid world shall run shouting to her feet?"
The colour rushed into Hadria's cheeks. "_Voila!_" exclaimed Madame
Vauchelet. M. Thillard beamed with satisfaction. "Did I not tell you?"
Jouffroy clapped his friend on the back with enthusiasm. "_Il faut
travailler_," he said, "_mais travailler!_" He questioned Hadria
minutely as to her course of study, approved it on the whole, suggesting
alterations and additions. He asked to look through some more of her
work.
"_Mon Dieu_," he ejaculated, as his quick eye ran over page after page.
"If Madame has a character as strong as her genius, her name will one
day be on the lips of all the world." He looked at her searchingly.
"I knew it!" exclaimed M. Thillard. "_Madame, je vous félicite._"
"Ah!" cried Jouffroy, with a shake of his black shaggy head, "this is
not a fate to be envied. _C'est dur!_"
"I am bewildered!" cried Hadria at last, in a voice that seemed to her
to come from somewhere a long way off. The whole scene had acquired the
character of a dream. The figures moved through miles of clear distance.
Her impressions were chaotic. While a strange, deep confirmation of the
musician's words, seemed to stir within her as if they had long been
familiar, her mind entirely refused credence.
He had gone too far. Had he said a remarkable talent, but----
Yet was it not, after all, possible? Nature scattered her gifts wildly
and cruelly: cruelly, because she cared not into what cramped nooks and
crannies she poured her maddening explosive: cruelly, because she hurled
this fire from heaven with indiscriminate hand, to set alight one dared
not guess how many chained martyrs at their stakes. Nature did not pick
and choose the subjects of her wilful ministrations. She seemed to
scatter at random, out of sheer _gaieté de coeur_, as Jouffroy had said,
and if some golden grain chanced to be gleaming in this soul or that,
what cause for astonishment? The rest might be the worst of dross. As
well might the chance occur to one of Nature's children as to another.
She did not bestow even one golden grain for nothing, _bien sûr_; she
meant to be paid back with interest. Just one bright bead of the whole
vast circlet of the truth: perhaps it was hers, but more likely that
these kind friends had been misled by their sympathy.
M. Jouffroy came next day to have a long talk with Hadria about her work
and her methods. He was absolutely confident of what he had said, but he
was emphatic regarding the necessity for work; steady, uninterrupted
work. Everything must be subservient to the one aim. If she contemplated
anything short of complete dedication to her art--well (he shrugged his
shoulders), it would be better to amuse herself. There could be no
half-measures with art. True, there were thousands of people who
practised a little of this and a little of that, but Art would endure no
such disrespect. It was the affair of a lifetime. He had known many
women with great talent, but, alas! they had not persistence. Only last
year a charming, beautiful young woman, with--_mon Dieu!_--a talent that
might have placed her on the topmost rank of singers, had married
against the fervent entreaties of Jouffroy, and now--he shrugged his
shoulders with a gesture of pitying contempt--"_elle est mère tout
simplement_." Her force had gone from herself into the plump infant,
whose "_cris dechirants_" were all that now remained to the world of his
mother's once magnificent voice. _Hélas!_ how many brilliant careers had
he not seen ruined by this fatal instinct! Jouffroy's passion for his
art had overcome the usual sentiment of the Frenchman, and even the
strain of Jewish blood. He did not think a woman of genius well lost for
a child. He grudged her to the fetish _la famille_. He went so far as to
say that, even without the claims of genius, a woman ought to be
permitted to please herself in the matter. When he heard that Madame had
two children, and yet had not abandoned her ambition, he nodded gravely
and significantly.
"But Madame has courage," he commented. "She must have braved much
censure."
It was the first case of the kind that had come under his notice. He
hoped much from it. His opinion of the sex would depend on Hadria's
power of persistence. In consequence of numberless pupils who had shewn
great promise, and then had satisfied themselves with "a stupid
maternity," Jouffroy was inclined to regard women with contempt, not as
regards their talent, which he declared was often astonishing, but as
regards their persistency of character and purpose.
One could not rely on them. They had enthusiasm--Oh, but enthusiasm _à
faire peur_, but presently "_un monsieur avec des moustaches
seduisantes_" approaches, and then "_Phui, c'est tout fini!_" There was
something of fatality in the affair. The instinct was terrible; a
demoniacal possession. It was for women a veritable curse, a disease. M.
Jouffroy had pronounced views on the subject. He regarded the maternal
instinct as the scourge of genius. It was, for women, the devil's
truncheon, his rod of empire. This "reproductive rage" held them--in
spite of all their fine intuitions and astonishing ability--after all on
the animal plane; cut them off from the little band of those who could
break up new ground in human knowledge, and explore new heights of Art
and Nature.
"I speak to you thus, Madame, not because I think little of your sex,
but because I grudge them to the monster who will not spare us even
one!"
Hadria worked with sufficient energy to please even Jouffroy. Her heart
was in it, and her progress rapid. Everything was organized, in her
life, for the one object. At the School of Music, she was in an
atmosphere of work, everyone being bent on the same goal, each detail
arranged to further the students in their efforts. It was like walking
on a pavement after struggling uphill on loose sand; like breathing
sea-breezes after inhaling a polluted atmosphere.
In old days, Hadria used to be haunted by a singular recurrent
nightmare: that she was toiling up a steep mountain made of hard
slippery rock, the summit always receding as she advanced. Behind her
was a vast precipice down which she must fall if she lost her footing;
and always, she saw hands without bodies attached to them placing stones
in the path, so that they rolled down and had to be evaded at the peril
of her life. And each time, after one set of stones was evaded, and she
thought there would be a time of respite, another batch was set rolling,
amid thin, scarcely audible laughter, which came on the storm-wind that
blew precipice-wards across the mountain; and invariably she awoke just
as a final avalanche of cruel stones had sent her reeling over the
hideous verge.
One is disposed to make light of the sufferings gone through in a dream,
though it would trouble most of us to explain why, since the agony of
mind is often as extreme as possibly could be endured in actual life.
From the day of her arrival in Paris, Hadria was never again tormented
with this nightmare.
Composition went on rapidly now. Soon there was a little pile of new
work for M. Jouffroy's inspection. He was delighted, criticizing
severely, but always encouraging to fresh efforts. As for the
publishing, that was a different matter. In spite of M. Jouffroy's
recommendation, publishers could not venture on anything of a character
so unpopular. The music had merit, but it was eccentric. M. Jouffroy was
angry. He declared that he would play something of Madame's at the next
Châtelet concert. There would be opposition, but he would carry his
point. And he did. But the audience received it very coldly. Although
Hadria had expected such a reception, she felt a chill run through her,
and a sinking of the heart. It was like a cold word that rebuffs an
offer of sympathy, or an appeal for it. It sent her back into depths of
loneliness, and reminded her how cut off she was from the great majority
of her fellows, after all. And then Guy de Maupassant's dreadful
"Solitude" came to her memory. There is no way (the hero of the sketch
asserts) by which a man can break the eternal loneliness to which he is
foredoomed. He cannot convey to others his real impressions or emotion,
try as he may. By a series of assertions, hard to deny, the hero arrives
at a terrible conclusion amounting to this: Art, affection, are in
vain; we know not what we say, nor whom we love.
Jouffroy came out of the theatre, snorting and ruffled.
"But they are imbeciles, all!"
Hadria thought that perhaps _she_ was the "imbecile"; it was a
possibility to be counted with, but she dared not say so to the irate
Jouffroy.
He was particularly angry, because the audience had confirmed his own
fear that only very slowly would the quality of the music be recognized
by even the more cultivated public. It had invaded fresh territory, he
said, added to the range of expression, and was meanwhile a new language
to casual listeners. It was rebel music, offensive to the orthodox.
Hubert had always said that "it was out of the question," and he
appeared to have been right.
"_Bah, ce ne sont que des moutons!_" exclaimed Jouffroy. If the work had
been poorer, less original, there would not have been this trouble. Was
there not some other method by which Madame could earn what was
necessary, _en attendent_?
In one of Professor Fortescue's letters, he had reminded Hadria of his
eagerness to help her. Yet, what could he do? He had influence in the
world of science, but Hadria could not produce anything scientific! She
bethought her of trying to write light descriptive articles, of a kind
depending not so much on literary skill as on subject and epistolary
freshness of touch. These she sent to the Professor, not without
reluctance, knowing how overburdened he already was with work and with
applications for help and advice. He approved of her idea, and advised
the articles being sent the round of the magazines and papers.
Through his influence, one of the shorter articles was accepted, and
Hadria felt encouraged. Her day was now very full. The new art was
laborious, severely simple in character, though she studiously made her
articles. Her acquaintances had multiplied very rapidly of late, and
although this brought into her experience much that was pleasant and
interesting, the demands of an enlarging circle swallowed an
astonishing number of hours. An element of trouble had begun to come
into the life that had been so full of serenity, as well as of regular
and strenuous work. Hadria was already feeling the effects of anxiety
and hurry. She had not come with untried powers to the fray. The reserve
forces had long ago been sapped, in the early struggles, beginning in
her girlhood and continuing at increasing pressure ever since. There was
only enough nerve-force to enable one to live from hand to mouth.
Expenditure of this force having been so often in excess of income,
economy had become imperative. Yet, economy was difficult. M. Jouffroy
was always spurring her to work, to throw over everything for this
object; letters from England incessantly urged a very different course;
friends in Paris pressed her to visit them, to accompany them hither and
thither, to join musical parties, to compose little songs (some
bagatelle in celebration of a birthday or wedding), to drive to the
further end of the town to play to this person or that who had heard of
Madame's great talent. Hadria was glad to do anything she could to
express her gratitude for the kindness she had received on all hands,
but, alas! there were only a certain number of hours in the day, and
only a certain number of years in one's life, and art was long.
Moreover, nerves were awkward things to play with.
Insidiously, treacherously, difficulties crept up. Even here, where she
seemed so free, the peculiar claims that are made, by common consent, on
a woman's time and strength began to weave their tiny cords around her.
She took warning, and put an end to any voluntary increase of her
circle, but the step had been taken a little too late. The mischief was
done. To give pain or offence for the sake of an hour or two, more or
less, seemed cruel and selfish, yet Hadria often longed for the
privilege that every man enjoys, of quietly pursuing his work without
giving either.
A disastrous sense of hurry and fatigue began to oppress her. This was
becoming serious. She must make a stand. Yet her attempts at
explanation were generally taken as polite excuses for neglecting those
who had been kind and cordial.
Jouffroy taxed her with looking tired. One must not be tired. One must
arrange the time so as to secure ample rest and recreation after the
real work was over. Women were so foolish in that way. They did
everything feverishly. They imagined themselves to have inexhaustible
nerves.
Hadria hinted that it was perhaps others who demanded of them what was
possible only to inexhaustible nerves.
True; towards women, people behaved as idiots. How was it possible to
produce one's best, if repose were lacking? Serenity was necessary for
all production.
As well expect water perpetually agitated to freeze, as expect the
crystals of the mind to produce themselves under the influence of
incessant disturbance.
Work? Yes. Work never harmed any man or woman. It was harassment that
killed. Work of the mind, of the artistic powers, that was a tonic to
the whole being. But little distractions, irregular duties, worries,
uncertainties--Jouffroy shook his head ominously. And not only to the
artist were they fatal. It was these that drew such deep lines on the
faces of women still young. It was these that destroyed ability and
hope, and killed God only knew how many of His good gifts! Poverty: that
could be endured with all its difficulties, if that were the one
anxiety. It was never the _one_ but the multitude of troubles that
destroyed. Serenity there must be. A man knew that, and insisted on
having it. Friends were no true friends if they robbed one of it. For
him, he had a poor opinion of that which people called affection,
regard. As for _l'amour_, that was the supreme egotism. The affections
were simply a means to "make oneself paid." Affection! Bah! One did not
offer it for nothing, _bien sûr_! It was through this insufferable
pretext that one arrived at governing others. "_Comment?_ Your presence
can give me happiness, and you will not remain always beside me? It is
nothing to you how I suffer? To me whom you love you refuse this small
demand?" Jouffroy opened his eyes, with a scornful glare. "It is in
_that_ fashion, I promise you, that one can rule!"
"Ah, monsieur," said Hadria, "you are a keen observer. How I wish you
could live a woman's life for a short time. You are wise now, but after
_that_----"
"Madame, I have sinned in my day, perhaps to merit purgatorial fires;
but, without false modesty, I do not think that I have justly incurred
the penalty you propose to me."
Hadria laughed. "It would be a strange piece of poetic justice," she
said, "if all the men who have sinned beyond forgiveness in this
incarnation, should be doomed to appear in the next, as well-brought-up
women."
Jouffroy smiled.
"Fancy some conquering hero reappearing in ringlets and mittens, as
one's maiden aunt."
Jouffroy grinned. "_Ce serait dur!_"
"_Ah, mon Dieu!_" cried Madame Vauchelet, "if men had to endure in the
next world that which they have made women suffer in this--that would be
an atrocious justice!"
CHAPTER XXXV.
Stubbornly Hadria sent her packets to the publishers; the publishers as
firmly returned them. She had two sets flying now, like tennis balls,
she wrote to Miss Du Prel: one set across the Channel. The publishers,
she feared, played the best game, but she had the English quality of not
knowing when she was beaten. Valeria had succeeded in finding a place
for two of the articles. This was encouraging, but funds were running
alarmingly low.
The _apartement_ would have either to be given up, or to be taken on for
another term, at the end of the week. A decision must be made. Hadria
was dismayed to find her strength beginning to fail. That made the
thought of the future alarming. With health and vigour nothing seemed
impossible, but without that----
It seemed absurd that there should be so much difficulty about earning a
living. Other women had done it. Valeria had always made light of the
matter--when she had the theory of the sovereignty of the will to
support.
Another couple of articles which seemed to their creator to possess
popular qualities were sent off.
But after a weary delay, they shared the fate of their predecessors.
Hadria now moved into a smaller suite of rooms, parting regretfully with
Therése, and flinging herself once more on the mercy of a landlady. This
time M. Thillard had discovered the lodging for her; a shabby, but sunny
little house, kept by a motherly woman with a reputation for perfect
honesty. Expenses were thus kept down, but unhappily very little was
coming in to meet them. It was impossible to pull through the year at
this rate. But, of course, there was daily hope of something turning up.
The arrival of the post was always an exciting moment. At last Hadria
wrote to ask Algitha to try and sell for her a spray of diamonds, worth
about eighty pounds.
Time must be gained, at all hazards. Algitha tried everywhere, and
enquired in all directions, but could not get more than five-and-twenty
pounds for it. She felt anxious about her sister, and thought of coming
over to Paris to see her, in order to talk over some matters that could
no longer be kept out of sight.
Algitha had wished to give Hadria an opportunity for work and rest, and
to avoid recurrence of worry; but it was no longer possible or fair to
conceal the fact that there were troubles looming ahead, at Dunaghee.
Their father had suffered several severe losses through some bank
failures; and now that wretched company in which he had always had such
faith appeared to be shaky, and if that were also to smash, the state of
affairs would be desperate. Their father, in his optimistic fashion,
still believed that the company would pull through. Of course all this
anxiety was telling seriously on their mother. And, alas! she had been
fretting very much about Hadria. After Algitha's misdeed, this second
blow struck hard.
One must act on one's own convictions and not on those of somebody else,
however beloved that other person might be, but truly the penalty of
daring to take an independent line of action was almost unbearably
severe. It really seemed, at times, as if there were nothing for it but
to fold one's hands and do exactly as one was bid. Algitha was beginning
to wonder whether her own revolt was about to be expiated by a life-long
remorse!
"Ah, if mother had only not sacrificed herself for us, how infinitely
grateful I should feel to her now! What sympathy there might have been
between us all! If she had but given herself a chance, how she might
have helped us, and what a friend she might have been to us, and we to
her! But she would not."
Algitha said that her mother evidently felt Hadria's departure as a
disgrace to the family. It was pathetic to hear her trying to answer
people's casual questions about her, so as to conceal the facts without
telling an untruth. Hadria was overwhelmed by this letter. Her first
impulse was to pack up and go straight to Dunaghee. But as Algitha was
there now, this seemed useless, at any rate for the present. And ought
she after all to abandon her project, for which so much had been risked,
so much pain inflicted? The question that she and Algitha thought they
had decided long ago, began to beat again at the door of her conscience
and her pity. Her reason still asserted that the suffering which people
entail upon themselves, through a frustrated desire to force their own
law of conduct on others, must be borne by themselves, as the penalty of
their own tyrannous instinct and of their own narrow thought. It was
utterly unfair to thrust that natural penalty of prejudice and of
self-neglect on to the shoulders of others. Why should they be protected
from the appointed punishment, by the offering of another life on the
altar of their prejudice? Why should such a sacrifice be made in order
to gratify their tyrannical desire to dictate? It was not fair, it was
not reasonable.
Yet this conclusion of the intellect did not prevent the pain of pity
and compunction, nor an inconsequent sense of guilt.
Meanwhile it would be best, perhaps, to await Algitha's arrival, when
affairs might be in a less uncertain state. All decision must be
postponed till then. "Try and come soon," she wrote to her sister.
To add to the anxieties of the moment, little Martha seemed to lose in
energy since coming to the new abode, and Hadria began to fear that the
house was not quite healthy. It was very cheap, and the landlady was
honest, but if it had this serious drawback, another move, with probably
another drawback, seemed to threaten. This was particularly troublesome,
for who could tell how long it would be possible to remain in Paris?
Hadria thought of the doctrine of the sovereignty of the will, and of
all the grand and noble things that the Preposterous Society had said
about it, not to mention Emerson and others--and she smiled.
However, she worked on, putting aside her anxieties, as far as was
possible. She would not fail for lack of will, at any rate. But it was a
hard struggle. Martha had to be very carefully watched just now.
Happily, after a few anxious days, she began to recover her fresh colour
and her high spirits. The move would not be necessary, after all. Hadria
had become more and more attached to the child, whose lovable qualities
developed with her growth. She was becoming singularly like her unhappy
mother, in feature and in colouring. Her eyes were large and blue and
sweet, with a little touch of pathos in them that Hadria could not bear
to see. It seemed almost like the after-glow of the mother's suffering.
Although adding to Hadria's anxieties, the child gave a sense of
freshness and youth to the little _ménage_. She made the anxieties
easier to bear.
Hadria came in, one morning, from her work, tired and full of
foreboding. Hat and cloak were laid aside, and she sank into an
arm-chair, lying back to lazily watch the efforts of the child to
overturn the obstinate blue man, who was still the favourite plaything,
perhaps because he was less amenable than the rest.
Martha looked up for sympathy. She wished to be helped in her persistent
efforts to get the better of this upstart blue man with the red cap, who
serenely resumed his erect position just as often as he was forced to
the ground. He was a stout, healthy-looking person, inclining to
_embonpoint_; bound to succeed, if only from sheer solidity of person.
Hadria was drawn into the game, and the two spent a good half hour on
the rug together, playing with that and other toys which Martha toddled
off to the cupboard to collect. The child was in great delight. Hadria
was playing with her; she liked that better than having Jean Paul
Auguste to play with. He took her toys away and always wanted to play a
different game.
The clock struck two. Hadria felt that she ought to go and see Madame
Vauchelet; it was more than a week since she had called, and the kind
old friend was always gently pained at an absence of that length.
Then there was an article to finish, and she ought really to write to
Dunaghee and Henriette and--well the rest must wait. Several other calls
were also more than due, but it was useless even to consider those
to-day. In spite of an oppressive sense of having much to do--perhaps
_because_ of it--Hadria felt as if it were a sheer impossibility to rise
from that hearthrug. Besides, Martha would not hear of it. A desire to
rest, to idle, to float down the stream, instead of trying always to
swim against it, became overpowering. The minutes passed away.
"The question is, Martha," Hadria said gravely, as she proceeded to pile
up a towering edifice of bricks, at the child's command, "the question
is: Are we going to stick to our plan, or are we going to be beaten? Oh,
take care, don't pull down the fairy palace! That is a bad trick that
little fingers have. No, no, I must have my fairy palace; I won't have
it pulled down. It is getting so fine, too; minarets and towers, and
domes and pinnacles, all mixed beautifully. Such an architecture as you
never saw! But some day perhaps you will see it. Those blue eyes look as
if they were made for seeing it, in the time to come."
"Pretty eyes!" said Martha with frank vanity, and then: "Pretty house!"
"It is indeed a pretty house; they all are. But they are so horribly
shaky. The minarets are top-heavy, I fear. That's the fault of the
makers of these bricks. They ought to make the solid ones in proper
proportion. But they can't be persuaded."
"Knock it down," said Martha, thrusting forth a mischievous hand, which
was caught in time to prevent entire destruction of the precious
edifice. Half the minarets had fallen.
"They must go up again," said Hadria. "How cruel to spoil all the work
and all the beauty." But Martha laughed with the delight of easy
conquest.
She watched with great interest the reconstruction, and seemed anxious
that every detail should be finished and worthy her iconoclasm. Having
satisfied herself that her strength would not be wasted on an incomplete
object, she made a second attempt to lay the palace low. Again she was
frustrated. The building had soared, by this time, to an ambitious
height, and its splendour had reached the limits of the materials at
command. The final pinnacle which was required to cope the structure had
been mislaid. Hadria was searching for it, when Martha, seizing her
chance, struck the palace a blow in its very heart, and in an instant,
the whole was a wreck.
"Oh, if that is to be the way of it, why should I build?" asked Hadria.
Martha gave the command for another ornamental object which she might
destroy.
"One would suppose you were a County-Council," Hadria exclaimed, "or the
practical man. No, you shall have no more beauty to annihilate, little
Vandal."
Martha, however, was now engaged in dissecting a doll, and presently a
stream of sawdust from its chest announced that she had accomplished her
dearest desire. She had found out what was inside that human effigy.
"I wish I could get at the sawdust that _I_ am stuffed with," Hadria
thought dreamily, as she watched the doll grow flabbier. "It is
wonderful how little one does know one's own sawdust. It would be
convenient to feel a little surer just now, for evidently I shall need
it all very soon. And I feel somewhat like that doll, with the stream
pouring out and the body getting limp."
She rose at last, and went to the window. The radiance of sun and green
trees and the stir of human life; the rumble of omnibuses and the sound
of wheels; the suggestion to the imagination of the river just a little
way off, and the merry little _bateaux-mouches_--it was too much. Hadria
rang for Hannah; asked her to take the child for a walk in the Bois,
stooped down to kiss the little upturned face, and went off.
In another ten minutes she was on board one of the steamboats, on her
way up the river.
She had no idea whither she was going; she would leave that to chance.
She only desired to feel the air and the sun and have an opportunity to
think. She soothed her uneasiness at the thought of Madame Vauchelet's
disappointment by promising herself to call to-morrow. She sat watching
the boats and the water and the gay banks of the river with a sense of
relief, and a curious sort of fatalism, partly suggested perhaps, by the
persistent movement of the boat, and the interminable succession of new
scenes, all bubbling with human life, full of the traces of past events.
One layer of consciousness was busily engaged in thinking out the
practical considerations of the moment, another was equally busy with
the objective and picturesque world of the river side. If the two or
more threads of thought were not actually followed at the same instant,
the alternation was so rapid as not to be perceived. What was to be
done? How was the situation to be met, if the worst came to the worst?
Ah! what far harder contests had gone on in these dwellings that one
passed by the hundred. What lives of sordid toil had been struggled
through, in the effort to earn the privilege of continuing to toil!
Hadria was inspired by keen curiosity concerning these homes and
gardens, and the whole panorama that opened before her, as the little
steamer puffed up the river. She longed to penetrate below the surface
and decipher the strange palimpsest of human life. What scenes, what
tragedies, what comedies, those bright houses and demure little villas
concealed. It was not exactly consoling to remember how small her own
immediate difficulties were in comparison to those of others, but it
seemed to help her to face them. She would not be discouraged. She had
her liberty, and that had to be paid for. Surely patience would prevail
in the end. She had learnt so much since she left home; among other
things, the habit of facing practical difficulties without that dismay
which carefully-nurtured women inevitably feel on their first movement
out of shelter. Yes, she had learnt much, surprisingly much, in the
short time. Her new knowledge contained perhaps rather dangerous
elements, for she had begun to realize her own power, not only as an
artist, but as a woman. In this direction, had she so chosen.... Her
thoughts were arrested at this point, with a wrench. She felt the
temptation assail her, as of late it had been assailing her faintly, to
explore this territory.
But no, that was preposterous.
It was certainly not that she regarded herself as accountable, in this
matter, to any one but herself; it was not that she acknowledged the
suzerainty of her husband. A mere legal claim meant nothing to her, and
he knew it. But there were moral perils of no light kind to be guarded
against; the danger such as a gambler runs, of being drawn away from the
real objects of life, of losing hold of one's main purpose, to say
nothing of the probable moral degeneration that would result from such
experiment. Yet there was no blinking the fact that the desire had been
growing in Hadria to test her powers of attraction to the utmost, so as
to discover exactly their range and calibre. She felt rather as a boy
might feel who had come upon a cask of gunpowder, and longed to set a
match to it, just to see exactly how high it would blow off the roof.
She had kept the growing instincts at bay, being determined that nothing
avoidable should come between her and her purpose. And then--well
considering in what light most men, in their hearts, regarded women--if
one might judge from their laws and their conduct and their literature,
and the society that they had organized--admiration from this sex was a
thing scarcely to be endured. Yet superficially, it was gratifying.
Why it should be so, was difficult to say, since it scarcely imposed
upon one's very vanity. Yet it was easy enough to understand how women
who had no very dominant interest in life, might come to have a thirst
for masculine homage and for power over men till it became like the
gambler's passion for play; and surely it had something in it of the
same character.
The steamer was stopping now at St. Cloud. Yielding to an impulse,
Hadria alighted at the landing-stage and walked on through the little
town towards the palace.
The sun was deliciously hot; its rays struck through to the skin, and
seemed to pour in life and well-being. The wayfarer stood looking up the
steep green avenue, resting for a moment, before she began the ascent.
At the top of the hill she paused again to look out over Paris, which
lay spread far and wide beneath her, glittering and brilliant; the
Eiffel Tower rising above domes and spires, in solitary inconsequence.
It seemed to her as if she were looking upon the world and upon life,
for the last time. A few weeks hence, would she be able to stand there
and see the gay city at her feet? She plunged back along one of the
converging avenues, yielding to the fascination of green alleys leading
one knows not whither. Wandering on for some time, she finally drifted
down hill again, towards the stately little garden near the palace. She
was surprised by a hurrying step behind her, and Jouffroy's voice in her
ear. She was about to greet him in her usual fashion, when he stopped
her by plunging head foremost into a startling tirade--about her art,
and her country, and her genius, and his despair; and finally his
resolve that she should not belong to the accursed list of women who
gave up their art for "_la famille_."
The more Hadria tried to discover what had happened and what he meant,
the faster he spoke and the more wildly he gesticulated.
He had seen how she was drifting away from her work and becoming
entangled in little affairs of no importance, and he would not permit
it. He cared not what her circumstances might be; she had a great talent
that she had no right to sacrifice to any circumstances whatever. He
had come to save her. Not finding her at her _apartement_, he had
concluded that she had taken refuge at her beloved St. Cloud. _Mon
Dieu!_ was he to allow her to be taken away from her work, dragged back
to a narrow circle, crushed, broken, ruined--she who could give such a
sublime gift to her century--but it was impossible! It would tear his
heart. He would not permit it; she must promise him not to allow herself
to be persuaded to abandon her purpose, no matter on what pretext they
tried to lure her. Hadria, in vain, enquired the cause of this sudden
excitement. Jouffroy only repeated his exhortations. Why did she not cut
herself entirely adrift from her country, her ties?
"They are to you, Madame, an oppression, a weariness, a----"
"M. Jouffroy, I have never spoken to you about these things. I cannot
see how you are in a position to judge."
"Ah, but I know. Have I not heard _cette chère Madame Bertaux_ describe
the life of an English village? And have I not seen----?"
"Seen what?"
"_Cette dame._ I have seen her at your apartment this afternoon. Do not
annihilate me, Madame; I mean not to offend you. The lady has come from
England on purpose to entrap you; she came last night, and she stays at
the Hotel du Louvre. She spoke to me of you." Jouffroy raised his hands
to heaven. "Ha! then I understood, and I fled hither to save you."
"Tell me, tell me quickly, Monsieur, has she fair hair and large grey
eyes. Is she tall?"
No, the lady was small, with dark hair, and brown, clever eyes.
"A lady, elegant, well-dressed, but, ah! a woman to destroy the soul of
an artist merely by her presence. I told her that you had decided to
remain in France, to adopt it as your country, for it was the country of
your soul!"
"Good heavens!" exclaimed Hadria, unable to repress a little burst of
laughter, in spite of her disappointment and foreboding.
"I told her that your friends would not let you go back to England, to
the land of fogs, the land of the _bourgeois_. The lady seemed
astonished, even indignant," continued Jouffroy, waving his hands
excitedly, "and she endeavoured to make me silent, but she did not have
success, I promise you. I appealed to her. I pointed out to her your
unique power. I reminded her that such power is a gift supreme to the
world, which the world must not lose. For the making of little ones and
the care of the _ménage_, there were other women, but you--you were a
priestess in the temple of art, you were without prejudice, without the
_bourgeois_ conscience, _grâce au ciel!_ you had the religion of the
artist, and your worship was paid at the shrine of Apollo. _Enfin_, I
counselled this elegant lady to return to England and to leave you in
peace. Always with a perfect politeness," added Jouffroy, panting from
excess of emotion. Hadria tried in vain to gather the object of this
sudden visit on the part of Henriette (for Henriette the elegant lady
must certainly be).
"I must return at once," she said. "I fear something must have gone
wrong at home." Jouffroy danced with fury.
"But I tell you, Madame, that she will drag you back to your fogs; she
will tell you some foolish story, she will address herself to your pity.
Your family has doubtless become ill. Families have that habit when they
desire to achieve something. Bah, it is easy to become ill when one is
angry, and so to make oneself pitied and obeyed. It is a common usage.
Madame, beware; it is for you the critical moment. One must choose."
"It is not always a matter of choice, M. Jouffroy."
"Always," he insisted. He endeavoured to induce her to linger, to make a
decision on the spot. But Hadria hastened on towards the river. Jouffroy
followed in despair. He ceased not to urge upon her the peril of the
moment and the need for resolute action. He promised to help her by
every means in his power, to watch over her career, to assist her in
bringing her gift to maturity. Never before had he felt a faith so
profound, or an interest so fervid in the genius of any woman. One had,
after all, regarded them ("les femmes") as accomplished animals.
"But of whom one demands the duties of human beings and the courage of
heroes," added Hadria.
"_Justement_," cried Jouffroy. But Madame had taught him a superb truth.
For her, he felt a sentiment of admiration and reverence the most
profound. She had been to him a revelation. He entreated her to bestow
upon him the privilege of watching over her career. Let her only make
the wise decision now, everything would arrange itself. It needed only
courage.
"This is the moment for decision. Remain now among us, and pursue your
studies with a calm mind, and I promise you--I, Jouffroy, who have the
right to speak on this matter--I promise you shall have a success beyond
the wildest dreams of your ambition. Madame, you do not guess your own
power. I know how your genius can be saved to the world; I know the
artist's nature. Have I not had the experience of twenty years? I know
what feeds and rouses it, and I know what kills it. And this I tell you,
Madame, that if you stay here, you have a stupendous future before you;
if you return to your fogs and your tea-parties--ah, then, Madame, your
genius will die and your heart will be broken."
CHAPTER XXXVI.
It was with great reluctance that Jouffroy acceded to Hadria's wish to
return home alone. She watched the river banks, and the boats coming and
passing, with a look of farewell in her eyes. She meant to hold out to
the utmost limits of the possible, but she knew that the possible _had_
limits, and she awaited judgment at the bar of destiny.
She hurried home on arriving at the quay, and found Henriette waiting
for her.
"What is it? Tell me at once, if anything is wrong."
"Then you knew I was here!" exclaimed Miss Temperley.
"Yes; M. Jouffroy told me. He found me at St. Cloud. Quick, Henriette,
don't keep me in suspense."
"There is nothing of immediate seriousness," Henriette replied, and her
sister-in-law drew a breath of relief. Tea was brought in by Hannah, and
a few questions were asked and answered. Miss Temperley having been
installed in an easy chair, and her cloak and hat removed, said that her
stay in Paris was uncertain as to length. It would depend on many
things. Hadria rang for the tray to be taken away, after tea was over,
and as Hannah closed the door, a sensation of sick apprehension overcame
her, for a moment. Henriette had obviously come to Paris in order to
recapture the fugitive, and meant to employ all her tact in the delicate
mission. She was devoted to Hubert and the children, heart and soul, and
would face anything on their behalf, including the present disagreeable
task. Hadria looked at her sister-in-law with admiration. She offered
homage to the prowess of the enemy.
Miss Temperley held a commanding position, fortified by ideas and
customs centuries old, and supported by allies on every side.
It ran through Hadria's mind that it was possible to refuse to allow the
subject to be broached, and thus escape the encounter altogether. It
would save many words on both sides. But Henriette had always been in
Hubert's confidence, and it occurred to Hadria that it might be well to
define her own position once more, since it was thus about to be
directly and frankly attacked. Moreover, Hadria began to be fired with
the spirit of battle. It was not merely for herself, but on behalf of
her sex, that she longed to repudiate the insult that seemed to her, to
be involved in Henriette's whole philosophy.
However, if the enemy shewed no signs of hostility, Hadria resolved that
she also would keep the truce.
Miss Temperley had already mentioned that Mrs. Fullerton was now staying
at the Red House, for change of air. She had been far from well, and of
course was worrying very much over these money troubles and perils
ahead, as well as about Hadria's present action. Mrs. Fullerton had
herself suggested that Henriette should go over to Paris to see what
could be done to patch up the quarrel.
"Ah!" exclaimed Hadria, and a cloud settled on her brow. Henriette had
indeed come armed _cap à pie!_
There was a significant pause. "And your mission," said Hadria at
length, "is to recapture the lost bird."
"We are considering your own good," murmured Miss Temperley.