The day after Othmar went alone to the green shadows of the vale of
Port-Royal. It was five o'clock in the afternoon when he reached
there: he saw Damaris before she saw him; all her rural habits and
associations had come to her in this leafy and rustic place; she rose
with the sun and went to bed with it; she had recovered her colour and
her strength; she assisted in the out-of-door work and rejoiced in it.
As he drew near he saw her mowing a swath of the autumnal aftermath
of the little field, the two watch dogs of Bonaventure, which he had
bought and restored to her, lying near and watching her with loving
eyes. Her arms, vigorous as a youth's and white as a swan's neck, were
seen bare to the shoulder in the swaying sweep of the scythe; her hair
was bound closely round her head, and its dark gold glistened in the
sun. The veins in her throat stood out in the effort of the movement;
the linen of her bodice heaved and fell. It was an attitude which Rude
or Clésinger would have given ten years of their lives to reproduce in
marble; it was the perfection of full and youthful female strength and
health, teeming with all the promise of a perfect organisation, all the
vitality which makes strong mothers of strong men.
It was womanhood; not the womanhood of the _mondaines_, delicate and
fragile as a hothouse flower, pale from late hours or faintly tinted
with the resources of art, serene and harmonious in tone, in charm, in
manner, the most perfect of all the products of artificial culture; but
womanhood as it was when the earth was young, and when life was simple
and straight as a rod of hazel; womanhood buoyant, healthful, forceful,
fearless; with limbs uncramped by fashion and beauty ignorant of art,
living in the wind, in the water, in the grass, in the sun, like the
dappled cattle and the strong-winged bird.
He watched her awhile, himself unseen. With what grace, yet with
what vigour, she moved the scythe, sweeping round her in its wide
semicircle, the long grass falling about her in green billows, with
trails of bindweed and tall red heads of clover in it; beyond her,
the blue sky and the pastoral horizon of the vast wheat-fields of La
Beauce.
What would the hot, close, fevered pressure of life in the world give
her that was half so good as that? How much better to dwell so, between
the green grass and the wide sky, than to court the fickle homage and
the fleeting loves of men! How much better if all her years could
pass so on the peaceful breast of the kindly earth, living to lead
her children out amongst the swaths of hay and teach them to love the
lark's song and the face of the fields as she loved them! How much
better to be Baucis than Aspasia!
Perhaps! but where was Philemon?
As the thoughts drifted through his mind she paused to whet her scythe,
looked up, and saw him. With a smile that was as glad as sunshine in
May weather she came towards him, leaping lightly over the hillocks of
mown grass. She was happy to see him there. She felt no embarrassment
for her bare arms and her kilted skirt; she had not been taught the
immodesty of prudes.
'No, we will not go in the house,' he said to her when he had greeted
her. 'Let us stay in your sweet-smelling meadow. Why are you mowing?
Are there no mowers to do it?'
'I like doing it,' she answered; 'and it spares Madame Chabot the day's
pay of a man. I can mow very well,' she added, with that pride in her
pastoral skill which she had been imbued with on Bonaventure.
She walked on by his side through the little narrow spaces of mown
ground which ran between the waves of the fallen grasses. She had
pulled down her sleeves and taken the pins out of her skirt, and passed
with her firm light tread and her uncovered head over the rough soil,
with the afternoon sun in her eyes and on the rich tints of her face.
It intensified the radiance of her colouring, as it did that of the
scarlet poppies which were blowing here and there where the grass still
stood uncut.
'What did he say of me?' she asked anxiously and wistfully, as Othmar
walked on in silence beside her.
'He says you have not deceived yourself.'
'Ah!'--she drew a deep breath of relief--'I pleased him, then? And yet,
when I heard him recite, it seemed to me that I could do nothing more
than stutter and gabble foolishly; his voice was music----'
'He has been a very great artist, and speech is to him as the flute to
the flute-player: an instrument with which he does what he will. Yes,
you pleased him, my dear. He thinks that you have in you the soul of an
artist, the future of one if you choose.'
'Ah!' she laughed aloud for sheer happiness and triumph, in the joy and
the pride of a child. It seemed to her the most exquisite glad tidings,
the most superb success.
'He will even help you; he will train you himself; and whoever is
trained by David Rosselin is in a certain sense secure of the public
ear,' said Othmar with a reluctance which he felt was unjust to her,
for if she possessed this power why should she be denied the knowledge
of it? 'But,' he added slowly, 'I must warn you that even he, great
artist as he has been, thinks as I think--that it is better to mow
grass in the fresh air than to seek the suffrage of crowds in the
gaslight. He thinks as I think, that, for a woman, the more secluded
and sheltered be the path of life the happier and the better is it for
her. This sounds very cold and cautious to you, no doubt; but it would
be what every man of the world would tell you, who was honest with you,
and had your welfare at heart.'
Her face changed and clouded as she heard him.
'Why?' she said abruptly.
He was silent. It was impossible to tell this child, who was as
innocent as any one of the poppies blowing in the grass, all the
reasons which made the future she coveted look to him like the open
mouth of a furnace into which a white sea-bird was flying in its
ignorance.
'Private life is the best life,' he said as she repeated, a little
imperiously, her 'why?' 'It is the calmest, the simplest, the most
screened from envy and hatred. I suppose tranquillity does not seem to
you the one inestimable blessing which it really is. You are full of
ardours and enthusiasms and longings, as the vines are full of sap in
the springtime. You want the wine of life, because you do not know that
the intoxication of it is always coupled with nausea, and fever, and
unspeakable disgust. It is of no use saying this to you, because you
are so young; but it is true. If I could compel your future, I would
have it pass yonder, where, far away, we see that golden haze. There
are the great wheat-lands of La Beauce, and the thrift and the peace
and the abundance of a rich pastoral life. If you spent your little
fortune on a farm there, with your love of country sights and sounds
and ways, you would be happy; and you could take your choice from the
many gallant youths who reap the harvests of those plains. You would
be a rich demoiselle in La Beauce, but in the world of art you may be
poor, my dear, for all your gifts from nature. We are poor, very poor,
forever, when once we have failed.'
His own words sounded in his ears unkind, unsympathetic, harsh, and
almost coarse; but he spoke as, it seemed to him, both experience and
conscience made it duty to do. Damaris looked down on the shorn grass
at her feet, and he saw her face and throat grow red.
'If I had wished to marry I would have married my cousin,' she said
with a sound of anger and offence in her voice. 'Peasant life is good,
very good. Perhaps, if I had never seen anything different, it might
have seemed always the best. But not now--not now----'
'But you do not know----.' He left his reply unfinished.
Standing in the green warm meadow, with the light of afternoon shed
on it, and the golden haze of a late summer day on its horizon, his
thoughts were full of all the many things in life of which she could
imagine nothing. All the passions and pleasures and disgusts, all the
desires and satisfactions and satieties, all the tumult and vanity and
nausea and giddy haste of life in the world--what could she tell of
these? She would be handsome and young and alone; what would that world
not teach her in a year, a month, an hour? Self-consciousness first;
then, with that knowledge, all else.
As, to her, having never known anything but the close limits of peasant
life, the world which she did not know assumed the colours and the
rejoicing of a vast borealis pageantry, so to him, by whom the world
was known like an oft-read Virgil, it seemed that the safety, the
quietude, the daily round of simple duties, undisturbed by ambition
within or by contention from without, which the life of the peasant
afforded, was a kind of happiness, a positive security from which any
safe within it were ill-advised to wander.
Of all wretched creatures the _déclassée_ seemed to him to be the most
wretched. He had reproached his wife with the effort to make this child
one of those pitiful anomalies, and he now reproached himself with
doing the same unkindness.
Damaris was a _déclassée_; she could never more return to the order of
life whence she had come. Ever since some indistinct glory for herself
had been suggested to her by the thoughtless words of the great lady
who had represented Fate to her, she had been haunted by the desire
for an existence wholly unlike that to which she had been born and by
which she had been surrounded. It had been only a very few hours which
she had passed under the roof of St. Pharamond, but that short space
had been long enough to make her conceive a world wholly inconceivable
to her before, a world in which art and luxury were things of daily
habit, in which leisure and loveliness and gaiety and ease were matters
of course, like the coming and going of time, in which personal graces
and personal charm were all cultured as the flowers were cultured
under glass; in which even for her there might become possible the
fruition of all manner of gorgeous indefinite visions, born out of the
suggestions of poets and the phantasmagoria of romantic books--a world
in which all she had humbly longed for, as she had listened to the
nightingales in the orange thickets, would become visible to her and
possessed.
She was a _déclassée_: not in the vulgar sense, but in the sadder
meaning of a young life uprooted from its natural soil and filled
with desires, aspirations, dreams, which made all that was actually
within her grasp valueless to her. That one night, in which she had
seen around her the destinies which appeared to her like a tale of
fairy-land, had impressed her imagination with indelible memories and
her heart with ineffaceable wishes. He, who only saw in the life of
his own world tedium, inanity, stupidity, extravagance, monotonous
repetition, could not guess what enchantment its externals had worn to
her. He, who was tired of the unvaried paths of that garden of pleasure
whose habitués only see that in it 'grove nods to grove, each alley has
its fellow,' could not divine what a paradise it had looked to this
young waif and stray, who had been only able to catch one glimpse of
its beauties through the golden bars of its shut gates. To him her wish
for the world appeared the most pathetic of errors, the most pitiable
of blunders, a very madness of unwise choice. Had not the world been
with him always, and what had it given him? Possibly it had in reality
given him much more than he remembered: it had given him culture with
all its charms, and courtesy with all its graces; it had given him the
great powers which lie in wealth, and the great light which shines
from knowledge. But then he was so used to these he counted them not,
and the world only wore to him the aspect of a monster devouring all
leisure, all simplicity, all repose, driving all mankind before it in
a breathless chase of swiftly escaping hours; and to her this monster
would be ravenous as a wolf, cruel as it could never be to any man! It
would take everything from her, and only give her in return worthless
gifts of ruinous passions, of consuming fevers, of poisoned fruits, of
fierce desires.
It seemed to him as if he saw some young child coming gaily through
the grasses, clasping all unconscious to its breast a mass of smoking
dynamite, and deeming it a kindly playfellow.
And it was impossible to warn her in words brutal enough to scare
her from her purpose. He could not say to her, 'Men are beasts, and
women are worse: there are hideous pleasures, hateful appetites, cruel
temptations, of which you know nothing, but which will all crowd on
your knowledge and grow to your taste, once you are in the midst
of them. The world will embrace you, but as the bull embraced the
Christian maiden forced to appear as Pasiphaë in the circus of Nero.
Be wise while there is time. Stay in the clean, clear daylight of a
country life. Its paths are narrow and few, they only lead from the
hearth to the door, from the door to the brook or the mill; but you may
walk in them safe and content, and teach your children to follow your
steps. Peace of mind is the sweetest thing upon earth; but it is like
the wood-sorrel, it only grows in shady, quiet, homely places. No one
has it in the world.'
But he thought these thoughts, and did not say them. He looked at
her standing with dew-wet feet amongst the seeding grasses, the warm
fresh air about her, the blue sky above, and he thought of her in
the atmosphere of a supper-room in Paris, with the smoke, and the
perfumes, and the odours of the wines, and beside her men with swimming
lascivious eyes, and _drôlesses_ with flushed faces and indecent
gestures. He would not take her there, but others would.
She raised her head suddenly and looked at him.
'What are you afraid of for me?' she said suddenly. 'There is nothing
to be afraid of. If I fail I fail; I have enough always to live on, you
say; and if I succeed----'
'Failure will not hurt you,' he said coldly; 'success may.'
'How can success hurt one unless one be very vain or very weak? I do
not think I am vain, and I know I am strong.'
'My dear--you can go from the meadows to the world if you will, but
remember you cannot come back from the world to the meadows.'
'Why? Did not many come from the world to Port-Royal when it stood
yonder?'
'Yes; they came with sick hearts, with defeated hopes, with aching
wounds, with disappointed passions; but they never stood in the green
pastures, in the morning of life, again.'
There was a sigh in the words which brought them home to her heart with
a sudden sense of all their meaning.
She was mute while the little crickets in the stalks of the hay grass
sung their last little song of one note, which would soon end with the
end of their tiny lives.
'You are not happy yourself?' she said after awhile. Astonishment and
regret were in the question.
Othmar hesitated. His sincerity combated the negative, which a vague
sense of loyalty to one absent made him desirous to utter.
'No one after a certain age is happy, my dear,' he answered evasively.
'Illusions are happiness; and in the world which you think must be a
fairy tale, we lose them very quickly.'
'I should have thought you were happy,' she said regretfully; that
splendid pageantry of life of which she had seen a glimpse seemed to
her magical, marvellous, inexhaustible.
'I did not think _she_ was,' she added, with that directness and
candour which made her great unlikeness to all of her sex whom he had
ever known.
'Why?' he asked abruptly; the supposition annoyed him.
'She looked tired, and as if she were looking for something she did not
find.'
The accuracy and divination in the words surprised him. How had this
child, who had never before seen any woman of the world, guessed so
accurately the perpetual vague desire and as vague dissatisfaction
which had always gone with the soul of his wife as a shadow goes
through brilliant light?
All her life long Nadège had found the old saw true, familiarity had
bred contempt in her; custom had made wisdom seem foolishness, wit seem
prose, amusement become tedium, and interest change to apathy. Intimate
knowledge of anything, of anyone, had always altered each for her, as
the fairy gold changed in mortal hands to withered leaves.
It was no fault of hers; it was not even mere inconstancy of temper; it
was rather due to the infinitude of her inexhaustible expectations and
the microscopic penetration of her intelligence. The world was small to
her as to Alexander.
He knew that neither to her nor to himself had their life together been
that poem, that passion, that harmony which they--or he at least--had
imagined that it would be. But was not this due only to that doom of
human nature which they shared in common with all the rest of mankind?
Was it not merely the effect of that lassitude and vague disappointment
which must follow on the indulgence of every great passion, simply
because in its supreme hours it reaches heights of rapture at which
nothing human can remain?
Yet, however his philosophy may explain it, to have any other imagine
that he does not render a woman who belongs to him perfectly contented
with him always irritates and offends every man. It is a suspicion cast
on his powers, his loyalty, and his good sense: it indirectly accuses
him of deficiency in attraction or of feebleness of character. Othmar
had but little vanity; no more than human nature naturally possesses
in its unconscious forms of self-love; but the little he had was
mortified by this child's observation. She, ignorant of all the fine
intricacies of emotion which are the traits of such highly-cultured and
over-refined temperaments as were theirs, could only say, in her simple
and inadequate language, that they seemed to her 'not happy.' It was
not the phrase which expressed what they lacked; it was too homely,
too crude, too direct, to describe the complicated world-weariness of
which they both suffered the penalties, the innumerable and conflicting
sentiments and desires which made of their lives a continual vague
expectation and as vague and continual a regret. But her young eyes,
unused as they were to read anything less clear than the open language
of sea and sky, and ignorant of the whole meaning of psychological
analysis, had yet been able to perceive the shadow of this which she
had had no power of understanding.
He was surprised at her penetration, whilst he wondered uneasily if the
world in general, so much keener of sight and more bitter of tongue
than she, saw as much as she saw. The idea that it might be so was
unwelcome to him. The supposition was horrible to him that the great
passion of his life had gone the way of most great passions which
are exposed to that most cruel of all slow destroyers--familiarity;
familiarity which is as the mildew to the wheat, as the sirdax to the
fir-tree, as the calandra to the sugar-cane. He loathed to realise the
fact, or think of it in any way; and when it was placed before him by
another's observation, he saw his own soul, as it were in a mirror, and
detested what he saw.
He answered with some constraint: 'I have told you, my dear, that
happiness is the fruit of illusions; it cannot exist without them any
more than we could have that beautiful haze yonder without water in the
atmosphere. Besides, in the world, people are only content so long as
they are of completely frivolous characters. My wife has cultivated her
intelligence and her wit too exquisitely to be capable of that sort of
coarse and common satisfaction with things as they are which is so easy
to mediocre minds.'
'Yet you advise _me_ to be content?'
'My dear child, you are young, you are accustomed to an out-of-door
life, you have the felicity of belonging to country things and country
thoughts which give you a storehouse full of sunny memories. My wife is
a _mondaine_ (if you have ever heard that word) who is also a pessimist
and a metaphysician. Life presents many intricate problems to her mind
which will, I hope, never trouble your joyous acceptance of it as it
is. Fénelon, I assure you, was a happier man than Lamennais.'
'Because he was a stupider one.'
'Stupid? No, but simpler, cast in a different mould, naturally inclined
to faith, averse to speculation, taking things as he found them without
question. That is the cast of mind of all men and women who are made to
be happy.'
She was silent; wishfully thinking of those immense fields of knowledge
shut out from her own eyes like the aerial spheres of unseen suns and
planets which the unassisted sight can never behold. She felt childish,
ignorant, made of dull and common clay.
The bells of a little distant spire sounded for Vespers. The sun was
sinking beyond the edge of the wide green plain. A deeper stillness
was stealing over the meadow and the low coppices which made its
boundaries. Birds, looking grey in the shadows, flew low, to and fro,
restlessly, in that uncertain flight with which, near nightfall, they
always seek a resting-place for the dark hours.
Othmar looked at his watch. 'I must leave you or I shall miss the train
to Paris, and I go to-night to Russia.'
She changed colour.
'To Russia! That is very far away!'
'It does not seem so in these days. One sleeps and wakes and sleeps
again, and one is there. If you want me in any way, write to me at the
Paris house and they will forward your letter. Rosselin will come to
see you to-morrow. He will tell you, as no one else can, all you will
have to prepare for and encounter if you choose the life of an artist.
Do not decide too hastily. There is no hurry. I like best to think of
you in these safe pastures.'
'But the winter will come to them and--some time--to me?'
'It is far enough off you, at least, to be forgotten. Well, listen to
Rosselin and be guided by your own impulses; they are the only safe
guides in such a choice as this. I dare say the world will win you; the
world always does. It is only in fable that Herakles goes with Pallas.
Adieu.'
She grew very pale, and the light had gone out of her face as it had
now gone off the landscape.
'You will come back soon?' she asked.
Othmar resisted a wave of tenderness and pity which passed over him.
'Not very soon,' he answered. 'You know I have many occupations, and
the world I warn you against is always with me, alas! I shall never
be able to see you often, my dear, for--for--very many reasons; but
whenever you really need me, write to me without hesitation, and always
depend upon the sincerity of my regard.'
She did not reply. She stood motionless. With the coming of the evening
shadows there had came a great chillness, a sense of loss upon her,
as if she had been suddenly brought from the warm green meadows of
the vale of Chevreuse into the awful silence and whiteness and frozen
solitude of a winter's night in Siberia.
'Write to me,' said Othmar again. With a gentle movement he stooped and
kissed her on the soft thick waves of hair which fell over her forehead.
Then he left her.
She remained standing in the same place and the same attitude, her feet
in the mown grass growing wet with dew, her head bent like a statue
of meditation. The caress had been gentle, slight, passionless, like
a kiss to a child; but her face and bosom had grown hot with blushes
which the evening shadows veiled, and a strange vague joy and pain
strove together in her.