when we were young, of believing, against wise authority, that it _was_
in mortals to command success, that he could command it who deserved
it. We believed that the race would be to the swift, the battle to
the strong; that a man was responsible for his own destiny, that
he’d get what he merited. We believed that honest labour couldn’t go
unrewarded. An immense mistake. Success is an affair of temperament,
like faith, like love, like the colour of your hair. Oh, the old story
about industry, resolution, and no vices! I was industrious, I was
resolute, and I had no more than the common share of vices. But I had
the unsuccessful temperament; and here I am. If my motives had been
ignoble--but I can’t see that they were. I wanted to earn a decent
living; I wanted to justify my existence by doing something worthy of
the world’s acceptance. But the stars in their courses fought against
me. I have tried hard to convince myself that the music I wrote was
rubbish. It had its faults, no doubt. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t
epoch-making. But, as music goes nowadays, it was jolly good. It was a
jolly sight better than the average.”
“Oh, that is certain, that is certain,” I exclaimed, as he paused again.
“Well, anyhow, it didn’t sell, and at last I couldn’t even get it
published. So then I tried to find other work. I tried everything. I
tried to teach--harmony and the theory of composition. I couldn’t get
pupils. So few people want to study that sort of thing, and there were
good masters already in the place. If I had known how to play, indeed!
But I was never better than a fifth-rate executant; I had never gone in
for that; my ‘lay’ was composition. I couldn’t give piano lessons, I
couldn’t play in public--unless in a _gargotte_ like the hole we have
just left. Oh, I tried everything. I tried to get musical criticism to
do for the newspapers. Surely I was competent to do musical criticism.
But no--they wouldn’t employ me. I had ill luck, ill luck, ill
luck--nothing but ill luck, defeat, disappointment. Was it the will of
Heaven? I wondered what unforgivable sin I had committed to be punished
so. Do you know what it is like to work and pray and wait, day after
day, and watch day after day come and go and bring you nothing? Oh, I
tasted the whole heart-sickness of hope deferred; Giant Despair was my
constant bed-fellow.”
“But--with your connections----” I began.
“Oh, my connections!” he cried. “There was the rub, London is the
cruellest town in Europe. For sheer cold blood and heartlessness give
Londoners the palm. I had connections enough for the first month or so,
and then people found out things that didn’t concern them. They found
out some things that were true, and they imagined other things that
were false. They wouldn’t have my wife; they told the most infamous
lies about her; and I wouldn’t have _them_. Could I be civil to people
who insulted and slandered _her_? I had no connections in London,
except with the underworld. I got down to copying parts for theatrical
orchestras; and working twelve hours a day, earned about thirty
shillings a week.”
“You might have come back to Paris.”
“And fared worse. I couldn’t have earned thirty pence in Paris. Mind
you, the only trade I had learned was that of a musical composer; and
I couldn’t compose music that people would buy. I should have starved
as a copyist in Paris, where copyists are more numerous and worse paid.
Teach there? But to one competent master of harmony in London there are
ten in Paris. No; it was a hopeless case.”
“It is incomprehensible--incomprehensible,” said I.
“But wait--wait till you’ve heard the end. One would think I had had
enough--not so? One would think my cup of bitterness was full. No
fear! There was a stronger cup still a-brewing for me. When Fortune
takes a grudge against a man, she never lets up. She exacts the
uttermost farthing. I was pretty badly off, but I had one treasure
left--I had Godelinette. I used to think that she was my compensation.
I would say to myself, ‘A fellow can’t have all blessings. How can
you expect others, when you’ve got her?’ And I would accuse myself
of ingratitude for complaining of my unsuccess. Then she fell ill.
My God, how I watched over, prayed over her! It seemed impossible--I
could not believe--that she would be taken from me. Yet, Harry, do you
know what that poor child was thinking? Do you know what her dying
thoughts were--her wishes? Throughout her long painful illness she was
thinking that she was an obstacle in my way, a weight upon me; that if
it weren’t for her, I should get on, have friends, a position; that it
would be a good thing for me if she should die; and she was hoping in
her poor little heart that she wouldn’t get well! Oh, I know it, I knew
it--and you see me here alive. She let herself die for my sake--as if I
could care for anything without her! That’s what brought us here, to
France, to Bordeaux--her illness. The doctors said she must pass the
spring out of England, away from the March winds, in the South; and I
begged and borrowed money enough to take her. And we were on our way to
Arcachon; but when we reached Bordeaux she was too ill to continue the
journey, and--she died here.”
We walked on for some distance in silence, then he added: “That was
four years ago. You wonder why I live to tell you of it, why I haven’t
cut my throat. I don’t know whether it’s cowardice or conscientious
scruples. It seems rather inconsequent to say that I believe in a God,
doesn’t it?--that I believe one’s life is not one’s own to make an
end of? Anyhow, here I am, keeping body and soul together as musician
to a _brasserie-à-femmes_. I can’t go back to England, I can’t leave
Bordeaux--she’s buried here. I’ve hunted high and low for work, and
found it nowhere save in the _brasserie-à-femmes_. With that, and a
little copying now and then, I manage to pay my way.”
“But your uncle?” I asked.
“Do you think I would touch a penny of his money?” Pair retorted,
almost fiercely. “It was he who began it. My wife let herself die. It
was virtual suicide. It was he who created the situation that drove her
to it.”
“You are his heir, though, aren’t you?”
“No, the estates are not entailed.”
We had arrived at the door of my hotel. “Well, good-night and _bon
voyage_,” he said.
“You needn’t wish me _bon voyage_,” I answered. “Of course I’m not
leaving Bordeaux for the present.”
“Oh, yes, you are. You’re going on to Biarritz to-morrow morning, as
you intended.”
And herewith began a long and most painful struggle. I could persuade
him to accept no help of any sort from me. “What I can’t do for
myself,” he declared, “I’ll do without. My dear fellow, all that
you propose is contrary to the laws of Nature. One man can’t keep
another--it’s an impossible relation. And I won’t be kept; I won’t be
a burden. Besides, to tell you the truth, I’ve got past caring. The
situation you find me in seems terrible to you; to me it’s no worse
than another. You see, I’m hardened; I’ve got past caring.”
“At any rate,” I insisted, “I shan’t go on to Biarritz. I’ll spend my
holiday here, and we can see each other every day. What time shall we
meet to-morrow?”
“No, no, I can’t meet you again. Don’t ask me to; you mean it kindly, I
know, but you’re mistaken. It’s done me good to talk it all out to you,
but I can’t meet you again. I’ve got no heart for friendship, and--you
remind me too keenly of many things.”
“But if I come to the _brasserie_ to-morrow night?”
“Oh, if you do that, you’ll oblige me to throw up my employment there,
and hide from you. You must promise not to come again--you must respect
my wishes.”
“You’re cruel, you know.”
“Perhaps, perhaps. But I think I’m only reasonable. Anyhow, good-bye.”
He shook my hand hurriedly, and moved off. What could I do? I stood
looking after him till he had vanished in the night, with a miserable
baffled recognition of my helplessness to help him.
To a Bunch of Lilac
By Theo Marzials
“_Dis-moi la fleur, je te dirai la femme_”
Is it the April springing,
Or the bird in the breeze above?
My throat is full of singing,
My heart is full of love.
O heart, are you not yet broken?
O dream, so done with and dead,
Is life’s one word not spoken,
And the rede of it all not read?
No hope in the whole world over!
No hope in the infinite blue!
Yet I sing and laugh out like a lover--
Oh, who is it, April--who?
And the glad young year is springing;
And the birds, and the breeze above,
And the shrill tree-tops, are singing--
And I am singing--of love.
* * * * *
O beautiful lilac flowers,
Oh, say, is it you, is it you
The sun-struck, love-sick hours
Go faint for murmuring through?
O full of ineffable yearning,
So balmy, mystical, deep,
And faint beyond any discerning,
Like far-off voices in sleep--
I love you, O lilac, I love you!
Till life goes swooning by,
I breathe and enwreathe and enfold you,
And long but to love, and die.
From a Pastel
By Albert Foschter
[Illustration]
Apple Blossom in Brittany
By Ernest Dowson
I
IT WAS the feast of the Assumption in Ploumariel, at the hottest part
of the afternoon. Benedict Campion, who had just assisted at vespers,
in the little dove-cotted church--like everything else in Ploumariel,
even vespers were said earlier than is the usage in towns--took up his
station in the market-place to watch the procession pass by. The head
of it was just then emerging into the Square: a long file of men from
the neighbouring villages, bare-headed and chaunting, followed the
crucifer. They were all clad in the picturesque garb of the Morbihan
peasantry, and were many of them imposing, quite noble figures with
their clear-cut Breton features, and their austere type of face.
After them a troop of young girls, with white veils over their heads,
carrying banners--children from the convent school of the Ursulines;
and then, two and two in motley assemblage (peasant women with their
white coifs walking with the wives and daughters of prosperous
_bourgeois_ in costumes more civilised but far less pictorial) half
the inhabitants of Ploumariel--all, indeed, who had not, with Campion,
preferred to be spectators, taking refuge from a broiling sun under the
grateful shadow of the chestnuts in the market-place. Last of all a
muster of clergy, four or five strong, a small choir of bullet-headed
boys, and the Curé of the parish himself, Monsieur Letêtre chaunting
from his book, who brought up the rear.
Campion, leaning against his chestnut tree, watched them defile. Once
a smile of recognition flashed across his face, which was answered
by a girl in the procession. She just glanced from her book, and the
smile with which she let her eyes rest upon him for a moment, before
she dropped them, did not seem to detract from her devotional air.
She was very young and slight--she might have been sixteen--and she
had a singularly pretty face; her white dress was very simple, and
her little straw hat, but both of these she wore with an air which at
once set her apart from her companions, with their provincial finery
and their rather commonplace charms. Campion’s eyes followed the
little figure until it was lost in the distance, disappearing with
the procession down a by-street on its return journey to the church.
And after they had all passed, the singing, the last verse of the
“Ave Maris Stella,” was borne across to him, through the still air,
the voices of children pleasantly predominating. He put on his hat
at last, and moved away; every now and then he exchanged a greeting
with somebody--the communal doctor, the mayor; while here and there a
woman explained him to her gossip in whispers as he passed, “It is the
Englishman of Mademoiselle Marie-Ursule--it is M. le Curé’s guest.”
It was to the dwelling of M. le Curé, indeed, that Campion now made
his way. Five minutes’ walk brought him to it; an unpretentious white
house, lying back in its large garden, away from the dusty road. It was
an untidy garden, rather useful than ornamental; a very little shade
was offered by one incongruous plane-tree, under which a wooden table
was placed and some chairs. After _déjeûner_, on those hot August days,
Campion and the Curé took their coffee here; and in the evening it was
here that they sat and talked while Mademoiselle Hortense, the Curé’s
sister, knitted, or appeared to knit, an interminable shawl; the young
girl, Marie-Ursule, placidly completing the quartet with her silent,
felicitous smile of a convent-bred child, which seemed sometimes, at
least to Campion, to be after all a finer mode of conversation. He
threw himself down now on the bench, wondering when his hosts would
have finished their devotions, and drew a book from his pocket as if
he would read. But he did not open it, but sat for a long time holding
it idly in his hand, and gazing out at the village, at the expanse
of dark pine-covered hills, and at the one trenchant object in the
foreground, the white façade of the convent of the Ursuline nuns. Once
and again he smiled, as though his thoughts, which had wandered a long
way, had fallen upon extraordinarily pleasant things. He was a man of
barely forty, though he looked slightly older than his age: his little,
peaked beard was grizzled, and a life spent in literature, and very
studiously, had given him the scholar’s premature stoop. He was not
handsome, but, when he smiled, his smile was so pleasant that people
credited him with good looks. It brought, moreover, such a light of
youth into his eyes, as to suggest that if his avocations had unjustly
aged his body, that had not been without its compensations--his soul
had remained remarkably young. Altogether, he looked shrewd, kindly
and successful, and he was all these things, while if there was also a
certain sadness in his eyes--lines of lassitude about his mouth--this
was an idiosyncracy of his temperament, and hardly justified by his
history, which had always been honourable and smooth. He was sitting in
the same calm and presumably agreeable reverie, when the garden gate
opened, and a girl--the young girl of the procession, fluttered towards
him.
“Are you quite alone?” she asked brightly, seating herself at his side.
“Has not Aunt Hortense come back?”
Campion shook his head, and she continued speaking in English, very
correctly, but with a slight accent, which gave to her pretty young
voice the last charm.
“I suppose she has gone to see _la mère Guémené_. She will not live
another night they say. Ah! what a pity,” she cried, clasping her
hands; “to die on the Assumption--that is hard.”
Campion smiled softly. “Dear child, when one’s time comes, when one is
old as that, the day does not matter much.” Then he went on: “But how
is it you are back; were you not going to your nuns?”
She hesitated a moment. “It is your last day, and I wanted to make tea
for you. You have had no tea this year. Do you think I have forgotten
how to make it, while you have been away, as I forget my English words?”
“It’s I who am forgetting such an English habit,” he protested. “But
run away and make it, if you like. I am sure it will be very good.”
She stood for a moment looking down at him, her fingers smoothing a
little bunch of palest blue ribbons on her white dress. In spite of her
youth, her brightness, the expression of her face in repose was serious
and thoughtful, full of unconscious wistfulness. This, together with
her placid manner, the manner of a child who has lived chiefly with old
people and quiet nuns, made her beauty to Campion a peculiarly touching
thing. Just then her eyes fell upon Campion’s wide-awake, lying on the
seat at his side, and travelled to his uncovered head. She uttered a
protesting cry: “Are you not afraid of a _coup de soleil_? See--you are
not fit to be a guardian if you can be so foolish as that. It is I who
have to look after you.” She took up the great grey hat and set it
daintily on his head; then with a little laugh she disappeared into the
house.
When Campion raised his head again, his eyes were smiling, and in the
light of a sudden flush which just died out of it, his face looked
almost young.
II
This girl, so foreign in her education and traditions, so foreign in
the grace of her movements, in everything except the shade of her dark
blue eyes, was the child of an English father; and she was Benedict
Campion’s ward. This relation, which many persons found incongruous,
had befallen naturally enough. Her father had been Campion’s oldest
and most familiar friend; and when Richard Heath’s romantic marriage
had isolated him from so many others, from his family and from his
native land, Campion’s attachment to him had, if possible, only been
increased. From his heart he had approved, had prophesied nothing but
good of an alliance, which certainly, while it lasted, had been an
wholly ideal relation. There had seemed no cloud on the horizon--and
yet less than two years had seen the end of it. The birth of the
child, Marie-Ursule, had been her mother’s death; and six months
later, Richard Heath, dying less from any defined malady than because
he lacked any longer the necessary motive to live, was laid by the
side of his wife. The helpless child remained, in the guardianship of
Hortense, her mother’s sister, and elder by some ten years, who had
already composed herself contentedly, as some women do, to the prospect
of perpetual spinsterhood, and the care of her brother’s house--an
ecclesiastic just appointed curé of Ploumariel. And here, ever since,
in this quiet corner of Brittany, in the tranquil custody of the
priest and his sister, Marie-Ursule had grown up.
Campion’s share in her guardianship had not been onerous, although
it was necessarily maintained; for the child had inherited, and what
small property would come to her was in England, and in English
funds. To Hortense Letêtre and her brother such responsibilities in
an alien land were not for a moment to be entertained. And gradually,
this connection, at first formal and impersonal, between Campion
and the Breton presbytery, had developed into an intimacy, into a
friendship singularly satisfying on both sides. Separate as their
interests seemed, those of the French country-priest, and of the
Englishman of letters, famous already in his own department, they
had, nevertheless, much community of feeling apart from their common
affection for a child. Now, for many years, he had been established in
their good graces, so that it had become an habit with him to spend
his holiday--it was often a very extended one--at Ploumariel; while to
the Letêtres, as well as to Marie-Ursule herself, this annual sojourn
of Campion’s had become the occasion of the year, the one event which
pleasantly relieved the monotony of life in this remote village; though
that, too, was a not unpleasant routine. Insensibly Campion had come
to find his chief pleasure in consideration of this child of an old
friend, whose gradual growth beneath influences which seemed to him
singularly exquisite and fine, he had watched so long; whose future,
now that her childhood, her schooldays at the convent had come to an
end, threatened to occupy him with an anxiety more intimate than any
which hitherto he had known. Marie-Ursule’s future! They had talked
much of it that summer, the priest and the Englishman, who accompanied
him in his long morning walks, through green lanes, and over white,
dusty roads, and past fields perfumed with the pungently pleasant
smell of the blood-red _sarrasin_, when he paid visits to the sick
who lived on the outskirts of his scattered parish. Campion became
aware then of an increasing difficulty in discussing this matter
impersonally, in the impartial manner becoming a guardian. Odd thrills
of jealousy stirred within him when he was asked to contemplate
Marie-Ursule’s possible suitors. And yet, it was with a very genuine
surprise, at least for the moment, that he met the Curé’s sudden
pressing home of a more personal contingency--he took this freedom
of an old friend with a shrewd twinkle in his eye, which suggested
that all along this had been chiefly in his mind. “_Mon bon ami_, why
should you not marry her yourself? That would please all of us so
much.” And he insisted, with kindly insistence, on the propriety of the
thing: dwelling on Campion’s established position, their long habit of
friendship, his own and his sister’s confidence and esteem, taking for
granted, with that sure insight which is the gift of many women and of
most priests, that on the ground of affection alone the justification
was too obvious to be pressed. And he finished with a smile, stopping
to take a pinch of snuff with a sigh of relief--the relief of a man who
has at least seasonably unburdened himself.
“Surely, _mon ami_, some such possibility must have been in your mind?”
Campion hesitated for a moment; then he proffered his hand, which
the other warmly grasped. “You read me aright,” he said slowly,
“only I hardly realised it before. Even now--no, how can I believe
it possible--that she should care for me. _Non sum dignus, non sum
dignus._ Consider her youth, her inexperience; the best part of my life
is behind me.”
But the Curé smiled reassuringly. “The best part is before you,
Campion; you have the heart of a boy. Do we not know you? And for the
child--rest tranquil there! I have the word of my sister, who is a
wise woman, that she is sincerely attached to you; not to speak of the
evidence of my own eyes. She will be seventeen shortly, then she can
speak for herself. And to whom else can we trust her?”
The shadow of these confidences hung over Campion when he next saw
Marie-Ursule, and troubled him vaguely during the remainder of his
visit, which this year, indeed, he considerably curtailed. Inevitably
he was thrown much with the young girl, and if daily the charm which
he found in her presence was sensibly increased, as he studied her
from a fresh point of view, he was none the less disquieted at the
part which he might be called upon to play. Diffident and scrupulous,
a shy man, knowing little of women; and at least by temperament, a sad
man, he trembled before felicity, as many at the palpable breath of
misfortune. And his difficulty was increased by the conviction, forced
upon him irresistibly, little as he could accuse himself of vanity,
that the decision rested with himself. Her liking for him was genuine
and deep, her confidence implicit. He had but to ask her and she would
place her hand in his and go forth with him, as trustfully as a child.
And when they came to celebrate her _fête_, Marie-Ursule’s seventeenth
birthday--it occurred a little before the Assumption--it was almost
disinterestedly that he had determined upon his course. At least
it was security which he could promise her, as a younger man might
not; a constant and single-minded kindness; a devotion not the less
valuable, because it was mature and reticent, lacking, perhaps, the
jealous ardours of youth. Nevertheless, he was going back to England
without having revealed himself; there should be no unseasonable
haste in the matter; he would give her another year. The Curé smiled
deprecatingly at the procrastination; but on this point Campion was
firm. And on this, his last evening, he spoke only of trivial things
to Marie-Ursule, as they sat presently over the tea--a mild and
flavourless beverage--which the young girl had prepared. Yet he noticed
later, after their early supper, when she strolled up with him to the
hill overlooking the village, a certain new shyness in her manner, a
shadow, half timid, half expectant in her clear eyes which permitted
him to believe that she was partly prepared. When they reached the
summit, stood clear of the pine trees by an ancient stone Calvary,
Ploumariel lay below them, very fair in the light of the setting sun;
and they stopped to rest themselves, to admire.
“Ploumariel is very beautiful,” said Campion after a while. “Ah!
Marie-Ursule, you are fortunate to be here.”
“Yes.” She accepted his statement simply, then suddenly: “You should
not go away.” He smiled, his eyes turning from the village in the
valley to rest upon her face; after all, she was the daintiest picture,
and Ploumariel with its tall slate roofs, its sleeping houses, her
appropriate frame.
“I shall come back, I shall come back,” he murmured. She had gathered a
bunch of ruddy heather as they walked, and her fingers played with it
now nervously. Campion stretched out his hand for it. She gave it him
without a word.
“I will take it with me to London,” he said; “I will have Morbihan in
my rooms.”
“It will remind you--make you think of us sometimes?”