you think that was necessary?” And they resumed their homeward way
silently, although to both of them the air seemed heavy with unspoken
words.
III
When he was in London--and it was in London that for nine months out of
the twelve Benedict Campion was to be found--he lived in the Temple, at
the top of Hare Court, in the very same rooms in which he had installed
himself, years ago, when he gave up his Oxford fellowship, electing
to follow the profession of letters. Returning there from Ploumariel,
he resumed at once, easily, his old avocations. He had always been a
secluded man, living chiefly in books and in the past; but this year
he seemed less than ever inclined to knock at the hospitable doors
which were open to him. For in spite of his reserve, his diffidence,
Campion’s success might have been social, had he cared for it, and not
purely academic. His had come to be a name in letters, in the higher
paths of criticism; and he had made no enemies. To his success indeed,
gradual and quiet as this was, he had never grown quite accustomed,
contrasting the little he had actually achieved with all that he had
desired to do. His original work was of the slightest, and a book that
was in his head he had never found time to write. His name was known in
other ways, as a man of ripe knowledge, of impeccable taste; as a born
editor of choice reprints, of inaccessible classics: above all, as an
authority--the greatest, upon the literature and the life (its flavour
at once courtly, and mystical, had to him an unique charm) of the
seventeenth century. His heart was in that age, and from much lingering
over it, he had come to view modern life with a curious detachment, a
sense of remote hostility: Democracy, the Salvation Army, the novels
of M. Zola--he disliked them all impartially. A Catholic by long
inheritance, he held his religion for something more than an heirloom;
he exhaled it, like an intimate quality; his mind being essentially of
that kind to which a mystical view of things comes easiest.
This year passed with him much as any other of the last ten years had
passed; at least the routine of his daily existence admitted little
outward change. And yet inwardly, he was conscious of alteration, of a
certain quiet illumination which was a new thing to him.
Although at Ploumariel when the prospect of such a marriage had dawned
on him, his first impression had been one of strangeness, he could
reflect now that it was some such possibility as this which he had
always kept vaguely in view. He had prided himself upon few things more
than his patience; and now it appeared that this was to be rewarded;
he was glad that he had known how to wait. This girl, Marie-Ursule,
had an immense personal charm for him, but, beyond that, she was
representative--her traditions were exactly those which the ideal girl
of Campion’s imagination would possess. She was not only personally
adorable; she was also generically of the type which he admired. It
was possibly because this type was, after all, so rare, that looking
back, Campion in his middle age, could drag out of the recesses of his
memory no spectre to compete with her. She was his first love precisely
because the conditions, so choice and admirable, which rendered it
inevitable for him to love her, had never occurred before. And he could
watch the time of his probation gliding away with a pleased expectancy
which contained no alloy of impatience. An illumination--a quite
tranquil illumination: yes, it was under some such figure, without
heart-burning, or adolescent fever, that love as it came to Campion
was best expressed. Yet if this love was lucent rather than turbulent,
that it was also deep he could remind himself, when a letter from the
priest, while the spring was yet young, had sent him to Brittany, a
month or two before his accustomed time, with an anxiety that was not
solely due to bewilderment.
“_Our child is well, mon bon_,” so he wrote. “_Do not alarm yourself.
But it will be good for you to come, if it be only because of an idea
she has, that you may remove. An idea! Call it rather a fancy--at least
your coming will dispel it. Petites entêtées: I have no patience with
these mystical little girls._”
His musings on the phrase, with its interpretation varying to his
mood, lengthened his long sea-passage, and the interminable leagues
of railway which separated him from Pontivy, whence he had still
some twenty miles to travel by the _Courrier_, before he reached his
destination. But at Pontivy, the round, ruddy face of M. Letêtre
greeting him on the platform dispelled any serious misgiving. Outside
the post-office the familiar conveyance awaited them: its yellow
inscription “Pontivy-Ploumariel,” touched Campion electrically,
as did the cheery greeting of the driver, which was that of an
old friend. They shared the interior of the rusty trap--a fossil
among vehicles--they chanced to be the only travellers, and to the
accompaniment of jingling harness, and the clattering hoofs of the
brisk little Carhaix horses, M. Letêtre explained himself.
“A vocation, _mon Dieu_! if all the little girls who fancied themselves
with one, were to have their way, to whom would our poor France look
for children? They are good women, _nos Ursulines_, ah, yes; but
our Marie-Ursule is a good child, and blessed matrimony also is a
sacrament. You shall talk to her, my Campion. It is a little fancy,
you see, such as will come to young girls; a convent ague, but when
she sees you” ... He took snuff with emphasis, and flipped his broad
fingers suggestively. “_Craque!_ it is a betrothal, and a _trousseau_,
and not the habit of religion, that Mademoiselle is full of. You will
talk to her?”
Campion assented silently, absently, his eyes had wandered away, and
looked through the little square of window at the sad-coloured Breton
country, at the rows of tall poplars, which guarded the miles of dusty
road like sombre sentinels. And the priest with a reassured air pulled
out his breviary, and began to say his office in an imperceptible
undertone. After a while he crossed himself, shut the book, and
pillowing his head against the hot, shiny leather of the carriage,
sought repose; very soon his regular, stertorous breathing, assured his
companion that he was asleep. Campion closed his eyes also, not indeed
in search of slumber, though he was travel weary; rather the better to
isolate himself with the perplexity of his own thoughts. An indefinable
sadness invaded him, and he could envy the priest’s simple logic, which
gave such short shrift to obstacles that Campion, with his subtle
melancholy, which made life to him almost morbidly an affair of fine
shades and nice distinctions, might easily exaggerate.
Of the two, perhaps the priest had really the more secular mind, as
it certainly excelled Campion’s in that practical wisdom, or common
sense, which may be of more avail than subtlety in the mere economy
of life. And what to the Curé was a simple matter enough, the removal
of the idle fancy of a girl, might be to Campion, in his scrupulous
temper, and his overweening tenderness towards just those pieties and
renunciations which such a fancy implied, a task to be undertaken
hardly with relish, perhaps without any real conviction, deeply as his
personal wishes might be implicated in success. And the heart had gone
out of his journey long before a turn of the road brought them in sight
of Ploumariel.
IV
Up by the great, stone Calvary, where they had climbed nearly a
year before, Campion stood, his face deliberately averted, while
the young girl uttered her hesitating confidences; hesitating, yet
candid, with a candour which seemed to separate him from the child by
more than a measurable space of years, to set him with an appealing
trustfulness in the seat of judgment--for him, for her. They had
wandered there insensibly, through apple-orchards white with the
promise of a bountiful harvest, and up the pine-clad hill, talking of
little things--trifles to beguile their way--perhaps, in a sort of
vain procrastination. Once, Marie-Ursule had plucked a branch of the
snowy blossom, and he had playfully chided her that the cider would be
less by a _litre_ that year in Brittany. “But the blossom is so much
prettier,” she protested; “and there will be apples and apples--always
enough apples. But I like the blossom best--and it is so soon over.”
And then, emerging clear of the trees, with Ploumariel lying in its
quietude in the serene sunshine below them, a sudden strenuousness had
supervened, and the girl had unburdened herself, speaking tremulously,
quickly, in an undertone almost passionate; and Campion, perforce,
had listened.... A fancy? a whim? Yes, he reflected; to the normal,
entirely healthy mind, any choice of exceptional conditions, any
special self-consecration or withdrawal from the common lot of men
and women must draw down upon it some such reproach, seeming the mere
pedantry of inexperience. Yet, against his reason, and what he would
fain call his better judgment, something in his heart of hearts stirred
sympathetically with this notion of the girl. And it was no fixed
resolution, no deliberate justification which she pleaded. She was
soft, and pliable, and even her plea for renunciation contained pretty,
feminine inconsequences; and it touched Campion strangely. Argument
he could have met with argument; an ardent conviction he might have
assailed with pleading; but that note of appeal in her pathetic young
voice, for advice, for sympathy, disarmed him.
“Yet the world,” he protested at last, but half-heartedly, with
a sense of self-imposture: “the world, Marie-Ursule, it has its
disappointments; but there are compensations.”
“I am afraid, afraid,” she murmured.
Their eyes alike sought instinctively the Convent of the Ursulines,
white and sequestered in the valley--a visible symbol of security, of
peace, perhaps of happiness.
“Even there they have their bad days: do not doubt it.”
“But nothing happens,” she said simply; “one day is like another. They
can never be very sad, you know.”
They were silent for a time: the girl, shading her eyes with one small
white hand, continued to regard the convent; and Campion considered her
fondly.
“What can I say?” he exclaimed at last. “What would you put on me? Your
uncle--he is a priest--surely the most natural adviser--you know his
wishes.”
She shook her head. “With him it is different--I am one of his
family--he is not a priest for me. And he considers me a little
girl--and yet I am old enough to marry. Many young girls have had a
vocation before my age. Ah, help me, decide for me!” she pleaded; “you
are my _tuteur_.”
“And a very old friend, Marie-Ursule.” He smiled rather sadly. Last
year seemed so long ago, and the word, which he had almost spoken then,
was no longer seasonable. A note in his voice, inexplicable, might
have touched her. She took his hand impulsively, but he withdrew it
quickly, as though her touch had scalded him.
“You look very tired; you are not used to our Breton rambles in this
sun. See, I will run down to the cottage by the chapel and fetch you
some milk. Then you shall tell me.”
When he was alone the smile faded from his face and was succeeded
by a look of lassitude, as he sat himself beneath the shadow of the
Calvary to wrestle with his responsibility. Perhaps it was a vocation:
the phrase, sounding strangely on modern ears, to him, at least, was
no anachronism. Women of his race, from generation to generation, had
heard some such voice and had obeyed it. That it went unheeded now
was, perhaps, less a proof that it was silent, than that people had
grown hard and deaf, in a world that had deteriorated. Certainly the
convent had to him no vulgar, Protestant significance, to be combated
for its intrinsic barbarism; it suggested nothing cold nor narrow
nor mean, was veritably a gracious choice, a generous effort after
perfection. Then it was for his own sake, on an egoistic impulse,
that he should dissuade her? And it rested with him; he had no doubt
that he could mould her, even yet, to his purpose. The child! how he
loved her.... But would it ever be quite the same with them after
that morning? Or must there be henceforth a shadow between them; the
knowledge of something missed, of the lower end pursued, the higher
slighted? Yet, if she loved him? He let his head drop on his hands,
murmured aloud at the hard chance which made him at once judge and
advocate in his own cause. He was not conscious of praying, but his
mind fell into that condition of aching blankness which is, perhaps,
an extreme prayer. Presently he looked down again at Ploumariel, with
its coronal of faint smoke ascending in the perfectly still air, at
the white convent of the Dames Ursulines, which seemed to dominate and
protect it. How peaceful it was! And his thought wandered to London: to
its bustle and noise, its squalid streets, to his life there, to its
literary coteries, its politics, its society; vulgar and trivial and
sordid they all seemed from this point of vantage. That was the world
he had pleaded for, and it was into that he would bring the child....
And suddenly, with a strange reaction, he was seized with a sense of
the wisdom of her choice, its pictorial fitness, its benefit for both
of them. He felt at once and finally, that he acquiesced in it; that
any other ending to his love had been an impossible grossness, and
that to lose her in just that fashion was the only way in which he
could keep her always. And his acquiescence was without bitterness, and
attended only by that indefinable sadness which to a man of his temper
was but the last refinement of pleasure. He had renounced, but he had
triumphed; for it seemed to him that his renunciation would be an ægis
to him always against the sordid facts of life, a protest against the
vulgarity of instinct, the tyranny of institutions. And he thought of
the girl’s life, as it should be, with a tender appreciation--as of
something precious laid away in lavender. He looked up to find her
waiting before him with a basin half full of milk, warm still, fresh
from the cow; and she watched him in silence while he drank. Then their
eyes met, and she gave a little cry.
“You will help me? Ah, I see that you will! And you think I am right?”
“I think you are right, Marie-Ursule.”
“And you will persuade my uncle?”
“I will persuade him.”
She took his hand in silence, and they stood so for a minute, gravely
regarding each other. Then they prepared to descend.
To Salomé at St. James’s
By Theodore Wratislaw
FLOWER of the ballet’s nightly mirth,
Pleased with a trinket or a gown,
Eternal as eternal earth
You dance the centuries down.
For you, my plaything, slight and light,
Capricious, petulant and proud,
With whom I sit and sup to-night
Among the tawdry crowd,
Are she whose swift and sandalled feet
And postured girlish beauty won
A pagan prize, for you unmeet,
The head of Baptist John.
And after ages, when you sit
A princess less in birth than power,
Freed from the theatre’s fume and heat
To kill an idle hour,
Here in the babbling room agleam
With scarlet lips and naked arms
And such rich jewels as beseem
The painted damzel’s charms,
Even now your tired and subtle face
Bears record to the wondrous time
When from your limbs’ lascivious grace
Sprang forth your splendid crime.
And though none deem it true, of those
Who watch you in our banal age
Like some stray fairy glide and pose
Upon a London stage,
Yet I to whom your frail caprice
Turns for the moment ardent eyes
Have seen the strength of love release
Your sleeping memories.
I too am servant to your glance,
I too am bent beneath your sway,
My wonder! My desire! who dance
Men’s heads and hearts away.
Sweet arbitress of love and death,
Unchanging on time’s changing sands,
You hold more lightly than a breath
The world between your hands!
Second Thoughts
By Arthur Moore
I
AS the clock struck eight Sir Geoffrey Vincent cast aside the dull
society journal with which he had been beguiling the solitude of his
after-dinner coffee and cigar, and abandoned, with an alacrity eloquent
of long boredom, his possession of one of the capacious chairs which
invited repose in the dingy smoking-room of an old-fashioned club. It
had been reserved for him, after twenty monotonous years of almost
unbroken exile, spent, for the most part, amid the jungles and swamps
of Lower Burma, to realise that a friendless man, alone in the most
populous city of the world, may encounter among thousands of his peers
a desolation more supreme than the solitude of the most ultimate
wilderness; and he found himself wondering, a little savagely, why,
after all, he had expected his home-coming to be so different from the
reality that now confronted him. When he landed at Brindisi, a short
ten days ago, misgivings had already assailed him vaguely; the fact
that he was practically homeless, that, although not altogether bereft
of kith and kin, he had no family circle to welcome him as an addition
to its circumference, had made it inevitable that his rapid passage
across the Continent should be haunted by forebodings to which he had
not cared to assign a shape too definite; phantoms which he exorcised
hopefully, with a tacit reliance on a trick of falling on his feet
which had seldom failed his need. He consoled himself with the thought
that London was home, England was home; he would meet old comrades in
the streets perhaps, assuredly at his club, and such encounters would
be so much the more delightful if they were fortuitous, unexpected. The
plans which he had laid so carefully pacing the long deck of the P. and
O. boat in the starlight, or, more remotely, lying awake through the
hot night hours under a whining punkah in his lonely bungalow, had all
implied, however vaguely and impersonally, a certain companionship. He
was dimly conscious that he had cousins somewhere in the background; he
had long since lost touch with them, but he would look them up. He had
two nieces, still in their teens, the children of his only sister who
had died ten years ago; he had never seen them, but their photographs
were charming--they should be overwhelmed with such benefactions as
a bachelor uncle with a well-lined purse may pleasantly bestow. His
friends--the dim legion that was to rise about his path--should take
him to see Sarah Bernhardt (a mere name to him as yet) at the Gaiety,
to the new Gilbert and Sullivan opera at the Savoy; they should
enlighten him as to the latent merits of the pictures at Burlington
House; they should dine with him, shoot with him, be introduced to
his Indian falcons; in a word, he would keep open house, in town and
country too, for all good fellows and their pretty wives. It had even
occurred to him, as a possibility neither remote nor unattractive, that
he might himself one day possess a pretty wife to welcome them.
His sanguine expectations encountered their first rebuff when he found
the Piccadilly Club, which had figured so often in the dreams of its
exiled member, abandoned to a horde of workmen, a mere wilderness of
paint and whitewash; and it was with a touch of resentment that he
accepted the direction of an indifferent hall-porter to an unfamiliar
edifice in Pall Mall as its temporary substitute. Entering the
smoking-room, a little diffidently, on the evening of his arrival in
London, he found himself eyed, at first with faint curiosity, by two
or three of the men upon whom his gaze rested expectantly, but in no
case was this curiosity--prompted doubtless by that touch of the exotic
which sometimes clings to dwellers in the East--the precursor of the
kindly recognition, the surprised, incredulous greeting which he had
hoped for. After a few days he was simply ignored; his face, rather
stern, with its distinctive Indian tan through which the grey eyes
looked almost blue, his erect figure, and dark hair sparsely flecked
with a frosty white, had become familiar; he had visited his tailor,
and his garments no longer betrayed him to the curious by their fashion
of Rangoon.
The Blue-book, which he had been quick to interrogate, informed him
that his old friend Hibbert lived in Portman Square, and that the old
lady who was the guardian of his nieces had a house at Hampstead:
further inquiry at the addresses thus obtained left him baffled by the
intelligence that Colonel Hibbert was in Norway, his nieces at school
in Switzerland. Mackinnon, late of the Woods and Forests, whom he met
at Burlington House, raised his hopes for an instant by a greeting
which sounded precisely the note of cordiality that he yearned for,
only to dash them by expressing a hope that he should see more of his
old friend in the autumn; he was off to Southampton to join a friend’s
yacht on the morrow, and after his cruise he had designs on Scotland
and the grouse.
Sir Geoffrey, chained to the neighbourhood of London by legal
business, already too long deferred, connected with the succession
which had made him a rich man and brought him home, could only rebel
mutely against the ill-fortune which left him solitary at a time when
he most longed for fellowship, acknowledging the while, with a touch
of self-reproach, that the position which he resented was very largely
due to his own shortcomings; he had always figured as a lamentably
bad correspondent, and his inveterate aversion to letter-writing had
allowed the links of many old friendships to fall asunder, had operated
to leave such friends as were still in touch with him in ignorance of
his home-coming.