FURTHER CONCERNING THEOPHIL'S LIFE AFTER THE DEATH OF JENNY
Knowing the quick but little love
Much mention of the dead.
I hesitate further to continue that history of a grief of which,
nevertheless, this book has now little heart or purpose to be other than
the record, and, as what I shall write in this chapter must seem
meaningless and wearisome to all but those who belong to the great
Secret Society of Sorrow, it were no doubt just as well that those who
have known nothing but joy should follow their natural impulse and leave
it unread. I confess, too, that I should feel the more comfortable
without the regard of their happy, ignorant eyes.
Sorrow is a mysticism, and to talk of it to those who have never known
the initiation of tears is like talking alchemy to a child. Sorrow,
too, is an aristocracy, and when Theophil came to realise that, as Jenny
had been found worthy to die, he had been found worthy to suffer, it
seemed to him almost vulgar only to have been happy. Happiness is such a
materialist, a creature of coarse tastes and literal pleasures, a
_bourgeois_ who has not yet attained the rank of a soul. The influence
of sorrow on the individual is much what the influence of Christianity
has been upon the world. Christianity, no doubt, has robbed us of
much--but then it has given us sorrow; it has taken away the sun, but it
has brought us the stars. It is only in the starlight of sorrow that we
become conscious of other worlds. The sun flatters our own little world
with the illusion of a transitory importance; the stars show it its
place in the universe, and teach it a nobler meaning for itself.
No consciousness of his gifts had ever given Theophil any such sense of
his belonging to the chosen and dedicated minority of mankind as this
initiation into the Secret Society of Sorrow. He had been chosen to
represent a sacred order. He stood for no lesser interests than those of
Love and Death. Though he were to represent Coalchester in the House of
Commons, what honour were there in that to one already so
mysteriously honoured?
Tears bring a strange new sight to the eyes, and "a new perception both
of grieving love" made Theophil see, and love to see, many things in the
world he had never noticed before. His eyes were opened to behold the
many mourners who go about the streets, the widows who walk in darkness,
and all the shapes of blackness moving phantom-like through the coloured
traffic; not all true children of sorrow, indeed, though wearing its
habit, but, true or not, symbols of the power and majesty of death in
the world. For the involuntary honour paid to death even by the
ignorantly busy, and happy, he kept ever a grateful and a jealous eye;
and as some funeral _cortège_ passed like a dream, Charon's barge amid
all the motley craft of merchandise and pleasure, he would watch sternly
to see if the fat and prosperous moment would do honour to the carriages
of the king. For a bowed head or a doffed hat he felt a personal
gratitude. And, since Jenny died, he seemed to be always meeting that
phantom procession in the streets.
Once, as he passed along the High Street, he had noticed a crowd round a
dying horse. He stood with the crowd a moment, and then went on his way.
In an hour's time he repassed the place, and there was the dead horse
lying solitary on the side of the street; but he noted with a curious
gladness that some hand had covered it reverently with a horse-cloth.
"So honoured is death," he mused to himself, "that even the humblest
animal on which he shall have set his seal is held sacred from the
common day, and shall not be gazed upon heedlessly by the passer-by."
This seemed the greatest honour he had known paid to the king!
The fascination with which from this time death and all that related to
or remotely suggested it absorbed him, was, he reflected one day with a
surprised recognition of the paradox, no longer the fascination of hate
or dread, but almost love. Death, the arch-enemy of joy, the assassin of
youth, the murderer of Jenny,--Death had robbed him of his life's one
treasure, and here was he loving him, watching for his face, listening
for his step, like a lover.
Surely this was the strangest of conclusions; but perhaps the
explanation was very simple. Theophil loved death because Jenny had
died, as he would have loved anything Jenny had chosen to do, as he
would have loved life had Jenny gone on living. By dying Jenny had made
death beautiful, and its gloomiest associations were but so many
allusions to Jenny.
Death was to Theophil as a foreign land of which before he had only
heard the name, and heard it almost without interest, as one hears
listlessly of Peru. But now that Jenny had gone to Peru, the books of
the world could not tell him enough about the new land where Jenny had
gone, and everyone who had friends there was at once his friend, and
every little dark-robed company gathered sadly to godspeed some new
emigrant to its distant shore was dear to him for Jenny's sake. Besides,
some of these might have heard from their friends there, might have news
to tell him of the dark land. One would walk far, would listen late for
such precious tidings.
Did such tidings ever come? Yes, some had even seen their loved ones
again, shining strangely on the air. Why did Jenny never come like that?
How he had prayed and called to her for just one sign out of the
silence, one swift uplifting of the veil; but none, except that dream,
had ever come. Yet one could never be sure by what common unnoticed
sights and sounds the dead might fumblingly be striving to reach us in
the deaf and dumb language of the dead. Perhaps it was they who led us
to passages in books we had never noticed before, pointed their fingers
to bright pages of faith, and left us here and there many a message of
hope we never dreamed had come from them. Or might it not happen that
the dead, like the living, could be unfaithful:--
"Is death's long kiss a richer kiss
Than mine was wont to be,
Or have you gone to some far bliss
And straight forgotten me?"
Perhaps Jenny already loved another in heaven, and his gift of
faithfulness might some day be a burden to her...
This love of death was no mere morbid absorption. It was but one of the
activities of a faithfulness to which the trees about the temple had
become "dear as the temple's self," and his jealousy for those honours
paid to death was only one expression of his eager watchfulness for the
signs of human faithfulness.
Not all unrewarded was that watch. The world held some faithful
hearts,--let us not ask how many,--lovers of invisible faces and voices
heard no more, men and women who still shared their joys and sorrows
with unseen comrades, and drank the cup of life as a sacrament of
remembrance.
This sharing with the dead seemed to Theophil the essential of
faithfulness,--faithfulness taking many forms, sometimes maybe
misrepresentative of itself, and seldom perhaps informing its
conventional externals.
A time will come in the profoundest griefs when those rituals to which
young grief is so eager to vow itself will grow lifeless and
conventional, the daily tasks of remembrance become as the told beads of
pattered prayers. Let the worshipper of relics beware lest his
treasures some day turn on his hands to so much irksome lumber, and true
sorrow be thus humiliated.
No! the service for the dead which is most likely to remain a vital
offering of the heart is not the ceremonial sorrow of specially
consecrated times and seasons, but rather the simple longing in hours of
joy that _they_ could have been with us. To think of our dead friends as
always in their shrouds is a way of remembrance which we shall not long
have heart or even interest to follow. It is only by taking them to our
feasts, keeping up with them the same old human companionship, that we
may hope to keep the dead as friends. A modern poet has written eight
lines which were of great comfort to Theophil,--
"You go not to the headstone
As aforetime every day,
And I who died, I do not chide,
Because, dear friend, you play;
"But in your playing think of him
Who once was kind and dear,
And if you see a beauteous thing,
Just say: 'He is not here.'"
Here it seemed to Theophil was the whole duty of faithfulness. The dead
know that if we remember them in our hours of joy, they are indeed
remembered; and if they know anything at all, they will understand the
waywardness of sad hearts better than sad hearts understand themselves.
Yet, indeed, save in the exercise of his faculties, Theophil had no joy
to reproach himself with. Surely returning spring, with its terrible
exuberance of warm life, was no joy. Perhaps he had looked on Jenny
lying dead with less anguish than he one day beheld an apple-tree thick
with blossom in the hot sun. Yes! the world had the heart to go on, to
bud and build, and sing,--though Jenny was gone. And in that bright
spring, see horrible and useless age still hobbling out into the beam!
What was life but one huge Mephistopheles laugh beneath the windows of
our dreams!
That spring James Whalley persuaded Theophil to walk with him for a week
of country lanes far beyond Coalchester, letting him talk of Jenny all
the time. Jenny had never been here! If only Jenny could have seen that
view! Jenny had never known that flower! Did he remember those verses
from James Thomson:--
"The chambers of the mansions of my heart,
In every one whereof thine image dwells,
Are black with grief eternal for thy sake.
"The inmost oratory of my soul,
Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,
Is black with grief eternal for thy sake.
"I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross,
With eyes for ever fixed upon that face,
So beautiful and dreadful in its calm.
"I kneel here patient as thou liest there;
As patient as a statue carved in stone,
Of adoration and eternal grief.
"While thou dost not awake I cannot move;
And something tells me thou wilt never wake,
And I alive feel turning into stone."
Strange joy of sad poetry for sad hearts!
Experience indeed was now divided for Theophil into what Jenny had not
seen or known and into what she had seen and known; and it was one of
the tricks of his grief, as time went on, to confuse the two. Sometimes
he would think that Jenny had been with him at a certain place, or
perhaps had read a certain book which, on taking thought, he knew she
could never have seen.
Allied perhaps to this confusion was the fancy that possessed him on
certain days that he caught glimpses of Jenny in little flitting figures
of women about the streets. A sudden poise of the head, the way of doing
the hair, a trick of walk,--just a flash and gone again; though
sometimes he was haunted with more persistent resemblances, which
brought him a curious mixture of joy and pain. And this perhaps is the
place to record what only those acquainted with grief will understand,
and not all of those,--for grief has many contradictory fashions.
Till he had loved Jenny, women had played little or no part in
Theophil's life; but with Jenny's death he found, to his surprise, that
the idea of woman was strangely sweet to him. His eyes were drawn after
women in the street, and he found himself longing sometimes for some
woman on whose shoulder he might lean his head and weep out his grief
for Jenny! He loved death because Jenny had died; was he to love women
because Jenny had been a woman? Perhaps his feet had wandered in
dangerous paths at this time, had it not been for the restrictions which
his calling laid upon him.
These, however, did not deny him the theatre, which it had been part of
his programme at New Zion to advocate, though there was seldom anything
worth seeing at Coalchester Theatre Royal. Yet sometimes a good London
company would call there on its provincial progress, and it chanced one
day, looking into a shop window, that Theophil caught sight of a
photograph of a woman that startled him with its remarkable resemblance
to Jenny. It was the prima donna of a Gaiety burlesque. Such was the
strange shape Jenny had for the moment taken!
For the first time after her death Theophil was at the theatre that
evening. The bright lights and the music pierced him as with swords.
Once more he saw that apple-tree thick with blossom in the hot sun. Yet
his fancy found grim spells to lay the insolent ghost of life, and death
ever at his side whispered that all this light and music and dancing was
for but a little while; that those gay rouged faces, so confident in
laughing beauty, and all those nimble shapes, were to the eye that had
looked beyond life already stark in their coffins, with chin-cloths
about their nerveless jaws. Surely the lover would trip in the shroud
that was plainly to be seen from his feet to his lips!
Like sudden snow on a summer meadow, a white silence fell from his
imagination across that fiddling, jigging, gleaming atmosphere, and
everywhere the dead sat around him, watching in a trance strange antics
of the grimacing dead. Curiously, in these moods, he never thought of
himself as dead. Alas! life was too cruel to release him so soon to
death and Jenny.
Suddenly the theatre sprang back to life again with the entrance of the
prima donna. Yes, the resemblance was even greater than in the
photograph. She was a little taller and more heavily built than Jenny,
and it was not Jenny's voice; but for the rest, she _was_ Jenny. The
fascination of watching her was terrible. It seemed impossible that one
form could so mockingly resemble another, and yet be so hopelessly
someone else. Theophil could hardly bring himself to believe that the
woman yonder with Jenny's eyes and mouth and hair had never even heard
of Jenny's name. Surely, if he were to come and look into her face, she
would recognise him at once, and the old common interests would rise to
her lips as of old.
Theophil went again to the theatre the next night, and again the next,
which was the last of the company's stay in the town; and the spell of
the false Florimel grew so strong upon him that at the close of the
final performance he sent up his card to the actress, and presently, as
in a dream, found himself stumbling among scenery and dipping under
beams on his way to the actress's room. If she were only as like Jenny
close to, he felt he must follow her to the end of the world; and indeed
the illusion still held as he entered the little mirrored room, smelling
of powder and littered with laces and silks,--fancy little Jenny here
among the grease-paints and the bouquets! It was only with the lack of
recognition in the polite welcome the actress gave him that the illusion
began to waver, or was it only that Jenny had forgotten him?
So possessed had he been with the hallucination, that he had not
thought what excuse he would have to make to the actress for his visit,
and it was with an embarrassing shock that the necessity of speech came
to him, when he had stumbled through some mechanical words of
salutation. She looked at him with a little air of bewilderment, and
motioned to her attendant to leave them alone. As the door closed,
Theophil had determined to tell her the simple truth.
"I have to ask your pardon," he began, "for a very strange intrusion.
The reason of it is simply this. You are so like someone I love who is
dead that I felt I could not rest till I had spoken to you. I trust you
will excuse me, and try to understand. Yes! you are terribly like her!"
The story appealed to the actress's instinct for romance, and she
entered into its spirit. Besides, the young clergyman was very
interesting to look at, and the charm of sorrow was on his face.
"An actress can hardly complain," she answered, "of being taken for
someone else, and though I don't know you, I feel that you have done me
an honour. Am I indeed so like her? How strange it must seem to you!"
"It is very strange," said Theophil, still fascinated. Then he told this
image of Jenny the story of how Jenny had died. The tears came into the
actress's eyes as he talked, and it was as though Jenny shed tears for
Jenny's death.
"Poor little girl!" she said; "I am so sorry for you both."
"But," she continued presently, "you should both be very happy too--for
it would be worth while to suffer for so beautiful a love.... I feel
happy," she added half gaily, "even to resemble a woman who is so
wonderfully loved."
Theophil lingered on, still fascinated, till the actress suggested that
he should walk with her to her hotel. Arrived there, Theophil, to the
possible scandalising of Coalchester, accepted her invitation to a
further chat over supper; and when at last he was back at Zion Place,
his heart was aware of a new comfort and a new pain. He had leaned his
head on a woman's kind shoulder, and she had let him talk and talk about
Jenny; but her shoulder had been warm, and it had been sweet to be
near her ...
"A creature might forget to weep who bore;
Thy comfort long" ...
and Theophil went to sleep that night with the taste of honey upon his
lips.
But with the morning there came to him remorseful misgivings, and he
told himself that it had been one of the sophistries of the flesh, a
call of the senses taking in vain the sacred name of Jenny; and then for
his comfort he remembered how the greatest of all lovers, Dante, had
craved in like manner for the solace of "a very pitiful lady, very
young," and had been similarly remorseful on account of his momentary
preoccupation with her.
Taking down his "Vita Nuova," he read: "_At length, by the constant
sight of this lady, mine eyes began to be gladdened overmuch with her
company; through which thing many times I had much unrest, and rebuked
myself as a base person: also, many times I cursed the unsteadfastness
of mine eyes, and said to them inwardly: 'Was not your grievous
condition of weeping wont one while to make others weep? And will ye now
forget this thing because a lady looketh upon you? who so looketh merely
in compassion of the grief ye then showed for your own blessed lady. But
what so ye can, that do ye, accursed eyes! many a time will I make you
remember it! for never, till death dry you up, should ye make an end of
your weeping_.'"
Moreover, Dante had married Gemma within a year of the death of
Beatrice, and had even lived so scandalously meanwhile as to bring down
upon him the stern reproof of his friend Guido Calvancanti; yet the
world still regards him as the type of all faithful lovers.
Faithfulness is an attitude of the mind, and all it touches turns to
Beatrice. Yet--
"Except by death, we must not any way
Forget our lady who is gone from us."