Mrs. Medwin was the only native-born australian lady who was “good
style.” So at least a Governor’s wife, about the “goodness” of whose
“style” there could be no question, had declared. It was not, this
Governor’s wife had explained, that there were no ladies in Australia,
(There were not however many, par parenthèse, and such style as they had
was at best but second-rate american), but they none of them had that
manner of dressing, moving, and speaking which characterizes what (to use
this rather objectional term again, for want of a better) we call “good
style.” This Governor’s wife, with her usual delicate feminine instinct,
had felt on the occasion of this now socially celebrated description
of Mrs. Medwin, that she had not quite satisfied herself, that the
description did not contain the truth, all the truth, and nothing but
the truth, of the matter; and she was right, it did not. Mrs. Medwin
undoubtedly possessed that serene refinement of movement and speech which
go so far to making up that all but defunct individuality, a “lady,” but
she was wanting in the final gift of a “lady,” social charm. The flower
was scentless, or rather the scent it had was of another description.
Her life had not, indeed, been favourable to the development of this
final gift. She had been married early, a ready enough victim to the
convenience of her family, to a man with whom she had little in common
and much in opposition. He was liked by none and feared by all those
who had any personal dealings with him: his savage outbursts of passion
recalled to memory the dark stories that were told of his father who had,
as the Australians euphemistically put it, come out at the government
expense. But she, having calmly decided to accept Medwin and life with
him, set herself by the sheer intrepidity of her sweet high beauty, to
dominate them. She succeeded. And she won, not only the control, but
the deep, admiring love, of the man. Then came the catastrophe which
those who knew him had prophesied and recanted. In one of his savage
outbursts of passion, he struck her. The blow was a cruel one and its
results life-long. Much as she then suffered in body and soul, she could
have no other feeling for him than that of pity. For days he would take
no food, but sat in a chair outside her door, like a dog that waits in
silence on an idolized master; and, when he was first permitted to enter,
flung himself onto his knees by the bedside, sobbing and moaning and
covering her hand with kisses. And she, who had had little or no care for
him before, save as the principal incident in her life, now to her own
surprise found that from out this appalling misery was born affection
for him and even love. Her life from then onwards had been spent in
a struggle far more terrible than that which she had waged with him.
At first the idea of wasting away inch by inch on a diseased sick-bed
almost overwhelmed her: she longed, she prayed for death. But death
did not come; and then her spiritual pride began to reassert itself,
and, like the captain of a battered ship, she once more thought how she
could rule these waters that had ruled her. For long it seemed as if
the effort would be too much for her: she said to herself one sleepless
horrible night that she was being consumed alive. Her very latest gift
seemed but as an added thorn to her; for now that she had affection
and even love, she had also jealousy. The spell of her sweet, fearless
health and strength and beauty was passed from him save as a memory: his
love, deepened it might be by his abiding remorse, was (as she thought)
deprived of that admiration which had been her first and strongest
hold on him. Nothing more pitiful, than to see the womanliness in her
assert itself against her pride and speak in jealousy! With wonderful
intuition, however, she divined and with wonderful determination carried
out, what was the only plan of still keeping for herself his admiration.
She, who since she had married him had not given his business affairs
a thought, now gave herself up to the mastery of them. She had herself
taught all arithmetic thoroughly, and, in little less than three years
after her misfortune, knew more of all his business affairs than he did
himself. And more. She stirred up in him the ambition to become the
leader of that great amorphous section of colonial society of which he
was a member, the land-owners, the “squatters.” She had a certain liking
for society, and when she was in England went into it as much as her
extremely delicate health would permit her: in Australia, however, where,
as she said, there was no society, or only of a sort which she did not
like, she yet entertained a good deal, as she wished her husband to be
popular in view of his entering parliament and attempting to organize his
party. But her entertainment was more after the fashion of a listless
social empress than an interested hostess: she did not care enough about
these people to make, what would have been to her, a painful physical
effort to attract them. She had indeed something of the feeling of one
of the old aristocrats forced by the pressure of the time to open their
houses to the Middle-class; she acknowledged the salute of her guests,
and provided them with fine rooms, music, amusement, foods and drinks,
and what more could they want? Her coldness was generally ascribed to
her notorious ill-health, but the young people felt instinctively that
she condemned them, and were not drawn to her. Between her and Gildea,
however, there was an understanding that was not without either charm or
brightness to both. He understood her, and she half-felt this and, never
having been really understood before, was in a way pleased at it and
drawn to him. She amused him and at times, thanks to the pity with which
her sweet courage inspired him, affected him. He was not too without
respect for her intuitional capacities. He said once to Sydney Medwin,
who was complaining that his mother was fifty years behind the time,
(Mrs. Medwin supported her husband in his views for their elder son),
that, on the contrary, she was fifty years before; for she was the only
person he had met or heard of in the Colony who clearly saw that the Land
Question was upon them. Mrs. Medwin indeed, as has been noticed, saw that
the attempt of the Australian land-owners to repeat the performance of
those of England and form a dominant aristocracy, would be met with keen
opposition, and that the only hope of success lay in creating out of an
amorphous class a party, and organizing it. The feeling of possession
and caste had grown a strong one in her, in her more or less absorbed in
the life of her husband. Hers, then, with all its powers of passionate
attachment to an individual, was one of those not frequent female souls
that see beyond a man into the cause which he represents. Her elder son
she looked upon as a failure, as useless, as worth no more than making
behave himself. Her younger son, Stephen, she was training with some
care, and to him the far greater bulk of his father’s wealth and property
was at present destined. Miss Medwin, whom Mrs. Medwin called her niece,
and who called Mr. and Mrs. Medwin respectively uncle and aunt, but who
was in reality no such relation, being the daughter of Mr. Medwin’s
father’s brother’s son; of Miss Medwin it will perhaps be enough to
state, that the report which Gildea had unexpectedly received of her from
the Private Enquiry Office was correct, and that she was the possessor
of a moderate fortune who had come out to Australia, half for a change
from her English life of which she was weary, half in search of an old
schoolfellow to whom she was much attached.
Gildea and Maddock stepped out together along the lawn and mounted the
steps that led up to the sitting-room balcony. The sunlight, intercepted
by an angle of the house, covered half of this portion of it, almost so
exactly half that the glass door, open in the middle of the bay window,
was partly in the sun and partly in the shade. As they reached the
balcony, Gildea, with the gesture of a courteous host, indicated to
Maddock to enter first, but he, with the no less courteous gesture of
a guest, refused and returned the indication. Gildea stepped into the
open doorway and, as he stood there for a moment with the sunlight and
shade playing upon him, met the gaze of Miss Medwin, seated upright,
looking almost proudly before her. Behind her was the dark red of the
curtain with its subdued white of delicately wrought muslin. Two rays of
sunlight lay along the rich variegated colours of the carpet, diffusing
a little light about her. She was very beautiful. They had recognized
one another at once. And more. They both were undergoing that feeling
of half-forgotten recollection that affects us with such unprepared and
mystic strangeness. Had they, then, seen one another before that day
when she had almost ridden over him under the Domain trees? had they met
in some way similar to their meeting now? At such moments the past, the
present, and the future, all half unknown, seem to join hands, and kiss,
and part with eyes dimmed with a regretless regret.
It had passed in a few moments. Gildea, with something that might be
called a sudden freak of tact, stepped into the room, turning a quite
self-possessed face to Mrs. Medwin. She was sitting on a sofa dispensing
serene little nothings to Alcock, whose face and manner beamed with
social polish. Gildea came straight to her and made his greetings with
winning grace: then, obeying a slight gesture of hers, moved aside and
she introduced him to her niece, Miss Medwin. With the same winning
grace, head courteously bowed, he stepped to Miss Medwin, and lightly
raised the hand she held up to him. Maddock was greeting Mrs. Medwin.
“I think,” said Gildea smiling slightly, “I think, Miss Medwin, that we
are not quite strangers.”
“And how is Mrs. Maddock?” asked Mrs. Medwin, “I hope she is quite well.”
Gildea sat down in a chair by Miss Medwin.
“No,” answered Miss Medwin gravely, “I was careless enough to have almost
ridden onto you.”
“The carelessness was mine. I was dreaming. Day-dreamers should be
awakened.” Maddock was assuring Mrs. Medwin that Mrs. Maddock was
in excellent health, and at this very moment enjoying herself quite
satisfactorily without the society of her lord and master.
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Medwin, “I hope we shall be able to see her before we
leave Sydney. We are stopping at Winslow’s.”
“That,” Miss Medwin said gravely again, “seems to me to depend a good
deal on the day.”
“Mr. Medwin is _with_ you, Mrs. Medwin?” interrogated Alcock with his
politest manner, “I understood that I should not have the pleasure of
seeing him till monday or tuesday?”
“It is true,” said Gildea, “that to-day the reality of things is so
troubling to the peace and pleasure of many of us, that it is cruel to
wake us from our dreams.”
“Oh no!” said Mrs. Medwin with her usual unruffled serenity, “Mr. Medwin
is not coming up till tuesday or perhaps wednesday.”
A swift sense of the humour of a social scene like this, where the
tendency of things is for the dramatis personæ to beat unlimited time
with musical voices, graceful gestures, and a charming expression of
countenance, dawned upon Gildea as a memory of almost distant days. The
poetry of society is mostly expended in its common-places. To be able to
do this is an art, an art of which provincial and colonial society is
ignorant. Hence Gildea’s sense of the humour of the present scene was as
an almost distant memory. “Here,” he thought, “we have four excellent
musicians who would make the most charmingly meaningless quartet
possible, Alcock being reduced to the part of accidental audience.”
It was not, of course, that Gildea’s talk with Miss Medwin was social
time-beating: it was, rather, spiritual time-beating, rendered in a
manner that partook of the social. Miss Medwin had not recovered from the
to her strange sensations of this second sudden meeting with him: she was
neither as consummate a master of her emotions as he was, nor careful of
becoming one, nor yet was she prepared, as he was, for their meeting: she
was left by it as one is who has had some swift revelation of good or
evil in himself—considering himself if he really was this, is that, and
will be something that contains them both. The individualities of other
men she had known had touched her as much, or almost as much, as his had
on that day in the Domain, but none had ever entered into her and, as it
were, “blown a thrilling summons to her will” as his had, as he stood
looking at her in the shadowy sunlit doorway there. And her will had
answered that summons, and instantaneously. To him that sight of her,
sitting upright, looking almost proudly before her, was ever to be as the
sight of an Antigone, one who felt “it was better not to be than not be
noble,” the depth of whose scorn for unworthiness was equal to her love,
high as the everlasting hills, deep as the unplumbed sea.
“Yes,” she said, “it is sometimes cruel to wake us from our dreams, and
yet it is best, I think.”
“—You think it is best to modify our poetry with prose? Was it better to
have awakened Shelley, and given us his ‘Prometheus’ with wooden limbs of
a day’s social dogmatism, than to have let him make delicate music in the
italian woods and by the italian shores, for ever sweet and fair?”
“So he told me,” said Alcock, “and I was very glad to hear it. The
interests of all wealth, whether in land or in money, is identic. But
we have no organization.—And Labour,” he added with a look to Maddock,
“as Mr. Hawkesbury just told us, is organizing, if it is not already
organized.”
If it had been possible for Mrs. Medwin to be amazed at anything, she
would have been amazed at this. Hawkesbury had a few years ago been an
employé on one of Medwin’s stations, the very station to which she was
now on her road. This was a reflection which was positively annoying
to her. “It would,” she had once simply remarked, “have been as well
perhaps, if he had eaten some poisoned meat when he was there, as they
used to say the troublesome blacks did. He is a danger to society.”
Sydney Medwin, who liked to do his best to ruffle his mother’s serenity
now and then, used not unfrequently to speak in praise of Hawkesbury
(his friend Hawkesbury, a clever fellow too, and who would make his mark
out here yet!) and had once even, as Gildea told Maddock, offered to
introduce him to her. “You know, Sydney,” said Mrs. Medwin simply, “I am
not interested in Mr. Hawkesbury. If you like to make up a shooting-party
at Lathong,” (a station of Medwin’s in Victoria), “with all the men on
the station, I daresay he would be pleased to join you.”—What, then, was
the meaning of Mr. Alcock’s remark that this firebrand socialist, this
impertinent journalist and pamphleteer, had been _just telling_ something
to Mr. Alcock, Dr. Maddock, and presumably Sir Horace?
“I’m sure,” said Alcock with his politest manner again, “that we all
of us cannot be too—too pleased to have found a lady who realized
this, and could help us to what we so much want—a ... a sort of general
rallying-point.—Nothing,” he proceeded, “struck me so much in England
as the use that the political parties made of their social gatherings,
and they tell me that this was much more the case once than it is at
present.” Alcock found a certain amount of difficulty in saying that he
thought women might, after all, be made of some use in political life, in
a manner that should be pleasing to _this_ woman.
The talk progressed more or less easily, Maddock, with a humorous
perception of the effect Alcock’s innocent allusion to Hawkesbury had
produced on Mrs. Medwin, playing the part of conversational mediator
between the two.
“You are not, then,” said Gildea, in answer to a remark of Miss Medwin’s,
“in sympathy with dreams and dreamers?”
“No,” she answered shaking her head, “not if they take their dreams for
realities. It is just, I think, because we have been dreaming so long and
dreaming so much, that our waking is so miserable.—You speak of prose
and poetry,” she continued, turning her head a little and looking at
him, “as if the prose had something disagreeable in it. Well, so it may
have—to the dreamers. I too am a dreamer, of course, in my way; but I
dream about the earth and the things of the earth, and so my dreams are
real as the wind is real, or the sunlight, or the moonlight, or the light
of the stars, none of which fear the contact of the earth or the water.
But these people seem to me to dream of the things of heaven, filling all
space with them. But space is empty—at any rate of things like theirs.”
“You do not believe,” he said, “as Taine does, that ‘at bottom there is
nothing truly sweet and beautiful in our life but our dreams?’”
“Yes,” she said, “yes and no! But what does it matter _what_ I believe?
I have no opinion of my own in this way. You would make me dogmatic. Now
I shall always try not to be dogmatic. I rebel against defining things,
especially things that I like; they are never the same afterwards. But
I am often doing this, and I have to suffer for it. This comes of being
born in an age which can describe everything and do nothing.—You see, you
make me petulant!”
It flashed across Gildea’s mind as she finished speaking that there
was a great difference between the manner of his talk with this girl
and with that bright intelligent girl in Melbourne. He perceived the
difference, and the greatness of the difference, but not much farther.
It was many years, and in point of spiritual time many ages, since
Gildea had been blind to the fact that another nature was influencing
and being influenced by his own with the force of fatality. It is the
distinguishing mark of the moderns that they are not blind in this
respect. None of Shakspere’s men, not even the intellectual Hamlet,
get beyond a suspicion that Fate is playing upon them. The chief cause
of Hamlet’s delay lies in this suspicion and his antagonism to it: the
others submit blindly, and only recognise fatality when the “wheel has
come full circle,” but _the process_ of fatality is all unknown to them,
not even a mystery. Miss Medwin too was in the same state as Gildea but
even deeper in it. She spoke to him as she had never spoken to anyone
else in her life, as to a comrade, without leaning, without supporting,
with complete simplicity. The spell that compels a mutual truthfulness is
the perception that you understand and are understood.
“I see,” he said, “that _you_ complain of your age because its senses are
deranged, and idlers like me because the gifts that it assigns to the
doers, as opposed to the thinkers, are not gold but tinsel.”
“No, no,” she said, “I do not complain of my age! If I complained of
anything, it would be of myself who am unfit for my age. And I do not
think that the gifts of our actions are tinsel.”
“Perhaps you are right, and the fault is mine because _my_ senses are
deranged?”
“There is great room for action now, as it seems to me. If a man appeared
to-morrow with the secret of attraction in him—the secret that Napoleon
had or Byron—he would control us as much as they did. They are ours too,
these men.”
“But we think too much? we can describe everything, and do nothing?”
“I do not know,” she said, “I have no opinion!”
“Alice,” said Mrs. Medwin.
“Yes, aunt,” answered Miss Medwin.
“Will you please make the tea?” she said.
Miss Medwin rose at once, Gildea rising too, smiling. It was Mrs.
Medwin’s peculiar charm that, at certain apparently eccentric moments,
she would speak and act with the pretty spontaneous sweetness of a young
girl. This was the scent this wonderful flower had retained, despite all
the terrible heats of the noontide and frosts of the dawn that had fallen
upon its life. She had spoken in this manner now.
Miss Medwin went behind the tea-table which Edgar had just brought in
and on which he was placing the bright silver tea-urn, and the water-can
with its blue-violet-flamed spirit-lamp; then, at a nod from Gildea,
disappeared. Miss Medwin poured out a cup of tea which Gildea took to
Mrs. Medwin, returning for the milk and sugar, while Miss Medwin took the
second cup to Maddock, who received it with suave and charming thanks.
Mrs. Medwin thanked Gildea, who passed on with the milk and sugar to
Maddock, and, as he returned to the tea-table for the cakes and biscuits,
passed Miss Medwin with the third cup on her way to Alcock. Alcock
received her with thanks profuse and jocular.
“Do you take milk and sugar?” asked Miss Medwin.
“No, no, thank you, Miss Medwin,” returned Alcock, “I take neither!”
Gildea arrived, with a plate of cakes in one hand and a plate of biscuits
in the other. Mrs. Medwin recognised in the biscuits those of a sort to
which she was somewhat addicted, and divined that Gildea had noticed the
fact.
“Thank you, Sir Horace,” she said, with her manner of pretty spontaneous
sweetness, “And presently Alice shall play for you. I know you will find
her style of playing a treat.”
Sir Horace made a suitable reply and passed on with the cakes and
biscuits. Mrs. Medwin and Maddock began to talk together, Alcock playing
the part of silent member.
“There is your tea,” Miss Medwin said to Gildea as he came back to the
tea-table. She was standing with her own cup in her hand as if about to
move away to a seat. Gildea proffered the biscuits. She took one. He put
down the plates and took up his cup.
“You are an epicure in tea,” she said, sipping a little of hers from her
tea-spoon, “are you not?”
“I do not know,” he answered with a slightly amused look, “but I believe
that the Russians are the only people in Europe who understand it.”
“They take neither sugar nor milk, do they? and a slice of lemon floating
in the tea?”
They were moving back to their places. He assented.
“And who are the only people in Europe who understand coffee?” she asked.
“Undoubtedly the French.”
“Ah, you mean the café au lait—with the milk and coffee both boiling and
poured in together? I like it that way, but not with too much milk. We
had a french cook once who used to make it for us, and, as I liked it, of
course I found out how to make it myself.”
“Yes,” he said, “certainly coffee with cold milk is a barbarism; but the
shape in which I like coffee best is as, what the French call, café noir.”
Miss Medwin said she had never seen it in that way, and, in answer to
Gildea’s slight expression of surprise, explained that she had never been
in France. Gildea described the café noir and the proper manner in which
to drink it.
“You fill the spoon with cognac,” he said, “into which you put a lump of
sugar—In France the sugar is in little thin slabs, not, as with us, in
squares—and then you set the cognac alight. This melts down the sugar
and, when all the spirit is burnt up, except that which saturates the
sugar, and goes out, you put in your spoon. The flavour of burnt sugar
and cognac is pleasant.”
“It is indeed, Sir Horace,” said Alcock, tired of playing the part of
silent member in the other conversation, “I drank it that way myself
in Paris. A friend of mine, an American told me of it. Paris is a very
pleasant place. You have a treat in store for you, going there, Miss
Medwin.”
“Yes,” she answered, “I should like to go to Paris; the Louvre is there.”
“A very fine collection,” said Alcock, “I was much struck with it!
Unfortunately all the best works of art are now either in collections, or
so expensive that they are out of the reach of us Australians who have
claims upon us more pressing. You saw the Picture Gallery in Melbourne?”
“Yes, I saw it. I think it is rather painful. I liked the Library better.”
“The building—the room, you mean?”
“No, I meant the books. I used to go and sit there and read.”
“Oh indeed?” said Alcock. “And what now do you think of the Picture
Gallery here?”
“Alice,” said Mrs. Medwin, “you are not to say! I won’t have you say that
the things in Sydney are better than in Melbourne!”
“Very well, aunt,” said Alice, “then I will not say it.”
“And now,” said Mrs. Medwin, “I want you to play for us.”
Miss Medwin rose at once with a look for the piano, which was on the
other side of the curtains. Both she and Gildea were amused and delighted
by Mrs. Medwin’s characteristic interruption and command: Maddock
was amused: even Alcock, who did not yet know her ways, was too much
influenced by the charm of this her happiest manner to think it rude or
imperious. “She is such an invalid,” he said, recounting this incident
as an anecdote to a friend of his at the Melbourne Club, “and rules
everyone about her like a little empress. But her manner is irresistible,
really irresistible; and it doesn’t offend you in the least—in fact you
rather like it. There is no woman in Melbourne who could help us to
consolidate a party in the english social manner as _she_ could. And I
really attach—I really do!—considerable importance to the idea.” Such
was the subsequent expression of the thoughts which were passing through
the mind of Alcock as Gildea, having held back the curtain for Miss
Medwin to pass, was opening the piano for her. Mrs. Medwin sat in serene
unconsciousness of the possibility of her manners being considered as
otherwise than her own, and would have been surprised if she had heard
that anyone thought they were open to question.
“Is there any piece, aunt,” asked Miss Medwin, bending back so as to see
Mrs. Medwin through the curtains, “that you would like me to play?”
“Oh no!” Mrs. Medwin said, “Why, I wanted you to play for Sir Horace, not
for me!”
Miss Medwin smiled assent, and, after a few moments’ pause to consider
what piece she would play and to collect her thoughts, began. The piece
was the one which she considered would most please her audience, and
which of course she knew. It was Chopin’s Eleventh Nocturne. It suited
her humour at many times, but particularly at the present. The Nocturne
is divided into two parts: passionate and half-weary wandering, and rest
in which passion is merged in peace. To her it conjured up the vision of
a twilight road winding up between woody rolling fields and a plantation.
The dark figure of the man, whose passionate and half-weary wandering is
here expressing itself, is coming slowly up the road. Low down and far
away behind the close straight stems of the plantation lie a few pallid
veins of sunset light. The shadows are stealing swiftly around him. He is
near to hopelessness, near to the wish to
lie down like a tired child,
and weep away the life of care
which he has borne and yet must bear:
but passion and yearning are still too strong in him for self-abandonment.
Then he hears sounds—a strain of music and voices—the nuns or monks
perhaps, singing an evening hymn to the blessèd Mary, mother of passion
and of peace! He moves on slowly and softly, listening. His hopelessness,
his weariness are soothed into rest: trust enters into him, trust in the
aims of life, that general life in which his own is now merged, even as
the yearning of passion is lost in the sweetness of peace....
When she had finished, there was a long pause, and then Gildea thanked
her for the pleasure she had given him. Mrs. Medwin and Maddock began
to speak of the piece, Maddock expressing his pleasure at it and his
admiration for Miss Medwin’s playing.
“You are, then, a lover of this Chopin?” said Gildea to Miss Medwin. “But
he is not your Master, as you would say?”
“No,” she answered, “he is not my Master.—I suppose you mean Beethoven by
that?” she added, looking up at him. He assented.
“And yet,” she said, “I cannot somehow call even him Master. I do not
love music as I ought to do—especially Beethoven and Wagner. They are
great, these men, very great, but I cannot lose myself in their spirit as
I should do. I often feel this.”
“It was one of Heine’s few fantastic sayings,” said Gildea, “that
Chopin was the Raphael of the piano, and indeed a piece like this, or
the stately opening of the Thirteenth Nocturne—You remember it?” (She
assented)—“or the Marche Funèbre, help to see what he meant; but to call
him a Raphael seems to me inapt. No Raphael, for instance, would have
dreamed of so entirely giving himself up to the influence of his passion
as Chopin does. Surely it is not in _his_ spirit that you can lose
yourself?”
“No,” she said, “less than in Beethoven’s. But perhaps Heine only meant
his expression about Chopin comparatively. Chopin, you remember, is the
only great composer who devoted himself to the piano. Certainly he is a
master of it, but his style of art is not like Raphael’s—at least so far
as I know of Raphael.”
They came back talking into the other room, where Gildea, from a glance
at Mrs. Medwin’s face, perceived that she now wished them to go down
to the yacht. In a few minutes he brought the conversation round to
the subject and, having asked and she having expressed her wish, the
party was presently crossing the lawn on its way down to the small
landing-stage, close to which the “Petrel” had now been brought in. Mrs.
Medwin, between Maddock and Alcock, was some yards ahead of Gildea and
Miss Medwin who were following them.
“You did not know,” Gildea was saying to her, “that Mr. Hawkesbury was a
friend of mine? He has been having lunch with us, and only just went away
before you arrived. He, and another friend of mine whom you perhaps have
met in Melbourne, Mr. Fitzgerald—No?—were unable to stay.”
“So I supposed,” said Miss Medwin, “or something like that.—You do not
perhaps know,” she added, “that my aunt has a dislike for him that really
almost amounts to antipathy?”
“Yes,” said Gildea, “I was aware of it: his social opinions are too much
for her, and Sydney Medwin annoys her by constantly mentioning both
them and him. A meeting would have been awkward indeed, but I made my
calculations carefully, and I should have regretted not giving my friend
Fitzgerald the opportunity of making Hawkesbury’s acquaintance. In a few
days one will be going due north and the other due south, but I hope they
will meet again later on. Two more charming examples of the two species
of enthusiast it would be hard to find.”
“What do you call the two species?”
“The enthusiast of heat and the enthusiast of light: both are to me
equally beautiful, equally charming!”
“Mr. Hawkesbury, then,” she said, “is the enthusiast of heat? I have
never known any man so much in earnest as he is. He seems to understand
nothing but devotion or abhorrence; and yet how well he generally
conceals this from those whom he thinks unworthy of the knowledge of
it! His patience and courtesy have often astonished and filled me with
admiration. I have heard him arguing with a stupid opponent, and I have
heard him addressing a crowd. His self-restraint, his clearness, were
simply wonderful. Has he ever spoken to you of his friend and Master, as
he says,—James Holden?”
“No,” answered Gildea, “but I happen to have seen Holden myself.—But here
we are!”
Alcock from the deck and Maddock from the shore had assisted Mrs. Medwin
over the plank into the “Petrel,” and now Miss Medwin, after shaking
hands, expressing her regrets that he could not come, and saying good-bye
to Maddock, followed.
Mrs. Medwin, Miss Medwin, Alcock and Gildea gathered opposite Maddock,
with whom they talked while the ropes were being cast loose and the yacht
got ready for starting. Then, as she glided away, bending slightly as
the wind caught and filled her sails, Maddock took off his hat and stood
bare-headed, bowing and waving farewell.
A more charming day for such a trip, it would have been hard to choose.
The air was warmer than in the morning, but the breeze was still strong
enough to prevent the volumes of foul smoke which issued from the funnels
of the harbour steamers from polluting the air and spoiling the view.
The “Petrel” made straight for the main channel of the harbour in the
direction of the Heads.
While Gildea was away talking with his skipper about the arrangements
that had been made for the trip, the other three passengers moved about
looking at the yacht, praising and admiring its neatness and cleanness.
And it was worthy too both of the praise and admiration which they
bestowed on its general completeness, that namely of silence, and of
the praise and admiration which they who were skilled in such matters
bestowed on its sailing-powers.
Presently Gildea rejoined them, and the conversation flowed on lightly
and pleasantly.
“I notice,” said Miss Medwin, “that you carry very little gear up aloft.
Your masts too are unusually tall, are they not?”
Gildea gave a pleased smile.
“Yes,” he said, “they call her the ghost yacht at Cowes. I use as little
hempen rope as I can. When the great point is speed, every extra inch
that you give to the prise of the wind is of importance. The steel, you
see, does not offer half as much resistance as the ordinary hempen rope.
Besides which, I have in several cases done away with a rope altogether
where I believed one, if properly handled, could do for two.”
Miss Medwin, who knew the rigging and handling of a sailing-ship fairly
well, asked for an explanation of how one or two things were done, which
he gave her with a certain pleasure.
“And what,” she said, “do your sailors think of your alterations?”
He laughed.
“They say the Old Man—that is my name with them—”
“It is the name of all skippers with their sailors, is it not?” she asked
smiling.
He assented.
“—They say, or rather used to say, that I had a twist that way. The
conservatism of sailors and builders as regards ships is quite wonderful.
Imagine that, when they came to build iron sailing ships instead of wood,
they actually had and have the stupidity to put up masts of the same
circumference as the old wooden ones, although thereby they gain no extra
strength, and expose square yards on yards needlessly to the prise of the
wind! I would venture to say that this alone makes a difference of three
or four knots per hour in a head wind to the speed of the vessel.”
Miss Medwin thought Gildea more charming in his capacity of intelligent
amateur captain than as consummate master of things social. They moved
down together towards the stern, and stood there talking and looking
forward. Mrs. Medwin and Alcock were standing together talking a little
way in front of them. Then Edgar appeared with seats and rugs, which he
offered to Mrs. Medwin and Alcock, who sat down, Mrs. Medwin with a rug
over her knees, and then came aft to the other two, who accepted two
chairs, but for the present remained standing as they talked.
Presently there came a pause in the conversation and Miss Medwin sat
down, Gildea following suit. The pause became a silence. At last he broke
it.
“You have noticed,” he said, “how different is the effect on you of the
sea, in a steamer and in a boat?”
“Yes,” she said, “I have noticed it. The steamer goes its own determined
way, breaking its sympathy with winds and waters, and you—you are so high
up that you cannot mingle in the being of the spirits, the breathings of
their lips, the wavings of their hands, the tossings of their hair.”
“_Where_,” he said smiling,
“_where the wild white horses play,_
_champ and chafe and toss in the spray._”
She smiled in turn. She was looking before her across the sunny rolling
billows to where, against some high brown jagged rocks, the foam-mantle
of the breakers rose ever silently and fell. She was breathing in gently
and serenely the delight of the sea, the bright breeze, the movement of
the yacht, the divine blue free expansion of the clouds and skies. There
was a silence.
“You are not fond of steamers, then?” he asked with a side-look.
“No,” she said, “except in rough weather, and then I too feel the elation
of my kind,—the frail race of men which can yet dominate the winds and
waters and make their paths along the neck of the untameable sea.—You do
not know,” she added, leaving her extraneous delight for a moment and
looking at him with a touch of self-amusement, “you do not know how I
swell with pride when I watch a great man-of-war sailing on and on with
such serene confidence, dominating the expanse of water like a thing
of self-evident strength and beauty. I remember once making sand-forts
with some children in England in a little rock-girt cove, and suddenly
I looked up and there, almost filling our narrow horizon, was a great
white troop-ship passing close to the shore. It struck me quite dumb
for a moment; and then I began to applaud and shout like a Bacchant,
the children following suit.” She turned her face away again, laughing,
looking here and there, delighting again in what she felt and saw.
“You are a true daughter of kindly men,” he said, laughing too, all
suspicion of mockery passed away from look and tone. There was another
silence. Gildea was beginning to perceive in himself a feeling he had
never felt before, the feeling that he was in the presence and even in
the influence of a girl-woman, (such was the idea presented to him),
of a spiritual force as consummate as, but wholly differing from, his
own. In a few moments he had recognized this, and by a wonderful stroke
of intuition divined the meaning of it. It partook of the nature of a
revelation. He seemed to see all his past life in a new light. He felt
that she—she, this woman, this girl, this child here—had, by some unknown
wonderful means, won the true talisman of life, that talisman whose
omnipotence is perpetuity. It was, then, possible, after all, to combine
perfect knowledge of life with the radiant joy and peace of perfect trust
in it!—It partook of the nature of a revelation and, to second thoughts,
of a delusion. His lip curled: he almost despised himself for the swift
speed with which a suddenly begotten hope had leaped to a birth whose
form and pressure was but the mask of credulity. “There has been no man,”
he said to himself, “save Goethe, who knew what life was and yet could
have a weariless joy in it. Carlyle well said that this man was to have
no imitators or successors.—_Nostra vita a che val? solo a spregiarla._”
And yet the idea of a new life, a life wherein might be found something
more than sweet resignation, hedonistic merely or even optimistic,
but supplying thought, action, and speech with a motive-power whose
strength should be in its truth—the idea would not be shaken off by mere
self-contempt at credulity in it.
“To tell you the truth,” he said to her, “I could almost envy you your
pure free joy in things.”
She looked at him, surprise passing swiftly into serene observation.
“What troubles you,” she said, “that you should not have it yourself?”
He smiled slightly as he answered her.
“Pleasure, however sweet, however clear, is not joy.—And yet,” he added
quickly, “I would not change my pleasure for your joy.”
“No?”
“A child has joy, a man has pleasure: joy, then, is a step backward. It
may excel in height, as we should say, but breadth is the finer quality.
The mountains are noble, but the sea, encompassing all lands, is great.”
“The sea also is deep, it has its valleys whose shadow is nadir to the
zenith peaks and light. I will not grant you your simile. You must not
mock at joy, for joy is the gift not only of childhood which precedes,
but of maturity which follows, manhood. I would sooner be a Christian and
have joy than a Heathen with only pleasure.”
“Christianity,” said Gildea, “is spiritual opium. You do not eat it?”
“No,” she said, “I see no use in drugs. But, as I said, I would sooner
take drugs that give me joy than live on meats and wines that only gave
me pleasure. Joy is mine, but pleasure is every one’s.”
“You had, then, once the temptation of drugs?”
“Yes,” she assented a little dreamily, “I had the temptation.—And yet,”
she added with a sudden return of interest, “it is wonderful how little
of _these_ drugs you can take, and live with energy and joy. Are the
lips of Monica pallid or her eyes stony? Theresa has a clear mind: she
can set her house in order. The songs and glories of the Creatures, do
they not pass purely and freely, as you say, through the lips of Saint
Francis?”
“True, but for us this aspect of the thing is past. The central trust in
the Christ-God is a skeletoned shadow, that the grate holds up a moment
beyond its time of falling in. You see it lying, a pile of shapeless ash,
and wonder it ever stood. The Mother of Love and Grief appears no more
save in the brilliant burning of distorted vision. It is a case of opium
or nothing!”
“You are right,” she said, “and so I saw it.”
“What, then, remains,” he asked, “but resignation? There is no joy in
patience. Nay, worse, there is little pleasure. I too take drugs, and
I have more than once thought that, if Fate had not kindly given me
the wherewithal to buy them, I should have ended the dreary business
for ever. What is the good of our life except to despise it? says
Leopardi. It is just bearable with drugs, but, without, I cannot think
it worth the bearing. Pure indifference keeps more of its high souls
alive now than the world wots of. They are careless of life, but they
are equally careless of death. They live merely waiting for chance to
kill them, or for life to become unendurable enough for them to care
to kill themselves. Such men are not miserable. Sometimes, it is true,
they suffer disgust; but they know nothing of despair, for despair means
illusion, and they have the truth. Sometimes, again they have pleasure.
But how, tell me, is it possible to have at once both truth and joy?”
“All this,” she said, “I too felt, and not so long ago—although I could
not have put it to myself so clearly. You, I think, have learned your
belief more by living than by reading: with me it was different. Before
I began properly to live,—to be free, that is, to examine and try
everything for myself,—I had arrived at my belief, and all my living has
only confirmed me in it.”
“_What_ is your belief?” he asked.
She smiled and shook her head.
“I will not try to tell it you explicitly,” she said, “for fear of
harming it. Analysis is a mistake, and now I have so long known this,
that I have little temptation to give way to it. You, it seems, have
tried to be a Heathen. You gave yourself up to the natural joy of your
youth and fortune, your health and strength and riches and powers, until
the joy turned to pleasure and the pleasure to almost pain. Then you went
for interest to the spiritual life of those about you, and again joy
turned to pleasure and pleasure to almost pain. But _you_—you were not
one that knew how to be resigned! You could not, as your great Master
could, add to the ‘Vanity of Vanities, all is vanity’ the ‘Fear God and
keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.’ Far otherwise
with _you_, as you have told me, was ‘the conclusion of the whole
matter.’”
“And you?” he said with the tone of comrade to comrade, “and you?”
“I had a revelation. It took place in a London fog in front of a fire in
a little backroom where I had my books. And, as it were, scales fell from
my eyes, and I saw men as trees walking.” Gildea, the true arch-mocker,
for the first time in his life had to undergo the sensation of doubt
whether or no he was being mocked at.
“Well?” he said.
“Well, I was in a rather miserable state at the time. Someone to whom I
was attached had had to leave me. I was sick of trying to satisfy myself
with the life of pleasure as pleasure, and I had the temptation to take
spiritual drugs, for I felt an appalling loneliness of soul. I thought
that no one had ever looked at things as I felt I should like to look
at them, and I was at times almost afraid that I was suffering under a
delusion that might end in something very like madness. Then I had my
revelation. I found out that there had been a whole race whose central
belief was the one I was stretching out my arms to.”
“Greece?” said Gildea, “Greece?”
“Yes, Greece! Here I found were men who realized the secret of life, who
knew what Truth was. They looked at life as it was, and they saw calmly
and clearly that the butterfly’s life is enough for the butterfly, and
the man’s for the man. They took no spiritual opium as the Christians do:
they have no yearning love. They have not resignation as the Heathens
have, resignation that sullenly accepts the evil, or that brightly
determines to make the best of the good in things. They have better;
they have truth and light and joy! Take, then, your Christian Faith and
Love: your Heathen Trust and Hope: _I_ am a Pagan, and my care is Truth
and Light!—And I found,” she went on, “I found, after a time, that there
had been others in these later days that had looked, or striven to look
at things, as I did. Such was Goethe, such was Keats. With Goethe the
freedom of his Paganism was bought at a great price, but Keats was born
free. When Goethe recognised what it was to have been a Christian, to be
a Heathen, and to wish to be a Pagan, he renounced his past and present
with all the strength of his soul, and fixed his eyes resolutely on his
future. But he never won it—that is to say, as he had won the others. He
was never a Pagan as he was a Heathen or a Christian. The Second Part
of Faust is not like the First. It is not with impunity that we have
passed through the Christianity of Catholicism and the Heathenism of the
Renascence. A Dante or a Shakspere could not be shaken off by a Goethe,
and a Sophokles wholly put on. Is a great pagan soul possible yet? How
shall we say no with what Keats might have become before us?—Sometimes I
think,” she said a little dreamily, “that I am the only one of my time
who understood these great men; Goethe, the god of the Transition, Keats,
the Herakles of Modernity, strangled in his cradle by the serpents of
Hera! And, for either of them, I would readily have given my life.” ...
Mrs. Medwin turned round towards them, Alcock turning too, as if they had
reached a point in their conversation in which a break was expedient.
Then Mrs. Medwin and Alcock rose and came up to them.
“Is not the water exquisitely clear?” she said to Gildea, “It reminds me
of Capreae. It only wants the beautiful coral rocks.”
Gildea smilingly assented. He remembered a remark of Mrs. Medwin’s to the
effect that, as you approached Melbourne from the north, it was like the
bay of Naples with Vesuvius.
“Miss Medwin,” he said, with the smile changing on his face and becoming
sweet and radiant, “Miss Medwin has just been explaining to me a passage
from Goethe which I never understood.”
“Indeed?” said Mrs. Medwin, “I did not know you read German, Alice. Was
it a passage from Faust? I think Faust is very difficult, and I do not
understand the Second Part in the least.”
“No,” answered Gildea, “It was not from Faust.—
Vom Halben zu entwöhnen;
im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen
resolut zu leben.”
“That is not very difficult, Sir Horace,” said Mrs. Medwin.
Gildea, in answer to the dumb look on Alcock’s face, who did not happen
to know German, translated it with courtesy:
“‘I resolved to wean myself,’” he said, “‘from halves, and to live for
the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful.’”
“And what does it _mean_?” asked Alcock.
“Ah,” answered Gildea smiling, “Miss Medwin must tell you that!”
_April, 1885._