"And now I see with eyes serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller betwixt life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn and comfort and command;
And yet a spirit too and bright
With something of an angel-light."
--Wordsworth.
When Barty had been six months in England, poor Mr. Gibson's affairs
went suddenly smash. My father saved him from absolute bankruptcy,
and there was lamentation and wailing for a month or so in Conduit
Street; but things were so managed that Mr. Gibson was able to keep
on the "West End firm," and make with it a new start.
He had long been complaining of his cashier, and had to dismiss him
and look out for another; but here his daughter came in and insisted
on being cashier herself--(to her mother's horror).
So she took her place at a railed-in desk at the back of the shop,
and was not only cashier and bookkeeper, but overseer of all things
in general, and was not above seeing any exacting and importunate
customer whom the shopmen couldn't manage.
She actually liked her work, and declared she had found her real
vocation, and quite ceased to regret Tavistock Square.
Her authority in the emporium was even greater than her father's,
who was too fond of being funny. She awed the shopmen into a kind of
affectionate servility, and they were prostrate as before a goddess,
in spite of her never-failing politeness to them.
Customers soon got into a way of asking to see Miss Gibson,
especially when they were accompanied by husbands or brothers or
male friends; and Miss Gibson soon found she sold better than any
shopman, and became one of the notables in the quarter.
All Mr. Gibson's fun came back, and he was as proud of his daughter
as if she'd been proposed to by an earl. But Mrs. Gibson couldn't
help shedding tears over Leah's loss of caste--Leah, on whose beauty
and good breeding she had founded such hopes; it is but fair to add
that she was most anxious to keep the books herself, so that her
daughter might be spared this degradation; for no "gentleman," she
felt sure, would ever propose to her daughter now.
But she was mistaken.
One night Barty and I dined at a little cagmag he used to frequent,
where he fared well--so he said--for a shilling, which included a
glass of stout. It was a disgusting little place, but he liked it,
and therefore so did I.
Then we called for Mrs. Gibson and Leah, and took them to the
Princess's to see Fechter in Ruy Blas, and escorted them home, and
had supper with them, a very good supper--nothing ever interfered
with the luxuriously hospitable instincts of the Gibsons--and a very
merry one. Barty imitated Fechter to the life.
"I 'av ze garrb of a _lacquais_--you 'av ze sole of _wawn_!"
This he said to Mr. Gibson, who was in fits of delight. Mr. Gibson
had just come home from his club, and the cards had been propitious;
Leah was more reserved than usual, and didn't laugh at Barty, for a
wonder, but gazed at him with love in her eyes.
When we left them, Barty took my arm and walked home with me, down
Oxford Street and up Southampton Row, and talked of Ruy Blas and
Fechter, whom he had often seen in Paris.
Just where a little footway leads from the Row to Queen Square and
Great Ormond Street, he stopped and said:
"Bob, do you remember how we tossed up for Leah Gibson at this very
spot?"
"I should think I did," said I.
"Well, you had a fair field and no favor, old boy, didn't you?"
"Oh yes, I've long resigned any pretensions, as I wrote you more
than a year ago; you may go in and win--si le coeur t'en dit!"
"Well, then, your congratulations, please. I asked her to marry me
as we crossed Regent Circus, Oxford Street, on the way home; a
hansom came by and scattered and splashed us. Then we came together
again, and just opposite Peter Robinson's, she asked me if my mind
was quite made up--if I was sure I wouldn't ever change. I swore by
the eternal gods, and she said she would be my wife; so there we
are, an engaged couple."
I must ask the reader to believe that I was equal to the occasion,
and said what I ought to have said.
* * * * *
Mrs. Gibson was happy at last; she was satisfied that Barty was a
"gentleman," in spite of the kink in his birth; and as for his
prospects, money was a thing that never entered Mrs. Gibson's head,
and she loved Barty as a son--was a little bit in love with him
herself, I believe; she was not yet forty, and as pretty as she
could be.
Besides, a week after, who should call upon her over the shop--there
was a private entrance of course--but the Right Honorable Lady
Caroline Grey and her niece, Miss Daphne Rohan, granddaughter of the
late and niece of the present Marquis of Whitby!
And Mrs. Gibson felt as much at home with them in five minutes as if
she'd known them all her life.
Leah was summoned from below, and kissed and congratulated by the
two aristocratic relatives of Barty's, and relieved of her shyness
in a very short time indeed.
[Illustration: "LEAH WAS SUMMONED FROM BELOW"]
As a matter of fact, Lady Caroline, who knew her nephew well, and
thoroughly understood his position, was really well pleased; she had
never forgotten her impression of Leah when she met her in the park with
Ida and me a year back, and we all walked by the Serpentine together--a
certain kind of beauty seems to break down all barriers of rank; and she
knew Leah's character both from Barty and me, and from her own native
shrewdness of observation. She had been delighted to hear from Barty of
Leah's resolute participation in her father's troubles, and in his
attempt--so successful through her--to rehabilitate his business. To
her old-fashioned aristocratic way of looking at things, there was
little to choose between a respectable West End shopkeeper and a medical
practitioner or dentist or solicitor or architect--or even an artist,
like Barty himself. Once outside the Church, the Army and Navy, or a
Government office, what on earth did it matter _who_ or _what_ one was,
or wasn't? The only thing she couldn't stand was that horrid form of
bourgeois gentility, the pretension to seem something better than you
really are. Mrs. Gibson was so naively honest in her little laments over
her lost grandeur that she could hardly be called vulgar about it.
Mr. Gibson didn't appear; he was overawed, and distrusted himself. I
doubt if Lady Caroline would have liked anything in the shape of
jocose familiarity; and I fear her naturalness and simplicity and
cordiality of manner, and the extreme plainness of her attire, might
have put him at his ease almost a trifle too much.
Whether her ladyship would have been so sympathetic about this
engagement if Barty had been a legitimate Rohan--say a son of her
own--is perhaps to be doubted; but anyhow she had quite made up her
mind that Leah was a quite exceptional person, both in mind and
manners. She has often said as much to me, and has always had as
high a regard for Barty's wife as for any woman she knows, and has
still--the Rohans are a long-lived family. She has often told me she
never knew a better, sincerer, nobler, or more sensible woman than
Barty's wife.
Besides which, as I have been told, the ancient Yorkshire house of
Rohan has always been singularly free from aristocratic hauteur;
perhaps their religion may have accounted for this, and also their
poverty.
This memorable visit, it must be remembered, happened nearly forty
years ago, when social demarcations in England were far more rigidly
defined than at present; then, the wife of a costermonger with a
donkey did not visit the wife of a costermonger who had to wheel his
barrow himself.
We are more sensible in these days, as all who like Mr. Chevalier's
admirable coster-songs are aware. Old Europe itself has become less
tolerant of distinctions of rank; even Austria is becoming so. It is
only in southeastern Bulgaria--and even of this I am not absolutely
sure--that the navvy who happens to be of noble birth refuses to
work in the same gang with the navvy who isn't; and that's what I
call real "esprit de corps," without which no aristocracy can ever
hope to hold its own in these degenerate days.
Noblesse oblige!
Why, I've got a Lord Arthur in my New York agency, and two Hon'bles
in Barge Yard, and another at Cape Town; and devilish good men of
business they are, besides being good fellows all round. They hope
to become partners some day; and, by Jove! they shall. Now I've said
it, I'll stick to it.
The fact is, I'm rather fond of noble lords: why shouldn't I be? I
might have been one myself any day these last ten years; I might
now, if I chose; but there! Charles Lamb knew a man who wanted to be
a tailor once, but hadn't got the spirit. I find I haven't got the
spirit to be a noble lord. Even Barty might have been a lord--he, a
mere man of letters!--but he refused every honor and distinction
that was ever offered to him, either here or abroad--even the
Prussian order of Merit!
Alfred Tennyson was a lord, so what is there to make such a fuss
about. Give me lords who can't help themselves, because they were
born so, and the stupider the better; and the older--for the older
they are the grander their manners and the manners of their
womankind.
Take, for instance, that splendid old dow, Penelope, Duchess of
Rumtifoozleland--I always give nicknames to my grand acquaintances;
not that she's particularly old herself, but she belongs to an
antiquated order of things that is passing away--for she was a
Fitztartan, a daughter of the ducal house of Comtesbois (pronounced
County Boyce); and she's very handsome still.
Have you ever been presented to her Grace, O reader?
If so, you must have been struck by the grace of her Grace's manner,
as with a ducal gesture and a few courtly words she recognizes the
value of whatever immense achievements yours must have been to have
procured you such an honor as such an introduction, and expresses
her surprise and regret that she has not known you before. The
formula is always the same, on every possible occasion. I ought to
know, for I've had the honor of being presented to her Grace seven
times this year.
Now this lofty forgetting of your poor existence--or mine--is not
aristocratic hauteur or patrician insolence; it is _betise pure et
simple_, as they call it in France. She was a daughter of the house
of Comtesbois, and the Fitztartans were not the inventors of
gunpowder, nor was she.
But for a stately, magnificent Grande Dame of the ancient regime, to
meet for the seventh time, and be presented to--for the seventh
time--with all due ceremony in the midst of a distinguished
conservative crowd--say at a ball at Buckingham Palace--give me
Penelope, Dowager Duchess of Rumtifoozleland!
(This seems a somewhat uncalled-for digression. But, anyhow, it
shows that when it pleases me to do so I move in the very best
society--just like Barty Josselin.)
* * * * *
So here was Mr. Nobody of Nowhere taking unto himself a wife from
among the daughters of Heth; from the class he had always disliked,
the buyers cheap and the sellers dear--whose sole aim in life is the
making of money, and who are proud when they succeed and ashamed
when they fail--and getting actually fond of his future father and
mother in law, as I was!
When I laughed to him about old Gibson--John Gilpin, as we used to
call him--being a tradesman, he said:
"Yes; but what an _unsuccessful_ tradesman, my dear fellow!" as if
that in itself atoned or made amends for everything.
"Besides, he's Leah's father! And as for Mrs. Gilpin, she's a
_dear_, although she's always on pleasure bent; at all events, she's
not of a frugal mind; and she's so pretty and dresses so well--and
what a foot!--and she's got such easy manners, too; she reminds me
of dear Lady Archibald! that's a mother-in-law I shall get on
with.... I wish she didn't make such a fuss about living over the
shop; I call that being above one's business in every way."
"Je suis au-dessus de mes affaires," as old Bonzig proudly said when
he took a garret over the Mont de Piete, in the Rue des Averses.
* * * * *
Barty's courtship didn't last long--only five or six months--during
which he made lots of money by sketching little full-length
portraits of people in outline and filling up with tints in
water-color. He thus immortalized my father and mother, and Ida
Scatcherd and her husband, and the old Scatcherds, and lots of other
people. It was not high art, I suppose; he was not a high artist;
but it paid well, and made him more tolerant of trade than ever.
He took the upper part of a house in Southampton Row, and furnished
it almost entirely with wedding-gifts; among other things, a
beautiful semi-grand piano by Erard--the gift of my father.
Everything was charming there and in the best taste.
Leah was better at furnishing a house than at drawing and
music-making; it was an occupation she revelled in.
It is not perhaps for me to say that their cellar might hold its own
with that of any beginners in their rank of life!
Well, and so they were married at Marylebone Church, and I was
Barty's best man (he was to have been mine, and for that very
bride). Nobody else was there but the family, and Ida, whose husband
was abroad; the sun shone, though it was not yet May--and then we
breakfasted; and John Gilpin made a very funny speech, though with
tears in his voice; and as for poor Maman-belle-mere, as Barty
called her, she was a very Niobe.
They went for a fortnight to Boulogne. I wished them joy from the
bottom of my heart, and flung a charming little white satin slipper
of Mrs. Gibson's; it alighted on the carriage--_our_ carriage,
by-the-way; we had just started one, and now lived at Lancaster
Gate.
It was a sharp pang--almost unbearable, but, also, almost the last.
The last was when she came back and I saw how radiant she looked.
And as for Barty, he was like
"the herald Mercury,
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill!"
and he had shaved off his beard and mustache to please his wife.
* * * * *
"From George du Maurier, Esqre., A.R.W.S., Hampstead Heath,
to the Right Honble. Sir Robert Maurice, Bart., M.P.:
"My Dear Maurice,--In answer to your kind letter, I shall be proud
and happy to illustrate your biography of Barty Josselin; but as for
editing it, _vous plaisantez, mon ami; un amateur comme moi!_ who'll
edit the editor? _Quis custodiet?_...
"You're mistaken about Malines. I only got back there a week or two
before he left it. I remember often seeing him there, arm in arm
with his aunt, Lady Caroline Grey, and being told that he was a
_monsieur anglais, qui avait mal aux yeux_ (like me); but in
Duesseldorf, during the following winter, I knew him very well
indeed.
"We, and the others you tell me you mention, had a capital time in
Duesseldorf. I remember the beautiful Miss Royce they were all so mad
about, and also Miss Gibson, whom I admired much the most of the
two, although she wasn't quite so tall--you know my craze for lovely
giantesses.
"Josselin and I came to London at about the same time, and there
again I saw much of him, and was immensely attracted by him, of
course--as we all were, in the very pleasant little artistic clique
you tell me you describe; but somehow I was never very intimate with
him--none of us were, except, perhaps, Charles Keene.
"He went a great deal into smart society, and a little of the
guardsman still clung to him, and this was an unpardonable crime in
those Bohemian days.
"He was once seen walking between two well-known earls, in the
Burlington Arcade, arm in arm!
"Z---- (to whom a noble lord was as a red rag to a bull) all but cut
him for this, and we none of us approved of his swell friends,
Guardsmen and others. How we've all changed, especially Z----, who
hasn't missed a levee for twenty years, nor his wife a drawing-room!
"Josselin and I acted in a little French musical farce together at
Cornelys's; he had a charming voice and sang beautifully, as you
know.
"Then he married, and a year after I did the same; and though we
lived near each other for a little while, we didn't meet very often,
beyond dining together once or twice at each other's houses. They
lived very much in the world.
"It will be very difficult to draw his wife. I really think Mrs.
Josselin was the most beautiful woman I ever saw; but she used to be
very reserved in those early days, and I never felt quite at my ease
with her. I'm sure she was sweetness and kindness itself; she was
certainly charming at her own dinner-table, where she was less shy.
"Millais's portrait of her is very good, and so is Watts's; but the
best idea of her is to be got from Josselin's little outlines in
'The Discreet Princess,' and these are out of print. If you have
any, please lend them to me, and I will faithfully return them. I
have more than once tried to draw her in _Punch_, from memory, but
never with success.
"I used to call her '_La belle dame sans merci._'
"I've often, however, drawn Josselin, as you must remember, and
people have recognized him at once. Thanks for all his old sketches
of school, etc., which will be very useful.
"I wish I had known the Josselins better. But when one lives in
Hampstead one has to forego many delightful friendships; and then he
grew to be such a tremendous swell! Good heavens!--_Sardonyx_, etc.
I never could muster courage even to write and congratulate him.
"It never occurred to any of us, either in Duesseldorf or London, to
think him what is called _clever_; he never said anything very
witty or profound. But he was always funny in a good-natured, jovial
manner, and made me laugh more than any one else.
"As for satire, good heavens! that seemed not in him. He was always
well dressed, always in high spirits and a good temper, and very
demonstrative and caressing; putting his arm round one, and slapping
one on the back or lifting one up in the air; a kind of jolty,
noisy, boisterous boon-companion--rather uproarious, in fact, and
with no disdain for a good bottle of wine or a good bottle of beer.
His artistic tastes were very catholic, for he was prostrate in
admiration before Millais, Burne-Jones, Fred Walker, and Charles
Keene, with the latter of whom he used to sing old English duets.
Oddly enough, Charles Keene had for Josselin's little amateur
pencillings the most enthusiastic admiration--probably because they
were the very antipodes of his own splendid work. I believe he
managed to get some little initial letters of Josselin's into
_Punch_ and _Once a Week_; but they weren't signed, and made no
mark, and I've forgotten them.
"Josselin didn't really get his foot in the stirrup till a year or
two after his marriage.
[Illustration: "BETWEEN TWO WELL-KNOWN EARLS"]
"And that was by his illustrations to his own _Sardonyx_, which are
almost worthy of the letter-press, I think; though still somewhat
lacking in freedom and looseness, and especially in the sense of
tone. The feeling for beauty and character in them (especially that
of women and children) is so utterly beyond anything else of the
kind that has ever been attempted, that technical considerations
no longer count. I think you will find all of us, in or outside the
Academy, agreed upon this point.
"I saw very little of him after he bought Marsfield; but I sometimes
meet his sons and daughters, _de par le monde_.
"And what a pleasure that is to an artist of my particular bent you
can readily understand. I would go a good way to see or talk to any
daughter of Josselin's; and to hear Mrs. Trevor sing, what miles!
I'm told the grandchildren are splendid--chips of the old block too.
"And now, my dear Maurice, I will do my best; you may count upon
that, for old-times' sake, and for Josselin's, and for that of '_La
belle dame sans merci_,' whom I used to admire so enthusiastically.
It grieves me deeply to think of them both gone--and all so sudden!
"Sincerely yours,
"George du Maurier.
"P. S.--Very many thanks for the Chateau Yquem and the Steinberger
Cabinet; _je tacherai de ne pas en abuser trop!_
"I send you a little sketch of Graham-Reece (Lord Ironsides), taken
by me on a little bridge in Duesselthal, near Duesseldorf. He stood
for me there in 1860. It was thought very like at the time."
* * * * *
When the Josselins came back from their honeymoon and were settled
in Southampton Row many people of all kinds called on the newly
married pair; invitations came pouring in, and they went very much
into the world. They were considered the handsomest couple in London
that year, and became quite the fashion, and were asked everywhere,
and made much of, and raved about, and had a glorious time till the
following season, when somebody else became the fashion, and they
had grown tired of being lionized themselves, and discovered they
were people of no social importance whatever, as Leah had long
perceived; and it did them good.
Barty was in his element. The admiration his wife excited filled him
with delight; it was a kind of reflected glory, that pleased him
more than any glory he could possibly achieve for himself.
I doubt if Leah was quite so happy. The grand people, the famous
people, the clever, worldly people she met made her very shy at
first, as may be easily imagined.
She was rather embarrassed by the attentions many smart men paid her
as to a very pretty woman, and not always pleased or edified. Her
deep sense of humor was often tickled by this new position in which
she found herself, and which she put down entirely to the fact that
she was Barty's wife.
She never thought much of her own beauty, which had never been made
much of at home, where beauty of a very different order was admired,
and where she was thought too tall, too pale, too slim, and
especially too quiet and sedate.
Dimpled little rosy plumpness for Mr. and Mrs. John Gilpin, and the
never-ending lively chatter, and the ever-ready laugh that results
from an entire lack of the real sense of humor and a laudable desire
to show one's pretty teeth.
Leah's only vanity was her fondness for being very well dressed; it
had become a second nature, especially her fondness for beautiful
French boots and shoes, an instinct inherited from her mother.
For these, and for pretty furniture and hangings, she had the truly
aesthetic eye, and was in advance of her time by at least a year.
She shone most in her own home--by her great faculty of making
others at home there, too, and disinclined to leave it. Her instinct
of hospitality was a true inheritance; she was good at the ordering
of all such things--food, wines, flowers, waiting, every little
detail of the dinner-table, and especially who should be asked to
meet whom, and which particular guests should be chosen to sit by
each other. All things of which Barty had no idea whatever.
I remember their first dinner-party well, and how pleasant it was.
How good the fare, and how simple; and how quick the hired
waiting--and the wines! how--(but I won't talk of that); and how
lively we all were, and how handsome the women. Lady Caroline and
Miss Daphne Rohan, Mr. and Mrs. Graham-Reece, Scatcherd and my
sister; G. du Maurier (then a bachelor) and myself--that was the
party, a very lively one.
After dinner du Maurier and Barty sang capital songs of the quartier
latin, and told stories of the atelier, and even danced a kind of
cancan together--an invention of their own--which they called "_le
dernier des Abencerrages_." We were in fits of laughter, especially
Lady Caroline and Mrs. Graham-Reece. I hope D. M. has not forgotten
that scene, and will do justice to it in this book.
There was still more of the Bohemian than the Guardsman left in
Barty, and his wife's natural tastes were far more in the direction
of Bohemia than of fashionable West End society, as it was called by
some people who were not in it, whatever it consists of; there was
more of her father in her than her mother, and she was not sensitive
to the world's opinion of her social status.
[Illustration: "LE DERNIER DES ABENCERRAGES"]
Sometimes Leah and Barty and I would dine together and go to the gallery
of the opera, let us say, or to see Fechter and Miss Kate Terry in the
_Duke's Motto_, or Robson in Shylock, or the _Porter's Knot_, or
whatever was good. Then on the way home to Southampton Row Barty would
buy a big lobster, and Leah would make a salad of it, with innovations
of her own devising which were much appreciated; and then we would
feast, and afterwards Leah would mull some claret in a silver saucepan,
and then we (Barty and I) would drink and smoke and chat of pleasant
things till it was very late indeed and I had to be turned out neck and
crop.
And the kindness of the two dear people! Once, when my father and
mother were away in the Isle of Wight and the Scatcherds in Paris, I
felt so seedy I had to leave Barge Yard and go home to Lancaster
Gate. I had felt pretty bad for two or three days. Like all people
who are never ill, I was nervous and thought I was going to die, and
sent for Barty.
In less than twenty minutes Leah drove up in a hansom. Barty was in
Hampton Court for the day, sketching. When she had seen me and how
ill I looked, off she went for the doctor, and brought him back with
her in no time. He saw I was sickening for typhoid, and must go to
bed at once and engage two nurses.
Leah insisted, on taking me straight off to Southampton Row, and the
doctor came with us. There I was soon in bed and the nurses engaged,
and everything done for me as if I'd been Barty himself--all this at
considerable inconvenience to the Josselins.
And I had my typhoid most pleasantly. And I shall never forget the
joys of convalescence, nor what an angel that woman was in a
sick-room--nor what a companion when the worst was over; nor how she
so bore herself through all this forced intimacy that no unruly
regrets or jealousies mingled in my deep affection and admiration
for her, and my passionate gratitude. She was such a person to tell
all one's affairs to, even dry business affairs! such a listener,
and said such sensible things, and sometimes made suggestions that
were invaluable; and of a discretion! a very tomb for momentous
secrets.
How on earth Barty would have ever managed to get through existence
without her is not to be conceived. Upon my word, I hardly see how I
should have got on myself without these two people to fill my life
with; and in all matters of real importance to me she was the
nearest of the two, for Barty was so light about things, and
couldn't listen long to anything that was at all intricate. Such
matters bored him, and that extraordinary good sense which underlies
all his brilliant criticism of life was apt to fail him in practical
matters; he was too headstrong and impulsive, and by no means
discreet.
It was quite amusing to watch the way his wife managed him without
ever letting him suspect what she was doing, and how, after his
raging and fuming and storming and stamping--for all his old
fractiousness had come back--she would gradually make him work his
way round--of his own accord, as he thought--to complete concession
all along the line, and take great credit to himself in consequence;
and she would very gravely and slowly give way to a delicate little
wink in my direction, but never a smile at what was all so really
funny. I've no doubt she often got me to do what she thought right
in just the same way--_a mon insu_--and shot her little wink at
Barty.
* * * * *
In due time--namely, late in the evening of December 31, 1862--Barty
hailed a hansom, and went first to summon his good friend Dr.
Knight, in Orchard Street; and then he drove to Brixton, and woke up
and brought back with him a very respectable, middle-aged, and
motherly woman whose name was Jones; and next morning, which was a
very sunny, frosty one, my dear little god-daughter was ushered into
this sinful world, a fact which was chronicled the very next day in
Leah's diary by the simple entry:
"Jan. 1.--Roberta was born and the coals came in."
When Roberta was first shown to her papa by the nurse, he was in
despair and ran and shut himself up in his studio, and, I believe,
almost wept. He feared he had brought a monster into the world. He
had always, thought that female babies were born with large blue
eyes framed with long lashes, a beautiful complexion of the lily and
the rose, and their shining, flaxen curls already parted in the
middle. And this little bald, wrinkled, dark-red, howling lump of
humanity all but made him ill. But soon the doctor came and knocked
at the door, and said:
"I congratulate you, old fellow, on having produced the most
magnificent little she I ever saw in my life--bar none; she might be
shown for money."
And it turned out that this was not the coarse, unfeeling chaff poor
Barty took it for at first, but the pure and simple truth.
So, my blessed Roberta, pride of your silly old godfather's heart
and apple of his eye, mother of Cupid and Ganymede and Aurora and
the infant Hercules, think of your poor young father weeping in
solitude at the first sight of you, because you were so hideous in
his eyes!
You were not so in mine. Next day--you had improved, no doubt--I
took you in my arms and thought well of you, especially your little
hands that were very prehensile, and your little feet turned in,
with rosy toes and little pink nails like shiny gems; and I was
complimented by Mrs. Jones on the skill with which I dandled you. I
have dandled your sons and daughters, Roberta, and may I live to
dandle theirs!
So then Barty dried his tears, if he really shed them--and he swears
he did--and went and sat by his wife's bedside, and felt
unutterably, as I believe all good men do under similar
circumstances; and lo!--proh!--to his wonderment and delight, in the
middle of it all, the sense of the north came back like a tide, like
an overwhelming avalanche. He declared he all but fainted in the
double ineffability of his bliss.
That night he arranged by his bedside writing materials chosen with
extra care, and before he went to bed he looked out of window at the
stars, and filled his lungs with the clean, frozen, virtuous air of
Bloomsbury, and whispered a most passionate invocation to Martia,
and implored her forgiveness, and went to sleep hugging the thought
of her to his manly breast, now widowed for quite a month to come.
Next morning there was a long letter in bold, vigorous Blaze:
"My more than ever beloved Barty,--It is for me to implore pardon,
not for _you_! Your first-born is proof enough to me how right you
were in letting your own instinct guide you in the choice of a wife.
"Ah! and well now I know her worth and your good-fortune. I have
inhabited her for many months, little as she knows it, dear thing!
"Although she was not the woman I first wanted for you, and had
watched so many years, she is all that I could wish, in body and
mind, in beauty and sense and goodness of heart and intelligence, in
health and strength, and especially in the love with which she has
so easily, and I trust so lastingly, filled your heart--for that is
the most precious thing of all to me, as you shall know some day,
and why; and you will then understand and forgive me for seeming
such a shameless egotist and caring so desperately for my own ends.
"Barty, I will never doubt you again, and we will do great things
together. They will not be quite what I used to hope, but they will
be worth doing, and all the doing will be yours. All I can do is to
set your brains in motion--those innocent brains that don't know
their own strength any more than a herd of bullocks which any little
butcher boy can drive to the slaughter-house.
"As soon as Leah is well enough you must tell her all about me--all
you know, that is. She won't believe you at first, and she'll think
you've gone mad; but she'll have to believe you in time, and she's
to be trusted with any secret, and so will you be when once you've
shared it with her.
"(By-the-way, I wish you weren't so slipshod and colloquial in your
English, Barty--Guardsman's English, I suppose--which I have to use,
as it's yours; your French is much more educated and correct. You
remember dear M. Durosier at the Pension Brossard? he taught you
well. You must read, and cultivate a decent English style, for the
bulk of our joint work must be in English, I think; and I can only
use your own words to make you immortal, and your own way of using
them.)
"We will be simple, Barty--as simple as Lemuel Gulliver and the good
Robinson Crusoe--and cultivate a fondness for words of one syllable,
and if that doesn't do we'll try French.
"Now listen, or, rather, read:
"First of all, I will write out for you a list of books, which you
must study whenever you feel I'm inside you--and this more for me
than for yourself. Those marked with a cross you must read
constantly and carefully at home, the others you must read at the
British Museum.
"Get a reading ticket at once, and read the books in the order I put
down. Never forget to leave paper and pencil by your bedside. Leah
will soon get accustomed to your quiet somnambulism; I will never
trouble your rest for more than an hour or so each night, but you
can make up for it by staying in bed an hour or two longer. You will
have to work during the day from the pencil notes in Blaze you will
have written during the night, and in the evening, or at any time
you are conscious of my presence, read what you have written during
the day, and leave it by your bedside when you go to bed, that I may
make you correct and alter and suggest--during your sleep.
"Only write on one side of a page, leaving a margin and plenty of
space between the lines, and let it be in copybooks, so that the
page on the left-hand side be left for additions and corrections
from my Blaze notes, and so forth; you'll soon get into the way of
it.
"Then when each copybook is complete--I will let you know--get Leah
to copy it out; she writes a very good, legible business hand. All
will arrange itself....
"And now, get the books and begin reading them. I shall not be ready
to write, nor will you, for more than a month.
"Keep this from everybody but Leah; don't even mention it to Maurice
until I give you leave--not but what's he's to be thoroughly
trusted. You are fortunate in your wife and your friend--I hope the
day will come when you will find you have been fortunate in your
"Martia."
Here follows a list of books, but it has been more or less carefully
erased; and though some of the names are still to be made out, I
conclude that Barty did not wish them to be made public.
* * * * *
Before Roberta was born, Leah had reserved herself an hour every
morning and every afternoon for what she called the cultivation of
her mind--the careful reading of good standard books, French and
English, that she might qualify herself in time, as she said, for
the intellectual society in which she hoped to mix some day; she
built castles in the air, being somewhat of a hero-worshipper in
secret, and dreamt of meeting her heroes in the flesh, now that she
was Barty's wife.
But when she became a mother there was not only Roberta who required
much attention, but Barty himself made great calls upon her time
besides.
To his friends' astonishment he had taken it into his head to write
a book. Good heavens! Barty writing a book! What on earth could the
dear boy have to write about?
He wrote much of the book at night in bed, and corrected and put it
into shape during the daytime; and finally Leah had to copy it all
out neatly in her best handwriting, and this copying out of Barty's
books became to her an all but daily task for many years--a happy
labor of love, and one she would depute to no one else; no hired
hand should interfere with these precious productions of her
husband's genius. So that most of the standard works, English and
French, that she grew to thoroughly master were of her husband's
writing--not a bad education, I venture to think!
Besides, it was more in her nature and in the circumstances of her
life that she should become a woman of business and a woman of the
world rather than a reader of books--one who grew to thoroughly
understand life as it presented itself to her; and men and women,
and especially children; and the management of a large and much
frequented house; for they soon moved away from Southampton Row.
She quickly arrived at a complete mastery of all such science as
this--and it is a science; such a mastery as I have never seen
surpassed by any other woman, of whatever world. She would have made
a splendid Marchioness of Whitby, this daughter of a low-comedy John
Gilpin; she would have beaten the Whitby record!
She developed into a woman of the world in the best sense--full of
sympathy, full of observation and quick understanding of others'
needs and thoughts and feelings; absolutely sincere, of a constant
and even temper, and a cheerfulness that never failed--the result of
her splendid health; without caprice, without a spark of vanity,
without selfishness of any kind--generous, open-handed, charitable
to a fault; always taking the large and generous view of everything
and everybody; a little impulsive perhaps, but not often having to
regret her impulses; of unwearied devotion to her husband, and
capable of any heroism or self-sacrifice for his sake; of that I
feel sure.
No one is perfect, of course. Unfortunately, she was apt to be
somewhat jealous at first of his singularly catholic and very
frankly expressed admiration of every opposite type of female
beauty; but she soon grew to see that there was safety in numbers,
and she was made to feel in time that her own type was the arch-type
of all in his eyes, and herself the arch-representative of that type
in his heart.
She was also jealous in her friendships, and was not happy unless
constantly assured of her friends' warm love--Ida's, mine, even that
of her own father and mother. Good heavens! had ever a woman less
cause for doubt or complaint on that score!
Then, like all extremely conscientious people who always know their
own mind and do their very best, she did not like to be found fault
with; she secretly found such fault with herself that she thought
that was fault-finding enough. Also, she was somewhat rigid in
sticking to the ways she thought were right, and in the selection of
these ways she was not always quite infallible. _On a les defauts de
ses qualites_; and a little obstinacy is often the fault of a very
noble quality indeed!
Though somewhat shy and standoffish during the first year or two of
her married life, she soon became "_joliment degourdie_," as Barty
called it; and I can scarcely conceive any position in which she
would have been awkward or embarrassed for a moment, so ready was
she always with just the right thing to say--or to withhold, if
silence were better than speech; and her fit and proper place in the
world as a great man's wife--and a good and beautiful woman--was
always conceded to her with due honor, even by the most impertinent
among the highly placed of her own sex, without any necessity for
self-assertion on her part whatever--without assumption of any kind.
It was a strange and peculiar personal ascendency she managed to
exert with so little effort, an ascendency partly physical, no
doubt; and the practice of it had begun in the West End emporium of
the "Universal Fur Company, Limited."
[Illustration: "SARDONYX"]
How admirably she filled the high and arduous position of wife to such a
man as Barty Josselin is well known to the world at large. It was no
sinecure! but she gloried in it; and to her thorough apprehension and
management of their joint lives and all that came of them, as well as to
her beauty and sense and genial warmth, was due her great popularity for
many years in an immense and ever-widening circle, where the memory of
her is still preserved and cherished as one of the most remarkable women
of her time.
With all this power of passionate self-surrender to her husband in
all things, little and big, she was not of the type that cannot see
the faults of the beloved one, and Barty was very often frankly
pulled up for his shortcomings, and by no means had it all his own
way when his own way wasn't good for him. She was a person to reckon
with, and incapable of the slightest flattery, even to Barty, who
was so fond of it from her, and in spite of her unbounded admiration
for him.
Such was your mother, my dear Roberta, in the bloom of her early
twenties and ever after; till her death, in fact--on the day
following his!
* * * * *
Somewhere about the spring of 1863 she said to me:
"Bob, Barty has written a book. Either I'm an idiot, or blinded by
conjugal conceit, or else Barty's book--which I've copied out myself
in my very best handwriting--is one of the most beautiful and
important books ever written. Come and dine with me to-night;
Barty's dining in the City with the Fishmongers--you shall have what
you like best: pickled pork and pease-pudding, a dressed crab and a
Welsh rabbit to follow, and draught stout--and after dinner I will
read you the beginning of _Sardonyx_--that's what he's called
it--and I should like to have your opinion."
I dined with her as she wished. We were alone, and she told me how
he wrote every night in bed, in a kind of ecstasy--between two and
four, in Blaze--and then elaborated his work during the day, and
made sketches for it.
And after dinner she read me the first part of _Sardonyx_; it took
three hours.
Then Barty came home, having dined well, and in very high spirits.
"Well, old fellow! how do you like _Sardonyx_?"
I was so moved and excited I could say nothing--I couldn't even
smoke. I was allowed to take the precious manuscript away with me,
and finished it during the night.
Next morning I wrote to him out of the fulness of my heart.
I read it aloud to my father and mother, and then lent it to
Scatcherd, who read it to Ida. In twenty-four hours our gay and
genial Barty--our Robin Goodfellow and Merry Andrew, our funny
man--had become for us a demi-god; for all but my father, who looked
upon him as a splendid but irretrievably lost soul, and mourned over
him as over a son of his own.
And in two months _Sardonyx_ was before the reading world, and the
middle-aged reader will remember the wild enthusiasm and the storm
it raised.
All that is ancient history, and I will do no more than allude to
the unparalleled bitterness of the attacks made by the Church on a
book which is now quoted again and again from every pulpit in
England--in the world--and has been translated into almost every
language under the sun.
Thus he leaped into fame and fortune at a bound, and at first they
delighted him. He would take little Roberta on to the top of his
head and dance "La Paladine" on his hearth-rug, singing:
"Rataplan, Rataplan,
I'm a celebrated man--"
in imitation of Sergeant Bouncer in _Cox and Box_.
But in less than a year celebrity had quite palled, and all his
money bored him--as mine does me. He had a very small appetite for
either the praise or the pudding which were served out to him in
such excess all through his life. It was only his fondness for the
work itself that kept his nose so constantly to the grindstone.
Within six months of the _Sardonyx_ Barty wrote _La quatrieme
Dimension_ in French, which was published by Dollfus-Mois freres, in
Paris, with if possible a greater success; for the clerical
opposition was even more virulent. The English translation, which is
admirable, is by Scatcherd.
Then came _Motes in a Moonbeam, Interstellar Harmonics_, and _Berthe
aux grands Pieds_ within eighteen months, so that before he was
quite thirty, in the space of two years, Barty had produced five
works--three in English and two in French--which, though merely
novels and novelettes, have had as wide and far-reaching an
influence on modern thought as the _Origin of Species_, that
appeared about the same time, and which are such, for simplicity of
expression, exposition, and idea, that an intelligent ploughboy can
get all the good and all the pleasure from them almost as easily as
any philosopher or sage.
Such was Barty's debut as a man of letters. This is not the place to
criticise his literary work, nor am I the proper person to do so;
enough has been written already about Barty Josselin during his
lifetime to fill a large library--in nearly every language there is.
I tremble to think of what has yet to follow!
[Illustration: "'RATAPLAN, RATAPLAN'"]
_Sardonyx_ came of age nearly twelve years ago--what a coming of age
that was the reader will remember well. I shall not forget its
celebration at Marsfield; it happened to coincide with the birth of
Barty's first grandchild, at that very house.
I will now go back to Barty's private life, which is the sole object
of this humble attempt at book-making on my part.
During the next ten years Barty's literary activity was immense.
Beautiful books followed each other in rapid succession--and so did
beautiful little Bartys, and Leah's hands were full.
And as each book, English or French, was more beautiful than the last;
so was each little Barty, male or female. All over Kensington and
Campden Hill--for they took Gretna Lodge, next door to Cornelys, the
sculptor's--the splendor of these little Bartys, their size, their
beauty, their health and high spirits, became almost a joke, and their
mother became almost a comic character in consequence--like the old
lady who lived in a shoe.
Money poured in with a profusion few writers of good books have ever
known before, and every penny not wanted for immediate household
expenses was pounced upon by Scatcherd or by me to be invested in
the manner we thought best: nous avons eu la main heureuse!
The Josselins kept open house, and money was not to be despised,
little as Barty ever thought of money.
Then every autumn the entire smalah migrated to the coast of
Normandy, or Picardy, or Brittany, or to the Highlands of Inverness,
and with them the Scatcherds and the chronicler of these happy
times--not to mention cats, dogs, and squirrels, and guinea-pigs,
and white mice, and birds of all kinds, from which the children
would not be parted, and the real care of which, both at home and
abroad, ultimately devolved on poor Mrs. Josselin--who was not so
fond of animals as all that--so that her life was full to
overflowing of household cares.
Another duty had devolved upon her also: that of answering the
passionate letters that her husband received by every post from all
parts of the world--especially America--and which he could never be
induced to answer himself. Every morning regularly he would begin
his day's work by writing "Yours truly--B. Josselin" on quite a
score of square bits of paper, to be sent through the post to fair
English and American autograph collectors who forwarded stamped
envelopes, and sometimes photographs of themselves, that he might
study the features of those who loved him at a respectful distance,
and who so frankly told their love; all of which bored Barty to
extinction, and was a source of endless amusement to his wife.
But even _she_ was annoyed when a large unstamped or insufficiently
stamped parcel arrived by post from America, enclosing a photograph
of her husband to which his signature was desired, and containing no
stamps to frank it on its return journey!
And the photographers he had to sit to! and the interviewers, male
and female, to whom he had to deny himself! Life was too short!
How often has a sturdy laborer or artisan come up to him, as he and
I walked together, with:
"I should very much like to shake you by the hand, Mr. Josselin, if
I might make so bold, sir!"
And such an appeal as this would please him far more than the most
fervently written outpourings of the female hearts he had touched.
They, of course, received endless invitations to stay at
country-houses all over the United Kingdom, where they might have
been lionized to their hearts' content, if such had been their wish;
but these they never accepted. They never spent a single night away
from their own house till most of their children were grown up--or
ever wanted to; and every year they got less and less into the way
of dining out, or spending the evening from home--and I don't
wonder; no gayer or jollier home ever was than that they made for
themselves, and each other, and their intimate friends; not even at
Cornelys's, next door, was better music to be heard; for Barty was
friends with all the music-makers, English and foreign, who cater
for us in and out of the season; even _they_ read his books, and
understood them; and they sang and played better for Barty--and for
Cornelys, next door--than even for the music-loving multitude who
filled their pockets with British gold.
And the difference between Barty's house and that of Cornelys was
that at the former the gatherings were smaller and more intimate--as
became the smaller house--and one was happier there in consequence.
Barty gave himself up entirely to his writing, and left everything
else to his wife, or to me, or to Scatcherd. She was really a mother
to him, as well as a passionately loving and devoted helpmeet.
To make up for this, whenever she was ill, which didn't often
happen--except, of course, when she had a baby--he forgot all his
writing in his anxiety about her; and in his care of her, and his
solicitude for her ease and comfort, he became quite a motherly old
woman, a better nurse than Mrs. Jones or Mrs. Gibson--as practical
and sensible and full of authority as Dr. Knight himself.
And when it was all over, all his amiable carelessness came back,
and with it his genius, his school-boy high spirits, his tomfooling,
his romps with his children, and his utter irresponsibility, and
absolute disdain for all the ordinary business of life; and the
happy, genial temper that never seemed to know a moment's depression
or nourish an unkind thought.
Poor Barty! what would he have done without us all, and what should
we have done without Barty? As Scatcherd said of him, "He's having
his portion in this life."
But it was not really so.
Then, in 1870, he bought that charming house, Mansfield, by the
Thames, which he rechristened Marsfield; and which he--with the help
of the Scatcherds and myself, for it became our hobby--made into one
of the most delightful abodes in England. It was the real home for
all of us; I really think it is one of the loveliest spots on earth.
It was a bargain, but it cost a lot of money; altogether, never was
money better spent--even as a mere investment. When I think of what
it is worth now! Je suis homme d'affaires!
What a house-warming that was on the very day that France and
Germany went to war; we little guessed what was to come for the
country we all loved so dearly, or we should not have been so glad.
I am conscious that all this is rather dull reading. Alas! Merry
England is a devilish dull place compared to foreign parts--and
success, respectability, and domestic bliss are the dullest things
to write--or read--about that I know--and with middle age to follow
too!
It was during that first summer at Marsfield that Barty told me the
extraordinary story of Martia, and I really thought he had gone mad.
For I knew him to be the most truthful person alive.
Even now I hardly know what to think, nor did Leah--nor did Barty
himself up to the day of his death.
He showed me all her letters, _which I may deem it advisable to
publish some day_: not only the Blaze suggestions for his books, and
all her corrections; things to occupy him for life--all, of course,
in his own handwriting; but many letters about herself, also written
in sleep and by his own hand; and the style is Barty's--not the
style in which he wrote his books, and which is not to be matched;
but that in which he wrote his Blaze letters to me.
If her story is true--and I never read a piece of documentary
evidence more convincing--these letters constitute the most
astonishing revelation ever yet vouchsafed to this earth.
But her story cannot be true!
That Barty's version of his relations with "The Martian" is
absolutely sincere it is impossible to doubt. He was quite
unconscious of the genesis of every book he ever wrote. His first
hint of every one of them was the elaborately worked out suggestion
he found by his bedside in the morning--written by himself in his
sleep during the preceding night, with his eyes wide open, while
more often than not his wife anxiously watched him at his
unconscious work, careful not to wake or disturb him in any way.
Roughly epitomized, Martia's story was this:
For an immense time she had gone through countless incarnations,
from the lowest form to the highest, in the cold and dreary planet
we call Mars, the outermost of the four inhabited worlds of our
system, where the sun seems no bigger than an orange, and which but
for its moist, thin, rich atmosphere and peculiar magnetic
conditions that differ from ours would be too cold above ground for
human or animal or vegetable life. As it is, it is only inhabited
now in the neighborhood of its equator, and even there during its
long winter it is colder and more desolate than Cape Horn or
Spitzbergen--except that the shallow, fresh-water sea does not
freeze except for a few months at either pole.
All these incarnations were forgotten by her but the last; nothing
remained of them all but a vague consciousness that they had once
been, until their culmination in what would be in Mars the
equivalent of a woman on our earth.
Man in Mars is, it appears, a very different being from what he is
here. He is amphibious, and descends from no monkey, but from a
small animal that seems to be something between our seal and our
sea-lion.
According to Martia, his beauty is to that of the seal as that of
the Theseus or Antinous to that of an orangoutang. His five senses
are extraordinarily acute, even the sense of touch in his webbed
fingers and toes; and in addition to these he possesses a sixth,
that comes from his keen and unintermittent sense of the magnetic
current, which is far stronger in Mars than on the earth, and far
more complicated, and more thoroughly understood.
When any object is too delicate and minute to be examined by the
sense of touch and sight, the Martian shuts his eyes and puts it
against the pit of his stomach, and knows all about it, even its
inside.
In the absolute dark, or with his eyes shut, and when he stops his
ears, he is more intensely conscious of what immediately surrounds
him than at any other time, except that all color-perception ceases;
conscious not only of material objects, but of what is passing in
his fellow-Martian's mind--and this for an area of many hundreds of
cubic yards.
In the course of its evolutions this extraordinary faculty--which
exists on earth in a rudimentary state, but only among some birds
and fish and insects and in the lower forms of animal life--has
developed the Martian mind in a direction very different from ours,
since no inner life apart from the rest, no privacy, no concealment
is possible except at a distance involving absolute isolation; not
even thought is free; yet in some incomprehensible way there is, as
a matter of fact, a really greater freedom of thought than is
conceivable among ourselves: absolute liberty in absolute obedience
to law, a paradox beyond our comprehension.
Their habits are as simple as those we attribute to the
cave-dwellers during the prehistoric periods of the earth's
existence. But their moral sense is so far in advance of ours that
we haven't even a terminology by which to express it.
In comparison, the highest and best of us are monsters of iniquity
and egoism, cruelty and corruption; and our planet (a very heaven
for warmth and brilliancy and beauty, in spite of earthquakes and
cyclones and tornadoes) is a very hell through the creatures that
people it--a shambles, a place of torture, a grotesque and impure
pandemonium.
These exemplary Martians wear no clothes but the exquisite fur with
which nature has endowed them, and which constitutes a part of their
immense beauty, according to Martia.
They feed exclusively on edible moss and roots and submarine
seaweed, which they know how to grow and prepare and preserve.
Except for heavy-winged bat-like birds, and big fish, which they
have domesticated and use for their own purposes in an incredible
manner (incarnating a portion of themselves and their consciousness
at will in their bodies), they have cleared Mars of all useless and
harmful and mutually destructive forms of animal life. A sorry
fauna, the Martian--even at its best--and a flora beneath contempt,
compared to ours.
They are great engineers and excavators, great irrigators, great
workers in delicate metal, stone, marble, and precious gems (there
is no wood to speak of); great sculptors and decorators of the
beautiful caves, so fancifully and so intricately connected, in
which they live, and which have taken thousands of years to design
and excavate and ventilate and adorn, and which they warm and light
up at will in a beautiful manner by means of the tremendous magnetic
current.
This richly parti-colored light is part of their mental and moral
life in a way it is not in us to apprehend, and has its exact
equivalent in sound--and vice versa.
They have no language of words, and do not need it, since they can
only be isolated in thought from each other by a distance greater
than that which any vocal sound can traverse; but their organs of
voice and hearing are far more complex and perfect than ours, and
their atmosphere infinitely more conductive of phonal vibrations.
It seems that everything which can be apprehended by the eye or hand
is capable of absolute sonorous translation: light, color, texture,
shape in its three dimensions, weight, and density. The phonal
expression and comprehension of all these are acquired by the
Martian baby almost as soon as it knows how to swim or dive, or move
upright and erect on dry land or beneath it; and the mechanical
translation of such expression by means of wind and wire and
sounding texture and curved surface of extraordinary elaboration is
the principal business of the Martian life--an art by which all the
combined past experience and future aspirations of the race receive
the fullest utterance. Here again personal magnetism plays an
enormous part.
And it is by means of this long and patiently evolved and highly
trained faculty that the race is still developing towards perfection
with constant strain and effort--although the planet is far advanced
in its decadence and within measurable distance of its unfitness for
life of any kind.
All is so evenly and harmoniously balanced, whether above ground or
beneath, that existence is full of joy in spite of the tremendous
strain of life, in spite also of a dreariness of outlook, on barren
nature, which is not to be matched by the most inhospitable regions
of the earth; and death is looked upon as the crowning joy of all,
although life is prolonged by all the means in their power.
For when the life of the body ceases and the body itself is burned
and its ashes scattered to the winds and waves, the infinitesimal,
imponderable, and indestructible something _we_ call the _soul_ is
known to lose itself in a sunbeam and make for the sun, with all its
memories about it, that it may then receive further development,
fitting it for other systems altogether beyond conception; and the
longer it has lived in Mars the better for its eternal life in the
future.
But it often, on its journey sunwards, gets entangled in other
beams, and finds its way to some intermediate planet--Mercury,
Venus, or the Earth; and putting on flesh and blood and bone once
more, and losing for a space all its knowledge of its own past, it
has to undergo another mortal incarnation--a new personal
experience, beginning with its new birth; a dream and a forgetting,
till it awakens again after the pangs of dissolution, and finds
itself a step further on the way to freedom.
Martia, it seems, came to our earth in a shower of shooting-stars a
hundred years ago. She had not lived her full measure of years in
Mars; she had elected to be suppressed, through some unfitness,
physical or mental or moral, which rendered it inexpedient that she
should become a mother of Martians, for they are very particular
about that sort of thing in Mars: we shall have to be so here some
day, or else we shall degenerate and become extinct; or even worse!
Many Martian souls come to our planet in this way, it seems, and
hasten to incarnate themselves in as promising unborn though just
begotten men and women as they find, that they may the sooner be
free to hie them sunwards with all their collected memories.
According to Martia, most of the best and finest of our race have
souls that have lived forgotten lives in Mars. But Martia was in no
hurry; she was full of intelligent curiosity, and for ten years she
went up and down the earth, revelling in the open air, lodging
herself in the brains and bodies of birds, beasts, and fishes,
insects, and animals of all kinds--like a hermit crab in a shell
that belongs to another--but without the slightest inconvenience to
the legitimate owners, who were always quite unconscious of her
presence, although she made what use she could of what wits they
had.
Thus she had a heavenly time on this sunlit earth of ours--now a
worm, now a porpoise, now a sea-gull or a dragon-fly, now some
fleet-footed, keen-eyed quadruped that did not live by slaying, for
she had a horror of bloodshed.
She could only go where these creatures chose to take her, since she
had no power to control their actions in the slightest degree; but
she saw, heard, smelled and touched and tasted with their organs of
sense, and was as conscious of their animal life as they were
themselves. Her description of this phase of her earthly career is
full of extraordinary interest, and sometimes extremely
funny--though quite unconsciously so, no doubt. For instance, she
tells how happy she once was when she inhabited a small brown
Pomeranian dog called "Schnapfel," in Cologne, and belonging to a
Jewish family who dealt in old clothes near the Cathedral; and how
she loved them and looked up to them--how she revelled in fried fish
and the smell of it--and in all the stinks in every street of the
famous city--all except one, that arose from Herr Johann Maria
Farina's renowned emporium in the Julichs Platz, which so offended
the canine nostrils that she had to give up inhabiting that small
Pomeranian dog forever, etc.
Then she took to man, and inhabited man and woman, and especially
child, in all parts of the globe for many years; and, finally, for
the last fifty or sixty years or so, she settled herself exclusively
among the best and healthiest English she could find.
She took a great fancy to the Rohans, who are singularly well
endowed in health of mind and body, and physical beauty, and
happiness of temper. She became especially fond of the ill-fated but
amiable Lord Runswick--Barty's father. Then through him she knew
Antoinette, and loved her so well that she determined to incarnate
herself at last as their child; but she had become very cautious and
worldly during her wandering life on earth, and felt that she would
not be quite happy either as a man or a woman in Western Europe
unless she were reborn in holy wedlock--a concession she made to our
British prejudices in favor of respectability; she describes herself
as the only Martian Philistine and snob.
Evil communications corrupt good manners, and poor Martia, to her
infinite sorrow and self-reproach, was conscious of a sad lowering
of her moral tone after this long frequentation of the best earthly
human beings--even the best English.
She grew to admire worldly success, rank, social distinction, the
perishable beauty of outward form, the lust of the flesh and the
pride of the eye--the pomps and vanities of this wicked world--and
to basely long for these in her own person!
Then when Barty was born she loved to inhabit his singularly well
constituted little body better than any other, and to identify
herself with his happy child-life, and enjoy his singularly perfect
senses, and sleep his beautiful sleep, and revel in the dreams he so
completely forgot when he woke--reminiscent dreams, that she was
actually able to weave out of the unconscious brain that was his:
absolutely using his dormant organs of memory for purposes of her
own, to remember and relive her own past pleasures and pains, so
sensitively and highly organized was he; and to her immense surprise
she found she could make him feel her presence even when awake by
means of the magnetic sense that pervaded her strongly as it
pervades all Martian souls, till they reincarnate themselves among
us and forget.
And thus he was conscious of the north whenever she enjoyed the
hospitality of his young body.
She stuck to him for many years, till he offended her taste by his
looseness of life as a Guardsman (for she was extremely
straitlaced); and she inhabited him no more for some time, though
she often watched him through the eyes of others, and always loved
him and lamented sorely over his faults and follies.
Then one memorable night, in the energy of her despair at his
resolve to slip that splendid body of his, she was able to influence
him in his sleep, and saved his life; and all her love came back
tenfold.
She had never been able to impose a fraction of her will on any
being, animal or human, that she had ever inhabited on earth until
that memorable night in Malines, where she made him write at her
dictation.
Then she conceived an immense desire that he should marry the
splendid Julia, whom she had often inhabited also, that she might
one day be a child of his by such a mother, and go through her
earthly incarnation in the happiest conceivable circumstances; but
herein she was balked by Barty's instinctive preference for Leah,
and again gave him up in a huff.
But she soon took to inhabiting Leah a great deal, and found her
just as much to her taste for her own future earthly mother as the
divine Julia herself, and made up her mind she would make Barty
great and famous by a clever management of his very extraordinary
brains, of which she had discovered the hidden capacity, and
influence the earth for its good--for she had grown to love the
beautiful earth, in spite of its iniquities--and finally be a child
of Barty and Leah, every new child of whom seemed an improvement on
the last, as though practice made perfect.
Such is, roughly, the story of Martia.
There is no doubt--both Barty and Leah agreed with me in this--that
it is an easy story to invent, though it is curiously convincing to
read in the original shape, with all its minute details and their
verisimilitude; but even then there is nothing in it that the author
of _Sardonyx_ could not have easily imagined and made more
convincing still.
He declared that all through life on awaking from his night's sleep
he always felt conscious of having had extraordinary dreams--even as
a child--but that he forgot them in the very act of waking, in spite
of strenuous efforts to recall them. But now and again on sinking
into sleep the vague memory of those forgotten dreams would come
back, and they were all of a strange life under new conditions--just
such a life as Martia had described--where arabesques of artificial
light and interwoven curves of subtle sound had a significance
undreamt of by mortal eyes or ears, and served as conductors to a
heavenly bliss unknown to earth--revelations denied to us here, or
we should be very different beings from what we most unhappily are.
He thought it quite possible that his brain in sleep had at last
become so active through the exhausting and depleting medical regime
that he went through in Malines that it actually was able to dictate
its will to his body, and that everything might have happened to him
as it did then and afterwards without any supernatural or
ultranatural agency whatever--without a Martia!
He might, in short, have led a kind of dual life, and Martia might
be a simple fancy or invention of his brain in an abnormal state of
activity during slumber; and both Leah and I inclined to this belief
(but for a strange thing which happened later, and which I will tell
in due time). Indeed, it all seems so silly and far-fetched, so "out
of the question," that one feels almost ashamed at bringing this
Martia into a serious biography of a great man--un conte a dormir
debout! But you must wait for the end.
Anyhow, the singular fact remains that in some way inexplicable to
himself Barty has influenced the world in a direction which it never
entered his thoughts even to conceive, so far as he remembered.
Think of all he has done.
He has robbed Death of nearly all its terrors; even for the young it
is no longer the grisly phantom it once was for ourselves, but
rather of an aspect mellow and benign; for to the most sceptical he
(and only he) has restored that absolute conviction of an
indestructible germ of Immortality within us, born of remembrance
made perfect and complete after dissolution: he alone has built the
golden bridge in the middle of which science and faith can shake
hands over at least one common possibility--nay, one common
certainty for those who have read him aright.
There is no longer despair in bereavement--all bereavement is but a
half parting; there is no real parting except for those who survive,
and the longest earthly life is but a span. Whatever the future may
be, the past will be ours forever, and that means our punishment and
our reward and reunion with those we loved. It is a happy phrase,
that which closes the career of _Sardonyx_. It has become as
universal as the Lord's Prayer!
To think that so simple and obvious a solution should have lain
hidden all these aeons, to turn up at last as though by chance in a
little illustrated story-book! What a nugget!
Ou avions-nous donc la tete et les yeux?
Physical pain and the origin of evil seem the only questions with
which he has not been able to grapple. And yet if those difficulties
are ever dealt with and mastered and overcome for us it can only be
by some follower of Barty's methods.
It is true, no doubt, that through him suicide has become the normal
way out of our troubles when these are beyond remedy. I will not
express any opinion as to the ethical significance of this admitted
result of his teaching, which many of us still find it so hard to
reconcile with their conscience.
Then, by a dexterous manipulation of our sympathies that amounts to
absolute conjuring, he has given the death-blow to all cruelty that
serves for our amusement, and killed the pride and pomp and
circumstance of glorious sport, and made them ridiculous with his
lusty laugh; even the bull-fights in Spain are coming to an end, and
all through a Spanish translation of _Life-blood_. All the
cruelties of the world are bound to follow in time, and this not so
much because they are cruel as because they are ridiculous and mean
and ugly, and would make us laugh if they didn't make us cry.
And to whom but Barty Josselin do we owe it that our race is on an
average already from four to six inches taller than it was thirty
years ago, men and women alike; that strength and beauty are rapidly
becoming the rule among us, and weakness and ugliness the exception?
He has been hard on these; he has been cruel to be kind, and they
have received notice to quit, and been generously compensated in
advance, I think! Who in these days would dare to enter the holy
state of wedlock unless they were pronounced physically, morally,
and mentally fit--to procreate their kind--not only by their own
conscience, but by the common consent of all who know them? And that
beauty, health, and strength are a part of that fitness, and old age
a bar to it, who would dare deny?
I'm no Adonis myself. I've got a long upper lip and an Irish kink in
my nose, inherited perhaps from some maternally ancestral Blake of
Derrydown, who may have been a proper blackguard! And that kink
should be now, no doubt, the lawful property of some ruffianly
cattle-houghing moonlighter, whose nose--which should have been
mine--is probably as straight as Barty's. For in Ireland are to be
found the handsomest and ugliest people in all Great Britain, and in
Great Britain the handsomest and ugliest people in the whole world.
Anyhow, I have known my place. I have not perpetuated that kink, and
with it, possibly, the base and cowardly instincts of which it was
meant to be the outward and visible sign--though it isn't in my
case--that my fellow-men might give me a wide berth.
Leah's girlish instinct was a right one when she said me nay that
afternoon by the Chelsea pier--for how could she see inside me, poor
child? How could Beauty guess the Beast was a Prince in disguise? It
was no fairy-tale!
Things have got mixed up; but they're all coming right, and all
through Barty Josselin.
And what vulgar pride and narrownesses and meannesses and vanities
and uglinesses of life, in mass and class and individual, are now
impossible!--and all through Barty Josselin and his quaint ironies
of pen and pencil, forever trembling between tears and laughter,
with never a cynical spark or a hint of bitterness.
How he has held his own against the world! how he has scourged its
wickedness and folly, this gigantic optimist, who never wrote a
single line in his own defence!
How quickly their laugh recoiled on those early laughers! and how
Barty alone laughed well because he laughed the last, and taught the
laughers to laugh on his side! People thought he was always
laughing. It was not so.