great Rubes' country. I am going to hear of the Past and the Future. I
am going to listen to what the Poets say. The swallows never would tell
me anything; but now I shall know as much as they know. Are you not glad
for me, O Sun?"
The Sun came over the trees, and heard and said nothing. If he had
answered at all he must have said:--
"The only time when a human soul is either wise or happy, is in that one
single moment when the hour of my own shining or of the moon's beaming
seems to that single soul to be past and present and future, to be at
once the creation and the end of all things. Faust knew that; so will
you."
But the Sun shone on and held his peace. He sees all things ripen and
fall. He can wait. He knows the end. It is always the same.
He brings the fruit out of the peach-flower, and rounds it and touches
it into ruddiest rose and softest gold; but the sun knows well that the
peach must drop--whether into the basket to be eaten by kings, or on to
the turf to be eaten by ants. What matter which very much after all?
The Sun is not a cynic; he is only wise because he is Life and He is
death, the creator and the corrupter of all things.
* * *
"And where are you going so fast, as if those wooden shoes of yours were
sandals of mercury?"
"Mercury--is that a shoemaker?"
"No, my dear. He did a terrible bit of cobbling once, when he made
Woman. But he did not shoe her feet with swiftness that I know of; she
only runs away to be run after, and if you do not pursue her, she comes
back--always."
Bébée did not understand at all.
"I thought God made women?" she said, a little awe-stricken.
* * *
There is a dignity of peasants as well as of kings--the dignity that
comes from all absence of effort, all freedom from pretence. Bébée had
this, and she had more still than this: she had the absolute simplicity
of childhood with her still.
Some women have it still when they are fourscore.
* * *
Prosper Bar, who is a Calvinist, always says, "Do not mix up prayer and
play; you would not cut a gherkin in your honey;" but I do not know why
he called prayer a gherkin, because it is sweet enough--sweeter than
anything, I think.
* * *
There is not much change in the great Soignies woods. They are aisles on
aisles of beautiful green trees, crossing and recrossing; tunnels of
dark foliage that look endless; long avenues of beech, of oak, of elm,
or of fir, with the bracken and the brushwood growing dense between; a
delicious forest growth everywhere, shady even at noon, and, by a little
past midday, dusky as evening; with the forest fragrance, sweet and
dewy, all about, and under the fern the stirring of wild game, and the
white gleam of little rabbits, and the sound of the wings of birds.
Soignies is not legend-haunted like the Black Forest, nor king-haunted
like Fontainebleau, nor sovereign of two historic streams like the brave
woods of Heidelberg; nor wild and romantic, and broken with black rocks,
and poetised by the shade of Jaques, and swept through by a perfect
river, like its neighbours of Ardennes; nor throned aloft on mighty
mountains like the majestic oak glades of the Swabian hills of the
ivory-carvers.
Soignies is only a Flemish forest in a plain, throwing its shadow over
corn-fields and cattle-pastures, with no panorama beyond it and no
wonders in its depth. But it is a fresh, bold, beautiful forest for all
that.
It has only green leaves to give--green leaves always, league after
league; but there is about it that vague mystery which all forests have,
and this universe of leaves seems boundless, and Pan might dwell in it,
and St. Hubert, and John Keats.
* * *
"I am going to learn to be very wise, dear," she told them; "I shall not
have time to dance or to play."
"But people are not merry when they are wise, Bébée," said Franz, the
biggest boy.
"Perhaps not," said Bébée; "but one cannot be everything, you know,
Franz."
"But surely you would rather be merry than anything else?"
"I think there is something better, Franz. I am not sure; I want to find
out; I will tell you when I know."
"Who has put that into your head, Bébée?"
"The angels in the Cathedral," she told them, and the children were awed
and left her, and went away to play blindman's buff by themselves on the
grass by the swan's water.
"But for all that the angels have said it," said Franz to his sisters,
"I cannot see what good it will be to her to be wise, if she will not
care any longer afterwards for almond gingerbread and currant cake."
* * *
To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.
* * *
"Ay dear; when the frost kills your brave rosebush, root and bud, do you
think of the thorns that pricked you, or only of the fair sweet-smelling
things that flowered all your summer?"
* * *
Flowers belong to fairyland; the flowers and the birds, and the
butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age; the only
perfectly beautiful things on earth, joyous, innocent, half divine,
useless, say they who are wiser than God.
* * *
When the day was done, Bébée gave a quick sigh as she looked across the
square. She had so wanted to tell him that she was not ungrateful, and
she had a little moss-rose ready, with a sprig of sweetbriar, and a tiny
spray of maiden-hair fern that grew under the willows, which she had
kept covered up with a leaf of sycamore all the day long.
No one would have it now.
The child went out of the place sadly, as the carillon rang. There was
only the moss-rose in her basket, and the red and white currants that
had been given her for her dinner.
She went along the twisting, many-coloured, quaintly-fashioned streets,
till she came to the water-side.
It is very ancient, there still; there are all manner of old buildings,
black and brown and grey, peaked roofs, gabled windows, arched doors,
crumbling bridges, twisted galleries leaning to touch the dark surface
of the canal, dusky wharves crowded with barrels, and bales, and cattle,
and timber, and all the various freightage that the good ships come and
go with all the year round, to and from the Zuyder Zee, and the Baltic
water, and the wild Northumbrian shores, and the iron-bound Scottish
headlands, and the pretty grey Norman seaports, and the white sandy
dunes of Holland, with the toy towns and the straight poplar-trees.
Bébée was fond of watching the brigs and barges, that looked so big to
her, with their national flags flying, and their tall masts standing
thick as grass, and their tawny sails flapping in the wind, and about
them the sweet, strong smell of that strange, unknown thing, the sea.
Sometimes the sailors would talk with her; sometimes some old salt,
sitting astride of a cask, would tell her a mariner's tale of far-away
lands and mysteries of the deep; sometimes some curly-headed cabin-boy
would give her a shell or a plume of seaweed, and try and make her
understand what the wonderful wild water was like, which was not quiet
and sluggish and dusky as this canal was, but was for ever changing and
moving, and curling and leaping, and making itself now blue as her eyes,
now black as that thunder-cloud, now white as the snow that the winter
wind tossed, now pearl-hued and opaline as the convolvulus that blew in
her own garden.
And Bébée would listen, with the shell in her lap, and try to
understand, and gaze at the ships and then at the sky beyond them, and
try to figure to herself those strange countries, to which these ships
were always going, and saw in fancy all the blossoming orchard province
of green France, and all the fir-clothed hills and rushing rivers of the
snow-locked Swedish shore, and saw too, doubtless, many lands that had
no place at all except in dreamland, and were more beautiful even than
the beauty of the earth, as poets' countries are, to their own sorrow,
oftentimes.
But this dull day Bébée did not go down upon the wharf; she did not want
the sailor's tales; she saw the masts and the bits of bunting that
streamed from them, and they made her restless, which they had never
done before. Instead she went in at a dark old door and climbed up a
steep staircase that went up and up and up, as though she were mounting
Ste. Gudule's belfry towers; and at the top of it entered a little
chamber in the roof, where one square unglazed hole that served for
light looked out upon the canal, with all its crowded craft, from the
dainty schooner yacht, fresh as gilding and holystone could make her,
that was running for pleasure to the Scheldt, to the rude, clumsy
coal-barge, black as night, that bore the rough diamonds of Belgium to
the snow-buried roofs of Christiania and Stromsöon.
In the little dark attic there was a very old woman in a red petticoat
and a high cap, who sat against the window, and pricked out lace
patterns with a pin on thick paper. She was eighty-five years old, and
could hardly keep body and soul together.
Bébée, running to her, kissed her.
"O mother Annémie, look here! Beautiful red and white currants, and a
roll; I saved them for you. They are the first currants we have seen
this year. Me? oh, for me, I have eaten more than are good! You know I
pick fruit like a sparrow, always. Dear mother Annémie, are you better?
Are you quite sure you are better to-day?"
The little old withered woman, brown as a walnut and meagre as a rush,
took the currants, and smiled with a childish glee, and began to eat
them, blessing the child with each crumb she broke off the bread.
"Why had you not a grandmother of your own, my little one?" she mumbled.
"How good you would have been to her, Bébée?"
"Yes," said Bébée seriously, but her mind could not grasp the idea. It
was easier for her to believe the fanciful lily-parentage of Antoine's
stories. "How much work have you done, Annémie? Oh, all that? all that?
But there is enough for a week. You work too early and too late, you
dear Annémie."
"Nay, Bébée, when one has to get one's bread, that cannot be. But I am
afraid my eyes are failing. That rose now, is it well done?"
"Beautifully done. Would the Baës take them if they were not? You know
he is one that cuts every centime in four pieces."
"Ah! sharp enough, sharp enough--that is true. But I am always afraid of
my eyes. I do not see the flags out there so well as I used to do."
"Because the sun is so bright, Annémie; that is all. I myself, when I
have been sitting all day in the Place in the light, the flowers look
pale to me. And you know it is not age with _me_, Annémie?"
The old woman and the young girl laughed together at that droll idea.
"You have a merry heart, dear little one," said old Annémie. "The saints
keep it to you always."
"May I tidy the room a little?"
"To be sure, dear, and thank you too. I have not much time, you see; and
somehow my back aches badly when I stoop."
"And it is so damp here for you, over all that water!" said Bébée, as
she swept and dusted and set to rights the tiny place, and put in a
little broken pot a few sprays of honeysuckle and rosemary that she had
brought with her. "It is so damp here. You should have come and lived in
my hut with me, Annémie, and sat out under the vine all day, and looked
after the chickens for me when I was in the town. They are such
mischievous little souls; as soon as my back is turned one or other is
sure to push through the roof, and get out amongst the flower-beds. Will
you never change your mind, and live with me, Annémie? I am sure you
would be happy, and the starling says your name quite plain, and he is
such a funny bird to talk to; you never would tire of him. Will you
never come? It is so bright there, and green and sweet-smelling, and to
think you never even have seen it!--and the swans and all,--it is a
shame."
"No, dear," said old Annémie, eating her last bunch of currants. "You
have said so so often, and you are good and mean it, that I know. But I
could not leave the water. It would kill me.
"Out of this window you know I saw my Jeannot's brig go
away--away--away--till the masts were lost in the mists. Going with iron
to Norway; the Fleur d'Epine of this town, a good ship, and a sure, and
he her mate; and as proud as might be, and with a little blest Mary in
lead round his throat.
"She was to be back in port in eight months bringing timber. Eight
months--that brought Easter time.
"But she never came. Never, never, never, you know.
"I sat here watching them come and go, and my child sickened and died,
and the summer passed, and the autumn, and all the while I
looked--looked--looked; for the brigs are all much alike; only his I
always saw as soon as she hove in sight because he tied a hank of flax
to her mizzen mast; and when he was home safe and sound I spun the hank
into hose for him; that was a fancy of his, and for eleven voyages, one
on another, he had never missed to tie the flax nor I to spin the hose.
"But the hank of flax I never saw this time; nor the brave brig; nor my
good man with his sunny blue eyes.
"Only one day in winter, when the great blocks of ice were smashing
hither and thither, a coaster came in and brought tidings of how off in
the Danish waters they had come on a waterlogged brig, and had boarded
her, and had found her empty, and her hull riven in two, and her crew
all drowned and dead beyond any manner of doubt. And on her stern there
was her name painted white, the Fleur d'Epine, of Brussels, as plain as
name could be; and that was all we ever knew--what evil had struck her,
or how they had perished, nobody ever told.
"Only the coaster brought that bit of beam away, with the Fleur d'Epine
writ clear upon it.
"But you see I never _know_ my man is dead.
"Any day--who can say?--any of those ships may bring him aboard of her,
and he may leap out on the wharf there, and come running up the stairs
as he used to do, and cry, in his merry voice, 'Annémie, Annémie, here
is more flax to spin, here is more hose to weave!' For that was always
his homeward word; no matter whether he had had fair weather or foul, he
always knotted the flax to his mast-head.
"So you see, dear, I could not leave here. For what if he came and found
me away? He would say it was an odd fashion of mourning for him.
"And I could not do without the window, you know. I can watch all the
brigs come in; and I can smell the shipping smell that I have loved all
the days of my life; and I can see the lads heaving, and climbing, and
furling, and mending their bits of canvas, and hauling their flags up
and down.
"And then who can say?--the sea never took him, I think--I think I shall
hear his voice before I die.
"For they do say that God is good."
Bébée sweeping very noiselessly, listened, and her eyes grew wistful and
wondering. She had heard the story a thousand times; always in different
words, but always the same little tale, and she knew how old Annémie was
deaf to all the bells that tolled the time, and blind to all the
whiteness of her hair, and all the wrinkles of her face, and only
thought of her sea-slain lover as he had been in the days of her youth.
* * *
When we suffer very much ourselves, anything that smiles in the sun
seems cruel--a child, a bird, a dragonfly--nay, even a fluttering
ribbon, or a spear-grass that waves in the wind.
* * *
Bébée, whose religion was the sweetest and vaguest mingling of Pagan and
Christian myths, and whose faith in fairies and in saints was exactly
equal in strength and in ignorance--Bébée filled the delf pot anew
carefully, then knelt down on the turf in that little green corner, and
prayed in devout hopeful childish good faith to the awful unknown Powers
who were to her only as gentle guides and kindly playmates.
Was she too familiar with the Holy Mother?
She was almost fearful that she was; but then the Holy Mother loved
flowers so well, Bébée could not feel aloof from her, nor be afraid.
"When one cuts the best blossoms for her, and tries to be good, and
never tells a lie," thought Bébée, "I am quite sure, as she loves the
lilies, that she will never altogether forget me."
* * *
The loveliest love is that which dreams high above all storms, unsoiled
by all burdens; but, perhaps, the strongest love is that which, whilst
it adores, drags its feet through mire, and burns its brow in heat for
the thing beloved.
* * *
It is, perhaps, the most beautiful square in all Northern Europe, with
its black timbers and gilded carvings, and blazoned windows, and
majestic scutcheons, and fantastic pinnacles. This Bébée did not know,
but she loved it, and she sat resolutely in front of the Broodhuis,
selling her flowers, smiling, chatting, helping the old woman, counting
her little gains, eating her bit of bread at noon-day like any other
market girl; but, at times, glancing up to the stately towers and the
blue sky, with a look on her face that made the old tinker and cobbler
whisper together--"What does she see there?--the dead people or the
angels?"
The truth was that even Bébée herself did not know very surely what she
saw--something that was still nearer to her than even this kindly crowd
that loved her. That was all she could have said had anybody asked her.
But none did.
No one wanted to hear what the dead said; and for the angels, the tinker
and the cobbler were of opinion that one had only too much of them
sculptured about everywhere, and shining on all the casements--in
reverence be it spoken of course.
_FAME._
"There is no soul in them," he muttered, and he set down his lamp and
frowned; a sullen mechanical art made him angered like an insult to
heaven; and these were soulless; their drawing was fine, their anatomy
faultless, their proportions and perspective excellent; but there all
merit ended. They were worse than faulty--they were commonplace. There
is no sin in Art so deadly as that.
* * *
He had been only a poor lad, a coppersmith's son, here in Munich; one
among many, and beaten and cursed at home very often for mooning over
folly when others were hard at work. But he had minded neither curse nor
blow. He had always said to himself, "I am a painter." Whilst camps were
soaked with blood and echoing only the trumpets of war, he had only seen
the sweet divine smile of Art. He had gone barefoot to Italy for love of
it, and had studied, and laboured, and worshipped, and been full of the
fever of great effort and content with the sublime peace of conscious
power. He had believed in himself: it is much. But it is not all. As
years had slid away and the world of men would not believe in him, this
noble faith in himself grew a weary and bitter thing. One shadow climbed
the hills of the long years with him and was always by his side: this
constant companion was Failure.
Fame is very capricious, but Failure is seldom inconstant. Where it once
clings, there it tarries.
* * *
It was a brilliant and gay day in Munich. It was the beginning of a
Bavarian summer, with the great plain like a sea of grass with flowers
for its foam, and the distant Alps of Tyrol and Vorarlberg clearly seen
in warm, transparent, buoyant weather.
Down by the winding ways of the river there were birch and beechen
thickets in glory of leaf; big water-lilies spread their white beauty
against the old black timbers of the water-mills; and in the quaint,
ancient places of the old streets, under the gables and beams, pots of
basil, and strings of green pease, and baskets of sweet-smelling
gillyflowers and other fragrant old-fashioned things, blossomed wherever
there was a breadth of blue sky over them or a maiden's hand within;
whilst above the towers and steeples, above the clanging bells of the
Domkirche and the melon-shaped crest of the Frauenkirche, and all the
cupolas and spires and minarets in which the city abounds, the pigeons
went whirling and wheeling from five at sunrise to seven of sunset,
flocks of grey and blue and black and white, happy as only birds can be,
and as only birds can be when they are doves of Venice or of Munich,
with all the city's hearths and homes for their granaries, and with the
sun and the clouds for their royal estate.
In the wide, dull new town it was dusty and hot; the big squares were
empty and garish-looking; the blistering frescoes on the buildings were
gaudy and out of place; the porticoes and friezes were naked and
staring, and wanted all that belongs to them in Italy. All the deep,
intense shadows, the sultry air, the sense of immeasurable space and of
unending light, the half-naked figures graceful as a plume of maize, the
vast projecting roofs, the spouts of tossing water, the brown barefoot
straw-plaiter passing in a broad path of sunshine, the old bronze lamp
above the painted shrine, the gateway framing the ethereal landscape of
amethystine horizons and silvery olive ways--they want all these, do
these classic porticoes and pediments of Italy, and they seem to stare,
conscious of a discordance and a lack of harmony in the German air. But
in the old town there is beauty still; in the timbered house-fronts, in
the barred and sculptured casements, in the mighty gables, in the gilded
and pictured signs, in the sunburnt walls, in the grey churches, in the
furriers' stalls, in the toysellers' workshops, in the beetling
fortresses, in the picturesque waysides, here is the old Munich of the
Minnesingers and master masons, of the burghers and the _burschen_, of
the Schefflertanz, and of the merry Christchild Fair. And old Munich
keeps all to itself, whether with winter snow on its eaves, or summer
leaves in its lattices; and here the maidens still wear coloured
kerchiefs on their heads and clattering shoes on their feet; and here
the students still look like etchings for old ballads, with long hair on
their shoulders and grey cloaks worn jauntily; and here something of the
odour and aspect of the Middle Ages lingers as about an illuminated roll
of vellum that has lain long put away and forgotten in a desk, with
faded rose-leaves and a miniature that has no name.
The Munich of builder-king Ludwig is grand, no doubt, and tedious and
utterly out of place, with mountains of marble and granite, and acres of
canvas more or less divine, and vast straight streets that make one weep
from weariness, and frescoed walls with nude women that seem to shiver
in the bitter Alpine winds; it is great, no doubt, but ponderously
unlovely, like the bronze Bavaria that looks over the plain, who can
hold six men in her head, but can never get fire in her eyes nor
meaning in her mouth--clumsy Athenæ-Artemis that she is.
New Munich, striving to be Athens or Rome, is monotonous and tiresome,
but old Munich is quaint and humble, and historical and romancical, with
its wooden pavements under foot, and its clouds of doves above head;
indeed, has so much beauty of its own, like any old painted Missal or
golden goblet of the _moyen âge_, that it seems incredible to think that
any man could ever have had the heart to send the hammers of masons
against it, and set up bald walls of plaster in its stead. Wandering in
old Munich--there is not much of it left, alas!--is like reading a
black-letter ballad about Henry the Lion or Kaiser Max; it has sombre
nooks and corners, bright gleams of stained casements, bold oriels, and
sculptured shields, arcades and arches, towers and turrets, light and
shade, harmony and irregularity, all, in a word, that old cities have,
and old Teutonic cities beyond all others; and when the Metzgersprung is
in full riot round the Marienplatz, or on Corpus Christi day, when the
King and the Court and the Church, the guilds and the senate and the
magistracy, all go humbly through the flower-strewn streets, it is easy
to forget the present and to think that one is still in the old days
with the monks, who gave their name to it, tranquil in their work-rooms
and the sound of battle all over the lands around them.