WEARY AND FAR DISTANT.
Twice already, in accordance with my promise to Dalrymple, I had called
upon Madame de Courcelles, and finding her out each time, had left my
card, and gone away disappointed. From Dalrymple himself, although I had
written to him several times, I heard seldom, and always briefly. His
first notes were dated from Berlin, and those succeeding them from
Vienna. He seemed restless, bitter, dissatisfied with himself, and with
the world. Naturally unfit for a lounging, idle life, his active nature,
now that it had to bear up against the irritation of hope deferred,
chafed and fretted for work.
"My sword-arm," he wrote in one of his letters, "is weary of its
holiday. There are times when I long for the smell of gunpowder, and the
thunder of battle. I am sick to death of churches and picture-galleries,
operas, dilettantism, white-kid-glovism, and all the hollow shows and
seemings of society. Sometimes I regret having left the army--at others
I rejoice; for, after all, in these piping times of peace, to be a
soldier is to be a mere painted puppet--a thing of pipe-clay and gold
bullion--an expensive scarecrow--an elegant Guy Fawkes--a sign, not of
what is, but of what has been, and yet may be again. For my part, I care
not to take the livery without the service. Pshaw! will things never
mend! Are the good old times, and the good old international hatreds,
gone by for ever? Shall we never again have a thorough, seasonable,
wholesome, continental war? This place (Vienna) would be worth fighting
for, if one had the chance. I sometimes amuse myself by planning a
siege, when I ride round the fortifications, as is my custom of an
afternoon."
In another, after telling me that he had been reading some books of
travel in Egypt and Central America, he said:--
"Next to a military life I think that of a traveller--a genuine
traveller, who turns his back upon railroads and guides--must be the
most exciting and the most enviable under heaven. Since reading these
books, I dream of the jungle and the desert, and fancy that a
buffalo-hunt must be almost as fine sport as a charge of cavalry. Oh,
what a weary exile this is! I feel as if the very air were stagnant
around me, and I, like the accursed vessel that carried the ancient
mariner,--
As idle as a painted ship,
Upon a painted ocean.'"
Sometimes, though rarely, he mentioned Madame de Courcelles, and then
very guardedly: always as "Madame de Courcelles," and never as his wife.
"That morning," he wrote, "comes back to me with all the vagueness of a
dream--you will know what morning I mean, and why it fills so shadowy a
page in the book of my memory. And it might as well have been a dream,
for aught of present peace or future hope that it has brought me. I
often think that I was selfish when I exacted that pledge from her. I do
not see of what good it can be to either her or me, or in what sense I
can be said to have gained even the power to protect and serve her.
Would that I were rich; or that she and I were poor together, and
dwelling far away in some American wild, under the shade of primeval
trees, the world forgetting; by the world forgot! I should enjoy the
life of a Canadian settler--so free, so rational, so manly. How happy we
might be--she with her children, her garden, her books; I with my dogs,
my gun, my lands! What a curse it is, this spider's web of civilization,
that hems and cramps us in on every side, and from which not all the
armor of common-sense is sufficient to preserve us!"
Sometimes he broke into a strain of forced gayety, more sad, to my
thinking, than the bitterest lamentations could have been.
"I wish to Heaven," he said, in one of his later letters--"I wish to
Heaven I had no heart, and no brain! I wish I was, like some worthy
people I know, a mere human zoophyte, consisting of nothing but a mouth
and a stomach. Only conceive how it must simplify life when once one has
succeeded in making a clean sweep of all those finer emotions which
harass more complicated organisms! Enviable zoophytes, that live only to
digest!--who would not be of the brotherhood?"
In another he wrote:--
"I seem to have lived years in the last five or six weeks, and to have
grown suddenly old and cynical. Some French writer (I think it is
Alphonse Karr) says, 'Nothing in life is really great and good, except
what is not true. Man's greatest treasures are his illusions.' Alas! my
illusions have been dropping from me in showers of late, like withered
leaves in Autumn. The tree will be bare as a gallows ere long, if these
rough winds keep on blowing. If only things would amuse me as of old! If
there was still excitement in play, and forgetfulness in wine, and
novelty in travel! But there is none--and all things alike are 'flat,
stale, and unprofitable,' The truth is, Damon, I want but one thing--and
wanting that, lack all."
Here is one more extract, and it shall be the last:--
"You ask me how I pass my days--in truth, wearily enough. I rise with
the dawn, but that is not very early in September; and I ride for a
couple of hours before breakfast. After breakfast I play billiards in
some public room, consume endless pipes, read the papers, and so on.
Later in the day I scowl through a picture-gallery, or a string of
studios; or take a pull up the river; or start off upon a long, solitary
objectless walk through miles and miles of forest. Then comes
dinner--the inevitable, insufferable, interminable German table-d'hôte
dinner--and then there is the evening to be got through somehow! Now and
then I drop in at a theatre, but generally take refuge in some plebeian
Lust Garten or Beer Hall, where amid clouds of tobacco-smoke, one may
listen to the best part-singing and zitter-playing in Europe. And so my
days drag by--who but myself knows how slowly? Truly, Damon, there comes
to every one of us, sooner or later, a time when we say of life as
Christopher Sly said of the comedy--''Tis an excellent piece of work.
Would 'twere done!'"