I wonder what the secret of it is—why that little fragment of a
musical phrase has always had this instant, irresistible power to move
me. The tune of which it formed a part I have never heard; whether it
was a merry tune or a sad tune, a pretty tune or a stupid one, I have
no means of guessing. A sequence of six notes, like six words taken
from the middle of a sentence, it stands quite by itself, detached,
fortuitous. If I were to pick it out for you on the piano, you would
scoff at it; you would tell me that it is altogether pointless and
unsuggestive, that any six notes, struck at haphazard, would signify as
much. And I certainly could not, with the least show of reason, maintain
the contrary. I could only wonder the more why it has always had, for
me, this very singular charm. As when I was a child, so now, after all
these years, it is a sort of talisman in my hands, a thing to conjure
with. I have but to breathe it never so softly to myself, and (if I
choose) the actual world melts away, and I am journeying on wings in
dreamland. Whether I choose or not, it always thrills my heart with
responsive echoes, it always wakes a sad, sweet emotion.
I remember quite clearly the day when I first heard it; quite clearly,
though it was more—oh, more than five-and-twenty years ago, and
the days that went before and came after it have entirely lost their
outlines, and merged into a vague golden blur. That day, too, as I look
backwards, glows in the distance with a golden light; and if I were
to speak upon my impulse, I should vow it was a smiling day of June,
clothed in sunshine and crowned with roses. But then, if I were to speak
upon my impulse, I should vow that it was June at Saint-Graal the whole
year round. When I stop to think, I remember that it was a rainy day,
and that the ground was sprinkled with dead leaves. I remember standing
at a window in my grandmother’s room, and gazing out with rueful eyes.
It rained doggedly, relentlessly—even, it seemed to me, defiantly,
spitefully, as if it took a malicious pleasure in penning me up within
doors. The mountains, the Pyrenees, a few miles to the south, were
completely hidden by the veil of waters. The sodden leaves, brown
patches on the lawn and in the pathways, struggled convulsively, like
wounded birds, to fly from the gusts of wind, but fell back fluttering
heavily. One could almost have touched the clouds, they hung so low, big
ragged tufts of sad-coloured cotton-wool, blown rapidly through the air,
just above the writhing tree-tops. Everywhere in the house there was
a faint fragrance of burning wood: fires had been lighted to keep the
dampness out.
Indeed, if it had been a fair day, my adventure could scarcely have
befallen. I should have been abroad, in the garden or the forest,
playing with André, our farmer’s son; angling, with a bit of red
worsted as bait, for frogs in the pond; trying to catch lizards on the
terrace; lying under a tree with Don Quixote or Le Capitaine Fracasse;
visiting Manuela in her cottage; or perhaps, best of all, spending
the afternoon with Hélène, at Granjolaye. It was because the rain
interdicted these methods of amusement that I betook myself for solace
to Constantinople.
I don’t know why—I don’t think any one knew why—that part of
our house was called Constantinople; but it had been called so from time
immemorial, and we all accepted it as a matter of course. It was the
topmost story of the East Wing—three rooms: one little room, by way
of ante-chamber, into which you entered from a corkscrew staircase; then
another little room at your left; and then a big room, a long dim room,
with only two windows, one at either end. And these rooms served as a
sort of Hades for departed household gods. They were crowded, crowded
to overflowing, with such wonderful old things! Old furniture—old
straight-backed chairs, old card-tables, with green cloth tops, and
brass claws for feet, old desks and cabinets, the dismembered relics of
old four-post bedsteads; old clothes—old hats, boots, cloaks—green
silk calashes, like bonnets meant for the ladies of Brobdingnag—and
old hoop-petticoats, the skeletons of dead toilets; old books,
newspapers, pictures; old lamps and candlesticks, clocks, fire-irons,
vases; an old sedan-chair; old spurs, old swords, old guns and pistols;
generations upon generations of superannuated utilities and vanities,
slumbering in one another’s shadows, under a common sheet of dust, and
giving off a thin, penetrating, ancient smell.
When it rained, Constantinople was my ever-present refuge. It was a
land of penumbra and mystery, a realm of perpetual wonderment, a mine
of inexhaustible surprises. I never visited it without finding something
new, without getting a sensation. One day, when André was there with
me, we both saw a ghost—yes, as plainly as at this moment I see the
paper I’m writing on; but I won’t turn aside now to speak of that.
And as for my finds, on two or three occasions, at least, they had more
than a subjective metaphysical importance. The first was a chest filled
with jewellery and trinkets, an iron chest, studded with nails, in size
and shape like a small trunk, with a rounded lid. I dragged it out of
a dark corner, from amidst a quantity of rubbish, and (it wasn’t even
locked!) fancy the eyes I made when I beheld its contents: half-a-dozen
elaborately carved, high-back tortoise-shell combs, ranged in a morocco
case; a beautiful old-fashioned watch, in the form of a miniature
guitar; an enamelled snuff-box; and then no end of rings, brooches,
buckles, seals, and watch-keys, set with precious stones—not very
precious stones, perhaps—only garnets, amethysts, carnelians; but
mercy, how they glittered! I ran off in great excitement to call my
grandmother; and she called my uncle Edmond; and he, alas, applied the
laws of seigniory to the transaction, and I saw my trover appropriated.
My other important finds were appropriated also, but about them I did
not care so much—they were only papers. One was a certificate, dated
in the Year III, and attesting that my grandfather’s father had taken
the oath of allegiance to the Republic. As I was a fierce Legitimist,
this document afforded me but moderate satisfaction. The other was a
Map of the World, covering a sheet of cardboard nearly a yard square,
executed in pen-and-ink, but with such a complexity of hair-lines,
delicate shading, and ornate lettering, that, until you had examined it
closely, you would have thought it a carefully finished steel-engraving.
It was signed “Herminie de Pontacq, 1818”; that is to say, by my
grandmother herself, who in 1818 had been twelve years old; dear me,
only twelve years old! It was delightful and marvellous to think that my
own grandmother, in 1818, had been so industrious, and painstaking, and
accomplished a little girl. I assure you, I felt almost as proud as if I
had done it myself.
The small room at the left of the ante-chamber was consecrated to the
roba of an uncle of my grandfather’s, who had been a sugar-planter in
the province of New Orleans, in the reign of Louis XVI. He had also been
a colonel, and so the room was called the Colonel’s room. Here were
numberless mementos of the South: great palm-leaf fans, conch-shells,
and branches of coral, broad-brimmed hats of straw, monstrous white
umbrellas, and, in a corner, a collection of long slender wands, ending
in thick plumes of red and yellow feathers. These, I was informed, the
sugar-planter’s slaves, standing behind his chair, would flourish
about his head, to warn off the importunate winged insects that abound
là-bas. He had died at Paris in 1793, and of nothing more romantic than
a malignant fever, foolish person, when he might so easily have been
guillotined! (It was a matter of permanent regret with me that none of
our family had been guillotined.) But his widow had survived him for
more than forty years, and her my grandmother remembered perfectly.
A fat old Spanish Créole lady, fat and very lazy—oh, but very lazy
indeed. At any rate, she used to demand the queerest services of the
negress who was in constant attendance upon her. “Nanette, Nanette,
tourne tête à moi. Veux”—summon your fortitude—“veux
cracher!” Ah, well, we are told, they made less case of such details
in those robust old times. How would she have fared, poor soul, had she
fallen amongst us squeamish decadents?
It was into the Colonel’s room that I turned to-day. There was a
cupboard in its wall that I had never thoroughly examined. The lower
shelves, indeed, I knew by heart; they held, for the most part, empty
medicine bottles. But the upper ones?
I shut my eyes for a moment, and the flavour of that far-away afternoon
comes back fresher in my memory than yesterday’s. I am perched on a
chair, in the dim light of Constantinople, at Saint-Graal; my nostrils
are full of a musty, ancient smell; I can hear the rain pat-pattering on
the roof, the wind whistling at the window, and, faintly, in a
distant quarter of the house, my cousin Elodie playing her exercises
monotonously on the piano. I am balancing myself on tip-toe, craning
my neck, with only one care, one preoccupation, in the world—to get a
survey of the top shelf of the closet in the Colonel’s room. The next
to the top, and the next below that, I already command; they are vacant
of everything save dust. But the top one is still above my head, and
how to reach it seems a terribly vexed problem, of which, for a little
while, motionless, with bent brows, I am rapt in meditation. And then,
suddenly, I have an inspiration—I see my way.
It was not for nothing that my great-aunt Radigonde (think of having had
a great-aunt named Radigonde, and yet never having seen her! She died
before I was born—isn’t Fate unkind?)—it was not for nothing that
my great-aunt Radigonde, from 1820 till its extinction in 1838, had
subscribed to the Revue Rose—La Revue Rose; Echo du Bon Ton; Miroir de
la Mode; paraissant tous les mois; dirigée par une Dame de la Cour; nor
was it in vain, either, that my great-aunt Radigonde had had the annual
volumes of this fashionable intelligencer bound. Three or four of them
now, piled one above the other on my chair, lent me the altitude I
needed; and the top shelf yielded up its secret.
It was an abominably dusty secret, and it was quite a business to wipe
it off. Then I perceived that it was a box, a square box, about eighteen
inches long and half as deep, made of polished mahogany, inlaid
with scrolls and flourishes of satin-wood. Opened, it proved to be a
dressing-case. It was lined with pink velvet and white brocaded silk.
There was a looking-glass, in a pink velvet frame, with an edge of gold
lace, that swung up on a hinged support of tarnished ormolu; a sere
and yellow looking-glass, that gave back a reluctant, filmy image of
my face. There were half-a-dozen pear-shaped bottles, of wine-coloured
glass, with tarnished gilt tops. There was a thing that looked like the
paw of a small animal, the fur of which, at one end, was reddened, as if
it had been rubbed in some red powder. The velvet straps that had once
presumably held combs and brushes, had been despoiled by an earlier hand
than mine; but of two pockets in the lid the treasures were intact: a
tortoise-shell housewife, containing a pair of scissors, a thimble,
and a bodkin, and a tortoise-shell purse, each prettily incrusted with
silver and lined with thin pink silk.
In front, between two of the gilt-topped bottles, an oval of pink
velvet, with a tiny bird in ormolu perched upon it, was evidently
movable—a cover to something. When I had lifted it, I saw, first, a
little pane of glass, and then, through that, the brass cylinder and
long steel comb of a musical box. Wasn’t it an amiable conceit,
whereby my lady should be entertained with tinkling harmonies the while
her eyes and fingers were busied in the composition of her face? Was it
a frequent one in old dressing-cases?
Oh, yes, the key was there—a gilt key, coquettishly decorated with a
bow of pink ribbon; and when I had wound the mechanism up, the cylinder,
to my great relief, began to turn—to my relief, for I had feared
that the spring might be broken, or something; springs are so apt to be
broken in this disappointing world. The cylinder began to turn—but,
alas, in silence, or almost in silence, emitting only a faintly audible,
rusty gr-r-r-r, a sort of guttural grumble; until, all at once, when
I was least expecting it—tirala-tirala—it trilled out clearly,
crisply, six silvery notes, and then relapsed into its rusty gr-r-r-r.
So it would go on and on till it ran down. A minute or two of creaking
and croaking, as it were, whilst it cleared its old asthmatic throat,
then a sudden silvery tirala-tirala, then a catch, a cough, and
mutter-mutter-mutter. Or was it more like an old woman maundering in
her sleep, who should suddenly quaver out a snatch from a ditty of her
girlhood, and afterwards mumble incoherently again?
I suppose the pin-points on the cylinder, all save just those six, were
worn away; or, possibly, those teeth of the steel comb were the only
ones that retained elasticity enough to vibrate.
A sequence of six notes, as inconclusive as six words plucked at random
from the middle of a sentence; as void of musical value as six such
words would be of literary value. I wonder why it has always had this
instant, irresistible power to move me. It has always been a talisman in
my hands, a thing to conjure with. As when I was a child, so now, after
twenty years, I have but to breathe it to myself, and, if I will, the
actual world melts away, and I am journeying in dreamland. Whether I
will or not, it always stirs a sad, sweet emotion in my heart. I wonder
why. Tirala-tirala—I dare say, for another, any six notes, struck at
haphazard, would signify as much. But for me—ah, if I could seize the
sentiment it has for me, and translate it into English words, I should
have achieved a sort of miracle. For me, it is the voice of a spirit,
sighing something unutterable. It is an elixir, distilled of unearthly
things, six lucent drops; I drink them, and I am transported into
another atmosphere, and I see visions. It is Aladdin’s lamp; I
touch it, and cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces are mine in the
twinkling of an eye. It is my wishing-cap, my magic-carpet, my key to
the Castle of Enchantment.
The Castle of Enchantment....
When I was a child the Castle of Enchantment meant—the Future;
the great mysterious Future, away, away there, beneath the uttermost
horizon, where the sky is luminious with tints of rose and pearl; the
ineffable Future, when I should be grownup, when I should be a Man, and
when the world would be my garden, the world and life, and all their
riches, mine to explore, to adventure in, to do as I pleased with! The
Future and the World, the real World, the World that lay beyond our
village, beyond the Forest of Granjolaye, farther than Bayonne, farther
even than Pau; the World one read of and heard strange legends of:
Paris, and Bagdad, and England, and Peru. Oh, how I longed to see it;
how hard it was to wait; how desperately hard to think of the immense
number of long years that must be worn through somehow, before it could
come true.
But—tirala-tirala!—my little broken bar of music was a touchstone.
At the sound of it, at the thought of it, the Present was spirited away;
Saint-Graal and all our countryside were left a thousand miles behind;
and the Future and the World opened their portals to me, and I wandered
in them where I would. In a sort of trance, with wide eyes and bated
breath, I wandered in them, through enraptured hours. Believe me, it
was a Future, it was a World, of quite unstinted magnificence. My
many-pinnacled Castle of Enchantment was built of gold and silver,
ivory, alabaster, and mother-of-pearl; the fountains in its courts
ran with perfumed waters; and its pleasaunce was an orchard of
pomegranates—one had no need to spare one’s colours. I dare say,
too, that it was rather vague, wrapped in a good deal of roseate
haze, and of an architecture that could scarcely have been reduced to
ground-plans and elevations; but what of that? And oh, the people, the
people by whom the World and the Future were inhabited, the cavalcading
knights, the beautiful princesses! And their virtues, and their graces,
and their talents Î There were no ugly people, of course, no stupid
people, no disagreeable people; everybody was young and handsome,
gallant, generous, and splendidly dressed. And everybody was
astonishingly nice to me, and it never seemed to occur to anybody that
I wasn’t to have my own way in everything. And I had it. Love and
wealth, glory, and all manner of romance—I had them for the wishing.
The stars left their courses to fight for me. And the winds of heaven
vied with each other to prosper my galleons.
To be sure, it was nothing more nor other than the day-dream of every
child. But it happened that that little accidental fragment of a phrase
of music had a quite peculiar power to send me off dreaming it.
I suppose it must be that we pass the Castle of Enchantment while we are
asleep. For surely, at first, it is before us—we are moving towards
it; we can see it shining in the distance; we shall reach it to-morrow,
next week, next year. And then—and then, one morning, we wake up,
and lo! it is behind us. We have passed it—we are sailing away from
it—we can’t turn back. We have passed the Castle of Enchantment!
And yet, it was only to reach it that we made our weary voyage, toiling
through hardships and perils and discouragements, forcing our impatient
hearts to wait; it was only the hope, the certain hope, of reaching it
at last, that made our toiling and our waiting possible. And now—we
have passed it. We are sailing away from it. We can’t turn back. We
can only look back—with the bitterness that every heart knows. If
we look forward, what is there to see, save grey waters, and then a
darkness that we fear to enter?
When I was a child, it was the great world and the future into which my
talisman carried me, dreaming desirous dreams; the great world, all gold
and marble, peopled by beautiful princesses and cavalcading knights; the
future, when I should be grown-up, when I should be a Man.
Well, I am grown-up now, and I have seen something of the great
world—something of its gold and marble, its cavalcading knights and
beautiful princesses. But if I care to dream desirous dreams, I touch
my talisman, and wish myself back in the little world of my childhood.
Tirala-tirala—I breathe it softly, softly; and the sentiment of my
childhood comes and fills my room like a fragrance. I am at Saint-Graal
again; and my grandmother is seated at her window, knitting; and André
is bringing up the milk from the farm; and my cousin Elodie is playing
her exercises on the piano; and Hélène and I are walking in the
garden—Hélène in her short white frock, with a red sash, and her
black hair loose down her back. All round us grow innumerable flowers,
and innumerable birds are singing in the air, and the frogs are
croaking, croaking in our pond. And farther off, the sun shines
tranquilly on the chestnut-trees of the Forest of Granjolaye; and
farther still, the Pyrenees gloom purple.... It is not much, perhaps it
is not very wonderful; but oh, how my heart yearns to recover it, how it
aches to realise that it never can.
In the Morning (says Paraschkine) the Eastern Rim of the Earth was piled
high with Emeralds and Rubies, as if the Gods had massed their Riches
there; but he—ingenuous Pilgrim—who set forth to reach this
Treasure-hoard, and to make the Gods’ Riches his, seemed presently to
have lost his Way; he could no longer discern the faintest Glint of the
Gems that had tempted him: until, in the Afternoon, chancing to turn his
Head, he saw a bewildering Sight—the Emeralds and Rubies were behind
him, immeasurably far behind, piled up in the West.
Where is the Castle of Enchantment? When do we pass it? Ah, well,
thank goodness, we all have talismans (like my little broken bit of a
forgotten tune) whereby we are enabled sometimes to visit it in spirit,
and to lose ourselves during enraptured moments among its glistening,
labyrinthine halls.