thing. The essence of a proper engagement is reverence, distance, and
mystery; the essence of marriage is familiarity. A _fiancee_ is a
living eidolon; a wife, from my point of view at least, should be a
confidential companion, a fellow-conspirator, an accessory after the
fact, at least, to one's little errors; should take some share of the
burthen and heat of the day with one, and have the humour to bear with
a mood of vexation or a fit of the blues. I doubt, do you know, if the
same kind of girl is suitable for engagements as for marriage. For an
engagement give me something very innocent, a little awe-inspiring on
that account, absolutely and tenderly worshipful, yet given to moods of
caressing affection, and altogether graceful and beautiful. A man, I
think, ought to be incapable of smoking or lounging in front of the
girl he professes to love, so reverent ought his love to be. But for
marriage let me have humour and some community of taste, a woman who
can climb stiles and stand tobacco smoke, and who knows a good cook by
her fruits.... It is a complicated business, this marrying.
"The familiarity of the marriage state, if it does not breed positive
contempt on the part of the angel, engenders at times, I think, a
considerable craving for change on the side of both parties. We men
are poor creatures at the best--I always pity your Euphemia. Married
people, for instance, always get too much of each other's conversation.
They do not have sufficient opportunity to recuperate their topics from
original sources. They get interested in outside people, merely from a
perfectly legitimate desire to get some amusing novel ideas for each
other, and then comes jealousy. I sometimes think that if Adam and Eve
had been merely engaged, she would not have talked with the serpent;
and the world had been saved an infinity of misery.
"No, George: engagements for me. It is the state we were made for. I
have delayed this matter all too long. But, thank heaven, I am engaged
at last--I hope for all the rest of my life. Now, will you not
congratulate me?"
"It may be very nice as you put it, but engagements end as well as
begin," I insisted. "You cannot be a law unto yourself in these
matters. When will you get married?"
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed my uncle. "Get married and end this
delightful state! You don't think she will want me to marry her, do
you? Besides, she told me some time ago that she did not intend to
marry again. It was only that encouraged me to suggest an engagement
to her. Though she is a wonderful woman, George--a wonderful woman.
Still, I think she looks at things very much as I do."
He paused thoughtfully. Then added with fervour, "At least I hope so."
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
A RHAPSODY
I found him in his own apartments, and strangely disordered. He went
to and fro, raving--beginning so soon as I entered the room. I noticed
a book half out of its cover, flung carelessly into the corner of the
room.
"I am enchanted of an impalpable woman, George," he said, "I am in
bonds to a spirit of the air. I can neither think nor work nor eat nor
sleep because of her. Sometimes I go out suddenly, tramping through
seething streets, through fog and drizzle or dry east wind, mourning
for her sake. My life is rapidly becoming one colourless melancholy
through her spells and twining sorceries. I sometimes wish that I were
dead.
"Yet I have never seen her. Often, indeed, I imagine her, anon as of
this shape, and anon of that. I know her only by her victims, those
she slays daily, and daily revives to slay. They come to me with their
complaints, mutilated, pathetic, terrible. I try to shut my ears to
them in vain. I have tried wool, but it made little or no difference.
"The business always begins with the slamming of a door and a healthy
footfall across the room. The piano is opened. Then some occasional
noises--the falling of a piece of music behind the piano, perhaps, and
its extraction by means of the tongs--I know it is tongs she uses by
the clang. Then the music-stool creaks, and La Belle Dame is ready to
play. She puts both her hands upon the key-board, and the treble
shrieks apprehensively, and the bass roars like a city in revolt.
After that this hush. Just this interval.
"Yet I sometimes think this hush is really the worst of it all. It is
a voluminous apprehension, a towering impendency. You don't
understand, George. You can't. The poor devil in Poe's 'Pit and the
Pendulum' must have had a taste of my sensations. A first victim is
being chosen. I have a vision of the spirits of composers small and
great--standing up like suspects awaiting identification, while her eye
ranges over them. Chopin tries to edge behind Wagner, a difficult and
forbidding person, and Gounod seeks eclipse of Mendelssohn, who
suddenly drops and crawls on all fours between Gounod's legs; Sullivan
cowers, and even Piccolomini's iron-framed nerves desert him. She
extends her hand. There is a frantic rush to escape. Have you ever
seen a little boy picking dormice out of a cage? I always see this
same nightmare during that dreadful pause, a vision of a writhing heap
of kicking, struggling, maddened composers, and of a ghoulish piano
grinning expectant, jaw raised--lid I mean--and showing all its black
and yellow keys. ... A melancholy shriek. Do you hear, George? Tito
Mattel is captured. A song.
"'Pum--So long the way--Pum--so dark the day--Pum--DEAR HEART! before
you come.' So Tito Mattel comes pumming through the wall into my
presence. I don't pity him. Indeed it is a positive relief that it is
only Tito Mattel. The man's no deity at the best, and a little pulling
out, and pulling crooked, and general patching together of limbs in the
wrong place scarcely matters so far as he and my taste are concerned.
Yet I always leave my work, George, when that begins, and walk about
the room. I try to persuade myself that I need fresh air, but the
autumnal day, the damp shiny street, has all the uninviting harshness
of truth--I admit I do not. Tito flops about, is riddled with dropped
notes and racked with hesitations, and presently becomes still. The
murder is over.
"What next? That Study of Chopin's! This time the thing is more
inspiring. Once upon a time it was a favourite of mine. Now it is a
favourite of the unseen lady's. She plays it with spirit, and conjures
up strange fancies in my brain. The noises that come through the wall
now, quicker, thicker, louder, are full of a tale of weltering
confusion, marine disaster, a ship in sore labour; there is a steady
beating like the sound of pumps, and a trickle of treble notes. There
are black silences, like thunderclouds, that burst into flashes of
music. Now the poor melody swings up into the air--then comes one of
those terrible pauses, and now down into the abyss. A crash, an
ineffectual beating, a spasmodic rush. I seem to hear the pumps again,
distant, remote, ineffectual. But that is not so; the struggle is
over. Chopin's Study has been battered to pieces; only disarticulated
fragments toss amidst the froth. High up the confusion of the stormy
sky she drives in a sieve dropping notes--the witch of the storm. La
Belle Dame Sans Merci.
"But the third piece in her repertory has begun--Rubinstein. This, at
any rate, is familiar. She plays with the confidence born of long
unpunished misdoing. That Rubinstein must indeed be sorry, and unless
their elysium is like the library of the Linnaean Society, and fitted
with double windows, all the great departed musicians must be sorry
too, that he ever wrote a Melody in F. Daily from the altars of a
thousand, of ten thousand, school pianos that melody cries to heaven.
From the empire of the music master, upon which the sun never sets, day
and night, week in week out, from year to year, Rubinstein's Melody in
F streams up for ever. These school pieces are like the Latin ritual
before the Reformation, they link all Christendom by a common use. As
the earth spins, and the sunlight sweeps ever westward, that melody
passes with the day. Now it is tinkling in a grey Moravian school, now
it dawns upon the Adige and begins in Alsace, now it has reached
Madrid, Paris, London. Then a devotee in some Connemara Establishment
for Young Ladies sets to. Presently tall ships upon the silent main
resound with it, and they are at it in the Azores and in Iceland, and
then--one solitary tinkling, doubling, reduplicating, manifolding into
an innumerable multitude--New York takes up the wondrous tale. On then
with the dawn to desolate cattle ranches, the tablelands of Mexico, the
level plains of Illinois and Michigan. So the great tide that started
in Rubinstein's cranium proceeds upon its destiny. Always somewhere
between the hours of eleven and two it comes back to me here, poor
hunted composition, running its eternal world gauntlet, pursuing its
Wandering Jew pilgrimage, and I curse and pity it as it goes by.... It
has gone. The 'Maiden's Prayer' is next usually. Then one of the
'Lieder ohne Worte,' then the 'Dead March'--all of them but the meagre
and mutilated skeletons of themselves; things of gaps and tatters, like
gibbet trophies. They are as knocked about as a fleet coming out of
action, they are as twisted and garbled as a Chinese war telegram; it
is like an hospital for congenitally diseased compositions taking the
air. And they have to hobble along sharply too; there is a certain
cruel decision in the way the notes are struck, a Nurse Gillespie touch
about this Invisible Lady. Or it may be the callousness of old habit,
a certain sense of a duty overdone, a certain impatience at the long
delay. You will hear.
"Listen!--_Tum Tum Ti-ti-tum_--No!--_tum_. Slight pause. Tum _tum
twiddle_--vigorous crescendo--TUM. This is unusual! A stranger? A
new piece for La Belle Dame Sans Merci? Her wonted reckless dash
deserts her. She is, as it were, exploring a new region, and advances
with mischievous coyness, with an affectation of a faltering heart,
with hesitating steps. My imagination is stimulated by these dripping
notes. I see her, as it were, on an uneven pavement; here the flags
are set on end, there fungi have tilted them, a sharp turning of the
page may reveal heaven knows what horrors; presently comes a black gap
with a vault of dusty silence below. A pause, an incoherency, a
repetition! She has encountered some difficulty, some slumbering coil
of sharps and flats, and it raises its bristling front in her way....
She has fled back to the opening again. I begin to wonder what unhappy
musician lies hidden in this new ruin, behind the bars of this
melancholy confusion. There is something familiar but elusive, like a
face that one has known and loved and lost and met again after the
cruel changes of intervening years. It conjures up oddly enough a
vision of a long room in the twilight, and an acacia in silhouette
against the pale gold of the western sky. Ah! now I know!
"_That_ of all pieces!
"I must have my walk, George. I cannot bear to hear that old-familiar
music so evilly entreated. But, all the same, the memory it has
touched will vibrate and smart; to-day and to-morrow, and I know not
for how many days, it will re-echo in my brain. All the old cloudy
remorse that has subsided will be set astir again. I shall hear again
a light touch upon the keys, see again the shadowy face against the
sunset, try to recall the sound of a voice.... What evil spirit has
put this mockery into the head of La Belle Dame? Surely without
this----"
He made a dive at the folding doors and presently reappeared in his
coat. It was the only intimation I ever had that my dear little uncle
had such a thing as a Past.
ON A TRICYCLE
I sat on the parapet of the bridge, and swung my feet over the water
that frothed and fretted at the central pier below. Above the bridge
the stream broadened into a cress-bespangled pool, over which the
sapphire dragon-flies hovered, and its earlier course was hidden by the
big oak trees that bent towards each other from either bank. Through
their speckled tracery of green one saw the hazy blue depths of the
further forest. I was watching the proceedings of some quick-moving
brown bird amid the rushes and marsh marigolds of the opposite bank.
"Pleasant," said a voice beside me.
I turned, and saw my uncle. He was disguised in a costume of
reddish-brown cloth. "Golf here?" said I, and then I noticed the
tricycle. "A vagrom man on wheels!"
Both the suit and the machine became him very well. The machine was
low, and singularly broad between the wheels, and altogether equal to
him, and it had chubby pneumatic tires and a broad and even imposing
wallet.
"Yes," said he, following my eye. "It is a handsome machine, a full
dress concern with all its plating and brown leather, and in use it is
as willing and quiet as any tricycle could be, a most urbane and
gentlemanly affair--if you will pardon the adjective. I am glad these
things have not come too late for me. Frankly, the bicycle is
altogether too flippant for a man of my age, and the tricycle hitherto,
with its two larger wheels behind and a smaller one in front, has been
so indecently suggestive of a perambulator that really, George, I could
not bring myself to it. But a Bishop might ride _that_ thing."
He swung himself up upon the parapet beside me and lit a cigar.
"The bicycle for boys, George--or fools. The things will not keep up
for a moment without you work at them, they need constant attention; I
would as soon ride a treadmill. You cannot loaf with them, and the
only true pleasure of cycling is to loaf. Yet only this morning did I
meet an elderly gentleman with a beard fit for Abraham, his face all
crimson and deliquescent with heat, and all distorted with the fury of
his haste, toiling up a hill on one of these unstable instruments.
When he saw me coming down in all my ease and dignity he damned at me
with his bell. Now, I do not like to see a bicycle wobble under a load
of years, and steer into the irascible. As years increase tempers
shorten, and bicycles, even the best of bicycles, are seductively
irritating.
"Besides, the devil of the Wandering Jew has power over all such as go
upon two wheels. 'Onward,' he says, 'onward! Faster, thou man! This
green and breezy earth is no abiding place for you!' And
hard-breathing, crook-shaped, whirling, bell-banging lunatics try and
race you. They whiz by, thinking indignities of your dignified
progress, and sometimes saying them. Not one cyclist in a dozen,
George, and seemingly not a solitary bicyclist, seems to think of
anything but getting to the end of his pleasure. I meet these servants
of the wheel at the inns, and they tell short stories and sketches
about their pace, and show each other their shoes and saddles, and
compare maps and roads; some even try to trade machines. They talk
most indecently of the makes and prices. I would as soon ask a man who
was his tailor or where he got his hair cut and how much he paid. One
man I met was not so much a man as a hoarding, blatant about the
Gaspipe Machine Company. For them no flowers exist, no wild birds, no
trees, no landscapes, no historical memorials, and no geological
associations, nothing but the roads they traverse and the bicycles they
ride. Those that have other interests have them in the form of cheap
portable cameras, malignant things that can find no beauty in earth or
heaven."
"George," said my uncle, suddenly, and I knew he had come upon a great
discovery; "real human beings are scarce in this world."
"You speak bitterly," said I. "I know what has happened. You are hot
from an inn full of the viler type of cyclist, and I presume that,
after their custom, they mocked at your machinery. But don't blacken a
popular exercise on that account."
"But these men are so aggressive! I tell you, George, it requires
moral courage to ride a tricycle about at a moderate pace, as a man of
discretion should. They want to make a sport of it; they are
race-struck, incapable of understanding a man who rides at seven miles
an hour when he might ride at fifteen. Read their special papers.
They mock and sneer at everything but pace; they worship the makes of
'94 in the interests of their advertising columns; touring simply means
hotel-touting to them, and landscape, deals in cameras; in the end they
will kill cycling--indeed, they are killing it. It is not nice to be
mocked at even when you are in the right; a blatant cad is like a
rhinoceros, and admits of no parleying, only since you must not kill
him you are obliged to keep out of his way. The common cyclist has
already driven ladies off the roads by forcing the pace, the honeymoon
tandem returns with its feelings hurt at his jesting, and now he is
driving off all quiet men."
"All this," said I, "because they said something disrespectful about
your machine at the last inn... You don't, I see, approve of the
feminine bicycle?"
My uncle did his best to be calm and judicial.
"A woman in a hurry is one of the most painful sights in the world, for
exertion does not become a woman as it does a man. Let us avoid all
prejudice in this matter, George, and discuss it with open minds. She
has, in the first place, a considerable length of hair, and she does it
up into rich and beautiful shapes with things called hairpins and with
curling irons. Very few people have hair that curls naturally, George.
You are young, but you are married, and I see nothing improper in
telling you these things. Well, when a woman rides about, exerting
herself violently to keep a bicycle going, her hair gets damp and the
pleasing curls lose their curliness and become wet, straggling bands of
hair plastered over her venous forehead. And a tragic anxiety is
manifest, an expression painful for a man to meet. Also her hairpins
come out and fall on the road to wait for pneumatic tires, and her hair
is no longer rich and beautiful in form. Then she gets dirty, horribly
dirty, as though she had been used to sweep the roads with. And her
skirts have to be weirdly altered, even to the divided skirt, so that
when she rides she looks like a short, squat little man. She not only
loses her beauty but her dignity. Now, for my own part, I think a man
wants a woman to worship--it is a man's point of view, of course, but I
can't help my sex--and the worshipping of these zouaves is incredible.
She is nothing more than a shorter, fuller, and feebler man. Heaven
help her! For the woman on the tricycle there are ampler excuses as
well as ampler skirts, the exertion is not too violent for grace and
coolness, and the offensive bulging above one narrow wheel is avoided.
But women will never sacrifice so much for so little; worshipfulness,
beauty, repose, and comfort for a paltry two or three miles more an
hour of pace. They know too well the graces of delay. To do things
slowly, George, is part of the art of living. Our sex learns that when
its youthful fervour is over and all the things are done. But women
are born wise."
"By the bye," said I, "how is Mrs Harborough?"
"Very well, thanks. How is Euphemia? Your bit of view, George, is
pretty, but I think I will have some heather now. There is a common
three miles ahead. This indeed is the true merit of cycling. For a
view, a panorama; for one picture, a gallery. Your true artist in
cycling sits by the roadside, and rides only by way of an interlude.
As for the worship of the machine, I would as soon worship a
scene-shifter."
He dropped off the bridge and mounted his machine, and was presently
pursuing his smooth and noiseless way. As he vanished round the corner
he sounded his gong. It was really a most potent, grave, and reverend
gong, with a certain note of philosophical melancholy in its tone, as
different from the vulgar tang of your common cycle as one can well
imagine. It asked you, at your convenience, sir (or madam), to get out
of the way, to stand aside and see a most worthy and dignified
spectacle roll by, if so be you had the mind for it. As for any
scolding insistence, any threat of imminent collision, there was none
of it. It was the bell of a man who loved margins, who was at his
ease, and would have all the world at its ease. More than anything
else, it reminded me of the boom of some ivy-clad church tower, warning
the world without unseemly haste that another hour had, with leisurely
completeness, accomplished itself.
And so he passed out of my sight and was gone.
AN UNSUSPECTED MASTERPIECE
(AUTHORESS UNKNOWN)
He pushed it away from him.
"I felt as though I had disturbed the graves of the long departed," he
said with a grimace, and then addressing the egg: "Forgive me the
sacrilege: they sold you to me as new laid, a mere thing of yesterday.
I had no idea I was opening the immemorial past. _De mortuis nihil
nisi bonum_--to you at least the quotation will be novel. Or I might
call you bad, you poor mummy.
"Unhappy, pent-up, ineffectual thing!" he said, waving his jilted bread
and butter, and addressing the discarded inedible. "Poor old maid
among eggs! And so it has come to this absolute failure with you. Why
were you ever laid? Surely, since you were once alive, some lurking
aspiration, some lowly, and yet not lowly, but most divine, striving
towards the Higher and the Better, hath stirred within you. The warm
sunlight shone through your translucent shell, the sweet air stirred
the sweet hay of the nest, and life called you from your dreaming to
awake, and join it in its interplay. And now! You might have
been--what might you not have been? A prize hen, fountain of a
broadening stream of hens, chicks, dozens of chicks, hundreds of
chicks, a surging ocean of chickens. Had you been hatched among the
early Victorian chickens that were, I presume, your contemporaries, by
now you might have been a million fowl, and the delight and support of
hundreds of thousands of homes. You might have been worth thousands of
pounds and have eaten corn by the ton. They might have written
articles about you in half-crown reviews and devoted poultry farms to
your sole support. And instead you have been narrowed down to this
sordid back-street tragedy, a mere offence, tempting a struggling
tradesman to risk the honour of my patronage of his books, for a paltry
fraction of a pennyworth of profit. Why, I ask you, were you not
hatched? Was it lack of courage? a fear of the unknown dangers that
lie outside the shell?
"An indescribable pity wells up in me for this lost egg, this dead end
in the tree of life, George. One thinks of the humble but deserving
amoeba, the primordial metazoon, the first fish, the remote reptile
ancestor, the countless generations of forefathers that, so far as this
egg went, have lived and learnt and suffered in vain. The torrent of
life had split and rushed by on either side of it. And you might,"
cried he, turning to the egg again, "have been a Variety, a novelty,
and an improvement in chickens. No chick now will ever be _exactly_
the chick you might have been. Only an Olive Schreiner could do full
justice to your failure, you poor nun, you futile eremite, you absolute
and hopeless impasse. Was it, I ask again, a lack of courage?
"Perhaps a lack of opportunity? It may be you stirred and hoped in the
distant past, and the warmth to quicken you never came. Ambition may
have fretted you. Indeed, now I think of it, there is something in the
flavour of you, singularly suggestive of disappointed ambition. In
literature, and more particularly in criticism, I can assure you I have
met the very fellow of your quality, from literary rotten eggs whose
opening came too late. They are like the genii in the 'Arabian Nights'
whom Solomon, the son of David, sealed in the pot. At first he
promised infinite delights to his discoverer--and his discoverer
lagged. In the end he was filled with unreasonable hatred against all
the feeble free, and emerged as a malignant fume, eager to wreak
himself upon the world.
"A sudden thought, George! I see my egg in a new light, and all my
pity changes to respect. Surely it is a most potent egg, a
gallinaceous Swift. After all, anything but pointless and childless,
since it has this strange quality of being offensive and engendering
thought. Food for the mind if not food for the body--didactic if not
delightful--a bit of modern literature, earnest and fundamentally real.
I must try and understand you, Ibsen Ovarum. Possibly it is a profound
parable I have stumbled upon. Though I scarcely reckoned on a parable
with my bread and butter. Frankly, I must confess I bought it for the
eating."