'I always like seeing you,' he said, smiling, and thereupon turned over
on the pillow, just as he was, and fell asleep.
I looked at his face as he lay there, with the shawl about his shoulders
and his hands outside the bedclothes. The jaw hung loose, the cheeks
were pinched with exhaustion, sweat stood out about the eyes. The sudden
collapse into sleep alarmed me. I could not leave him in such a state,
and with no one at hand but those people supping in the next room. I sat
down in a corner near the bed and waited.
As I sat there listening to the exuberant voices, I wondered by what
casual or quixotic impulse Waydelin had been led to marry the woman, and
whether the woman was really heartless because she sat drinking
champagne with her friends of the music-hall while her husband, a man of
genius in his way, lay dying in the next room. I forced myself to
acknowledge that she had probably no suspicion of how near she was to
being a widow, that Waydelin would deceive her to the end in this
matter, and the last thing in the world he would desire would be to see
Mrs. Waydelin in tears at the foot of the bed.
As time went on the supper-party got merrier, but Waydelin did not stir,
and I sat still in my corner. It was probably in about two hours, as he
had foreseen, that a chord was struck on the piano, and a man began to
sing a music-hall song in a rough, facile voice. At the sound Waydelin
shivered through his whole body and woke up. In a very weak voice he
asked me for water. I brought him a glass of water and held it to his
lips. He drank a little and then pushed it away and began shivering
again. 'Let me send for a doctor,' I said, but he seized my hand, and
said violently that he would see no doctor. In the next room the piano
rattled and all the voices joined in the chorus. I distinguished the
voice of Mrs. Waydelin. He seemed to be listening to it, and I said,
'Let me call her in.' 'Poor Clara may as well amuse herself,' he said,
with his odd smile. 'What is the use? I feel very much as if I am going
to die. Will it bother you: being here, I mean?' His voice seemed to
grow weaker as he spoke, and his eyes stared. I left him and went
hastily into the other room. The singer stopped abruptly, and the girl
at the piano turned round. I saw the remains of supper on the table, the
empty glasses and bottles, the chairs tilted back, the cigars,
tobacco-smoke, the flushed faces, rings, artificial curls; and then Mrs.
Waydelin came to me out of the midst of them, looking almost frightened,
and said, 'What's the matter?' 'Get rid of these people at once,' I said
in a low voice, 'and send for a doctor.' Her face sobered instantly, she
took one step to the bell, was about to ring it, then turned and said to
one of the men, 'Go for a doctor, Jim,' and to the others, 'You'll go,
all of you, quietly?' and then she came with me into the bedroom.
Waydelin lay shivering and quaking on the bed; he seemed very conscious
and wholly preoccupied with himself. He never looked at the woman as she
flung herself on the floor by the bedside and began to cry out to him
and kiss his hand. The tears ran down over her cheeks, leaving ghastly
furrows in the wet powder, which clotted and caked under them. The curl
was beginning to come out of her too yellow hair, which straggled in
wisps about her ears. She sobbed in gulps, and entreated him to look at
her and forgive her. At that he looked, and as he looked life seemed to
revive in his eyes. He motioned to me to lift him up. I lifted him
against the pillows, and in a weak voice he asked me for drawing-paper
and a pencil. 'Don't move,' he said to his wife, who knelt there struck
into rigid astonishment, with terror and incomprehension in her eyes.
The pose, its grotesque horror, were finer than the finest of his
inventions. He made a few scrawls on the paper, trying to fix that last
and best pose of his model. But he could no longer guide the pencil, and
he let it drop out of his hand with a look of helplessness, almost of
despair, and sank down in the bed and shut his eyes. He did not open
them again. The doctor came, and tried all means to revive him, but
without success. Something in him seemed consciously to refuse to come
back to life. He lay for some time, dying slowly, with his eyes fast
shut, and it was only when the doctor had felt his heart and found no
movement that he knew he was dead.
AN AUTUMN CITY.
To Daniel Roserra life was a matter of careful cultivation. He respected
nature, for what might be cunningly extracted from nature; provided only
that one's aim was a quite personal thing, willingly subject to
surroundings on its way to the working out of itself. He tended his soul
as one might tend some rare plant; careful above most things of the
earth it was to take root in. And so he thought much of the influence of
places, of the image a place makes for itself in the consciousness, of
all that it might do in the formation of a beautiful or uncomely
disposition. Places had virtues of their own for him; he supposed that
he had the quality of divining their secrets; at all events, if they
were places to which he could possibly be sensitive. Much of his time
was spent in travelling, in a leisurely way, about Europe; not for the
sake of seeing anything in particular, for he had no interest in
historical associations or in the remains of ugly things that happened
to be old, or in visiting the bric-a-brac museums of the fine arts which
make some of the more tolerable countries tedious. He chose a city, a
village, or a seashore for its charm, its appeal to him personally;
nothing else mattered.
When Roserra was forty he fell in love, quite suddenly, though he had
armed himself, as he imagined, against such disturbances of the aesthetic
life, and was invulnerable. He had always said that a woman was like a
liqueur: a delightful luxury, to be taken with discretion. He feared the
influence of a companion in his delicate satisfactions: he realised that
a woman might not even be a sympathetic companion. He had, it is true,
often wished to try the experiment, a risky one, of introducing a woman
to one of his friends among cities; it was a temptation, but he
remembered how rarely such introductions work well among people. Would
the cities be any more fortunate?
When, however, he fell in love, all hesitation was taken out of his
hands by the mere force of things. Livia Dawlish was remarkably
handsome, some people thought her beautiful; she was tall and dark, and
had a sulky, enigmatical look that teased and attracted him. Some who
knew her very well said that it meant nothing, and was merely an
accident of colour and form, like the green eye of the cat or the golden
eye of the buffalo. Roserra tried to study her, but he could get no
point of view. He felt something that he had never felt before, and this
something was like a magnetic current flowing subtly from her to him;
perhaps, like the magnetic rocks in the 'Arabian Nights,' ready to draw
out all the nails and bolts of his ship, and drown him among the wrecked
splinters of his life.
He was rich, not too old, of a good Cornish family; he could be the most
charming companion in the world; he knew so many things and so many
places and was never tedious about them: Livia thought him on the whole
the most suitable husband whom she was likely to meet. She was happy
when he asked her to marry him, and she married him without a misgiving.
She was not reflective.
After the marriage they went straight to Paris, and Roserra was
surprised and delighted to find how childishly happy Livia could be
among new surroundings. She had always wanted to see Paris, because of
its gaiety, its bright wickedness, its names of pleasure and fashion.
Everything delighted her; she seemed even to admire a little
indiscriminatingly. She thought the Sainte-Chapelle the most beautiful
thing in Paris.
They went back to London with more luggage than they had brought with
them, and for six months Livia was quite happy. She wore her Paris hats
and gowns, she was admired, she went to the theatre; she seemed to get
on with Roserra even better than she had expected.
During all this time Roserra seemed to have found out very little about
his wife. It gave him more pleasure to do what she wanted than it had
ever given him to carry out his own wishes. So far, they had never had a
dispute; he seemed to have put his own individuality aside as if it no
longer meant anything to him. But he had not yet discovered her
individuality from among her crowds of little likes and dislikes, which
meant nothing. Nothing had come out yet from behind those enigmatical
eyes; but he was waiting; they would open, and there would be treasure
there.
Gradually, while he was waiting, his old self began to come back to him.
He must do as he had always wanted to do: introduce the most intimate of
his cities to a woman. Autumn was beginning; he thought of Arles, which
was an autumn city, and the city which meant more to him than almost any
other. He must share Arles with Livia.
Livia had heard of the Arlesiennes, she remembered Paris, and, though
she was a little reluctant to leave the new London into which she had
come since her marriage, she consented without apparent unwillingness.
They went by sea to Marseilles, and Livia wished they were not going any
further. Roserra smiled a little satisfied smile; she was so pleased
with even slight, superficial things, she could get pleasure out of the
empty sunlight and obvious sea of Marseilles. When the deeper appeal of
Arles came to her, that new world in which one went clean through the
exteriorities of modern life, how she would respond to it!
They reached Arles in the afternoon, and drove to the little
old-fashioned house which Roserra had taken in the square which goes
uphill from the Amphitheatre, with the church of Notre Dame la Major in
the corner. Livia looked about her vividly as the cab rattled round
twenty sharp angles, in the midst of narrow streets, on that perilous
journey. Here were the Arlesiennes, standing at doorways, walking along
the pavements, looking out of windows. She scarcely liked to admit to
herself that she had seen prettier faces elsewhere. The costume,
certainly, was as fine as its reputation; she would get one, she
thought, to wear, for amusement, in London. And the women were a noble
race; they walked nobly, they had beautiful black hair, sometimes
stately and impressive features. But she had expected so much more than
that; she had expected a race of goddesses, and she found no more than a
townful of fine-looking peasants.
'Do not judge too quickly,' said Roserra to her; 'you must judge neither
the place nor the people until you have lived yourself into their midst.
The first time I came here I was disappointed. Gradually I began to see
why it was that even the guide-books tell you to come to this quiet,
out-of-the-way place, made up of hovels that were once palaces.'
'I will wait,' said Livia contentedly. The queer little house, with its
homely furniture, the gentle, picturesque woman who met her at the door,
amused her. It was certainly an adventure.
Next day, and the days following, they walked about the town, and
Roserra felt that his own luxuriating sensations could hardly fail to be
shared by Livia, though she said little and seemed at times
absent-minded. They strolled among the ruins of the theatre begun under
Augustus, and among the coulisses of the great amphitheatre; they sat
on the granite steps; they went up the hundred steps of the western
tower. From the cloisters of St. Trophime they went across to the museum
opposite, where a kindly little dwarf showed them the altar to Leda, the
statue of Mithras, and the sarcophagi with the Good Shepherd. He sold
them some photographs of Arlesian women: one was very beautiful. 'That
is my sister,' he said shyly.
When the soul of Autumn made for itself a body, it made Arles. An autumn
city, hinting of every gentle, resigned, reflective way of fading out of
life, of effacing oneself in a world to which one no longer attaches any
value; always remembering itself, always looking into a mournfully
veiled mirror which reflects something at least of what it was, Arles
sits in the midst of its rocky plains, by the side of its river, among
the tombs. Everything there seems to grow out of death, and to be
returning thither. The town rises above its ruins, does not seem to be
even yet detached from them. The remains of the theatre look down on
the public garden; one comes suddenly on a Roman obelisk and the
fragments of Roman walls; a Roman column has been built into the wall of
one of the two hotels which stand in the Forum, now the Place du Forum;
and the modern, the comparatively modern houses, have an air which is
neither new nor old, but entirely sympathetic with what is old. They are
faded, just a little dilapidated, not caring to distinguish themselves
from the faint colours, the aged slumber, of the very ancient things
about them.
Livia tried to realise what it was that charmed Roserra in all this. To
her there was no comfort in it; it depressed her; in the air itself
there was something of decay. There was a smell of dead leaves
everywhere, the moisture of stone, the sodden dampness of earth, water
forming into little pools on the ground, creeping out of the earth and
into the earth again. There was dust on everything; the trees that close
in almost the whole city as with a leafy wall were dust-grey even in
sunlight. The Aliscamps seemed to her drearier than even a modern
cemetery, and she wondered what it was that drew Roserra to them, with
a kind of fascination. On the way there, along the Avenue Victor Hugo,
there were some few signs of life; the cafes, the Zouaves going in and
out of their big barrack, the carts coming in from the country; and in
the evening the people walked there. But she hated the little melancholy
public garden at the side, with its paths curving upwards to the ruined
walls and arches of the Roman theatre, its low balustrades of crumbling
stone, its faint fountains, greenish grey. It was a place, she thought,
in which no one could ever be young or happy; and the road which went
past it did but lead to the tombs. Roserra told her that Dante, when he
was in hell, and saw the 'modo piu amaro' in which the people there are
made into alleys of living tombs, remembered Arles:
'Si com' ad Arli ove 'l Rodano stagna.'
She laughed uneasily, with a half shudder. The tombs are moved aside now
from the Aliscamps, into the little secluded Allee des Tombeaux, where
they line both sides of the way, empty stone trough after empty stone
trough, with here and there a more pompous sarcophagus. There is a quiet
path between them, which she did not even like to walk in, leading to
the canal and the bowling-green; and in the evening the old men creep
out and sit among the tombs.
At first there was bright sunshine every day, but the sun scorched; and
then it set in to rain. One night a storm wakened her, and it seemed to
her that she had never heard such thunder, or seen such lightning, as
that which shook the old roof under which she lay, and blazed and
flickered at the window until it seemed to be licking up the earth with
liquid fire. The storm faded out in a morning of faint sunshine; only
the rain clung furtively about the streets all day.
Day after day it rained, and Livia sat in the house, listlessly reading
the novels which she had brought with her, or staring with fierce
impatience out of the window. The rain came down steadily, ceaselessly,
drawing a wet grey curtain over the city. Roserra liked that softened
aspect which came over things in this uncomfortable weather; he walked
every day through the streets in which the water gathered in puddles
between the paving-stones, and ran in little streams down the gutters;
he found a kind of autumnal charm in the dripping trees and soaked paths
of the Aliscamps; a peaceful, and to him pathetic and pleasant, odour of
decay. Livia went out with him once, muffled in a long cloak, and
keeping her whole face carefully under the umbrella. She wanted to know
where he was taking her, and why; she shivered, sneezed, and gave one or
two little coughs. When she saw the ground of the Aliscamps, and the
first trees began to drip upon her umbrella with a faint tap-tapping on
the strained silk, she turned resolutely, and hurried Roserra straight
back to the house.
After that she stayed indoors day after day, getting more irritable
every day. She took up one book after another, read a little, and then
laid it down. She walked to and fro in the narrow room, with nothing, as
she said, to think about, and nothing to see if she looked out of the
window. There was the square, every stone polished by the rain; the
other houses in the square, most of them shuttered; the little church in
the corner, with its monotonous bell, its few worshippers. She knew them
all; they were mostly women, plain, elderly women; not one of them had
any interest, or indeed existence, for her. She wondered vaguely why
they went backwards and forwards, between their houses and the church,
in such a regular way. Could it really amuse them? Could they really
believe certain things so firmly that it was worth while taking all that
trouble in order to be on the right side at last? She supposed so, and
ended her speculations.
When Roserra was with her, he annoyed her by not seeming to mind the
weather. He would come in from a walk, and, if she seemed to be busy
reading, would sit down cheerfully by the stove, and really read the
book which he had in his hand. She looked at him over the pages of hers,
hating to see him occupied when she could not fix her mind on anything.
She felt imprisoned; not that she really wanted to go out: it was the
not being able to that fretted her.
About the time when, if she had been in London, she would have had tea,
the uneasiness came over her most actively. She would go upstairs to her
room, and sit watching herself pityingly in the glass; or she would try
on hat after hat, hats which had come from Paris, and were meant for
Paris or London, hats which she could not possibly wear here, where her
smallest and simplest ones seemed out of place. Sometimes she brought
herself back into a good temper by the mere pleasurable feel of the
things; and she would run downstairs forgetting that she was in Arles.
One afternoon, when she was in one of her easiest moods, Roserra
persuaded her to attend Benediction with him at the church of Notre Dame
la Major, in the corner of the square. The church was quite dark, and
she could only dimly see the high-altar, draped in white, and with
something white rising up from its midst, like a figure mysteriously
poised among the unlighted candles. Hooded figures passed, and knelt
with bowed heads; presently a light passed across the church, and a lamp
was let down by a chain, lighted, and drawn up again to its place. Then
a few candles were lighted, and only then did she see the priest
kneeling motionless before the altar. The chanting was very homely, like
that in a village church; there was even the village church's harmonium;
but the monotony of one air repeated over and over again brought even to
Livia some sense of a harmony between this half-drowsy service and the
slumbering city outside. They waited until the service was over, the
priests went out, the lamps and the candles were extinguished, and the
hooded figures, after a little silence, began to move again in the
dimness of the church.
Sometimes she would go with Roserra to the cloisters of St. Trophime,
where Arles, as he said, seemed to withdraw into its most intimate self.
The oddness of the whole place amused her. Every side was built in a
different century: the north in the ninth, the east in the thirteenth,
the west in the fourteenth, and the south in the sixteenth; and the
builders, century by century, have gathered into this sadly battered
court a little of the curious piety of age after age, working here to
perpetuate, not only the legends of the Church, but the legends that
have their home about Arles. Again and again, among these naive
sculptures, one sees the local dragon, the man-eating Tarasque who has
given its name to Tarascon. The place is full of monsters, and of
figures tortured into strange dislocations. Adam swings ape-like among
the branches of the apple-tree, biting at the leaves before he reaches
the apple. Flames break out among companies of the damned, and the devil
sits enthroned above his subjects. A gentle Doctor of the Church holding
a book, and bending his head meditatively sideways, was shown to Livia
as King Solomon; with, of course, in the slim saint on the other side of
the pillar, the Queen of Sheba. Broken escutcheons, carved in stone,
commemorate bishops on the walls. There is no order, or division of
time; one seems shut off equally from the present and from any
appreciable moment of the past; shut in with the same vague and
timeless Autumn that has moulded Arles into its own image.
But it was just this, for which Roserra loved Arles above all other
places, that made Livia more and more acutely miserable. Wandering about
the streets which bring one back always to one's starting-point, or
along the boulevards which suggest the beginning of the country, but set
one no further into it, nothing seems to matter very much, for nothing
seems very much to exist. In Livia, as Roserra was gradually finding
out, there was none of that sympathetic submissiveness to things which
meant for him so much of the charm of life. She wanted something
definite to do, somewhere definite to go; her mind took no subtle colour
from things, nor was there any active world within her which could
transmute everything into its own image. She was dependent on an
exterior world, cut to a narrow pattern, and, outside that, nothing had
any meaning for her. He began to wonder if he had made the irremediable
mistake, and, in his preoccupation with that uneasy idea, everything
seemed changed; he, too, began to grow restless.
Meanwhile Livia was deciding that she certainly had made a mistake,
unless she could, after all, succeed in getting her own way; and to do
that she would have to take things into her own hands, much more
positively than she had yet done. She would walk with him when it was
fine, because there was nothing else to do. Once they walked out to the
surprising remains of the abbey of Mont-Major, and it began to rain, and
they lingered uncomfortably about the ruins and in the subterranean
chapel. She walked back with him, nursing a fine hatred in silence. She
turned it over in her heart, and it grew and gathered, like a snowball
rolled over and over in the snow. It was comprehensive and unreasoning,
and it forgot the small grievance out of which it rose, in a sense of
the vast grievance into which it had swollen. To Roserra such moods,
which were now becoming frequent, were unintelligible, and he suffered
from them like one who has to find his way through a camp of his enemies
in the dark.
When they got back to the house, Livia would silently take up a book and
sit motionless for hours, turning over the pages without raising her
eyes, or showing a consciousness of his presence. He pretended to do the
same, but his eyes wandered continually, and he had to read every page
twice over. He wanted to speak, but never knew what to say, when she was
in this prickly state of irritation. To her, his critical way of
waiting, and doing nothing, became an oppression. And his silence, and
what she supposed to be his indifference, grew upon her like a heavy
weight, until the silent woman, who sat there reading sullenly, felt the
impulse to rise and fling away the book, and shriek aloud.