_There is an old French air,
A little song of loneliness and grief--
Simple as nature, sweet beyond compare--
And sad--past all belief!
Nameless is he that wrote
The melody--but this I opine:
Whoever made the words was some remote
French ancestor of mine.
I know the dungeion deep
Where long he lay--and why he lay therein;
And all his anguish, that he could not sleep
For conscience of a sin._
I see his cold, hard bed;
I hear the chimes that jingled in his ears
As he pressed nightly, with that wakeful head,
A pillow wet with tears.
Oh, restless little chime!
It never changed--but rang its roundelay
For each dark hour of that unhappy time
That sighed itself away.
And ever, more and more,
Its burden grew of his lost self a part--
And mingled with his memories, and wore
Its way into his heart.
And there it wove the name
Of many a town he loved, for one dear sake,
Into its web of music; thus he came
His little song to make.
Of all that ever heard
And loved it for its sweetness, none but I
Divined the clew that, as a hidden word,
The notes doth underlie.
That wail from lips long dead
Has found its echo in this breast alone!
Only to me, by blood-remembrance led,
Is that wild story known!
And though 'tis mine, by right
Of treasure-trove, to rifle and lay bare--
A heritage of sorrow and delight
The world would gladly share--
Yet must I not unfold
For evermore, nor whisper late or soon,
The secret that a few slight bars thus hold
Imprisoned in a tune.
For when that little song
Goes ringing in my head, I know that he,
My luckless lone forefather, dust so long,
Relives his life in me!
I sent them to ----'s Magazine, with the six French lines on at the
which they were founded at the top. ----'s _Magazine_ published only the
six French lines--the only lines in my handwriting that ever got into
print. And they date from the fifteenth century!
Thus was my little song lost to the world, and for a time to me. But
long, long afterwards, I found it again, where Mr. Longfellow once found
a song of _his_: "in the heart of a friend"--surely the sweetest bourne
that can ever be for any song!
Little did I foresee that a day was not far off when real blood
remembrance would carry me--but that is to come.
* * * * *
Poetry, friendship and love having failed, I sought for consolation in
art, and frequented the National Gallery, Marlborough House (where the
Vernon collection was), the British Museum, the Royal Academy, and other
exhibitions.
I prostrated myself before Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Veronese, Da
Vinci, Botticelli, Signorelli--the older the better; and tried my best
to honestly feel the greatness I knew and know to be there; but for
want of proper training I was unable to reach those heights, and, like
most outsiders, admired them for the wrong things, for the very beauties
they lack--such transcendent, ineffable beauties of feature, form, and
expression as an outsider always looks for in an old master, and often
persuades himself he finds there--and oftener still, _pretends_ he does!
I was far more sincerely moved (although I did not dare to say so) by
some works of our own time--for instance, by the "Vale of Rest," the
"Autumn Leaves," "The Huguenot" of young Mr. Millais--just as I found
such poems as _Maud_ and _In Memoriam_, by Mr. Alfred Tennyson,
infinitely more precious and dear to me than Milton's _Paradise Lost_
and Spenser's _Faerie Queene_.
Indeed, I was hopelessly modern in those days--quite an every-day young
man; the names I held in the warmest and deepest regard were those of
then living men and women. Darwin, Browning, and George Eliot did not,
it is true, exist for me as yet; but Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens,
Millais, John Leech, George Sand, Balzac, the old Dumas, Victor Hugo,
and Alfred de Musset!
I have never beheld them in the flesh; but, like all the world, I know
their outer aspect well, and could stand a pretty stiff examination in
most they have ever written, drawn, or painted.
Other stars of magnitude have risen since, but of the old galaxy four at
least still shine out of the past with their ancient lustre undimmed in
my eyes--Thackeray; dear John Leech, who still has power to make me
laugh as I like to laugh; and for the two others it is plain that the
Queen, the world, and I are of a like mind as to their deserts, for one
of them is now an ornament to the British peerage, the other a baronet
and a millionaire; only I would have made dukes of them straight off,
with precedence over the Archbishop of Canterbury, if they would care to
have it so.
It is with a full but humble heart that I thus venture to record my long
indebtedness, and pay this poor tribute, still fresh from the days of my
unquestioning hero-worship. It will serve, at least, to show my reader
(should I ever have one sufficiently interested to care) in what mental
latitudes and longitudes I dwelt, who was destined to such singular
experience--a kind of reference, so to speak--that he may be able to
place me at a glance, according to the estimation in which he holds
these famous and perhaps deathless names.
It will be admitted, at least, that my tastes were normal, and shared by
a large majority--the tastes of an every-day young man at that
particular period of the nineteenth century--one much given to athletics
and cold tubs, and light reading and cheap tobacco, and endowed with the
usual discontent; the last person for whom or from whom or by whom to
expect anything out of the common.
* * * * *
But the splendor of the Elgin Marbles! I understood that at
once--perhaps because there is not so much to understand. Mere
physically beautiful people appeal to us all, whether they be in flesh
or marble.
By some strange intuition, or natural instinct, I _knew_ that people
ought to be built like that, before I had ever seen a single statue in
that wondrous room. I had divined them--so completely did they realize
an aesthetic ideal I had always felt.
I had often, as I walked the London streets, peopled an imaginary world
of my own with a few hundreds of such beings, made flesh and blood, and
pictured them as a kind of beneficent aristocracy seven feet high, with
minds and manners to match their physique, and set above the rest of the
world for its good; for I found it necessary (so that my dream should
have a point) to provide them with a foil in the shape of millions of
such people as we meet every day. I was egotistic and self-seeking
enough, it is true, to enroll myself among the former, and had chosen
for my particular use and wear just such a frame as that of the Theseus,
with, of course, the nose and hands and feet (of which time has bereft
him) restored, and all mutilations made good.
And for my mistress and companion I had duly selected no less a person
than the Venus of Milo (no longer armless), of which Lintot possessed a
plaster-cast, and whose beauties I had foreseen before I ever beheld
them with the bodily eye.
"Monsieur n'est pas dégoûté!" as Ibbetson would have remarked.
But most of all did I pant for the music which is divine.
Alas, that concerts and operas and oratorios should not be as free to
the impecunious as the National Gallery and the British Museum--a
privilege which is not abused!
Impecunious as I was, I sometimes had pence enough to satisfy this
craving, and discovered in time such realms of joy as I had never
dreamed of; such monarchs as Mozart, Handel, and Beethoven, and others,
of whom my father knew apparently so little; and yet they were more
potent enchanters than Grétry, Hérold, and Boieldieu, whose music he
sang so well.
I discovered, moreover, that they could do more than charm--they could
drive my weary self out of my weary soul, and for a space fill that
weary soul with courage, resignation, and hope. No Titian, no
Shakespeare, no Phidias could ever accomplish that--not even Mr. William
Makepeace Thackeray or Mr. Alfred Tennyson.
My sweetest recollections of this period of my life (indeed, the only
sweet recollections) are of the music I heard, and the places where I
heard it; it was an enchantment! With what vividness I can recall it
all! The eager anticipation for days; the careful selection, beforehand,
from such an _embarras de richesses_ as was duly advertised; then the
long waiting in the street, at the doors reserved for those whose
portion is to be the gallery. The hard-won seat aloft is reached at
last, after a selfish but good-humored struggle up the long stone
staircase (one is sorry for the weak, but a famished ear has no
conscience). The gay and splendid house is crammed; the huge chandelier
is a golden blaze; the delight of expectation is in the air, and also
the scent of gas, and peppermint, and orange-peel, and music-loving
humanity, whom I have discovered to be of sweeter fragrance than the
common herd.
[Illustration]
The orchestra fills, one by one; instruments tune up--a familiar
cacophony, sweet with seductive promise. The conductor takes his
seat--applause--a hush--three taps--the baton waves once, twice,
thrice--the eternal fountain of magic is let loose, and at the
very first jet
"_The cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away_."
Then lo! the curtain rises, and straightway we are in Seville--Seville,
after Pentonville! Count Alma-viva, lordly, gallant, and gay beneath his
disguise, twangs his guitar, and what sounds issue from it! For every
instrument that was ever invented is in that guitar--the whole
orchestra!
"_Ecco ridente il cielo_....," so sings he (with the most beautiful male
voice of his time) under Rosina's balcony; and soon Rosina's voice (the
most beautiful female voice of hers) is heard behind her curtains--so
girlish, so innocent, so young and light-hearted, that the eyes fill
with involuntary tears.
Thus encouraged, he warbles that his name is Lindoro, that he would fain
espouse her; that he is not rich in the goods of this world, but gifted
with an inordinate, inexhaustible capacity for love (just like Peter
Ibbetson); and vows that he will always warble to her, in this wise,
from dawn till when daylight sinks behind the mountain. But what matter
the words?
"Go on, my love, go on, _like this_!" warbles back Rosina--and no
wonder--till the dull, despondent, commonplace heart of Peter Ibbetson
has room for nothing else but sunny hope and love and joy! And yet it is
all mere sound--impossible, unnatural, unreal nonsense!
Or else, in a square building, decent and well-lighted enough, but not
otherwise remarkable--the very chapel of music--four business-like
gentlemen, in modern attire and spectacles, take their places on an
unpretentious platform amid refined applause; and soon the still air
vibrates to the trembling of sixteen strings--only that and
nothing more!
But in that is all Beethoven, or Schubert, or Schumann has got to say to
us for the moment, and what a say it is! And with what consummate
precision and perfection it is said--with what a mathematical certainty,
and yet with what suavity, dignity, grace, and distinction!
They are the four greatest players in the world, perhaps; but they
forget themselves, and we forget them (as it is their wish we should),
in the master whose work they interpret so reverently, that we may yearn
with his mighty desire and thrill with his rapture and triumph, or ache
with his heavenly pain and submit with his divine resignation.
Not all the words in all the tongues that ever were--dovetail them,
rhyme them, alliterate them, torture them as you will--can ever pierce
to the uttermost depths of the soul of man, and let in a glimpse of the
Infinite, as do the inarticulate tremblings of those sixteen strings.
Ah, songs without words are the best!
Then a gypsy-like little individual, wiry and unkempt, who looks as if
he had spent his life listening to the voices of the night in Heaven
knows what Lithuanian forests, with wolves and wild-boars for his
familiars, and the wind in the trees for his teacher, seats himself at
the great brass-bound oaken Broadwood piano-forte. And under his
phenomenal fingers, a haunting, tender, world-sorrow, full of
questionings--a dark mystery of moonless, starlit nature--exhales itself
in nocturnes, in impromptus, in preludes--in mere waltzes and mazourkas
even! But waltzes and mazourkas such as the most frivolous would never
dream of dancing to. A capricious, charming sorrow--not too deep for
tears, if one be at all inclined to shed them--so delicate, so fresh,
and yet so distinguished, so ethereally civilized and worldly and
well-bred that it has crystallized itself into a drawing-room ecstasy,
to last forever. It seems as though what was death (or rather
euthanasia) to him who felt it, is play for us--surely an immortal
sorrow whose recital will never, never pall--the sorrow of Chopin.
Though why Chopin should have been so sorry we cannot even guess; for
mere sorrow's sake, perhaps; the very luxury of woe--the real sorrow
which has no real cause (like mine in those days); and that is the best
and cheapest kind of sorrow to make music of, after all!
And this great little gypsy pianist, who plays his Chopin so well;
evidently he has not spent his life in Lithuanian forests, but hard at
the key-board, night and day; and he has had a better master than the
wind in the trees--namely, Chopin himself (for it is printed in the
programme). It was his father and mother before him, and theirs, who
heard the voices of the night; but he remembers it all, and puts it all
into his master's music, and makes us remember it, too.
Or else behold the chorus, rising tier upon tier, and culminating in the
giant organ. But their thunder is just hushed.
Some Liliputian figure, male or female, as the case may be, rises on its
little legs amid the great Liliputian throng, and through the sacred
stillness there peals forth a perfect voice (by no means Liliputian). It
bids us "Rest in the Lord," or else it tells us that "He was despised
and rejected of men"; but, again, what matter the words? They are almost
a hinderance, beautiful though they be.
The hardened soul melts at the tones of the singer, at the unspeakable
pathos of the sounds that cannot lie; one almost believes--one believes
at least in the belief of others. At last one understands, and is purged
of intolerance and cynical contempt, and would kneel with the rest, in
sheer human sympathy!
Oh, wretched outsider that one is (if it all be true)--one whose
heart, so hopelessly impervious to the written word, so helplessly
callous to the spoken message, can be reached only by the organized
vibrations of a trained larynx, a metal pipe, a reed, a
fiddle-string--by invisible, impalpable, incomprehensible little
air-waves in mathematical combination, that beat against a tiny drum at
the back of one's ear. And these mathematical combinations and the laws
that govern them have existed forever, before Moses, before Pan, long
before either a larynx or a tympanum had been evolved. They
are absolute!
Oh, mystery of mysteries!
Euterpe, Muse of Muses, what a personage hast thou become since first
thou sattest for thy likeness (with that ridiculous lyre in thy untaught
hands) to some Greek who could carve so much better than thou
couldst play!
Four strings; but not the fingerable strings of Stradivarius. Nay, I beg
thy pardon--five; for thy scale was pentatonic, I believe. Orpheus
himself had no better, it is true. It was with just such an instrument
that he all but charmed his Eurydice out of Hades. But, alas, she went
back; on second thoughts, she liked Hades best!
Couldst thou fire and madden and wring the heart, and then melt and
console and charm it into the peace that passeth all understanding, with
those poor five rudimentary notes, and naught between?
Couldst thou, out of those five sounds of fixed, unalterable pitch,
make, not a sixth sound, but a star?
What were they, those five sounds? "Do, re, mi, fa, sol?" What must thy
songs without words have been, if thou didst ever make any?
Thou wast in very deed a bread-and-butter miss in those days, Euterpe,
for all that thy eight twin sisters were already grown up, and out; and
now thou toppest them all by half a head, at least. "Tu leur mangerais
des petits pâtés sur la tête--comme Madame Seraskier!"
And oh, how thou beatest them all for beauty! In _my_ estimation, at
least--like--like Madame Seraskier again!
And hast thou done growing at last?
Nay, indeed; thou art not even yet a bread-and-butter miss--thou art but
a sweet baby, one year old, and seven feet high, tottering midway
between some blessed heaven thou hast only just left and the dull home
of us poor mortals.
The sweet one-year-old baby of our kin puts its hands upon our knees and
looks up into our eyes with eyes full of unutterable meaning. It has so
much to say! It can only say "ga-ga" and "ba-ba"; but with oh! how
searching a voice, how touching a look--that is, if one is fond of
babies! We are moved to the very core; we want to understand, for it
concerns us all; we were once like that ourselves--the individual and
the race--but for the life of us we cannot _remember_.
And what canst _thou_ say to us yet, Euterpe, but thy "ga-ga" and thy
"ba-ba," the inarticulate sweetness whereof we feel and cannot
comprehend? But how beautiful it is--and what a look thou hast, and
what a voice--that is, if one is fond of music!
"Je suis las des mois--je suis d'entendre
Ce qui peut mentir;
J'aime mieux les sons, qu'au lieu de comprendre
je n'ai qu'à sentir."
Next day I would buy or beg or borrow the music that had filled me with
such emotion and delight, and take it home to my little square piano,
and try to finger it all out for myself. But I had begun too late
in life.
To sit, longing and helpless, before an instrument one cannot play, with
a lovely score one cannot read! Even Tantalus was spared such an
ordeal as that.
It seemed hard that my dear father and mother, so accomplished in music
themselves, should not even have taught me the musical notes, at an age
when it was so easy to learn them; and thus have made me free of that
wonder-world of sound in which I took such an extraordinary delight, and
might have achieved distinction--perhaps.
But no, my father had dedicated me to the Goddess of Science from before
my very birth; that I might some day be better equipped than he for the
pursuit, capture, and utilization of Nature's sterner secrets. There
must be no dallying with light Muses. Alas! I have fallen between
two stools!
And thus, Euterpe absent, her enchantment would pass away; her
handwriting was before me, but I had not learned how to decipher it, and
my weary self would creep back into its old prison--my soul.
[Illustration: (no caption)]
Self-sickness-_selbstschmerz, le mal do soi!_ What a disease! It is not
to be found in any dictionary, medical or otherwise.
I ought to have been whipped for it, I know; but nobody was big enough,
or kind enough, to whip me!
* * * * *
At length there came a day when that weary, weak, and most ridiculous
self of mine was driven out--and exorcised for good--by a still more
potent enchanter than even Handel or Beethoven or Schubert!
There was a certain Lord Cray, for whom Lintot had built some laborers'
cottages in Hertfordshire, and I sometimes went there to superintend the
workmen. When the cottages were finished, Lord Cray and his wife (a very
charming, middle-aged lady) came to see them, and were much pleased with
all that had been done, and also seemed to be much interested in _me_,
of all people in the world! and a few days later I received a card of
invitation to their house in town for a concert.
At first I felt much too shy to go; but Mr. Lintot insisted that it was
my duty to do so, as it might lead to business; so that when the night
came, I screwed up my courage to the sticking-place, and went.
That evening was all enchantment, or would have been but for the
somewhat painful feeling that I was such an outsider.
But I was always well content to be the least observed of all observers,
and felt happy in the security that here I should at least be left
alone; that no perfect stranger would attempt to put me at my ease by
making me the butt of his friendly and familiar banter; that no gartered
duke, or belted earl (I have no doubt they were as plentiful there as
blackberries, though they did not wear their insignia) would pat me on
the back and ask me if I would sooner look a bigger fool than I was, or
be a bigger fool than I looked. (I have not found a repartee for that
insidious question yet; that is why it rankles so.)
I had always heard that the English were a stiff people. There seemed to
be no stiffness at Lady Cray's; nor was there any facetiousness; it put
one at one's ease merely to look at them. They were mostly big, and
strong, and healthy, and quiet, and good-humored, with soft and
pleasantly-modulated voices. The large, well-lighted rooms were neither
hot nor cold; there were beautiful pictures on the walls, and an
exquisite scent of flowers came from an immense conservatory. I had
never been to such a gathering before; all was new and a surprise, and
very much to my taste, I confess. It was my first glimpse of "Society;"
and last--but one!
There were crowds of people--but no crowd; everybody seemed to know
everybody else quite intimately, and to resume conversations begun an
hour ago somewhere else.
Presently these conversations were hushed, and Grisi and Mario sang! It
was as much as I could do to restrain my enthusiasm and delight. I could
have shouted out loud--I could almost have sung myself!
In the midst of the applause that followed that heavenly duet, a lady
and gentleman came into the room, and at the sight of that lady a new
interest came into my life; and all the old half-forgotten sensations of
mute pain and rapture that the beauty of Madame Seraskier used to make
me feel as a child were revived once more; but with a depth and
intensity, in comparison, that were as a strong man's barytone to a
small boy's treble.
It was the quick, sharp, cruel blow, the _coup de poignard_, that beauty
of the most obvious, yet subtle, consummate, and highly-organized order
can deal to a thoroughly prepared victim.
And what a thoroughly prepared victim was I! A poor, shy,
over-susceptible, virginal savage--Uncas, the son of Chingachgook,
astray for the first time in a fashionable London drawing-room.
A chaste mediaeval knight, born out of his due time, ascetic both from
reverence and disgust, to whom woman in the abstract was the one
religion; in the concrete, the cause of fifty disenchantments a day!
A lusty, love-famished, warm-blooded pagan, stranded in the middle of
the nineteenth century; in whom some strange inherited instinct had
planted a definite, complete, and elaborately-finished conception of
what the ever-beloved shape of woman should be--from the way the hair
should grow on her brow and her temples and the nape of her neck, down
to the very rhythm that should regulate the length and curve and
position of every single individual toe! and who had found, to his pride
and delight, that his preconceived ideal was as near to that of Phidias
as if he had lived in the time of Pericles and Aspasia.
For such was this poor scribe, and such he had been from a child, until
this beautiful lady first swam into his ken.
She was so tall that her eyes seemed almost on a level with mine, but
she moved with the alert lightness and grace of a small person. Her
thick, heavy hair was of a dark coppery brown, her complexion clear and
pale, her eyebrows and eyelashes black, her eyes a light bluish gray.
Her nose was short and sharp, and rather tilted at the tip, and her red
mouth large and very mobile; and here, deviating from my preconceived
ideal, she showed me how tame a preconceived ideal can be. Her perfect
head was small, and round her long, thick throat two slight creases went
parallel, to make what French sculptors call _le collier de Vénus;_ the
skin of her neck was like a white camellia, and slender and
square-shouldered as she was, she did not show a bone. She was that
beautiful type the French define as _la fausse maigre_, which does not
mean a "false, thin woman."
She seemed both thoughtful and mirthful at once, and genial as I had
never seen any one genial before--a person to confide in, to tell all
one's troubles to, without even an introduction! When she laughed she
showed both top and bottom teeth, which were perfect, and her eyes
nearly closed, so that they could no longer be seen for the thick lashes
that fringed both upper and under eyelids; at which time the expression
of her face was so keenly, cruelly sweet that it went through one like a
knife. And then the laugh would suddenly cease, her full lips would
meet, and her eyes beam out again like two mild gray suns, benevolently
humorous and kindly inquisitive, and full of interest in everything and
everybody around her. But there--I cannot describe her any more than one
can describe a beautiful tune.
Out of those magnificent orbs kindness, kindness, kindness was shed like
a balm; and after a while, by chance, that balm was shed for a few
moments on me, to my sweet but terrible confusion. Then I saw that she
asked my hostess who I was, and received the answer; on which she shed
her balm on me for one moment more, and dismissed me from her thoughts.
Madame Grisi sang again--Desdemona's song from _Othello_--and the
beautiful lady thanked the divine singer, whom she seemed to know quite
intimately; and I thought her thanks--Italian thanks--even diviner than
the song--not that I could quite understand them or even hear them
well--I was too far; but she thanked with eyes and hands and shoulders--
slight, happy movements--as well as words; surely the sweetest and
sincerest words ever spoken.
She was much surrounded and made up to--evidently a person of great
importance; and I ventured to ask another shy man standing in my corner
who she was, and he answered--
"The Duchess of Towers."
She did not stay long, and when she departed all turned dull and
commonplace that had seemed so bright before she came; and seeing that
it was not necessary to bid my hostess good-night and thank her for a
pleasant evening, as we did in Pentonville, I got myself out of the
house and walked back to my lodgings an altered man.
I should probably never meet that lovely young duchess again, and
certainly never know her; but her shaft had gone straight and true into
my very heart, and I felt how well barbed it was, beyond all possibility
of its ever being torn out of that blessed wound; might this never heal;
might it bleed on forever!
She would be an ideal in my lonely life, to live up to in thought and
word and deed. An instinct which I felt to be infallible told me she was
as good as she was fair--
_"Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of
love."_
[Illustration: THE DUCHESS OP TOWERS.]
And just as Madame Seraskier's image was fading away, this new star had
arisen to guide me by its light, though seen but for a moment; breaking
once, through a parted cloud, I knew in which portion of the heavens it
dwelt and shone apart, among the fairest constellations; and ever after
turned my face that way. Nevermore in my life would I do or say or think
a mean thing, or an impure, or an unkind one, if I could help it.
* * * * *
Next day, as we walked to the Foundling Hospital for divine service,
Mrs. Lintot severely deigned--under protest, as it were--to
cross-examine me on the adventures of the evening.
I did not mention the Duchess of Towers, nor was I able to describe the
different ladies' dresses; but I described everything else in a manner I
thought calculated to interest her deeply--the flowers, the splendid
pictures and curtains and cabinets, the beautiful music, the many lords
and ladies gay.
She disapproved of them all.
Existence on such an opulent scale was unconducive to any qualities of
real sterling value, either moral or intellectual. Give _her_, for one,
plain living and high thinking!
"By-the-way," she asked, "what kind of supper did they give you?
Something extremely _recherché_, I have no doubt. Ortolans,
nightingales' tongues, pearls dissolved in wine?"
Candor obliged me to confess there had been no supper, or that if there
had I had managed to miss it. I suggested that perhaps everybody had
dined late; and all the pearls, I told her, were on the ladies' necks
and in their hair; and not feeling hungry, I could not wish them
anywhere else; and the nightingales' tongues were in their throats to
sing heavenly Italian duets with.
"And they call that hospitality!" exclaimed Lintot, who loved his
supper; and then, as he was fond of summing up and laying down the law
when once his wife had given him the lead, he did so to the effect that
though the great were all very well in their superficial way, and might
possess many external charms for each other, and for all who were so
deplorably weak as to fall within the sphere of their attraction, there
was a gulf between the likes of them and the likes of us, which it would
be better not to try and bridge if one wished to preserve one's
independence and one's self-respect; unless, of course, it led to
business; and this, he feared, it would never do with me.
"They take you up one day and they drop you like a 'ot potato the next;
and, moreover, my dear Peter," he concluded, affectionately linking his
arm in mine, as was often his way when we walked together (although he
was twelve good inches shorter than myself), "inequality of social
condition is a bar to any real intimacy. It is something like disparity
of physical stature. One can walk arm in arm only with a man of about
one's own size."
This summing up seemed so judicious, so incontrovertible, that feeling
quite deplorably weak enough to fall within the sphere of Lady Cray's
attraction if I saw much of her, and thereby losing my self-respect, I
was deplorably weak enough not to leave a card on her after the happy
evening I had spent at her house.
Snob that I was, I dropped her--"like a 'ot potato" for fear of her
dropping me.
Besides which I had on my conscience a guilty, snobby feeling that in
merely external charms at least these fine people were more to my taste
than the charmed circle of my kind old friends the Lintots, however
inferior they might be to these (for all that I knew) in sterling
qualities of the heart and head--just as I found the outer aspect of
Park Lane and Piccadilly more attractive than that of Pentonville,
though possibly the latter may have been the more wholesome for such as
I to live in.
But people who can get Mario and Grisi to come and sing for them (and
the Duchess of Towers to come and listen); people whose walls are
covered with beautiful pictures; people for whom the smooth and
harmonious ordering of all the little external things of social life has
become a habit and a profession--such people are not to be dropped
without a pang.
So with a pang I went back to my usual round as though nothing had
happened; but night and day the face of the Duchess of Towers was ever
present to me, like a fixed idea that dominates a life.
* * * * *
On reading and rereading these past pages, I find that I have been
unpardonably egotistic, unconscionably prolix and diffuse; and with such
small beer to chronicle!
And yet I feel that if I strike out this, I must also strike out that;
which would lead to my striking out all, in sheer discouragement; and I
have a tale to tell which is more than worth the telling!
Once having got into the way of it, I suppose, I must have found the
temptation to talk about myself irresistible.
It is evidently a habit easy to acquire, even in old age--perhaps
especially in old age, for it has never been my habit through life. I
would sooner have talked to you about yourself, reader, or about you to
somebody else--your friend, or even your enemy; or about them to you.
But, indeed, at present, and until I die, I am without a soul to talk to
about anybody or anything worth speaking of, so that most of my talking
is done in pen and ink--a one-sided conversation, O patient reader, with
yourself. I am the most lonely old man in the world, although perhaps
the happiest.
Still, it is not always amusing where I live, cheerfully awaiting my
translation to another sphere.
There is the good chaplain, it is true, and the good priest; who talk to
me about myself a little too much, methinks; and the doctor, who talks
to me about the priest and the chaplain, which is better. He does not
seem to like them. He is a very witty man.
But, my brother maniacs!
They are lamentably _comme tout le monde_, after all. They are only
interesting when the mad fit seizes them. When free from their awful
complaint they are for the most part very common mortals: conventional
Philistines, dull dogs like myself, and dull dogs do not like
each other.
Two of the most sensible (one a forger, the other a kleptomaniac on an
important scale) are friends of mine. They are fairly well educated,
respectable city men, clean, solemn, stodgy, punctilious, and resigned,
but they are both unhappy; not because they are cursed with the double
brand of madness and crime, and have forfeited their freedom in
consequence; but because they find there are so few "ladies and
gentlemen" in a criminal lunatic asylum, and they have always been used
to "the society of ladies and gentlemen." Were it not for this, they
would be well content to live here. And each is in the habit of
confiding to me that he considers the other a very high-minded,
trustworthy fellow, and all that, but not altogether "quite a
gentleman." I do not know what they consider me; they probably confide
that to each other.
Can anything be less odd, less eccentric or interesting?
Another, when quite sane, speaks English with a French accent and
demonstrative French gestures, and laments the lost glories of the old
French régime, and affects to forget the simplest English words. He
doesn't know a word of French, however. But when his madness comes on,
and he is put into a strait-waistcoat, all his English comes back, and
very strong, fluent, idiomatic English it is, of the cockneyest kind,
with all its "h's" duly transposed.
Another (the most unpleasant and ugliest person here) has chosen me for
the confidant of his past amours; he gives me the names and dates and
all. The less I listen the more he confides. He makes me sick. What can
I do to prevent his believing that I believe him? I am tired of killing
people for lying about women. If I call him a liar and a cad, it may
wake in him Heaven knows what dormant frenzy--for I am quite in the dark
as to the nature of his mental infirmity.
Another, a weak but amiable and well-intentioned youth, tries to think
that he is passionately fond of music; but he is so exclusive, if you
please, that he can only endure Bach and Beethoven, and when he hears
Mendelssohn or Chopin, is obliged to leave the room. If I want to please
him I whistle "Le Bon Roi Dagobert," and tell him it is the _motif_ of
one of Bach's fugues; and to get rid of him I whistle it again and tell
him it is one of Chopin's impromptus. What his madness is I can never be
quite sure, for he is very close, but have heard that he is fond of
roasting cats alive; and that the mere sight of a cat is enough to rouse
his terrible propensity, and drive all wholesome, innocent, harmless,
natural affectation out of his head.
There is a painter here who (like others one has met outside) believes
himself the one living painter worthy of the name. Indeed, he has
forgotten the names of all the others, and can only despise and abuse
them in the lump. He triumphantly shows you his own work, which consists
of just the kind of crude, half-clever, irresponsible, impressionist
daubs you would expect from an amateur who talks in that way; and you
wonder why on earth he should be in a lunatic asylum, of all places in
the world. And (just as would happen outside, again) some of his
fellow-sufferers take him at his own valuation and believe him a great
genius; some of them want to kick him for an impudent impostor (but that
he is so small); and the majority do not care.
His mania is arson, poor fellow; and when the terrible wish comes over
him to set the place on fire he forgets his artistic conceit, and his
mean, weak, silly face becomes almost grand.
And with the female inmates it is just the same. There is a lady who has
spent twenty years of her life here. Her father was a small country
doctor, called Snogget; her husband an obscure, hard-working curate; and
she is absolutely normal, common-place, and even vulgar. For her hobby
is to discourse of well-born and titled people and county families, with
whom (and with no others) it has always been her hope and desire to mix;
and is still, though her hair is nearly white, and she is still here.
She thinks and talks and cares about nothing else but "smart people,"
and has conceived a very warm regard for me, on account of
Lieutenant-colonel Ibbetson, of Ibbetson Hall, Hopshire; not because I
killed him and was sentenced to be hanged for it, or because he was a
greater criminal than I (all of which is interesting enough); but
because he was my relative, and that through him I must be distantly
connected, she thinks, with the Ibbetsons of Lechmere--whoever they may
be, and whom neither she nor I have ever met (indeed, I had never heard
of them), but whose family history she knows almost by heart. What can
be tamer, duller, more prosaic, more sordidly humdrum, more hopelessly
sane, more characteristic of common, under-bred, provincial
feminine cackle?
And yet this woman, in a fit of conjugal jealousy, murdered her own
children; and her father went mad in consequence, and her husband cut
his throat.
In fact, during their lucid intervals it would never enter one's mind
that they were mad at all, they are so absolutely like the people one
meets every day in the world--such narrow-minded idiots, such deadly
bores! One might as well be back in Pentonville or Hopshire again, or
live in Passionate Brompton (as I am told it is called); or even in
Belgravia, for that matter!
For we have a young lord and a middle-aged baronet--a shocking pair, who
should not be allowed to live; but for family influence they would be
doing their twenty years' penal servitude in jail, instead of living
comfortably sequestered here. Like Ouida's high-born heroes, they "stick
to their order," and do not mingle with the rest of us. They ignore us
so completely that we cannot help looking up to them in spite of their
vices--just as we should do outside.
And we, of the middle class, we stick to our order, too, and do not
mingle with the small shop-keepers--who do not mingle with the laborers,
artisans, and mechanics--who (alas, for them!) have nobody to look down
upon but each other--but they do not; and are the best-bred people in
the place.
Such are we! It is only when our madness is upon us that we cease to be
commonplace, and wax tragical and great, or else original and grotesque
and humorous, with that true deep humor that compels both our laughter
and our tears, and leaves us older, sadder, and wiser than it found us.
"_Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt_."
(So much, if little more, can I recall of the benign Virgil.)
And now to my small beer again, which will have more of a head to it
henceforward.
* * * * *
Thus did I pursue my solitary way, like Bryant's Water-fowl, only with a
less definite purpose before me--till at last there dawned for me an
ever-memorable Saturday in June.
I had again saved up enough money to carry my long longed-for journey to
Paris into execution. The _Seine's_ boiler got up its steam, the
_Seine's_ white awning was put up for me as well as others; and on a
beautiful cloudless English morning I stood by the man at the wheel, and
saw St. Paul's and London Bridge and the Tower fade out of sight; with
what hope and joy I cannot describe. I almost forgot that I was me!
And next morning (a beautiful French morning) how I exulted as I went up
the Champs Elysées and passed under the familiar Arc de Triomphe on my
way to the Rue de la Pompe, Passy, and heard all around the familiar
tongue that I still knew so well, and rebreathed the long-lost and
half-forgotten, but now keenly remembered, fragrance of the _genius
loci_; that vague, light, indescribable, almost imperceptible scent of a
place, that is so heavenly laden with the past for those who have lived
there long ago--the most subtly intoxicating ether that can be!
When I came to the meeting of the Rue de la Tour and the Rue de la
Pompe, and, looking in at the grocer's shop at the corner, I recognized
the handsome mustachioed groceress, Madame Liard (whose mustache twelve
prosperous years had turned gray), I was almost faint with emotion. Had
any youth been ever so moved by that face before?
There, behind the window (which was now of plate-glass), and among
splendid Napoleonic wares of a later day, were the same old India-rubber
balls in colored net-work; the same quivering lumps of fresh paste in
brown paper, that looked so cool and tempting; the same three-sou boxes
of water-colors (now marked seventy-five centimes), of which I had
consumed so many in the service of Mimsey Seraskier! I went in and
bought one, and resmelt with delight the smell of all my by-gone
dealings there, and received her familiar sounding--
"Merci, monsieur! faudrait-il autre chose?" as if it had been a
blessing; but I was too shy to throw myself into her arms and tell her
that I was the "lone, wandering, but not lost" Gogo Pasquier. She might
have said--
"Eh bien, et après?"
The day had begun well.
Like an epicure, I deliberated whether I should walk to the old gate in
the Rue de la Pompe, and up the avenue and back to our old garden, or
make my way round to the gap in the park hedge that we had worn of old
by our frequent passage in and out, to and from the Bois de Boulogne.
I chose the latter as, on the whole, the more promising in exquisite
gradations of delight.
The gap in the park hedge, indeed! The park hedge had disappeared, the
very park itself was gone, cut up, demolished, all parcelled out into
small gardens, with trim white villas, except where a railway ran
through a deep cutting in the chalk. A train actually roared and panted
by, and choked me with its filthy steam as I looked round in
stupefaction on the ruins of my long-cherished hope.
If that train had run over me and I had survived it, it could not have
given me a greater shock; it all seemed too cruel and brutal an outrage.
A winding carriage-road had been pierced through the very heart of the
wilderness; and on this, neatly-paled little brand-new gardens abutted,
and in these I would recognize, here and there, an old friend in the
shape of some well-remembered tree that I had often climbed as a boy,
and which had been left standing out of so many, but so changed by the
loss of its old surroundings that it had a tame, caged, transplanted
look--almost apologetic, and as if ashamed of being found out at last!
Nothing else remained. Little hills and cliffs and valleys and
chalk-pits that had once seemed big had been levelled up, or away, and I
lost my bearings altogether, and felt a strange, creeping chill of
blankness and bereavement.
But how about the avenue and my old home? I hastened back to the Rue de
la Pompe with the quick step of aroused anxiety. The avenue was
gone--blocked within a dozen yards of the gate by a huge brick building
covered with newly-painted trellis-work! My old house was no more, but
in its place a much larger and smarter edifice of sculptured stone. The
old gate at least had not disappeared, nor the porter's lodge; and I
feasted my sorrowful eyes on these poor remains, that looked snubbed
and shabby and out of place in the midst of all this new splendor.
[Illustration]
Presently a smart concierge, with a beautiful pink ribboned cap, came
out and stared at me for a while, and inquired if monsieur
desired anything.