"Descends donc, malheureux; tu vas te casser les deux jambes! Saute!
saute!" ... I cry, holding out my arms. He does not pay the slightest
attention: he reaches the corner, followed low down by Gogo and Mimsey,
who are beside themselves with generous envy and admiration. Stimulated
by their applause, he becomes more foolhardy than ever, and even tries
to be droll, and standing on one leg, sings a little song that begins--
_"Maman m'a donné quat' sous Pour m'en aller à la foire, Non pas pour
manger ni boire, Alais pour m'régaler d'joujoux!"_
Then suddenly down he slips, poor boy, and breaks both his legs below
the knee on an iron rail, whereby he becomes a cripple for life.
All this sad little tragedy of a New-year's Eve plays itself anew. The
sympathetic crowd collects; Mimsey and Gogo weep; the heart-broken
parents arrive, and the good little doctor Larcher; and Mary and I look
on like criminals, so impossible it seems not to feel that we might have
prevented it all!
We two alone are alive and substantial in all this strange world of
shadows, who seem, as far as we can hear and see, no less substantial
and alive than ourselves. They exist for us; we do not exist for them.
We exist for each other only, waking or sleeping; for even the people
among whom our waking life is spent know hardly more of us, and what our
real existence is, than poor little André Corbin, who has just broken
his legs for us over again!
[Illustration]
And so, back to "Magna sed Apta," both saddened by this deplorable
misadventure, to muse and talk and marvel over these wonders; penetrated
to the very heart's core by a dim sense of some vast, mysterious power,
latent in the sub-consciousness of man--unheard of, undreamed of as yet,
but linking him with the Infinite and the Eternal.
And how many things we always had to talk about besides!
Heaven knows, I am not a brilliant conversationalist, but she was the
most easily amusable person in the world--interested in everything that
interested me, and I disdamaged myself (to use one of her
Anglo-Gallicisms) of the sulky silence of years.
Of her as a companion it is not for me to speak. It would be
impertinent, and even ludicrous, for a person in my position to dilate
on the social gifts of the famous Duchess of Towers.
Incredible as it may appear, however, most of our conversation was about
very common and earthly topics--her homes and refuges, the difficulties
of their management, her eternal want of money, her many schemes and
plans and experiments and failures and disenchantments--in all of which
I naturally took a very warm interest. And then my jail, and all that
occurred there--in all of which I became interested myself because it
interested her so passionately; she knew every corner of it that I knew,
every detail of the life there--the name, appearance, and history of
almost every inmate, and criticised its internal economy with a
practical knowledge of affairs; a business-like sagacity at which I
never ceased to marvel.
One of my drollest recollections is of a visit she
paid there _in the flesh_, by some famous philanthropists of both sexes.
I was interviewed by them all as the model prisoner, who, for his
unorthodoxy, was a credit to the institution. She listened demurely to
my intelligent answers when I was questioned as to my bodily health,
etc., and asked whether I had any complaints to make. Complaints! Never
was jail-bird so thoroughly satisfied with his nest--so healthy, so
happy, so well-behaved. She took notes all the time.
[Illustration: MARY, DUCHESS OF TOWERS. From a photograph by
Strlkzchuski, Warsaw.]
Eight hours before we had been strolling hand in hand through the Uffizi
Gallery in Florence; eight hours later we should be in each
other's arms.
* * * * *
Strange to relate, this happiness of ours--so deep, so acute, so
transcendent, so unmatched in all the history of human affection--was
not always free of unreasonable longings and regrets. Man is never so
blessed but what he would have his blessedness still greater.
The reality of our close companionship, of our true possession of each
other (during our allotted time), was absolute, complete, and thorough.
No Darby that ever lived can ever have had sweeter, warmer, more tender
memories of any Joan than I have now of Mary Seraskier! Although each
was, in a way, but a seeming illusion of the other's brain, the illusion
was no illusion for us. It was an illusion that showed the truth, as
does the illusion of sight. Like twin kernels in one shell
("Philipschen," as Mary called it), we touched at more points and were
closer than the rest of mankind (with each of them a separate shell of
his own). We tried and tested this in every way we could devise, and
never found ourselves at fault, and never ceased to marvel at so great a
wonder. For instance, I received letters from her in jail (and answered
them) in an intricate cipher we had invented and perfected together
entirely during sleep, and referring to things that had happened to us
both when together.[A]
[Footnote A: _Note_.--Several of these letters are in my possession.
MADGE PLUNKET.]
Our privileges were such as probably no human beings could have ever
enjoyed before. Time and space were annihilated for us at the mere wish
of either--we lived in a palace of delight; all conceivable luxuries
were ours--and, better than all, and perennially, such freshness and
elation as belong only to the morning of life--and such a love for each
other (the result of circumstances not to be paralleled) as time could
never slake or quench till death should come and part us. All this, and
more, was our portion for eight hours out of twenty-four.
So what must we do sometimes, but fret that the sixteen hours which
remained did not belong to us well; that we must live two-thirds of our
lives apart; that we could not share the toils and troubles of our
work-a-day, waking existence, as we shared the blissful guerdon of our
seeming sleep--the glories of our common dream.
And then we would lament the lost years we had spent in mutual ignorance
and separation--a deplorable waste of life; when life, sleeping or
waking, was so short.
How different things might have been with us had we but known!
We need never have lost sight and touch of each other; we might have
grown up, and learned and worked and struggled together from the
first--boy and girl, brother and sister, lovers, man and wife--and yet
have found our blessed dream-land and dwelt in it just the same.
Children might have been born to us! Sweet children, _beaux comme le
jour_, as in Madame Perrault's fairy tales; even beautiful and good as
their mother.
And as we talked of these imaginary little beings and tried to picture
them, we felt in ourselves such a stupendous capacity for loving the
same that we would fall to weeping on each other's shoulders. Full well
I knew, even as if they had formed a part of my own personal experience,
all the passion and tenderness, all the wasted anguish of her brief,
ill-starred motherhood: the very ache of my jealousy that she should
have borne a child to another man was forgotten in that keen and
thorough comprehension! Ah, yes ... that hungry love, that woful pity,
which not to know is hardly quite to have lived! Childless as I am
(though old enough to be a grandfather) I have it all by heart!
Never could we hope for son or daughter of our own. For us the blessed
flower of love in rich, profuse, unfading bloom; but its blessed fruit
of life, never, never, never!
Our only children were Mimsey and Gogo, between whom and ourselves was
an impassable gulf, and who were unconscious of our very existence,
except for Mimsey's strange consciousness that a Fairy Tarapatapoum and
a Prince Charming were watching over them.
All this would always end, as it could not but end, in our realizing the
more fully our utter dependence on each other for all that made life not
only worth living, ingrates that we were, but a heaven on earth for us
both; and, indeed, we could not but recognize that merely thus to love
and be loved was in itself a thing so immense (without all the other
blessings we had) that we were fain to tremble at our audacity in daring
to wish for more.
* * * * *
Thus sped three years, and would have sped all the rest, perhaps, but
for an incident that made an epoch in our joint lives, and turned all
our thoughts and energies in a new direction.