At length, one afternoon, a strange, inexplicable, overwhelming
nostalgic desire came over me to see once more the Mare d'Auteuil--only
once; to walk thither for the last time through the Chaussée de la
Muette, and by the fortifications.
It grew upon me till it became a torture to wait for bedtime, so frantic
was my impatience.
When the long-wished-for hour arrived at last, I laid myself down once
more (as nearly as I could for my bonds) in the old position I had not
tried for so long; my will intent upon the Porte de la Muette, an old
stone gate-way that separated the Grande Rue de Passy from the entrance
to the Bois de Boulogne--a kind of Temple Bar.
It was pulled down forty-five years ago.
I soon found myself there, just where the Grande Rue meets the Rue de la
Pompe, and went through the arch and looked towards the Bois.
It was a dull, leaden day in autumn; few people were about, but a gay
_repas de noces_ was being held at a little restaurant on my right-hand
side. It was to celebrate the wedding of Achille Grigoux, the
green-grocer, with Félicité Lenormand, who had been the Seraskiers'
house-maid. I suddenly remembered all this, and that Mimsey and Gogo
were of the party--the latter, indeed, being _premier garçon d'honneur_,
on whom would soon devolve the duty of stealing the bride's garter, and
cutting it up into little bits to adorn the button-holes of the male
guests before the ball began.
In an archway on my left some forlorn, worn-out old rips, broken-kneed
and broken-winded, were patiently waiting, ready saddled and bridled, to
be hired--Chloris, Murat, Rigolette, and others: I knew and had ridden
them all nearly half a century ago. Poor old shadows of the long-dead
past, so life-like and real and pathetic--it "split me the heart" to
see them!
A handsome young blue-coated, silver-buttoned courier of the name of
Lami came trotting along from St. Cloud on a roan horse, with a great
jingling of his horse's bells and clacking of his short-handled whip. He
stopped at the restaurant and called for a glass of white wine, and
rising in his stirrups, shouted gayly for Monsieur et Madame Grigoux.
They appeared at the first-floor window, looking very happy, and he
drank their health, and they his. I could see Gogo and Mimsey in the
crowd behind them, and mildly wondered again, as I had so often wondered
before, how I came to see it all from the outside--from another point of
view than Gogo's.
Then the courier bowed gallantly, and said, _"Bonne chance!"_ and went
trotting down the Grande Rue on his way to the Tuileries, and the
wedding guests began to sing: they sang a song beginning--
_"Il était un petit navire, Qui n'avait jamais navigué_...."
I had quite forgotten it, and listened till the end, and thought it very
pretty; and was interested in a dull, mechanical way at discovering
that it must be the original of Thackeray's famous ballad of "Little
Billee," which I did not hear till many years after. When they came to
the last verse--
"_Si cette histoire vous embête, Nous allons la recommencer_,"
I went on my way. This was my last walk in dreamland, perhaps, and
dream-hours are uncertain, and I would make the most of them, and
look about me.
I walked towards Ranelagh, a kind of casino, where they used to give
balls and theatrical performances on Sunday and Thursday nights (and
where afterwards Rossini spent the latter years of his life; then it was
pulled down, I am told, to make room for many smart little villas).
In the meadow opposite M. Erard's park, Saindou's school-boys were
playing rounders--_la balle au camp_--from which I concluded it was a
Thursday afternoon, a half-holiday; if they had had clean shirts on
(which they had not) it would have been Sunday, and the holiday a
whole one.
I knew them all, and the two _pions_, or ushers, M. Lartigue and _le
petit Cazal_; but no longer cared for them or found them amusing or
interesting in the least.
Opposite the Ranelagh a few old hackney-coach men were pacifically
killing time by a game of _bouchon_--knocking sous off a cork with other
sous--great fat sous and double sous long gone out of fashion. It is a
very good game, and I watched it for a while and envied the
long-dead players.
Close by was a small wooden shed, or _baraque_, prettily painted and
glazed, and ornamented at the top with little tricolor flags; it
belonged to a couple of old ladies, Mère Manette and Grandmère
Manette-the two oldest women ever seen. They were very keen about
business, and would not give credit for a centime--not even to English
boys. They were said to be immensely rich and quite alone in the world.
How very dead they must be now! I thought. And I gazed at them and
wondered at their liveliness and the pleasure they took in living. They
sold many things: nougat, _pain d'èpices_, mirlitons, hoops, drums,
noisy battledoors and shuttlecocks; and little ten-sou hand-mirrors,
neatly bound in zinc, that could open and shut.
I looked at myself in one of these that was hanging outside; I was old
and worn and gray-my face badly shaven--my hair almost white. I had
never been old in a dream before.
I walked through the gate in the fortifications on to the outer Talus
(which was quite bare in those days), in the direction of the Mare
d'Auteuil. The place seemed very deserted and dull for a Thursday. It
was a sad and sober walk; my melancholy was not to be borne--my heart
was utterly broken, and my body so tired I could scarcely drag myself
along. Never before had I known in a dream what it was to be tired.
I gazed at the famous fortifications in all their brand-new pinkness,
the scaffoldings barely removed--some of them still lying in the dry
ditch between--and smiled to think how these little brick and granite
walls would avail to keep the Germans out of Paris thirty years later
(twenty years ago). I tried to throw a stone across the narrow part, and
found I could no longer throw stones; so I sat down and rested. How thin
my legs were! and how miserably clad--in old prison trousers, greasy,
stained, and frayed, and ignobly kneed--and what boots!
[Illustration: "I sat down and rested."]
Never had I been shabby in a dream before.
Why could not I, once for all, walk round to the other side and take a
header _à la hussarde_ off those lofty bulwarks, and kill myself for
good and all? Alas! I should only blur the dream, and perhaps even wake
in my miserable strait-waistcoat. And I wanted to see the _mare_ once
more, very badly.
This set me thinking. I would fill my pockets with stones, and throw
myself into the Mare d'Auteuil after I had taken a last good look at it,
and around. Perhaps the shock of emotion, in my present state of
weakness, might really kill me in my sleep. Who knows? it was worth
trying, anyhow.
I got up and dragged myself to the _mare_. It was deserted but for one
solitary female figure, soberly clad in black and gray, that sat
motionless on the bench by the old willow.
I walked slowly round in her direction, picking up stones and putting
them into my pockets, and saw that she was gray-haired and middle-aged,
with very dark eyebrows, and extremely tall, and that her magnificent
eyes were following me.
Then, as I drew nearer, she smiled and showed gleaming white teeth, and
her eyes crinkled and nearly closed up as she did so.
"Oh, my God!" I shrieked; "it is Mary Seraskier!"
* * * * *
I ran to her--I threw myself at her feet, and buried my face in her lap,
and there I sobbed like a hysterical child, while she tried to soothe me
as one soothes a child.
After a while I looked up into her face. It was old and worn and gray,
and her hair nearly white, like mine. I had never seen her like that
before; she had always been eight-and-twenty. But age became her
well--she looked so benignly beautiful and calm and grand that I was
awed--and quick, chill waves went down my backbone.
Her dress and bonnet were old and shabby, her gloves had been
mended--old kid gloves with fur about the wrists. She drew them off, and
took my hands and made me sit beside her, and looked at me for a while
with all her might in silence.
At length she said: "Gogo mio, I know all you have been through by the
touch of your hands. Does the touch of mine tell you nothing?"
It told me nothing but her huge love for me, which was all I cared for,
and I said so.
She sighed, and said: "I was afraid it would be like this. The old
circuit is broken, and can't be restored--not yet!"
We tried again hard; but it was useless.
She looked round and about and up at the tree-tops, everywhere; and then
at me again, with great wistfulness, and shivered, and finally began to
speak, with hesitation at first, and in a manner foreign to her. But
soon she became apparently herself, and found her old swift smile and
laugh, her happy slight shrugs and gestures, and quaint polyglot
colloquialisms (which I omit, as I cannot always spell them); her
homely, simple ways of speech, her fluent, magnetic energy, the winning
and sympathetic modulations of her voice, its quick humorous changes
from grave to gay--all that made everything she said so suggestive of
all she wanted to say besides.
"Gogo, I knew you would come. I _wished_ it! How dreadfully you have
suffered! How thin you are! It shocks me to see you! But that will not
be any more; we are going to change all that.
"Gogo, you have no idea how difficult it has been for me to come back,
even for a few short hours, for I can't hold on very long. It is like
hanging on to the window-sill by one's wrists. This time it is Hero
swimming to Leander, or Juliet climbing up to Romeo.
"Nobody has ever come back before.
"I am but a poor husk of my former self, put together at great pains for
you to know me by. I could not make myself again what I have always been
to you. I had to be content with this, and so must you. These are the
clothes I died in. But you knew me directly, dear Gogo.
"I have come a long way--such a long way--to have an _abboccamento_ with
you. I had so many things to say. And now we are both here, hand in hand
as we used to be, I can't even understand what they were; and if I
could, I couldn't make _you_ understand. But you will know some day, and
there is no hurry whatever.
"Every thought you have had since I died, I know already; _your_ share
of the circuit is unbroken at least. I know now why you picked up those
stones and put them in your pockets. You must never think of _that_
again--you never will. Besides, it would be of no use, poor Gogo!"
Then she looked up at the sky and all round her again, and smiled in her
old happy manner, and rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands, and
seemed to settle herself for a good long talk--an _abboccamento!_
* * * * *
Of all she said I can only give a few fragments--whatever I can recall
and understand when awake. Wherever I have forgotten I will put a line
of little dots. Only when I sleep and dream can I recall and understand
the rest. It seems all very simple then. I often say to myself, "I will
fix it well in my mind, and put it into well-chosen words--_her_
words--and learn them by heart; and then wake cautiously and remember
them, and write them all down in a book, so that they shall do for
others all they have done for me, and turn doubt into happy certainty,
and despair into patience and hope and high elation."
[Illustration: "IT IS MARY SERASKIER!"]
But the bell rings and I wake, and my memory plays me false. Nothing
remains but the knowledge _that all will be well for us all, and of such
a kind that those who do not sigh for the moon will be well content_.
Alas, this knowledge: I cannot impart it to others. Like many who have
lived before me, I cannot prove--I can only affirm....
* * * * *
"How odd and old-fashioned it feels," she began, "to have eyes and ears
again, and all that--little open windows on to what is near us. They are
very clumsy contrivances! I had already forgotten them."
* * * * *
Look, there goes our old friend, the water-rat, under the bank--the old
fat father--_le bon gros père_--as we used to call him. He is only a
little flat picture moving upsidedown in the opposite direction across
the backs of our eyes, and the farther he goes the smaller he seems. A
couple of hundred yards off we shouldn't see him at all. As it is, we
can only see the outside of him, and that only on one side at a time;
and yet he is full of important and wonderful things that have taken
millions of years to make--like us! And to see him at all we have to
look straight at him--and then we can't see what's behind us or
around--and if it was dark we couldn't see anything whatever.
Poor eyes! Little bags full of water, with a little magnifying-glass
inside, and a nasturtium leaf behind--to catch the light and feel it!
A celebrated German oculist once told papa that if his instrument-maker
were to send him such an ill-made machine as a human eye, he would send
it back and refuse to pay the bill. I can understand that now; and yet
on earth where should we be without eyes? And afterwards where should we
be if some of us hadn't once had them on earth?
* * * * *
I can hear your dear voice, Gogo, with both ears. Why two ears? Why
only two? What you want, or think, or feel, you try to tell me in sounds
that you have been taught--English, French. If I didn't know English and
French, it would be no good whatever. Language is a poor thing. You fill
your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make
mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little
drums in my head--a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones
behind--and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout
way, and what a waste of time!
* * * * *
And so with all the rest. We can't even smell straight! A dog would
laugh at us--not that even a dog knows much!
And feeling! We can feel too hot or too cold, and it sometimes makes us
ill, or even kills us. But we can't feel the coming storm, or which is
north and south, or where the new moon is, or the sun at midnight, or
the stars at noon, or even what o'clock it is by our own measurement. We
cannot even find our way home blindfolded--not even a pigeon can do
that, nor a swallow, nor an owl! Only a mole, or a blind man, perhaps,
feebly groping with a stick, if he has already been that way before.
And taste! It is well said there is no accounting for it.
And then, to keep all this going, we have to eat, and drink, and sleep,
and all the rest. What a burden!
* * * * *
And you and I are the only mortals that I know of who ever found a way
to each other's inner being by the touch of the hands. And then we had
to go to sleep first. Our bodies were miles apart; not that _that_ would
have made any difference, for we could never have done it waking--never;
not if we hugged each other to extinction!
* * * * *
Gogo, I cannot find any words to tell you _how_, for there are none in
any language that _I_ ever knew to tell it; but where I am it is all ear
and eye and the rest in _one_, and there is, oh, how much more besides!
Things a homing-pigeon has known, and an ant, and a mole, and a
water-beetle, and an earthworm, and a leaf, and a root, and a
magnet--even a lump of chalk, and more. One can see and smell and touch
and taste a sound, as well as hear it, and _vice versâ_. It is very
simple, though it may not seem so to you now.
And the sounds! Ah, what sounds! The thick atmosphere of earth is no
conductor for such as _they_, and earthly ear-drums no receiver. Sound
is everything. Sound and light are one.
* * * * *
And what does it all mean?
I knew what it meant when I was there--part of it, at least--and should
know again in a few hours. But this poor old earth-brain of mine, which
I have had to put on once more as an old woman puts on a nightcap, is
like my eyes and ears. It can now only understand what is of the
earth--what _you_ can understand, Gogo, who are still of the earth. I
forget, as one forgets an ordinary dream, as one sometimes forgets the
answer to a riddle, or the last verse of a song. It is on the tip of the
tongue; but there it sticks, and won't come any farther.
Remember, it is only in your brain I am living now--your earthly brain,
that has been my only home for so many happy years, as mine has
been yours.
How we have nestled!
* * * * *
But this I know: one must have had them all once--brains, ears, eyes,
and the rest--on earth. 'Il faut avoir passé par là!' or no
after-existence for man or beast would be possible or even conceivable.
One cannot teach a born deaf-mute how to understand a musical score,
nor a born blind man how to feel color. To Beethoven, who had once heard
with the ear, his deafness made no difference, nor their blindness to
Homer and Milton.
Can you make out my little parable?
* * * * *
Sound and light and heat, and electricity and motion, and will and
thought and remembrance, and love and hate and pity, and the desire to
be born and to live, and the longing of all things alive and dead to get
near each other, or to fly apart--and lots of other things besides! All
that comes to the same--'C'est comme qui dirait bonnet blanc et blanc
bonnet,' as Monsieur le Major used to say. 'C'est simple comme bonjour!'
Where I am, Gogo, I can hear the sun shining on the earth and making
the flowers blow, and the birds sing, and the bells peal for birth and
marriage and death--happy, happy death, if you only knew--'C'est la clef
des champs!'
It shines on moons and planets, and I can hear it, and hear the echo
they give back again. The very stars are singing; rather a long way off!
but it is well worth their while with such an audience as lies between
us and them; and they can't help it....
I can't hear it here--not a bit--now that I've got my ears on; besides,
the winds of the earth are too loud....
Ah, that _is_ music, if you like; but men and women are stone-deaf to
it--their ears are in the way! ...
Those poor unseen flat fish that live in the darkness and mud at the
bottom of deep seas can't catch the music men and women make upon the
earth--such poor music as it is! But if ever so faint a murmur, borne on
the wings and fins of a sunbeam, reaches them for a few minutes at
mid-day, and they have a speck of marrow in their spines to feel it, and
no ears or eyes to come between, they are better off than any man, Gogo.
Their dull existence is more blessed than his.
But alas for them, as yet! They haven't got the memory of the eye and
ear, and without that no speck of spinal marrow will avail; they must be
content to wait, like you.
The blind and deaf?
Oh yes; _là bas_, it is all right for the poor deaf-mutes and born
blind of the earth; they can remember with the past eyes and ears of all
the rest. Besides, it is no longer _they_. There is no _they_! That is
only a detail.
* * * * *
You must try and realize that it is just as though all space between us
and the sun and stars were full of little specks of spinal marrow, much
too small to be seen in any microscope--smaller than anything in the
world. All space is full of them, shoulder to shoulder--almost as close
as sardines in a box--and there is still room for more! Yet a single
drop of water would hold them all, and not be the less transparent. They
all remember having been alive on earth or elsewhere, in some form or
other, and each knows all the others remember. I can only compare it
to that.
Once all that space was only full of stones, rushing, whirling,
meeting, and crushing together, and melting and steaming in the
white-heat of their own hurry. But now there's a crop of something
better than stones, I can promise you! It goes on gathering, and being
garnered and mingled and sifted and winnowed--the precious,
indestructible harvest of how many millions of years of life!
* * * * *
And this I know: the longer and more strenuously and completely one
lives one's life on earth the better for all. It is the foundation of
everything. Though if men could guess what is in store for them when
they die, without also knowing _that_, they would not have the patience
to live--they wouldn't wait! For who would fardels bear? They would just
put stones in their pockets, as you did, and make for the nearest pond.
They mustn't!
* * * * *
Nothing is lost--nothing! From the ineffable, high, fleeting thought a
Shakespeare can't find words to express, to the slightest sensation of
an earthworm--nothing! Not a leaf's feeling of the light, not a
loadstone's sense of the pole, not a single volcanic or electric thrill
of the mother earth.
All knowledge must begin on earth for _us_. It is the most favored
planet in this poor system of ours just now, and for a few short
millions of years to come. There are just a couple of others, perhaps
three; but they are not of great consequence. 'Il y fait trop chaud--ou
pas assez!' They are failures.
The sun, the father sun, _le bon gros père_, rains life on to the
mother earth. A poor little life it was at first, as you know--grasses
and moss, and little wriggling, transparent things--all stomach; it is
quite true! That is what we come from--Shakespeare, and you, and I!
* * * * *
After each individual death the earth retains each individual clay to
be used again and again; and, as far as I can see, it rains back each
individual essence to the sun--or somewhere near it--like a precious
water-drop returned to the sea, where it mingles, after having been
about and seen something of the world, and learned the use of five small
wits--and remembering all! Yes, like that poor little exiled wandering
water-drop in the pretty song your father used to sing, and which always
manages to find its home at last--
_'Va passaggier' in fiume,
Va prigionier' in fonte,
Ma sempre ritorn' al mar.'_
Or else it is as if little grains of salt were being showered into the
Mare d'Auteuil, to melt and mingle with the water and each other till
the Mare d'Auteuil itself was as salt as salt can be.
Not till that Mare d'Auteuil of the sun is saturated with the salt of
the earth, of earthly life and knowledge, will the purpose be complete,
and then old mother earth may well dry up into a cinder like the moon;
its occupation will be gone, like hers--'adieu, panier, les vendanges
sont faites!'
And, as for the sun and its surrounding ocean of life--ah, that is
beyond _me_! but the sun will dry up, too, and its ocean of life no
doubt be drawn to other greater suns. For everything seems to go on more
or less in the same way, only crescendo, everywhere and forever.
* * * * *
You must understand that it is not a bit like an ocean, nor a bit like
water-drops, or grains of salt, or specks of spinal marrow; but it is
only by such poor metaphors that I can give you a glimpse of what I
mean, since you can no longer understand me, as you used to do on
earthly things, by the mere touch of our hands.
* * * * *
Gogo, I am the only little water-drop, the one grain of salt that has
not yet been able to dissolve and melt away in that universal sea; I am
the exception.
It is as though a long, invisible chain bound me still to the earth,
and I were hung at the other end of it in a little transparent locket, a
kind of cage, which lets me see and hear things all round, but keeps me
from melting away.
And soon I found that this locket was made of that half of you that is
still in me, so that I couldn't dissolve, because half of me wasn't dead
at all; for the chain linked me to that half of myself I had left in
you, so that half of me actually wasn't there to be dissolved.... I am
getting rather mixed!
But oh, my heart's true love, how I hugged my chain, with you at the
other end of it!
With such pain and effort as you cannot conceive, I have crept along it
back to you, like a spider on an endless thread of its own spinning.
Such love as mine is stronger then death indeed!
* * * * *
I have come to tell you that we are inseparable forever, you and I, one
double speck of spinal marrow--'Philipschen!'--one little grain of salt,
one drop. There is to be no parting for _us_--I can see that; but such
extraordinary luck seems reserved for you and me alone up to now; and it
is all our own doing.
But not till you join me shall you and I be complete, and free to melt
away in that universal ocean, and take our part, as One, in all is
to be.
That moment--you must not hasten it by a moment. Time is nothing. I'm
even beginning to believe there's no such thing; there is so little
difference, _là-bas_, between a year and a day. And as for space--dear
me, an inch is as as an ell!
Things cannot be measured like that.
A midge's life is as long as a man's, for it has time to learn its
business, and do all the harm it can, and fight, and make love, and
marry, and reproduce its kind, and grow disenchanted and bored and sick
and content to die--all in a summer afternoon. An average man can live
to seventy years without doing much more.
And then there are tall midges, and clever and good-looking ones, and
midges of great personal strength and cunning, who can fly a little
faster and a little farther than the rest, and live an hour longer to
drink a whole drop more of some other creature's blood; but it does not
make a very great difference!
* * * * *