I
Yes indeed, I say to myself, pen in hand, I can keep hold of the thread
and let it lead me back to the first impression. The little story is all
there, I can touch it from point to point; for the thread, as I call
it, is a row of coloured beads on a string. None of the beads are
missing--at least I think they’re not: that’s exactly what I shall amuse
myself with finding out.
I had been all summer working hard in town and then had gone down to
Folkestone for a blow. Art was long, I felt, and my holiday short; my
mother was settled at Folkestone, and I paid her a visit when I could. I
remember how on this occasion, after weeks, in my stuffy studio, with my
nose on my palette, I sniffed up the clean salt air and cooled my eyes
with the purple sea. The place was full of lodgings, and the lodgings
were at that season full of people, people who had nothing to do but
to stare at one another on the great flat down. There were thousands of
little chairs and almost as many little Jews; and there was music in an
open rotunda, over which the little Jews wagged their big noses. We
all strolled to and fro and took pennyworths of rest; the long, level
cliff-top, edged in places with its iron rail, might have been the deck
of a huge crowded ship. There were old folks in Bath chairs, and there
was one dear chair, creeping to its last full stop, by the side of which
I always walked. There was in fine weather the coast of France to look
at, and there were the usual things to say about it; there was also
in every state of the atmosphere our friend Mrs. Meldrum, a subject of
remark not less inveterate. The widow of an officer in the Engineers,
she had settled, like many members of the martial miscellany, well
within sight of the hereditary enemy, who however had left her leisure
to form in spite of the difference of their years a close alliance with
my mother. She was the heartiest, the keenest, the ugliest of women,
the least apologetic, the least morbid in her misfortune. She carried it
high aloft, with loud sounds and free gestures, made it flutter in the
breeze as if it had been the flag of her country. It consisted mainly of
a big red face, indescribably out of drawing, from which she glared at
you through gold-rimmed aids to vision, optic circles of such diameter
and so frequently displaced that some one had vividly spoken of her
as flattening her nose against the glass of her spectacles. She was
extraordinarily near-sighted, and whatever they did to other objects
they magnified immensely the kind eyes behind them. Blessed conveniences
they were, in their hideous, honest strength--they showed the good lady
everything in the world but her own queerness. This element was enhanced
by wild braveries of dress, reckless charges of colour and stubborn
resistances of cut, wonderous encounters in which the art of the toilet
seemed to lay down its life. She had the tread of a grenadier and the
voice of an angel.
In the course of a walk with her the day after my arrival I found myself
grabbing her arm with sudden and undue familiarity. I had been struck
by the beauty of a face that approached us and I was still more affected
when I saw the face, at the sight of my companion, open like a window
thrown wide. A smile fluttered out of it as brightly as a drapery
dropped from a sill--a drapery shaken there in the sun by a young lady
flanked with two young men, a wonderful young lady who, as we drew
nearer, rushed up to Mrs. Meldrum with arms flourished for an embrace.
My immediate impression of her had been that she was dressed in
mourning, but during the few moments she stood talking with our friend
I made more discoveries. The figure from the neck down was meagre, the
stature insignificant, but the desire to please towered high, as well as
the air of infallibly knowing how and of never, never missing it. This
was a little person whom I would have made a high bid for a good chance
to paint. The head, the features, the colour, the whole facial oval and
radiance had a wonderful purity; the deep grey eyes--the most agreeable,
I thought, that I had ever seen--brushed with a kind of winglike grace
every object they encountered. Their possessor was just back from
Boulogne, where she had spent a week with dear Mrs. Floyd-Taylor: this
accounted for the effusiveness of her reunion with dear Mrs. Meldrum.
Her black garments were of the freshest and daintiest; she suggested a
pink-and-white wreath at a showy funeral. She confounded us for three
minutes with her presence; she was a beauty of the great conscious,
public, responsible order. The young men, her companions, gazed at her
and grinned: I could see there were very few moments of the day at which
young men, these or others, would not be so occupied. The people who
approached took leave of their manners; every one seemed to linger
and gape. When she brought her face close to Mrs. Meldrum’s--and she
appeared to be always bringing it close to somebody’s--it was a marvel
that objects so dissimilar should express the same general identity,
the unmistakable character of the English gentlewoman. Mrs. Meldrum
sustained the comparison with her usual courage, but I wondered why she
didn’t introduce me: I should have had no objection to the bringing of
such a face close to mine. However, when the young lady moved on
with her escort she herself bequeathed me a sense that some such
_rapprochement_ might still occur. Was this by reason of the general
frequency of encounters at Folkestone, or by reason of a subtle
acknowledgment that she contrived to make of the rights, on the part of
others, that such beauty as hers created? I was in a position to answer
that question after Mrs. Meldrum had answered a few of mine.