NINON'S TABLE D'HÔTE
The day dies in sultry languor. A warm night breathes upon the town,
and in the exhaustion of light and hush of sound, life strikes sharply
on the ear and brain.
It was early in the evening when I returned home, and, sitting in the
window, I read till surprised by the dusk; and when my eyes could no
longer follow the printed page, holding the book between finger and
thumb, my face resting on the other hand, I looked out on the garden,
allowing my heart to fill with dreams. The book that had interested me
dealt with the complex technique of the art of the Low Countries--a
book written by a painter. It has awakened in me memories of all
kinds, heartrending struggles, youthful passion, bitter
disappointments; it has called into mind a multitude of thoughts and
things, and, wearied with admiring many pictures and arguing with
myself, I am now glad to exchange my book for the gentle
hallucinations of the twilight.
I see a line of leafage drawn across the Thames, but the line dips,
revealing a slip of grey water with no gleam upon it. Warehouses and a
factory chimney rise ghostly and grey, and so cold is that grey tint
that it might be obtained with black and white; hardly is the warmth
of umber needed. Behind the warehouses and the factory chimney the sky
is murky and motionless, but higher up it is creamy white, and there
is some cloud movement. Four lamps, two on either side of the factory
chimney, look across the river; one constantly goes out--always the
same lamp--and a moment after it springs into its place again. Across
my window a beautiful branch waves like a feather fan. It is the only
part of the picture worked out in detail. I watch its soft and almost
imperceptible swaying, and am tempted to count the leaves. Below it,
and a little beyond it, between it and the river, night gathers in the
gardens; and there, amid serious greens, passes the black stain of a
man's coat, and, in a line with the coat, in the beautifully swaying
branch, a belated sparrow is hopping from twig to twig, awakening his
mates in search for a satisfactory resting-place. In the sharp towers
of Temple Gardens the pigeons have gone to sleep. I can see the cots
under the conical caps of slate.
The gross, jaded, uncouth present has slipped from me as a garment
might, and I see the past like a little show, struggles and
heartbreakings of long ago, and watch it with the same indifferent
curiosity as I would the regulated mimicry of a stage play. Pictures
from the past come and go without an effort of will; many are habitual
memories, but the one before me rises for the first time--for fifteen
years it has lain submerged, and now like a water weed or flower it
rises--the Countess Ninon de Calvador's boudoir! Her boudoir or her
drawing-room, be that as it may, the room into which I was ushered
many years ago when I went to see her. I was then a young man, very
thin, with sloping shoulders, and that pale gold hair that Manet
used to like to paint. I had come with a great bouquet for Ninon,
for it was _son jour de fête_, and was surprised and somewhat
disappointed to meet a large brunette with many creases in her neck, a
loose and unstayed bosom; one could hardly imagine Ninon dressed
otherwise than in a _peignoir_--a blue _peignoir_ seemed inevitable.
She was sitting by a dark, broad-shouldered young man when I came
in; they were sitting close together; he rose out of a corner and
showed me an impressionistic picture of a railway station. He was
one of the many young men who at that time thought the substitution of
dots of pink and yellow for the grey and slate and square brushwork of
Bastien Lepage was the certain way to paint well. I learned
afterwards, during the course of the evening, that he was looked at
askance, for even in Montmartre it was regarded as a dishonour to
allow the lady with whom you lived to pay for your dinner. Villiers de
L'Isle Adam, who had once been Ninon's lover, answered the reproaches
levelled against him for having accepted too largely of her
hospitality with, "Que de bruit pour quelques côtelettes!" and his
transgressions were forgiven him for the sake of the _mot_ which
seemed to summarise the moral endeavour and difficulties of the entire
quarter. When Villiers was her lover Villiers was middle-aged, and
Ninon was a young woman; but when I knew her she was interested in the
young generation, yet she kept friends with all her old lovers, never
denying them her board. How funny was the impressionist's indignation
against Villiers! He charged him with having squandered a great part
of Ninon's fortune, but Villiers's answer to the young man was, "He
talks like the _concierge_ in my story of 'Les Demoiselles de
Bienfillatre.'"
Poor Villiers was not much to blame; it was part of Ninon's
temperament to waste her money, and the canvases round the room
testified that she spent a great deal on modern art. She certainly had
been a rich woman; rumour credited her with spending fifty thousand
francs a year, and in her case rumour said no more than the truth, for
it would require that at least to live as she lived, keeping open
house to all the literature, music, painting, and sculpture done in
Montmartre. At first sight her hospitality seems unreasonable, but
when one thinks one sees that it conforms to the rules of all
hospitality. There must be a principle of selection, and were the
_ratés_ she entertained less amusing than the people one meets in
Grosvenor Square or the Champs Elysées? Any friend could introduce
another, that is common practice, but at Ninon's there was a
restriction which I never met elsewhere--no friend could bring another
unless the newcomer was a _raté_--in other words, unless he had
written music or verse, or painted or carved, in a way that did not
appeal to the taste of the ordinary public; inability to reach the
taste of the general public was the criterion that obtained there.
The windows of Ninon's boudoir opened upon the garden, and on my
expressing surprise at its size and at the large trees that grew
there, she gave me permission to admire and investigate; and I walked
about the pond, interested in the numerous ducks, in the cats, in the
companies of macaws and cockatoos that climbed down from their perches
and strutted across the swards. I came upon a badger and her brood,
and at my approach they disappeared into an enormous excavation, and
behind the summer-house I happened upon a bear asleep and retreated
hurriedly. But on going towards the house I heard a well-known voice.
"That is Augusta Holmes singing her opera," I said; "she sings all the
different parts--soprano, contralto, tenor, and bass." At this time we
were all talking about her, and I stood by the window listening until
suddenly a well-known smell interrupted her. It was Ninon's cat that
had misconducted herself. A window was thrown open, but the
ventilation did not prove sufficient. Augusta and her admirers had to
leave the piano, and they came from the house glad to breathe the
evening air. How dear to me are flowered gowns and evening skies and
women with scarfs about their shoulders. Ah! what a beautiful evening
it was! And how well do I remember the poet comparing the darkening
sky to a blue veil with the moon like a gold beetle upon it. One of
the women had brought a guitar with her, and again Augusta's voice
streamed up through the stillness, till, compelled by the beauty of
the singing, we drew nearer; as the composer sang her songs attitudes
grew more abandoned, and hands fell pensively. Among the half-seen
faces I caught sight of a woman of exceeding fairness; her hair had
only a faint tinge of gold in it; and Ninon remembered that she was a
cousin of hers, one whom she had not seen for many years. How Clare
had discovered her in the Rue la Moine she could not tell. It was
whispered that she was the wife of a rich _commerçant_ at Tours.
This added to the mystery, and later in the evening the lady told me
she had never been in artistic society before, and begged me to point
out to her the celebrities present, and to tell her why they were
celebrated.
"Who is he--that one slouching towards the pond, that one wearing grey
trousers and a black jacket?--oh!"
My companion's exclamation was caused by a new sight of Verlaine; at
that moment he had lifted off his hat (the evening was still warm),
and the great bald skull, hanging like a cliff over the shaggy
eyebrows, shaggy as furze bushes, frightened her. The poet continued
his walk round the pond, and, turning suddenly towards us, he stopped
to speak to me. I was but a pretext; he clearly wished to speak to my
companion. But how strangely did he suit his conversation to her, yet
how characteristic of his genius were the words I heard as I turned
away, thinking to leave them together--"If I were in love with a young
girl or with a young man?" My companion ran forward quickly and seized
my arm. "You must not leave me with him," she said. On account of his
genius Verlaine was a little slow to see things outside of
himself--all that was within him was clear, all without him obscure;
so we had some difficulty in getting rid of him, and as soon as he was
out of hearing my companion inquired eagerly who he was, and I was
astonished at the perception she showed. "Is he a priest? I mean, was
he ever a priest?" "A sort of cross between a thieves' kitchen and a
presbytery. He is the poet Verlaine. The singer of the sweetest verses
in the French language--a sort of ambling song like a robin's. You
have heard the robin singing on a coral hedge in autumn-tide; the
robin confesses his little soul from the topmost twig; his song is but
a tracery of his soul, and so is Verlaine's. His gift is a vision of
his own soul, and he makes a tracery as you might of a drawing with a
lead pencil, never troubling himself to inquire if what he traces is
good or ill. He knows that society regards him as an outcast, but
society's point of view is not the only one, that he knows too, and
also, though he be a lecher, a crapulous and bestial fellow at times,
at other times he is a poet, a visionary, the only poet that
Catholicism has produced since Dante. Huysmans, the apologist of
Gilles de Rais,--there he is over yonder, talking to the impressionist
painter, that small thin man with hair growing thickly, low down on
his forehead--Huysmans somewhere in his description of the trial of
the fifteenth-century monster, the prototype, so it is said, of the
nursery tale of Blue Beard, speaks of the white soul of the Middle
Ages; he must have had Verlaine on his mind, for Verlaine has spoken
of himself as a mediaeval Catholic, that is to say a Catholic in whom
sinning and repentance alternates regularly as night and day. Verlaine
has not cut the throats of so many little boys as Gilles de Rais, but
Gilles de Rais always declared himself to be a good Catholic. Verlaine
abandons himself to the Church as a child to a fairy tale; he does
trouble to argue whether the Conception of the Virgin was Immaculate;
the mediaeval sculptors have represented her attired very prettily in
cloaks with long folds, they have put graceful crowns upon her head,
and Verlaine likes these things; they inspire him to write, he feels
that belief in the Church is part of himself, and his poetical genius
is to tell his own story; he is one of the great soul-tellers. From a
literary point of view there is a good deal to be said in favour of
faith when it is not joined with practice; acceptation of dogma
shields one from controversy; it allows Verlaine to concentrate
himself entirely upon things; it weans him away from ideas--the curse
of modern literature--and makes him a sort of divine vagrant living
his life in the tavern and in the hospital. It is only those who have
freed themselves from all prejudice that get close to life, who get
the real taste of life--the aroma as from a wine that has been many
years in bottle. And Verlaine is aware that this is so. Sometimes he
thinks he might have written a little more poetry, and he sighs, but
he quickly recovers. 'After all, I have written a good many volumes.'
'And what would art be without life, without love?' He has a verse on
that subject; I wish I could remember it for you. His verse is always
so winsome, so delicate, slender as the birch tree, elegiac like it; a
birch bending over a lake's edge reminds me of Verlaine. He is a lake
poet, but the lake is in a suburb not far from a casino. What makes me
speak about the lake is that for a long time I thought these verses,
Ton âme est un lac d'amour
Dont mes pensêes sont les cygnes.
Vois comme ils font le tour....
were Verlaine's, but they are much less original; their beauty, for
they are beautiful, is conventional; numbers of poets might have
written them, whereas nobody but Verlaine could have written any of
his, really his own, poetry. His desires go sometimes as high as the
crucifix; very often they are in the gutter, hardly poetry at all,
having hardly any beauty except that of truth, and of course the
beauty of a versification that haunts in his ear, for he hears a song
in French verse that no French poet has ever heard before, and a song
so fluent, ranging from the ecstasy of the nightingale to the robin's
little homily.
Oui, c'était par un soir joyeux de cabaret,
Un de ces soirs plutôt trop chauds où l'on dirait
Que le gaz du plafond conspire à notre perte
Avec le vin du zinc, saveur naïve et verte.
On s'amusait beaucoup dans la boutique et on
Entendait des soupirs voisins d'accordéon
Que ponctuaient des pieds frappant presque en cadence.
Quand la porte s'ouvrit de la salle de danse
Vomissant tout un flot dont toi, vers où j'étais,
Et de ta voix fait que soudain je me tais,
S'il te plaît de me donner un ordre péremptoire.
Tu t'écrias 'Dieu, qu'il fait chaud! Patron, à boire!'
"She was from Picardy; and he tells of her horrible accent, and in
elegy number five he continues the confession, telling how his well
beloved used to get drunk.
"Tu fis le saut de ... Seine et, depuis morte-vive,
Tu gardes le vertige et le goût du néant."
"But how can a man confess such things?" my companion asked me, and we
stood looking at each other in the midst of the gardens until an ape,
cattling prettily, ran towards me and jumped into my arms, and looking
at the curious little wizened face, the long arms covered with hair, I
said:
"Verlaine has an extraordinary power of expression, and to be ashamed
of nothing; but to be ashamed is his genius, just as it was Manet's.
It is to his shamelessness that we owe his most beautiful poems, all
written in garrets, in taverns, in hospitals--yes, and in prison."
"In prison! But he didn't steal, did he?" and the _commerçant's_
wife looked at me with a frightened air, and I think her hand went
towards her pocket.
"No, no; a mere love story, a dispute with Rambaud in some haunt of
vice, a knife flashed, Rambaud was stabbed, and Verlaine spent three
years in prison. As for Rambaud, it was said that he repented and
renounced love, entered a monastery, and was digging the soil
somewhere on the shores of the Red Sea for the grace of God. But these
hopes proved illusory; only Verlaine knows where he is, and he will
not tell. The last certain news we had of him was that he had joined a
caravan of Arabs, and had wandered somewhere into the desert with
these wanderers, preferring savagery to civilization. Verlaine
preferred civilized savagery, and so he remained in Paris; and so he
drags on, living in thieves' quarters, getting drunk, writing
beautiful poems in the hospitals, coming out of hospitals and falling
in love with drabs."
Dans ces femmes d'ailleurs je n'ai pas trouvé l'ange
Qu'il eût fallu pour remplacer ce diable, toi!
L'une, fille du Nord, native d'un Crotoy,
Etait rousse, mal grasse et de prestance molle;
Elle ne m'adressa guère qu'une parole
Et c'était d'un petit cadeau qu'il s'agissait,
En revanche, dans son accent d'ail et de poivre,
Une troisième, recemment chanteuse au Havre,
Affectait de dandinement des matelots
Et m'... enguelait comme un gabier tancant les flots,
Mais portrait beau vraiment, sacrédié, quel dommage
La quatrième était sage comme une image,
Châtain clair, peu de gorge et priait Dieu parfois:
Le diantre soit de ses sacrés signes de croix!
Les seize autres, autant du moins que ma mémoire
Surnage en ce vortex, contaient toutes l'histoire
Connue, un amant chic, puis des vieux, puis "l'îlot"
Tantôt bien, tantôt moins, le clair café falot
Les terasses l'été, l'hiver les brasseries
Et par degrés l'humble trottoir en théories
En attendant les bons messieurs compatissants
Capables d'un louis et pas trop repoussants
_Qutorum ego parva pars erim_, me disais-je.
Mais toutes, comme la première du cortège,
Dès avant la bougie éteinte et le rideau
Tiré, n'oubliaient pas le "mon petit cadeau."
"In the verses I have just quoted, you remember, he says that the
fourth was chaste as an image, her hair was pale brown, she had
scarcely any bosom, and prayed to God sometimes. He always hated piety
when it interfered with his pleasure, and in the next verse he says,
'The devil take those sacred signs of the Cross!'"
"But do you know any of these women?"
"Oh, yes; we all know the terrible Sara. She beats him."
The _commerçante's_ wife asked if she were here.
"He wanted to bring her here, in fact he did bring her once, only she
was so drunk that she could not get beyond the threshold, and Ninon's
lover, the painter you saw painting the steam engines, was charged to
explain to the poet that Sara's intemperance rendered her impossible
in respectable society. 'I know Sara has her faults,' he murmured in
reply to all argument, and it was impossible to make him see that
others did not see Sara with his eyes. 'I know she has her faults,' he
repeated, 'and so have others. We all have our faults.' And it was a
long time before he could be induced to come back: hunger has brought
him."
"And who is that hollow-chested man? How pathetic he looks with his
goat-like beard."
"That is the celebrated Cabaner. He will tell you, if you speak to
him, that his father was a man like Napoleon, only more so. He is the
author of many aphorisms; 'that three military bands would be
necessary to give the impression of silence in music' is one. He comes
every night to the Nouvelle Athènes, and is a sort of rallying-point;
he will tell you that his ballad of 'The Salt Herring' is written in a
way that perhaps Wagner would not, but which Liszt certainly would
understand."
"Is his music ever played? Does it sell? How does he live? Not by his
music, I suppose?"
"Yes, by his music, by playing waltzes and polkas in the Avenue de la
Motte Piquet. His earnings are five francs a day, and for thirty-five
francs a month he has a room where many of the disinherited ones of
art, many of those you see here, sleep. His room is furnished--ah, you
should see it! If Cabaner wants a chest of drawers he buys a fountain,
and he broke off the head of the Vénus de Milo, saying that now she no
longer reminded him of the people he met in the streets; he could
henceforth admire her without being troubled by any sordid
recollection. I could talk to you for hours about his unselfishness,
his love of art, his strange music, and his stranger poems, for his
music accompanies his own verses."
"Is he too clever for the public, or not clever enough?"
"Now you're asking me the question we've been asking ourselves for the
last ten years.... The man fumbling at his shirt collar over yonder is
the celebrated Villiers de L'Isle Adam."
And I remember how it pleased me to tell this simple-minded woman all
I knew about Villiers.
"He has no talent whatever, only genius, and that is why he is a
raté," I said.
But the woman was not so simple as I had imagined, and one or two
questions she put to me led me to tell her that Villiers's genius only
appeared in streaks, like gold in quartz.
"The comparison is an old one, but there is no better one to explain
Villiers, for when he is not inspired his writing is very like
quartz."
"His great name----"
"His name is part of his genius. He chose it, and it has influenced
his writings. Have I not heard him say, 'Car je porte en moi les
richesses stériles d'un grand nombre de rois oubliés.'"
"But is he a legitimate descendant?"
"Legitimate in the sense that he desired the name more than any of
those who ever bore it legitimately."
At that moment Villiers passed by me, and I introduced him to her, and
very soon he began to tell us that his _Eve_ had just been
published, and the success of it was great.
"On m'a dit hier de passer à la caisse ... l'edition était épuisée,
vous voyez--il paraît, la fortune est venue ... même à moi."
But Villiers was often tiresomely talkative about trifles, and as soon
as I got the chance I asked him if he were going to tell us one of his
stories, reminding him of one I had heard he had been telling lately
in the _brasseries_ about a man in quest of a quiet village where
he could get rest, a tired composer, something of that kind. Had he
written it? No, he had not written it yet, but now that he knew I
liked it he would get up earlier to-morrow. Some one took him away
from us, and I had to tell my companion the story.
"Better," I said, "he should never write it, for half of it exists in
his voice, and in his gestures, and every year he gets less and less
of himself onto the paper. One has to hear him tell his stories in the
café--how well he tells them! You must hear him tell how a man,
recovering from a long illness, is advised by his doctor to seek rest
in the country, and how, seeing the name of a village on the map that
touches his imagination, he takes the train, feeling convinced he will
find there an Arcadian simplicity. But the village he catches sight of
from the carriage window is a morose and lonely village, in the midst
of desolate plains. And worse than Nature are the human beings he sees
at the station; they lurk in corners, they scrutinise his luggage, and
gradually he believes them all to be robbers and assassins.
"He would escape but he dare not, for he is being followed, so turning
on his pursuers he asks them if they can direct him to a lodging. The
point of Villiers's story is how a suspicion begins in the man's mind,
how it grows like a cancer, and very soon the villagers are convinced
he is an anarchist, and that his trunks are full of material for the
manufacture of bombs. And this is why they dare not touch them. So
they follow him to the farmhouse whither they have directed him, and
tell their fears to the farmer and his wife. Villiers can improvise
the consultations in the kitchen; at midnight in the café, but when
morning comes he cannot write, his brain is empty. You must come some
night to the Nouvelle Athènes to hear him; leaning across the table he
will tell the terror of the hinds and farmer, how they are sure the
house is going to be blown up. The sound of their feet on the
staircase inspires terror in the wretched convalescent. He sits up in
bed, listening, great drops of sweat collected on his forehead. He
dare not get out of bed, but he must; and Villiers can suggest the
sound of feet on the creaking stairs--yes, and the madness of the man
piling furniture against the door, and the agony of those outside
hearing the noise within. When they break into the room they find a
dead man; for terror has killed him. You must come to the Nouvelle
Athènes to hear Villiers tell his story. I'll meet you there to-morrow
night.... Will you dine with me? The dinner there is not really too
bad; perhaps you'll be able to bear with it."
The _commerçant's_ wife hesitated. She promised to come, and she
came; but she did not prove an interesting mistress; why, I cannot
remember, and I am glad to put her out of my mind, for I want to think
of the strange poet whom we heard reciting verses, under the aspen, in
which one of the apes had taken refuge. Through the dimness of the
years I can see his fair hair floating about his shoulders, his blue
eyes and his thin nose. Didn't somebody once describe him as a sort of
sensual Christ? He, too, was after the _commerçant's_ wife. And
didn't he select her as the subject of his licentious verses--reassure
yourself, reader, licentious merely from the point of view of prosody.
"Ta nuque est de santal sur les vifs frissons d'or.
Mais c'est une autre, que j'adore."
The _commerçant's_ wife, forgetful of me, charmed by the poet, by
the excitement of hearing herself made a subject of a poem, drew
nearer. Strange, is it not, that I should remember a few words here
and there?
"Il m'aime, il m'aime pas, et selon l'antique rite
Elle effleurait la Marguerite."
The women still sit, circlewise, as if enchanted, the night inspires
him, and he improvises trifle after trifle. One remembers fragments.
Some time afterwards Cabaner was singing the song of "The Salt
Herring."
"He came along holding in his hands dirty, dirty, dirty,
A big nail pointed, pointed, pointed,
And a hammer heavy, heavy, heavy.
He placed the ladder high, high, high,
Against the wall white, white, white.
He went up the ladder high, high, high,
Placed the nail pointed, pointed, pointed
Against the wall--toc! toc! toc!
He tied to the nail a string long, long, long,
And at the end of it a salt herring, dry, dry, dry,
And letting fall the hammer heavy, heavy, heavy,
He got down from the ladder high, high, high,
And went away, away, away.
Since then at the end of the string long, long, long,
A salt herring dry, dry, dry,
Has been swinging slowly, slowly, slowly.
Now I have composed this story simple, simple, simple,
To make all serious men mad, mad, mad,
And to amuse children, little, little, little."
This was the libretto on which Cabaner wrote music "that Wagner would
not understand, but which Liszt certainly would." Dear, dear Cabaner,
how well I can see thee with thy goat-like beard, and the ape in the
tree interrupting thee; he was not like Liszt, he chattered all night.
Poor ape, he broke his chain earlier in the evening, and it was found
impossible to persuade him to come down. The brute seemed somehow
determined that we should not hear Cabaner. Soon after the cocks began
answering each other, though it was but midnight; and so loud was
their shrilling that I awoke, surprised to find myself sitting at my
window in King's Bench Walk. A moment ago I was in Madame Ninon de
Calvador's garden, and every whit as much as I am now in King's Bench
Walk. Madame Ninon de Calvador--what has become of her?
Is the rest of her story unknown? As I sit looking into the darkness,
a memory suddenly springs upon me. Villiers, who came in when dinner
was half over, brought a young man with him. Fumbling at his shirt
collar, apologising for being late, assuring us that he had dined, he
introduced his friend to the company as a young man of genius, of
extraordinary genius. Don't I remember Villiers's nervous, hysterical
voice! Don't I remember the journalist's voice when he asked Ninon's
lover if he sold his pictures, creating at once a bad impression? By
some accident a plate was given to him, out of which one of the cats
had been fed. The plate might have been given to any one else:
Villiers would not have minded, and as for Cabaner, he never knew what
he was eating; but it was given to the journalist. Now I remember the
young man misconducted himself badly; he struck the table with his
fist, and said, "Et bien, je casse tout." Yes, it was he who wrote the
article entitled "Ninon's Table d'hôte" in the _Gil Blas_, and
from it she learned for the first time how the world viewed her
hospitality, how misinterpreted were her efforts to benefit the arts
and the artists. Somebody told me this story: who I cannot tell; it is
all so long ago. But it seems to me that I remember hearing that it
was this article that killed her.
The passing of things is always a moving subject for meditation, and
it is strange how accident will bring back a scene, explicit in every
detail--a tree taking shape upon the dawning sky, the hairy ugliness
of the ape in its branches, and along the grey grass a waddling squad
of the ducks betaking themselves to the pond, a poet talking to a
_commerçant's_ wife, Madame de Calvador leaning on a lover's arm.
Had I a palette I could match the blue of the _peignoir_ with the
faint grey sky. I could make a picture out of that dusky suburb. Had I
a pen I could write verses about these people of old time, but the
picture would be a shrivelled thing compared with the dream, and the
verses would limp. The moment I sought a pen the pleasure of the
meditation, which is still with me, which still endures, would vanish.
Better to sit by my window and enjoy what remains of the mood and the
memory. The mood has nearly passed, the desire of action is
approaching.... I would give much for another memory, but memory may
not be beckoned, and my mind is dark now, dark as that garden; the
swaying, fan-like bough by my window is nearly one mass of green; the
last sparrow has fallen asleep. I hear nothing.... I hear a horse
trotting in the Strand.