IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS
There was a time when my dream was not literature, but painting; and I
remember an American giving me a commission to make a small copy of
Ingres's "Perseus and Andromeda," and myself sitting on a high stool
in the Luxembourg, trying to catch the terror of the head thrown back,
of the arms widespread, chained to the rock, and the beauty of the
foot advanced to the edge of the sea. Since my copying days the
picture has been transferred to the Louvre. What has become of my
copy, whether I ever finished it and received the money I had been
promised, matters very little. Memories of an art that one has
abandoned are not pleasant memories. Maybe the poor thing is in some
Western state where the people are ignorant enough to accept it as a
sketch for the original picture. My hope is that it has drifted away,
and become part of the world's rubbish and dust. But why am I thinking
of it at all? Only because a more interesting memory hangs upon it.
After working at it all one morning, I left the museum feeling half
satisfied with my drawing, but dreading the winged monster that
awaited me after lunch. In those days I was poor, though rich for the
Quarter. I moved in a society of art students, and we used to meet for
breakfast in a queer little café; the meal cost us about a shilling.
On my return from this café soon after twelve--I had breakfasted early
that morning--I remember how, overcome by a sudden idleness, I could
not go back to my work, and feeling that I must watch the birds and
the sunlight (they seemed to understand each other so well), I threw
myself on a bench and began to wonder if there was anything better in
the world worth doing than to sit in an alley of clipped limes,
smoking, thinking of Paris and of myself.
Every one, or nearly every one, except perhaps the upper classes,
whose ideas of Paris are the principal boulevards--the Rue de Rivoli,
the Rue de la Paix--knows the Luxembourg Gardens; and watching April
playing and listening to water trickling from a vase that a great
stone Neptune held in his arms at the end of the alley, my thoughts
embraced not only the garden, but all I know of Paris, of the old city
that lies far away behind the Hôtel de Ville and behind the Boulevard
St. Antoine. I thought of a certain palace now a museum, rarely
visited, of its finely proportioned courtyard decorated with
bas-reliefs by Jean Goujon. I had gone there a week ago with Mildred;
but finding she had never heard of Madame de Sévigné, and did not care
whether she had lived in this palace or another, I spoke to her of the
Place des Vosges, saying we might go there, hoping that she would feel
interested in it because it had once been the habitation of the old
French nobility. As I spoke, its colour rose up before my eyes, pretty
tones of yellow and brown brick, the wrought-iron railings and the
high-pitched roofs and the slim chimneys. As I walked beside her I
tried to remember if there were any colonnades. It is strange how one
forgets; yes, and how one remembers. The Place des Vosges has always
seemed to me something more than an exhibition of the most beautiful
domestic architecture in France. The mind of a nation shapes itself,
like rocks, by a process of slow accumulation, and it takes centuries
to gather together an idea so characteristic as the Place des Vosges.
One cannot view it--I cannot, at least--without thinking of the great
monarchical centuries, and of the picturesque names which I have
learned from Balzac's novels and from the history of France. In his
"Étude de Catherine de Médicis," Balzac speaks of Madame de Sauve, and
I am sure she must have lived in the Place des Vosges. Monsieur de
Montresser might have occupied a flat on the first floor. Le Comte
Bouverand de la Loyère, La Marquise d'Osmond, Le Comte de Coëtlogon,
La Marquise de Villefranche, and Le Duc de Cadore, and many other
names rise up in my mind, but I will not burden this story with them.
I suppose the right thing to do would be to find out who had lived in
the Place des Vosges; but the search, I am afraid, would prove tedious
and perhaps not worth the trouble. For if none of the bearers of the
names I have mentioned lived in the Place des Vosges, it is certain
that others bearing equally noble names lived there.
Its appearance is the same to-day as it was in the seventeenth
century, but it is now inhabited by the small tradespeople of the
Quarter; the last great person who lived there was Victor Hugo; his
house has been converted into a museum, and it is there that the most
interesting relics of the great poet are stored. I unburdened my mind
to Mildred, and my enthusiasm enkindled in her an interest sufficient
to induce her to go there with me, for I could not forgo a companion
that day, though she was far from being the ideal companion for such
sentimental prowling as mine. Afterwards we visited Notre Dame
together, and the quays, and the old streets; but Mildred lacked the
historical sense, I am afraid, for as we returned in the glow of the
sunset, when the monumented Seine is most beautiful, she said that
Paris wasn't bad for an old city, and it was the memory of this
somewhat crude remark that caused a smile to light up my lips as I
looked down the dark green alley through which the April sunlight
flickered.
But I did not think long of her; my attention was distracted by the
beauty of a line of masonry striking across the pale spring sky,
tender as a faded eighteenth-century silk, only the blue was a young
blue like that of a newly opened flower; and it seemed to me that I
could detect in the clouds going by, great designs for groups and
single figures, and I compared this aerial sculpture with the
sculpture on the roofs. In every angle of the palace there are
statues, and in every corner of the gardens one finds groups or single
figures. Ancient Rome had sixty thousand statues--a statue for every
thirty-three or thirty-four inhabitants; in Paris the proportion of
statues to the people is not so great, still there are a great many;
no city has had so many since antiquity; and that is why Paris always
reminds me of those great days of Greece and Rome when this world was
the only world.
When one tires of watching the sunlight there is no greater delight
than to become absorbed in the beauty of the balustrades, the stately
flights of steps, the long avenues of clipped limes, the shapely stone
basins, every one monumented in some special way. "How shapely these
gardens are," I said, and I fell to dreaming of many rocky hills
where, at the entrance of cool caves, a Neptune lies, a vase in his
arms with water flowing from it. Yesterevening I walked in these
gardens with a sculptor; together we pondered Carpeau's fountain, and,
after admiring Frémiet's horses, we went to Watteau's statue,
appropriately placed in a dell, among greenswards like those he loved
to paint. At this moment my meditation was broken.
"I thought I should find you in the museum painting, but here you are,
idling in this pretty alley, and in the evening you'll tell us you've
been working all day."
"Will you come for a walk?" I said, thinking that the gardens might
interest her, and, if they did not, the people we should meet could
not fail to amuse her. It was just the time to see the man who came
every morning to feed the sparrows; he had taught them to take bread
from his lips, and I thought that Mildred would like to see the funny
little birds hopping about his feet, so quaint, so full of themselves,
seeming to know all about it. Then if we had luck we might meet Robin
Hood, for in those days a man used to wander in the gardens wearing
the costume of the outlaw, and armed with a bow and quiver. The
strange folk one meets in the Luxembourg Gardens are part of their
charm. Had I not once met a man in armour, not plate, but the
beautiful chain armour of the thirteenth century, sitting on a bench
eating his lunch, his helmet beside him?--a model no doubt come from a
studio for the lunch hour, or maybe he was an _exalté_ or a
_fumist_; a very innocent _fumist_ if he were one, not one
of the Quarter certainly, for even the youngest among us would know
that it would take more than a suit of armour to astonish the
frequenters of the gardens. As we came down a flight of steps we met
an old man and his wife, an aged couple nearly seventy years of age,
playing football, and the gambols of this ancient pair in the pretty
April sunlight were pathetic to watch. I called her attention to them,
telling her that in another part of the garden three old women came to
dance; but seeing that Mildred was not interested, I took the first
opportunity to talk of something else. She was more interested in the
life of the Quarter, in _le bal Bullier_, in my stories of
grisettes and students; and I noticed that she considered every
student as he passed, his slim body buttoned tightly in a long
frock-coat, with hair flowing over his shoulders from under his
slouched hat, just as she had considered each man on board the boat a
week ago as we crossed from Folkestone to Boulogne. We had met on the
boat; I noticed her the moment I got on board; her quiet, neat clothes
were unmistakably French, though not the florid French clothes
Englishwomen so often buy and wear so badly. The stays she had on I
thought must be one of those little ribbon stays with very few bones,
and as she walked up and down she kept pressing her leather waistband
still more neatly into its place, looking first over one shoulder and
then over the other. She reminded me of a bird, so quick were her
movements, and so alert. She was nice-looking, not exactly pretty, for
her lips were thin, her mouth too tightly closed, the under lip almost
disappearing, her eyes sloped up very much at the corners, and her
eyebrows were black, and they nearly met.
The next time I saw her she was beside me at dinner--we had come by
chance to the same hotel, a small hotel in the Rue du Bac. Her mother
was with her, an elderly, sedate Englishwoman, to whom the girl talked
very affectionately, "Yes, dearest mamma"; "No, dearest mamma." She
had a gay voice, though she never seemed to laugh or joke; but her
face had a sad expression, and she sighed continually. After dinner
her mother went to the piano and played with a great deal of accent
and noise the "Brooklyn Cake Walk."
"We used to dance that at Nice. Oh, dear mamma, do you remember that
lovely two-step?"
Her mother nodded and smiled, and began playing a Beethoven sonata,
but she had not played many bars before her daughter said:
"Now, mother, don't play any more; come and talk to us."
I asked her if she did not like Beethoven. She shrugged her shoulders;
an expression of irritation came into her face. She either did not
want to talk of Beethoven then, or she was incapable of forming any
opinion about him, and, judging from her interest in the "Brooklyn
Cake Walk," I said:
"The Cake Walk is gayer, isn't it?"
The sarcasm seemed lost upon her; she sat looking at me with a vague
expression in her eyes, and I found it impossible to say whether it
was indifference or stupidity.
"Mildred plays Beethoven beautifully. My daughter loves music. She
plays the violin better than anybody you ever heard in your life."
"Well, she must play very well indeed, for I've heard Sarasate
and----"
"If Mildred would only practise," and she pressed her daughter to play
something for me.
"I haven't got my keys--they're upstairs. No, mother ... leave me
alone; I'm thinking of other things."
Her mother went back to the piano and continued the sonata. Mildred
looked at me, shrugged her shoulders, and then turned over the
illustrated papers, saying they were stupid. We began to talk about
foreign travel, and I learned that she and her mother spent only a
small part of every year in England. She liked the Continent much
better; English clothes were detestable; English pictures she did not
know anything about, but suspected they must be pretty bad, or else
why had I come to France to paint? She admitted, however, she had met
some nice Englishmen, but Yankees--oh! Yankees! There was one at
Biarritz. Do you know Biarritz? No, nor Italy. Italians are nice, are
they not? There was one at Cannes.
"Don't think I'm not interested in hearing about pictures, because I
am, but I must look at your ring, it's so like mine. This one was
given to me by an Irishman, who said the curse of Moreen Dhu would be
upon me if I gave it away."
"But who is Moreen Dhu? I never heard of her."
"You mustn't ask me; I'm not a bit an intelligent woman. People always
get sick of me if they see me two days running."
"I doubt very much if that is true. If it were you wouldn't say it."
"Why not? I shouldn't have thought of saying it if it weren't true."
Next evening at dinner I noticed that she was dressed more carefully
than usual; she wore a cream-coloured gown with a cerise waistband and
a cerise bow at the side of her neck. I noticed, too, that she talked
less; she seemed preoccupied. And after dinner she seemed anxious; I
could not help thinking that she wished her mamma away, and was
searching for an excuse to send her to bed.
"Mamma, dear, won't you play us the 'Impassionata'?"
"But, Milly dear, you know quite well that I can't play it."
Mamma was nevertheless persuaded to play not only the "Impassionata"
but her entire repertoire. She was not allowed to leave the piano, and
had begun to play Sydney Smith when the door opened, and a man's face
appeared for a second. Remembering her interest in men, I said:
"Did you see that man? What a nice, fresh-looking young man!"
She put her finger on her lip, and wrote on a piece of paper:
"Not a word. He's my fiancé, and mother doesn't know he's here. She
does not approve; he hasn't a bean." ... "Thank you, mother, thank
you; you played that sonata very nicely."
"Won't you play, my dear?"
"No, mother dear, I'm feeling rather tired; we've had a long day."
And the two bade me good-night, leaving me alone in the sitting-room
to finish a letter. But I had not quite got down to the signature when
she came in looking very agitated, even a little frightened.
"Isn't it awful?" she said. "I was in the dining-room with my fiancé,
and the waiter caught us kissing. I had to beg of him not to tell
mamma. He said _'Foi de gentilhomme,_' so I suppose it's all
right."
"Why not have your fiancé in here? I'm going to bed."
"Oh, no, I wouldn't think of turning you out. I'll see him in my
bedroom; it's safer, and if one's conscience is clear it doesn't
matter what people say."
A few days afterwards, as I was slinging my paintbox over my
shoulders, I heard some one stop in the passage, and speaking to me
through the open door she said:
"You were so awfully decent the other night when Donald looked in. I
know you will think it cheek; I am the most impudent woman in the
world; but do you mind my telling mamma that I am going to the Louvre
with you to see the pictures? You won't give me away, will you?"
"I never split on any one."
"My poor darling ought to go back. He's away from the office without
leave, and he may get the sack; but he's going to stay another night.
Can you come now? Mamma is in the salon. Come just to say a word to
her and we will go out together. Donald is waiting at the corner."
Next morning as I was shaving I heard a knock at my door.
"_Entré!_"
"Oh, I beg your pardon, but I didn't want to miss you. I'll wait for
you in the salon."
When I came downstairs she showed me a wedding ring. She had married
Donald, or said she had.
"Oh, I am tired. I hate going to the shops, and now mamma wants me to
go shopping with her. Can't you stay and talk to me, and later on we
might sneak out together and go somewhere?... Are you painting
to-day?"
"Well, no, I'm going to a museum a long way from here. I have never
seen Madame de Sévigné's house."
"Who is she?"
"The woman who wrote the famous letters."
"I am afraid I shall only bore you, because I can't talk about books."
"You had better come; you can't stay in this hotel by yourself all the
morning."
There was some reason which I have forgotten why she could not go out
with Donald, and I suppose it was my curiosity in all things human
that persuaded me to yield to her desire to accompany me, though, as I
told her, I was going to visit Madame de Sévigné's house. The reader
doubtless remembers that we visited not only Madame de Sévigné's
house, but also Victor Hugo's in the Place des Vosges, and perhaps her
remark as we returned home in the evening along the quays, that "Paris
wasn't bad for an old city," has not yet slipped out of the reader's
memory. For it was a strange remark, and one could hardly hear it
without feeling an interest in the speaker; at least, that was how I
felt. It was that remark that drew my attention to her again, and when
we stopped before the door of our hotel, I remembered that I had spent
the day talking to her about things that could have no meaning for
her. Madame de Sévigné and Jean Goujon, old Paris and its associated
ideas could have been studied on another occasion, but an opportunity
of studying Mildred might never occur again. I was dining out that
evening; the next day I did not see her, and the day after, as I sat
in the Luxembourg Gardens, beguiled from my work by the pretty April
sunlight and the birds in the alley (I have spoken already of these
things), as I sat admiring them, a thought of Mildred sprang into my
mind, a sudden fear that I might never see her again; and it was just
when I had begun to feel that I would like to walk about the gardens
with her that I heard her voice. These coincidences often occur, yet
we always think them strange, almost providential. The reader knows
how I rose to meet her, and how I asked her to come for a walk in the
gardens. Very soon we turned in the direction of the museum, for,
thinking to propitiate me, Mildred suggested I should take her there,
and I did not like to refuse, though I feared some of the pictures and
statues might distract me from the end I now had in view, which was to
find out if Donald had been her first lover, and if her dear little
mamma suspected anything.
"So your mother knows nothing about your marriage?"
"Nothing. He ought to go back, but he's going to stay another night. I
think I told you. Poor dear little mamma, she never suspected a bit."
As we walked to the museum I caught glimpses of what Donald's past
life had been, learning incidentally that his father was rich, but
since Donald was sixteen he had been considered a ne'er-do-well. He
had gone away to sea when he was a boy, and had been third mate on a
merchant ship; in a hotel in America he had been a boot-black, and
just before he came to Paris he fought a drunken stoker and won a
purse of five pounds.
She asked me which were the best pictures, but she could not keep her
attention fixed, and her attempts to remember the names of the
painters were pathetic. "Ingres, did you say? I must try to
remember.... Puvis de Chavannes? What a curious name! but I do like
his picture. He has given that man Donald's shoulders," she said,
laying her hand on my arm and stopping me before a picture of a young
naked man sitting amid some grey rocks, with grey trees and a grey
sky. The young man in the picture had dark curly hair, and Mildred
said she would like to sit by him and put her hands through his hair.
"He has got big muscles, just like Donald. I like a man to be strong:
I hate a little man."
We wandered on talking of love and lovers, our conversation
occasionally interrupted, for however interested I was in Mildred, and
I was very much interested, the sight of a picture sometimes called
away my attention. When we came to the sculpture-room it seemed to me
that Mildred was more interested in sculpture than in painting, for
she stopped suddenly before Rodin's "L'age d'arain," and I began to
wonder if her mind were really accessible to the beauty of the
sculptor's art, or if her interest were entirely in the model that had
posed before Rodin. Sculpture is a more primitive art than painting;
sculpture and music are the two primitive arts, and they are therefore
open to the appreciation of the vulgar; at least, that is how I tried
to correlate Mildred with Rodin, and at the same moment the thought
rose up in my mind that one so interested in sex as Mildred was could
not be without interest in art. For though it be true that sex is
antecedent to art, art was enlisted in the service of sex very early
in the history of the race, and has, if a colloquialism may be allowed
here, done yeoman service ever since. Even in modern days,
notwithstanding the invention of the telephone and the motor car, we
are still dependent upon art for the beginning of our courtships.
To-day the courtship begins by the man and the woman sending each
other books. Before books were invented music served the purpose of
the lover. For when man ceased to capture woman, he went to the
river's edge and cut a reed and made it into a flute and played it for
her pleasure; and when he had won her with his music he began to take
an interest in the tune for its own sake. Amusing thoughts like these
floated through my mind in the Luxembourg galleries--how could it be
otherwise since I was there with Mildred?--and I began to argue that
it was not likely that one so highly strung as Mildred could be blind
to the sculptor's dream of a slender boy, and that boy, too, swaying
like a lily in some ecstasy of efflorescence.
"The only fault I find with him is that he is not long enough from the
knee to the foot, and the thigh seems too long. I like the greater
length to be from the knee to the foot rather than from the knee to
the hip. Now, have I said anything foolish?"
"Not the least. I think you are right. I prefer your proportions. A
short tibia is not pretty."
A look of reverie came into her eyes. "I don't know if I told you that
we are going to Italy next week?"
"Yes, you told me."
Her thoughts jerked off at right angles, and turning her back on the
statue, she began to tell me how she had made Donald's acquaintance.
She and her mother were then living in a boarding-house in the same
square in which Donald's father lived, and they used to walk in the
square, and one day as she was running home trying to escape a shower,
he had come forward with his umbrella. That was in July, a few days
before she went away to Tenby for a month. It was at Tenby she had
become intimate with Toby Wells; he had succeeded for a time in
putting Donald out of her mind. She had met Toby at Nice.
"But you like Donald much better than Toby?"
"Of course I do; he came here to marry me. Oh, yes, I've forgotten all
about Toby. You see, I met Donald when I went back to London. But do
look at that woman's back; see where her head is. I wonder what made
Rodin put a woman in that position."
She looked at me, and there was a look of curious inquiry on her face.
Overcome with a sudden shyness, I hastened to assure her that the
statue was "La Danaide."
"Rodin often introduces a trivial voluptuousness into art; and his
sculpture may be sometimes called _l'article de Paris_. It is
occasionally soiled by the sentiment, of which Gounod is the great
exponent, a base soul who poured a sort of bath-water melody down the
back of every woman he met, Margaret or Madeline, it was all the
same."
"Clearly this is not a day to walk about a picture-gallery with you.
Come, let us sit down, and we'll talk about lighter things, about
lovers. You won't mind telling me; you know you can trust me. One of
these days you will meet a man who will absorb you utterly, and all
these passing passions will wax to one passion that will know no
change."
"Do you think so? I wonder."
"Do you doubt it?"
"I don't think any one man could absorb me; no one man could fill my
life."
"Not even Donald?"
"Donald is wonderful. Do you remember that morning, a few days after
we arrived?"
"Your wedding night?"
"Yes, my wedding night."
We are interested in any one who is himself or herself, and this girl
was certainly herself and nothing but herself. Travelling about as she
did with her quiet, respectable mother, who never suspected anything,
she seemed to indicate a type--type is hardly the word, for she was an
exception. Never had I seen any one like her before, her frankness and
her daring; here at least was one who had the courage of her
instincts. She was man-crazy if you will, but now and then I caught
sight of another Mildred when she sighed, when that little
dissatisfied look appeared in her face, and the other Mildred only
floated up for a moment like a water-flower or weed on the surface of
a stream.
"... You know I do mean to be a good girl. I think one ought to be
good. But really, if you read the Bible----Oh, must you go?--it has
been such a relief talking things over with you. Shall I see you
to-night? There is no one else in the hotel I can talk to, and mamma
will play the piano, and when, she plays Beethoven it gets upon my
nerves."
"You play the violin, don't you?"
"Yes, I play," and that peculiar sad look which I had begun to think
was characteristic of her came into her face, and I asked myself if
this sudden misting of expression should be ascribed to stupidity or
to a sudden thought or emotion. "I am sorry you're not dining at the
hotel."
"I am sorry, too; I'm dining with students in the Quarter; they would
amuse you."
"I wish I were a grisette."
"If you were I would take you with me. Now I must say good-bye; I have
to get on with my painting."
That night I returned to the hotel late and went away early in the
morning. But the next day she came upon me again in the gardens, and
as we walked on together she told me that Donald had gone away.
"He was obliged to return, you see; he left the office without leave,
and he had only two pounds, the poor darling. I don't know if I told
you that he had to borrow two pounds to come here."
"No, you omitted that little fact. You see, you are so absorbed in
yourself that you think all these things are as interesting to
everybody else as they are to you."
"Now you're unkind," and she looked at me reproachfully. "It is the
first time you have been unsympathetic. If I talked to you it was
because I thought my chatter interested you. Moreover, I believed that
you were a little interested in me, and I have come all this way--"
My heart was touched, and I begged of her to believe that my remark
was only uttered in sport, to tease her. But it was a long time before
I could get her to finish the sentence. "You have come a long way, you
said--"
"I came to tell you that we are going to Rome tomorrow. I didn't like
to go away without seeing you, but it seems as if I were mistaken; it
would not have mattered to you if I had."
She had her fiddle-case with her; and to offer to carry it for her
seemed an easy way out of my difficulty; but she would not surrender
it for a while. I asked her if she had been playing at a concert, or
if she were coming from a lesson. No; well, then, why had she her
fiddle-case with her?
"Don't ask me; leave me in peace. It doesn't matter. I cannot play
now, and ten minutes ago my head was full of it."
These little ebullitions of temper were common in Mildred, and I knew
that the present one would soon pass away. In order that its passing
might be accomplished as rapidly as possible, I suggested we should
sit down, and I spoke to her of Donald.
"I don't want to talk about him. You have offended me."
"I'm sorry you are leaving Paris. This is the beautiful month. How
pleasant it is here, a soft diffused warmth in the air, the sunlight
flickering like a live thing in the leaves, and the sound of water
dripping at the end of the alley. We are all alone here, Mildred.
Come, tell me why you brought your fiddle-case."
"Well," she said, "I brought it on the chance of meeting you. I
thought you might like to hear me play. We are going away to-morrow
morning. I can't play in that hotel, in that stuffy little room; mamma
would want to accompany me."
"Play to me in the Luxembourg Gardens!"
"One can do anything one likes here; no one pays any attention to
anybody else," and she pointed with her parasol to a long poet, with
hair floating over his shoulders, who walked up and down the other end
of the alley reciting his verses.
"Perhaps your playing will interrupt him."
"Oh, if he doesn't like it he'll move away. But I don't want to play;
I can't play when I'm out of humour, and I was just in the very humour
for playing until your remark about--"
"About what?"
"You know very well," she answered.
The desire to hear her play the fiddle in the gardens gained upon me.
The moment was an enchanting one, the light falling through the
translucid leaves and the poet walking up and down carried my thoughts
into another age. I began to see a picture--myself, the poet, and
this girl playing the violin for us; other figures were wanting to
make up the composition. Cabanel's picture of the Florentine poet
intruded itself, interrupting my vision, the picture of Dante reading
his verses at one end of a stone bench to a frightened girl whose
lover is drawing her away from him who had been to Hell and witnessed
the tortures of the damned, who had met the miserable lovers of Rimini
whirling through space and heard their story from them. Lizard-like, a
man lies along a low wall, listening to the poet's story. But why
describe a picture so well known? Why mention it at all? Only because
its design intruded itself, spoiling my dream, an abortive idea that I
dimly perceived in Nature without being able to grasp it; an illusive
suggestion for a picture was passing by me, and so eager was my
pursuit of the vision that there was no strength in me to ask Mildred
to play. True that the sound of her violin might help me, but it must
happen accidentally, just as everything else was happening, without
sequence, without logic. At that moment my ear caught the sound of
violin-playing; some dance measure of old time was being played, and
in the sunlit interspace three women appeared dancing a gavotte,
advancing and retiring through the light and shade. The one who played
the violin leaned sometimes against a tree, and sometimes she joined
the others, playing as she danced.
"I know that gavotte. Come, let us go to them. I'll play for them if
they'll let me."
Very soon the woman who played the violin seemed to recognise Mildred
as a better player than herself. She handed her fiddle to a bystander
and the gavotte proceeded, the three old ladies bowing and holding up
their skirts and pointing their toes with the grace of bygone times.
Never, I think, did reality seem more like a dream. "But who are these
three women?" I asked myself, and, sinking on a bench like one
enchanted, I dreamed that these were three sisters, the remnant of a
noble family who had lost its money during several generations till at
last nothing remained, and the poor old women had to devise some mode
of earning their living. I imagined the scene in some great house
which they would have to leave on the morrow, and they talking
together, thinking they must go forth to beg, till she who played the
fiddle said that something would happen to save them from the shame of
mendicancy. I imagined her saying that their last crust of bread would
not be eaten before some one would come to tell them that a fortune
awaited them. And it so happened that the day they divided this crust
the one to whom faith had been given came upon an old letter. She
stood reading till the others asked her what she was reading with so
much interest. "I told you," she said, "that we should be saved, that
God in His great mercy would not turn us out into the streets to beg.
This letter contains explicit directions how the gavotte used to be
danced when our ancestors lived in the Place des Vosges."
"But what help to us to know the true step of the gavotte?" cried the
youngest sister.
"A great deal," the eldest answered gravely; "I can play the fiddle,
and we can all learn to dance; we'll go to dance the gavotte in the
Luxembourg Gardens whenever it is fine--the true gavotte as it was
danced when Madame de Sévigné drove up in a painted coach drawn by six
horses, and entered the courtyard of her hotel decorated with
bas-reliefs by Jean Goujon."
This is the story that I dreamed as I sat on the bench listening to
the pretty, sprightly music flowing like a live thing. Under the
fingers of the old woman the music scratched along like dead leaves
along a pathway, without accent, without rhythm; now the old gavotte
tripped like the springtime, pretty as the budding trees, as the
sunlight along the swards. Mildred brought out the contrast between
the detached and the slurred notes. How gaily it went! Full of the
fashion of the time--the wigs, the swords, the bows, the gallantry!
How sedate! How charming! How well she understood it! How well the old
women danced to it! How delighted every one was! She played on until
the old women, unable to dance any more, sat down to listen to her.
After trying some few things which I did not know, I heard her playing
a piece of music which I could not but think I had heard before--in
church! Beginning it on the low string, she poured out the long, long
phrase that never seems to end, so stern and so evocative of
Protestantism that I could not but think of a soul going forth on its
way to the Judgment Seat, telling perforce as it goes how it has
desired and sought salvation, pleading almost defiantly. But Mildred
could not appreciate such religious exaltation, yet it was her playing
that had inspired the thought in me. Had she been taught to play it?
Was she echoing another's thought? Her playing did not sound like an
echo; it seemed to come from the heart, or out of some unconscious
self, an ante-natal self that in her present incarnation only emerged
in music, borne up by some mysterious current to be sucked down by
another.
She played other things, not certain what she was going to play; and
then, as if suddenly moved to tell us about other things, she began to
play a very simple, singing melody, interrupted now and again, so it
seemed to me, by little fluttering confessions. I seemed to see a lady
in white, at the close of day, in a dusky boudoir, one of Alfred
Stevens's women, only much more refined, one whose lover has been
unfaithful to her, or maybe a woman who is weary of lovers and knows
not what to turn her mind to, hesitating between the convent and the
ball-room. Ah, the beautiful lament--how well Mildred played
it!--followed by the slight crescendo, and then the return of the soul
upon itself, bewailing its weakness, confessing its follies in
elegant, lovely language, seemingly speaking in a casual way, yet
saying such profound things, profound even as Bach. The form is
different, more light, more graceful, apparently more superficial, but
just as deep; for when we go to the bottom of things all things are
deep, one as deep as another, just as all things are shallow, one as
shallow as another; for have not mystics of every age held that things
exist not in themselves, but in the eye that sees and the ear that
hears?
A crowd had collected to hear her, for she was playing out of the
great silence that is in every soul, in that of the light-o'-love as
well as of the saint, and she went on playing, apparently unaware of
the number of people she had collected about her. She stopped playing
and returned to me.
"You play beautifully; why did you say you didn't like Beethoven?"
"I didn't say I didn't like Beethoven; you know very well mamma can't
play the 'Impassionata.'"
"Why aren't you always like this?"
"I don't know. One can't always be the same. I feel differently when I
play; the mood only comes over me sometimes. I used to play a great
deal; I only play occasionally now, just when I feel like it."
We walked through the alleys by the statues, seeing them hardly at
all, thinking of the music.
"I must be getting back," she said. "You see, I've got to pack up.
Mother can't do any packing; I've to do hers for her. I hope we shall
meet again some day."
"What good would it be? I only like you when you're playing, and
you're not often in the mood."
"I'm sorry for that; perhaps if you knew me better----"
"Now you're married, and I suppose Donald will come to Rome to fetch
you?"
"Oh, I don't think he'll be able. He has got no money."
"And you'll fall in love with some one else?"
"Well, perhaps so; I don't feel that I ever could again after this
week." Stopping suddenly in front of a hosier's shop, she said: "I
like those collars; they have just come out--those turned-down ones.
Do you like them as well as the great high stand-up collars about
three inches deep? When they were the fashion men could hardly move
their heads." Then she made some remarks about neckties and the colour
she liked best--violet. "Yes, there's a nice shade of violet. Poor
Donald! He's so handsome."
After the hosier's shop she spoke no more about music. And long before
we reached the hotel she who had played--I cannot say for certain what
she played that day in the Luxembourg Gardens; my love of music was
not then fully awakened; could it have been?--the names of Bach and
Chopin come up in my mind--"I can't speak about music," she said, as
we turned into the Rue du Bac, and she ran up the stairs of the hotel
possessed completely by the other Mildred. She asked her mother to
play the "Brooklyn Cake Walk," and she danced "the lovely two-step,"
as she had learned it at Nice, for my enjoyment. I noticed that she
looked extraordinarily comic as she skipped up and down the room, the
line of her chin deflected, and that always gives a slightly comic
look to a face. She came downstairs with me, and, standing at the
hotel door, she told me of something that had happened yesterday.
"Mother and I went to Cook's to get the tickets. When we went into the
office I saw a Yank--oh, so nicely dressed! Lovely patent-leather
boots. And I thought, 'Oh, dear, he'll never look at me.' But
presently he did, and took out his card-case and folded up a card and
put it on the ledge behind him, and gave me a look and moved away. So
I walked over and took it up. Mamma never saw, but the clerks did."
* * * * *
I have reported Mildred's story truthfully at a particular moment of
her life. Those who travel meet people now and again whose
individuality is so strong that it survives. Mildred's has survived
many years, and I have written this account of it because it seems to
me to throw a gleam into the mystery of life without, however, doing
anything to destroy the mystery.