A REMEMBRANCE
It was in the vastness of Westminster Hall that I saw her for the
first time--saw her pointed face, her red hair, her brilliant teeth.
The next time was in her own home--a farm-house that had been rebuilt
and was half a villa. At the back were wheat-stacks, a noisy
thrashing-machine, a pigeon-cote, and stables whence, with jangle of
harness and cries of yokels, the great farm-horses always seemed to be
coming from or going to their work on the downs. In a garden planted
with variegated firs she tended her flowers all day; and in the
parlour, where we assembled in the evening, her husband smoked his
pipe in silence; the young ladies, their blonde hair hanging down
their backs, played waltzes; she alone talked. Her conversation was
effusive, her laughter abundant and bright. I had only just turned
eighteen, and was deeply interested in religious problems, and one day
I told her the book I carried in my pocket, and sometimes pretended to
study, was Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." My explanation of the
value of the work did not seem to strike her, and her manifest want of
interest in the discussion of religious problems surprised me, for she
passed for a religious woman, and I failed to understand how mere
belief could satisfy any one. One day in the greenhouse, whither I had
wandered, she interrupted some allusion to the chapter entitled "The
Deduction of the Categories" with a burst of laughter, and declared
that she would call me Kant. The nickname was not adopted by the rest
of the family--another was invented which appealed more to their
imagination--but she held to the name she had given me, and during the
course of our long friendship never addressed me by any other.
There was no reason why I should have become the friend of these
people. We were opposed in character and temperament, but somehow we
seemed to suit. There was little reflection on either side; certainly
there was none on mine; at that time I was incapable of any; my youth
was a vague dream, and my friends were the shadows on the dream. I saw
and understood them only as one sees and understands the summer clouds
when, lying at length in the tall grass, one watches the clouds curl
and uncurl. In such mood, visit succeeded visit, and before I was
aware, the old Squire who walked about the downs in a tall hat died,
and my friends moved into the family place, distant about a hundred
yards--an Italian house, sheltered among the elms that grew along the
seashore. And in their new house they became to me more real than
shadows; they were then like figures on a stage, and the building of
the new wing and the planting of the new garden interested me as might
an incident in a play; and I left them as I might leave a play, taking
up another thread in life, thinking very little of them, if I thought
at all. Years passed, and after a long absence abroad I met them by
chance in London.
Again visit succeeded visit. My friends were the same as when I had
left them; their house was the same, the conduct of their lives was
the same. I do not think I was conscious of any change until, one day,
walking with one of the girls in the garden, a sensation of home came
upon me. I seemed always to have known these people; they seemed part
and parcel of my life. It was a sudden and enchanting awaking of love;
life seemed to lengthen out like the fields at dawn, and to become
distinct and real in many new and unimagined ways. Above all, I was
surprised to find myself admiring her who, fifteen years ago, had
appeared to me not a little dowdy. She was now fifty-five, but such an
age seemed impossible for so girl-like a figure and such young and
effusive laughter. I was, however, sure that she was fifteen years
older than when I first saw her, but those fifteen years had brought
each within range of the other's understanding and sympathy. We became
companions. I noticed what dresses she wore, and told her which I
liked her best in. She was only cross with me when I surprised her in
the potting-shed wearing an old bonnet out of which hung a faded
poppy. She used to cry: "Don't look at me, Kant. I know I'm like an
old gipsy woman."
"You look charming," I said, "in that old bonnet."
She put down the watering-can and laughingly took it from her head.
"It is a regular show."
"Not at all. You look charming when working in the greenhouse.... I
like you better like that than when you are dressed to go to
Brighton."
"Do you?... I thought you liked me best in my new black silk."
"I think I like you equally well at all times."
We looked at each other. There was an accent of love in our
friendship. "And strange, is it not," I said, "I did not admire you
half as much when I knew you first?"
"How was that? I was quite a young woman then."
"Yes," I said, regretting my own words; "but, don't you see, at that
time I was a mere boy--I lived in a dream, hardly seeing what passed
around me."
"Yes, of course," she said gaily, "you were so young then, all you saw
in me was a woman with a grown-up son."
Her dress was pinned up, she held in her hand the bonnet which she
said made her look like an old gipsy woman, and the sunlight fell on
the red hair, now grown a little thinner, but each of the immaculate
teeth was an elegant piece of statuary, and not a wrinkle was there on
that pretty, vixen-like face. Her figure especially showed no signs of
age, and if she and her daughters were in the room it was she I
admired.
One day, while seeking through the store-room for a sheet of brown
paper to pack up a book in, I came across a pile of old
_Athenaeums_. Had I happened upon a set of drawings by Raphael I
could not have been more astonished. Not one, but twenty copies of the
_Athenaeum_ in a house where never a book was read. I looked at
the dates--three-and-thirty years ago. At that moment she was
gathering some withering apples from the floor.
"Whoever," I cried, "could have left these copies of the
_Athenaeum_ here?"
"Oh, they are my _Athenaeums_," she said. "I always used to read
the _Athenaeum_ when I was engaged to be married to Mr. Bartlett.
You must have heard of him--he wrote that famous book about the
Euphrates. I was very fond of reading in those days, and he and I used
to talk about books in the old garden at Wandsworth. It is all built
over now."
This sudden discovery of dead tastes and sympathies seemed to draw us
closer together, and in the quietness of the store-room, amid the
odour of the apples, her face flushed with all the spirit of her
girlhood, and I understood her as if I had lived it with her.
"You must have been a delightful girl. I believe if I had known you
then I should have asked you to marry me."
"I believe you would, Kant.... So you thought because I never read
books now that I had never read any? You have no idea how fond of
books I was once, and if I had married Mr. Bartlett I believe I should
have been quite a blue-stocking. But then Dick came, and my father
thought it a more suitable match, and I had young children to look
after. We were very poor in those days; the old Squire never attempted
to help us."
At this time I seemed to be always with my friends; I came to see them
when I pleased, and sometimes I stayed a week, sometimes I stayed six
months: but however long my visit they said it was not long enough.
The five-o'clock from London brought me down in time for dinner, and I
used to run up to my room just as if I were a member of the family. If
I missed this train and came down by the six-o'clock, I found them at
dinner, and then the lamplight seemed to accentuate our affectionate
intimacy, and to pass round the table shaking hands with them all was
in itself a peculiar delight. On one of these occasions, missing her
from her place, I said: "Surely you have not allowed her to remain
till this hour in the garden?"
I was told that she was ill, and had been for the last fortnight
confined to her room. Several days passed; allusion to her illness
became more frequent; and then I heard that the local doctor would
accept the responsibility no longer, and had demanded a consultation
with a London physician. But she would not hear of so much expense for
her sake, and declared herself to be quite sufficiently well to go to
London.
The little pony-carriage took her to the station, and I saw her in the
waiting-room wrapped up in shawls. She was ashamed to see me, but in
truth the disease had not changed her as she thought it had. There are
some who are so beautiful that disease cannot deform them, and she was
endowed with such exquisite life that she would turn to smile back on
you over the brink of the grave.
We thought the train was taking her from us for ever, but she came
back hopeful. Operation had been pronounced unnecessary, but she
remained in her room many days before the medicine had reduced her
sufficiently to allow her to come downstairs. Nearly a month passed,
and then she appeared looking strangely well, and every day she grew
better until she regained her girlish figure and the quick dance of
movement which was a grace and a joy in the silent peacefulness of the
old house. Her grace and lightness were astonishing, and one day,
coming down dressed to go in the carriage, she raced across the
library, opened her escritoire, hunting through its innumerable
drawers for one of the sums of money which she kept there wrapped up
in pieces of paper.
"How nice you look! You are quite well now, and your figure is like a
girl of fifteen."
She turned and looked at me with that love in her face which an old
woman feels for a young man who is something less and something more
to her than her son. As a flush of summer lingers in autumn's face, so
does a sensation of sex float in such an affection. There is something
strangely tender in the yearning of the young man for the decadent
charms of her whom he regards as the mother of his election, and who,
at the same time, suggests to him the girl he would have loved if time
had not robbed him of her youth. There is a waywardness in such an
affection that formal man knows not of.
I remember that day, for it was the last time I saw her beautiful.
Soon after we noticed that she did not quite recover, and we thought
it was because she did not take her medicine regularly. She spent
long hours alone in her greenhouse, the hot sun playing fiercely
on her back, and we supplicated--I was the foremost among her
supplicators--that she would not carry the heavy flower-pots to and
fro, nor cans of water from the tank at the bottom of the garden, and
to save her I undertook to water her flowers for her. But she was one
of those who would do everything herself--who thought that if she did
not shut the door it was not properly shut. She was always speaking of
her work. "If I leave my work," she would say, "even for one week,
everything gets so behind-hand that I despair of ever being able to
make up the arrear. The worst of it is that no one can take up my work
where I leave off." And as she grew worse this idea developed until it
became a kind of craze. At last, speculating on the strength of our
friendship, I told her her life belonged to her husband and children,
and that she had no right to squander it in this fashion. I urged that
with ordinary forbearance she might live for twenty years, but at the
present rate of force-expenditure she could not hope to live long. I
spoke brutally, but she smiled, knowing how much I loved her; and,
looking back, it seems to me she must have known she could not be
saved, and preferred to give the last summer of her life entirely to
her flowers. It was pathetic to see her, poor moribund one, sitting
through the long noons alone, the sun beating in upon her through the
fiery glass, tending her flowers. I remember how she used to come in
in the evenings exhausted, and lie down on the little sofa. Her
husband, with an anxious, quiet, kindly look in his eyes, used to draw
the skirt over her feet and sit down at her feet, tender, loving,
soliciting the right to clasp her hand, as if they had not been
married thirty years, but were only sweethearts. At that time we used
all to implore her to allow us to send for the London doctor, and I
remember how proud I was when she looked up and said, "Very well,
Kant, it shall be as you wish it." I remember, too, waiting by the
little wood at the corner of the lane, where I should be sure to meet
the doctor as he came up from the station. The old elms were beautiful
with green, the sky was beautiful with blue, and we lingered, looking
out on the fair pasturage where the sheep moved so peacefully, and,
with the exquisite warmth of summer in our flesh, we talked of her who
was to die.
"Is it then incurable?"
"There is no such thing as cure.... We cannot create, we can only
stimulate an existent force, and every time we stimulate we weaken,
and so on until exhaustion. Our drugs merely precipitate the end."
"Then there is no hope?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Can she live for five years?"
"I should think it extremely improbable."
"What length of life do you give her?"
"You are asking too much.... I should say about a year."
The doctor passed up the leafy avenue. I remained looking at the silly
sheep, seeing in all the green landscape only a dark, narrow space.
That day I saw her for the last time. She was sitting on a low chair,
very ill indeed, and the voice, weak, but still young and pure, said:
"Is that you, Kant? Come round here and let me look at you." Amid my
work in London, I used to receive letters from my friends, letters
telling me of the march of the disease, and with each letter death
grew more and more realisable until her death seemed to stand in
person before me. It could not be much longer delayed, and the letter
came which told me that "Mother was not expected to live through the
winter." Soon after came another letter: "Mother will not live another
month"; and this was followed by a telegram: "Mother is dying; come at
once."
It was a bleak and gusty afternoon in the depth of winter, and the
Sunday train stopped at every station, and the journey dragged its
jogging length of four hours out to the weary end. The little station
shivered by an icy sea, and going up the lane the wind rattled and
beat my face like an iron. I hurried, looking through the trees for
the lights that would shine across the park if she were not dead, and
welcome indeed to my eyes were the gleaming yellow squares. Slipping
in the back way, and meeting the butler in the passage, I said: "How
is she?"
"Very bad indeed, sir."
She did not die that night, nor the next, nor yet the next; and as we
waited for death, slow but sure of foot, to come and take what
remained of her from us, I thought often of the degradation that these
lingering deaths impose upon the watchers, and how they force into
disgraceful prominence all that is animal in us. For, however great
our grief may be, we must eat and drink, and must even talk of other
things than the beloved one whom we are about to lose; for we may not
escape from our shameful nature. And, eating and drinking, we
commented on the news that came hourly from the sickroom: "Mother will
not live the week." A few days after, "Mother will hardly get over
Sunday"; and the following week, "Mother will not pass the night."
Lunch was the meal that shocked me most, and I often thought, "She is
dying upstairs while we are eating jam tarts."
One day I had to ride over the downs for some letters, and when, on my
return, I walked in from the stables, I met her son. He was in tears,
and sobbing he said: "My dear old chap, it is all over; she is gone."
I took his hand and burst into tears. Then one of her daughters came
downstairs and I was told how she had passed away. A few hours before
she died she had asked for a silk thread; for thirty years, before
sleeping, she always passed one between her beautiful teeth. Her poor
arms were shrunken to the very bone and were not larger than a little
child's. Haggard and over-worn, she was lifted up, and the silk was
given to her and the glass was held before her; but her eyes were
glazed with death, and she fell back exhausted. Then her breathing
grew thicker, and at last and quite suddenly, she realised that she
was about to die; and looking round wildly, not seeing those who were
collected about her bed, she said, "Oh, to die when so much remains
undone! How will they get on without me!"
I helped to write the letters, so melancholy, so conventional, and
expressing so little of our grief, and the while the girls sat weaving
wreaths for the dead, and at every hour wreaths and letters of
sympathy arrived. The girls went upstairs where the dead lay, and when
they returned they told me how beautiful their mother looked. And
during those dreadful days, how many times did I refuse to look on her
dead! My memory of her was an intensely living thing, and I could not
be persuaded to sacrifice it. We thought the day would never come, but
it came. There was a copious lunch, cigars were smoked, the crops, the
price of lambs, and the hunting, which the frost had much interfered
with, were alluded to furtively, and the conversation was interspersed
with references to the excellent qualities of the deceased. I remember
the weather was beautiful, full of pure sunlight, with the colour of
the coming spring in the face of the heavens. And the funeral
procession wound along the barren sea road, the lily-covered coffin on
a trolley drawn by the estate labourers. That day every slightest line
and every colour of that bitter, barren coast impressed themselves on
my mind, and I saw more distinctly than I had ever done before the old
church with red-brown roofs and square dogmatic tower, the forlorn
village, the grey undulations of the dreary hills, whose ring of trees
showed aloft like a plume. In the church the faces of the girls were
discomposed with grief, and they wept hysterically in each other's
arms. The querulous voice of the organ, the hideous hymn, and the
grating voice of the aged parson standing in white surplice on the
altar-steps! Dear heart! I saw thee in thy garden while others looked
unto that sunless hole, while old men, white-haired and tottering,
impelled by senile curiosity, pressed forward and looked down into
that comfortless hole.
The crowd quickly dispersed; the relatives and the friends of the
deceased, as they returned home, sought those who were most agreeable
and sympathetic, and matters of private interest were discussed. Those
who had come from a distance consulted their watches, and an apology
to life was implicit in their looks, and the time they had surrendered
to something outside of life evidently struck them as being strangely
disproportionate. The sunlight laughed along the sea, and the young
corn was thick in the fields; leaves were beginning in the branches,
larks rose higher and higher, disappearing in the pale air, and, as we
approached the plantations, the amorous cawing of the rooks sounded
pleasantly in the ear. The appearance of death in the springtime, at
the moment when the world renews its life, touched my soul with that
anguish which the familiar spectacle has always and will never fail to
cause as long as a human heart beats beneath the heavens. And,
dropping behind the chattering crowd that in mourning-weed wended its
way through the sad spring landscape, I thought of her whom I had
loved so long and should never see again. I thought of memory as a
shrine where we can worship without shame, of friendship, and of the
pure escapement it offers us from our natural instincts; I remembered
that there is love other than that which the young man offers to her
he would take to wife, and I knew how much more intense and strangely
personal was my love of her than the love which that day I saw the
world offering to its creatures.