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MARGARITA'S SOUL
[Illustration: THEY CROONED TOGETHER THERE, THE WOMAN, THE CHILD
AND THE BIRDS]
MARGARITA'S
SOUL
THE ROMANTIC RECOLLECTIONS
OF A MAN OF FIFTY
BY
INGRAHAM LOVELL
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. SCOTT WILLIAMS
AND WHISTLER BUTTERFLY DECORATIONS
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMIX
_Copyright, 1909_
By THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING COMPANY
_Copyright, 1909_
By JOHN LANE COMPANY
* * * * *
CONTENTS
PART I
IN WHICH YOU SEE A SECRET SPRING
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Fate Walks Broadway 11
II. Fate Goes A-fishing 17
III. As the Twigs Were Bent 28
IV. Fate Reels In 37
PART II
IN WHICH THE SPRING FLOWS IN A LITTLE STREAM
V. Roger Finds the Island 47
VI. Fate Casts Her Die 59
VII. I Ride Knight Errant 66
VIII. The Mists of Eden 74
PART III
IN WHICH THE STREAM JOINS WITH OTHERS
AND PLUNGES DOWN A CLIFF
IX. Margarita Meets the Enemy and He is Hers 81
X. Fate Spreads an Island Feast 87
XI. Our Parson Proves Capable 94
XII. I Leave Eden 105
PART IV
IN WHICH THE STREAM WINDS THROUGH A
SULLEN MARSH AND BECOMES A BROOK
XIII. Straws that Showed the Wind 111
XIV. The Island Cottage 118
XV. Fate Plays Me in the Shallows 130
XVI. Margarita Comes to Town 141
PART V
IN WHICH THE BROOK BECOMES A RIVER AND
FLOWS BY GREAT CITIES
XVII. Our Pearl Bathes in Seine Water 149
XVIII. My Pearl of Too Great Price 157
XIX. Fate Lands Me on the Rocks 164
PART VI
IN WHICH YOU ARE SHOWN THE RIVER'S VERY
SOURCES, FAR UNDERGROUND
XX. A Garden Glimpse of Eden 181
XXI. Hester Prynne's Secret 186
XXII. Fate Laughs and Baits Her Hook 196
PART VII
IN WHICH THE RIVER LEAPS A SUDDEN CLIFF
AND BECOMES A CATARACT
XXIII. Fate Spreads Her Net 213
XXIV. Our Second Summer in Eden 221
XXV. The Island Tomb 231
XXVI. A Handful of Memories 235
PART VIII
IN WHICH THE RIVER RUSHES INTO PERILOUS
RAPIDS
XXVII. We Bring Our Pearl to Market 247
XXVIII. Arabian Nights in England 257
XXIX. Fate Grips Her Landing Net 273
PART IX
IN WHICH THE RIVER FINDS THE SEA
XXX. A Terror in the Snow 279
XXXI. Fate Empties Her Creel 289
XXXII. The Sunset End 294
* * * * *
ILLUSTRATIONS
They Crooned Together There, the Woman, the Child
and the Birds _Frontispiece_
PAGE
Scooped Hundreds--Perhaps Thousands--Out of a Chest
to Flee at Dawn 43
The Tall, Gaunt, Silent Woman ... Striding Through
the Pastures 49
I Seem to See ... a Beautiful Woman in a Blue Dress
Sitting Under a Fruit Tree 105
Persons Born in That Month of That Year Will Never
Be Otherwise Than Far Out of the Ordinary 132
Margarita Stopped and Stared at It Several Minutes 144
For Hours and Hours I Walked, Muttering and Cursing 163
Her Weekly Check, Plus a Draft for a Hundred Pounds 174
She Spins Her Hemp and Weaves Osiers into Baskets
and Changes Them for Goats' Hams 204
The Gloomy, Faded Glories of the Musty Palace 208
Ah, Faithful Caliban, What Hours of Terrible Tuition
Made Thy Task Clear to Thee! 233
He Sketched Her in Charcoal, Dressed (He Would Have
It) in Black 240
It Was After the Garden Love-Scene That She Won
Her Recalls 250
They Are Still as Death, Tranced in Those Liquid Bell-Tones 270
I Leaned Over the Bank and Cried That I Was There,
But She Never Stopped--It Was Terrible 281
It Is a Favourite Claim of Ours Who Are Bidden to That
Home That It Is an Enchanted Isle 296
* * * * *
PART ONE
IN WHICH YOU SEE A SECRET SPRING
O I have seen a fair mermaid,
That sang beside a lonely sea,
And now her long black hair she'll braid,
And be my own good wife to me.
O woe's the day you saw the maid,
And woe's the song she sang the sea,
In hell her long black hair she'll braid,
For ne'er a soul at all has she!
_Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden._
MARGARITA'S SOUL
CHAPTER I
FATE WALKS BROADWAY
Roger Bradley was walking up Broadway. This fact calls sharply for
comment, for he had not done it in years; the thoroughfare was
intolerable to him. But one of its impingements upon a less blatant
avenue had caught him napping and he found himself entangled in a mesh
of theatre dribblings, pool-room loungers, wine-touts and homeward
bent women of the middle, shopping class. Being there, he scorned to
avail himself of the regularly recurring cross streets, but strode
along, his straight, trim bulk, his keen, judicial profile--a profile
that spoke strong of the best traditions of American blood--marking
him for what he was among a crowd not to be matched, in its way, upon
the Western Continent.
At the second slanting of the great, tawdry lane he bent with it and
encountered suddenly a little knot of flustered women just descended
from the elevated way that doubled the din and blare of the shrieking
city. They were bundle-filled, voluble, dressed by any standards save
those of their native city, far beyond their probable means and
undoubted station. As they stopped unexpectedly and hesitated, damming
the flood of hurrying citizens, Roger halted of necessity and stepped
backward, but in avoiding them he bumped heavily against the person
behind him. A startled gasp, something soft against his shoulder, the
sharp edge of a projecting hat, told him that this person was a
woman, and stepping sidewise into the shelter of a neighbouring
news-stall, he raised his hat with a courtesy alien to the place and
hour.
"I beg your pardon, madam," he said, "I trust I have not hurt you?"
"No," said the woman, who wore a heavy grey veil, and as that is
literally all she said and as her method of saying it was as
convincing as it was simple, one would suppose the incident closed and
look to see Roger complete his journey to his club without further
adventure.
Do I wish he had? God knows. It was undoubtedly the turning-point in
his life and he was forty. Had he gone on to the club where I was
waiting for him; had we dined, played out our rubber, dropped in at
the occasional chamber concert that was our usual and almost our only
dissipation in those days, I should not now be ransacking old letters
and diaries from which to make this book, nor would Margarita's
picture--her loveliest, as _Juliet_--lean toward me from the wall. She
is smiling; not as one smiles in photographs, but as a flesh-and-blood
woman droops over the man she loves and smiles her heart into his
lips, reaching over his shoulder. Everything slips behind but you two,
herself and you, when you look at it. Sarony, who took it, told me he
had never posed such a subject, and I believe him.
Well, well, it's done now. It was twenty years ago that Roger bumped
into his fate in that eddy of Broadway and I was as powerless as you
are now to disentangle him and keep him for myself, which, selfishly
enough, of course, I wanted terribly to do. You see, he was all I had,
Roger, and I was hoping we would play the game out together. But--not
to have known Margarita? Never to have watched that bending droop of
her neck, that extraordinary colouring of her skin--a real Henner
skin! I remember Maurice Grau's telling me that he had always thought
Henner colour blind till he saw Margarita's neck in her name-part in
_Faust_.
The things that girl used to tell me, before she had any soul, of
course, and in the days when I was the third man to whom she had ever
spoken more than ten words in her life, were almost enough to pay for
all the pain she taught me. Such talks! I can close my eyes and
actually smell the sea-weed and the damp sand and hear the inrush of
the big combers. She used to sit in the lee of the rocks, all huddled
in that heavy, supple army-blue officer's cloak of hers with its
tarnished silver clasps, and talk as Miranda must have talked to
Ferdinand's old bachelor friend, who probably appreciated the
chance--too well, the poor old dog!
I had reached, I think, when I left off my plain unvarnished tale and
took to maundering, that precise point in it which exhibits Roger in
the act of replacing his hat upon his even then slightly greyish head
and striding on. It seems to me that he would not have checked in his
stride if the woman had replied after the usual tautological fashion
of her sex (we blame them for it, not thinking how wholly in nature it
is that they should be so, like the repeated notes of birds, the
persistence of the raindrops, the continual flicker of the sun through
the always fluttering leaves,) with some such phrase as, "No, indeed,
not in the least, I assure you!" or "Not at all, really--don't mention
it!" or even, "No, indeed," with a shy bow or a composed one, as the
case might be. But this woman uttered merely the syllable, "No," with
no modification nor variation, no inclination of the head, no movement
forward or back. Her utterance was grave, moreover, and precise; her
tone noticeably full and deep. Roger, pausing a moment in the shelter
of the news-stall, spoke again at the spur of some unexplainable
impulse.
"I was afraid I had stepped directly on your foot--it felt so," he
said.
Again she answered simply, "No," and that was his second chance. Now
in the face of these facts it is folly to contend that the woman
"accosted" him, as his cousin, who was one of the Boston Thayers, put
it to me. She did nothing of the kind; she replied twice, to his
distinct questions, in the coldest of monosyllables and he could not
even have told if she looked at him, her veil was so thick. Let that
be definitely understood, once and for all. The chances were even in
favour of her being violently pitted from the small-pox, since even
twenty years ago, when the city was less cosmopolitan (and from my
point of view more interesting) the women of New York of the class
that travels unaccompanied and on foot at dusk were not accustomed to
go heavily veiled if they had any fair excuse for the contrary course.
Nevertheless to that veiled woman did Roger address
himself--unnecessarily, mark you--for the third time. Why did he? He
had his chance; two chances in fact. But this is folly, for of course
he had no chance at all. Fate stood by that news-stall, with the
blear-eyed, frousy woman that tended it looking vacantly on; Fate,
veiled, too, and not even monosyllabic in his behalf. I should have
known this, I think, even if I had not lived those curious, long eight
months in Algeria and slept those dreamless nights under the Algerian
stars that got into my blood and call me back now and then;
imperiously and never in vain, though I feel older than the stars, and
Alif and the rest are dead or exhibiting themselves at the great
American memorial fairs that began to flourish about the time this
tale begins. No, there was no help: it was written.
"I am glad I did not hurt you," he said, really moving forward now and
again raising his hat, "these crowds are dangerous for women at this
hour."
He took two steps and stopped suddenly, for a hand slipped under his
arm. (You should have seen his cousin's face, the Boston one, when in
that relentless way known only to women and eminent artists in
cross-examination she got this fact out of me.)
"Will you tell me the quickest way to Broadway?" said the woman to
whom he had just spoken.
"To Broadway?" he echoed stupidly, standing stock still, conscious of
the grasp upon his arm, a curious sense of the importance of this
apparently cheap experience surging over him, even while he resented
its banality. "This is Broadway. What do you want of it?"
"I want to show myself on it," said the woman, a young woman, from the
voice.
Roger stepped back against the news-stall, dragging her with him,
since her hand did not leave his arm.
"To show yourself on it?" he repeated sternly, "and why do you want to
do that?"
"To get myself some friends. I have none," said she serenely.
Now you must not think Roger a fool, for he was not. You see, you
never heard the voice that spoke to him. If you had, and had possessed
any experience or knowledge of the world, you would have realised that
the owner of that voice possessed neither or else was a very great and
convincing actress. Mere print cannot excuse him, perhaps, but I give
you my word he was as a matter of fact excusable, since he was a
bachelor. Most men are very susceptible to the human voice, especially
to the female human voice, and it has always been a matter of the
deepest wonder to me that the men who do not hear a lovely one once in
the year are most under the dominion of their females. I mean, of
course, the Americans. It is one of the greatest proofs of the power
of these _belles Americaines_ that they wield it in spite of the
rustiness of this, their chief national weapon.
The bell notes, the grave, full richness of this veiled woman's voice
touched Roger deeply and with a brusque motion he drew out from his
pocket a banknote and pressed it into the hand under his arm.
"Take this and go home," he said severely. "If you will promise me to
call at an address I will give you, I will guarantee you a decent
means of livelihood. Will you promise me?"
She reached down without a word into a bag that hung _en chatelaine_
at her waist and drew out something in her turn.
"I have a great many of those," she said placidly, "and more at home.
See them!"
And under his face she thrust a double handful of stamped paper--all
green.
"Each one of these is called twenty dollars," she informed him, "and
some of them are called fifty dollars. They are in the bottom of the
bag. I do not think that I need any more."
Roger stared at her.
"Put that away directly," he said, "and lift your veil so that I can
see who you are. There is something wrong here."
They stood in the lee of the flaring stall, a pair so obvious in their
relation to each other, one would say, as to require no comment beyond
the cynical indifference of the red-eyed woman who tended it. No doubt
she had long ceased to count the well-dressed, athletic men who drew
indifferently clothed young women into the shelter of her stand. And
yet no one of his Puritan ancestors could have been further in spirit
from her dreary inferences than this Roger. Nor do I believe him to be
so exceptional in this as to cause remark. We are not all birds of
prey, dear ladies, believe me. Indeed, since you have undertaken the
responsibilities of the literary dissecting-room so thoroughly and
increasingly; since you have, as one might say, at last freed your
minds to us in the amazing frankness of your multitudinous and
unsparing pages, I am greatly tempted to wonder if you are not
essentially less decent than we. One would never have ventured to
suspect it, had you not opened the door....
The woman threw back her veil so that it framed her face like a cloud
and Roger looked straight into her eyes. And so the curtain rolled up,
the orchestra ceased its irrelevant pipings and the play was begun.