OUR SECOND SUMMER IN EDEN
That winter had been my introduction to Egypt. I have never since let
more than three winters, at most, go by without revisiting the
strange, haunted place; next to Nippon the fairy country it is dearest
to me of all the warm corners of the earth--and I have dragged my
twinging, tortured muscles to them all. Only last winter--for many
months have passed since I copied those last letters into my
manuscript, and I paid dear for a last attempt at a February in New
York--I strolled through Cairo streets, drew gratefully into my
nostrils the extraordinary mixture of odours that differentiates Cairo
from every place in the world (how the great cities are stamped
indelibly each with her own nameless atmosphere, by the way! And yet
not quite nameless, for London's is based on street mud and
flower-trays, Rome is garlic and incense, Paris is watered asphalt,
New York is untended horses and tobacco-smoke, and Tokyo is rice
straw) and as I strolled, a strange thing happened to me.
I was passing by a street-seller of scarabs, a treacherous-looking
wretch, whose rolling eyes glanced covetously at the scarab--better
than any of his--that I wore at my scarf-knot, and pressed against him
to avoid a great black with a tray of brass bowls and platters on his
head. Just ahead of me a lemonade-merchant uttered his wailing, minor
cry, and as the crowd jostled in the narrow, dirty lane, my eye was
caught by a coffee-coloured woman, a big Juno, with flashing teeth and
a neck like a bronze tower. Across her shoulders sat a naked baby who
held his balance by his two chubby hands buried in her thick black
hair, one leg dropping over each splendid breast. She caught my eye,
and laughed outright as the child kicked out with one fat foot and
struck the brasses on the tray so that it tipped and swayed
dangerously.
I stood there, lost in a maze of Cairo streets, and the babel of the
shrieking, blue-clad donkey-boys was the scream of gulls to my ears
and the sun on the swaying brass platters was the reflection of a
polished sun-dial. The turquoises on the scarab-seller's tray were
turquoises about Margarita's waist, the lemonade was borne by Caliban,
and the child that rode astride those strong shoulders had hair like
corn-silk burned in the sun and eyes as blue as any turquoise! For so
had she held her baby, walking with that free, noble stride, and so
she had laughed and met my eyes, and so the child had clutched her
hair, in the summer just passed.
So vivid was the impression that I stood, as I say, in a maze, and the
scarab-seller and he of the brass tray cursed me heartily as they
struggled for balance in the pushing, screaming, reeking crowd. How
meaningless that phrase, "real life!" Years and years of actual
happenings in my life have been less real than those seconds in the
Cairo streets, when down the alley-ways of sound and sight, across the
intricate network of that spongy, grey tissue in my skull, this tiny,
deathless, unimportant memory led my soul away from the present and
left me, an unconscious, stupid, mechanical toy, to block the Cairo
traffic, while I--the real I--lived far away. Truly the poets and the
children are our only realists, and Time and Space have fooled the
rest of us unmercifully.
I find that trivial recollections of this sort interest me far more in
the recording than my sensations as a wealthy man. These last were,
indeed, strikingly few. Beyond the pleasure of buying old Jeanne a
Cashmere shawl, the hidden ambition of her life, and giving orders for
Harriet's hospital (for I seemed to have brought the natives of North
Carolina down on my shoulders, somehow--and that without the faintest
interest in them!) my amazing good fortune made less impression upon
me, as a matter of fact, than Uncle Winthrop's first legacy. What was
there for me to do with it? Roger refused to touch a penny; my mother,
beyond a little increase in her charity fund and a pony phaeton, was
merely bewildered when asked to make any suggestions, and would have
handed purses to every tramp in New England if she had been given the
means; my father's people were well-to-do, and the conferring of
benefactions has always been difficult for me, anyway. The only way
for me would be to drop gold-pieces on needy thresholds by night and
run away--a startling occupation for a rheumatic bachelor, surely! I
do not know how to receive thanks--they embarrass me frightfully. To
stand smugly with a philanthropic smile while the widow and the orphan
weep around my knees, is something I should be forever unable to
achieve. Harriet's hospital was not a charity--it was something to
keep the ridiculous creature busy--her yacht, her picture gallery, her
stud-farm, if you will.
As for me, I had none of these tastes. I bought the one or two
pictures I had always wanted, that were within my means (most of them
weren't within anybody's!) I put a piano in my new rooms, laid in a
little wine for my appreciative friends, bespoke the unshared services
of Hodgson, who was unfortunately necessary to me now that every
sudden damp day crippled my right shoulder (he came to me wearing one
of my old suits, by the way) and put a new steam-launch into Roger's
concealed boat-house. I presented Margarita with another and a larger
gift of pearls, it is true, but without one-tenth of the choking
excitement with which I had clasped that first single one upon her
neck.
The lady herself, however, balanced this equation; she was greatly
delighted, and if she had not, perhaps, perfectly appreciated the
first offering, more than atoned by her rapturous recognition of the
second.
"And how they must have cost!" she cried. "Jerry, you are too
generous--but I do love them!"
To think of Margarita's estimating the value of a gift!
We had famous talks that August, while Roger sweated at his new
task--making an island for us, no less!--and _petite Marie_ gathered
shells and buried them in tiny, wave-washed graves.
She took to reading that summer, and I read _Pendennis_ and _David
Copperfield_ aloud and she embroidered great grey butterflies all over
her grey gown for _Faust_, and the big brindled hound slept at our
feet near the beehives.
"Which do you like best?" I asked her curiously.
"Oh, the one about Mr. Pendennis is the prettiest," she answered
promptly, "I should have liked the man that made that book the best.
But Mr. Dickens knows about more things. He makes more different kinds
of people."
"Thackeray has been called cynical," I suggested.
"What is that, Jerry?"
I explained, and she shook her head.
"O no, that is not cynical. That is the way things are, Jerry. Only
everybody does not say so."
"Do you think," I asked, "that people really talk the way Mr. Micawber
talks? I never heard anybody. And certainly nobody ever talked like
his wife."
"No," she said thoughtfully, "I never did, either. But there must be a
good many people _like_ them, Jerry, I am sure. And if they knew as
many long words as Mr. Dickens, that is the way they _would_ talk, I
think."
I have never heard a better criticism of the literary giant of the
nineteenth century.
She never made the slightest secret of her affection for me nor of our
thorough comprehension of each other and our similarity of tastes.
Quiet always, or almost always, with Roger, with me she chattered like
a bird, and I could give her opinion on many matters of which he knew
nothing.
"Jerry and I like Botticelli and caviar sandwiches and street songs
and Egypt, and Roger does not," she told Clarence King once--I can
hear him roar now.
"I can talk better to you than to Roger," she confided to me one day
on the rocks; "if it were the custom to have two husbands, Jerry, I
should like you for the other--but it is not," she added mournfully.
I agreed to this with regret and she went on thoughtfully.
"You see, Roger would not like it, even if it _was_ the custom, so I
could not, anyway."
"That is very amiable of you," I said.
"It is strange how I always think of what he would like," she added,
with perfect sincerity, I am sure. "One day when he would not let me
have any more bread--it was so bad for my voice, you know--I got very
angry and spoke crossly to him, but still he would not, and I told him
that since he did not want me to sing he had better let me spoil my
voice, if I wanted to--and you would think he would, would you not,
Jerry?"
"No," I answered soberly, "no, Margarita, I wouldn't. He knew you
really wanted your voice more than the bread, so he gave you what you
wanted."
"Yes. But that day I was so angry, I planned how much more free I
should be if he were to die--was it not terrible, Jerry?--and then I
got so interested I could not stop, and I made a dying sickness for
him like my father's, and Miss Buxton came, and then I got a black
frock like Hester when my father died, and then we--you and I--made a
grave for him with my father's grave on the little point, and then
(this was all in my mind, you see, Jerry) I was so sad I cried and
cried--as I do in _Marguerite_, all over my cheeks, and then, what do
you think?"
"Heavens, child, what can I think? I don't know," I said unsteadily,
revolving God knows what of possibilities in my presumptuous and
selfish heart.
"Why," she said simply, "I felt so badly that I went to Roger (in my
mind) to tell him about it and show him the beautiful grave we had
made and my black frock (I had a little pointed bonnet with white
under the front, like the widows in Paris) and suddenly I remembered
that I could not show him--he would be dead! You see that would have
been very bad, for I had been planning all the time that he would be
there to--to--well, _that he would be there_! You see what I mean,
don't you, Jerry? Roger has to be there."
"Yes, I see," I said, very low, filled with sickening shame, "he has
to be there, my dear."
"And so I stopped all that dying sickness directly," she continued
comfortably, "because it was too silly, if I could not tell him about
it afterwards, you see.
"And yet he was very cross to me about the bread," she burst out
childishly. "Why do I think he has to be there, Jerry? He cannot talk
to me nearly so nicely as you can--he does not understand. Why must he
be there?"
I choked and laughed at once.
"Because you love him, you silly Margarita!" I declared.
"That must be it," she agreed, with a serious, long look at me out of
those deep-sea coloured eyes.
Ah, me!
How we worked at that canal! Caliban and two swarthy Italians and
Roger and I--for I marked out the course of it in an artfully natural
curve and put in the stakes. There were eighty-odd feet across the
part of the peninsula we selected, and it bade fair to wear us all out
and last forever, till I seized the occasion of a business trip that
took Roger away for four days and hired a great gang of labourers who
finished it all up, so that he walked into his island home across a
foot-bridge, to his great and boyish delight. What a big boy he was,
after all! Not that I did not share his pleasure in the Island: it
gave me a delicious feeling of security and distance from the rest of
the world. With the help of the gang I had been able to widen our
channel considerably and it took a very respectable bridge indeed to
span the gap. We had made plans for a regular drawbridge, but later
we abandoned them, and chopped even the old one down. The water has
washed and washed and worn away since, on the island side, and now one
must be bent upon a swim indeed who cares to venture among the jagged
ledges and mill-races that my blasting made.
We piped our spring too--a beauty--up through the dairy cellar to the
kitchen, and Caliban was saved many a weary trip. Some years afterward
I took my chance during another absence of the lord of the Island, and
a hurried and astonished set of plumbers installed a luxurious
bathroom in either ell of the cottage--a surprise for his birthday.
Profiting by a winter in Bermuda, I copied their roof reservoirs,
allowing one to each ell, sanded without, whitewashed within, an
architectural measure which made the skyline even more rocky and wild,
in appearance, from the water. Before we left, that autumn, we planted
fifty evergreens, pines, hemlocks and spruces, in a broad belt just
opposite the Island, masking it completely from the shore, and hardly
a year passed after that without thickening and lengthening that
concealing wall. Oh, we guarded our jewel, I can tell you!
It was that summer, I think, that Whistler came to us and drew that
series of sepia sketches that frames the big fireplace. They are on
the plaster itself--a sort of exquisite fresco--and Venice sails,
Holland wind-mills and London docks cluster round the faded bricks
with an indescribably fascinating effect. At my urgent request I was
allowed to protect them with thin tiles of glass riveted through the
corners into the plaster: how the collectors' mouths water at the
sight of them!
Stevenson came a few years later: all the quaint comforts and intimate
beauties hidden away behind the boulders plainly caught his elfish,
childlike fancy--it was he who made the little grotto beyond the
asparagus bed, lined the pool in it with unusual shells and coloured
pebbles, fitted odd bits of looking-glass here and there, and wrote a
poem on a smooth stone at the door for little Mary, to whom he
dedicated it.
"The purple pool of mussel shells,
All full of salty ocean smells,
The coral branches in the wall--
And you the mermaid queen of all ..."
She used to recite it all very charmingly. Roger never wanted it
printed in the _Child's Garden of Verses_, where it properly
belongs--one of the best of them, in my opinion.
He and Margarita talked together by the hour and I have seen his
dog-like brown eyes fixed on her an hour at a time. I asked him once
if he intended to "put her in a story"--the quaint query of the
layman, so strangely irritating to the book-man--and he shook his
loose-locked head slowly.
"They say I can't do women, you know," he said, "and nobody would
believe her if I put her in, she's too artistically effective."
And here am I doing it! Fools rush in ...
It may seem odd that Roger and I should not discuss the opera
business, but we didn't. That it hurt him I knew, for I knew Roger.
Anglo-Saxon to the backbone, the position which his wife as a
successful operatic star must put him in could be nothing but highly
distasteful to him. It is one thing to snatch your wife from the
stage, as Margarita's noble grandfather had done, and enjoy her in
your home; it is quite another to see her snatched from your home to
that stage, after you have married her. But I have never known a
juster man, and though he talked little of the "rights" of women, and
then in a brief, blunt fashion that would have exasperated the
fast-emerging sex most terribly, he nevertheless respected the rights
of every human creature most scrupulously. Though he had the private
appreciation of the unmistakable good points of the harem-seclusion
shared by every healthy male, he would never have shut Margarita into
a New York house or a honeymoon-island against her will, and I think
he was too proud to reason with her on the only lines open to him. I
think, too, that his quiet refusal to take any strong measures may
have been based, partly, on the full appreciation of the risk he ran
in marrying such a bundle of possibilities as Margarita. One of the
greatest passions that ever (I firmly believe) mated two people had
whirled him out of the conventional current of his life, and because
it had, in its course, brought him into the rapids, he was enough of a
man to set his teeth and take it quietly, knowing that when he left
the calm, green-bordered stream for the adventure of flood tide, he
did it with his eyes open--a grown man. Or so, at least, I take it
that he reasoned: he acted as if he had.
Again, it would have been difficult for me to discuss the matter for
another reason than Roger's perfectly characteristic reserve. Much as
I regretted that this issue should have arisen in Roger's household,
like Sue Paynter I had a secret sympathy with Margarita. Roger was
never fond of the stage, and I was. He preferred chamber-music and
symphony to opera, and was never deeply sensible to the solo voice,
though a good critic of it. The glamour of the stage--that lime-light
that has eternally dazzled the sons of Adam--had little effect upon
him: he was the last man in the world to marry an actress. Now, I was
not. Judie, the naughty creature, had once her charm for me. I have
stood in a crowd to see the Jersey Lily, and the Queen of English
comediennes could have had me for a turn of her thick lashes--before I
knew Margarita. My paternal grandmother was part French, and I have
always observed that a mixture of blood predisposes its inheritors to
dramatic triumphs--or enjoyments, if no more.
So he dug at his canal and Margarita practised her Jewel Song (it was
a shade high for her: she was not a pure soprano, but had one of those
flexible mezzos that tempt their trainers to all sorts of
_tours-de-force_) and Dolledge tended Mary and Miss Jencks developed
Caliban.
The good woman was utterly unhappy without some subject on which to
exercise her really remarkable powers of education. Mary's attendant
resented bitterly any rival in her certainly well-filled sphere, and
Margarita was far beyond her one-time mentor now, and regarded her
with the affectionate tolerance of a princess for her old nurse. This
was hard on the devoted Barbara, for she adored Margarita, and to find
oneself gently sliding to the foot of the pedestal, when one has not
so long ago been occupied in moulding the statue, cannot be very
enlivening, though one be never so philosophical.
In truth I had at that time a strange sensation: I found that I had
insensibly drifted into a state of mind in which we five, Roger, Miss
Jencks, Dolledge, Caliban and I seemed to be at home, contented,
occupied, attached by every interest domestic and romantic, to the
spot that was dearest on earth to us, while Margarita, a brilliant
bird of passage, but lingered with us for the moment, before she took
up her journey through the world--for that she was destined for the
world, who could doubt? We were, to use the homely old figure, like a
circle of motherly hens, staring fatalistically, sadly or disgustedly,
according to our several barnyard temperaments, at our daring,
iridescent duckling as she breasted the (to her) familiar flood.
For it was familiar: there are people for whom--taken though they may
have been from the most secluded corner of the earth, unprepared,
undisciplined, unwarned, the great world, the glitter of its
footlights, the shock of its tournaments, the cruelty of its
victories, the coldness of its neglect, have absolutely no terrors.
They face it superbly, as one should face a mob, and the great world,
like any proper mob, licks their feet and fawns on them. Admiration is
their due; devotion is no more than the sky above them or the earth
under them; they keep the divine, expectant _hauteur_ of childhood and
rule us, like the children, through our pity and our wonder. And
Margarita was one of these.