A HANDFUL OF MEMORIES
They left in October that year; Margarita to get ready for her
_debut_, Roger, quiet and inscrutable, to work, as he said, at his
treatise on Napoleon. He had grown deeply interested in this and spent
most of his leisure at it, and it had gone far beyond his first idea
of an essay. I did not go with them, but took the occasion for a
filial visit to my mother and a grudging journey to North Carolina,
where I stared uncomprehendingly at the chaotic hospital, a litter of
bricks and scantling, listened to tiresome and enthusiastic statistics
from young Collier and Dr. McGee, distributed papers of sweets to a
ward of convalescent and sticky infants, and refused to take a
toilsome journey around the borders of my one-time coal-lands. They
were no longer mine--why should I care to view them?
Just before I left for Paris, where Captain Upgrove was to join me, I
remembered some drawings I had planned to make in order to get the
dimensions of the rambling, old-fashioned garden behind the house where I
intended to put a certain ancient shallow stone basin I had in mind, and
then beg Roger to pipe the spring into it for a sort of fountain-pool.
There was such a basin on an old, decaying estate some miles out of our old
school-town: Roger and I knew it well, for we had often been invited there
by a friend of my mother's to drink tea and eat rusk and fresh butter and
_confiture_ (of field strawberries--delicious!) and--of all things--broiled
bacon, because Roger was devotedly fond of it and never got it at school.
How many June half-holidays have we hung over that old carved basin,
teasing the goldfish, stopping up the tiny fountain till it spouted all
over us, sailing beetles across it on linden leaves, or lolling full-fed
and lazy, smoking contraband cigarettes of caporal! I knew well how pleased
he would be when he saw that battered dolphin that threw the water and the
funny little stone frogs at each corner, and I had a shrewd idea that old
Mrs. Y---- would not object to parting with it, moss and lichen and all, if
one made it worth her while!
A cold, rainy week--the delayed equinox--caught and held me on the
island, huddled over the fire, and it was then that I conceived the
famous idea of the furnace. I had planned many a pleasant autumn
there, for it was now the best of America to me, and if such weeks as
this were possible (and probable) there would be little comfort for me
away from the chimney corner--which has never been my favourite post,
by the way. Caliban and Agnes, the cook, a kindly Normandy woman, did
their best for me and for the ravenous gang of workmen that laboured
(in the slight intervals between their meals!) at the monstrous,
many-mouthed iron tube in the cellar; while I chafed and scolded at
the delays, unwilling to leave the men, weary of my dear Island now
its chief jewel was gone, irritated by the tramping feet and tuneless
whistling where I had heard so much the patter of _petite Marie's_
slippers and the rich melody of her mother's voice.
It was then that I fell upon Lockwood Prynne's library and learned
more of his mind, I believe, than anyone else could ever know. I wish
I had known the man himself. The little I have been able to find out
about him in the South (the war practically wiped out the family) only
confirmed my first idea of him. I actually succeeded in tracking an
old album of daguerreotypes to a shiftless darkey cabin and
identifying a picture of him as a boy from a half-blind negro mammy,
with one of his father in full uniform and a singularly beautiful head
that I am sure from the likeness of the brow and the set of the eyes
must have been his mother, though here the old slave could not or
would not help me. I rescued, too, for Margarita, a rich carved
mahogany chair from a cow stall ("ole Marse Lockwood's pay chair") and
a graceful, brass-handled serving-table, "what his grandpa done leave
fo' li'l Marse Lockwood fer ter rec'leck' him by." I picked up a
silver cup, at a roadside auction (and bid high for it against a Fifth
Avenue dealer) engraved with his mother's coat-of-arms, and
shamelessly inveigled Margarita into taking it, later, and giving me
in return the silver bowl that stood for so long under the Henner
etching. It stands there still, but not in the old place. Not Caliban,
but Hodgson fills that bowl to-day and every day that I am in America
with the most beautiful flowers Uncle Winthrop's money can buy; though
Lockwood Prynne no longer lies in the army cot that faces it, one of
his best friends does--a friend who loves him no less, that he never
saw his face.
Well, we got that furnace in and fifty tons of coal, too, towed over
in an old scow and binned down in the cellar, and when I saw the bills
for this last, I received the impression (which I have never been able
wholly to abandon) that I must have been underpaid for those
coal-lands!
Many a time have we discussed it since, with a curious, frightened
wonder: why should that furnace have seemed so all-important to me? At
best we expected to spend but few days at the Island when it could
have been necessary; Margarita had grown up among Atlantic winters and
had more times than she could count broken the ice in her bedroom
ewer; such a luxurious whim would never have occurred to Roger, who,
like most men of his type, expected every one to be as hardy as
himself--how many generations of his ancestors had stoically toasted
their shins while their backs were freezing! It must be, as Margarita
teasingly insists, that my pathetic care for my rheumatic old bones
was at the bottom of it all, and that I was rapidly assimilating one
of the cardinal doctrines of the swollen purse, that no sum could be
ill spent when spent for my comfort.
Well, well, let it go at that--to use the bluff, pertinent phrase of
the present day. Though Barbara Jencks would have died before she had
let it go at anything like that, I assure you, and has spent many an
eager moment of shy, persistent effort to make me comprehend the
inscrutable and sleepless interest of Providence, an interest which
had intended, from the time of the Exodus, if I seize her idea
correctly, that a hot-air plant should complete the summer home of
Roger Bradley--a man who had less interest in Providence than anyone I
know! Poor Barbara! As I hung about the house that mellow autumn, I
fell, more than once, into musing laughter, as here and there some
piece of furniture, some picture or dish or oddment brought back to me
her uncounted, endless assaults on Margarita's simple, healthy and (to
the orthodox English woman) baseless scheme of existence. Not that it
should have been dignified by so philosophical a term as "scheme":
Margarita was given to the practice of life, not its theory. I never
tired of watching the extraordinary effect of her downright mental
processes upon the mass of perfunctory, inherited ideas whose edges,
once sharp-milled and fresh from some startling Mint, we have dulled
and misshapen with generations of unthinking, accustomed barter.
For instance, a treasure of a Spode fruit dish that I had picked up at
a dewy Devonshire farm, all clotted cream and apple-cheeked children,
caught my eye as it lay on the piano, and I found myself chuckling as
I recalled the unfortunate eddy of doctrine into which the innocent
bit of china had whirled us. Margarita had asked what the quaint
Scriptural figures upon it illustrated, and Miss Jencks, every ready,
had explained to her the parable of the labourers in the vineyard and
the marvel of the late comer's good fortune.
"And that is a very beautiful thought, my dear," she concluded, "is it
not?"
Margarita stared at her in frank surprise.
"Beautiful?" she echoed, "you call it beautiful that so many poor men
should work hard so long, and then have to see the lazy ones who came
in late be paid as much as they for one-tenth as much work? I do not
know what you mean by beautiful; it was certainly very unfair."
"My dear, my dear!" poor Barbara fluttered, "it had the approval of
our Lord, remember."
"He was probably not one of the ones who had worked all day, then,"
Margarita replied blandly.
"It was not an actual occurrence," said Miss Jencks, a little coldly,
as Roger's irrepressible chuckle echoed from the porch outside, "it
was merely a parable--a lesson."
"Oh!" (The exquisite, falling melody of that simple monosyllable
expressed so perfectly, through such a trained larynx, all the sudden
lack of interest!) "It never happened, then? So of course it does not
matter. But why do you call it a lesson, Miss Jencks?"
"Because it teaches Christian charity," said Barbara firmly.
Margarita turned away and dismissed the subject.
"If I ever hired myself to anybody, I would rather he had been taught
fairness than Christian charity," she observed, and left Miss Jencks
clutching the fruit plate pathetically, her eyes fixed hopelessly on
me. For it was always my delicate task to soothe the poor lady after
these theological encounters: Roger's uncompromising treatment of the
situation had a way of uncomfortably resembling his wife's!
"You know, dear Miss Jencks," I began, as seriously as I could, "she
is not really cynical--she is no more irreverent than a child would
be. Surely some of your pupils, sometimes ..."
"Never, Mr. Jerrolds, never!" the bulwark of the Governor-General's
family protested tearfully, "never, I assure you!"
"Well, well," I said, "it's all the same--they might have. You see,
she pays these things the great compliment of taking them
seriously--and literally. And they wouldn't work, Miss Jencks, some of
them, if one tried them, you know. Just consider the labour unions for
one thing: suppose Roger were to pay off his workmen on that
principle--they'd fling his money in his face."
[Illustration: HE SKETCHED HER IN CHARCOAL, DRESSED (HE WOULD HAVE IT)
IN BLACK]
"Then what would you say to the Prodigal Son?" she shot at me
defiantly.
"I say that it's very beautiful and that I'm old enough to hope it may
be true," I told her, "but for heaven's sake, Miss Jencks, don't try
Mrs. Bradley with it--not just now, at any rate!"
Then there was her guitar, a small one, of lemon-coloured pear wood,
curiously inlaid: Whistler got it for her in one of those old pawn
shops near the London wharves, and we used to wonder what happy
sailor, burnt and eager for the town, had brought it for what waiting
girl all the long miles, and how it had crept at last, ashamed and
stained, into that dingy three-balled tomb of so many hopes and
keepsakes. He sketched her in charcoal, dressed (he would have it) in
black, with a Spanish comb in her hair and the guitar on a broad
ribbon of strange deep Chinese blue; behind her, on an aerially
slender perch, stands a gaudy Mexican parrot. It does not look like
her to us who know her well (though, curiously enough, all strangers
consider it an extremely fine likeness) but as a _tour de force_ it is
remarkable, and amongst the plain, Saxon furnishings of the Island
living-room it stands out with an extraordinary vividness--an
unmistakable bit of Southern Europe, the perfectly conscious
sophistication of old cities and sunny, secret streets, worn uneven
and discoloured before Raleigh started across seas.
Roger never liked it, I believe, and I have always suspected the
impish James of deliberately putting us face to face with Margarita's
foreign strain and the tiny, deep gulf that cut her off, in some parts
of her nature, so hopelessly from us. And he made us see it, too, that
Puck of all painters, even as he had intended, and we were forced
to thank him for it, for it was too beautiful to have gone undone, and
he knew it. And Jimmie's dead, worse luck, and one of his most devoted
collectors told me last week that he really thought the psychological
moment for selling out had arrived, for he'd never go any higher! And
we're all grass, that to-day is and to-morrow goes into the oven, and
there's no doubt of it, my brothers.
But how she used to sing _O sole mio_, with that sweet, piercing
Italian cry, a real _cri du coeur_ (except for the trifling fact
that there was no more heart in it, really, than there is in most
Italian singing! I suppose that while the art of song remains among
the children of men, that particular child who is able to throw his
voice most easily into what Mme. M----i used to call "ze frront of ze
face" and detach it from the throat, where the true feelings lie
gripped, will continue to thrill the other children with his or her
"heart in the voice!") And how she would drag the rhythm, deliciously,
intentionally, and shade the downward notes, and hang a breath too
long on the phrase-ends, as only Italians dare! And how the distilled
essence of Italy dripped out of those luscious, tender, mocking
folk-songs, till the vineyards steeped before us, and the white
city-squares baked in the noon sun, and the ardent sailor sang to his
brown girl over the quaint, bobbing, weighted nets!
The men who dug the ice-house and piled the coast wall and blasted out
trenches for draining would stop and lean on their picks, when her
resonant, golden humming, like a drowsy contralto bee, floated out
from the verandah vines to them: I have seen their faces clear and
their dull eyes focus suddenly on some distant, darling memory, while
they dropped back for a precious minute into the past that you think
is all bread and cheese and beer, because, forsooth, they never sat
beside you in white gloves when Margarita sang!
Go to--there was Spring and a girl for every man of them, once, and
both were the same as yours.
I had to go into her room at that time, to make sure that the floor
should not be unduly marred and that, according to the best of my poor
judgment (Roger should have planned it all, as a matter of fact) the
registers might be inserted in the best places; and as I moved among
the dainty luxuries that replaced the almost sordid bareness of that
room when I had first seen it, I realised, with surprise but with
clear certainty, that the change was only apparent, not deep or
inherent. They were all there, to be sure, the pretty paraphernalia
that modern woman (and ancient, too, for the matter of that!) has
found necessary to preserve and augment her mystery and charm; ivory
and silver and crystal and fluted frills and scented silk. Oh, yes,
they were all there, but there was no atmosphere of Margarita amongst
them all: she had escaped out of them and given them the slip as
effectually as in the old, bare days of the brush and comb and the
print gown on a peg in the unscented closet. She was simply not there,
that was all, and the most infatuated lover in all the Decameron would
have felt that here was not the place for self-indulgent raptures.
Margarita used her sleeping-room as a snail uses his shell or a bird
its nest: it was impersonal, deserted, out of commission, now--the
room, merely, of a beautiful woman, who might have been any woman,
with a woman's need of comfort, warmth, clear air, and cleanliness
pushed to an arrogance of physical purity.
My mother's bedroom was her own as definitely as her blue-veined,
pointed hands; Sue Paynter's, into which I went once to lift out her
little son in one of his illnesses, was like no one's else in the
world, individual, intense; even old Madam Bradley's, in its clear
whites and polished dark wood, translated to my boyish, awed soul, a
sense of her impenetrable character.
But not so Margarita's. It was furnished and decorated in grey-blue
tints, because I had suggested this. It had odd touches of greyish
rose, because Whistler had insisted on it. It was fitted with old
mahogany, because Roger liked this and collected it here and there.
But of all the personality that her father-lover had known how to
build into his home of exile, there was absolutely none.
Was it because there were no work-baskets, spilling lace and bits of
ribbon, no photographs, no keepsakes, hideous perhaps, but dear for
what they represent, no worn girlhood's books, no shamefaced toys,
lingering from the nursery, no litter of any other member of her
family? Perhaps. Mme. Modjeska, then, and even now one of the greatest
actresses on our stage, called it an unwomanly room, but I am not
quite sure that this is precisely what she meant.
No, the most vivid impression the room could make upon me was one that
brings a reminiscent chuckle even to-day. As my eye fell on the
antique dressing-table, I seemed to see, suddenly and laughably,
Margarita, sweeping down the stairs, enveloped in a billowy
_peignoir_, her hair loose, her eyes flashing furiously, in her
extended finger and thumb, held as one would hold a noxious adder, a
thin navy-blue necktie.
"Is that yours?" she demanded tragically of her husband.
"Why, yes, I believe it is," said Roger, with the grave politeness
that years of intimacy could never take from him.
"I found it _on my dressing-table_!" she thundered, and her voice
echoed like an angry vault, "_on--my--dressing-table_!"
She dropped it like a toad at his feet, swept us all with the
lightning of her eyes, coldly, distastefully, and swam up the stairs,
an avenging goddess, deaf to Roger's matter-of-fact apology, blind to
Miss Jencks's deprecating blushes. As for me, so under the spell of
that voice have I always been, that I swear I thought her hardly
used--the darling vixen!
PART EIGHT
IN WHICH THE RIVER RUSHES INTO
PERILOUS RAPIDS
Come, my mother that carried me,
Make me to-night an olden spell!
Try if my witch wife loves the Sea,
Or she'll choose the waves or she'll choose for me,
Then hey, for heaven or ho, for hell!
Circle the Cross on the midnight sand,
Heap the fire and mutter the charm,
Call her out to ye, soul in hand,
Blind and bare to the moon she'll stand,
Then out to the sea or in to my arm!
_Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden._