ARABIAN NIGHTS IN ENGLAND
I had much to reconstruct that season in regard to Margarita. I had
found her once before, in Paris, no longer a child, but a woman; I
found her now no woman merely, but a woman of the world. It seems
incredible, indeed, and I have puzzled over it many an hour when the
demon of sciatica has clawed at my hip and Hodgson's faithful hands
have dropped fatigued from his ministrations. How she did it, how an
untrained, emotional little savage, with hands as quick to strike as
the paws of a cub lioness, with tongue as unbridled as the tongue of a
four-year-old, with no more religion than a Parisian _boulevardier_,
with not one-tenth the instruction of a London board-school child--how
such a creature became in two years an (apparently) finished product
of civilisation, I am at a loss to comprehend. That she did it is
certain. My own eyes have seen Boston Brahmins drinking her tea
gratefully; my own ears have heard New York fashionables babbling in
her drawing-room. As for London, she dominated one whole season, and
not to be able to bow to her, when she rode on her grey gelding of a
morning, was to argue oneself unbowed to! Paris can never forget her,
for did she not invent an entirely new _Marguerite_? And the Republic
of Art is not ungrateful. She would have been a social success in
Honolulu or Lapland, the witch!
Whether her ancestor the prince or her ancestress the actress made her
development possible, whether her Connecticut grandfather or her
Virginia grandmother taught her, how much she owed her bandit father
who defied the world and her mother, the nun, who won it--both for
love--who shall say?
When I look back on those wonderful months I find that the fanciful
sprite whose province it is to tint imperishably the choice pictures
that shall brighten the last grey days, has selected for my gallery
not those hours when the footlights stretched between us, though one
would suppose them beyond all doubt the most brilliant, but quaint,
unexpected bits, sudden, unrehearsed scenes that stand out like tiny,
jewelled landscapes viewed through a reversed telescope, or white
sudden statues at the end of a dark corridor.
There is that delicious afternoon when we went, she and I and Sue
Paynter and an infatuated undergrad, to Oxford together, and ate
strawberries and hot buttered tea-cake and extraordinary little buns
choked with plums, and honey breathing of clover and English meadows,
and drank countless cups of strong English tea with blobs of yellow,
frothing cream atop. Heavens, how we ate, and how we talked, and how
tolerantly the warm, grey walls, ivy-hung and statue-niched, smiled
through the long, opal English sunset at our frivolous and ephemeral
chatter! They have listened to so much, those walls, and we shall
perish and wax old as a garment, and still the tea and strawberries
shall brew and bloom along the emerald turf, and infatuated youths
shall cross their slim, white-flannelled legs and hang upon the voice
of their charmer. Not the pyramids themselves give me that sense of
the continuity of the generations, the ebb and flow of youth and
youth's hot loves and hot regrets and the inexorable twilight that
makes placid middle age, as do those grey walls and blooming closes of
what I sometimes think is the very heart's core of England. My
mother's countrymen may fill London with their national caravanseries
and castles with their nation's lovely (if somewhat nasal) daughters,
but Oxford shall defy them forever.
The infatuated undergrad was the owner of a banjo, an instrument
hitherto unknown to Margarita and in regard to which she was vastly
curious, and at her request he and three of his mates blushingly sang
for her some of the American negro melodies then so popular among
them. She was delighted with them and soon began to hum and croon
unconsciously, the velvet of her voice mingling most piquantly with
their sweet throaty English singing. By little and little her tones
swelled louder and more bell-like: theirs softened gradually, till the
harmony, so simple, yet so inevitable, dwindled to the nearest echo
and barely breathed the quaint, primitive words:
_"Nellie was a lady--
Last night she died ..."_
Those deep tones of hers, stolen from envious contraltos, turned in
our ears to a mourning purple; a sombre, tender gloom haunted us, and
the sorrow of life, that alone binds us together who live, hung like a
lifting cloud over all who came within the magic radius of her voice.
The people gathered like bees to a honeycomb from all sides; black
caps and pale clear draperies drifted into a wondering circle; the
clink of cups, the murmur of gentle English voices died softly away
and the silence that was always her royal right spread around her.
_"Toll the bell for lovely Nell,
My dark ... Virginia ... bride!"_
Who they were, those listening hundreds, I could not say for my life.
I suppose they must have been some garden party--I distinctly recall
the gaiters of a bishop and the coloured linings of more than one
doctor's hood among them. They are as sudden, as unexplained in my
memory, as those crowds in dreams, so definite, so individualised,
where haunting, special faces stand out and hands clasp and shoulders
touch--and all fades away. Around the vivid emerald lawn they group
themselves, and Margarita, a pearl in pearly trailing laces, sits on
a stone bench, defaced and mossy, in the centre, at the back; the lads
adore at her feet, the banjo drops tinkling handfuls of chords at
intervals, the birds flutter through the ivy overhead, the watered
turf smells strong and sweet in the fanlike rays of the slow sun;
bright pencils of yellow light fall like stained glass among the
immemorial ivy; the day goes, softly, pensively....
_"Toll the bell for lovely Nell ..."_
"Ah-h-h!" they sigh and melt, and I see nothing more. But the picture
is safe.
Then there was the famous house-party down in Surrey, whither the
elect of England, for some reason or other, seem to gravitate; whether
because the long midsummer Surrey days appear to them the last stage
on the way to a peaceful, well-ordered heaven, in case they expect to
spend eternity there, or a temporary solace, in case they don't! Sue,
to whom all musical Europe opened its doors on poor Frederick's
account, had taken Margarita, to whom the said doors were gladly
opening on her own, to one of the famous country houses of a county
famous for such jewels, and when Roger and I turned up there, who
should our host be but one of my old schoolmates at Vevay--younger son
of a younger son, then, and unimportant to a degree, but advanced
since by one of those series of family holocausts that so change
English county history, to be the head of a great house and lord of
more acres than seems quite discreet--until one is in a position to
slap the lord on the shoulder!
To Sue and me the soft-shod luxury, the studious, ripe comfort of the
great, hedged establishment, were frankly marvellous, accustomed as we
were to the many grades and stages of domestic prosperity between this
rose-lined ease and little-a-year; but Margarita, to whom the old red
jersey of the Island was no more real than the barbaric trappings of
_Aida_, who accepted shells from Caliban or diamonds from
_Mephistopheles_ with equal _sang-froid_, displayed an indifference
to her surroundings as regal as it was sincere. Indeed, the two
simplest people at that party (famous for years in country-house
annals as the most brilliant gathering of well-mixed rank and talent
that ever fought with that arch-enemy of the leisured classes,
_Ennui_, and throttled him successfully for seventy-two hours) were
the wife of an American attorney-at-law and the eldest son of
England's greatest duke--the most eligible _parti_ in the United
Kingdom, a youth of head-splitting lineage and fabulous possessions.
They sat together on the floor of a chintz-hung breakfast room,
spinning peg-tops all over the polished wax, for two rainy hours
before dinner (which function was delayed half an hour to please them,
to the awed wonder of the lesser guests and the apoplectic amusements
of the young peer's father) and were the only occupants of the great
house, except three collie pups who sat with them, to see nothing odd
in the performance, though Saint-Saens was come over from Paris to
accompany Margarita on the piano and the princess of a royal family
was dressed in her palpitating best for the best reason in the world
not unconnected with the son of an historic house!
Du Maurier drew a picture of it for _Punch_ in his very best manner
(it went the length and breadth of England) and then, at Roger's grave
request, withdrew it from the all-but-printed page and gracefully
presented him with it. It was wonderfully characteristic of both of
them and prettily done on both sides, to my old-fashioned way of
thinking.
Well, it was after that top-spinning that Margarita and the Fortunate
Youth jumped up carelessly, kicked away the tops, and raced each other
to the noble music room, a magnificent gallery, all oak and Romneys
and Lelys, and there the Fortunate Youth sat down at the piano
(Saint-Saens standing amused in the curve of it) and began to play the
accompaniment of one of Tosti's great popular waltz-songs. It is no
longer in favour, your waltz-song, though I have lived through a
sufficient number of musical fashions to be reasonably certain of its
return to power, some day, but then it was at its height, and
subalterns hummed them to military bands, from Simla to Quebec, and
soft eyes dropped under those subalterns' right shoulders and soft
hearts melted as the chorus was repeated by request, and the dawn
found them still dancing--bless the happy days!
Now Providence had seen fit (displaying thus an astonishing lack of
socialistic wisdom and an altogether regrettable tendency to give to
those to whom much had already been given) to bestow upon this
Fortunate Youth enough musical ability to have made the fortune of a
pair of Blind Toms, so that he could play any and all instruments,
instinctively, apparently, and almost equally well. He played also by
ear, with the greatest ease, the most complicated harmonies, and could
accompany anybody's singing or playing of anything whatever--if he
happened to be in the mood for it.
"It is a thousand pities that one could not have found him in the
gutter, that boy," as M. Saint-Saens confided to me, "it would have
been of service to him!"
Which remark, being overheard, scandalised many good British souls
horribly and caused the youth to blush with perfectly ingenuous and
modest pleasure.
He sat down at the great Steinway and ran his long white fingers
loosely over the keys, and said to Margarita, while the butler gazed
in agony at his mistress, and the other guests, all arrayed for one of
the climaxes of one of England's most temperamental importations from
the kitchens of France, stood divided between interest and foreboding,
"I say, Mrs. Bradley, can you sing _'Bid me Good-bye and Go'?_ I'm
awfully fond of that."
"I can sing it if it is here," said Margarita placidly, "why not?"
"Oh, it's safe to be here," he answered easily, and sure enough, it
was there, in a cabinet close by.
Well, it was banal enough, heaven knows--how else could it have been
popular? Lincoln was not a musician, so far as I know, but he knew
that one can't fool all the people all the time! And the good Tosti,
however light he may ring nowadays, had one little bit of information
not always at the disposal of modern song-writers--he understood how
to write for the human voice. Which has always seemed to me a very
valuable acquisition, if one happens to be in the song-writing trade.
So when Margarita, with a quick glance at the obvious little melody,
put her hands behind her back like a school-girl--she was dressed in a
tight, plain little jacket and skirt of English tweeds, with stiff
white collar and cuffs and thick-soled boots, and what used to be
called an "Alpine hat"--and began to sing, to a slow waltz rhythm, one
might not have expected much: indeed, the youth hummed audaciously
with her, at first, and the other men, not one of whom was within many
degrees of nonentity, beat time carelessly.
"_Is_ there a single _joy_ or pain
That I may _never_ know?"
Stop a bit! What caught at your heart and worried you, Colonel, and
stabbed a little under your D. S. O.? Were you quite fair to that
lovely, high-spirited creature you married, all those years ago?
"_Take_ back your love, it is in vain ..."
Ah, Lady Mary, you are a good twelve stone nowadays, but when that
poor younger cousin gave you that look in the garden and the roses
crawled over the old dial in the moonlight, you were slighter, and
crueler!
"_Bid_ me good-_bye_ and _go_!"
It was a waltz, oh, yes, but it was a very Dance of Death to those of
us who had any parting to look back to, that changed our life--and we
could never go back again and make it better; never any more. That was
what cut so, and Margarita, dark and slim like a plain brown
nightingale, who leaves plumage to the raucous peacock because it
matters so little what she, the real queen of us all, wears--Margarita
spelled it out remorselessly, to the tune of a mess-room waltz, and
told us that youth is only once and so sweet and for so little time!
And the boy beside her smiled with pleasure and embroidered her rich,
clear-cut phrasing and annotated it and threw jewels and flowers of
unexpected chords through it and mocked the sad, charming fatalism of
it as only spendthrift youth can.
"_You_ do not _love_ me, no!
_Bid_ me good-_bye_ and go ..."
Cruel Margarita, how could you make the tears splash down the cheeks
of the poor little princess, who knew what was expected of her and had
no greater sin on her conscience than a tiny lock of her yellow hair
always warm, now, in the breast of a ridiculous second cousin on a
sheep-ranch in far Dakota, U. S. A.?
"Good-_bye_, good-_bye_, 'tis better so ..."
They stand so still in this picture, those big, non-committal British,
each gnawing his lip a little under the drooping mustache; the women's
shoulders are ivory against the panelled oak and bowls of Guelder
roses in Chinese bowls; that beautiful line from the base of the
throat to the top of the _corsage_ which America has not to give her
daughters, as yet, heaves and droops; the Romneys smile behind their
wax candles in sconces. It is only a waltz of the street, but she has
bewitched us with it, has our Margarita.
But strongest and clearest of all, keen in light and dense in shadow
like a Rembrandt, I see that extraordinary night in Trafalgar Square,
that night that surely lives unique in the memory of Nelson and the
Lions, though most that shared it may be, and doubtless are--for they
were not for various reasons long-lived classes of people--dead and
dust by now. How and why we found ourselves at Trafalgar Square I
could not tell, though I went to the stake for it this minute. But I
think it must have been that Margarita wanted to walk through the
streets, a form of exercise for which she took fitful fancies at odd
times, and that I, as was mostly the case, went with her.
We were all alone, for Roger, who shared our walks usually, when he
was not too busy, had just left for Berlin an hour earlier, on one of
his patient unravellings of Carter's diplomatic tangles.
It had been a dull, damp day--the kind of day that tried Margarita
terribly in England, for she was much under the influence of the
weather, and _le beau temps_ brought out her plumage like her Mexican
parrot in Whistler's portrait. Looking back at it all, too, I seem to
feel, though with no definite reason for it, that she was perturbed
and excited about something known only to herself, for she was
strangely irritable on our walk, contradicted me fiercely, inquired
testily who Nelson might be, then chid me for a dry old schoolmaster,
when I told her, and such like flighty vagaries, inseparable, I
believed, from her sex in general and her temperament in particular.
If I have never taken the trouble to defend myself from the accusation
of thinking The Pearl perfect in her somewhat spoiled relations with
her best friends at this period of her life, it is because I have
always considered that such people as are too inelastic in their views
of human nature to realise that Margarita merely exhibited _les
defauts de ses qualites_ (as who of us does not, at one time or
another?) are unworthy even my argumentative powers, which are not
great, as I perfectly understand.
So she unsheathed her sharp little female claws and patted me
mercilessly with them, and contrived to make me seem to myself a
tactless, blundering fool to her heart's content that night, striding
easily beside me, meanwhile, like a boy, though she had refused to
change her high-heeled bronze slippers for more sensible footgear and
carried the unreasonably long train of her black lace dinner gown
over her arm. Roger did not care for her in black, and she seldom wore
it, but had ordered this a few days ago from the great Worth, who then
ruled those fortunate ladies who could afford to number themselves
among his subjects with a sway he has since, I am assured, been forced
to divide among other monarchs--the only monarchs left now to a
Republic that has never denied that one divine succession through all
her revolutions. For that monarchy Paris never will sing _ca ira_; for
that principle she knows no cynicism; that wonderful juggernaut, the
Fashion, shall never rumble across channel, it seems!
I had derided myself for a sentimentalist and spinner of fine theories
when I had thought I detected a little defiance in her first
assumption of this midnight black robe, with its startling corals on
her arm and neck, and the foreign-looking comb behind her high-dressed
hair, the whole bringing out markedly that continental strain that
amused Whistler (naughty Jimmie!) and displeased Roger. But when she
appeared in it that night determined on a dinner where most of the
guests were highly distasteful to Roger, who had congratulated himself
on a quiet evening at home; when she had dragged him to it at the risk
of losing his only train and teased him shamefully all through it by
the most ridiculous flirtation with one of the worst _roues_ of Europe
(Margarita was so fundamentally honest and so thoroughly attached to
her husband that such performances could only be doubly painful to
him, since they were obviously intended maliciously) when she sent him
off before the long dinner's close without any but the most casual
_adieux_ and without the remotest intention of accompanying him, I was
uncomfortably forced to the conclusion that this long-trained, inky
dress was a veritable devil's livery, that she had put it on
deliberately and that there would be no stopping her till the mood was
off.
And now I find myself about to write a most unjustifiable thing, in
view of the possibility of these idle memories falling somehow,
sometime, somewhere, into the hands of that ubiquitous Young Person to
whom all print is free as air in these enlightened days. In America it
has been the rule, to suppress such print as could not brave this
freedom; in France, to suppress such Young Persons as could! There is
something to be said for both methods, and each has, perhaps, its
defects; the one producing more stimulating Young Persons, the other
enjoying more virile prose.
Be that as it may, I am quite aware that my duty to the youth of Anglo
Saxondom should lead me to state, sadly but firmly, that such conduct
as Margarita displayed on the night in question could have had but one
result--that of filling me, her friend and admirer, with a grieved
displeasure and disgust; that her unwomanly carelessness as to the
feelings of others and her wanton disregard of the wishes and comfort
of those who should have been dearest to her lowered her in my
estimation and greatly detracted from her charm in my eyes. But I am
not writing particularly for the Young Person and candour compels me
to state that she was quite as interesting to me as ever! I didn't
think she had treated Roger very handsomely--true; but Roger had known
that he was marrying a delicious vixen when he married Margarita, you
see, and if I had begun to lecture her, there were too many others who
would have been only too delighted to relieve her of my society. She
abused her power sometimes, I admit it--but then, she had the power!
And oh, the balm she kept for the wounds she gave!
As I have said, I have not the remotest idea of how or why we
confronted Nelson and the Lions, I cannot by any effort of memory see
us arriving or leaving; but I see myself pausing in my lecture on
English history, as a lighted transparency, a straggling crowd and a
band bear down upon us suddenly out of nowhere. It is a poor, vicious
sort of crowd, the gutter-sweepings of London; pale, stunted lads,
haggard, idle slatterns, a handful of women of the street, a trio of
tawdry flower girls. Around the band, which turns out to be only a big
drum and a clattering tambourine, a group of men and women in a
vaguely familiar uniform, the women in ugly coal-scuttle bonnets.
"What is that, Jerry?" says Margarita.
"That is the Salvation Army--let's get along," I answer.
But she will not, for she is curious, and I resign myself to the
inevitable and wait. Their crude appeals are symbols born of a deep
knowledge of the human heart they fight to win--gleaming light and
rhythmic drum: the first groping of savagery, the last pinnacle of the
most highly organised religious spectacle the world has yet
elaborated. They gather near the fountain, they group about their
lighted banner, and a drawling cockney voice afflicts the air. I can
see the circle now--they form in the classic amphitheatre that knows
no century nor country; a humpback pushing a barrow of something
before him stops near us; a woman, coughing frightfully, leans on it,
muttering to herself, staring at Margarita's scarf-wrapped head.
The cockney's address begins, "O my brothers ..." but I do not attend:
I want to get Margarita out of the growing crowd, listless, but lifted
for a moment from their sordid treadmill of existence by the light and
the muffled, rhythmic crush and the high-pitched sing-song. They must
have followed for a long way, for they are churnings from the very
dregs of London and alien to Trafalgar Square, and the officer on his
beat looks at them suspiciously enough.
"Won't you give us a song, lieutenant?" says the speaker suddenly,
"pipe h'up there, friends--many a sinner's saved his soul with a
song--w'y not some o' you? Are you ready, lieutenant?"
I can see her so plainly, the pretty, worn little creature; pale as
death and in no condition for street singing, evidently, but plucky
and borne along by the very zeal of the Crusaders. The other woman,
who cannot sing, shakes the tambourine, a great, burly fellow, some
rescued navvy, thuds at the drum, and her sweet, thin little voice
rises, shrill, but wonderfully appealing, through the night.
_"I need Thee every hour,
Most gracious Lord!"_
It is not difficult now to see why the crowd followed; her voice is
like a child's lost in the wood, but brave, and sure of ultimate
protection; it has a curious effect of the country and the hedgerows.
They listen eagerly, they like it.
"Come, Margarita, I think we ought to get away--the crowd is getting
thicker. People are staring at us."
"No, no, Jerry, let me alone! Oh, see the poor woman, she is too ill
to sing! She has lost her voice--do you know it?"
And so she has. With a clutch at her throat and a pathetic turn of her
eyes to the speaker, the little lieutenant shakes her head at him and
is dumb. He seats her deftly on a camp stool by the drummer, pats her
shoulder, sends a friendly gutter-rat with the face of a sneak-thief
for water, and turns to the crowd.
"Come now, friends, the lieutenant 'ere 'as lost 'er voice along o'
you, an' tryin' to save yer! Can't you pipe up, some o' you? If some
of you'd sing a bit with us, now, maybe we'd be able to take back
_one_ soul to Christ with us to-night. Can't one o' yer sing?"
"I will sing!" says some one near me--and it is Margarita!
I clutch her cape fiercely, but it slips off in my hand and she is at
the drum, and the lane that opened for her closes for me, and I fight
in vain to reach her--Oh, it must be a dream!
"I _need_ Thee every _hour_...."
Ah-h-h! The crowd sighs with the old familiar joy, the magic of the
golden voice slips like a veil over the cruel angles of their broken
lives and mists and softens everything.
She has a slip of printed paper in her hand and reads seriously from
it; some one holds the transparency near her shoulder for light--her
white shoulders, bare in Trafalgar Square!
[Illustration: THEY ARE STILL AS DEATH, TRANCED IN THOSE LIQUID
BELL-TONES]
"I _need_ Thee every _hour_,
Most _gracious_ Lord,
No _tender_ voice like _thine_
Can _peace_ afford...."
They are still as death, tranced in those liquid bell-tones. The great
drum shivers, as it shivered, of old, a tom-tom, across the African
desert; the old, primal thrill creeps through my blood--good heavens,
is this fear? Is it superstition? _Is it religion?_
"I _need_ Thee--oh, I _need_ Thee!"
The woman sobs like a damned soul beside me; a man coughs huskily.
Will no one stop her? They have wedged me so that I cannot breathe, I
feel them gathering from the nearby streets. And there she stands,
coral like blood on her bare neck, the scarf fallen from her black
hair, the plea of all humanity pouring in a great anguished stream of
melody out of her white throat.
"I _need_ Thee oh, I _need_ Thee,
Ev'ry _hour_ I need Thee!"
The tambourine shudders barbarically across the smooth flood of her
voice: it is the tingling crash of the Greek Mysteries--and I had
thought it vulgar!
I hear hansoms jingling up--what will Roger say? He would kill them
all, if he could, I know, and yet no one there would hurt a hair of
her head--and does she not belong to the public?
God knows the poor devils need something--is it that, then? Is it a
real thing? Do people fight for it like that? For this imperious Voice
is agonising for something and the drum is the beat of its heart.
"Gawd's frightful hard on women," the poor creature beside me moans,
and lo, the little dumb lieutenant is by her side miraculously, and
like a shifting kaleidoscope the crowd lets them through and she
kneels, shaking, by the drum.
Their white faces heap in layers before me; drawn, wolfish, brutal in
the flaring lights they peer and gasp and sob, like uncouth
inhabitants of another world--wait a bit, Jerry, it is your world,
just the same, and perhaps you are responsible for it? Ugh!
"I _need_ Thee ..."
"Gad, it's little Josefa!"
The clear English voice cuts across the hush, and,
"What a lark!" answers a deeper bass.
He is a very important and highly conventional personage, nowadays,
that slender pink dandy, with five grown daughters and a Constituency;
but if by any odd chance he should read this, I will wager he forgets
what he is actually looking at for a moment and sees against the black
shadows and rising night fog of Trafalgar Square a beautiful,
black-robed woman in red corals lifted to an empty barrow by two eager
club-dandies and held there by a gigantic Guardsman--the best fencer
in Europe, once!
Oh, Bertie, the Right Honourable now, the always honourable then, do
you know that there were tears on your pink cheeks? And your noble
friend, who broke up his establishment in St. John's Wood the next day
and founded the Little Order of the Sons of St. Francis, does he know
that the lightning stroke that blinded him like Saul of Tarsus and
sent him reeling from Piccadilly to the slums, lighted for a moment,
as it fell, the way of a dazed, rheumatic bachelor from America, who
saw the terror in his eyes and the sweat on his forehead as he held
his corner of the barrow and Margarita drove him to his God?
"Ev'ry _hour_ I _need_ Thee ..."
The fog rolls over us, the lights flare through a sea of mist; the
Honourable Bertie produces a hansom, from his pocket apparently, and
the wild, dark etching is wiped out like a child's picture on a slate.
Margarita falls asleep on my shoulder, I gain my usual philosophical
control, gradually, and realise, now the echoes of that agonised
pleading have ceased to disturb my soul, that the woman beside me is
not even a Christian, technically speaking, and knew not, literally,
what she did!
The magic of the Golden Voice--ah, what magic can cope with it? Of all
the pictures hers has painted for me on those miraculous, grey-tissued
walls where memory lives, this strange coarse-tinted sketch--a very
Hogarth in its unsparing contrasts--stands out the clearest. At night,
when I close my eyes and think "London," then does that poor sister of
the streets moan to me that "Gawd's frightful hard on women," and
fight her way to Margarita--who has been favoured beyond most women,
and knows not God--at least, not that implacable deity of the London
slum! Whenever I hear or read the phrase "Salvation Army" then do I
see a young exquisite with a white camellia in his buttonhole, gazing
like a hypnotised Indian Seer at a crude transparency blotted with
unconvincing texts, then rushing off to found a celibate order--from
Margarita, who was no more celibate that Ceres the bountiful!
Ah, well, the Way is a Mystery, as Alif said, and who am I that I
should expect to solve it, when kings and philosophers have failed? At
any rate, I have my pictures safe.