Preparation of Gentlemen for Matrimony
The great success which has attended all those who have gone through the course of study at the Benedictentiary of Mesdames —— has led the proprietors to add another wing to this popular institution. The buildings are situated in park-like grounds, far from any disturbing influences. The lecturers are ladies of personal attraction with wide experience, and the discipline of the establishment is of the severest kind compatible with comfort. A special feature of this institution is the means afforded for healthy recreation of all kinds, the object being to make the students attractive in every sense. Gentlemen over fifty years of age are only admitted on terms which can be learnt by application to the Principal. These terms will vary according to the character of the applicant. During the last season twenty-five of Mesdames —— pupils made brilliant marriages, and the most flattering testimonials are constantly being received from the wives of former students. There are only a few vacancies, and application should be made at once to the Principal.
That is the sort of thing. Do you know any experienced lady in want of a vocation that might combine profit with highly interesting employment? You can give her this suggestion, but advise her to be careful in her choice of lecturers, and let the ladies combine the wisdom of the serpent with the gentle cooing of the dove; otherwise, some possible husbands might be spoilt in the making.
XIII
HER FIANCÉ
YOU say that my opinions are very unorthodox, that my views on human constancy are cynical, and that it is wicked to sympathise with children who oppose their inclinations to the behests of their parents.
Do you forget that I said we should not agree, and will you be angry if I venture to suggest that you have not read my letters very carefully, or that your sense of justice is temporarily obscured? If I dared, I would ask you to look again at the letters, and then tell me exactly wherein I have sinned. I maintained that all are not gifted with that perfect constancy which distinguished Helen and Guinevere, and a few other noble ladies whose names occur to me. I notice that, as regards yourself, you disdain to answer my question, and we might safely discuss the subject without reference to personal considerations.
My regrets over the strained relations which sometimes exist between parents and children could hardly be construed into an incitement to rebellion. They did not amount to more than a statement of lamentable facts, and a diagnosis of the causes of the trouble. When you add that truth is often disagreeable and better left unspoken, I will subscribe to the general principle, but fail to see its application here. Nor can I agree with you that problems of this sort are lacking in interest. To be able to construct a geometrical figure, and prove that the method is correct, does not sound very interesting; but architects, who have knowledge of this kind, have achieved results that appeal to those who look at the finished work, without thought of the means by which the end was gained.
With your permission, I will move the inquiry to new ground; and do not think I am wavering in my allegiance, or that my loyalty is open to doubt, if I say one word on behalf of man, whose unstable affections are so widely recognised that no sensible person would seek to dispute the verdict of all the ages. He is represented as loving a sex rather than an individual; is likened to the bee which sucks where sweetness can be found and only whilst it lasts; he shares with the butterfly the habit of never resting long on any flower, and, like it, he is drawn by brilliant colouring and less clean attractions. Virtuous affection and plain solid worth do not appeal to him.
These are articles of popular belief, and must not be questioned; but I may say to you, that they do the poor man somewhat less than justice. As a bachelor, he has few opportunities of examining virtuous affection, on his own account; the experiences of his friends are not always encouraging; and, if he has to work, other things absorb most of his attention at this stage of his existence. If he marries, especially if he marries young, he is often enthusiastic, and usually hopelessly ignorant of feminine methods, inclinations, and fastidious hesitation. He feels an honest, blundering, but real and passionate affection. He shows it, and that is not seldom an offence. He looks for a reciprocation of his passion, and when, as often happens, he fully realises that his transports awaken no responsive feeling, but rather a scarcely veiled disgust, his enthusiasm wanes, he cultivates self-repression, and assumes a chilly indifference that, in time, becomes the true expression of his changed feelings. From this keen disappointment, this sense of his own failure in his own home, the transition to a state of callousness, and thence, to one of deep interest in another object where his advances are met in a different spirit, is not very difficult.
You see, I am taking for granted that the popular conception of his shortcomings in regard to the affections is correct, and I only want to suggest some of the reasons which have earned for him such a bad reputation. First, it is the fault of his nature, for which he is not altogether responsible; it is different to yours. In this respect he starts somewhat unfairly handicapped, if his running is tried by the same standard as that fixed for the gentler sex. Then his education, not so much in the acquirement of book-knowledge as in the ways of the world, is also different. His physical robustness is thought to qualify him, when still a boy, to go anywhere, to see everything at close quarters, and without a chaperone. He is thrown into the maelstrom of life, and there he is practically left to sink or swim; and whether he drown or survive, he must pass through the deep water where only his own efforts will save him. A few disappear altogether, and, while all get wet, some come out covered with mud, and others are maimed, or their constitutions permanently injured by the immersion.
That is the beginning, and I think you will admit that, except in a few very peculiar cases, the boy’s early life is more calculated to smirch than to preserve his original innocence.
Then he settles down to work for a living or for ambition, and, in either case, he is left but little time to study the very complex complement of his life, woman. If he does not incontinently fall in love with what appeals to his eye, he deliberately looks about for some one who may make him a good, a useful, and, if possible, an ornamental wife. In the first case he is really to be pitied; but his condition only excites amusement. The man is treated as temporarily insane, and every one looks to the consummation of the marriage as the only means to restore him to his right mind. That, indeed, is generally the result, but not for the reason to which the cure is popularly ascribed. The swain is very much in love, whereas the lady of his choice is entering into the contract for a multitude of reasons, where passionate affection, very probably, plays quite an inferior part. The man’s ardour destroys any discretion he may have. He digs a pit for himself and falls into it, and, unless he has great experience, unusual sympathy, or consummate tact, he misunderstands the signs, draws false conclusions, and nurses the seeds of discontent which will sooner or later come up and bear bitter fruit.
If, on the other hand, he deliberately enters the matrimonial market and makes his choice with calm calculation, as he would enter the mart to supply any other need, he may run less risk of disappointment. But the other party to the bargain will, in due time, come to regret the part she has undertaken to play, and feel that what the man wanted was less a wife than a housekeeper, a hostess, a useful ally, or an assistant in the preservation of a family name. Very few women would fail to discover the truth in such a case, and probably none would neglect to mention it. Neither the fact, the discovery, nor the mention of it will help to make a happy home.
With husbands and wives, if neither have any need to work, it ought to be easy to avoid boredom (the most gruesome of all maladies), and to accommodate themselves to each other’s wishes. They, however, constitute a very small proportion of society. A man usually has to work all day, and, if he is strong and healthy, it is hardly reasonable to suppose that his only thought, when his work is over, should be how he can best amuse his wife. If he sets that single object before him as his duty or his pleasure, and his wife accepts the sacrifice, the man’s health is almost certain to suffer, unless there is some form of exercise which they can enjoy together.
Husbands and wives take a good deal for granted, and it is more curious that lovers, who are bound by no such tie, often meet with shipwreck on exactly the same sort of dangers. To be too exacting is probably, of all causes, the most fertile in parting devoted lovers.
But enough of speculation. Pardon my homily, and let me answer your question. You ask me what has become of the man we used to see so constantly, sitting in the Park with a married lady who evidently enjoyed his society. I will tell you, and you will then understand why it is that you have not seen him since that summer when we too found great satisfaction in each other’s company. He was generally “about the town,” and when not there seemed rather to haunt the river. Small blame to him for that; there is none with perceptions so dead that the river, on a hot July day, will not appeal to them. I cannot tell how long afterwards it was, but the man became engaged to a girl who was schooling or travelling in France. She was the sister of the woman we used to see in the Park. Un bel giorno the man and his future sister-in-law started for the Continent, to see his fiancée. Arrived at Dover, the weather looked threatening, or the lady wanted rest, or it was part of the arrangement—details of this kind are immaterial—anyhow, they decided to stay the night in an hotel and cross the following morning. In the grey light which steals through darkness and recoils from day, some wanderer or stolid constable saw a white bundle lying on the pavement by the wall of the hotel. A closer examination showed this to be the huddled and shattered body of a man in his night-dress; a very ghastly sight, for he was dead. It was the man we used to see in the Park, and several storeys above the spot where he was found were the windows, not of his room, but of another. I do not know whether the lady continued her journey; but, if she did, her interview with her sister must have been a bad experience.
XIV
BY THE SEA
YOU asked me to paint you a picture—a picture of a wonderful strand half-circling a space of sunlit sea; an island-studded bay, girt, landwards, by a chain of low blue hills, whose vesture of rich foliage is, through all the years, mirrored in the dazzling waters that bathe those rocky feet. The bay is enclosed between two headlands, both lofty, both rising sheer out of the sea, but that on the north juts out only a little, while the southern promontory is much bolder, and terminates a long strip of land running at right angles to the shore out into very deep water.
The beach between these headlands forms an arc of a circle, and the cord joining its extremities would be about seven miles in length, while following the shore the distance is nearly ten miles.
One might search east or west, the Old World or the New, and find in them few places so attractive as this little-known and sparsely inhabited dent in a far Eastern coast.
Here the sky is nearly always bright; a day which, in its thirteen hours of light, does not give at least half of brilliant, perhaps too brilliant sunshine, is almost unknown. Then it is the sunshine of endless summer, not for a month or a season, but for ever.
Except on rare occasions, the winds from the sea are softest zephyrs, the land breezes are cool and fragrant, sufficient only to stir the leaves of trees and gently ruffle the placid surface of the bay.
The waters of the bay are green—green like a yellow emerald—but in some few places, near the shore, this changes into a warm brown. The beach is a wide stretch of sand broken by rocks of dark umber or Indian red. The sand is, in some places, so startlingly white that the eye can hardly bear the glare of it, while in others it is mixed with fine-broken grains of the ironstone called laterite, and this gives a burnt-sienna colour to the beach. When the tide is high, the great stretches of hard, clean sand are covered with water to a depth of between five and ten feet, and, owing to the absence of mud, mangroves, and mankind, the waters of the bay are of an extraordinary limpidity. The beach in many places dips steeply, so that, at high tide, there are six feet of water within two or three yards of the trees, shrubs, ferns, and creepers that clothe the shore in an abandonment of wild and graceful luxuriance. The sand shines beneath the waters of the sea like powdered diamonds, and all the myriads of pebbles and shells glisten and scintillate, with a fire and life and colour which they lose when the tide falls and leaves the sands dry, but for the little pools that fill the depressions of a generally even surface.
Then, however, is the time to see strange shells moving slowly about, and crabs, of marvellous colour and unexpected instincts, scampering in hundreds over the purple rocks, that here and there make such a striking contrast to the brilliant orange and red, or the startling whiteness of the sand in which they lie half-embedded.
And how positively delightful it is to paddle with bare feet between and over these rounded stones, while the tireless waters make continents and oceans in miniature, and the strange denizens of this life-charged summer sea destroy each other, in the ceaseless struggle to preserve an existence for which they are no more responsible than we are. Here is an army of scarlet-backed crabs, hunting in battalions for something smaller and weaker than its own tiny, fragile units. The spider-like legion, alarmed by the approach of your naked feet, scuttles hurriedly towards a new Red Sea, and, dashing recklessly into the two inches of water, which are running between banks of sandy desert, disappears as completely as Pharaoh and his host. Unlike the Egyptian king, however, the crabs, which have only burrowed into the sand, will presently reappear on the other shore and scour the desert for a morning meal.
And then you are standing amongst the rocks, on a point of a bay within the bay; and, as the rippling wavelets wash over your feet, you peer down into the deeper eddies and pools in search of a sea-anemone. Again, you exclaim in childish admiration of the marvellous colouring of a jelly-fish and his puzzling fashion of locomotion, or your grown-up experience allows you an almost pleasurable little shudder when you think of the poisonous possibilities of this tenderly-tinted, gauzily-gowned digestive system.
The land is not less rich in life than the sea. Nature has fringed the waters with a garden of graceful trees, flowering shrubs, brilliantly blossomed creepers, and slender ferns, far more beautiful in their untrained luxuriance than any effort of human ingenuity could have made them. There are magnolias, sweeping the waters with their magnificent creamy blossoms, made more conspicuous by their background of great, dark green leaves. There are gorgeous yellow alamanders, each blossom as large as a hand; soft pale pink myrtles, star-flowered jasmines, and the delicate wax-plant with its clusters of red or white blossoms. These and a multitude of others, only known by barbarous botanical names, nestle into each other’s arms, interlace their branches, and form arbours of perfumed shade. Close behind stand almond and cashew trees, tree-ferns, coconuts, and sago palms, and then the low hills, clothed with the giants of a virgin forest, that shut out any distant view.
Groups of sandpipers paddle in the little wavelets that lovingly caress the shore; birds of the most gorgeous plumage flit through the jungle with strange cries; and, night and morning, flocks of pigeons, plumed in green and yellow, in orange and brown, flash meteor-like trails of colour, in their rapid flight from mainland to island and back again. The bay is studded with islets, some near, some far, tiny clusters of trees growing out of the water, or a mass of stone, clothed from base to summit with heavy jungle, except for a narrow band of red rocks above the water’s edge.
Sailing in and out the islands, rounding the headlands, or standing across the bay, are boats with white or brown or crimson sails; boats of strange build, with mat or canvas sails of curious design, floating, like tired birds, upon the restful waters of this “changeless summer sea.”
But you remember it all: how we sat under the great blossoms and shining leaves of the magnolias, and, within arm’s length, found treasures of opal-tinted pebbles, and infinite variety of tiny shells, coral-pink and green and heliotrope,—and everything seemed very good indeed.
A mass of dark-red boulders, overlying a bed of umber rock, ran out into the water, closing, as with a protecting arm, one end of the little inlet, while the forest-clad hill, rising sheer from the point, shut out everything beyond. And then the road! bright terra cotta, winding round the bluff through masses of foliage in every shade of green,—giant trees, a maze of undergrowth, and the dew-laden ferns and mosses, blazing with emerald fires under the vagrant shafts of sunlight;—dies cretâ notanda.
Do you remember how, when the sun had gone, and the soft, fragrant, Eastern night brought an almost tangible darkness, lighted only by the stars, we returned across the bay in a little boat, with two quaintly coloured paper lanterns making a bright spot of colour high above the bow? The only sound to break the measured cadence of the oars was the gentle whisper of the land-wind through the distant palm leaves, and the sighing of the tide as it wooed the passive beach.
And then, as we glided slowly through the starlit darkness, you, by that strange gift of sympathetic intuition, answered my unspoken thought, and sang the Allerseelen, sang it under your breath, “soft and low,” as though it might not reach any ears but ours—yes, that was All Souls’ Day.
There was only the sea and the sky and the stars, only the perfection of aloneness, “Le rêve de rester ensemble sans dessein.”
And then, all too soon, we came to a space of lesser darkness, visible through the belt of trees which lined the shore; far down that water-lane twinkled a light, the beacon of our landing-place. Do you remember?——
XV
AN ILLUMINATION
AFTER an absence which cannot be measured by days—not at least days of twenty-four hours, but rather by spaces of longing and regret,—I am back again in a house where everything suggests your presence so vividly that I hardly yet realise that I cannot find you, and already, several times, hearing, or fancying I heard, some sound, I have looked up expecting to see you. It is rather pitiful that, waking or sleeping, our senses should let us be so cruelly fooled.
It seems years ago, but, sitting in this room to-night, memory carries me back to another evening when you were also here. It had rained heavily, and the sun had almost set when we started to ride down the hill, across the river, and out into the fast-darkening road that strikes through the grass-covered plain, and leads to the distant hills. The strangely fascinating transformation of day into night, as commonly seen from that road, cannot fail to arrest the attention and awaken the admiration of the most casual observer; but for us, I think, it possessed the special charm which comes from the contemplation of nature in harmony with the mood of the spectator,—or seen, as with one sight, by two persons in absolute sympathy of body and soul. Then nothing is lost—no incident, no change of colour, no momentary effect of light or shade; the scene is absorbed through the eyes, and when the sensation caused finds expression through the voice of one, the heart of the other responds without the need of words.
I see the picture now; a string of waggons, the patient oxen standing waiting for their drivers, picturesquely grouped before a wayside booth; a quaintly fashioned temple, with its faint altar-light shining like a star from out the deep gloom within the portal; tall, feathery palms, whose stems cast long, sharp shadows across the dark-red road; on either side a grass-covered, undulating plain, disappearing into narrow valleys between the deep blue hills; behind all, the grey, mist-enshrouded mountains, half hidden in the deepening twilight.
The last gleams of colour were dying out of the sky as we left the main road, and, turning sharp to the left, urged our horses through the gathering darkness. At last we were obliged to pull up, uncertain of our bearings, and even doubtful, in the now absolute blackness of tropical night, whether we were in the right way. Carefully avoiding the deep ditches, more by the instinct of the horses than any guidance of ours, we struck into another road and set our faces homewards. It was still intensely dark, but growing clearer as the stars shone out, and we gradually became more accustomed to the gloom; dark yet delightful, and we agreed that this was the time of all others to really enjoy the East, with a good horse under you and a sympathetic companion to share the fascination of the hour.
Riding through the groves of trees that lined both sides of the road, we caught occasional glimpses of illuminated buildings, crowning the steep hill which forms one side of the valley. Traversing the outskirts of the town, we crossed a river and came out on a narrow plain, above which rose the hill. I shall never forget the vision which then rose before us. How we exclaimed with delight! and yet there was such an air of glamour about the scene, such unrealness, such a savour of magic and enchantment as tied our tongues for a while.
The heights rose in a succession of terraces till they seemed to almost pierce the clouds, each terrace a maze of brilliantly illuminated buildings to which the commanding position, the environment, the style of architecture, and the soft, hazy atmosphere lent an imposing grandeur.
The buildings which crowned the summit of the spur, lined the terraces, and seemed to be connected by a long flight of picturesque stone steps, were all of a dazzling whiteness. Low-reaching eaves, supported on white pillars, formed wide verandahs, whose outer edges were bordered by heavy balustrades. Every principal feature of every building, each door and window, each verandah, balustrade, and step, was outlined by innumerable yellow lights that shone like great stars against the soft dark background of sky and hill. It is impossible to imagine the beauty of the general effect: this succession of snow-white walls, rising from foot to summit of a mist-enveloped hill, suggested the palace-crowned heights of Futtepur Síkri, illuminated for some brilliant festival. The effect of splendour and enchantment was intensified by the graceful but indistinct outlines of a vast building, standing in unrelieved darkness by the bank of the river we had just crossed. In the gloom it was only possible to note the immense size of this nearer palace, and to realise its towers and domes, its pillars and arches, and the consistently Moorish style of its architecture.
As we approached the lowest of the series of illuminated buildings that, step by step, rose to the summit of the heights, we beheld a sheet of water beneath us on our right, and in this water were reflected the innumerable lights of a long, low temple, standing fifty feet above the opposite bank of the lake. Fronds of the feathery bamboo rose from the bank, and, bending forwards in graceful curves, cast deep shadows over the waters of this little lake, from the depths of which blazed the fires of countless lights.
We stood there and drank in the scene, graving it on the tablets of our memories as something never to be forgotten. Then slowly our horses passed into the darkness of the road, which, winding round the hillside, led up into the open country, a place of grass-land and wood, lying grey and silent under a starlit sky.
And, when we had gained the house, it was here you sat, in this old-world seat, with its covering of faded brocade. I can see you now, in the semi-darkness of a room where the only lamp centres its softened light on you—an incomparable picture in a charming setting. You do not speak; you are holding in your hand a small white card, and you slowly tear it in two, and then again and again. There is something in your face, some strange glory that is not of any outward light, nor yet inspired by that enchanted vision so lately seen. It is a transfiguration, a light from within, like the blush that dyes the clouds above a waveless sea, at the dawn of an Eastern morning. Still you speak no word, but the tiny fragments of that card are now so small that you can no longer divide them, and some drop from your hands upon the floor.
I picked them up—afterwards—did I not?
XVI
OF DEATH, IN FICTION
IT is delightful to have some one to talk to with whom it is not necessary to think always before one speaks, to choose every word, to explain every thought—some one, in fact, who has sympathy enough not to be bored with the discussion of a subject that deals neither with gossip nor garments, and intelligence enough to understand what is implied as well as what is said. I have done a good deal of desultory reading lately, mostly modern English and French fiction, and I cannot help being struck by the awkward manner in which authors bring their stories to a conclusion. It so very often happens that a book begins well, possibly improves as the plot develops, becomes even powerful as it nears the climax, and then—then the poor puppets, having played their several parts and done all that was required of them, must be got rid of, in order to round off the tale, to give finality, and satisfy the ordinary reader’s craving for “full particulars.” This varnishing and framing and hanging of the picture is usually arrived at by marrying or slaying some principal character; the first is a life, and the last a death, sentence. Thus the reader is satisfied, and often the story is ruined; that is, if skilful drafting and true perspective are as necessary to a good picture as artistic colouring and the correct disposition of light and shade. But is the reader satisfied? Usually, yes; occasionally, no. In the latter case the book is closed with a strong sense of disappointment, and a conviction that the writer has realised the necessity of bringing down the curtain on a scene that finishes the play, and leaves nothing to the imagination; so, to secure that end, he has abandoned truth, and even probability, and has clumsily introduced the priest or the hangman, the “cup of cold poison,” or the ever-ready revolver. The effect of the charming scenery, the pretty frocks, the artistic furniture, and “the crisp and sparkling dialogue,” is thus spoilt by the unreal and unconvincing dénouement.
It seems to me—“to my stupid comprehension,” as the polite Eastern constantly insists—that this failure is due to two causes. First, most fiction is founded on fact, and the writer has, in history, in the newspapers, in his own experience or that of his friends, met with some record or paragraph, some adventure or incident, that has served for the foundation of his story; but, unless purely historical, he has been obliged to supply the last scene himself, because in reality there was none, or, if there was, he could not use it. In our own experience, in that of every one who has seen a little of the world, have we not become acquainted with quite a number of dramatic, or even tragic incidents, that have scarred our own or others’ lives, and would make stories of deep interest in the hands of a skilful writer? But the action does not cease. The altar is oftener the fateful beginning than the happy ending of the drama; and, when the complications fall thick upon each other, there is no such easy way out of the impasse as that provided by a little prussic acid or a bullet. They are ready to hand, I grant you, but they are not so often used in life as in fiction. I have known a man walk about, with a revolver in his pocket, for three days, looking for a suitable opportunity to use it upon himself, and then he has put it away against the coming of a burglar. When it is not yourself, but some one else, you desire to get rid of, the prospect is, strange to say, even less inviting. Thus it happens that, in real life, we suffer and we endure, the drama is played and the tragedy is in our hearts, but it does not take outward and visible form. So the fiction—whilst it is true to life—holds our interest, and the skill of the artist excites our admiration; but the impossible climax appeals to us, no more than a five-legged cow. It is a lusus naturæ, that is all. They happen, these monstrosities, but they never live long, and it were best to stifle them at birth.
Pardon! you say there is genius. Yes, but it is rare, and I have not the courage to even discuss genius; it is like Delhi and the planets, a long way off. We can only see it with the help of a powerful glass, if indeed then it is visible. There is only one writer who openly lays claim to it, and the claim seems to be based chiefly on her lofty disdain for adverse criticism. That is, perhaps, a sign, but not a complete proof, of the existence of the divine fire.
But to return to the humbler minds. It does happen that real lives are suddenly and violently ended by accident, murder, or suicide, and there seems no special reason why fictitious lives should be superior to such chances. Indeed, to some authors, there would be no more pleasure in writing novels, without the tragic element as the main feature, than there is for some great billiard exponents to play the game with the spot-stroke barred. I would only plead, in this case, that the accident or the suicide, to be life-like, need not be very far-fetched. In murder, as one knows, the utmost licence is not only permissible but laudable, for the wildest freaks of imagination will hardly exceed the refinements, the devilish invention, and the cold-blooded execution of actual crimes. I remember you once spoke scornfully of using a common form of accident as a means of getting rid of a character in fiction; but surely that is not altogether inartistic, for the accidents that occur most commonly are those to which the people of romance will naturally be as liable as you or I. It is difficult to imagine that you should be destroyed by an explosion in a coal-mine, or that I should disappear in a balloon; but we might either of us be drowned, or killed in a railway accident, under any one of a variety of probable circumstances. Again, in suicide, the simplest method is, for purposes of fiction, in all likelihood the best. Men usually shoot themselves, and women, especially when they cannot swim, seek the water. Those who prefer poison are probably the swimmers. It is a common practice in fiction to make the noble-minded man who loves the lady, but finds himself in the way of what he believes to be her happiness (that is, of course, some other man), determine to destroy himself; and he does it with admirable resolution, considering how cordially he dislikes the rôle for which he has been cast, and how greatly he yearns for the affection which no effort of his can possibly secure. I cannot, however, remember any hero of fiction who has completed the sacrifice of his life in a thoroughly satisfactory manner, for he invariably leaves his body lying about, where it is sure to attract attention, and cause great distress to the lady he designs to oblige. That is thoughtless; and those who really mean to prove their self-denial should arrange, not only to extinguish their lives, but to get rid of their bodies, so that there may be as little scandal and trouble to their friends as possible. I have always felt the sincerest admiration for the man who, having made up his mind to destroy himself, and purchased a revolver with which to do the deed, settled his affairs, moved into lodgings quite close to a cemetery, wrote letters to the coroner, the doctor, and the undertaker, giving them in each case the exact hour at which they should call on their several errands, paid all his debts, left something to indemnify his landlady, and more than enough for funeral expenses, and then shot himself. That, however, was not a character in fiction, but a common mortal, and there was no lady in the case.
I am sure there are many people who would be greatly obliged to me for inviting attention to these matters, if only they could get it in print, to lie about on the table with the page turned down at the proper place. Nothing is more common than the determined suicides who live to a green old age for want of a book of instructions. These people weary their friends and acquaintances by eternally reiterated threats that they will destroy themselves, and yet, however desirable that course may be, they never take it. This novel and brilliant idea first comes to them in some fit of pique, and they declare that they will make an end of themselves, “and then perhaps you will be sorry.” They are so pleased with the effect caused by this statement, that, on the next favourable opportunity, they repeat it; and then they go on and on, dragging in their wretched threat on every possible and impossible occasion, especially in the presence of strangers and the aged relatives of themselves or the person they want to get at, until mere acquaintances wish they would fulfil their self-imposed task and cease from troubling. It is almost amusing to hear how these suicides déterminés vary, from day to day or week to week, the methods which they have selected for their own destruction—poison, pistols, drowning, throwing themselves out of window or under a train—nothing comes amiss; but, when they wish to be really effective, and carry terror into the hearts of their hearers, they usually declare either, that they will blow their brains out, or cut their throats. The vision of either of these processes of self-extinction, even though remote and unsubstantial, is well calculated to curdle the blood. That, as a rule, is all that is meant; and, when you understand it, the amusement is harmless if it is not exactly kind. “Vain repetitions” are distinctly wearying, even when they come from husbands and wives, parents or children; the impassioned lover, too, is not altogether free from the threat of suicide and the repetition of it. In all these cases it would be a kindness to those who appear weary of life, and who weary others by threatening to put an end to it, if they could be persuaded, either to follow the example of the man who, without disclosing his intentions, took a room by the gate of the cemetery, or, if they don’t really mean it, to say nothing more about it. Therefore, if ever you are over-tried in this way, leave this letter where it will be read. The weak point about the prescription is that it is more likely to cure than to kill. However, I must leave that to you, for a good deal depends on how the remedy is applied. The size of the dose, the form of application, whether external or internal, will make all the difference in the world. I do not prescribe for a patient, but for a disease; the rest may safely be left to your admirable discretion; but you will not forget that a dose which can safely and advisedly be administered to an adult may kill a child.
XVII
A HAND AT ÉCARTÉ
I WROTE to you of death in fiction, and, if I now write of death in fact, it is partly to see how far you agree with an opinion that was lately expressed to me by a man who is himself literary, and whose business it is to know the public taste in works of fiction. We were discussing a book of short stories, and he spoke of the author’s success, and said he hoped we might have a further instalment of similar tales. I ventured to suggest that the public must be rather nauseated with horrors, with stories of blood and crime, even though they carried their readers into new surroundings, and introduced them to interesting and little-described societies. My companion said, “No, there need be no such fear; we like gore. A craving for horrors pervades all classes, and is not easily satisfied. Those who cannot gloat over the contemplation of carcasses and blood, revel in the sanguinary details which make them almost spectators in the real or imaginary tragedies of life. The newspapers give one, and some writers of fiction the other; there is a large demand for both, especially now that the circle of readers is so rapidly widening amongst a class that cannot appreciate refinements of style, and neither understands nor desires the discussion of abstract questions. Therefore give us,—not Light, but—Blood.”
I wonder what you think. If I felt you had a craving for horrors I could paint the pages scarlet; for I have been in places where human life was held so cheap that death by violence attracted little notice, where tragedies were of daily occurrence, and hundreds of crimes, conceived with fiendish ingenuity and carried out with every detail calculated to thrill the nerves and tickle the jaded palate of the most determined consumer of “atrocities,” lie hidden in the records of Courts of Justice and Police Offices. Any one who compares the feelings with which he throws aside the daily paper, as he leaves the Underground Railway, or even those with which he closes the shilling shocker in more favourable surroundings, with the sense of exaltation, of keen, pulse-quickening joy that comes to him after reading one page in the book of Nature—after a long look at one of its myriad pictures—would, I think, hesitate to confess to a great hankering for a perpetual diet of blood. It is not the dread of appearing to be dissipated, but the certainty that there is better health, and a far more intense pleasure, in the clear atmosphere of woods and hills, of river and sea, than in the shambles.
Sewers are a product of civilisation in cities, but they are not pretty to look at, and I cannot appreciate a desire to explore their darksome nastiness while we may, if we choose, remain in the light and air of heaven. London slums are daily and nightly the scenes of nameless horrors, but it may be doubted whether a faithful and minute description of them, in the form of cheap literature, does more good than harm.
That is by way of preface. What I am going to tell you struck me, because I question whether a tragedy in real life was ever acted with details that sound so fictional, so imaginary, and yet there was no straining after effect. It was the way the thing had to be worked out; and like the puzzles you buy, and waste hours attempting to solve, I suppose the pieces would only fit when arranged in the places for which they were designed by their Maker.
A long time ago there lived, in one of the principal cities of Italy, a certain marchese, married to a woman of great beauty and distinguished family. She had a lover, a captain of cavalry, who had made himself an Italian reputation for his success in love-affairs, and also in the duels which had been forced upon him by those who believed themselves to have been wronged. The soldier was a very accomplished swordsman and equally skilful with a pistol, and that is possibly the reason why the husband of the marchesa was blind to a state of affairs which at last became the scandal of local society. The marchesa had a brother, a leading member of the legal profession; and when he had unsuccessfully indicated to his brother-in-law the line of his manifest duty, he determined to himself defend his sister’s name, for the honour of an ancient and noble family. The brother was neither a swordsman nor a pistol-shot, and when he undertook to vindicate his sister’s reputation he realised exactly what it might cost him. The position was unbearable; the cafés were ringing with the tale; and, if her husband shirked the encounter, some man of her own family must bring the offender to book and satisfy the demands of public opinion.
Having made up his mind as to the modus operandi, the brother sought his foe in a crowded café, and in the most public manner insulted him by striking him across the face with his glove. A challenge naturally followed, and the choice of weapons was left with the assailant. He demanded pistols, and, knowing his own absolute inferiority, stipulated for special conditions, which were, that the combatants should stand at a distance of one pace only, that they should toss, or play a game of écarté for the first shot, and that if the loser survived it, he should go as close to his adversary as he pleased before discharging his own weapon. Under the circumstances, the soldier thought he could hardly decline any conditions which gave neither party an advantage, but no one could be found to undertake the duties of second in a duel on such terms. Two friends of the principals agreed, however, to stand by with rifles, to see that the compact was not violated; and it was understood that they would at once fire on the man who should attempt foul play.
It was, of course, imperative that the proceedings should be conducted with secrecy, and the meeting was arranged to take place on the outskirts of a distant town, to which it was necessary to make a long night journey by rail. In the early dawn of a cold morning in March, the four men met in the cemetery of a famous monastery, that stands perched on a crag, overlooking the neighbouring city, and a wide vale stretching away for miles towards the distant hills. A pack of cards was produced, and, with a tombstone as a table, the adversaries played one hand at écarté. The game went evenly enough, and rather slowly, till the brother marked four against his opponent’s three. It was then the latter’s deal; he turned up the king and made the point, winning the game. A line was drawn, the distance measured, the pistols placed in the duellists’ hands, and the two friends retired a few yards, holding their loaded rifles ready for use. The word was given, and the brother stood calmly awaiting his fate. The soldier slowly raised his pistol to a point in line with the other’s head, and, from a distance of a few inches, put a bullet through his brain, the unfortunate man falling dead without uttering a sound or making a movement.
The officer obtained a month’s leave and fled across the border into Switzerland, but, before the month was up, public excitement over the affair had waned, and the gossips were busy with a new scandal. Their outraged sense of propriety had been appeased by the sacrifice of the dead, and the novel and piquant circumstances which accompanied it. As for the intrigue which had led to the duel, that, of course, went on the same as ever, only rather more so.
XVIII
THE GENTLE ART OF VEERING WITH THE WIND
TO-DAY I received a letter from you. I have read it twice, and, though it contains eight pages of closely written lines, there is not one word in it that would show that I am any more to you than the merest acquaintance. For weeks I have anxiously awaited this letter; plans, of the utmost importance to me, depended upon the answer you would give to a question I had put; and my whole future, at least that future which deals with a man’s ambitions, would, in all probability, be influenced by your reply. I asked you—well, never mind what—and you, being entirely free to write what you mean and what you wish, say that it is a point on which you cannot offer advice; but you tell me that you have given up reading and taken to gardening, as you find it is better for you! Have you ever read the story of Zadig? If you have, you will perhaps remember how his wife, Azora, railed against the newly made widow whom she found gardening. I have no prejudices of that kind, and, in my case, no one’s nose is in danger of the razor; but still I think I may not unreasonably feel somewhat aggrieved.
Do not believe that I could ever wish to remind you of what you have forgotten, or wish to forget. I only want to know what is real and what is counterfeit, and you alone can tell me. I may ask this, may I not? It is not that I may presume to judge you, or from any wish to gratify an impertinent curiosity, but that I may be saved from imagining what is not, and, while torturing myself, possibly even distress you. I find it hard to reconcile this letter of yours with others I have received, and if that sounds to you but a confession of my stupidity, I would rather admit my want of intelligence and crave your indulgence, than stand convicted of putting two and two together and making of them twenty-two. If you tell me there is no question of indulgence, but that quite regular verbs have different moods, that present and past tenses are irreconcilable, and, of the future, no man knoweth—I shall have my answer.
You do not write under the influence of winter. I cannot charge myself with any offence against you. Nay, God knows that all my thoughts and all my efforts are but to do you honour. If I have misread your earlier letters, if I have been unduly elated by such kind words as you have sent me, it is the simplest thing in the world to undeceive me and show me the error of my ways. Are you only souffrante, and may I disregard the chilling atmosphere of your present missive, remembering the tender sympathy of voice, of eye, of hand, in the rapturous days of a cherished past?
It seems as natural to some people to love to-day, and to be almost strangers to-morrow, as that we should revel in a flood of light when the moon is full, and grope in darkness when the goddess of night is no longer visible. The temperament that makes this possible is fortunately rare, so much so that it creates an interest in the observer. I have never seen it in man, but I have in woman; and one realises that then it is better to be a spectator than an actor in what is never a farce, and may easily develop into tragedy. Imagine such a woman of very unusual personal attractions: great beauty of face and figure united to a high intelligence and extreme charm of manner; witty, ambitious, courageous, full of high thoughts and endowed with all the advantages that wealth can add to personal gifts. Deep in a nature that is strangely complex, and capable of the most opposite extremes, suppose there is implanted, amongst many other feelings, a passionate yearning to be understood, and to be loved with a love that would shrink from nothing to prove the greatness of its devotion. Here you have a being capable of what seem the strangest contradictions, and not the least startling of these may be a rare, but absolute and passionate, self-abandonment, under the influence of certain circumstances which strongly appeal to the senses. Overcome by intoxication of sound, colour, and magnetism, every moral and conventional muscle suddenly relaxes, and, the violence of the forces released, is wild and uncontrolled, because of the firm determination by which they are habitually bound. To-morrow, in the cold grey light of day, the slow-working mind of man is absolutely bewildered by what he sees and hears. He comes, dominated by an exalted passion, enthralled by a vision of ecstasy through which he sees, imperfectly, the people about him, only “men as trees walking”; reserving his thoughts and perceptions of surrounding objects till he shall again gaze upon that face which seems to him to have opened the door of life with the key of a boundless love. Still dazed by the memories of last night, he enters the presence of his beloved, and experiences a shock, such as a swimmer might feel, if floating, half-entranced, in some tropic sea, he suddenly hit against an iceberg.
Sometimes, even, influenced by surroundings, maddened by the whisperings of a southern night, passed in a place where she breathes an atmosphere impregnated with the romance of centuries, the lonely soul of the woman, hungering for sympathy and communion, will seize a pen and write, “Come to me; I want you, for you understand; come, and I will give you happiness.” Before the letter has been gone one day, on a journey that may take it to the ends of the earth, the writer’s mood has changed, and she has forgotten her summons as completely as though it had never been written. When the missive reaches its destination, the recipient will be wise to curb his impetuosity, and realise that his opportunity is long since dead and buried.
The bewildering phases of such a nature as I have here imagined are nothing to us. To you it may even seem inexcusable that I should allude to a character with which you have no sympathy, an abnormal growth which sounds rather fantastic than real. It is the argumentum ad absurdum, and has its value. This strange perversity which, by reason of its startling contradictions, seems almost inhuman, and if, in rare instances, met with, can only excite feelings of curiosity or repugnance—this is the extreme case. The application of the moral will come nearer home to us, if we make the changes from passionate love to cold indifference a little less marked, the intervals between the moods a little longer. It is well to know one’s own mind, not because wavering and change hurt the fickle, but because some stupid person may suffer by the purchase of experience; may take it to heart, and may do himself an injury. It is well to know one’s own heart, and what it can give; lest another put too high a value on the prize and lose all in trying to win it. It is well to know our own weakness, and at once recognise that we shall be guided by it; lest another think it is strength, and make, for our sakes, sacrifices that only frighten and perhaps even annoy us, especially when they are made in the absurd belief that they will please us.
If you can give the extreme of happiness, do not forget that you can also cause an infinity of pain. No one can blame you for declining to accord favours; and if that refusal gives pain, there is no help for it. There can be little sympathy for those who seek the battle and then complain of their wounds. Such hurts do not rankle, and quickly heal. But it is different when a woman gives love of her own free will, uninfluenced by any consideration beyond her inclination, and then takes it back, also without other cause than caprice. It is difficult to use any other word—either it was a caprice to say she gave what never was given, or it is a caprice to take it back. A confession of thoughtlessness in estimating the character of her own feelings, or of weakness and inability to resist any opposing influence, is a poor pretext for a sudden withering of the tendrils of affection. Such a confession is an indifferent consolation to the heart which realises its loss, but cannot appreciate the situation. Do not mistake me; it is so hard to be absolutely candid and fair in considering our own cases. We are not less likely to make mistakes in matters of sentiment than in the purely practical affairs of life. If we think we love, and then become certain that we have made a mistake, the only safe and kind course is to confess the error; but if we deliberately seek love and give it, much protesting and much exacting, how shall we then deny it? Would one say, “If you asked me, I would go down into hell with you, now,” and then, ere twelve months had passed, for no crime but enforced absence, speak or write, to that other, almost as a stranger?
There was Peter, I know; but even he was not altogether satisfied with himself, and, besides denying his Lord, he stands convicted of physical cowardice.
XIX
A REJOINDER
THANK you. Before my last letter could reach you, vous m’aviez donné affreusement à penser, and this is what occurs to me:—
“Of all the lover’s sorrows, next to that
Of Love by Love forbidden, is the voice
Of Friendship turning harsh in Love’s reproof,
And overmuch of counsel—whereby Love
Grows stubborn, and recoiling unsupprest
Within, devours the heart within the breast.”
I dare say it is as well. I am beginning to recognise the real attractions of what I may call a “surprise letter.” I have had several lately. It is perhaps the irony of fate that, just after I had mildly hinted to you that the phases of the moods of the feminine mind were sometimes rather bewildering, you should write to me the sort of letter which, had it been sent by me to a man I called my friend, I should richly deserve death at his hands. There are certainly few things more thoroughly enjoyable than to take up a letter that you see comes from—well, let us say from a very dear friend—to dally a little over the opening, in the mingled desire and hesitation to read the contents; feverish desire to know that all is well, to hear some word of affectionate regard—hesitation lest the news be bad, the letter cold; and then to find such a missive as you have sent to me.
To begin with, there is a page and a half on which you have poured out the vials of your wrath. I was quite hot before I had read half of it, and my ears even were burning before I came to a page in which you told me how greatly you were enjoying yourself. And then, at the end, there was another page and a half, every word of which seemed to strike me in the face like a blow. I suppose you introduced the middle section that I might meditate on the difference between your circumstances and mine, and duly appreciate the full weight of your displeasure. Well, yes, I have done so; and, as God only knows when I shall see you again, I must write one or two of the many words it is in my heart to say to you.
I am a very unworthy person; I have deeply offended you; and you have felt it necessary to tell me gently how ill my conduct looks to you. You leave me to infer that there are offences which cannot be tolerated, and that it would not be difficult to dispense with my acquaintance. I humbly accept this verdict, and as it is absolutely just and right that the prisoner should first be condemned without hearing, and then suffered to state his case, and say anything he pleases in mitigation of sentence, I will try not to weary you by any reference to ancient history, but simply confine myself to the charge.
Now, what is my crime? You asked me a question; I am sure you have long ago forgotten what it was, and I need not remind you; but I, like an idiot, thought you really wanted an answer, and that it was my bounden duty to find a means of sending it. The question gave me infinite pleasure, and, again like an idiot, I thought the answer I longed to send would be welcome. I could not send it in the ordinary way, as you will admit, and, a sudden thought striking me that there was a safe and easy means of transmission, I acted on it, and your letter is the result. You tell me your pride is wounded, your trust in my word gone, and your conscience scandalised. It is useless for me now to express regret. I have been convicted, and I am only pleading in mitigation of sentence. Well, mine was a deliberate sin. I had to decide whether I would answer you or not, and, though I disliked the means, I thought the end would justify them. To me they did not then, and do not now, seem very objectionable; and it certainly did not occur to me that I could thereby wound the most sensitive feelings. Of course I was an imbecile, and ought to have realised that a question like that was only a phrase, with no serious meaning. I gave a promise, you say, and have broken it. It is a pity. I had rather have sinned in any other way, for I have my pride too, and it asserts itself chiefly in the keeping of promises, rather than the gift of them. As to the conscience, I deeply sympathise. An offended conscience must be a very inconvenient, not to say unpleasant, companion. But you were greatly enjoying yourself (you impress that upon me, so you will not be offended if I mention it), therefore I conclude your conscience was satisfied by the uncompromising expression of your sense of my misdeeds. Might I ask which way your conscience was looking when you wrote this letter to me, or does it feel no call to speak on my behalf? I would rather my hand were palsied than write such a letter to any one, and you know that I have forfeited your favour in trying to do your will. I think your quarrel was rather with your conscience than with me; but it is well to keep friends with those of one’s own household.
Truly it is an evil thing to stake one’s happiness upon the value of x in an indeterminate equation. It is possible to regard the unknown quantity with philosophy; it is like the unattainable. The mischief all comes with what looks like solution, but proves in the end to be drawn from false premises. Lines can be straight, and figures may be square, but sentient beings are less reliable, and therefore more interesting—as studies. The pity is that we sometimes get too close, in our desire to examine minutely what looks most beautiful and most attractive. Then proximity destroys the powers of critical judgment, and, from appearances, we draw conclusions which are utterly unreliable, because our own intelligence is obscured by the interference of our senses. We have to count with quantities that not only have no original fixed value, but vary from day to day, and even from hour to hour.
You will say that if I can liken you to an algebraic sign, speak of you as a “quantity” and “an indeterminate equation,” it cannot matter much whether you write to me in terms of hate or love. If, however, you consider where you are and where I am, and if, when this lies in your hand, you are on good terms with your pride and your conscience, you may be able to spare, from the abundance you lavish on them, a grain of sympathy for me in my loneliness. Is it a crime for the humble worshipper to seek to assure the deity of his unaltered devotion? It used not to be so; and though the temple has infinite attractions for me, the tavern none, I could say with the Persian—
“And this I know: whether the one True Light
Kindle to love, or Wrath-consume me quite,
One Flash of It within the Tavern caught
Better than in the Temple lost outright.”
Life is too short, and too full of storm and stress, to induce any one to stake it on a proved uncertainty, however attractive. It is better never to take ship at all than to be constantly meeting disaster on the shoals and rocks of the loveliest summer sea. Of the end of such a venture there is no uncertainty. The bravest craft that ever left port will be reduced to a few rotting timbers, while the sea smiles anew on what is but a picturesque effect.
XX
OF IMPORTUNITY
I MUST unburden myself to you, because I may do so without offence, without shocking you beyond forgiveness; for I feel that if my letter were to another, I should either have to use such self-control that I should gain no relief for my injured feelings, or else the other would think I had gone mad, and blot my name out of the book of her correspondents—two r’s, please. You see I am in an evil mood, the bad tense of the evil mood; so I may as well begin in the green leaf what is sure to come in the brown. Besides, you are partly to blame! Is not that like a man? You supplied me with the fruit of this knowledge which has set my teeth on edge, but it is also true that you gave it in furtherance of my request and to oblige me. I fancy that was the case with Eve. Adam probably sent her up a tree (the expression has lasted to our own time), looked the other way, and pretended he had forgotten all about it when the obliging lady came down and tendered the result of her painful efforts. It is bad enough to climb with your clothes on, as I saw the other day, when I induced a friend to swarm up a fern-tree by telling him I did not believe he could do it. But this is all beside the mark;—what has roused my ire is a parcel of new books, kindly selected by you to cheer my solitude. As they came direct from the bookseller, I do not know whether you have read them, but they are very new indeed, and, from what you say, I think you must at least have wrestled with some of them. Very recent publications, like many of these, are rather a rarity here, and, as I was particularly busy, I lent some of them to friends who are always hungering for new literature. Now I am rather sorry, though I washed my hands of the transaction by saying that I would not take the responsibility of recommending anything, but they were at liberty to take what they liked. In due time the volumes were returned, without comment, but with the pages cut. I did not think anything of that at the time, the realities of the moment interested me a great deal more than any book could; but now I have read some of the batch, and I am suffering from an earnest desire to meet the authors and “have it out with them.” As however, that is not in my power, I am going to victimise you. There is one story, of a kind that is now common enough, that is specially aggravating. If you have read it you will know which I refer to; if not, I won’t tell you. It is written by a woman, and discourses in a very peculiar fashion on the ways of men. That is of no particular moment, for the writer has either a very indifferent knowledge of men, or she is not to be congratulated on her male friends, or she has had some very unfortunate personal experiences, and judges the species by some repulsive individuals. It was a man who said that women do not possess the sentiment of justice, and he might, if he had wished to be fair, have added that it is comparatively rare in men. Men have written many unkind and untrue things about women as a sex, but they cannot have harmed them much, since their influence over the beings, derisively styled “Lords of Creation” is certainly on the increase, especially in new countries like America.
What, however, is rather strange is that, in the book I speak of, there are two women—joint-heroines, as it were—held up for the reader’s admiration, but described as perfectly odious creatures. The story, however, is practically confined to the life and character of one of these ladies, and the exact position of the other, in relation to her friend, is not altogether clear, nor of any concern as regards my point. Let me then speak of the one woman as the heroine; it is to her I wish to apply the epithet odious. The writer, I take it, is very pleased and satisfied with the lady of her creation, and, whilst she never loses an opportunity of enlarging on the very objectionable characteristics of all men of birth and education, she evidently means the reader to understand that she has drawn and coloured the picture of a very perfect and altogether captivating woman. A young, beautiful, intelligent, highly educated, perfectly dressed woman, surrounded by every luxury that great wealth and good taste can secure, may easily be captivating, and it might be counted something less than a crime that a number of admirers should be anxious to marry her. When it comes to character it is different; and even though the spectacle of a woman with fewer attractions than I have named, and a disposition that left something to be desired, enslaving men of renown, is not unknown to history, it seems a little unusual to design a heroine as the very embodiment of selfishness, and then exhibit her as the perfect woman. The life that is shown to us is chiefly that of a girl,—old enough, and independent and intelligent enough, to know perfectly what she was doing,—constantly allowing, or alluring, men to make love to her; and then, when they wished to marry her, telling them in language which, if not considerate, was certainly plain, how deeply insulted she felt. If they wasted years and years, or lost their useless, sinful lives altogether, over her, that was a matter of such absolute indifference that it never gave her a second thought or a moment of regret. She did not avoid men altogether; on the contrary, she seemed rather fond of their society, as she had only one woman friend, and is described as giving them all ample opportunities of declaring their passionate admiration for her beauty and intelligence. The lovers were many and varied; coming from the peerage, the squirearchy, the army, the Church, and other sources; but they all met with the same fate, and each in turn received a special lecture on the vice and amazing effrontery of his proposal.
I suppose it is a book with a purpose, and, unlike a Scotch sermon, it is divided into only two heads. As to one, I could imagine the reply might be in the form of another book styled “Her Lord the Eunuch.” Biblical history deals with the species. It is less common now, but if a demand again arises, no doubt there will be a supply to meet it. That is the head I cannot discuss, even in these days of fin de siècle literature, wherein it is a favourite subject, and would have fewer difficulties than the case of a nineteenth-century Virgin Mary, which formed the text of one volume in the parcel. The other consideration seems to rest on safe ground, with no treacherous bogs or dangerous quicksands, and therefore I venture to ask you what you think of this paragon of all the virtues. Is she the type of a woman’s woman? One sometimes, but very, very rarely, meets a woman like this, in England at any rate; and though the lady’s girdle is certain to be decorated with a collection of male scalps of all ages and many colours, very few of her own sex will be found in the number of her friends or admirers. Her charity is generally a form of perversity; for if she occasionally lavishes it on some animal or human being, it is a caprice that costs her little, and to the horse or dog which fails in instant obedience, to the beggar or relative who importunes, she is passionately or coldly cruel. Yet her fascination is real enough, but it seldom endures. There is no need to sympathise with the would-be lovers, who are rejected yet still importunate. When, as sometimes happens in a world of change, there has been mutual love between man and woman, and one has ceased to love, it is natural enough that the other should desire to retain what may still be, to him or her, the only thing worth living for. But to importune a woman to give herself, her body and soul, her whole destiny till death, when she does not wish it, is to ask for something that it were better not to precisely define. Presumably if the man thinks he is in love, it is the woman’s love he wants. She says she does not love him, and he is a fool, or worse, to take anything less, even when she is willing to sacrifice or sell herself for any conceivable reason. Surely, if the man had any real regard for her, he would think first of her happiness, and refuse to take advantage of her weakness or necessities. Besides, her misery could not be his advantage, and the worn-out sophism of parents or other interested persons, that “she did not know her own mind, and would get to like him,” is too hazardous a chance on which to stake the welfare of two lives. Of course men plague women to marry them after they have been refused. The world is full of people who want what is not for them, and are not too particular as to the means, if they can secure the end. But I wonder what a man would say if some woman he did not care about worried his life out to marry her. Man is easily flattered, the sensation is with him comparatively rare, and he is very susceptible to the agreeable fumes of that incense; but only the very weakest would be lured to the altar, and the after-life of the lady who took him there would not be an altogether happy one. Man and his descendants have had a grudge against the first woman for thousands of years, for an alleged proposal of hers that is said to have interfered with his prospects. It is not chivalrous for a man to press a woman to “let him love her, if she can’t love him;” it is not a very nice proposition, if he will take it home and work it out quietly; it is something very like an insult to her, and it is certainly not likely to be anything but a curse to him. That is when she is endowed with those charming qualities common to most women. When, however, as in the case I have referred to, she has a special aversion to men generally, and him in particular, and prides herself on the possession of characteristics that he could not admire in his own mother, to still insist upon forcing the lady into a union with him is to be vindictively silly. It is hardly necessary to go as far as this to prove his determination and his title to a sort of spurious constancy.
XXI
OF COINCIDENCES
IN spite of the testimony of many worthy and some unworthy people, I have not yet been able to accept spiritual manifestations and the reappearance of the dead as even remotely probable. I think most of the current ghost stories are capable of a simple explanation, if one could only get an unvarnished statement of real facts from the witnesses. Usually, however, those on whose authority these stories rest, are constitutionally of such a nervous organisation that they are physically incapable of describing with exact accuracy what they saw or heard. When, as not infrequently happens, those who have seen visions admit to having felt that extremity of fear which bathes them in a cold perspiration, or makes their hair rise up straight on their heads (this last is not, I think, alleged by women), then there is all the more reason to doubt their testimony. Undoubtedly curious things happen which do not admit of easy explanation, but they are not necessarily supernatural, or connected in any way with the return of the dead to the sight of the living. Dreams, again, are sometimes very curious, and it might be difficult to offer a reasonable explanation of some dream-experiences, especially those which lead to the backing of winning horses or the purchase of prize-tickets in a lottery. A really reliable dreamer of this kind would be a valuable investment; but, unfortunately, there is a want of certainty about even those who have, once in a lifetime, brought off a successful coup. Still, it has happened. I myself have heard a dreamer—who was also a dream-talker—place accurately the three first horses in a coming race; but I had not sufficient confidence in the “tip” to take advantage of it. In that case, too, the winner was a very pronounced favourite. Many people say they have dreamt of strange places, and afterwards seen those places in reality, and even been able to find their way about in them. It may be so. For myself, I cannot say I have ever had such an experience, but I believe (I say it doubtfully, because one may be deceived about journeys in dreamland) that I have often seen the same places in different dreams, dreamed after intervals of years, so that, while dreaming, I have at once recognised the place as a familiar scene in my dreamland. But those places I have never beheld on earth. In my early youth, scared by tales of the bottomless pit and the lake of brimstone, I used to dream, almost nightly, of those places of torment; but it is a long time ago, and I have quite forgotten what they were like. I have no ambition to renew my acquaintance, or to be given the opportunity of comparing the reality with the nightmare of my childish imagination and a cramped position. Apart from these more or less vain considerations, I have known some very curious coincidences, and I will tell you the story of one of them.
I was journeying in a strange, a distant, and an almost unknown land. More than this, I was the guest of the only white man in a remote district of that country. It was a particularly lovely spot, and, being an idler for the moment, I asked my host, after a few days, what there was of interest that I could go and see. He said he would send a servant with me to show me a cemetery, where were buried a number of Englishmen who, some few years before, had been killed or died in the neighbourhood, during the progress of one of England’s successful little military expeditions. That afternoon I was led to the cemetery in question. I have seldom seen a more glorious succession of pictures than were presented by the view from that lovely spot; and never in any country have I beheld a more ideal resting-place for the honoured dead. It did not surprise me that my host told me he had already selected his own corner, and repeatedly made it the objective of his afternoon walks. Within a fenced enclosure, partly surrounded by graceful, ever-green trees, lay the small plot of carefully kept grass which formed the burial-ground. It occupied the summit of a rising ground commanding a magnificent view of the surrounding country. From the gate the ground sloped steeply down to a road, and then dropped sheer forty or fifty feet to the waters of a great, wide, crystal-clear river, flowing over a bed of golden sand. Under this steep and lofty bank, the base all rock, the river swirled deep and green; but it rapidly shallowed towards the centre, and the opposite shore, seven hundred feet distant, was a wide expanse of sand, half-circled by great groves of palms, and backed by steep, forest-clad hills. The river made a wide sweep here, so that, looking down on it from such a height gave it rather the appearance of a huge lake narrowing into the distant hills. Picturesque villages lined both banks of the river, the houses showing splashes of colour between the trees. Boats of quaint build—sailing, poling, paddling, rowing—passed up and down the broad stream, giving life to the scene; while at distances varying from three miles to thirty or more, the valley was shut in by lofty mountains, green near by, with their garment of unbroken forest, but, in the distance, blue as an Italian sky. I drank this in, felt it all as a feeling, this and much more with which I will not weary you, and then I turned to look at the grass-covered mounds and wooden crosses that marked the graves of the exiled dead. I was standing in front of a somewhat more pretentious headstone, which marked the resting-place of an officer killed a few miles from this spot, when, through the wicket, came a messenger bearing a letter for me. The cover bore many post-marks, signs of a long chase, and here at last it had caught me in my wanderings. I did not recognise the handwriting, but when I had opened the letter and looked at the signature, I realised that it was that of an old lady who was but an acquaintance, and one of whom I had not heard for years. I read the letter, and I may confess to some little astonishment. It told me that, hearing that I was leaving England for a long journey, and that I should eventually arrive at somewhere in the East, the writer wished to tell me that her daughter (whom I hardly remembered) had married a certain soldier, that he had been killed some time before, and was buried in some place (which she tried indifferently to name) where there were no Europeans. If I should ever be in the neighbourhood, would I try to find his grave, and tell them something about it; for they were in great grief, and no one could relieve their anxiety on the subject of their loved one’s last home.
It seemed to me a somewhat remarkable coincidence that I should, at that moment, be standing in front of the stone which told me that, underneath that emerald turf, lay all that was left of the poor lady’s son-in-law, the grief-stricken daughter’s husband. The situation appealed to my artistic instincts. I sat down, there and then, and, with a pencil and a bit of paper, I made a rough sketch of the soldier’s grave; carefully drawing the headstone, and inscribing on it, in very plain and very black print, the legend that I saw in front of me. Then I went home, and, while the situation was hot upon me, I wrote, not to the mother, but to the widow, a little account of what had occurred, using the most appropriate and touching language I could think of, to describe the scene and my deep sympathy. Finally I enclosed the little picture, which I had drawn with such a compelling sense of my responsibilities, and the unique character of the opportunity, to show that I was a man of rather uncommon feeling. Much pleased with the result of my efforts, I entrusted the letter to my friend (there was no such thing as a post-office), and we became almost sentimental over the chastened tears with which my letter would be read by the two poor ladies.
The mother’s letter to me had wandered about for two or three months before it came to my hands; but I learned,—ages afterwards,—that my letter to the daughter was a far longer time in transit; not the fault of my friend, but simply of the general unhingedness of things in those wild places.
The letter did at last arrive, and was handed to the widow on the day she was married to a new husband. That is why I believe in the quaintness of coincidences.
XXII
OF A COUNTRY-HOUSE CUSTOM
I WENT one morning to a hotel in London to call upon a celebrated writer of fiction, a lady, and she told me that, as a protest against ideas which she despised, she always locked her door when she was talking to a man. I stayed there about two hours, but I don’t remember whether the door was locked or not, probably not; no one, however, tried it, and my reputation survived the ordeal. The practice is unconventional, though innocent enough. It is much more common to find yourself in a lady’s room, at night, in a country-house in England, and there you may talk to a friend, perhaps to two, and even, on occasions, smoke a cigarette, while the door is seldom locked. Do you see any harm in it? The thing itself is so pleasant that I do not mean to discuss with you the fors and againsts; I am satisfied that it is often done, and that I sometimes profit by the arrangement. A century ago, or rather more, it was common enough, if not in England, certainly on the Continent, and the guest was sometimes present while the lady lay in bed, or made her toilette. It is conceivable that this custom deserved to be discouraged, and it seems to have gone out of fashion, no doubt for sufficiently good reasons.
I was once a guest in a delightful country-house in the heart of England, a house where nothing was lacking that could contribute to comfort, and where the hostess was attraction sufficient to draw visitors from the uttermost parts of the earth, and keep them with her as long as she desired their presence. She was wayward (an added charm), and the company came and went, and some came again, but none remained long enough to become overpoweringly tedious or compromisingly épris. It was winter, the hard earth was full of “bone,” the waters icebound, and the face of the country white with a thick covering of frozen snow. There were but few of us in the house, and we had been skating on the ornamental water in a neighbour’s park, miles away. That was the only form of exercise open to us, and we had enjoyed it. The long walk over the crisp snow and the uneven cart tracks of a country road, the intoxicating ease and rapidity of motion over the glassy ice, the ring of steel on that hard, smooth surface, how distinctly they all come back! And then the trudge home in the gathering dusk, between the woods whose snow-laden trees looked the very picture of winter,—it was all delightful and exhilarating, and, if our dinner-party was small, it was certainly a merry one. When we parted on the stairs it was close on midnight, and I was standing enjoying the blaze of my fire and the intense cosiness of my room, when there came a knock, and what I had thought was a cupboard-door opened to admit the head of our charming chatelaine, with an inquiry as to my comfort and contentment, and an invitation to put on a smoking-jacket and have a cigarette in her snuggery. I very eagerly and gratefully accepted that offer, and a few minutes later found myself in the most delightfully warm, cosy, and withal artistically beautiful room the heart and mind of woman could desire or design. This boudoir faced the front of the house, and looking over the lawn and terraces were three French windows, through which streamed bright rays of moonlight, for the shutters were not closed. Within, a great wood fire blazed on a wide hearth of olive-green tiles. Two lamps, with shades of vieille rose, shed a soft glow over inviting-looking chairs, thick carpet, tables littered with books and papers, lovely bits of porcelain and bronze, treasures in burnished silver and dull red gold. Every chair looked as if it were made for comfort, and the whole room said unmistakably, “This is where I live.” I should have noted the general effect at a glance, but I had time to appreciate the details, for, when I entered, I found the room unoccupied. In a few minutes my hostess appeared from her room, which opened out of this fascinating retreat, and said—
“Well, how do you like my snuggery; is it not cosy?”
I said it was charming and delightful, and everything that good taste and an appreciation of real comfort could make it.
“I am so glad,” she said; “will you smoke one of my cigarettes?”
“Thank you, yes.”
“Shall I light it for you?”
“That would be most kind.”
“There; now we can make ourselves quite comfortable and have a real good chat, and no one will come to disturb us. What have you been doing with yourself all this time? What new friends have you made? What books have you been reading? Tell me all about everything. I think you would be more comfortable over there; don’t worry about me, this is my favourite seat, but I change about and never sit very long in one place. You can imagine I am your Father Confessor, so don’t keep me waiting; tell it all, and keep back nothing; you know I shall be sure to find you out if you try to deceive me.”
I found a seat—not exactly where I had first wished to place myself, but where I was put—and our chat was so mutually interesting that I was surprised to find it was 2 A.M. when my hostess told me I must go to bed. I must have smoked a good many cigarettes, and I have a vague recollection that there were glasses with spiritual comfort as well; it is probable, for nothing that any reasonable human being could want was ever lacking there. I know that I lingered, and the white light through the curtains drew us both to the window. Never shall I forget the incomparable picture of that snow-covered landscape;—glittering, scintillating under the silver radiance of a full winter moon, riding high in a clear, grey, frosty sky. The absolute stillness of it; not a sign of life; the bare trees throwing sharp shadows on the dazzling whiteness of a prospect broken only by the evergreens of the garden, the cleared stone steps of the terraces, and beyond, a small stream winding through the narrow valley, and forming a little lake of as yet unfrozen water, its ever rippling surface showing black and sombre under the shadow of a high bank which shut out the moonlight. The contrast between that outside,—the coldness, the whiteness, the sense of far-into-the-nightness, which somehow struck one instantly; and the inside,—the warmth, the comfort, the subtle sympathy of companionship with a most fascinating, most beautiful, perfectly-garmented woman: it was too striking to be ever forgotten. The picture has risen unbidden before my eyes on many a night since then, under other skies and widely different circumstances.
Turning away from the window, I could see through an open door into my companion’s room, and I said, “How did you get into my room?” “Very easily,” she answered; “there is a cupboard in the thickness of the wall between your room and mine; it opens into both rooms, but is at present full of my gowns, as you would have seen had you had the curiosity to look in, and the door happened to be unlocked.”
I said I had abundant curiosity, and would gratify it when I got back.
My hostess smiled and said, “There is nothing to find out now; I have told you all there is to tell. Good night.”
“But,” I said, “why should I go all the way round, through cold passages, when I can walk straight through to my room by this way?” and I pointed to the open door.
“That is very ingenious of you,” she answered; “and you are not wanting either in the quick grasp of a situation, or the assurance to make the most of it. You do not deserve that I should pay you such a pretty compliment! It is too late for banter; I am getting sleepy. Good night.”
XXIII
A MERE LIE
AS the tale I am going to tell you is only a lie, you will understand that it is not of my making; I cannot even pretend to have heard it at first hand. The author was a scientist who lied in the intervals between his researches. It was a relief, I suppose, after too close contact with the eternal truths of Nature. His mental fingers seemed to wander over the keys of an instrument of romance, striking strange chords and producing unsuspected effects in an accompaniment to which he sang a perpetual solo.
Amongst the most eccentric of his class the Professor would still have been a remarkable character. No one seemed to know to what nationality he belonged, and it was useless to ask him for any information, because of the doubt which clouded any statement that he made. Indeed, to put it shortly, he lied like a tombstone. When I met him his only companion was a Papuan boy, so black that a bit of coal would have made a white mark on him; and the Professor would affectionately stroke the child’s head, and say that when he had grown bigger, when his skull was fully developed, he meant to take it, and was looking forward to the day when he could examine it carefully, inside and out, and compare it with the skulls of certain wild tribes which, he felt certain, he should thus be able to prove were of true Melanesian origin. He would then sometimes relate how, during a visit to Cadiz, he took a great fancy to the head of a Spaniard whom he met there. He thought the man was in failing health; but as he could not waste time in the Peninsula, he looked about for some means of hastening the possibly slow progress of disease. The Professor soon found that the owner of the head had a reckless and profligate nephew, with whom he scraped acquaintance. To him the Professor said that he had observed his uncle, and thought him looking far from well, indeed, he did not fancy he could last long, and, explaining that he was himself an anthropologist, concerned in scientific studies for the benefit of humanity, he arranged with the nephew that, when his uncle died, the Professor should pay a sum of £30 and be allowed to take the uncle’s head. The uncle died shortly afterwards, and the money was paid, but the nephew, a man without principle, buried his relative in defiance of his bargain with the Professor.
The means by which the man of science secured full value for his investment made one of his best stories; and some day I may tell it to you, but, when I began this letter, I had quite a different adventure in my mind, and I will take the liberty of asking you to suppose that the collector of skulls is telling you his own tale in his own way.
“I was in Australia, where I had already met with some strange experiences, the last of them a disastrous expedition into the desert, where, when I was quite alone and a thousand miles from the nearest habitation, I fell over two precipices, first breaking my right and then immediately afterwards my left leg. I got back to civilisation with some difficulty, as I had to crawl on my hands most of the way, dragging my broken legs behind me; but what really made the journey seem long was the fact that I had to forage for my own sustenance as well. I was somewhat exhausted by these hardships, and was giving myself a short holiday for rest, when Australia was moved to a pitch of the greatest excitement and indignation by the exploits of a daring bushranger, who set the Police and the Government at defiance, and established such a panic in the land that a party of Volunteers was formed, sworn to track the outlaw down and bring him in alive or dead. I do not say that I had any ultimate designs on the man’s head, but still the skull of a person of that type could not fail to be interesting. So, partly as a relaxation, but mainly in the cause of science, I joined the expedition.
“It would not interest you to describe our failures—how the man outwitted us; how, just when we thought we had him, he would slip through our fingers, partly by his own skill, his knowledge of the bush, and the excellence of his horses, but mainly, I think, by the help of sympathisers, who always gave warning of our movements and most secret plans. I will pass over all that and take you to the final scene in the drama.
“When we were not actually in the bush we were following our quarry from one country-place to another, as the information we received gave us a clue to his whereabouts. It seldom happened that we passed a night in a town, and, when not camping out, we were billeted on the people of the district, the wealthiest and most important of them being too glad to place their houses at our disposal. One evening, after a hot pursuit, feeling sure we were close upon the trail of our man, we reached a great house where a number of guests were already being entertained. In spite of our numbers we were welcomed with effusion, and, after dinner, the ladies of the party took advantage of the sudden arrival of a number of young fellows ready for anything to get up an impromptu dance. I am not a dancing man—my time has been spent in communion with Nature, in reading in the open book of Truth—therefore I left the revellers and went to bed.
“We had had a long and a hard day in the saddle, and I was weary, and must have fallen asleep almost as soon as I lay down.
“Now I must tell you what I afterwards heard from others of my party. It was a little after midnight, and the dancing was going on with great spirit, when I—this, of course, is what they tell me—suddenly appeared at a door of the ball-room in my night-dress, with a rifle in my hand, and, without hesitation, I walked through the room and out into a verandah that led towards the back of the house. My head was thrown somewhat back, my eyes were wide open and seemed fixed on some distant object, while I was evidently unconscious of my immediate surroundings.
“I fear my sudden entry into the dancing-room in such a very unconventional dress was rather a shock to some of the ladies. I am told that several screamed, and one or more of the older ones fainted; but for myself I knew none of this till afterwards. It appears that, what with astonishment at my appearance, and the necessary attentions to the ladies whose nerves were upset, a little time elapsed before any one thought of following me. Then some one fancied he heard the sound of a horse’s feet, and the men of my party pulled themselves together and made for the stables, as that was the direction I seemed to have taken.
“I was nowhere to be seen; but a stable door was open, and my horse, saddle, and bridle had gone. Then the matter began to look serious, and, as my friends saddled their horses and started to look for me, riding they hardly knew where, there were rather dismal forebodings of the probable fate of even a fully-clad man luckless enough to be lost in the Australian bush. It was a lovely starlight night with a young moon, and, under other circumstances, the ride might have been pleasant enough; but the aimlessness of the whole business was becoming painfully evident to the searchers, when the sound of a rifle-shot was distinctly heard at no great distance. The horses’ heads were turned towards the direction from which the sound came, and the troop pushed on at a brisk pace. Almost immediately, a faint column of smoke was perceived, and as the horsemen approached the spot, the embers of a dying fire shed a slight ruddy glow in the darkness. The word was passed to proceed with caution, but the party was already so close that they could see my white night-dress, as I stood with naked feet by the side of my horse, regarding, with a half-dazed expression, the smoking rifle which I held in my hand. Sixty yards off was the thin column of smoke rising from the dying fire.
“I was surrounded by my friends, who all spoke at once, and fired a perfect volley of questions at me. I said, ‘Softly, gentlemen, softly, and I will tell you all I know about it, for indeed the situation seems strange enough. As you know I went to bed. I slept and I dreamed. I suppose I was over-wrought, and my mind was full of the bushranger, for I thought I was again on his track, out in the bush, on horseback and alone. It was night, but I seemed to be riding with a purpose, or my horse knew where he was going, for by-and-by I was drawn towards a thin column of white smoke, the smoke of a wood fire, and then, as I got nearer, I caught the flickering glow of dying embers. I felt the object of our search was there, and I moved forward with extreme caution, till I had got within a hundred yards, and then I distinctly saw the outlaw lying perfectly straight on the ground, his feet towards the fire, and his horse hobbled hard by. I say I saw the outlaw, but I was dreaming, and in my dream I knew it was the man, though I could not see his face. I dismounted, and, leading my horse, I got to within sixty yards of the sleeper. Then, fearing that if I went nearer he might wake and escape me, I took a steady aim, pulled the trigger, and—the next instant I was wide awake standing here in my night-dress.’
“Almost before I had finished I saw men looking towards the fire, which was no dream, and we all of us now distinctly made out the form of a man, lying on his side, almost on his face, with his feet towards the embers and his head by the bush. Moreover, we could both see and hear a horse, that was evidently hobbled not very far from the sleeper. It did not take long to surround the spot where the man lay; but, as we rapidly closed in on the sleeper, he never stirred. A moment more and we were beside him. A dark stream, on which the glow from the fire seemed to shed some of its own red light, was oozing slowly from beneath the man’s chest; and, as several hands turned his face up to the stars and the pale moonlight, it was too evident that he was dead, and that his life had gone out with that crimson stream which flowed from a bullet wound in his heart.
“I did not know the man myself, but several of our party recognised him. It was the bushranger, and, as I expected, his skull was not without features of special interest to science.”
XXIV
TIGERS AND CROCODILES
WHEN I first came, a visitor, to the Malay Peninsula, I was struck by the fact that wherever I went I heard stories of tigers. If, in the course of a day’s ride, I stopped at a village to eat my luncheon, the people who pressed round to watch me and have a chat would always tell me a tiger story of local and comparatively recent occurrence. Wherever I encamped for the night, I should be sure of at least one tale of successful attack or successful resistance, where a tiger had filled the principal rôle. When once I understood the little peculiarity, I took it as a matter of course, and at talking time I used to say, “Now tell me about the tiger: what was it he did?” It may have been accident, but it is no exaggeration to say that my question nearly always drew forth a more or less ghastly story.
Now that my visit is nearly over, it occurs to me that, though I have accumulated an almost endless series of more or less interesting tales of the “low, crouching horror with the cruel fangs,” I have not retailed any of them to you. In a certain number of cases I was myself near enough to be able to verify details, and in others I had means of proving main facts. One is almost bound to say that, because tiger-stories, which are worth repeating, are almost always listened to with incredulity, or, what is worse, with that banter which often means, in plain words, “What I have not seen myself I decline to believe.” That is the attitude of England to the Orient in the presence of a tiger-story with which the auditors can claim no connection. I said that the prevalence of these tales struck me on my first arrival. I soon became blasé, and for a long time I have had no curiosity on the subject; but I will tell you of two tiger incidents that I personally verified, as far as I was able, and I will make no attempt to paint in the background with local colour, in order to supply you with finished pictures.
There is an island by the western shore of the Straits of Malacca. You would never guess it to be an island, for it is simply a block of mangrove-covered mud, with one side towards the sea, and the other three sides separated from the mainland by deep but narrow lagoons of tidal water. The only inhabitants are a few wood-cutters, Malays and Chinese, who live in huts of mat or bark with palm-leaf roofs, while they are employed cutting mangroves and a hard-wood palm called Nîbong. The huts of the Chinese are on the ground, but the Malay dwellings are invariably raised a few feet above the damp soil, and to them entry is obtained by means of a ladder. These hovels are very carelessly built; they are of flimsy materials, only intended to last for a few months, when they are abandoned and rapidly fall to pieces. They serve their purpose. The occupants are out from dawn till afternoon, when they return to cook, eat, and sleep; and so, from day to day, till the job on which they are engaged is completed, and they can return, in the case of the Malays, to their families, while the Chinese are probably moved to another scene of similar labour.
I was obliged to tell you this; you would not understand the story otherwise.
The island covers an area of several thousand acres, but except for the few wood-cutters it was, at the time I write of, uninhabited. At one spot there was a hut containing two Chinese, near it a Malay house with eight or ten men in it, and at no great distance a large shed with nearly a score of Chinese. One dark night, about 11 P.M., the two Chinese who lived together were awakened by a noise in that part of the hut where they kept their food. One of the two got up, struck a light, and went into the back room. Immediately there was a dull thud, as of a man knocked heavily down, and the poor wretch screamed, “Help me, it is a tiger!” His comrade at once got out of his mosquito-curtain, and sprang to his friend’s assistance. Seizing him by the arm, he tried to free him from the clutches of the tiger, who already had a firm hold of the doomed man’s leg. The tug of life and death did not last long, for the tiger pulled the would-be rescuer down on his face, and, the light having been extinguished in the struggle, the man’s courage went out with it, and, in a paroxysm of fear, he climbed on to the roof. There he remained till daylight, while, close beneath him, within the narrow limits of the hut, the tiger dragged his victim hither and thither, snarling and growling, tearing the flesh and crunching the bones of the man, whose agonies were mercifully hidden. In the grey light which heralds dawn, the watcher, clinging to the roof-ridge, saw the tiger drag out of the house and into the forest the shapeless remains of his late companion. When once the sun was fairly up, the survivor slid down, and without daring to look inside the hut, made his way to the nearest Police Station, and reported what had occurred. An examination of the premises fully bore out his statement.
A week passed. The Malays, whose hut was nearest to that visited by the tiger, were careful to bar their door after hearing what had happened; but in this case the precaution proved useless. Easterns, especially those engaged in severe manual labour, sleep exceedingly heavily, and the men of this household were aroused by a smothered cry from one of their number; the noise of a heavy body falling through the thatch having passed practically unnoticed. One of the party got up, lighted a torch, and was at once knocked down by a tiger springing upon him. In a moment every man had seized his heavy chopping-knife, and the whole party fell upon the man-eater, and, by the light of the fallen torch, hit so hard and straight that the beast suddenly sprang through the roof and disappeared. It was then, for the first time, discovered that this was the means by which the tiger had effected its entrance, and it left by the hole which it had made on entering the hut. The first man attacked was dead; the second was taken to hospital, and there died of his wounds.
There was a fourth victim. I am not certain of the facts in that case, but he was severely injured and was sent to hospital, where, I believe, he recovered with the entire loss of his scalp. That filled up the cup of crime. Almost directly afterwards the murderer killed a bullock; the carcass was poisoned, and the next day the body of a tigress was found close by that of her victim. She was not very large, eight feet from nose to the tip of the tail; she was in splendid condition—teeth perfect and coat glossy—but her legs and feet were disproportionately large to the size of her body. On her head there was a deep clean cut, and one of her fore-legs was gashed, evidently by a Malay chopper. The most curious feature was that in certainly two out of the three cases the tigress, who always attacked by night, the only time when the huts were occupied, effected her entrance by springing on the roof and forcing her way through the thin palm thatching.
There is another tiger story that I can tell you in two words. It is curious, it sounds highly improbable; but, after hearing it on the spot from the two men concerned, I believe it.
Quite recently it was the fruit season here, and, as is customary, two men were watching an orchard situated on the side of a main cart-road. The orchard was not enclosed in any way, and the fruit trees on one side actually overhung the road. The road was divided from the orchard by a rather wide but quite shallow ditch, that was always dry except during rain. Fifteen or twenty feet on the inside of this ditch was a tiny lean-to under the trees. The shelter consisted of a raised floor of split bamboos, covered by a palm-thatch roof, and a narrow sort of bench, also under the roof, but level with the floor. The bench was next to the high road.
On the night of which I write, one man was sleeping on the bench, the other on the floor of the shelter. It was fine, with a young, early-setting moon; the scattered houses of a considerable village were all round, and there was nothing to fear.
I said before that natives sleep soundly, and you must believe it, or you will never credit my story. About 1 A.M. the man sleeping on the floor of the shelter heard his friend shouting for help. The voice came from the ditch by the road, and thither the man ran, shouting “What is the matter?” “Thieves!” promptly replied the other, but a moment’s conversation dispelled the idea born of his partially-awakened intelligence, and led them to the true interpretation of the riddle. The man in the ditch said then, and says now, that he was asleep, and knew nothing till he suddenly found himself thrown in the ditch, when he awoke and shouted, “Help, thieves!” But, all the same, when he tried to get up, and his friend helped him to the shelter and got a light, it was seen that he had a deep gash in the shoulder, which kept him in hospital for nearly three weeks. The light also showed the track of a tiger up to the bench, thence to the spot in the ditch where the man was lying, and straight across the high road into another orchard. One other thing it showed, and that was a patch of earth on the top of the wounded man’s head.
The friend’s theory, shared by all the neighbours, is this. He points to the exact position in which the sleeper was lying, and how a post, from ground to roof, completely protected the back of his neck, so that the tiger could not seize him as he must have wished to do. Owing to the man’s position, and the way the post of the house and the rails of the bench (for it had a sort of back) ran, the tiger had to take a very awkward grip of his prey, catching him by the shoulder, and therefore carrying him with his head almost on the ground. Three or four steps, a second or two in time, would bring him to the shallow, dry ditch. It was so shallow that he would not jump it, but the in-and-out of a tiger with a kill would be the equivalent of a jump. In he would go easily enough, but the cut slope of the ditch and the slight rise into the road on the other side just saved the man’s life, for the top of his head hit against the edge of the ditch, and, awkwardly held as he was, knocked him out of the tiger’s mouth.
Once dropped, the beast would not return to pick his prey up again, especially with one man shouting and the noise of the other coming to his assistance.
The tiger is the scourge of the land, the crocodile of the water. They seem to be complement and supplement—each of the other: the “golden terror with the ebon bars,” the very embodiment of vitality, sinew, and muscle—of life that is savage and instant to strike—and the stony-eyed, spiky-tailed monster, outwardly a lifeless, motionless log; but, once those pitiless jaws open, it is only a question of what tooth closes on the victim, whether it be “The last chance,” “Tear the shroud,” or “God save your soul.”
I was starting for some hot springs in a remote spot, far in the interior, where I was certain of finding both elephant and rhinoceros, and the second night of my journey I spent at the junction of two large streams. Strolling back from a swim in the river, the local chief told me this pathetic story of fruitless heroism.
The country hereabout is very sparsely peopled, only a few scattered huts breaking the monotony of the virgin forest, Malays and wild tribes the sole inhabitants. Every house is on the bank of a river, and beyond the produce of their rice-fields and orchards the people rely mainly on the water to supply them with food. The Malay is exceedingly cunning in devising various means for catching fish, but what he likes best is to go out in the evening, just at sundown, with a casting-net. Either he wades about by himself, or, with a boy to steer for him, he creeps along in a tiny dug-out, throws his net in the deep pools, and usually dives in after it, to free the meshes from the numerous snags on which they are sure to become entangled.
One evening, a few days before my arrival, a Malay peasant was netting in the river accompanied by his son, a boy of twelve years old. They were wading, and, while the father moved along the edge of the deeper water under the bank, the boy walked in the shallows out in the stream. The short twilight passed, and the darkness of night was gathering over the waters of the wide river, when suddenly the father was startled by a cry from the boy, and, as he turned, he shuddered to hear the one word, “crocodile,” come in an agonised scream from the poor child. Dropping his net, the man swam and stumbled through the shallowing stream to the boy’s rescue. The child was down, but making frantic, though hopelessly ineffectual struggles to free himself from the grip of a crocodile which had him by the knee and thigh. The man was naked, except for a pair of short trousers; he had no weapon whatever, yet he threw himself, without hesitation, on the saurian, and with his hands alone began a struggle with the hideous reptile for the possession of the boy. The man was on the deep-water side of his foe, determined at all costs to prevent him from drowning the child; he had seized the creature from behind, so as to save himself from its claws, and he tried to find, through darkness and water, the eye-sockets, by which alone he could hope to reach a vulnerable joint in its impenetrable harness. The father’s fury and despair guided his hands to the reptile’s eyes, and pressing his thumbs with all his might on these points of less resistance, he inflicted such pain that the creature gave a convulsive spring which threw the man backwards into the water. But the boy was released, and the saurian retired from the fight to sulk and blink over his defeat in some dark pool beneath the overhanging grasses of the river bank.
The man carried the boy on shore, and thence to his home; but the poor child was so severely injured that, with no skilled surgeon to attend him, he died after three days of suffering.
XXV
A ROSE AND A MOTH
WHEN I came again to this enchanted mountain, above the steaming plains, the first thing I did was to wander in the garden, amid the sweet-smelling blossoms and the bees and butterflies, and feast my eyes upon the ever-new loveliness of the changeless hills, the changeful sky and sea, that crowd the prospect with a thousand pictures of infinite beauty and inspiring grandeur. Then I saw a perfect rose, a rose of divine, deep colour—betwixt rubies and red wine—of the texture of finest velvet, and I gathered it. Once, long ago, at least so it seems, you gave me the fellow of this rose, plucked from the same tree. To me this flower will always suggest you, for, beyond the association, there are certain characteristics which you share with it, “dark and true and tender,” a rare sweetness of perfume and, in the heart of the rose, a slumbering passion, the like of which will some day wake you to the joy or the sorrow of life. I have treasured that sweet-scented blossom as long as it would stay with me; and now, when the petals are falling, I see that they are the counterpart of three rose-petals that had travelled from far over sea in a letter from you. They came the bearers of their own message, and now I seem to read it. Have I been very dense, or am I only fatuous now? Why can’t they speak, these things you have touched, or do they speak and I lack understanding? At least you sent them, and that is much from you. I am grateful, and if I am a prey to vain imaginings, you will forgive me, and understand that I did not, presumptuously and with indecent haste, set about the construction of a castle that, even now, has but my wish for its unsubstantial foundation.
Last night, this morning rather, for it was between midnight and 1 A.M., I was reading that very weird story about a phantom dog. I was deeply engrossed in the weirdest part of it, when I heard a buzzing noise, and in a dark corner behind the piano I saw a pair of very strange eyes approaching and receding. They were like small coals of fire, extraordinarily brilliant, with a pinkish flame, shedding light as well as containing it. I realised that they were the eyes of what looked like a very large moth, whose wings never ceased to move with marvellous rapidity.
My chair was touching a table on which was a long vase of perfume-laden lilies, white lilies with yellow hearts, and by-and-by the moth flew to the flowers and stood, poised in air, before a lily-blossom. There were two very bright lights on the table, and the creature was within two feet of me, so I saw it plainly enough. The wings never for an instant stopped their vibration, and it was so rapid that I could not tell their form or colour. Once directly opposite the flower, the moth produced a delicate proboscis, which it inserted into the blossom, and then slowly pushed it right up the stamen, apparently in search of honey. When extended, this feeler was of quite abnormal length, at least two or three inches. What, however, surprised me was that, having withdrawn the probe (for that was what it looked like, a very fine steel or wire probe, such as dentists use), the instrument seemed to go back into the moth’s head, or wherever it came from, to be again extended to sound the depths of another blossom. There! it is past midnight, and I hear the buzzing in the next room; here it comes; and I can examine the creature again. Alas! what a disappointment: this is a horned beetle. I thought it made over-much noise for my interesting friend. Now to continue my tale.
I observed the moth had a large, dark, cigar-shaped body, with two longish antennæ, much stouter than the proboscis, and infinitely shorter. After pursuing its researches into the internal economy of several lilies, the thing flew into my face, and I ought to have caught and examined it, for then the feeler had disappeared; but I was surprised and rather alarmed, and I thought it would return to the flowers, and I could again watch, and, if necessary, catch it. It made, however, for a dark corner, and then buzzed about the wooden ceiling till it came to an iron hook from which hung a basket of ferns. I was carefully watching it all the time, and at the hook it disappeared, the buzzing ceased, and I concluded the creature had gone into a hole where it probably lived. To-day, in daylight, I examined the ceiling all round the hook, but there was no hole anywhere.
Now is this the beginning of the dog business, and am I to be haunted by those fiery eyes, by the ceaseless clatter of those buzzing wings, and the long supple feeler that suggests the tortures of dentistry, and may probe deep into the recesses of my brain? It can’t, I think, be liver, for I have not yet learnt on which side of me that useful organ lies, and it is not drink. If it is only a moth of a rather uncommon kind, I suppose the fire in its eyes is to light it through the darkness; but I never before saw a moth going into raptures over flowers, and I can’t yet understand where it puts away that instrument of torture, unless it winds it round a bobbin, inside its head or its body, when not using it. It reminds me of a man I saw swallowing swords at the Aquarium. I was quite willing to admire and believe, until he took up a sword, the blade of which, by outside measurement, stretched from his mouth nearly to his knee, and swallowed it to the hilt at one gulp. Then I doubted; and the knotty sticks, umbrellas, and bayonets, which he afterwards disposed of with consummate ease, only increased my dislike for him. Still this proboscis is not an umbrella, and though it is about twice as long as the moth itself, and seems to come out of the end of its nose, I know so little of the internal arrangements of these creatures that I dare say this one can, by winding the instrument up like the spring of a watch, find room for it in its head. Why the thing won’t keep its wings still, and sit quietly on the petals of the flower while it thrusts that probe into the lily’s nerve-centres, I can’t imagine. Then one could examine it quietly, and not go to bed in fear of a deadly nightmare.
Perhaps, after all, it is the result of reading about that “Thing too much,” that starving, murderous cur, at 1 A.M.; if it is, I had better go to bed now, for it has just struck the hour. Am I wrong about the message of the rose? You see how hard I try to do your bidding.
XXVI
A LOVE-PHILTRE
THERE is, to me, something strangely attractive about Muhammadan prayers, especially those fixed for the hour of sunset. Time and again I have gone in with the Faithful, when the priest chants the mu’azzin, and I have sat by and been deeply impressed by the extraordinary reverence of the worshippers, while eye and ear have been captivated by the picturesque figures against their colourful background, the wonderfully musical intoning of the priest, and the not less harmonious responses. I do not pretend that this oft-repeated laudation of God’s name, this adoration by deep sonorous words and by every bodily attitude that can convey profound worship, would appeal to others as it does to me, even when I have to guess at the exact meaning of prayers whose general import needs no interpretation.
The fifth hour of prayer follows closely on that fixed for sundown, and the interval is filled up by singing hymns of praise led by the priest, or by telling, and listening to, stories of olden times. Of Eastern places the Malay Peninsula had special attractions for me, and the few European travellers I met there, and who, like myself, were not bound to a programme, seemed equally fascinated. Most of them either prolonged their stay, or determined to return for a longer visit.
It is difficult to say exactly wherein lies the spell, but there are beauties of scenery, the undoubted charm of the people (as distinguished from other Easterns), and the sense of mystery, of exclusiveness, of unspoilt nature and undescribed life, that arouse a new interest in the wearied children of the West. It is pleasant to get at something which is not to be found in any encyclopædia, and it is, above all, gratifying to obtain knowledge direct and at the fountain-head. This is why I often return, in thought, to the narrow land that lies between two storm-swept seas, itself more free from violent convulsions than almost any other. There, is perpetual summer; no volcanoes, no earthquakes, no cyclones. Even the violence of the monsoons, that lash the China Sea and the Indian Ocean into periodical fury, is largely spent before it reaches the unprotected seaboards of the richly dowered peninsula.
Forgive this digression. I was sitting with the Faithful, and the first evening prayer was over. The brief twilight was fast deepening into night. The teacher excused himself, and the disciples pushed themselves across the floor till they could sit with their backs against the wall, leaving two rows of prayer-carpets to occupy the middle of the room. I had asked some question which, in a roundabout way, led to the telling of this tale.
“I remember all about it,” said a man, sitting in the corner; “he was a stranger, a man of Sumatra, called Nakhôdah Ma’win, and he gave the girl a love-potion that drove her mad. He was a trader from Bâtu Bâra, and he had been selling the famous silks of his country in the villages up our river. Having exhausted his stock and collected his money, he embarked in his boat and made his way to the mouth of the river. Every boat going to sea had to take water on board, and there were two places where you could get it; one was at Teluk Bâtu on our coast, and the other was on an island hard by. But, in those days, the strait between the coast and the island was a favourite haunt of pirates, and Nakhôdah Ma’win made for Teluk Bâtu to get his supply of fresh water. He was in no hurry, a week or a month then made no difference; so he first called on the chief of the place, a man of importance, styled Toh Permâtang, and then he began to think about getting the water. Now it happened that Toh Permâtang had four daughters, and the youngest but one, a girl called Ra’ûnah, was very beautiful. When there is a girl of uncommon beauty in a place, people talk about it, and no doubt the Nakhôdah, idling about, heard the report and managed to get sight of Ra’ûnah. At once he fell in love with her, and set about thinking how he could win her, though she was already promised in marriage to another. These Sumatra people know other things besides making silks and daggers, and Nakhôdah Ma’win had a love-philtre of the most potent kind. It was made from the tears of the sea-woman whom we call dûyong. I know the creature. I have seen it. It is bigger than a man, and something like a porpoise. It comes out of the sea to eat grass, and, if you lie in wait for it, you can catch it and take the tears. Some people eat the flesh, it is red like the flesh of a buffalo; and the tears are red, and if you mix them with rice they make the rice red; at least, people say so. Anyhow, Nakhôdah Ma’win had the philtre, and he got an old woman to needle the way for him, as one always does, and she managed to mix the dûyong’s tears with Ra’ûnah’s rice, and, when the girl had eaten it, she was mad with love for the Nakhôdah. He stayed at Teluk Bâtu for a month, making excuses, but all to be with Ra’ûnah; and he saw her every day—with the help of the old woman, of course. You can’t go on like that for long without some one suspecting something, and, though I never heard for certain that there was anything really wrong, the girl was mad and reckless, and the Nakhôdah took fright. She was a chief’s daughter, while he was a trader and a stranger, and he knew they would kill him without an instant’s hesitation if Toh Permâtang so much as suspected what was going on. Therefore, having got the water on board, the Nakhôdah put to sea, saying nothing to any one. In a little place people talk of little things, and some one said, in the hearing of Ra’ûnah, that the Bâtu Bâra trader had sailed away. With a cry of agony the girl dashed from the house, her sisters after her; and seeing the boat sailing away, but still at no great distance, for there was little breeze, she rushed into the sea and made frantic efforts to tear herself from the restraining arms of her sisters, who could barely prevent her from drowning herself. At the noise of all this uproar a number of men ran down to the shore, and, when they saw and heard what was the matter, they shouted to the Nakhôdah to put back again. He knew better than to thrust his neck into the noose, and, though they pursued his boat, they failed to catch him.
“When Ra’ûnah saw that she could not get to her lover, and that each moment was carrying him farther away, she cried to him to return, and bursting into sobs, she bemoaned her abandonment, and told her tale of love in words of endearment and despair that passed into a song, which to this day is known as Ra’ûnah’s Lament.
“Yes, I can remember the verses, and will repeat them if it does not weary you. The Nakhôdah never returned.
“‘Oh, shelter! my dear shelter! the palm stands in the plain.
The fruit of the nutmeg falls to the ground and lies there.
Thine is thy sister, small but comely,
Thy diamond! the light of Permâtang Guntong.
Oh, my shelter! I hear the measured splash of the oars;
I see the drift-weed caught in the rudder.
Thou art above, my protecting shelter;
I am beneath, in lowly worship.
Oh, my shelter! ’twas the hour of evening prayer when thou settest sail;
The oars are straining and the boat reels along.
God’s mercy is great, His promise sure;
By His blessing we shall meet in the Garden of Paradise.
Oh, my shelter! the breeze is blowing in fitful gusts;
Be careful not to pull the sail to the left.
In three months and ten days,
Thou wilt return, my brother!
Oh, my shelter! make for the island, Sri Rama;
For there are two marabouts and a fish-weir.
Though thou leavest me, be not long absent;
In two, at most in three, months, return again.
Oh, my shelter! the waters of the sea are calm,
Yet do not hug the shore.
Have no fear of my betrothed;
Was not thy sword but lately sharpened?
Oh, my shelter! thou camest to Teluk Bâtu,
And the peace of my heart has gone.
Satan delights in my undoing,
For my heart cleaves to thine.
Oh, my shelter! take good thought,
The passions war with the soul.
Do not waste the gold in thy hand,
Lest scoffers have cause to mock thee.
Oh, my Nakhôdah! when the mattress is spread, who will lie on it?
Who shall be covered by the folded coverlet?
Who will sit upon the embroidered mat,
Or lean against the great round pillow?
Oh, my Nakhôdah! the feast is waiting, but who will eat it?
The water is cool, but who will drink it?
The napkin is there, whose mouth can it wipe?
The sireh is ready, but who will use it?
Thy Sister is cold, who will fondle her?
Ah-hu! ah-hu! come death, deliver me.’
“And then she fell to weeping and moaning, struggling with her sisters, and trying to cast herself into the sea.
“That is the tale of Ra’ûnah and Nakhôdah Ma’win, and every one knows it. Some tell it one way and some another, but that is how it came to me. The girl was mad, mad with love and regret for six months; and then her father married her to another man, and that cured her. I knew the man: he was a foreigner. She and two of her sisters died long ago, but the other is alive still.
“How to get the dûyong’s tears? Oh, that is easy enough. You catch the sea-woman when she comes up the sand to eat the sweet grass on shore. I told you how to do it. You have to lie in wait and she waddles up on two sort of fins that she uses like feet, helping with her tail. If she sees you, she tries to get back into the sea, but you stand between her and the water and so catch her. Then, if you want her tears, you make a palisade of sticks in the deeper water of the bay through which she came, and there you bind her in a sort of cage, at the surface of the water, so that she can’t move. It is like the thing they put elephants in when they are half-tamed. When she finds she is held fast there, and cannot get down into the deep water to her young, she weeps, and as the tears stream down her face you catch them, sweep them into a vessel, and you have the philtre.”
There was a pause. Then a man said, “I hear they sell dûyong’s tears in Penang.”
The teller of the story at once replied, “Very likely, I have heard it too; but it is probably only some make-believe stuff. You must try it before you buy it.”
“How do you do that?”
“Easily. Rub some of the philtre on a chicken’s beak; if it is really potent, the chicken will follow you wherever you go!”
“Have you seen that yourself?”
“No. I want no love-philtres. I manage well enough without them. I don’t care to play with a thing you can’t control. I might get into trouble, like Nakhôdah Ma’win. It is easy enough to give the potion, but I never heard what you do to stop it. Anyhow, if I wanted to buy the stuff, I should first try it on a chicken, and if it had no effect I should not believe in it, for every one knows that the story of Ra’ûnah and Ma’win is true, or they would not sing about it to this day. Hark! the teacher is calling to prayer.”
A number of boys’ high-pitched voices were chanting—
“Bihak-illah, rizal-l’ Allah!
A’ain-nu na, bi-aun illah!”
and, across their chorus, came the sonorous, far-reaching tones of the priest—
“Allah-hu akbar!
Allah-hu akbar!
Ashâd-du Allah, illah-ha il-Allah.”
When the little group of men had fallen into their places, and the only sound in the building was the musical intoning of the half-whispered prayers, I could not help musing on the extraordinarily happy expression, “he found an old woman to needle the way for him.” Nothing could be more delightful than the symbol of the small, insinuating, finely tempered, horribly sharp bit of steel that goes so easily through things, and leaves no trace of its passage. And then there is nearly always a thread behind it, and that remains when the needle has gone!
I have translated Ra’ûnah’s lament for you absolutely literally, except that the word which occurs so often, and which I have rendered “shelter,” means “umbrella.” The umbrella here, as in other countries, is an emblem of the highest distinction: a shelter from sun and rain, a shield and protection, “the shadow of a great rock in a dry land.” A yellow umbrella is a sign and token of sovereignty.
XXVII
MOONSTRUCK
ONCE I suggested to you that the greatest facts of life are, in English, expressed by the smallest words, and, with that dainty, hesitating manner that is so captivating, you almost consented to agree. Look, for instance, at these words: God, sin, good, bad, day, night, sun, moon, light, dark, heat, cold, earth, sky, sea, world, peace, war, joy, pain, eat, drink, sleep, love, hate, birth, death. They cover a good deal of ground, and you can easily add to them. A philologist would tell you why the most profound conceptions, the most important abstract facts, are denoted by simple words, but the explanation might not interest you. The circle of my acquaintances does not include a philologist; my nearest approach to such dissipation is a friend who pretends to be a lexicographer. Now look at that word, it is long enough in all conscience, but the idea which it represents only makes one tired.
Whilst a good reason could be found for expressing original principles in monosyllables, I wonder if any one can say why that fantastic product of this century, the (so-called) educated Indian, revels in the use and misuse of all the longest words he can find to convey his, sometimes grotesque, but nearly always commonplace, thoughts, when he tries to put them in English. Curiously enough, this transcendental language, which is the peculiar pride of the Indian babu, leaves on the mind of the listener no concrete idea, no definite conception of what the speaker wants to say; but it does invariably conjure up a figure typical of the class which employs this barbarous tongue as a high-sounding medium in which to disguise its shallow thoughts. And then one feels sorry for the poor overthrown words, the maimed quotations, and the slaughtered sentences, so that one realises how happy is that description which speaks of the English conversation of East Indians as a mêlée, wherein the words lie about “like dead men on a battle-field.” There must be something in the Indian’s character to account for this; and, as a great stream of words pours from the narrow channel of his mind, and gives expression to his turgid thoughts in an avalanche of sound, so you will see the same extravagance of outward display in the manner of his life, in his strange garments, his sham jewellery, and his pitiful and disastrous attempts to ape what he thinks is the riotous “fastness” of the quite white man. Behind this outward seeming, there is also, in many cases, nothing, and sometimes even less than that. Misapplied English education has a good deal to answer for, and, if the babu has a soul, it may demand a reckoning from those who gave it a speech in which to make known the impossible aspirations of a class that is as rich in wordy agitation as it is poor in the spirit and physique of a ruling race. Many babus cannot quench revolt. Perhaps the babu is the “thing too much” in India; they could do without him. And yet he and education, combined, make a growing danger that may yet have to be counted with. But enough of the babu; I cannot think how he got into my letter.
My visit to this strange and beautiful country is over. For the last time a steamer is hurrying me down one of those great waterways which, until recent times, have been the only means of getting into this mysterious land. The dying day supplied a feast of colour, of momentarily changing pictures that, however familiar, seem always new, always resplendent with amazing lights, delicate half-tints, and soft shadows, such as only a moisture-charged atmosphere and a fiery sun can produce. Does the thought of such an evening ever come back to you, or are you trying to accustom yourself to the greys and neutral tints of the life of resignation? Ah! The moon is just rising; the scene is quite enchanting, and I must try to tell you exactly what I see.
The river is six or seven hundred yards wide. It is high tide, and, to the eye, the picture has but three component parts—sky, wood, and water. Sky and water are divided by a belt of wood which borders the river. The continuous belt of trees, of varying height, growing from out the river and up the bank, makes a deeply indented line of vegetation. This belt is unbroken, but it rises into plumes and graceful fronds, where some loftier palm or giant jungle-tree towers above its neighbours, and all its foliage shows clear as an etching against the grey-blue background. Again, the belt dips and leaves broken spaces of sky, where the foliage suddenly dwarfs. The sky is dark grey just above the trees, but the grey changes to blue as the eye travels upward, and overhead the zenith is sapphire, cloudless sapphire spangled with stars. The water is like burnished gun-metal, and, under the shore, there is a shadow as dark and wide as the line of trees which throws it. The moon, a perfect circle of brilliant light, not silver nor gold, but the colour produced by silvering over a golden ground, has just risen, and rides a short space above the trees. In the deepest shadow, exactly where water and land meet, there is a narrow streak of amazingly bright light; then a space of darkness, covered by the shadow of the trees, and then a veritable column of gold, the width of the moon, and the length of the moon’s distance above the trees. The column is not still, it is moved by the shimmer of the water, and it dazzles the eyes. The effect is marvellous: this intense brilliance as of molten gold, this pillar of light with quivering but clearly-defined edges, playing on a mirror of dark burnished steel. Then that weird glint of yellow flame, appearing and disappearing, in the very centre of the blackest shadow, and, above all, the Queen of Night moves through the heavens in superb consciousness of her own transcendent beauty, calmly satisfied to recognise that the sapphire firmament, and all the world of stars, are but the background and the foils to her surpassing loveliness.
As the moon rises, the reflection in the river lengthens, widens, breaks into ripples of amber, and shoots out arrows of paler light. Soon there is a broad pathway of glittering wavelets, which opens out into a great silvery road, and the light of the risen moon dispels the grey fog that hung over the belt of jungle, and tinges with silver the few fleecy clouds that emphasise the blueness of their background. Then a dark curtain gradually spreads itself across the sky, dims the moonlight, veils the stars, and throws a spell over the river, hiding its luminous highway, and casting upon the water the reflection of its own spectre-like form.
The fog clung to the river, but when we reached the sea the moon reigned alone, paling the stars and filling the air with a flood of delicious light. I was leaning over the side of the ship, wondering where I could ever see such a sight again, when a man of the country came and stood by me. I said something to him of the beauty of the night, and he answered, “Yes, there are flowers in the moon.”
I asked him what he meant, and this is what he told me:—
“It was a night like this, and I was going with my mother, my wife, and child to a neighbouring island to visit some relatives. We were travelling by a small steamer, and in the early hours of the morning were coasting along the shore of the island. The moon was then setting, but it was extraordinarily brilliant, and I tried to find a spot in the shadow where I could sleep. As I settled myself comfortably, I noticed that my mother was standing, looking over the bulwark. It might have been an hour later when I awoke, and, as we were near the port, I went to rouse my people and collect my luggage. I could not find my mother anywhere. The rest of my party and all the other passengers were asleep till I roused them, and no one had seen or heard anything unusual. We all of us searched the ship in every direction, but without success, and the only conclusion was that the poor old lady had somehow fallen overboard. By this time the vessel had reached the anchorage, and there was nothing to be done but to go ashore. I took my family to the house of our friends, some miles from the landing-place, and then wondered what to do next. The village we had come to was on the shore, and not very far from the place where I had last seen my mother on board the ship. I determined, therefore, to drive to a spot as nearly opposite that place as I could get, and then to walk along the beach, and ask at the huts of the Chinese fishermen whether they had seen a body in the water. The first two or three cottages I came to were empty, but I made my way to a solitary hut which I saw standing in the centre of a tiny bay. In that hut, to my surprise and great joy, I found my mother and two Chinese fishermen. The men told me that they had gone out before daylight to set their nets, and in the light of the moon, then almost on the horizon, they saw a woman, as they described it, “standing in the water,” so that, though her head only was visible, she seemed to be upright, and they imagined she must be supported somehow, or resting her feet on an old fishing stake, for the water was fifteen or twenty feet deep there. She did not cry out or seem frightened, only rather dazed. They rowed to the spot and pulled her into the boat, and just then the moon sank out of sight. The old lady had lost her skirt, but otherwise seemed little the worse, and, as far as the fishermen could see, she was not resting on any support. When I asked her how she got into the sea, she said she could not tell, but she was looking at the moon, and she saw such lovely flowers in it that she felt she must try to get to them. Then she found herself in the water, but all the time she kept looking at the flowers till the fishermen pulled her into their boat and brought her on shore. I took her to the house where we were staying, and I have left her in the island ever since, because I dare not let her travel by sea again.”
XXVIII
THE “DEVI”
I AM in Agra. The Japanese say that if you have not been to Nikko you cannot say kekko. That is an insular conceit, meant, no doubt, originally for Japan and the Japanese only; but national pride—speaking as the frog spoke who lived under half a coconut-shell, and thought the limits of his vision comprised the universe—now declares that the Nikko temples are incomparable. I cannot claim to have seen all the great buildings in the world, but I have visited some of the most famous, and I say with confidence that the Tâj at Agra is the most perfect triumph of the architect’s and builder’s skill in existence. I visited this tomb first by daylight, and it is difficult to give you any idea of the extraordinary effect the first sight of it produced on me. I drove in a wretched two-horse gharry, along a dusty and uninteresting road, until the rickety vehicle was pulled up with a jerk in front of a great red stone portal, and I got out. Through that lofty Gothic arch, and framed by it, appeared a vision of white loveliness, an amazing structure of dazzling marble, shooting towers and minarets into a clear, blue, cloudless sky.
The Tâj—the Crown of Kings—stands on a raised terrace; it is a considerable distance from the gate, and the eye is led to it by a wide, straight path, bisecting a garden, which, at the first glance, seems a mass of dark green foliage. The garden is extensive, and shut in by a high wall. Just outside this wall, to right and left of the Tâj, are a palace and a mosque of deep red sandstone. More than that you cannot see, but the river Jumna flows under the rear wall of the raised terrace on which the Tâj stands.
The marble monument, which contains the tombs of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, is an enormous building, and represents seventeen years’ work of a force of twenty thousand men. But the design is so faultless, the proportions so perfect, the whole effect so exquisitely graceful, that, until you are close to the wide steps leading up to the terrace, and realise that men standing by the walls look almost like flies, you are not struck by any sense of extraordinary size.
The building itself is superb. The conception is absolutely unique, and the harmony of every part a crowning triumph; the splendour of material, the purity of that dazzling, unbroken whiteness—these are a joy and a delight.
But the surroundings, the setting in which this jewel stands, are so marvellously well calculated to exactly frame the picture, that the whole scene seems a vision, unearthly in its beauty. When once that sensation passes, when one has gazed, and blinked, and rubbed one’s eyes, and compassed the reality of it all, one is profoundly impressed by the genius that could raise such a heavenly edifice, and one is proudly thankful to have lived that hour of life, to have felt the soul stir, and to carry away an imperishable memory of one of the noblest of human achievements.
The main entrance is by a great arched door, bordered by Arabic characters in black marble let into the white wall. Pierced marble windows admit a dim and softened light to a lofty chamber. In the comparative gloom one slowly discerns a marble wall surrounding the centre space. The wall is inlaid with precious stones—jasper and onyx, sardius and topaz, amethyst, chrysobel, and sapphire, set in floral designs. Within this enclosure are the white marble tombs of Shah Jahan and his wife.
Last night the moon was full, and, an hour before midnight, I went and sat in that dark stone palace, and revelled in the beauty of a spectacle that cannot be equalled on earth. It is said that the palace was built for Royal ladies, and was specially designed to give them the most perfect view of the Tâj. There is an open stone verandah, over which I leaned and gazed in ecstasy at the scene. The dark trees of the garden spread from under the walls of the palace over a wide space of ground, and from them rose the incomparable Tâj; minarets, walls, and windows, blazing with silver sheen under the direct rays of the moon, softened in the half shadows, darkening to deep tones of grey on the river face. Slightly to the left of the Tâj, and as far beyond it as the Tâj was from me, stood the mosque, a splendid foil to the glittering radiance of the tomb. In the shadow, cast by the great mass of marble, rippled the shallow waters of the wide river. The rear walls of the building are on the edge of the bank, and beyond the Tâj the river stretches away in a silver ribbon towards the city. In a line to the right of the Tâj, and distant about three miles, rises a dark hill, crowned by the Palace and Citadel of Agra. The enclosing walls and battlements, built of the same red sandstone, were scarcely distinguishable from the hill; but the moonlight caught the white marble buildings within, and innumerable lights twinkled from walls and windows.
I must have been a long time in my solitude, intoxicated by the wonder of the night and the splendour of the scene, when I heard the strains of a violin, played with extraordinary skill. The music seemed familiar (for I had heard the songs of many Eastern lands), and, moreover, I became certain that the instrument was being played somewhere in the great building wherein I chanced to be. The sounds ceased, but presently the musician began a Persian dance which I recognised; and as the wild air leaped from the strings in quickening waves of sound, the devilry of the mad nautch seemed to possess me, and it became impossible not to beat time to the rhythm of the music. Again there was silence, and I wondered greatly who could make a violin throb with such feeling, and where the minstrel could be. Whilst still absorbed by these thoughts, and anxiously listening for the faintest sound, my ear caught the strains of an Arab love-song that I knew well enough, but had never heard played like this before, nor yet under such circumstances. The air was in the minor key, and was, I knew, played only on three strings, but it seemed to wail and shiver from the instrument out into the night, through the trees, across the bright lights and deep shadows, to mingle with the crooning of the river, to fill the atmosphere and soar towards the empyrean. It was like the song of a lark at the dawn of a day in spring. The power of the musician was such that Tâj and city, mosque and river and garden faded away, and I distinctly saw a narrow street in an Arab town. Flat-roofed buildings, pierced by a few small iron-barred windows, lined either side of a street, which rose in a gentle ascent till it twisted out of sight round a distant corner. A brilliant moon, shining in a cloudless sky, threw into white light the roofs on one side the street. But the houses on the other side cast a deep shadow, and in that shadow a man, with his back to me, was standing playing the three-stringed Arab gambus, and singing—singing as though for his life, in a low, sweet voice—up to a barred window whence issued a ray of yellow light. I thought I could even understand the words of the passionate serenata, though I know almost as little of the Arabic as of the Patagonian tongue. It was the music, the angelic skill of the violinist, which had bewitched me, and I stood enthralled by that soul-entrancing melody.
Before you write me down an emotional ass, remember where I was, and try to imagine what I saw, what I heard. I cannot expect to impress you with any true idea of either scene or song.
While those yearning, thrilling, imploring waves of sound cried to the exquisite beauty of the night, I was spell-bound. But, in the silence that followed, I reasoned that the music came from above me, probably from the roof, and that I might well seek the author of it. I passed through a maze of passages, where light and shadow alternated, and, as I groped about to find a staircase, I was guided to my object by the strains of the violin, and a gleam of light which, striking through a narrow window, disclosed a winding stair.
As I expected, the stairs led up to the roof, and I was not a little surprised by what I saw there. The head of the staircase was in a corner of the great flat space forming the roof, and a parapet, about thirty inches high, completely enclosed it, except for a flight of outside steps leading down to another and lower roof. The cement floor and surrounding parapet were so brilliantly lighted by the moon, that every inch unshadowed was as bright as day. Four people occupied the space, and my eye was first caught by a white-robed, dark-complexioned boy, who, leaning against the parapet, played a violin with closed eyes, his face set in an expression of dreamy rapture. At a little distance from him, but nearer to me, were a woman and two girls. The woman sat upon a quantity of silks spread over the parapet, while she leaned against a pile of cushions placed against a round stone column. I should say she was hardly twenty. Her skin was very fair, her complexion wonderfully clear, her hair black and abundant, her eyes large, dark, and liquid, while long curling lashes threw a shadow far down her cheeks. The eyebrows were strongly marked and slightly arched, like the artificial spur of a game-cock. Her nose was straight and rather small; her scarlet lips made a perfect Cupid’s bow, and the upper lip was so short that it disclosed teeth of extreme regularity with a whiteness and sheen as of pearls. The chin was round, the face oval; the ears, hands, and feet very small, but beautifully formed. This woman, or girl, was clothed in silk skirts of a dull red, heavy with gold thread; she wore a jacket of white satin, embroidered with small red and gold flowers, and fastened by three diamond brooches. On her head, falling in graceful folds over her shoulders, was a dark gossamer veil, studded with tiny gold stars, and bordered by a wide hem of shining gold lace. In one hand she listlessly held a long spray of stephanotis. She seemed absorbed by the music, and the wonder of that soft white light, which so enhanced her loveliness that I stared in wide-eyed admiration, forgetful of Eastern customs, of politeness, and all else, save only that fascinating figure. At her feet, on the roof, sat two girls, attendants, both clad in bright-coloured silk garments, and both wearing gold-embroidered gossamer veils.
Not one of the group seemed to notice my presence, and I heard no words exchanged.
It was long past midnight; the violinist had excelled himself in pulse-stirring dances, in passionate love-songs and laments that sounded like the sobbing of despairing hearts. I had gradually moved forward, and was leaning over the parapet looking towards Agra, and feeling that no moment of a night like this could be missed or forgotten, when suddenly I heard a sharp cry, half of surprise, half of dread. I turned and saw my four companions all gazing with startled eyes at something beyond me, out past the parapet, towards the glistening river. I turned again, and I now saw a white marble bridge stretching in a single graceful arch—an arch like a strung bow—springing from the centre of the back wall of the Tâj across the river, till it rested on the farther bank. There rose another Tâj! the exact duplicate of the one standing on the hither side of the stream, as white, as graceful, as perfect in all respects as its fellow.
The roadway of the bridge was enclosed in a sort of long gallery, the sides of marble fretwork, with windows at intervals opening on to the river. The roof was formed of marble slabs. One could see the shining water through the perforated walls of the gallery; occasionally, where two opposite windows were open, there were glimpses of the distant lights, the palace, and the hill. The beautiful flat arch of that bridge, its graceful lines, and the airy lightness of the structure are unforgetable. Think of that bridge, that pure white bow of glistening stone, spanning the river’s width, and tying Tâj to Tâj!
As I feasted my eyes, in wonder and admiration, on this alluring vision, a mist rose from the river, gathered volume and density, shut out the distance, enveloped bridge and river, bank and building, and hung in a thick white cloud, the ends creeping rapidly to right and left across the level plain. I looked upward; the moon was slowly sinking towards the west; it had a faint bluish tinge, a common effect at very late hours of the night, when it seems to shine with even greater brilliance.
I turned to look for my companions, but found I was alone. There was not a sign of lady, or maid, or minstrel. They had disappeared, vanished without a sound; and, of their late presence, there was no sign—except the spray of stephanotis. It was strange, I thought, as I walked to the spot where the flower lay and picked it up, but one cannot be astonished at anything in the East.
I felt a chill puff of wind, and I glanced back towards Agra. The mist was moving, rising rapidly in wisps; it was thin and transparent, and I could indistinctly see the background through it. The marble bridge, the other Tâj—that second tomb Shah Jahan meant to build—were gone. Clearly my imagination, a mirage, or the mist had played me a trick. And then the girl, the violinist: were they also the phantoms of my brain? Surely that was impossible. Why, I can see the girl now; I could tell you every detail of her face, her figure, pose, and dress. The violinist could have been no spirit; though he played like an angel, his music was earthly, and perfectly familiar to me.
I gave it up and went away, wondering; but I took the stephanotis, and it stands in front of me now in a tiny vase of water.
To-day, in daylight, when the sun was high, and I had eaten and bandied commonplaces, and knew that I was sane, I went to find the old creature who keeps the gate of the garden of the Tâj. I asked him who was in the Red Palace late last night, and he said that not having been there himself he could not tell; moreover, that he did not turn night into day, but slept, like other respectable people. I felt snubbed but still curious, so I said—
“The boy who plays the violin, who is he?”
“What boy? Where? How should I know?” he said, but he began to look rather startled.
“On the roof of the Red Palace, over there,” I replied, pointing to the corner of the building visible from where we stood. “And the lady, the young lady in the beautiful clothes, who is she?”
But the old man had started, and at mention of the girl he dropped the stick on which he leaned; and as he slowly and painfully recovered himself from the effort of picking it up, I heard him say, in an awe-struck whisper, “The Devi!”
My attempts to extract anything further from this old fossil were futile. He hobbled off to his den, muttering to himself, and evidently anxious to be rid of my society.
After this rebuff I hesitate to make further inquiries from others, because I know no one here; because the white people never concern themselves with native matters, and are mainly interested in gossip; and because I am conscious that my story invites doubt, and must rest on my word alone. It is not the personal ridicule I am afraid of, but I don’t like the idea of jest at the expense of the girl whom I saw on that parapet, the Devi whose stephanotis perfumes my room.
XXIX
THE DEATH-CHAIN
WHEN last I wrote and told you about the Devi, I had a vague hope that my stephanotis would, indirectly, prove that the lovely girl, from whose hand it had fallen, gathered it in some heavenly garden, beyond mortal ken, where Death and Time are unknown.
I did not like to say so, but I meant to keep the flower, and, if I had seen it fade and die, I should have been disappointed, perhaps even rather surprised. You will say such fantastic ideas can only come to people whose minds have been warped by contact with Oriental mysticism; and, while you are probably right, I reply that when you have a Tâj, when you have an atmosphere of sunshine unsoiled by coal-smoke, when, in fine, any really big miracle is wrought in your Western world, then you may see a Devi sitting in the moonlight, you may hear angelic music played by a boy unknown to the critics, and you may even weave romances round a spray of stephanotis.
I guarded my flower carefully, and, for five days, I could not see that it showed any sign of fading. True I kept it in water, even when I was travelling; and, if it came from a heavenly garden, I dare say that care was altogether needless; but we are creatures of habit, and my Faith was not very robust, and leaned somewhat heavily on Hope. I had to leave Agra and journey through Rajputana. On the fifth day from that night, which I had almost said “was worth, of other nights, a hundred thousand million years,” I was in Jaipur, and from there I visited the glorious Palace of Amber. I restrain myself with difficulty from going into raptures over that ancient castle, which, for so many centuries, has stood on that distant hillside and watched its many masters come and go, while the ladies loved, and gossiped, and hated, in the Hall of a Thousand Delights, and the horsemen and spearmen went down from the gates to the dusty road, the seething plains, whence many of them never returned.
I will spare you. You are long-suffering, but there must be a limit even to your patience. I know that qui s’excuse s’accuse, and I offer no excuse for trying to draw for you the pictures that are only seen beyond beaten tracks. Ruskin has said, “The greatest thing the human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.” If thousands can think for one who can see, surely there must be still thousands who see and cannot tell “in a plain way” what they saw. There are millions whose eyes are to them only what animals’ eyes are—aids to the gratification of appetite. There are thousands more who do see and appreciate, yet cannot put what they have seen into words; cannot communicate their own feelings, cannot help another to share, even a little, in the joy that has come to them through greater opportunities. I have often wondered why people who have seen the most interesting places on earth, have been present perhaps on memorable occasions, and have met the most famous people of their time, showed, in their conversation, no sign of these advantages, and, if questioned, could only give the most disappointing, uninteresting description of any personal experiences. Then there are the very few who have seen, and can help others to see again, through their eyes; but they seldom do it, because they have found that, with rare exceptions, the relation of their experiences is but little appreciated. Ruskin himself is one of the few who can see and can describe, but others may hesitate to string the plain words, knowing how little worthy they will be of what the eyes have seen.
Some of this I may have been thinking, as I slowly made my way back to Jaipur; but, when I reached the house of my sojourn, almost the first thing I noticed was that the tiny vase which had carried my spray of stephanotis was empty of all but water. Of course I sent for everybody, and made minute inquiries, and, of course, every one had seen the flower, and no one had touched it, and I was left to draw any conclusion I pleased.
I drew none. There are no data on which to come to a conclusion; but the facts remind me of a story I will tell you.
I have an Italian friend. He is a very uncommon type, and worthy of far more attention than I will give him now, because, for the moment, I am concerned rather with his story than with him. He was in Egypt, and whilst there he discovered a buried city. Carefully and wisely he kept his knowledge to himself, till, owing to an absence of some months, he lost all trace of the place, and never found it again. A sand-storm had buried it once more.
The original discovery was purely the result of accident, and his first researches had to be conducted in secrecy, without assistance, otherwise the trouvaille would have become public property. His explorations led him to a building that he believed was a tomb; and having, by laborious efforts, gained an entrance, he had the satisfaction of proving that his surmise was correct, and also the reward of finding in the chamber a single sarcophagus, containing a mummified girl, or woman, in wonderful preservation. He knew the common superstition that disaster would befall any one who disturbed a mummy; but he thought little of the tale, and did not mean to be deterred from removing the body when he should have the means to do so. Meanwhile he had to be content with what he could carry, and that consisted of a few coins, and a necklace which he unfastened from the lady’s poor shrivelled neck, or rather from the cere-cloths in which it was swathed.
Perhaps you have never seen one of these mummy necklaces; they are rather curious, and, from my friend’s account of it, the one he found nearly resembled others which I have seen myself. The material seemed to be some kind of pottery, or opaque glass made into rough beads, and short lengths of small glazed piping, strung together in a quaint pattern. The prevailing colour was a sort of turquoise with an extra dash of green, and every bit of piping was so tinted; but, alternately with these blue lengths, were strung groups of round beads, in bunches of two to six or eight, or even more. By far the majority of the beads were turquoise-blue, but some were yellow, others brown, and a few almost black, and the arrangement was such that it could easily have been made to represent a string of words. The effect of the chain was bizarre but attractive, and it somewhat resembled the rosaries worn by devout Arabs. The intrinsic worth of the thing was nil, but sometimes one has a friend who will accept and value un rien like this, for the sake of the giver, when jewels would be declined. My Italian had such a friend, and the bauble found a new home on her neck.
Not long after she had begun to wear the quaint little chain which had lain for so many centuries round the throat of the dead Egyptian, its new owner was distressed and alarmed by a persistent form of nightmare, which gradually induced a feeling that she was haunted by the wraith of a dark-skinned girl, of a type of feature unlike any known to her, but clad in raiment such as she fancied had been worn by Egyptians in the days of the Pharaohs. The apparition was always clothed in the same manner, and though she wore a number of strangely fashioned ornaments, her neck was left completely bare. The girl seemed to be ever present in her dreams, and her face always wore a look of extreme distress, as of one who grieved for the loss of some dearly beloved friend or possession. The curious part of it was, that the dream-girl seemed always to come to the sleeper as to one from whom she could get relief; and while, in her earlier appearances, she had the expression and the manner of a supplicant, the dreamer fancied that latterly there had been a change, and the dark face looked both agonised and threatening.
These visitations, which could not be ascribed to any reasonable cause, had so got on the lady’s nerves that she had gone for change to a villa on the coast of Normandy. The change of scene brought no relief. The haunting form of the Egyptian girl, though not a nightly visitor, was so constantly present, that the dread of seeing her deprived sleep of all power of giving rest, and the poor lady was not only becoming seriously ill, but she was so affected by her uncanny infliction, that she even sometimes imagined she caught glimpses of her tormentor when she herself was wide awake.
One afternoon, the lady was lying in a darkened room, the persiennes closed to keep out the hot and penetrating rays of a summer sun. She felt very weary and despondent, the result of many broken nights and the prolonged strain on her nerves, and, though she held a book in her hand she was all the time wondering how much longer she could bear this oppression, and what she had done to deserve such a weirdly horrible fate. In a dull sort of way she supposed she must be going mad, and felt with grim cynicism that the border-land between sanity and insanity was so narrow that she would hardly realise the moment when she crossed it. There was absolute silence everywhere, except for the faint soothing whisper of the sea, rippling over the sand beneath the wooded bluff on which the villa stood. The air was warm and heavy with summer perfumes; the room was darkening slowly as the sun dipped towards the placid waters of La Manche; the woman was deadly weary, and she slept.
At first her sleep must have been sound; but, after a time, her eyes opened to that other consciousness which is of the world of dreams, and once again she saw her now dreaded companion, the dark-eyed, dark-skinned girl from the land of the Pharaohs. The girl seemed to plead in impassioned terms for something, but the dreamer could not understand the strange words, and racked her brain, as dreamers will, to try to imagine their meaning. The girl burst into a storm of tears, sinking to the ground in her grief and despair, and burying her face on a pile of cushions. Still the dreamer, suffering torture herself, was helpless to relieve the other. Then suddenly the girl sprang up, and, dashing the tears from her eyes, which now seemed to blaze with murderous resolve, she sprang upon the white woman, enlaced her throat with supple brown fingers, pressed and pressed, tighter and tighter—ah, God! the horror and the suffocating pain of it—and all the while the sleeper’s hands seemed tied to her side. Then with a scream the dreamer awoke. She felt her eyes must be starting from her head, and instinctively raised her hands to her throat, only to realise that her vivid sensation of strangulation was merely a nightmare, but that the chain—the string of turquoise beads which she had never unfastened from the day she first put it on—was gone.
There was now little light in the room, only enough to see things vaguely, yet the lady declares that in that first moment of waking she distinctly saw a figure, exactly like that of the girl of her dreams, glide swiftly away from her and pass out through a portière into the verandah. For some time she was too frightened and unnerved to move, but when at last she summoned her people they had seen no one.
The only thing that was real was that she had lost the necklace, and never saw it again. As some compensation she also lost for ever the society of her dream-visitor, and completely recovered her own health.
Now who took my stephanotis?
XXX
SCANDAL AND BANGLES
FOR years I have not been so angry as I am at this minute; I have very nearly lost my temper, and the reason is really ridiculous. Why I should choose this as a favourable opportunity for writing to you I cannot tell, but my tormentor had no sooner left the room than I seized the pen, which is nearly always ready to my hand, and you are the victim. The cause of this unusual and unseemly frame of mind is a girl, quite a pretty girl, who walked in here, sans cérémonie, and, after a few minutes’ desultory conversation, told me a preposterous piece of gossip about myself, a fantastic story in which there was not a grain of truth.
“Who says that?” I asked.
“Everybody says so.”
“Then everybody is mistaken.”
“Of course you deny it; but it is true, all the same.”
“It is not in the least true, and I am prepared to swear that in any form of oath.”
“I dare say you are, but no one will believe you.”
“Very well. Now what does your story rest upon?”
“The evidence of people’s senses. Every one has seen you.”
“I cannot deal with ‘every one,’ it is too indefinite. You say I went to some one’s house,—not that it would matter the least if I did,—but who saw me?”
“I did.”
“You did! I never was in the house in my life.”
“Try to remember. I have seen you go in and also seen you come out of it.”
“If it were not so stupid, one might almost get angry. I repeat that I have never been in the house, nor spoken to the owner.”
“And I, having seen with my own eyes, maintain that you have.”
“You have mistaken some one else for me, or drawn on your imagination, for what you say is absolutely untrue. But, as you seem to have constructed a fantastic story on that insecure foundation, I have a good mind to charge you with defaming me.”
“By all means, and I will go into court and say what I know and you know to be true.”
Now, what can you do with a person like that? If I were the judge, trying my own cause and knowing there is not a semblance of a particle of truth in this absurd tale, I believe that if a witness appeared and gave evidence against me with this sublime assurance, I would decide the case against myself.
The wasp has still a sting left; she says, “You sent your carriage to a lady, that she might drive in it?”
“I did.”
“And she sent it back.”
“She did.”
“She would not use it because of what I have told you, and she does not want to see or speak to you again!”
I said I should not die of the affront, nor commit any rash act if the lady adhered to her determination; but I admit that, though I laughed, I was beginning to lose my temper, and I told my tormentor that if I could whip her it would be a satisfaction! She also laughed, but as I had seen that she was brimful of merriment all along, that was nothing. By-and-by she disclosed that she wanted me to do something for her, and, when I had heaped coals of fire on her head by doing what she wished, she went away asking me if I had any message for the lady who had refused my carriage! I heard her laughing all the way downstairs, and, as she insisted on walking through the grounds to her carriage, I fancy I can hear her giggling still.
I think I remarked once before that the train of another’s thoughts are not easy to divine, but explanations are boring, so I leave you to supply the connection between what I have just written and what now occurs to me to tell you. It is not only fowls and curses that come home to roost.
Once upon a time there was a very beautiful and attractive lady, the wife of a high official in India. She was of those who have but one admirer at a time, and that one very devoted. Women of her type cannot share with any one else the attentions of their cavaliers; they insist upon a service that is complete and unquestioning, dog-like in devotion and obedience; and they do not seem to care if it is also dog-like in its inability to do more than gaze in rapture at the face of its mistress. I have known cases of the kind myself, and marvelled to see how the lady and her slave can stand, and sit, and walk together, with no one to disturb their confidences, and yet they never seem to speak. As far as I can understand, that was the case with the heroine of my tale and her cavaliere servente. They were on the hills or in the plains—it does not matter where—when a native Prince appeared upon the scene. He was a delightful and fascinating person, but wicked beyond the dreams of wickedness. He stayed several months in the station, and when about to return to his own native state, he called upon an English friend of his and said, “I am going away; I speak English very indifferently; I wish to say good-bye to some of my friends: will you come with me?” The Englishman at once said he would be delighted, and they set out on a round of calls, the Prince saying where he wished to go. Amongst other houses they visited that of the engaging lady, and after a few words explaining his early departure and regret, the Prince produced a number of beautiful gold bangles, and said he trusted the lady would accept them as a token of his respectful admiration. This was duly interpreted, and the lady replied that as her husband held a Government post she could not accept any present. The Prince said he trusted that she would not persist in this determination, because he was merely a visitor, and as the lady’s husband had no authority or influence in his territory, he could not believe that the ordinary rules would apply to a gift of such small value, which was merely an expression of his esteem and thanks for the kindness he had received. Meanwhile the bangles had been tendered to the lady; they had lain in her hand, and she appreciated their curious design and artistic excellence.
“What shall I do?” said the lady, appealing to the Englishman.
“What you please,” he replied.
It is possible that it was out of consideration for the feelings of the donor that she then said—
“My husband would never let me accept the bangles, but I should like to keep them if I knew that you would say nothing.”
“Pray do not think of me,” said the friend; “I am an accident in the interview, and, when I leave the house, I shall have forgotten all about it.”
“Then I shall keep them.”
One evening, about a fortnight or three weeks later, the lady was dancing with the man who had interpreted, and he said, “Will you allow me to admire your bangles: they are not only beautiful in themselves but exceedingly becoming.”
“Yes,” she replied, “but the unfortunate part of it is that my husband thinks they have been given to me by some one else, and I can’t enlighten him, for I dare not tell the truth!”
P.S.—The lady who refused to use my carriage has just sent me an invitation to dinner!
XXXI
THE REPREHENSIBLE HABIT OF MAKING COMPARISONS
I AM not given to the use of postscripts, but I indulged myself with one in the last letter I wrote to you. It reminds me of the only bon mot to which I can lay claim. When I was about six years old, my mother and I were visiting an aunt of mine, and, one evening, my mother read aloud to my aunt a letter she had just received. It was lengthy, and no doubt interesting to the two ladies, while the contents were probably beyond my comprehension. “Little pigs have long ears,” and I noticed that, at the conclusion of the letter, my mother read “P.S.,” and then some final sentences. Immediately afterwards I was ordered to bed, and, once there, my mother came to see me. My small mind was full of this new idea, and I was thirsting for information as to the meaning of these mysterious letters. Therefore, when my mother had bid me good night and was going away, I said, “Mother, what does P.S. mean; is it Parting Subject?” She smiled and said, “No, the letters stand for post scriptum, but the meaning is not very different.” She afterwards helped me to wrestle with the Latin grammar, and in time I arrived at the exact translation of post scriptum, but my childish rendering of P.S. would do just as well. I was made to bitterly regret having ever suggested it; for, when my proud mother told the story, my various brothers and sisters, separately and collectively, insisted that some one had told me to say it, and I am not sure that they did not, each in turn, give me a thrashing to impress upon me the vice of “trying to be sharp.” When children have brothers and sisters, their schooling begins early and lasts a long time—fortunately for themselves and the world at large.
That, however, has nothing to do with the matter I was going to write about. I suppose you sometimes look through those galleries of garments which begin and end ladies’ journals, just as I occasionally glance at the advertisements of new books, which I find at the end of a modern novel. The other day I was idly turning over the pages of such a series of advertisements (each page devoted to one book, and quotations from the newspaper reviews of it), and I could not help noticing how, in the case of every book, if not in every critique, the author was compared with some well-known writer—Dickens, Thackeray, George Meredith, Zola, Ibsen, De Maupassant—it does not seem to matter who it is, so long as it is some one. As for Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a writer who mentions India, China, Japan, Siam, the French or Dutch Indies, or any place within two or three thousand miles of them, is certain to find himself compared with the astonishingly talented author of “Soldiers Three,” “The Drums of the Fore and Aft,” and a dozen other tales that had made Mr. Kipling famous in India years before his name had been heard in the West.
I know that whenever we visit a new place, we have a ridiculous desire to compare it with some totally different spot that is familiar to us; and I suppose we make the comparison, either because we want to show that we have been somewhere and seen something, or because we are so devoid of ideas or language to express them, that this comparison is our only means of description. Like London, only bigger; Petersburg in winter, but not so cold; bluer than the Mediterranean, and so on. It seems to imply poverty of resource; but if to help readers to realise the appearance of a spot in New Zealand, that place is compared with the Carse of Stirling, the information is not of much use to those who do not know their Scotland.
Is it the same with literary critics? Hardly, I fancy; because even though they write easily of Lake Toba, the Thibetan highlands, or more or less known writers, it can’t give them any real satisfaction, for their own names are but seldom disclosed.
Enlightened people who attend places of Christian worship, often wish that the occupant of the pulpit would read a sermon by some great divine, rather than stumble through an original discourse, which possibly arouses only the scorn, the resentment, or the pity of his hearers. The preacher who is conscious of his own want of eloquence, or realises that the spring of his ideas trickles in the thinnest and most uncertain of streams, may seek to improve his language, or replenish his own exhausted stock of subjects, by studying the sermons of abler men. I doubt if he is greatly to be blamed. Some illustrious writers have won renown after a diligent study of the works of dead authors, and a suggestion of the style of a famous master may be observable in the work of his admirer; just as a modern painter may, consciously or unconsciously, follow the methods, the composition, or the colour schemes of a genius who has given his name to a school of imitators. It would, however, be a little unreasonable to compare all play-writers with Shakespeare, all essayists with Macaulay. If there is nothing new under the sun, two or more men or women, contemporaries, may have the same ideas on a given subject without either being open to a charge of plagiarism. They may express the same ideas differently, or put different ideas in somewhat the same style of language: both may have drawn inspiration from a more or less original source, not generally known or quoted—in all these cases comparisons may be, and often are, simply inept. Some subjects are not yet entirely exhausted, and while it is interesting to compare the different views of recognised authorities, it is annoying to both writers and readers to find that the highest flight of criticism of a new work seems often to consist in mentioning the names of other writers on the same subject—as though it were, in a sense, their personal property, or they had some vested interest in it, by reason of discovery or continual harping on that particular theme. I suppose reviewers, except in a few instances, have no time to really read the books they criticise, and judge them on their merits; but, if they could, it would be more satisfactory to possible readers, who, as things are, can form very little opinion of what a book contains, its relative value or worthlessness, from statements like this, which purports to be an extract from a review in a leading London paper:—
“The opening chapters have a savour of Dickens; the climax is almost Zolaesque.”
Or this:—
“The knowledge of character revealed reminds us of George Eliot’s ‘Scenes of Clerical Life.’”
You will think that one who wanders from an infantile legend about the word postscript to a growl anent newspaper reviews, is indifferently qualified to criticise any one or anything. As a letter-writer I acknowledge that I am inconsequent. I do not even seek to be otherwise.
XXXII
A CHALLENGE
OH! Oh! Oh! What a storm! But are you not a little unreasonable?
You are not a circulating library, you say, nor a railway book-stall; you don’t want to hear tales of forest and flood which have no personal interest for you or me; and you cannot carry on a correspondence with a phrase-book, a thing that has no existence as a human being, and, when not lecturing you, or taking advantage of your good-nature to air boring platitudes, is doling out little stories to you, as though you were a child in a Sunday School.
My dear lady, I hope that you feel better after that tirade; but as you have attacked me with violence, and at all points at once, I claim the right to defend myself, and again I say you are unreasonable. We were never strangers to each other, or so it seems to me, but circumstances and a certain mental attraction drew us into friendship. In the delight of your society I realised what it would be to me if, through that friendship, I might win your affection. I even dreamed that I might compel the impossible, and attain to an earthly paradise of sweet alliance whence no mortal promises and no inspired writings could ever win me.
Whilst we dream of life’s big possibilities, its little duties drive us where they will. We were parted, and, if I do not now remind you of that time, it is because I know that there are few things a woman hates more than to be told she once, by word or deed, showed any tender feeling for a man who no longer holds the same place in her regard. You went and I stayed; you spoke and I believed; and what I did not say was only what you told me not to repeat, lest parting should seem over-hard to bear. Then I wrote and you wrote, and, at first, your letters were so fine a gift that they almost consoled me for your absence, and, in my great gratitude, I wrote some of the thoughts of my inmost heart. My fervour seemed to frighten you, and the chill of your surroundings came through your letters to me. It may have been the fault of those about you; it may have been that you were tried beyond endurance, possibly even that I, in some indirect way, was a cause of your distress. But you never said so; you never took me into your confidence and frankly told me you were in any trouble; only your letters went through those phases which I, once, cynically suggested were the common fate of those whose friendship could not survive a real separation. I was too slow to at once trim my sails to the varying breeze, nor could I call back letters which were already on their way. Therefore I fell under your displeasure, and you ordered me to write only of “the daily round, the common task.” I obeyed you, as nearly as I was able. When you asked me to tell you of what I saw, of what I was doing, I attempted to do so, and to make the telling as little personal as I could. To weary you with the trivialities of my daily life, to describe to you the wearisome people I met, the banalités they uttered—that was beyond me. Therefore, to try and interest you, I gave you the best of what had interested me, and even that was only done with some sacrifice, for you know my time is not all my own. Naturally those letters were empty of personal reference. To have written of myself would have been to write of you, and that might have brought down on my head another storm of invective. I am in the position of the burnt child: I dread the fire. Even now I dare not accept your invitation. I might write, and, before the letter could reach you, receive from you another missive, telling me your present letter was written under an impulse you regret but cannot explain, and that of course it meant nothing. You would add that you delight in the discussion of abstract questions, and queer little stories are, to you, as rain to dry land. Then I can imagine the sternly traced characters of that other destroying scroll, in which you would sum up the tale of my sins, after reading such a letter as I might send in answer to your present message of discontent and provocation. So, I warn you. I shall give you time to think; in spite of your scoffing, I shall continue to write to you as I have done in these latter days; and then—and then—your blood be on your own head. If the outward cold of damp and fog, of weeks of sunless gloom and surroundings of rain-drenched rows of hideous dwellings, muddy roads, sullen skies, and leaden seas produce what you no doubt think is a virtuous frame of mind, when the state of the crops and the troubles of the farmers are the only matters with which a conscience-burdened woman can occupy her mind, I shall pander to your appetite, and write to you of famine and plague, the prospects of the poppy (the opium poppy, you understand) and I will even stretch a point to discuss the silver question and the fate of the rupee. If, on the other hand, you throw discretion to the winds; if in that atmosphere where you say you are always frozen, “outside and in,” you pine for a glimpse of sunlight; if you like to watch a conflagration when at a safe distance from the flames, or even if the contortions of the cockchafer, when impaled by the pin, excite your amusement;—then also I will help you to realise these very reasonable wishes. Yes, then I will write you a love-letter that will be but a poor substitute for the impassioned words that should stir your heart, were once my lips within reach of yours.
Even from here I see you smile; even now I hear you say, “Well, write—after all vivisection has benefited the race, and the contortions of the cockchafer will perhaps distract one’s attention for a moment from the eternal monotony of the narrow life.”
XXXIII
IN EXILE
IN order that I may keep on perfectly safe ground, and successfully resist the temptation to depart from my resolve, I will tell you a story of my visit to Burmah, where, wandering aimlessly, I found an old friend in a distinguished Indian civilian, who invited me to accompany him on a tour of inspection. I gladly accepted his invitation, and we had been travelling for some time, driving, riding, walking, and, finally, after rafting over a magnificent series of rapids, had been some days paddling down the river in house-boats, when we reached a remote inland station called Phatmah. I caught my first view of the place as our boat swung round a bend in the great river, disclosing a reach of brown water, enclosed between high, jungle-covered banks, and shut in, at the end, by a green hill, crowned by a plank bungalow with a mat roof.
The boat was soon alongside the rough landing-stage, where a young civilian, introduced as Basset, was waiting to receive his chief. We climbed the steep hill, and Basset conducted us to the house devoted to our shelter for the couple of days we were to spend at Phatmah.
In my two days’ stay there, I had ample opportunities of seeing the place, and realising its few attractions and its many drawbacks. There was a tiny native village on the bank of one of the two streams that here united in one great river, and flowed in stately, ever-widening progress for over two hundred miles before it reached the sea: two hundred miles of virgin forest, save for the native villages and clearings that lined the banks at uncertain intervals. A few jungle tracks leading to distant mines were the only apology for roads; the river was the real highway, and the sole means of transport were native boats. Comfortable enough, these boats, for men used to jungle travel; flat and wide, with a palm-leaf roof, the fore-part occupied by the crew, the after-part by passengers. There was a deck of boards or split bamboos, and you could only move about it by crawling on your hands and knees. Entrance and exit were accomplished by the same means. A door, at the back of the enclosed after-deck, led on to a bamboo frame over the rudder; the steersman sat on the palm-leaf awning, and the only privacy was obtained by hanging a screen between crew and passengers. There was room for two mattresses on the after-deck, and there the passengers sat or lay through the blazing heat of the tropical day and the star-lit stillness of the Burmese night.
At this station there dwelt, besides Basset, an officer of police, another concerned with public works, and an apothecary in charge of a hospital. That was all. Their quarters were dotted about on the high land behind Basset’s bungalow. For the rest, the eye was met by jungle—near and far—endless jungle, and the river-reach. Silent and placid the waters, moving along in brown eddies, when, as now, the river was in flood; clear and shallow, disclosing groups of rocks dotted about the bed, in what was called the dry season.
At the time of our visit it was spring, and the jungle, especially in certain parts of the mountainous country, was a truly marvellous sight. The forest had put on its wedding garment, and the new leaves of many, even of most of the trees, were dazzling in the brilliance of their colouring. The prevailing hues were red and yellow; but then there were shades of red and of yellow that one never seemed to have dreamed of, such quantity, such intensity that the eyes almost ached with gazing at the glory of it all.
One is struck, especially in the East, by the wonder of flowering trees, or the striking creepers that cling to the tops of forest giants; but imagine these same trees in all their height, their wealth of foliage, and beauty of form, one mass of colour! There were trees of delicate lemon, of brilliant cadmium, of deepest orange; trees of such crimson that every leaf looked as though it were dripping with fresh blood; trees of copper and pale pink, of terra-cotta and scarlet—all these in one pure colour, or intermingled with every shade of green from palest apple, through varying tones of emerald, to the shining dark leaves that seemed all but black. Dotted about, here and there, stood trees of some shade of brown, or graceful forms clothed in darker or paler heliotrope. The virgin Eastern forest is a sight to see, but the glory of the jungle in the first freshness of spring leafage is a revelation.
That jungle was one of the attractions of Phatmah;—not monopolised by Phatmah, only shared, and not to so large an extent as by a thousand other places nearer the great hills.
Then there was the river reach, where all day long the shadows crept gradually closer under one bank as they were projected from the other; while now and then a native boat passed up or down the river, and, for a few minutes, broke the melancholy of that changeless stretch of water. The sunsets made the last, and perhaps the greatest attraction of Phatmah. Then, in the after-glow, great beams of light would rise, fan-like, from east and west, almost meeting in the zenith, and leave, between their rays, sharply-defined, heavenly roads of deepest blue; while the soft white clouds, riding through the sky, took shades of gold and rose and pearly-grey, until the stars shone out and set all the cicadas shrilling a chorus to waken every other denizen of the jungle.
Sunsets cannot be commanded; they are intermittent, and, though they are comforting—in a way—they do not always come when they are most wanted. In Phatmah it would rain in torrents on the evening that you had set your heart upon seeing a gorgeous sunset, and, when it did not rain, it was hotter than in almost any other spot in Burmah, and that is saying a great deal. Moreover, it was as dull probably as any place on earth, except to the three white men who lived there and had their work to do, or whose business took them, weekly, or at least monthly, into some other more or less desolate part of the district.
I noted these things in that first day I was at Phatmah, while my friend and Basset were talking about roads to be made and buildings constructed, natives to be encouraged or sat upon, dacoits harried, and all the things that make the life of the exiled English officer in the outermost parts of the Empire. I also observed Basset. I knew he had a wife, a girl whom he had just married, when at home on leave in England, and who was now in that house, across the grass, a hundred yards away. I had not seen Basset’s wife, but I had heard of her from some who had met her, before she left the last confines of civilisation and started for what must in future be her home. What I had heard made it seem unlikely that Mrs. Basset would reconcile herself to jungle life, and, when I understood Phatmah, I thought it would be very surprising if such a miracle could be wrought for the sake of Basset.
Basset was a most excellent fellow, a good officer, good to look at, lithe and well-made, a man who had found favour with his seniors and was likely to do well. He was young, but that was a fault for which he was not responsible, and one that every day was curing. And yet, when I saw Phatmah, I thought Basset had been unwise, and when I saw his wife, as I did the next day, I felt certain of it.
I had been told she was very young in years and child-like at that, nervous to the last degree, selfish, unreasonable, full of fancies, and rather pretty—but the one or two ladies who were my informants differed as to this last important particular.
What I saw for myself, when I went to call upon “the only lady in Phatmah,” was this: a glory of fair waving hair framing a young, but not very youthful face; a pallid complexion, and features where nothing specially appealed for admiration; a voice that was not more than pleasant, and a figure that, while very petite, seemed well enough shapen, as far as could be seen under the garment of silk and lace that must have been the first of its kind to visit Phatmah. The house did not strike me as showing more than the evidences of a young man’s anxiety to make it what he would call “fit for a lady”; but then the resources of Phatmah were strictly limited, the Bassets had only just, so to speak, arrived, and things entrusted to the tender mercies of river transport were often months upon the way. On the whole there was nothing about Mrs. Basset to excite either sympathy or interest, if you had met her in any civilised place; but as the only white woman in Phatmah, come here to gain her first real experiences of life, scared by frogs and lizards, and terrified by the many insects that fly straight at you and stick on your hair, your face, your clothes, one could not help feeling that the experiment, if not a cruel one to her, was at least thoughtless, and, if persisted in, might end in disaster.
My friend and I exerted ourselves that afternoon and evening (for the Bassets dined with us) to put as good a complexion as we could on Burmah in general and Phatmah in particular; and though, to the ordinary spectator, we might have appeared to succeed fairly well, I carried away with me vague suspicions, born of my own observation and the conversation I had had with the lady as we sat and looked over that jungle-shrouded river-reach, while the path to the stars grew an ever-deepening blue, and she told me somewhat of herself and her life. There was no doubt that she not only looked dissatisfied, but felt it, and said it, and took credit for her candour. Then she complained that Phatmah offered no opportunities for “getting into mischief,” but that was probably merely another way of saying that she was utterly bored; and, in truth, when she asked if I could conceive a greater dulness, the trite reply that she had her husband stuck in my throat, and I admitted that it was immeasurably dull, but talked cheerfully of what it would be when communication with the outside world was easier, and then fell to asking her if she read, or played, or sang, or sketched, as Phatmah seemed to be the very place for study, or the practice of accomplishments. She pleaded that she was too lately from school to hanker after study, but became almost enthusiastic on the subject of music.
Then our tête-à-tête was interrupted, and in the evening the only thing that struck me was that, for a girl so lately from school, our guest drank rather more in quantity and variety than was usual, and whenever in the after-days my thoughts went back to Phatmah, I remembered this with an uncomfortable feeling of the awful loneliness of that reach of brown river, the boundless forest, and the girl, left for days to her own devices, and the possibility of “getting into mischief” by drowning a craving, not for excitement so much as for the companionship of her kind.
A hundred miles below Phatmah the river wound through the plains in long reaches, six or seven miles in length; the country was more open, and the banks were occasionally fringed with palms and orchards surrounding the huts of a native hamlet. The moon was waxing to the full, and, sitting at the stern of my boat, looking back up the long stretch of water bathed in mellow light, till the wide band of silver narrowed to a point that vanished in grey mist, I could not help thinking that, even here, the sense of loneliness, of monotony, and banishment, was less acute than in Phatmah’s forest-bound clearing.
Years passed, and I was again in Burmah, this time with an object. I had forgotten all about the Bassets: one does not remember people who live in the East, only the places that are striking, and the things seen or heard of that may become profitable in one way or another. I thought of my friend, because he might be able to help me, but he was away in another part of the province and I had to journey alone. Officials are useful on their own ground, and even when they are not personal friends, they are, in the East at any rate, ready enough to be hospitable. The advantage of “entertaining angels unawares” is, however, all on their side, and guests so soon recognise this fact, that they feel under no obligation to their hosts, and seldom wish to remember them if they meet them in Europe. This is specially the case with English notabilities, who seem to think that they have a prescriptive right, not only to waste a man’s time, but also to use his house, stables, and servants, as at an hotel where the visitor exercises every privilege except that of making payment. Unfortunately for me, I had to go beyond the region of even occasional civilians, those isolated exiles whose houses the stranger occupies, whether the master is present or absent, and for some days I had to put up with the Dâk Bungalow and the chicken of happy despatch.
It was the very hottest time of the morning when I arrived at such a bungalow in a small mining village. I had been riding since dawn, and was glad enough to turn into that weedy compound and get off my pony. Whew! the heat of it! The two or three sinewy hens, which by-and-by would be slaughtered to make the traveller’s holiday, were sitting half-buried and wallowing in the dust, with their wings spread out and their mouths open, gasping for breath. It was a day when solids liquefy, when inanimate objects develop an extraordinary faculty for sticking to each other, and when water no longer feels wet. There was not a sign of any human being anywhere, and I went round to the back premises to try and find the caretaker. After a diligent search I discovered him, fast asleep of course, and, while he went to prepare a room, I unsaddled the pony and put it in the stable. Then I went into the house and told the servant to get me some food while I had a bath. The process of catching the hen and cooking her was a long one, and I was sleeping in a chair when the man came to tell me the feast was ready. I had an idea that I was not alone in the house, and, when I questioned the caretaker, he said that there was a lady who had arrived the night before and had not appeared that morning. Our means of conversation was limited to a few words, and I could not make out who the lady was, or even whether he knew her; but it seemed to me a curious thing that a white woman should be there, and I supposed she came from one of the big ruby mines; but even then it was strange that she should be alone. I made further inquiries about the neighbourhood, and learned that I was not more than a day’s journey from Phatmah. I knew it was somewhere about, but had not thought it so near; it was not on the line of my objective, and I was not interested in its exact position. Then some of my bearers arrived with luggage, and I deliberately settled myself for a siesta.
It was late afternoon when I awoke, and I determined to push on to another small place, which I could just reach before darkness made further progress impossible. Even a short stage by night would be preferable to the frightful heat and the oppressive atmosphere of this lonely house, in its neglected and overgrown garden, where one lean chicken now scratched alone. Just then the caretaker came to me and asked my advice about the other guest. He had seen and heard nothing of her for the whole day, and was afraid there must be something amiss. That, I felt, was extremely likely, especially when he told me he had knocked at the door of her room and received no answer. I did not at all like the mission, but there was nothing for it but to go and see what was the matter. A few steps took us to the door of the lady’s room, and I knocked, first gently, then loudly, but no sound broke the ominous silence. Then I turned the handle, only to find that the door was locked. As I could not force it open without making a great clatter, I went outside to try the windows. There were two of these some height from the ground, and it was difficult to get at them. The first was fast, and from my insecure footing I could not force it; but with the second I was more fortunate, and as a half-shutter sprang open, and a stream of light poured into the dark room, I saw the form of a girl, or woman, lying on the bed, in an attitude that somehow did not suggest sleep. I shouted at her, but she never moved, and then I climbed into the room. I noticed instantly that there was hardly anything lying about the ill-furnished room, but, on a small table near the bed, was an almost empty brandy bottle and a glass. The woman was dressed in a blouse and skirt, the only things she had taken off being apparently her hat and shoes. She had her back towards me, and the sunlight centred on a mass of fair hair and gave it a deeper tinge. Before I put my hand on her cold fingers I felt certain she was dead, and as I gently turned her head and recognised in the now grey features the face of the only white woman in Phatmah, I don’t think I was very much surprised, though I was terribly shocked. Held tightly in her other hand was a small empty bottle that had once held chloral, and the faint sickly smell of it hung in the heavy stifling atmosphere of that bare and comfortless room. Poor lonely child, she had managed to “get into mischief” after all.
XXXIV
OF LOVE—NOT IN FICTION
YOU have sent me the answer which I expected. Now tell me how to write a love-letter that shall speak no word of love—a letter as full of the passion, the boundless adoration, and the faith of love, as the Chaurapanchâsika, those fifty distichs of Chauras that proclaimed his forbidden worship of the lovely daughter of King Sundava. The Brahman’s lament won the king’s heart and saved the poet’s life; and I would learn of you how to win a heart, and perhaps save more than one life from shipwreck. After all, our civilisation may, in its comparative refinement, be more cruel than the unfettered caprice of an Eastern king nineteen centuries ago. Tell me, tell me, you who know, how can pen and ink be made to speak with the force and persuasion of spoken words, when half the world divides the writer from the reader of poor halting sentences that must, of necessity, leave unsaid all that the heart yearns to utter?
When eye can look into eye, when the stretched-out hand meets a responsive touch,—timid and uncertain, or confident with the knowledge of passionate love passionately returned,—the words that are spoken may be feeble, but the influence of a loved presence will carry conviction, and one voice awaken in one heart the music of the spheres. Then the dullest day is bright, the lovers’ feet tread on air, day is a joy and night a gladness, or at least a dream of delight. Then life is divided between anticipation and reality. No wonder the hours fly on wings; no wonder the thoughts suggested by brief absences are forgotten in the wonder and delight of briefer meetings, till the dread moment of separation comes, and aching hearts too late realise the appalling suddenness of the actual parting and the ceaseless regret for opportunities lost. You understand that my thoughts are not of the devout lover who is going through a short apprenticeship before signing a bond of perpetual servitude or partnership, as the case may be. That is a phase which, if it occasionally deserves sympathy, seldom receives it; indeed, it hardly awakens interest, except in those who wish to see the preliminaries concluded, that their interest in the principals may either cease, and give themselves more freedom, or begin, and bring them some profit. I appeal to you to tell me how to keep alive the divine flame when oceans and continents divide two loving hearts; how to tell of longing and bitter regret, of faith and love and worship, when such words may not be written; how to make personal influence felt across five seas and through many weary months; how to kill doubt and keep strong and faithful a priceless love, against which the stars in their courses may seem ready to fight; how, above all, to help one who needs help, and warm sympathy, and wise advice, so that, if it be possible, she may escape some of life’s misery and win some of life’s joy.
Journeying through this weary old world, who has not met the poor struggling mortal, man or woman, old or young, for whom the weal or woe of life hangs in the balance, to turn one way or the other, when the slightest weight is cast into either scale? Who has not been asked for sympathy or advice, or simply to lend an ear to the voice of a hopeless complaint? Some feel the iron in their souls far more keenly than others. While the strong fight, the weak succumb, and the shallow do not greatly mind, after they have gone through a short torture of what seems to them profound emotion. But in their case sympathy is rather wasted, for, however violent their grief, their tears are soon dried, and it must have been written for them that “joy cometh with the morning.”
You know what it is when the heart seems to struggle for more freedom, because it is choking with a love it may not, or will not, express; when, in the absence of one face, all other companionship is irksome, all conversation stale and unprofitable; when daylight wearies and night is cruelly welcome, because the struggle to play a part, and pretend an interest one does not feel, is over, and one stretches out one’s arms to the darkness, and whispers, “Come to me,” to ears that cannot hear. What strange unnatural creatures we are, for we stifle the voices of our souls, and seem to delight in torturing ourselves for the sake of some idea born of a tradition, the value of which we dare not even submit to the test of argument. If in response to your heart’s cry there came the one whose presence you desire, you would instantly torture yourself rather than confess your message. Whatever it cost you, you would not only pretend that the sudden appearance of the greatly beloved was the last thing you wished for, but you might even send him away with the impression that he had deeply offended you. And yet—Ah well! this artificial fortress we take such pains to build, and to keep in repair, is not proof against every assault. There are crises of life—an imminent danger, the presence or appearance of death, a sudden and irresistible wave of passionate feeling, or a separation that has no promise of reunion—before these the carefully constructed rampart of convention and outward seeming goes down like a house of cards.
“When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded by the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes within another’s eyes see clear;
When one world-deafened ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed,
A bolt is shot back somewhere in the heart,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again;
The eye sinks inward and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean we say,
And what we would we know.”
There was a day which, to me, will ever be my day of days—halcyon hours of joy and gladness, coloured by a setting of wondrous beauty, and burdened by the fateful shadow of an inevitable parting that would, in all human probability, be the point where two lives, which had grown strangely and sweetly close, must divide, without any hope of re-uniting. You remember how in that early dawn we drove through the dewy grass, covered with the fairies’ dainty white gossamer kerchiefs, lace cobwebs spread out to dry in the morning sun; and, as we left the town and made for the distant mountains, the dark red road wound up and down hills, through orchards and grass-land and forest, till we gained a little village, where the road forked, and a clear, rain-swollen stream slipped swiftly past the picturesque brown cottages. Whilst the horses were being changed, we strolled a little way down the road, and watched a group of laughing urchins, playing in that lilied stream like water-babies. How they screamed with delight as their small glistening bodies emerged from the shining water to struggle up a crazy ladder that led from the back of a hut down into the winding stream; and how the sun shone! lighting the snow-white plumage of a brood of solemn-looking ducks, sailing majestically round the sedge-girt edges of a tiny pool beneath the bridge. In that pool was mirrored a patch of clear blue sky, and across it fell the shadows cast by a great forest tree. That was “a day in spring, a day with thee and pleasure!” Then, as we drove on, there were heavenly glimpses of sapphire hills, seen down long vistas through the forest. For the last few miles, the road followed the bank of a deep and rapid river, whose clear waters reflected the graceful overhanging trees, while the banks were buried in a thick maze of ferns and grasses, and great shining patches of buttercups and marigolds.
Were you sorry when the drive was over, and our sweet converse perforce ended? I wonder would you have enjoyed it better had that exquisite spot, in the depths of the forest, been ours alone for that one day? One day is so little in a lifetime, and yet what was ours was good! Do you remember how, in that far-off place, we met on the road one whom you recognised, but whose face and manner gave no clue to the romantic story of his life, a story that would have brought him great renown in the days when valour was accounted of the highest worth? You have not forgotten that, nor yet the return drive, when, as we crested the last hill, and began the steep and tortuous descent into the plain, the lurid rays of the setting sun threw crimson stains across dark pools of lotus-bearing water, half-hidden by overhanging grasses and the dank leaves of white-blossomed lilies. Beneath us lay a wide stretch of swamp-land, the very picture of abandonment, desolation, and solitude; heaps of up-turned earth, green with rank vegetation, and pools of dead water, whose dark shadows reflected the lambent fires of the western horizon. A broken line of black trees stood clear against the rapidly-darkening sky, but, as we reached the foot of the hill, heaven and earth were wrapped in the shadows of night. And then my day was done. Doubt was buried, and the “big word” bound our hearts in the joy of that priceless sympathy which carries human aspirations beyond the storm and stress of human life to a knowledge of the Divine. We said little; when hearts are at one, few words are needed, for either knows the other’s thoughts. But you were slow to unbend, making a brave fight against fate, and keeping true to your creed, though seven days would bring the end. To me, the light of that one brilliant day had been intensified by the rapidly approaching shadow of the inevitable parting. I wonder—now that the bitterness of separation has come, now that I vaguely ask myself what has happened to Time since I lost you—whether, if we could have that day again, you would again be so merciless in your determination to hold love in leash, and give no sign of either the passion or the pain that was tearing your heart. I think it was a hard fight, for, though you concealed your thoughts, you could not hide the physical effects of the struggle. Did you know how your weariness distressed me, and what I would have given to have the right to try to comfort you?
I have a confused memory of those other days. Brief meetings and partings; insane desires to make any excuse to write to you, or hear from you, though I had but just left your presence; a hopeless and helpless feeling that I had a thousand things to say to you, and yet that I never could say one of them, because the time was so short that every idea was swallowed up in the ever-present dread of your departure, and the ceaseless repetition of your cry, “I cannot bear it, I cannot bear it.” From out that vague background shine two stars, two brilliant memories to light the darkness of the weary months until I see your face again—a blissful memory and a sign. All the rest seems swallowed up in the bitterness of that parting, which comes back like some horrible nightmare.
Only black water under a heavy overcast sky; only the knowledge that the end had come; that what should be said must be said then, with the instant realisation that the pain of the moment, the feeling of impotent rebellion against fate, destroyed all power of reflection, and the impulse to recklessness was only choked back by the cold words of a publicly spoken farewell. Then rapid motion, and in one minute the envious darkness had taken everything but the horrible sense of loss and inconsolable regret. Whatever my suffering, it was worse for you; I at least was alone, alone with a voice which ever murmured in my ears that despairing cry, “I cannot bear it, I cannot bear it.”
When two who have been brought together, so close together that they have said the “big word” without faltering, are suddenly swept asunder by the receding wave of adverse circumstances, there must ever arise in their hearts that evil question, “How is it now? Is it the same? Or have time, and distance, and a thousand other enemies, so filled the space between us that the memory of either is growing dim, and the influence of the other waning, waning till the absence of all binding tie begins to feel like a very bond. Will the vision simply fade gradually out of sight?” For us there is no promise, no tie, no protestations of fealty; only knowledge, and that forced upon us rather than sought. You give or you don’t give, that is all; if you also take away, you are within your right. There may be reasons and reasons, I understand them all; and I have only one desire, that whatever prevails may secure you happiness. What you can give seems to me so unlike what others ever have to give, so infinitely beyond price, that, where I might gain, it is not right that I should speak. Therefore I cannot urge, I dare not even plead, a cause that has less to recommend it than the forlornest hope.
XXXV
OF OBSESSION
IF that is irrevocable—why, then, no more. You can only decide, and while I would not have you consider me, I do ask you to think of yourself. I have no title to be considered, not the remotest; if I had, it might be different. Possibly, even, I had better not write now, and yet I must, though you say “Don’t.” It cannot matter for this once, and after—well, there may be no after. We are curiously inconsistent and very hard to understand; even when we think we know each other well, we speak to conceal our thoughts; and, when we write (and it is often easier to write what we mean than to say it) I wonder whether it occurs to us how marvellously contradictory we can be, and what difficult riddles we can frame, in two or three pages of a letter that comes straight from the heart and cries to be understood. Verily we are the slaves of circumstance; but whilst we accept that position, whilst we make sacrifices that can be absolutely heroic, and dumbly suffer the crucifixion of a lifetime, we want one other heart to know and understand. There are few things harder to bear than to stifle every strongest inclination, every dearest hope, to shut the gate of life, to lock it and throw away the key, with a determination to accept existence and make the best of it. God knows how bitter is that renunciation, but, if it be for another, and that other misunderstands, then the cruelty of it all seems almost beyond endurance.
If I may write no more to you, you may never understand. If I saw you, later, under other circumstances, I could not speak; so there can be no explanation for me. I do not plead, I may not. Not once, but often you have heard my profession of faith—a gift is good, because it is given freely. The greatest good, the most priceless gift, is love. It is valuable because it is free. You cannot buy it or compel it; even when given, you cannot lock it up, or chain it down, and say, “It is mine for ever.” It comes, and it is the joy of life; it goes, and it is pity, misery, despair. It is as useless to rave against the loss, as to shake one’s fist at Zeus and his thunderbolts. If I ever had, then I was thrice-blessed. If I have no longer, the fault is probably mine, and I have still the knowledge of what was. Not God Himself can deprive me of that. I would have liked that you should know all I yearn to say, but because you are not here to tell me, “Say it, say it all,” therefore I must keep silence. Perhaps I do not read aright all you mean; but some at least I know, and that is what you would have me understand without any shadow of doubt. That I realise, down to the very lowest depths of the suffering which is dumb for sheer pain; and I can say nothing, absolutely nothing, because I have no right; nay, more, you tell me to be silent. Surely you know, you know, what I would say? You remember how one evening we rode out by the rocks, and we talked of a story of faith and high resolve, and you said you did not think I was capable of a like devotion. That was a fairy tale; but what I said then, I repeat, with greater confidence, now; with hope, yes, I could stand and wait—with none, perhaps not.
That is all of me. What your letters have been you know, or at least you can guess, for I have answered them, and in those answers you could read all I might not say. “There must be an end, and it is not because of the trouble, but it is because of the pleasure.” You could not tell me that and think, because you bid me, I would not answer? Nor does one forget—fortunately—though if to forget be fortunate, I suppose to remember must be unfortunate, only it does not seem so to me. “Silence is a great barrier”—yes, death is silence, and the greatest barrier of all, and the silence of the living is, in a way, harder to bear, for it seems so needlessly unkind. Silence, determined, unbroken silence, will, I think, kill all feeling. I will not accept that as your last word, not yet; but if, when you receive this, you make that the beginning of silence, then I shall know, and I will not break it. Only I beg of you not to do so hard a thing as this, for I will gladly accept any less cruel sentence if you will not make yourself as dead to me. I have not done anything that need drive you to issue such an edict. Will not some less hopeless judgment, something short of eternal silence, serve until I bring on myself this ghastly doom? You are thinking that it was I who said, “All or nothing,” I who said friendship was too hard a road to tread. That was before—before I had tried; before I knew all I know now. You hid your heart far out of sight, and I never dared to guess—I do not now. But you went, and I, remembering how you went, catch at straws; for, as the Eastern says, I am drowning in the deepest sea. Do not think that is extravagant; it is because I have learned to count the unattainable at its true value that I also realise the immensity of the loss. We stood on either side of a wall, and because the wall was near to me I looked over it and almost forgot its existence. You, standing farther off, saw always the wall, and it shut me out. Then I, thinking it could be nothing to you, tried to get across the intervening space, and so fell, hurting myself, as those who fall must do. It was not a caprice, not an impulse that took me, it was the victory of the uncontrollable. So, doubting me, and to do right for both, you said, “I will build a wall too, stronger and higher, and then we can sometimes look over and talk to each other, and everything will be well.” But it is not well. Only you have vowed yourself to the work, and, if it seems hard, you say that all things are hard, and this must be good because it costs so much. To suffer is bad enough; to give suffering where you would strain every nerve to give only joy is so hard that, to help the other, seems worth any conceivable pain to oneself. What can it matter how it affects me, if I can do some little good for you; something that may save you a little pain, win you a little joy? Believe me, I have no wish but this. Whatever my selfishness would suggest is not really me, for “Thy law is my delight”; nay more, it is my delight to try to anticipate your wish. I have no fear except that you should misunderstand me, that I should misunderstand you. I am my own to offer, yours to accept—equally if, by effacement, I can save you the smallest regret, help you for a few yards over the stony path of life by keeping silence, you will neither see nor hear from me again. I would you did not doubt, perhaps you do not now; at least you cannot distrust, and in this I shall not fail. I shall not say farewell. I will never say that; but through the silence, if so it must be, sometimes, on a day in spring, perhaps, will come the echo of a past that you can recall with nothing more than regret. And that is what I do not quite understand. You say, “In all the years to come I shall not regret.” Not regret what has been, what might have been, or what will be then? Therein lies all the difference, and therein lies the riddle, there and in those words, “I am sometimes—” How am I to supply the rest? It might be any one of so many things. Could it ever be that you are sometimes driven to wonder whether everything I could offer is worth anything you would give? “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it; if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would be utterly contemned.” If that be true, and it has high authority, then in that one sentence is contained the conclusion of the whole matter. It tells you all that you can wish to know for yourself and myself and even for others. I have done; an accident drew from me an acknowledgment of my own hurt when it seemed unlikely that the fact should interest you. Now I am so unfortunate that, hurt myself, I have made you suffer as well. I have nothing to offer to help you, for all I had is yours already. And so the end: if so you deem it best. “Si j’étais Dieu,” I would use what power I had to spare you a moment’s pain and give you such happiness that you should forget the meaning of the word “suffering.” How utterly powerless we are, how impotent to save those we love, when no offer of the best we have, no devotion, no self-effacement, will secure the happiness of one other being, whose every pulse throbs in unison with ours, yet between whom and us there is fixed the great gulf of our own conventions. Is the end of all human hopes, all human sorrows, described in these two lines?—
“Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There was, and then no more of Thee and Me.”
“Let me say it whilst I have the courage.” Suppose you had the greater courage to write, “I will never say it.” Let me rather cry with Saul, “Farewell to others, but never we part.” And yet I know that we have already parted to meet no more.
XXXVI
OF PARADISE LOST
BY a dispensation of that Providence which, if seldom kind, is sometimes less than malignant, I received your two letters together—the poison and the antidote. I looked at the dates on the postmarks, and I took the poison first. It did not take long to read, and I am glad now that I can truly tell you that my impulse was to ignore your expressed wish, your command, and to at once tell you that I did not believe a single word of those lines, which, if meant to hurt, could not have been better conceived, for truly they were coldly cruel. Indeed, the note was hateful, and so absolutely unlike you, that it must have defeated its object, had that been really as you declared it. If you know me at all, you must have realised that, if I know the Kingdom of Heaven may not be taken by storm, I should never seek for the charity which is thrown to the importunate. But the other letter was there, and in it I found such measure of consolation as is vouchsafed to those who find that, if their path is difficult, they will not tread it alone, and it tends upward. It may not be all we desire—how should it be in a world which is full of
“Infinite passion
And the pain of finite hearts that yearn”?
Still, it is much; and, at the worst, it is death without its sting.
Do I know? I think I do. You see, if the future contains nothing for me, I have still the past—and, in that past, I have learnt to implicitly trust you, and you have let me see enough of your very self to make me disregard even what comes from you, when it has nothing in common with your real character. But I shall not forget—I do not do that easily at any time—and, if all else faded, I could not forget our friendship. Do you think the first man and woman ever forgot that once they dwelt in Paradise? It was the recollection of all they had lost which was the beginning of mortal suffering. If that “pleasant place” is closed to me, I am not likely to forget that I have seen the gate, that I know where to find it, and that there is but one. Yes, I understand; and the proof is, that in my regret there is no bitterness now. I also remember what I said when we leant over the balustrade of a verandah and looked out into the silver sheen of a ravishing Eastern night, wherein the frail chalices of the moonflower shone like great, milk-white stars in their leafy sky, while from the trellis-work beneath us rose the faint, sweet scent of those strange blossoms. You have taught me how great the exception can be. The cynicism is only skin-deep, and I shall never swell the ranks of the Faithful—though I still think there is much to be said for the Faith. The creed, like other creeds, suffers by the perfunctory service of those who profess to be true believers. As for the way you have chosen, I think it is the right way, at least it is the best to follow now; and, to help you tread it well, I also say, “God be with you.” They need not be my last words to you, for, if ever my loyal service can further any wish of yours, our friendship is not so poor a thing that you would hesitate to give me the satisfaction of doing for you anything that lies in my power. That was in the bond we made long ago. If we cannot forget what came into our dream of mutual trust and intellectual companionship, is it not better to bravely accept the fiat of Destiny and make the past a link to bind us more closely to the terms of our bond? Even so we may still help each other, still cleave to the sympathy which we know will never fail us; and, if our paths divide, the earth is not wide enough to keep us asunder, should we ever try to say “Adieu.”
XXXVII
“TO MARY, IN HEAVEN”
THIS is my last letter to you, Carina, and I am writing in the belief that you are in heaven. But are you really there, and, if you are, is all well with you? Have you everything you desire and no regrets? It seems such a very long way off, you have such small control over the means of transport, and so much depends on hearsay, that one may, I trust, be pardoned for entertaining doubt where all is so indefinite. Then the accounts of that blessed place that have come to different parts of the world, though always inspired, differ so materially. To mortals, immortality is a difficult conception. To finite minds, conscious of the grasp of a limited intelligence, but still very much alive to the evidence of the senses we possess, the idea of a heaven, somewhere beyond the reach of earthly imagination, is perhaps more difficult still. So many millions come into the world, and we realise fairly well how and why they come; they all, without exception, go, and none ever return, and some, we are told, are in heaven, and some elsewhere. The time here is so absurdly short, and the eternity there is so impossibly long, that, if our chances of spending the latter in joy, or sorrow, depend on what we do in the former, it is only natural that this one idea should occupy our thoughts to the exclusion of all others. Yet there, again, we are such frail things, that in this way lies what we call madness.
If you have solved the great problem, can you not enlighten my darkness, my craving for exact knowledge? Write to me, Carina, write and tell me what it is all like. If I have wearied you with my feeble, little tales, my stupid questions, my pictures that must seem to you so flat and colourless in the glory of that better world, my vain imaginings and poor human longings, will you not take pity on me and gladden my weary eyes with a word-painted vision of the Heavenly City, the fields of Elysium, or at least the houris who are to be the portion of the Faithful? I do not know which paradise you are in. See, I wait with the pencil on the paper: will you not make it write?
You do not heed. Perhaps, after all, you are not there; or is it possible that you have forgotten this small planet and those you left here, and that you find more congenial friends in the company of the angels? I dare say it is natural, and I do not upbraid you; but some day I may reach that desired haven, and I want you to remember that I have earned your consideration by my discretion, if you can spare me no more tender feeling. If, for instance, I had sent you these letters while you were still on earth, and you had incautiously left them about (as you would have been certain to do), quite a number of them would have compromised you in the opinion of the servant girl, and she is the origin of a vast deal of earthly gossip. I suppose you have no servant girls and no gossip where you are: the absence of effect depending on the want of cause. Happy heaven! and yet I believe that there are people on this earth who really enjoy being the subject of gossip. To them the suggestions of scandal are as the savour of salt, as danger is to the sportsman; the wilder the suggestion, the more amusing the game; and there are even those who, when tattle wanes and desire fails, say or insinuate, to their own detriment, the thing that is not, rather than disappear into obscurity. It is the same desire for notoriety and attention which prompted Martin to set fire to York Minster, and led the woman to complain to the vicar that her husband had ceased to beat her.
Up in the serene atmosphere of those heavenly heights you have no cathedrals, no husbands, no wives, no work, no play, no food, no frocks—pardon me, that is a slip of the pen; of course you have frocks, but what else have you? Is it not sometimes just a little monotonous? If life is so short that it amounts to little more than the constant fear of coming death, are you not sometimes overawed by the contemplation of eternity? But, after all, the dwellers in heaven may never think. Never to remember, and so never to regret; never to think, and so never to desire—that is a possible scheme of existence where a thousand years might be as one day, and to the weary it would mean rest. But so would oblivion, and we are not altogether satisfied with the thought of oblivion.
“Oh, Threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing is certain—This Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.”
That is well enough, but it is not an inspired writing; it is a cry rather of despair than conviction, and oft repeated to make up for want of certainty. Of things mundane we have acquired a tolerable knowledge, however much there is yet to be learnt; but that in us which we call the Soul will never be satisfied till it learns something of the hereafter. Who will teach it? Do we know more now than they did when men fought with bows and arrows, or flint weapons, instead of hundred-ton guns fired by electricity?
Standing alone in some vast solitude where man and his doings have no part, have made no mark and left no trace—where face to face with Nature, with mountain and plain, forest and sea and a limitless firmament, man’s somewhat puny efforts are forgotten, there comes an intense longing for something higher and nobler than the life we live. The soul of man cries out for light, for some goal towards which he may by effort and sacrifice attain; for he is not lacking in the qualities that have made heroes and martyrs throughout all the ages. If he cannot rend the veil and scale the heights of heaven, he can grasp the things within his reach; and, realising that there are problems beyond his intelligence, he can yet give his life to make easier the lot of his fellow-creatures, seeking humbly, but courageously, to follow, no matter how far behind, in the footsteps of his Great Exemplar. Nor need his efforts be less strenuous, his object less worthy, because this passionate cry of a voice, stilled centuries ago, strikes a sympathetic chord in his heart.
“Yet ah! that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth’s sweet-scented manuscript should close!
The Nightingale, that in the branches sang,
Ah whence, and whither flown again, who knows!
Would but the Desert of the Fountain yield
One glimpse—if dimly, yet indeed reveal’d,
To which the fainting Traveller might spring,
As springs the trampled herbage of the field!
Would but some wingèd Angel, ere too late,
Arrest the yet-unfolded Roll of Fate,
And make the stern Recorder otherwise
Enregister, or quite obliterate!
Ah Love, could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!”
THE END
Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
Edinburgh & London
SECOND EDITION
Malay Sketches
BY
FRANK ATHELSTANE SWETTENHAM
WITH TITLE-PAGE AND COVER DESIGNED BY
PATTEN WILSON
Crown 8vo, 6s.
“Mr. Swettenham’s style is simple and direct and vigorous. Particularly good is his eye for colour, and he has a fine sense of the brilliant melancholy of the East. To few falls the good fortune of introducing us to a new people, and seldom have we the advantage of so admirable a guide.”—Pall Mall Gazette.
“Nothing approaching Mr. Swettenham’s intimate knowledge and illuminative analysis has yet seen the light about that fascinating country which he so well describes.”—Daily Chronicle.
“Its unconventional character is one of the most attractive points about this very attractive volume. Mr. Swettenham succeeds in making the life and character of the Malays real to us in a way that so far as we are aware no other writer has done.”—Publishers’ Circular.
“A pleasant simplicity of style, a total lack of affectation, and a comparatively unknown land and people for subject-matter, make ‘Malay Sketches’ entirely delightful. They are always vivid, always convincing.”—St. James’s Budget.
“This is one of those books which exercise such a fascination upon the mind of the stay-at-home traveller. Stay-at-home though he may be, he has no difficulty in distinguishing the work of a genuine authority from the hasty and inexact impressions of the idle globe-trotter. ‘Malay Sketches’ will be speedily recognised by him as belonging to the more reliable kind of his favourite literature.”—Spectator.
London: JOHN LANE, The Bodley Head
1898
List of Books
IN
BELLES LETTRES
Published by John Lane
The Bodley Head
VIGO STREET, LONDON, W.
Adams (Francis).
Essays in Modernity. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
[Shortly.
A Child of the Age. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
A. E.
Homeward: Songs by the Way. Sq. 16mo, wrappers, 1s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
The Earth Breath, and other Poems. Sq. 16mo. 3s. 6d. net.
Aldrich (T. B.).
Later Lyrics. Sm. fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
Allen (Grant).
The Lower Slopes: A Volume of Verse. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
The Woman Who Did. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Twenty-third Edition.
The British Barbarians. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
Atherton (Gertrude).
Patience Sparhawk and her Times. Crown 8vo. 6s.
[Third Edition.
The Californians. Crown 8vo. 6s.
[Shortly.
Bailey (John C.).
English Elegies. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
[In preparation.
Balfour (Marie Clothilde).
Maris Stella. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Songs from a Corner of France.
[In preparation.
Beeching (Rev. H. C.).
In a Garden: Poems. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
St. Augustine at Ostia. Crown 8vo, wrappers, 1s. net.
Beerbohm (Max).
The Works of Max Beerbohm. With a Bibliography by John Lane. Sq. 16mo. 4s. 6d. net.
The Happy Hypocrite. Sq. 16mo. 1s. net.
[Third Edition.
Bennett (E. A.).
A Man from the North. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide. Sq. 16mo. 2s. 6d. net.
Benson (Arthur Christopher).
Lyrics. Fcap. 8vo, buckram. 5s. net.
Lord Vyet and other Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Bridges (Robert).
Suppressed Chapters and other Bookishness. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
Brotherton (Mary).
Rosemary for Remembrance. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Brown (Vincent).
My Brother. Sq. 16mo. 2s. net.
Ordeal by Compassion. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Two in Captivity. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
[In preparation.
Bourne (George).
A Year’s Exile. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Buchan (John).
Scholar Gipsies. With 7 full-page Etchings by D. Y. Cameron. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
[Second Edition.
Musa Piscatrix. With 6 Etchings by E. Philip Pimlott. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Grey Weather. Crown 8vo. 5s.
[In preparation.
John Burnet of Barns. A Romance. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Campbell (Gerald).
The Joneses and the Asterisks. A Story in Monologue. 6 Illustrations by F. H. Townsend. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
Case (Robert H.).
English Epithalamies. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Castle (Mrs. Egerton).
My Little Lady Anne. Sq. 16mo. 2s. net.
Chapman (Elizabeth Rachel).
Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Charles (Joseph F.).
The Duke of Linden. Crown 8vo. 5s.
[In preparation.
Cobb (Thomas).
Carpet Courtship. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Mr. Passingham. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
[In preparation.
Coleridge (Ernest Hartley).
Poems. 3s. 6d. net.
Corvo (Baron).
Stories Toto Told Me. Square 16mo. 1s. net.
Crane (Walter).
Toy Books. Re-issue of.
This Little Pig’s Picture Book, containing:
- I. This Little Pig.
- II. The Fairy Ship.
- III. King Luckieboy’s Party.
Mother Hubbard’s Picture Book, containing:
- IV. Mother Hubbard.
- V. The Three Bears.
- VI. The Absurd A. B. C.
Cinderella’s Picture Book, containing:
- VII. Cinderella.
- VIII. Puss in Boots.
- IX. Valentine and Orson.
Each Picture-Book containing three Toy Books, complete with end papers and covers, together with collective titles, end-papers, decorative cloth cover, and newly written Preface by Walter Crane, 4s. 6d. The Nine Parts as above may be had separately at 1s. each.
Crackanthorpe (Hubert).
Vignettes. A Miniature Journal of Whim and Sentiment. Fcap. 8vo, boards. 2s. 6d. net.
Craig (R. Manifold).
The Sacrifice of Fools. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Crosse (Victoria).
The Woman who Didn’t. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Third Edition.
Custance (Olive).
Opals: Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Croskey (Julian).
Max. Crown 8vo. 6s.
[Second Edition.
Dalmon (C. W.).
Song Favours. Sq. 16mo. 3s. 6d. net.
D’Arcy (Ella).
Monochromes. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
The Bishop’s Dilemma. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Modern Instances. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Dawe (W. Carlton).
Yellow and White. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Kakemonos. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Dawson (A. J.).
Mere Sentiment. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Middle Greyness. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Davidson (John).
Plays: An Unhistorical Pastoral; A Romantic Farce; Bruce, a Chronicle Play; Smith, a Tragic Farce; Scaramouch in Naxos, a Pantomime. Small 4to. 7s. 6d. net.
Fleet Street Eclogues. Fcap. 8vo, buckram. 4s. 6d. net.
[Third Edition.
Fleet Street Eclogues. 2nd Series. Fcap. 8vo, buckram. 4s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
A Random Itinerary. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net.
Ballads and Songs. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net.
[Fourth Edition.
New Ballads. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
Godfrida. A Play. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net.
De Lyrienne (Richard).
The Quest of the Gilt-Edged Girl. Sq. 16mo. 1s. net.
De Tabley (Lord).
Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical. By John Leicester Warren (Lord de Tabley). Five Illustrations and Cover by C. S. Ricketts. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
[Third Edition.
Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical. Second Series. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Devereux (Roy).
The Ascent of Woman. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Dick (Chas. Hill).
English Satires. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
[In preparation.
Dix (Gertrude).
The Girl from the Farm. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
Dostoievsky (F.).
Poor Folk. Translated from the Russian by Lena Milman. With a Preface by George Moore. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Dowie (Menie Muriel).
Some Whims of Fate. Post 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
Duer (Caroline, and Alice).
Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Egerton (George).
Keynotes. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Eighth Edition.
Discords. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Fifth Edition.
Symphonies. Crown 8vo. 6s.
[Second Edition.
Fantasias. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
The Hazard of the Ill. Crown 8vo. 6s.
[In preparation.
Eglinton (John).
Two Essays on the Remnant. Post 8vo, wrappers. 1s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
Farr (Florence).
The Dancing Faun. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Fea (Allan).
The Flight of the King: A full, true, and particular account of the escape of His Most Sacred Majesty King Charles II. after the Battle of Worcester, with Sixteen Portraits in Photogravure and over 100 other Illustrations. Demy 8vo. 21s. net.
Field (Eugene).
The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac. Post 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Lullaby Land: Songs of Childhood. Edited, with Introduction, by Kenneth Grahame. With 200 Illustrations by Chas. Robinson. Uncut or gilt edges. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Firth (George).
The Adventures of a Martyr’s Bible. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Fleming (George).
For Plain Women Only. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Flowerdew (Herbert).
A Celibate’s Wife. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Fletcher (J. S.).
The Wonderful Wapentake. By “A Son of the Soil.” With 18 Full-page Illustrations by J. A. Symington. Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net.
Life in Arcadia. With 20 Illustrations by Patten Wilson. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
God’s Failures. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Ballads of Revolt. Sq. 32mo. 2s. 6d. net.
The Making of Matthias. With 40 Illustrations and Decorations by Lucy Kemp-Welch. Crown 8vo. 5s.
Ford (James L.).
The Literary Shop, and Other Tales. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Frederic (Harold).
March Hares. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Third Edition.
Mrs. Albert Grundy: Observations in Philistia. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
Fuller (H. B.).
The Puppet Booth. Twelve Plays. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
Gale (Norman).
Orchard Songs. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net.
Garnett (Richard).
Poems. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Dante, Petrarch, Camoens, cxxiv Sonnets, rendered in English. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Geary (Sir Nevill).
A Lawyer’s Wife. Crown 8vo. 6s.
[Second Edition.
Gibson (Charles Dana).
Drawings: Eighty-Five Large Cartoons. Oblong Folio. 20s.
Pictures of People. Eighty-Five Large Cartoons. Oblong folio. 20s.
London: As Seen by C. D. Gibson. Text and Illustrations. Large folio, 12 × 18 inches. 20s.
The People of Dickens. Six Large Photogravures. Proof Impressions from Plates, in a Portfolio. 20s.
Gilbert (Henry).
Of Necessity. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Gilliat-Smith (E.).
Songs from Prudentius. Pott 4to. 5s. net.
Gleig (Charles).
When all Men Starve. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
The Edge of Honesty. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Gosse (Edmund).
The Letters of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Now first edited. Pott 8vo. 5s. net.
Grahame (Kenneth).
Pagan Papers. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
The Golden Age. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Eighth Edition.
A New Volume of Essays.
[In preparation.
See Eugene Field’s Lullaby Land.
Greene (G. A.).
Italian Lyrists of To-day. Translations in the original metres from about thirty-five living Italian poets, with bibliographical and biographical notes. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
[Second Edition.
Greenwood (Frederick).
Imagination in Dreams. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Grimshaw (Beatrice Ethel).
Broken Away. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Hake (T. Gordon).
A Selection from his Poems. Edited by Mrs. Meynell. With a Portrait after D. G. Rossetti. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Hansson (Laura M.).
Modern Women. An English rendering of “Das Buch der Frauen” by Hermione Ramsden. Subjects: Sonia Kovalevsky, George Egerton, Eleanora Duse, Amalie Skram, Marie Bashkirtseff, A. Ch. Edgren Leffler. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Hansson (Ola).
Young Ofeg’s Ditties. A Translation from the Swedish. By George Egerton. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Harland (Henry).
Grey Roses. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Comedies and Errors. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Hay (Colonel John).
Poems including “The Pike County Ballads” (Author’s Edition), with Portrait of the Author. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
Castilian Days. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
Speech at the Unveiling of the Bust of Sir Walter Scott in Westminster Abbey. With a Drawing of the Bust. Sq. 16mo. 1s. net.
Hayes (Alfred).
The Vale of Arden and Other Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Hazlitt (William).
Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion. Edited, with an Introduction, by Richard Le Gallienne. To which is added an exact transcript of the original MS., Mrs. Hazlitt’s Diary in Scotland, and letters never before published. Portrait after Bewick, and facsimile letters. 400 Copies only. 4to, 364 pp., buckram. 21s. net.
Heinemann (William).
The First Step; A Dramatic Moment. Small 4to. 3s. 6d. net.
Summer Moths: A Play. Sm. 4to. 3s. 6d. net.
Henniker (Florence).
In Scarlet and Grey. (With The Spectre of the Real by Florence Henniker and Thomas Hardy.) Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
Hickson (Mrs. Murray).
Shadows of Life. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Hopper (Nora).
Ballads in Prose. Sm. 4to. 6s.
Under Quicken Boughs. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Housman (Clemence).
The Were Wolf. With 6 Illustrations by Laurence Housman. Sq. 16mo. 3s. 6d. net.
Housman (Laurence).
Green Arras: Poems. With 6 Illustrations, Title-page, Cover Design, and End Papers by the Author. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Gods and their Makers. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Irving (Laurence).
Godefroi and Yolande: A Play. Sm. 4to. 3s. 6d. net.
Jalland (G. H.).
The Sporting Adventures Of Mr. Popple. Coloured Plates. Oblong 4to, 14 × 10 inches. 6s.
[In preparation.
James (W. P.).
Romantic Professions: A Volume of Essays. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Johnson (Lionel).
The Art of Thomas Hardy: Six Essays. With Etched Portrait by Wm. Strang, and Bibliography by John Lane. Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
Johnson (Pauline).
White Wampum: Poems. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Johnstone (C. E.).
Ballads of Boy and Beak. Sq. 32mo. 2s. net.
Kemble (E. W.)
Kemble’s Coons. 30 Drawings of Coloured Children and Southern Scenes. Oblong 4to. 6s.
King (K. Douglas).
The Child who will Never Grow Old. Crown 8vo. 5s.
King (Maud Egerton).
Round about a Brighton Coach Office. With over 30 Illustrations by Lucy Kemp-Welch. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Lander (Harry).
Weighed in the Balance. Crown 8vo. 6s.
The Lark.
Book the First. Containing Nos. 1 to 12.
Book the Second. Containing Nos. 13 to 24. With numerous Illustrations by Gelett Burgess and Others. Small 4to. 25s. net, the set.
[All published.
Leather (R. K.).
Verses. 250 copies. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. net.
Lefroy (Edward Cracroft).
Poems. With a Memoir by W. A. Gill, and a reprint of Mr. J. A. Symonds’ Critical Essay on “Echoes from Theocritus.” Cr. 8vo. Photogravure Portrait. 5s. net.
Le Gallienne (Richard).
Prose Fancies. With Portrait of the Author by Wilson Steer. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
[Fourth Edition.
The Book Bills of Narcissus. An Account rendered by Richard le Gallienne. With a Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Third Edition.
Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy, and Other Poems, mainly Personal. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
English Poems. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
[Fourth Edition, revised.
George Meredith: Some Characteristics. With a Bibliography (much enlarged) by John Lane, portrait, &c. Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net.
[Fourth Edition.
The Religion of a Literary Man. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Fifth Thousand.
Retrospective Reviews, A Literary Log, 1891-1895. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. 9s. net.
Prose Fancies. (Second Series). Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
The Quest of the Golden Girl. Crown 8vo. 6s.
[Fifth Edition.
The Romance of Zion Chapel. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Love in London: Poems. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
[In preparation.
See also Hazlitt, Walton and Cotton.
Legge (A. E. J.).
Mutineers. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Linden (Annie).
Gold. A Dutch Indian story. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Lipsett (Caldwell).
Where the Atlantic Meets the Land. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Locke (W. J.).
Derelicts. Crown 8vo. 6s.
[Second Edition.
Lowry (H. D.).
Make Believe. Illustrated by Charles Robinson. Crown 8vo, gilt edges or uncut. 6s.
Women’s Tragedies. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
The Happy Exile. With 6 Etchings by E. Philip Pimlott. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Lucas (Winifred).
Units: Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Lynch (Hannah).
The Great Galeoto and Folly or Saintliness. Two Plays, from the Spanish of José Echegaray, with an Introduction. Small 4to. 5s. 6d. net.
McChesney (Dora Greenwell).
Beatrix Infelix. A Summer Tragedy in Rome. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Macgregor (Barrington).
King Longbeard. With over 100 Illustrations by Charles Robinson. Small 4to. 6s.
Machen (Arthur).
The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
The Three Impostors. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Macleod (Fiona).
The Mountain Lovers. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Makower (Stanley V.).
The Mirror of Music. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Cecilia. Crown 8vo. 5s.
Mangan (James Clarence).
Selected Poems. With a Biographical and Critical Preface by Louise Imogen Guiney. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Mathew (Frank).
The Wood of the Brambles. Crown 8vo. 6s.
A Child in the Temple. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
The Spanish Wine. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
At the Rising of the Moon. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Marzials (Theo.).
The Gallery of Pigeons and Other Poems. Post 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
Meredith (George).
The First Published Portrait of this Author, engraved on the wood by W. Biscombe Gardner, after the painting by G. F. Watts. Proof copies on Japanese vellum, signed by painter and engraver. £1 1s. net.
Meynell (Mrs.).
Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Sixth Edition.
The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Sixth Edition.
The Colour of Life and Other Essays. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Fifth Edition.
The Children. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
Miller (Joaquin).
The Building of the City Beautiful. Fcap. 8vo. With a Decorated Cover. 5s. net.
Milman (Helen).
In the Garden of Peace. With 24 Illustrations by Edmund H. New. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
[Second Edition.
Money-Coutts (F. B.).
Poems. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
The Revelation of St. Love the Divine. Sq. 16mo. 3s. 6d. net.
Monkhouse (Allan).
Books and Plays: A Volume of Essays on Meredith, Borrow, Ibsen, and others. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
A Deliverance. Crown 8vo. 5s.
[In preparation.
Nesbit (E.).
A Pomander of Verse. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
In Homespun. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Nettleship (J. T.).
Robert Browning: Essays and Thoughts. Portrait. Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net.
[Third Edition.
Nicholson (Claud).
Ugly Idol. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Noble (Jas. Ashcroft).
The Sonnet in England and Other Essays. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Oppenheim (M.).
A History of the Administration of the Royal Navy, and of Merchant Shipping in relation to the Navy from MDIX to MDCLX, with an introduction treating of the earlier period. With Illustrations. Demy 8vo. 15s. net.
Orred (Meta).
Glamour. Crown 8vo. 6s.
O’Shaughnessy (Arthur).
His Life and His Work. With Selections from his Poems. By Louise Chandler Moulton. Portrait and Cover Design. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net.
Oxford Characters.
A series of lithographed portraits by Will Rothenstein, with text by F. York Powell and others. 200 copies only, folio. £3 3s. net.
Pain (Barry).
The Tompkins Verses. Edited by Barry Pain, with an introduction. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
[In preparation.
Pennell (Elizabeth Robins).
The Feasts of Autolycus: The Diary of a Greedy Woman. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Peters (Wm. Theodore).
Posies out of Rings. Sq. 16mo. 2s. 6d. net.
Phillips (Stephen).
Poems. With which is incorporated “Christ in Hades.” Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
[Fourth Edition.
Pinkerton (T. A.).
Sun Beetles. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Plarr (Victor).
In the Dorian Mood: Poems. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Posters in Miniature:
over 250 reproductions of French, English and American Posters, with Introduction by Edward Penfield. Large crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Price (A. T. G.).
Simplicity. Sq. 16mo. 2s. net.
Radford (Dollie).
Songs and other Verses. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
Risley (R. V.).
The Sentimental Vikings. Post 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
Rhys (Ernest).
A London Rose and Other Rhymes. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Robertson (John M.).
New Essays towards a Critical Method. Crown 8vo. 6s. net.
Russell (T. Baron).
A Guardian of the Poor. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
St. Cyres (Lord).
The Little Flowers of St. Francis: A new rendering into English of the Fioretti di San Francesco. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
[In preparation.
Seaman (Owen).
The Battle of the Bays. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Fourth Edition.
Horace at Cambridge. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Sedgwick (Jane Minot).
Songs from the Greek. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Setoun (Gabriel).
The Child World: Poems. With over 200 Illustrations by Charles Robinson. Crown 8vo, gilt edges or uncut. 6s.
Sharp (Evelyn).
Wymps: Fairy Tales. With 8 Coloured Illustrations by Mrs. Percy Dearmer. Small 4to, decorated cover. 6s.
[Second Edition.
At the Relton Arms. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
The Making of a Prig. Crown 8vo. 6s.
All the Way to Fairy Land. With 8 Coloured Illustrations by Mrs. Percy Dearmer. Small 4to, decorated cover. 6s.
[Second Edition.
Shiel (M. P.).
Prince Zaleski. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Shapes in the Fire. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Shore (Louisa).
Poems. With an appreciation by Frederic Harrison and a Portrait. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net.
Shorter (Mrs. Clement). (Dora Sigerson).
The Fairy Changeling, and other Poems. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Smith (John).
Platonic Affections. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Stacpoole (H. de Vere).
Pierrot. Sq. 16mo. 2s. net.
Death, the Knight, and the Lady. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Stevenson (Robert Louis).
Prince Otto. A Rendering in French by Egerton Castle. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
A Child’s Garden of Verses. With over 150 Illustrations by Charles Robinson. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
[Fourth Edition.
Stimson (F. J.).
King Noanett. A Romance of Devonshire Settlers in New England. With 12 Illustrations by Henry Sandham. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Stoddart (Thos. Tod).
The Death Wake. With an Introduction by Andrew Lang. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net.
Street (G. S.).
Episodes. Post 8vo. 3s. net.
Miniatures and Moods. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. net.
Quales Ego: A few Remarks, in particular and at large. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
The Autobiography of a Boy. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Sixth Edition.
The Wise and the Wayward. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Notes of a Struggling Genius. Sq. 16mo, wrapper. 1s. net.
Sudermann (H.).
Regina: or, The Sins of the Fathers. A Translation of Der Katzensteg. By Beatrice Marshall. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Swettenham (Sir F. A.).
Malay Sketches. Crown 8vo. 6s.
[Second Edition.
Unaddressed Letters. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Syrett (Netta).
Nobody’s Fault. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
The Tree of Life. Crown 8vo. 6s.
[Second Edition.
Tabb (John B.).
Poems. Sq. 32mo. 4s. 6d. net.
Lyrics. Sq. 32mo. 4s. 6d. net.
Taylor (Una).
Nets for the Wind. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Tennyson (Frederick).
Poems of the Day and Year. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Thimm (Carl A.).
A Complete Bibliography of Fencing and Duelling, as practised by all European Nations from the Middle Ages to the Present Day. With a Classified Index, arranged Chronologically according to Languages. Illustrated with numerous Portraits of Ancient and Modern Masters of the Art. Title-pages and Frontispieces of some of the earliest works. Portrait of the Author by Wilson Steer. 4to. 21s. net.
Thompson (Francis).
Poems. With Frontispiece by Laurence Housman. Pott 4to. 5s. net.
[Fourth Edition.
Sister-Songs: An Offering to Two Sisters. With Frontispiece by Laurence Housman. Pott 4to. 5s. net.
Thoreau (Henry David).
Poems of Nature. Selected and edited by Henry S. Salt and Frank B. Sanborn. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
Traill (H. D.).
The Barbarous Britishers: A Tip-top Novel. Crown 8vo, wrapper. 1s. net.
From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Tynan Hinkson (Katharine).
Cuckoo Songs. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net.
Miracle Plays. Our Lord’s Coming and Childhood. With 6 Illustrations by Patten Wilson. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
Wells (H. G.).
Select Conversations with an Uncle, now Extinct. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Walton and Cotton.
The Compleat Angler. Edited by Richard Le Gallienne. With over 250 Illustrations by Edmund H. New. Fcap. 4to, decorated cover. 15s. net.
Also to be had in thirteen 1s. parts.
Warden (Gertrude).
The Sentimental Sex. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Watson (H. B. Marriott).
At the First Corner and Other Stories. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Galloping Dick. Crown 8vo. 6s.
The Heart of Miranda. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Watson (Rosamund Marriott).
Vespertilia and other Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
A Summer Night and Other Poems. New Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. net.
Watson (William).
The Father of the Forest and other Poems. With New Photogravure Portrait of the Author. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Fifth Thousand.
Odes and Other Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
[Fifth Edition.
The Eloping Angels: A Caprice. Square 16mo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
Excursions in Criticism: being some Prose Recreations of a Rhymer. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
[Second Edition.
The Prince’s Quest and Other Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
[Third Edition.
The Purple East: A Series of Sonnets on England’s Desertion of Armenia. With a Frontispiece after G. F. Watts, R.A. Fcap. 8vo, wrappers. 1s. net.
[Third Edition.
The Year of Shame. With an Introduction by the Bishop of Hereford. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
The Hope of the World, and Other Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Third Edition.
Watt (Francis).
The Law’s Lumber Room. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
The Law’s Lumber Room. Second Series. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
Watts-Dunton (Theodore).
Jubilee Greeting at Spithead to the Men of Greater Britain. Crown 8vo. 1s. net.
The Coming of Love and other Poems. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
[Second Edition.
Wenzell (A. B.).
In Vanity Fair. 70 Drawings. Oblong folio. 20s.
Wharton (H. T.).
Sappho. Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation by Henry Thornton Wharton. With 3 Illustrations in Photogravure, and a Cover designed by Aubrey Beardsley. With a Memoir of Mr. Wharton. Fcap. 8vo. 6s. net.
[Fourth Edition.
Wotton (Mabel E.).
Day Books. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Xenopoulos (Gregory).
The Stepmother: A Tale of Modern Athens. Translated by Mrs. Edmonds. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
Zola (Emile).
Four Letters to France—The Dreyfus Affair. Fcap. 8vo, wrapper. 1s. net.
THE YELLOW BOOK
An Illustrated Quarterly.
Pott 4to. 5s. net.
| I. | April 1894, 272 pp., 15 Illustrations. [Out of print. |
| II. | July 1894, 364 pp., 23 Illustrations. |
| III. | October 1894, 280 pp., 15 Illustrations. |
| IV. | January 1895, 285 pp., 16 Illustrations. |
| V. | April 1895, 317 pp., 14 Illustrations. |
| VI. | July 1895, 335 pp., 16 Illustrations. |
| VII. | October 1895, 320 pp., 20 Illustrations. |
| VIII. | January 1896, 406 pp., 26 Illustrations. |
| IX. | April 1896, 256 pp., 17 Illustrations. |
| X. | July 1896, 340 pp., 13 Illustrations. |
| XI. | October 1896, 342 pp., 12 Illustrations. |
| XII. | January 1897, 350 pp., 14 Illustrations. |
| XIII. | April 1897, 316 pp., 18 Illustrations. |
Transcriber’s Note:
Quotations from other sources, and transliterated materials, have been transcribed as they appear in this book.
The ordering of entries in the book catalogue has been retained.
Spelling, grammar, and variation in hyphenation and word usage have been retained.
Punctuation has been changed occasionally where a clear predominance of usage could be ascertained.
p. 7:
si cœtera noscit
changed to
si cætera noscit
p. 124:
between the deep blue bills
changed to
between the deep blue hills
p. 157:
to regard the unknown quanity with philosophy
changed to
to regard the unknown quantity with philosophy
p. 165:
Persumably if the man thinks
changed to
Presumably if the man thinks
p. 254:
The wasp has still a sting left, she says; “You sent
changed to
The wasp has still a sting left; she says, “You sent