UNADDRESSED LETTERS
I
THE HILL OF SOLITUDE
AN hour ago I climbed the narrow, winding path that circles the Hill of Solitude, and as I gained the summit and sat upon that narrow bench, facing the west, I may have fallen into a trance, for there appeared to me an ever-changing vision of unearthly beauty.
The sun was sinking into the sea, directly in a line with the wide estuary that marks a distant river’s mouth. It was setting in a blaze of molten gold, while all above and to the northward, the background of sky glowed with that extraordinary, clear pale-blue blent with green, that makes one of the most striking features of the sunsets seen from this hill. The clouds were fewer to-night, the background wider and clearer, the colour more intense, more transparent, as though the earnest gazer might even discern some greater glory, beyond and through the shining crystal of those heavenly windows.
The calm surface of the sea beneath mirrored the lights above, till sea and sky vied with each other in a perfection of delicate translucent sheen. Northwards a few grey-gold clouds lay against this wondrous background, but in the south they were banked in heavy masses, far down the sky to the limits of vision.
Out of a deep forest-clad valley, immediately behind the hill, a freshening breeze was driving volumes of white mist across the northern spur; driving it, at racing speed, in whirling, tangled wisps, across the water-holes that cluster around the foot of the great range; driving it over the wide plain, out towards the glittering coast-line.
But in a moment, as though by magic, the thick banks of cloud in the south were barred with broad shafts of brilliant rose dorée; the spaces of clear sky, which, an instant before, were pale silver-blue, became pale green, momentarily deepening in intensity of tone. Close around the setting sun the gold was turning to flame, and, as the glory of magnificent colouring spread over all the south, the clouds took every rainbow hue, as though charged with a galaxy of living, palpitating radiance, grand yet fateful, a God-painted picture of battle and blazing cities, of routed hosts and desperate pursuit.
Overhead, and filling the arc from zenith to the outer edge of sun-coloured cloud, the sky was a deep sapphire, half covered by soft, rounded clouds of deeper sapphire still, only their edges tinged with gleams of dull gold.
Another sweep of the magic wand, and, as the patches of pale aquamarine deepened into emerald, the heavier clouds became heliotrope, and a thick heliotrope haze floated gently across the wide plain, seawards. The fires of crimson light blazed brighter in the gathering gloom of rising mist and lowering cloud, but the sea shone with ever-increasing clearness in the rapidly narrowing space of yet unhidden view.
For a moment the mist disappeared, as suddenly as it came; the sapphire clouds took a deeper hue, heliotrope turned to purple, the crimson lights were softer but richer in colour, streaked with narrow bands of gold, and dark arrowlike shafts shot from the bow of Night.
Standing there, it was as though one were vouchsafed, for a moment, a vision of the Heavenly City which enshrines the glory of God. One caught one’s breath and shivered, as at the sound of violins quivering under inspired fingers, or the voices of boys singing in a cathedral choir.
All this while a solitary, ragged-edged cloud-kite hung, almost motionless, in middle distance, over the glittering waters of the river mouth. This cloud gathered blackness and motion, spread itself out, like a dark thick veil, and, as the mist, now grey and cold, closed in, the last sparks of the dying sunset were extinguished in the distant sea.
And then I was stumbling down the path in the darkness, my eyes blinded by the glory of the vision; and as I groped through the gloom, and heard the wail of the night-wind rushing from those far-away mountains, across this lonely peak, I began to wonder whether I had not been dreaming dreams conjured up by the sadly-sweet associations of the place.
The darkness deepened, and, as I reached the dividing saddle and began to mount the opposite hill, I heard the faint jingle of a dangling coin striking metal, and I said to myself that such associations, acting on the physical weariness resulting from days of intolerable strain, followed by nights of worse regret, were enough to account for far stranger journeys in the land which lies beyond the Gates of Ivory and Horn.
II
OF WORSHIP
“THIS life—good as it can be—is horribly difficult and complicated. I feel as though I were walking in the dark, just stumbling along and groping my way—there seems to be no light to guide me—you are so far away, and there is ever that wall between us,—no higher than before, but quite as impenetrable—I wonder,—I wonder,—I wonder what the future will bring to you,—to me.”
“I think of you up there, among the soft white clouds, watching the sun setting into the sea, while the great blue hills are melting through twilight into night. Oh! there’s nothing like that beauty here,—in the West,—and I am sick for the East and all her hot, passionate loveliness; all her colour and light; all her breadth and grandeur; for her magnificent storms and life,—life on a big scale. Here everything is so small, so petty, so trivial. I want,—I want,—I want,—that’s how I feel; I am lovesick and heartsick and sick for the sun. Well, this life is nearly done, and in the next I shall at least be worshipped.”
That is well, and if you are worshipped you should not say “at least.” What more can you want? Especially since, having all other things and lacking worship, you would have nothing. They were not meant for this application, but these old Monkish lines are worth remembering:—
“Qui Christum nescit, nil scit, si cætera noscit.
Qui Christum noscit, sat scit, si cætera nescit.”
I hardly like to suggest it, but are you afraid of the “worship,” of its quality, or its lasting properties? Or, assured on these points, do you think worship alone will prove unsatisfying? I wonder.
It is an attractive subject, and women disagree as to how it should be treated. The fact is, that they are seldom able to generalise; they do not take any great interest in generalities, and the answer to an impersonal question must have a personal application before it can be given. And not that alone, for where, as in this case, and, indeed, all those of greatest human interest, another person, a special person, is concerned, then the answer depends largely on that other person as well. You can, perhaps, in your own mind, think of some one or more from whom you would rather have a little worship, than become an object of lifelong adoration to many others who have seemed anxious to offer it. And that is not because their all was less than the little of those with a larger capacity for the worship of human beings, nor even because their appreciation of your personal worth is in any degree limited, or smaller by comparison with that of others. Probably it is exactly the reverse. But I will ask you, of your sweetness and light, to give me knowledge. Would you rather have the absolute, unsought worship of a man, or would you win, perchance even from his unwillingness, a devotion that, if it was not thrown at you, was probably, when gained, not likely to burn itself out in a blaze of ardent protestations? You will, of course, say that it depends on the attitude assumed by the man, and I reply that it does not, because the same man would never be found ready to render his service in either of these—well—disguises, if you will. It would be in one or in the other. Therefore my question will admit of the personal application, and you can go through your acquaintances, admirers, friends (I dare not say the other word), and tell me whether you would be most attracted by the man who fell at your feet and worshipped, giving of his ample store without effort and without stint, or by the man who, if he were a woman, would be called difficile. This problem will give you no trouble if, as I said before, you can work it out as a personal equation, and it is therefore only necessary that you should have amongst your friends two men of the required types.
In return for your anticipated answer, I will give you this. There are many men who pay their court to women, if not all in one breath, or at one sitting, at least the phase is limited by a definite period. That period is usually shorter or longer in the inverse ratio of the violence of the attack. The operations result in a decisive action, where the man is either worsted or victorious. If he gains his end, and persuades the lady to take him for whatever he is worth, the ordinary type of Englishman will very often consider that his obligation towards her as an idolater, a lover,—whatever name you call the part by,—is over when the curtain comes down on the procession to the altar or to the office of the Registrar, or, at any rate, when the honeymoon has set and the duty-moon rises to wax and wane for evermore. That is the man to avoid; and if the womanly instinct, which is so useful and so little understanded of men (until they learn to fear its unerring accuracy), is only called upon in time, it will not mislead its owner.
You know all this, you will say; very likely, but it is extraordinary how many thousands of women, especially English women, there are who are now eating out their hearts, because they neglected either to ask this question of their instincts or disregarded the answer. Probably it is very seldom asked; for a girl is hardly likely to suppose that, after feeding her on love for a few weeks, or months, the man will starve her of the one thing needful, until death does at last part them. He says he has not time for love-making, and he acts as though he had not the inclination either, though probably, somewhere in his system he keeps the forces that once stirred him to expressions of affection that now seem as needless as it would be to ask his servants for permission to eat the dinner which he has paid for, and which he can take or neglect, praise or find fault with, at his own will and pleasure.
That is a very long homily, but it has grown out of the point of the pen, possibly because I am sitting here alone, “up in the soft white clouds,” as you say, or rather in the softer moonlight; and some of the littlenesses of life loom large, but not over-large, considering their bearing on the lifelong happiness, or misery, of men and women.
Yes, I am sitting exactly where you imagined. It was on that sofa that you used to lie in the evenings, when you were too feeble to sit up, and I read to you out of a book of knowledge. But that was years and years ago, and now you wonder. Well, I too wonder, and—there, it has just struck 1 A.M.—I will wonder no more, but look out at the surpassing loveliness of this white night, and then—rest.
It is so strange, I have come back to tell you. The soft white clouds are actually there—motionless—they cover everything, sea and plain and valley, everything but the loftiest ridges of this mountain. The moon rides high, turning to silver the tops of the great billowy clouds, while it shines full on this house and garden, casting deep shadows from the fern-trees across the gravel, and, from the eaves and pillars of the house, across the verandah. The air is perfectly still now, though, some hours ago, it was blowing a gale and the wind wailed as though mourning its own lost soul.
It seemed then, as it tore round the corner of the house, to be crying, “I come from the rice swamps which have no dividing banks, from the waters which contain no fish, where the apes cry by night and the baboons drink as they hang from the boughs; a place where the chinchîli resorts to bathe, and where man’s food is the kĕmahang fern.” Some day I will tell you more about that place.
And the spirits of the storm that have passed and left this death-like stillness, where are they now? They went seaward, westward, to you-ward, but they will never reach you, and you will not hear their message.
III
WEST AND EAST
ONE night, in the early months of this year, I sat at dinner next to a comparatively young married woman, of the type that is superlatively blonde in colour and somewhat over-ample in figure. She was indifferently dressed, not very well informed, but apparently anxious, by dint of much questioning, to improve her knowledge where possible. She was, I believe, a journalist.
Some one must have told her that I had been in the East, and she, like most stay-at-home people, evidently thought that those who go beyond the shores of England can only be interested in, or have an acquaintance with, the foreign country wherein they have sojourned. Therefore the lady fired at me a volley of questions, about the manners and habits of the Malay people, whom she always referred to as “savages.” I ventured to say that she must have a mistaken, or at any rate incomplete, knowledge of the race to speak of Malays as savages, but she assured me that people who were black, and not Christians, could only be as she described them. I declined to accept that definition, and added that Malays are not black. I fancy she did not believe me; but she said it did not matter, as they were not white and wore no clothes. I am afraid I began to be almost irritated, for the long waits between the courses deprived me of all shelter from the rain of questions and inconsequent remarks.
At last, I said, “It may surprise you to hear that these savages would think, if they saw you now, that you are very insufficiently clad;” and I added, to try and take the edge off a speech that I felt was inexcusably rude, “they consider the ordinary costume of white men so immodest as to be almost indecent.” “Indeed,” said the lady, who only seemed to hear the last statement, “I have often thought so too, but I am surprised that savages, for I must call them savages, should mind about such things.” It was hopeless, and I asked how soon the great American people might be expected to send a force to occupy London.
I have just been reminded of this conversation. A few days ago, I wrote to a friend of mine, a Malay Sultan, whom I have not seen for some months, a letter inquiring how he was, and saying I hoped soon to be able to visit him. Now comes his answer; and you, who are in sympathy with the East, will be able to appreciate the missive of this truculent savage.
In the cover there were three enclosures: a formal letter of extreme politeness, written by a scribe, the Arabic characters formed as precisely and clearly as though they had been printed. Secondly, a letter written in my friend’s own hand, also in the Arabic character, but the handwriting is very difficult to decipher. And thirdly there is another paper, headed “Hidden Secrets,” written also in the Sultan’s own hand. The following is a translation of the beginning of the second letter. At the top of the first page is written, “Our friendship is sealed in the inmost recesses of my heart.” Then this: “I send this letter to my honoured and renowned friend” (here follow my name, designation, and some conventional compliments). The letter then continues: “You, my dear friend, are never out of my thoughts, and they are always wishing you well. I hear that you are coming to see me, and for that reason my heart is exceeding glad, as though the moon had fallen into my lap, or I had been given a cluster of flowers grown in the garden called Bĕnjerâna Sri, wide-opening under the influence of the sun’s warm rays. May God the Most Mighty hasten our meeting, so that I may assuage the thirst of longing in the happy realisation of my affectionate and changeless regard. At the moment of writing, by God’s grace, and thanks to your prayers, I and my family are in good health, and this district is in the enjoyment of peace; but the river is in flood, and has risen so high that I fear for the safety of the bridge.”
There is more, but what I have quoted is enough to show you the style. When the savage has turned from his savagery he will write “Dear sir,” and “Yours truly”; his correspondence will be type-written, in English, and the flaxen-haired lady will remark with approval that the writer is a business man and a Christian, and hardly black at all.
Whilst the Malays are still in my mind, it may interest you to know that they have a somewhat original form of verse in four-line stanzas, each stanza usually complete in itself, the second and fourth lines rhyming. The last two lines convey the sense, while the first two are only introduced to get the rhythm, and often mean nothing at all. Here are some specimens which may give you an idea of these pantun, as they are called, though in translating them I have made no attempt to give the necessary “jingle.”
“A climbing bean will gain the roof;
The red hibiscus has no scent.
All eyes can see a house on fire;
No smoke the burning heart betrays.
Hark! the flutter of the death’s-head moth;
It flies behind the headman’s house.
Before the Almighty created Adam,
Our destinies were already united.
This is the twenty-first night of the moon,
The night when women die in child-birth.
I am but as a captive song-bird,
A captive bird in the hand of the fowler.
If you must travel far up river,
Search for me in every village;
If you must die, while I yet linger,
Wait for me at the Gate of Heaven.”
One of the fascinations of letter-writing is that one can wander at will from one subject to another, as the butterflies flutter from flower to flower; but I suppose there is nearly always something that suggests to the writer the sequence of thought, though it might be difficult to explain exactly what that something is. I think the reference in the above stanzas to Adam and the Gate of Heaven,—or Paradise,—have suggested to me the snake,
“And even in Paradise devise the snake,”
which reminds me that, last night, I said to the ancient and worthy person to whom is entrusted the care of this house—
“Leave the drawing-room doors open while I am at dinner: the room gets overheated.”
Then he, “I not like leave open the doors, because plenty snakes.”
“Snakes: where?”
“Outside, plenty snakes, leave doors open come inside.”
“What sort of snakes?”
“Long snakes” (stretching out his arm to show the length), “short snakes” (measuring off about a foot with the other hand).
“Have you seen them?”
“Yes, plenty.”
This is cheerful news, and I inquire: “Where?”
“In bedrooms.”
“When?”
“Sometimes daytime, sometimes night-time.”
An even pleasanter prospect,—but I am still full of unbelief.
“Have you seen them yourself?”
“Yes, I kill.”
“But when and how was it?”
“One time master not here, lady staying here; daytime I kill one long snake, here, this room—night-time lady call me, I kill one short snake in bedroom.”
“Which bedroom?”
“Master’s bedroom.”
That is not exactly reassuring, especially when you like to leave your doors and windows open, and sleep in the dark. I thank him, and he goes away, having entirely destroyed my peace of mind. The wicked old man! I wish I could have seen his face as he went out. Now I go delicately, both “daytime” and “night-time,” above all at night-time, and I am haunted by the dread of the “plenty long snake, plenty short snake.” In one’s bedroom too, it is a gruesome idea. If I had gone on questioning him, I dare say he would have told me he killed a “plenty long snake” inside the bed, trying to warm itself under the bed-clothes in this absurdly cold place. I always thought this a paradise, but without the snake. Alas! how easily one’s cherished beliefs are destroyed.
It is past midnight; the moon is full, and looking down, resplendent in all her majesty, bathes everything in a silver radiance. I love to go and stand in it; but the verandahs are full of ferns, roses and honeysuckle twine round the pillars, the shadows are as dark as the lights are bright, and everywhere there is excellent cover for the “long snake” and the “short snake.” Perhaps bed is the safest place after all, and to-morrow—well, to-morrow I can send for a mongoose.
IV
A CLEVER MONGOOSE
IN my last letter I told you how the ancient who guards this Eden had complained of the prevalence of snakes, and I, with an experience which Adam does not appear to have possessed, determined to send for a mongoose to deal with the matter. Well, I saw nothing of the serpent, did not even dream about him, and forgot all about the mongoose. It is the thought of what I last wrote to you that reminds me of an excellent story, and a curious trick which I once witnessed, both having to do with the mongoose.
First the story. A boy of twenty got into a train one day, and found, already seated in the carriage, a man of middle age, who had beside him, on the floor, a closed basket. The train started, and by-and-by the boy, feeling dull, looked at his companion, and, to break the ice, said—
“Is that your basket, sir?”
To which the stranger, who did not at all relish the idea of being dragged into a conversation with a strange youth, replied, “Yes, it is,” slightly stammering as he said it.
A pause,—then the boy, “I beg your pardon, but is there some beast in it?”
The man, annoyed, “Ye—es, there’s a m—mongoose in it.”
The boy had no idea what a mongoose was, but he had the curiosity of youth and was unabashed, so he said, “May I ask what the mongoose is for?”
The man, decidedly irritated, and wishing to silence his companion, “G—got a f—friend that sees snakes, t—taking the m—mongoose to catch ’em.”
The boy concluded the stranger was mad, and wishing to pacify him, said—
“Yes, but the snakes are not really there, are they?”
The man, “No, n—neither is the m—mongoose.”
Now as to my experience. Some years ago I was in Calcutta, and, walking in the street one day, I was accosted by a man carrying a bag and leading a mongoose by a string. He said, “I Madras man, master want to see plenty trick, I very good conjurer,” and he produced a sheaf of more or less grimy credentials, in which it was stated, by a number of reputable people, that he was a conjurer of unusual skill. When I had looked at some of the papers, he said, “I come master’s house, do trick, this very clever mongoose, I bring him show master.”
I was quite willing, so I gave him my address and told him to come whenever he liked.
Some days later the conjurer was announced, and there happened to be in my rooms at the time a German dealer in Japanese curios, who had seen rather more than usual during a sixteen years’ residence in Japan and the Farthest East. He was an extremely amusing old person, and glad of the opportunity of seeing the conjurer, who was duly admitted to our presence with his bag of properties. The very clever mongoose came in last, at the end of his string.
The conjurer certainly justified his reputation, and performed some extremely clever tricks, while the mongoose sat by with a blasé expression, taking very little interest in the proceedings. When the conjurer had come to the end of his programme, or thought he had done enough, he offered to sell the secret of any trick I liked to buy, and, taking him at his word, I was shown several tricks, the extreme simplicity of the deceit, when once you knew it, being rather aggravating.
In the interest of watching the performance and the subsequent explanations, I had forgotten the mongoose, and the conjurer was already pushing his paraphernalia into the sack, when I said, “But the mongoose, the clever mongoose, where is his trick?”
The conjurer sat down again, pulled the mongoose towards him, and tied the end of his string to a chair leg, giving the little beast plenty of rope on which to play. Then the man pushed round in front of him an earthenware chatty or water-vessel, which had hitherto stood on the floor, a piece of dirty cloth being tied over its mouth. Next the conjurer thrust his hand into the sack, and pulled out one of the trumpet-mouthed pipes on which Indians play weird and discordant airs.
Now I want you to remember that this was my room, that the man’s stock-in-trade was contained in the sack which he had pushed on one side, that the pieces in the game were the mongoose, the chatty (or what it contained), and the pipe, while the lynx-eyed curio-dealer and I sat as close as we pleased to see fair play. I am obliged to tell you that; of what happened I attempt no explanation, I only relate exactly what I saw.
The stage being arranged as I have described, the conjurer drew the chatty towards him, and said, “Got here one very good snake, catch him in field this morning;” at the same time he untied the cloth, and with a jerk threw on the floor an exceedingly lively snake, about three feet long. From the look of it, I should say it was not venomous. The conjurer had thrown the snake close to the mongoose, who jumped out of its way with surprising agility, while the conjurer kept driving it towards the little beast. Neither snake nor mongoose seemed to relish the situation, and to force the game the conjurer seized the snake by the tail, and, swinging it thereby, tried, two or three times, to hit the mongoose with it. This seemed to rouse both beast and reptile, and the mongoose, making a lightning-like movement, seized the snake by the head, shook it for a second or two, dragging it over the matting, and then dropped it on the floor. The instant the snake showed fight the conjurer had let it go, and the mongoose did the rest.
Where the snake had been dragged, the floor was smeared with blood, and now the creature lay, giving a few spasmodic twitches of its body, and then was still. The conjurer pulled it towards him, held it up by the tail, and said laconically, “Snake dead.” The mongoose meanwhile sat quietly licking its paw as though nothing particular had happened.
As the man held it up I looked very carefully at the snake; one eye was bulging out, by reason of a bite just over it; the head and neck were covered with blood, and as far as my judgment went, the thing was dead as Herod. The conjurer dropped the snake on the floor, where it fell limply, as any dead thing would, then he put it on its back and coiled it up, head inwards, saying again, “You see, snake dead.”
He left the thing lying there, and searched in his sack till he found what appeared to be a very small piece of wood, it was, in fact, exactly like a wooden match. The sack, all this time, was at his side, but not close to him, while the snake was straight in front of him, under our noses. Breaking off a very small piece of the wood, he gave it to the mongoose, which began to eat it, apparently as a matter of duty. At the same time the conjurer took an even smaller bit of the same stuff, and opening the snake’s mouth, pushed the stick, or whatever it was, inside, and then shut the mouth again. This transaction would, I think, have convinced any one who saw it that there was no life in the snake.
The conjurer now took up his pipe, and made it squeal some high discordant notes. Then taking it from his lips, he said in Hindustani, as he touched the snake’s tail with the pipe, “Put out your tail,” and the creature’s tail moved slowly outwards, a little way from the rest of the coiled body. The conjurer skirled another stave on his pipe, and as he lowered the instrument with his left hand, he exclaimed, “Snake all right now,” and stretched out his right hand at the same instant, to seize the reptile by the tail. Either as he touched it, or just before, the snake with one movement was up, wriggling and twisting, apparently more alive than when first taken out of the chatty. While the conjurer thrust it back into the vessel there was plenty of time to remark that, miraculous as the resurrection appeared to be, the creature’s eye still protruded through the blood which oozed from the hole in its head.
As he tied the rag over the top of the chatty, the conjurer said, with a smile, “Very clever mongoose,” gathered up his sack, took the string of his clever assistant in his left hand, raised his right to his forehead, and with a low bow, and a respectful “Salâam, Sahib,” had left the room before I had quite grasped the situation.
I looked at the dealer in curios, and, as with Bill Nye, “he gazed upon me,” but in our few minutes’ conversation, before he left, he could throw no light on the mystery, and we agreed that our philosophy was distinctly at fault.
That evening I related what had taken place to half-a-dozen men, all of whom had lived in India for some years, and I asked if any of them had seen and could explain the phenomenon.
No one had seen it, some had heard of it, all plainly doubted my story. One suggested that a new snake had been substituted for that killed by the mongoose, and another thought that there was no real snake at all, only a wooden make-believe. That rather exasperated me, and I said I was well enough acquainted with snakes to be able to distinguish them from chair-legs. As the company was decidedly sceptical, and inclined to be facetious at my expense, I said I would send for the man again, and they could tell me how the thing was done when they had seen it.
I sent, and it so happened that the conjurer came on a Sunday, when I was sitting in the hall, on the ground-floor of the house where I was staying. The conjurer was already squatted on the white marble flags, with his sack and his chatty (the mongoose’s string held under his foot), when my friends, the unbelievers, or some of them, returned from church, and joined me to watch the proceedings. I will not weary you by going through it all again. What took place then was an exact repetition of what occurred in my room, except that this time the man had a larger chatty, which contained several snakes, and when he had taken out one, and the mongoose had consented to lay hold of it, he worried the creature as a terrier does a rat, and, pulling his string away from under his master’s foot, he carried the snake into the corner of the room, whither the conjurer pursued him and deprived him of his prey. The result of the encounter was that the marble was smeared with streaks of blood that effectually disposed of the wooden-snake theory. That little incident was certainly not planned by the conjurer; but when the victim had been duly coiled on the floor and the bit of stick placed (like the coin with which to fee Charon) within its mouth, then, to my surprise, the conjurer re-opened the chatty, took out another snake, which in its turn was apparently killed by the mongoose, and this one was coiled up and laid on the floor beside the first victim. Then, whilst the first corpse was duly resuscitated, according to the approved methods I have already described, the second lay on the floor, without a sign of life, and it was only when No. 1 had been “resurrectioned,” and put back in the vessel, that the conjurer took up the case of No. 2, and, with him, repeated the miracle.
This time I was so entertained by the manifest and expressed astonishment of the whilom scoffers, that again the conjurer had gone before I had an opportunity of buying this secret, if indeed he would have sold it. I never saw the man again.
There is the story, and, even as it stands, I think you will admit that the explanation is not exactly apparent on the surface. I can assure you, however, that wherever the deception (and I diligently, but unsuccessfully, sought to find it), the performance was the most remarkable I have ever witnessed in any country. To see a creature, full of life,—and a snake, at close quarters, is apt to impress you with its vitality,—to see it killed, just under your eyes, to watch its last convulsive struggles, to feel it in your hands, and gaze at it as it lies, limp and dead, for a space of minutes; then heigh, presto! and the thing is wriggling about as lively as ever. It is a very curious trick—if trick it is.
That, however, is not quite all.
A month or two later I was sitting in the verandah of an hotel in Agra. A number of American globe-trotters occupied most of the other chairs, or stood about the porch, where I noticed there was a little knot of people gathered together. I was idly staring into the street when the words, “Very clever little mongoose,” suddenly attracted my attention, and I realised that two Indian conjurers were amusing the party in the porch. I went at once to the spot, and found the mongoose-snake trick was just beginning. I watched it with great attention, and I noticed that the mongoose only seemed to give the snake one single nip, and there was very little blood drawn. The business proceeded merrily, and in all respects in accordance with what I had already seen, until, at the conclusion of the sort of Salvation-Army resurrection-march, the juggler declared that the snake was quite alive and well—but he was not, he was dead, dead as Bahram the Great Hunter. No piping or tickling or pulling of his tail could awaken the very faintest response from that limp carcass, and the conjurers shuffled their things together with downcast faces, and departed in what the spectators called “a frost.” To them, no doubt, the game was absolutely meaningless; to me it seemed that the mongoose had “exceeded his instructions.”
V
A BLUE DAY
“THERE is a green hill,” you know it well; it is not very “far away,” perhaps a little over a mile, but then that mile is not quite like other miles. For one thing it takes you up 500 feet, and as that is the last pull to reach the highest point of this range (the summit of a mountain over 5000 feet in height), the climb is steep. Indeed, one begins by going down some rough stone steps, between two immense granite boulders; then you make a half-circuit of the hill by a path cut on the level, and thence descend for at least 250 feet, till you are on the narrow saddle which joins this peak to the rest of the range. Really, therefore, in a distance of little over half a mile there is an ascent of 750 feet.
And what a path it is that brings you here! For I am now on the summit, though several times on the way I was sorely tempted to sit down and put on paper the picture of that road as it lay before my eyes. It is a narrow jungle track, originally made by the rhinoceros, the bison, and the elephant, and now simply kept clear of falling trees. It is exceeding steep, as I have said, and you may remember. It begins by following the stony bed of a mountain stream, dry in fine weather, but full of water after half-an-hour’s tropical rain. Where the path is not covered by roots or stones, it is of a chocolate colour; but, in the main, it is overspread by a network of gnarled and knotted tree-roots, which, in the lapse of ages, have become so interlaced that they hide the soil. These roots, the stones round which they are often twined, and the banks on either side, are covered by mosses in infinite variety, so that when you look upwards the path stands like a moss-grown cleft in the wood.
The forest through which this track leads is a mass of dwarfed trees, of palms, shrubs, and creepers. Every tree, without exception, is clothed with moss, wherever there is room to cling on branch or stem, while often there are great fat tufts of it growing in and round the forks, or at any other place with convenient holding. The trees are moss-grown, but that is only where the innumerable creepers, ferns, and orchids leave any space to cover. The way in which these things climb up, embrace, and hang to every tree or stick that will give them a footing is simply marvellous. Even the great granite boulders are hidden by this wealth of irresistible vegetation. Through the green foliage blaze vivid patches of scarlet, marking the dazzling blossoms of a rhododendron that may be seen in all directions, but usually perched high on some convenient tree. Then there is the wonderful magnolia with its creamy petals; the jungle apple-blossom, whose white flowers are now turning to crimson berries; the forest lilac, graceful in form, and a warm heliotrope in colour. These first catch the eye, but, by-and-by, one realises that there are orchids everywhere, and that, if the blossoms are not great in size or wonderful in colour, they are still charming in form, and painted in delicate soft tones of lilac and brown, orange and lemon, while one, with strings of large, pale, apple-green blossoms, is as lovely as it is bizarre.
As for palms, the forest is full of them, in every size, colour, and shape; and wherever the sunlight can break through the foliage will be found the graceful fronds of the giant tree-fern. Lastly, the ground is carpeted with an extravagant luxuriance of ferns and flowers and “creeping things innumerable, both small and great.” The wasteful abundance of it all is what first strikes one, and then you begin to see the beauty of the details. Masses of lycopodium, ringing all the changes through wonderful metallic-blue to dark and light green, and then to russet brown; there are Malay primroses, yellow and blue, and a most delightful little pale-violet trumpet, with crinkled lip, gazing towards the light from the highest point of its delicate stem. On either side of this path one sees a dozen jungle flowers in different shades of blue or lilac; it seems to be the prevailing colour for the small flowers, as scarlet and yellow are for the great masses of more striking blossom. And then there are birds—oh yes, there are birds, but they are strange, like their surroundings. At the foot of this hill I came suddenly on a great black-and-white hornbill, which, seeing me, slowly got up and flew away with the noise of a train passing at a distance. High up the path was a collection of small birds, flitting and twittering amongst the leaves. There were hardly two of the same plumage, but most of them carried their tails spread out like fans, and many had pronounced tufts of feathers on their heads. The birds at this height are usually silent, and, when they make any sound at all, they do not seem to sing but to call; and from the jungle all round, far and near, loud and faint, will be heard similar answering calls. I was surprised to hear, suddenly, some bars of song, close by me, and I waited for a long time, peering earnestly into the tree from which the sound came; but I saw nothing and heard nothing beyond the perpetual double note (short and long, with the accent on the latter) of a bird that must be the bore and outcast of the forest.
Coming out into the clearing which crowns the hill, I passed several kinds of graceful grasses, ten or twelve feet high, and the flight of steps which leads to the actual summit is cut through a mass of bracken, over and through which hang the strange, delicately painted cups of the nepenthes, the stems of the bracken rising from a bed made rosy by the countless blossoms of a three-pointed pale-pink starwort.
In the jungle one could only see the things within reach, but, once on the peak, one has only eyes for the grandeur and magnificence of an unequalled spectacle.
The view seems limitless, it is complete in every direction, unbarred by any obstruction, natural or artificial. First I look eastwards to those great ranges of unexplored mountains, rising tier after tier, their outlines clear as cut cameos against the grey-blue sky. Betwixt them and my point of sight flows a great river, and though it is ten or twelve miles distant as the crow flies, I can see that it is brown with flood-water, and, in some places, overflowing its banks. Nearer lie the green rice-fields and orchards, and, nearer still, the spurs of the great range on whose highest point I stand.
Then northward, that is the view that is usually shut out from me. It is only hill and dale, river and plain, but it is grand by reason of its extent, beautiful in colour and form, intensely attractive in the vastness of those miles of mysterious jungle, untrodden, save by the feet of wild beasts; endless successions of mountain and valley, peak and spur, immovable and eternal. You know there are grey days and golden days; as there are crimson and heliotrope evenings, white, and, alas! also black nights—well, this is a blue day. There is sunlight, but it is not in your eyes, it only gives light without shedding its own colour on the landscape. The atmosphere seems to be blue; the sky is blue, except on the horizon, where it pales into a clear grey. Blue forest-clad hills rise, in the middle distance, from an azure plain, and the distant mountains are sapphire, deep sapphire. The effect is strange and uncommon, but supremely beautiful.
Westward, a deep valley runs down from this range into the flat, forest-covered plains, till, nearing the coast, great patches of light mark fields of sugar-canes and thousands upon thousands of acres of rice. Then the sea, the sea dotted by distant islands, the nearest thirty miles away, the farthest perhaps fifty. The morning heat is drawing a veil of haze across the distance; on a clear evening a great island, eighty miles away to the northward, is clearly visible.
I turn to the south, and straight before me rises the grand blue peak of a mountain, 6000 feet high, and not more than six miles away. It is the highest point of a gigantic mass of hill that seems to fill the great space between the flooded river and the bright calm sea. Looking across the eastern shoulder of the mountain, the eye wanders over a wide plain, lost far away to the south in cloud-wrapt distance. Beyond the western slopes lies the calm mirror of a summer sea, whereon many islands seem to float. The coast-line is broken, picturesque and beautiful, by reason of its many indentations and the line of bold hills which, rising sheer out of the water, seem to guard the shore.
Due west I see across the deep valley into my friend’s house, where it crowns the ridge, and then beyond to that vast plain which, in its miles and miles of forest-covered flatness, broken by great river-mouths, long vistas of deep lagoons, and a group of shining pools scattered over its surface, forms one of the strangest features in this matchless panorama of mountain, river and plain, sea, sky, and ever-changing cloud-effects.
There is an empty one-roomed hut of brown palm-leaves on this most lonely peak. One pushes the mat window upwards and supports it on a stick,—beneath the window is a primitive seat or couch. That is where I have been sitting, a cool breeze blowing softly through the wide open windows. I could not stay there any longer, the place seemed full of memories of another day, when there was no need, and no inclination, to look outside to see the beauty of the world and the divine perfection of the Creator’s genius. And then I heard something, it must have been fancy, but there was a faint but distinct jingle of metal.
It is better out here, sitting on a moss-grown boulder in the pleasant warmth of the sun. The swifts are circling the hill, and they flash past me with the hiss of a sword cleaving the air. I look down on the tops of all these stunted trees, heavy with their burden of creepers and mosses straining towards the light. A great bunch of pitcher-plants is hanging in front of me, pitcher-plants a foot long, scarlet and yellow, green and purple, in all the stages of their growth, their lids standing tilted upwards, leaving the pitcher open to be filled by any passing shower. But my eyes travel across all the intervening miles to rest upon the sea, the sea which is now of a quite indescribable blue, basking under a sky of the same colour. Out there, westward, if I could only pierce the distance, I should see——
Ah! the great white clouds are rising and warning me to go. Good-bye! good-bye! for you the missing words are as plain as these.
VI
OF LOVE, IN FICTION
I HAVE been reading “Casa Braccio,” and I must talk to you about it. Of course I do not know whether you have read it or not, so if I bore you forgive me. I was much interested in Part I., rather disappointed with Part II., and it struck me that Mr. Crawford showed signs in Part III. of weariness with the characters of his own creation. There are nine people who play important parts in the story, and the author kills six of them. The first, an abbess, dies naturally but conveniently; the second, an innkeeper’s daughter, dies suddenly, by misadventure; the third, a nun, dies, one is not told how, when, or where—but she dies. This is disappointing, because she promised to be a very interesting character. Then the fourth, daughter of No. 3, commits suicide, because, having run away from her husband, and got tired of the other man, the husband declines to have her back. The fifth, a most uninteresting and weak-kneed individual, is an artist, husband of No. 4, and he dies, apparently to make himself disagreeable; while the sixth, the original cause of all the trouble, is murdered by the innkeeper, who has been hunting him, like a good Christian, for twenty years, determined to kill him when found, under the mistaken impression that he eloped with, and disposed of, his daughter, No. 2.
No one can deny that the author has dealt out destruction with impartiality, and it is rather strange, for Mr. Crawford often likes to use his characters for two or even three books; that is why, I think, he got a little tired with these particular people, and determined to bury them. Out of this lot he has kept only three for future vivisection and ultimate extinction.
I trust that, if you have not read the book already, you will be induced, by what I have told you, to get “Casa Braccio,” for you will find many interesting human problems discussed in it, and many others suggested for the consideration of the reader. Here, for instance, is a text which may well give you pause, “The widowhood of the unsatisfied is hell, compared with the bereavement of complete possession.”
Now what do you say to that? For I am sure the somewhat bald, if not positively repellent, look and sound of the words, will not deter you from considering the truth or falseness of the statement. I do not altogether like the theory; and one may even be permitted to differ from the conclusion contained in the text. But the reason why this sentence arrested my attention is because you quote, “L’absence ni le temps ne sont rien quand on aime,” and later, you appeal to the East as a place of broader views, of deeper feeling, of longer, wider experience than the West. You appeal to the East, and this is what a Persian poet says:—
“All that is by nature twain,
Fears and suffers by the pain
Of separation—Love is only perfect,
When itself transcends itself,
And one with that it loves
In Undivided Being blends.”
Now, how do you reconcile the Western with the Eastern statement, and will either support the “Casa Braccio” theory? You tell me that time and absence count for nothing as between lovers; the Persian says that separation, under these circumstances, is the one calamity most to be dreaded, and that love cannot be perfect without union. The French writer evidently believed that “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” while the Eastern, without saying, “Out of sight, out of mind,” clearly thought that love in absence is a very poor substitute for the passion which sees, hears, and touches the object of its adoration. Undoubtedly the Eastern expressed the feeling, not only of his own countrymen, but of all other Orientals, and probably of Western lovers as well; but if the separation is a matter of necessity, then the Western character, the feeling of loyalty towards and faith in the object of our love, helps us to the belief that “Partings and tears and absence” none need fear, provided the regard is mutual. It is a good creed, and the only one to uphold, but we are not so blind that we cannot see how often it fails to secure even fidelity; while who would deny the Persian’s contention that the bond cannot be perfect in absence?
“The widowhood of the unsatisfied is hell, compared with the bereavement of complete possession.”
No, certainly, it does not look well. It is hardly worth while to inquire into the bereavement of a complete possession that was not only satisfied but satiated; therefore the comparison must be between perfect love realised, and love that is only not perfected because unrealised. If that is so, then the text appears to be false in theory, for, inasmuch as nothing earthly can be more perfect than that realisation of mutual affection which the same Persian describes as—
“She and I no more,
But in one Undivided Being blended,”—
so the severance of that union by death must be the greatest of human ills.
“The widowhood of the unsatisfied” admits of so many special constructions, each of which would accentuate the despair of the unsatisfied, that it makes the consideration rather difficult, but, in any case, the magnitude of the loss must be imaginative. It is only, therefore, by supposing that no realisation could be so perfect as to equal the ideal of imagination, that the theory of the text could be established. If that be granted, and it were also admitted that the widowhood of this unsatisfied imagination were as hell, compared with “the bereavement of complete possession,” that would merely show that “complete possession” is worth very little, and no one need grieve because their longings after a purely imaginary heaven had been widowed before being wedded to the hell of such a disappointing possession.
In any case, I think one is forced to the conclusion that the man (and one must assume it to be a man, in spite of the word “widowhood”) who should thus express his feelings would never agree that “L’absence ni le temps ne sont rien quand on aime;” that is, of course, supposing he has not got beyond the protesting and unsatisfied stage. Once arrived, he would doubtless subscribe to the phrase with virtuous stolidity. Personally I think, as you probably do, that these words of De Musset give a most charming description of the best form of that true friendship which time cannot weaken nor absence change. For friends it is admirable, for lovers, no.
I have not sought out this riddle for the purpose of airing my own views, but to draw from you an expression of yours. You say my letters are the most tantalising in the world, as I never tell you anything you want to know; just leading up to what most interests you, and then breaking off to something else. If there is nothing in this letter to interest you, at least I have kept to one subject, and I have discussed it as though I were expressing a real opinion! One can hardly do more than that. You see, if I gave you no opportunity of scolding me, you might never write!
VII
THE JINGLING COIN
YOU ask me the meaning of the jingling coin. It was a tale I heard that impressed me, and sometimes comes back with a strange fascination. Did I never tell you? Well, here it is.
I was in India, staying at a hill station, no matter where. I met there a man who for years had spent his holidays in the place, and, walking with him one day up a narrow mountain-path to the top of a hill, whence there was a magnificent view of the Himalayan snows, we passed a small stone slab on which was cut a date. The stone was at a spot where, from the path, was a sheer fall of several hundreds of feet, and as we passed it my companion said—“Look at that. I will tell you what it means when we get to the top.”
As we lay on the grass and feasted our eyes upon the incomparable spectacle, before which earthly lives and troubles seemed so insignificant, my companion told his tale. I now repeat it, as nearly as I can remember, in his own words.
“If I tell you this story,” he said, “you must not ask me how I know the details, or seek for any particulars beyond what I give you.
“During one of my many visits to this place, I met a man whom I had seen before and heard a good deal about, for he was one of those people who concern themselves with no one’s business but their own, and, therefore, their affairs seem to have a special attraction for the Philistine. He knew that rumour was busy with his name, but beyond the fact that he became more reserved than nature had already made him, the gossip, which was always founded on imagination, sometimes on jealousy, and even malice, seemed to make no impression whatever. That may have been the result of a strong character, but partly, no doubt, it was due to the fact that all his public life had been lived under the fierce light of a criticism that was, in a way, the measure of his success. His friends (and he was fortunate in the possession of particularly loyal friends of both sexes) realised that if, even to them, this man showed little of his real self, he sometimes writhed under calumnies of which no one knew the authorship, and the existence of which only reached him rarely, through his most intimate friends. For his own reasons he kept his own counsel, and I doubt whether any one knew as much of the real man as I did. A few months before the time I speak of he had made the acquaintance of a girl, or, perhaps I ought to say, a woman, for she was married, who was, with her mother, visiting India. When first the man met this girl he was amazed, and, to some extent, carried away by her extraordinary beauty. But his work took him elsewhere, and, beyond that first impression, which had so powerfully affected him, there was neither time nor opportunity to ascertain whether the lovely exterior was the casket to a priceless jewel, or only the beautiful form harbouring a mindless, soulless, disappointment. She had heard of the man, and while unwilling to be prejudiced by gossip, she was on her guard, and rather afraid of a cynicism which her quick intelligence had noted at their first meeting. Otherwise she was,—womanlike and generous,—curious to see, and to judge for herself, what manner of man this was, against whom more than one indiscreet acquaintance had already warned her.
“Some time elapsed, and then these two found themselves staying in the same house. The man realised the attractions of the woman’s glorious beauty, and he honestly determined that he would neither think, nor look, nor utter any feeling beyond that of ordinary friendship. This resolve he as honestly kept, and, though accident threw in his way every kind of opportunity, and he was constantly alone with the girl, he made no attempt to read her character, to seek her confidence, or to obtain her friendship;—indeed, he charged himself with having been somewhat neglectful in those attentions which make the courtesy of man to woman,—and, when they parted, he questioned whether any man had ever been so much in this woman’s society without saying a word that might not have been shouted in the market-place. Somehow the man had an intuitive feeling that gossip had supplied the girl with a not too friendly sketch of him, and he, for once, abandoned the cynicism that, had he cared less, might have prompted him to convey any impression of himself, so long as it should not be the true one. To her this visit said nothing beyond the fact that the man, as she found him, was quite unlike his picture, as painted by professed friends, and that the reality interested her.
“The three Fateful Sisters, who weave the destinies of men and women into such strange tangles, threw these two across each other’s paths, until the man, at least, sought to aid Fortune, in providing opportunities for meeting one whose attractive personality appealed so greatly to his artistic sense. Chance helped him, and, again catching together the threads of these lives, Destiny twisted them into a single strand. One brief day, or less, is enough to make a bond that only death can sever, and for this man and woman there were days and days when, in spite of resistance, their lives were gradually drawn so close together that at last the rivets were as strong as they were invisible.
“The triumphant beauty of the woman, rare and disturbing though it was, would not alone have overcome him, but, as the days went by, and they were brought more and more into each other’s society, she gradually let him see the greater beauty of her soul; and small wonder if he found the combined attractions irresistible. She was so young that I have called her a girl, and yet she had seen as much of life as many women twice her age. Her beauty and charm of manner had brought her hosts of admirers, but still she was completely unspoilt, and devoid of either coquetry or self-consciousness. A lovely face, lighted by the winning expression of an intelligent mind and a warm, loving nature; a graceful, willowy figure, whose lissom movements showed a quite uncommon strength and power of endurance; these outward attractions, united to quick discernment, absolute honesty of speech and intention, a bright energy, perfectly unaffected manners, and a courage of the highest order, moral as well as physical, fascinated a man, the business of whose life had been to study his fellow-creatures. He felt certain that he saw here—
“‘La main qui ne trahit, la bouche qui ne ment.’
“His experience had given him a horror of weakness in every form, and here, he realised, was a woman who was only capable of great thoughts and great deeds, obeying the dictates of her own heart and mind, not the suggestions of the weaker brethren. If she fell, it would be as an angel might fall, through love of one of the sons of men.
“Her shy reserve slowly gave way to confidence, and, in the sympathy of closer friendship, she let him see beauties of soul of which he would have deemed it sacrilege to speak to another. What drew her to him I cannot tell; perhaps his profound reverence for, and admiration of, her sex, his complete understanding of herself, or perhaps some quality of his own. I had not her confidence, so cannot say; but there were men who recognised his fascination, due in part, no doubt, to his compelling will. Perhaps she was simply carried away by the man’s overpowering love, which at last declared itself. They realised the hopelessness of the position, and yet they both took comfort from their mutual love and trust in each other’s unchanging faith. That was all they had to look forward to,—that and Fate.
“With that poor prospect before them he gave her, on a day, a gold coin, ‘for luck,’ he said—an ancient Indian coin of some forgotten dynasty, and she hung it on a bangle and said laughingly, that if ever she were likely to forget him the jingle of the coin would be a ceaseless reminder of the giver. And so the thing lived there day and night, and, when she moved, it made little musical sounds, singing its story to her willing ears, as it struck against the bangle from which it hung.
“Then they came here, he to his work, she to see the snows and some friends, before leaving India for Japan, or California, or some other stage of the voyage which brings no rest to the troubled soul. One day they had ridden up here, and were returning down the hill. It was afternoon, and she was riding in front, he behind, the syces following. The path is narrow, as you saw, and very steep. She dropped something, stopped, and called a syce to pick it up. Her horse was impatient, got his head round, and, as the syce approached, backed over the edge of the road. The thing was done in an instant, the horse was over the side, down on his belly, terror-struck and struggling in the loose earth. The man had only time to shout, ‘Get off! get off!’ but she could not get off, the horse had fallen on his off side, and, as the man threw himself on the road, her horse rolled slowly right over her, with a horrible crunching noise,—then faster, over her again, and then horse and rider disappeared, and, crashing through the undergrowth, banging against great granite boulders, fell with a horrible thud, far down the height.
“He had never seen her face; she had her back towards him, and she never uttered a sound.
“The road makes a long détour, and then comes back, several hundred feet lower down, to a spot almost directly underneath the point where the accident happened. A little way in from there the man saw the horse lying perfectly still, with its neck broken. Higher up the bank he found the woman, moaning a little, but quite unconscious, crushed and torn,—you have seen the place and you can guess. She only lived a few minutes.
“When at last the man awoke out of his stupor, to lift her up and carry her down to the path, he noticed that the bangle and the coin had both gone, wrenched off in that wild plunge through trees and stones into eternity—or oblivion.
“The man waited there, while one of the syces went for help and a litter, and it was only after they had carried her home that I saw him. I could hardly recognise him. There were times when I had thought him the saddest-looking man I had ever seen, but this was different. There was a grey, drawn setness on his face, and something in his eyes I did not care to look at. He and I were living in the same house, and in the evening he told me briefly what had happened, and several times, both while he spoke and afterwards, I saw him throw up his head and listen intently. I asked him what it was, and he said, ‘Nothing, I thought I heard something.’ Later, he started suddenly, and said—
“‘Did you hear that?’
“‘Hear what?’ I asked.
“‘A faint jingling noise,’ he replied. ‘You must have heard it; did you do it?’
“But I had heard nothing, and I said so.
“He got up and looked about to see if any one was moving, and then came back and sat down again. I tried to make him go to bed, but he would not, and I left him there at last.
“They buried her the next evening, and all the English in the station were there. The man and I stood on the outskirts of the people, and we lingered till they had gone, and then watched the grave-diggers finish the filling of the grave, put on the sods, and finally leave the place. As they built up the earth, and shaped it into the form of a roof to cover that narrow dwelling, the man winced under every blow of the spades, as though he were receiving them on his own body. There was nothing to say, and we said nothing, but more than once I noticed the man in that listening attitude, and I began to be alarmed about him. I got him home, and except for that look, which had not left his face, and the intentness with which I sometimes caught him listening, there was nothing strange in his manner; only he hardly spoke at all. On subsequent evenings for the next fortnight he talked more than usual about himself, and as I knew that he often spent a good deal of time in, or looking on to, the cemetery, I was not surprised to hear him say that he thought it a particularly attractive graveyard, and one where it would be pleasant to lie, if one had to be put away somewhere. It is on the hill, you know, by the church, and one can see the eternal snows across that blue valley which divides us from the highlands of Sikkim. He was insistent, and made me remark that, as far as he was concerned, there could be no better place to lie than in this God’s Acre.
“Once or twice, again, he asked me if I did not hear a jingle, and constantly, especially in the quiet of evening, I saw him start and listen, till sometimes I really began to think I heard the noise he described.
“A few evenings later, but less than a month after the accident, I went to bed, leaving him cleaning a revolver which he thought a deal of, and certainly he could shoot very straight with it. I was sitting half-undressed, when I heard a loud report, and you may imagine the feelings with which I ran to the room where I had left him. He was sitting at the table, with his left hand raised, as though to reach his heart, and his right straight down by his side, the revolver on the floor beneath it. He was dead, shot through the heart; but his head was slightly thrown back, his eyes wide open, and in them that look of listening expectancy I had seen so often of late. At the corners of his mouth there seemed to be the shadow of the faintest smile.
“At the inquest I explained that I left him cleaning the pistol, and that, as it had a hair-trigger, no doubt it had gone off by misadventure. When each of the jurors had, in turn, raised the hammer, and found it was hardly necessary to touch the trigger in order to fire the weapon, they unanimously returned a verdict of ‘accidental death.’”
“It is curious,” concluded my companion, “but I sometimes think I hear the jingle of that coin, especially if I am alone on this hill, or sitting by myself at night in the house where that sad accident happened.” He put a slight stress on the word “accident,” that was not lost on me.
As we passed the stone, on our way down the hill, I seemed to see that horse blunder backwards over the edge of the path, to hear the slow, crunching roll, and then the crash and ghastly thud, far down below; and, as an involuntary shudder crept slowly down my back, I thought I heard the faint jingle of that ill-omened piece of gold.
VIII
A STRANGE SUNSET
YOU will think I am eternally babbling of sunsets, but no one, with a spark of feeling, could be here and not be moved to the depths of his nature by the matchless, the ever-changing beauty of the wonderful pictures that are so constantly before his eyes. People who are utterly commonplace, whose instincts seem, in some respects, to approach those of the beasts, when they come here are amazed into new sensations, and, in unaccustomed words, voice the expression of their admiration. If I weary you, pardon me, and remember that you are the only victim of my exaltation.
One looks for a sunset in the west, does one not? and that is the direction in which to find it here as elsewhere; but to-night the marvellous effects of the setting sun were, for a time, confined almost entirely to the east, or, to be strictly accurate, rather to the south of east. Facing that direction one looks across a remarkable ridge, entirely covered by giant forest trees. The ridge dips in a sort of crescent from about 4500 feet in height at one extremity to 3000 feet at the other, and extends for a distance of perhaps two miles between the horns. Beyond and below the ridge lies a great, fertile valley, watered by a stately river, along the opposite bank of which runs a range of hills, varying in height from 2000 to 3000 feet. Behind these hills there is another valley, another range, and then a succession of ever-loftier mountains, forming the main chain.
The sun had disappeared behind a thick bank of grey clouds, and the only evidence of his presence was in the lambent edges of these clouds, which here and there glittered like molten metal. The western sky was, except for this bank, extraordinarily clear and cloudless, of a pale translucent blue, flecked here and there by tiny cloud-boats, airy and delicate, moving very slowly across the empyrean. I noticed this because what I saw in the east was so remarkable that I noted every detail.
Against a background the colour of a hedge-sparrow’s egg in the south, and blue without the green in the east, stood one white cloud, like a huge plume, with its base resting on the many ranges across the river, while it seemed to lean towards me, the top of the plume being almost over my head. At first the plume shone, from base to top, with a golden effulgence; but this gradually gave place to that lovely tint which I can only describe as rose dorée, the warm colour momentarily intensifying in tone until it suffused the entire cloud with such a roseate blush that all the hills beneath, and all the fast-darkening plain, blushed in response.
For twenty minutes that glowing plume of softly rounded, feathery cloud stood framed against its wondrous blue-green background, the rosy colour of the cloud deepening as the land beneath it gathered blackness. Then, almost imperceptibly, the glow flickered and died, leaving only an immense grey-white cloud hanging over the night-shrouded plain.
The sun, I knew, had long sunk beneath the horizon. Though I could see nothing behind that thick curtain of cloud, I waited, for the after-glow, seen from this height, is often more wonderful than the actual sunset. Five minutes of dull greyness, and then the whole western sky, for a space above the horizon, was overspread with pale gold, while countless shafts of brighter light radiated, as from the hub of the Sun-God’s chariot-wheel, across the gilded space, into the blue heights above. In the midst of this pale golden sheen there appeared, almost due west, and low down in the sky, a silver crescent, fine as a thread, curved upwards like the lip of a cup of which bowl and stem were invisible. It was the new-born moon.
Gradually all sunlight failed, and close above the long, narrow bank of dark clouds, clearly etched against their grey background, hung a now golden crescent, into which seemed to be falling a solitary star of surpassing brilliance.
To stand alone here in the presence of Nature, to witness the marvels of sunrise or sunset, the strange influence of nights of ravishing moonlight and days of quickening heat, impresses one with the conviction that if Oriental language is couched in terms that sound extravagant to Western ears, the reason is not far to seek. Nature revels here; one can really see things grow, where the sun shines every day as it never shines in lands of cold and fog. Natural phenomena are on a grander scale; the lightning is more vivid, the thunder more deafening, the rain a deluge against which the feeble artifices of man offer no protection. The moonlight is brighter, the shadows deeper, the darkness blacker than in northern climes. So the vegetation covers the earth, climbs on to the rocks, and disputes possession even with the waters of the sea. The blossoms are as brilliant in colour as they are profuse in quantity, and two men will stagger under the weight of a single fruit. As for thorns, they are long as nails, stiff as steel, and sharp as needles. The beasts of the forest are mighty, the birds of the air are of wonderful plumage, the denizens of the deep are many, and huge, and strange. In the lower forms of life it is just the same; the lizards, the beetles, the ants, the moths and butterflies, the frogs and the snakes,—they are great in size and legion in number. Even the insects, however small, are in myriads.
Only man stagnates, propagates feebly, loses his arts, falls a prey to pestilence, to new diseases, to imported vices, dies,—while every creature and every plant around him is struggling in the ceaseless renewal of life. Man dies, possibly because exultant nature leaves him so little to do to support his own existence; but it is not strange that, when he goes beyond the ordinary avocations of daily life, and takes himself at all seriously, his language should partake somewhat of the colour of his surroundings. Nor, perhaps, is it altogether surprising that, living with the tiger and the crocodile, the cobra and the stinging-ray, the scorpion and the centipede, he should have acquired some of their bloodthirstiness and venom, rather than have sought an example in the gentleness of the dove, a bird much fancied by Eastern peoples for the sweetness of its note and the excellence of its fighting qualities.
I suppose it is the appalling difficulties of making a passage through the jungle that have given the elephant and rhinoceros their strength and courage; but for the people, who are never really cold, and seldom hungry, there is little inducement to exertion. They can lie under the fruit trees, and idly watch the grey, gossamer-winged butterflies floating dreamily across a sunlit glade; they drowse and sleep to the music of the waters, as the whispering river slips gently towards a summer sea.
And it is all so comfortable. There is Death, but that is predestined, the one thing certain in so much that is too hard for the finite mind. There is also Hell, but of all those who speak so glibly of it, none ever believes that the same Power which created him, to live for a moment in trouble on the earth, will condemn him to an eternity of awful punishment. It is Paradise for which each man, in his own mind, is destined; a Paradise where he will be rewarded for all his earthly disappointments by some such pleasant material advantages as he can picture to himself, while he lies on the river bank and gradually sinks into a delightful slumber, lulled by the restful rippling of the passing stream. And he will dream—dream of that Celestial Being of whom it is related that “his face shone golden, like that of a god, so that many lizards fell, dazzled, from the walls, and the cockroaches in the thatch fought to bask in the light of his countenance.”
Oriental imagery,—but a quaintly pretty idea, the creatures struggling to sit in the light shed by that radiant face.
IX
OF LETTER-WRITING
SO you prefer the unaddressed letters, such as you have seen, to those which you receive from me in a cover, whereon are duly inscribed your name, style, and titles, and you ask me whether some of the letters are not really written to you. They are written to “Mary, in heaven,” or to you, if you please, or to any one to whom they appeal. The reason why you prefer them to the epistles I address to you is because they are unconstrained (too much so, you might think, if you saw them all), while, in writing to you, I am under constraint, and, directly I feel it, I have to be careful what I say, and beat about for some safe subject; and, as I abhor gossip and cannot write about my neighbour’s cat, I become unnatural, stilted, stupid, boring. With Mary it is different, for she is in heaven, where there are no marriages, and, therefore, I imagine, no husbands. As for lovers, I do not mind them, for they have no special privileges; at any rate, they have no right to interfere with me. The idea that what I write for your eye may be read by some one for whom it was not intended, hampers the pen and takes away more than half the pleasure of writing.
If you answer, “You ought not to want to write anything to me that may not be read by the master over my shoulder, or by the maid in the kitchen,” I say that I do not wish to interfere with the circulation of the Family Herald; and, for the rest, when you honour me with a letter, is it to be shown to any one who wishes to know what a really charming and interesting letter is like? I am blessed with some really delightful correspondents, of whom I would say you are the chief, did I not fear to offend some others; but I cannot help noticing, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with painful regret, that the character of their letters has a way of changing that, between first and last, may be compared to looking at the landscape through one end of a telescope and then through the other. When I see the field of vision narrowing to something like vanishing-point, until, in fact, the features of interest are no longer visible, I feel that I too must put on a minifying-glass, before I attempt to describe to you my surroundings, my thoughts, my hopes and fears. Worst of all, I can no longer ask you freely how life is treating you; for if I do, I get no answer, or you tell me that the winter has been one of unexampled severity, or the political party in power seems to be losing ground and missing its opportunities. Individuals and parties have been losing opportunities since the days when Joseph lost his coat; always regretting them and always doing it again, because every party and every individual scorns to profit by the experience of another. That, you will tell me, is a platitude beneath a child’s notice. I agree with you, and I only mention it in support of my contention that it is better to write what you see, or hear, or imagine, or believe, to no one at all, than to write “delicately,” with the knowledge that there is a possible Samuel waiting somewhere about, if not to hew you in pieces, to put inconvenient questions to your friends, and give them the trouble of making explanations which are none the less aggravating because they are needless. As a man, I may say that the effort to avoid writing to women everything that can, by a suspicious mind, be twisted into something mildly compromising, is more than I am capable of. The thought that one may innocently get a friend into trouble is not amusing, so pray dismiss from your mind the idea that any of these letters are written to you. They are not; and if they ever recall scenes, or suggest situations that seem familiar, that is merely an accident. Pure, undiluted fable is, I fancy, very rare indeed; but travellers are supposed to be responsible for the most of it, and I am a traveller. On the other hand, almost all fiction is founded on fact, but you know how small a divergence from the latter is sufficient to make the former. If my fiction looks like fact, I am gratified; if, at the same time, it has awakened your interest (and you say it has), that is more than I ever hoped to achieve. A wanderer’s life in often beautiful, sometimes strange, surroundings; a near insight into the fortunes of men and women of widely differing race, colour, and creed; and the difficulty of writing freely and fearlessly to those who, like yourself, would give me their sympathy and kindly interest—these are mainly responsible for the Letters. As to the other contributing causes, it will amuse you more to exercise your imagination in lively speculations than to hear the dull truth from me. Besides, if I told you the truth it would only mislead, for you would not believe it.
X
AT A FUNERAL
DO you remember how Matthew Arnold, in his Essay on “Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment,” translates a scene from the fifteenth Idyll of Theocritus, giving the experiences of two Syracusan visitors at the feast of Adonis at Alexandria, about three hundred years before the Christian era? The description is wonderfully fresh and realistic, and it came back to me with strange insistence last night when my host detailed to me his experiences at a Malay funeral. I fear the effect will all be lost when I try to repeat what I heard—but you are indulgent, and you will pardon my clumsy periods for the sake of my desire to interest you. My only chance of conveying any idea of the impression made on me is to assume the rôle of narrator at first hand, and to try, as far as I may, to speak in my host’s words.
“I was travelling,” he said, “and on the point of starting for a place where lived a Malay raja who was a great friend of mine, when I heard accidentally that his son had just died. That evening I reached the station where my friend lived. I saw him, and learned that his son, a mere lad, would be buried the next day. It is needless to say why he died, it is not a pretty tale. He had visited, perhaps eighteen months earlier, a British possession where the screams of Exeter Hall had drowned the curses of the people of the land, and this wretched boy returned to his country to suffer eighteen months of torture,—agonising, loathsome corruption,—in comparison with which death on the cross would be a joyous festival. That is nothing, he was dead; and, while his and many another life cry to deaf ears, the momentary concern of his family and his friends was to bury him decently. My arrival was regarded as a fortuitous circumstance, and I was bidden to take part in the function.
“It was early afternoon when I found myself, with the father, standing at the window of a long room, full of women, watching till the body should be carried to a great catafalque that stood at the door to receive it. As we waited there, the man beside me,—a man of unusually tender feeling,—showed no emotion. He simply said, ‘I am not sorry; it is better to die than to live like that; he has peace at last.’
“There was a sound of heavy feet staggering over the grass under the weight of a great load, and the coffin was borne past our window towards the door. As we walked down the room a multitude of women and children pressed after us, and while a crowd of men lifted the body into its place on the catafalque, a girl close by us burst into a perfect passion of weeping, intermingled with despairing cries, and expressions of affection for the dead, whom she would never see again. The raja pulled me by the sleeve, saying, ‘Come outside, I cannot bear this,’ and I saw the tears were slowly coursing down his face as we passed the heart-broken child, who, in the abandonment of her grief, had thrown herself into the arms of another girl, and was weeping hysterically on her breast. The mourner was the dead boy’s only sister.
“Meanwhile, the coffin had been placed on the huge wooden bier, and this was now being raised on the shoulders of a hundred men, with at least another hundred crowded round to take turns in carrying it to the place of burial. At this moment the procession moved off, and anything more unlike a funeral, as you and I know it, would be hard to imagine. A band of musicians, Spanish mestizos, in military uniforms, headed the cortège, playing a wild Spanish lament, that seemed to sob and wail and proclaim, by every trick of sound, the passing of the dead. Immediately behind them followed a company of stalwart Indian soldiers with arms reversed. Then a posse of priests and holy men chanting prayers. Next we came, and behind us a row of boys carrying their dead master’s clothes, a very pathetic spectacle. After them the great bier, vast in size, curious in form, and gay with colour, but so unwieldy that it seemed to take its own direction and make straight for the place of burial, regardless of roads and ditches, shrubs and flowers, or the shouts and cries of its bearers and those who were attempting to direct their steps. Last of all, a crowd of men and boys,—friends, retainers, chiefs, sightseers, idlers, gossips and beggars, a very heterogeneous throng.
“The road to the burial-ground wound down one hill and up another, and the band, the escort, the priests, and the mourners followed it. But the catafalque pursued its own devious course in its own blundering fashion, and, by-and-by, was set down on a high bluff, o’erlooking a great shining river, with palm-clad banks, backed by a space of level ground shut in by lofty blue hills. The coffin was then lifted from out the bier and placed upon the ground.
“I stood by the ready-dug grave and waited; while the father of the dead boy moved away a few yards, and an aged chief called out, ‘Now, all you praying people, come and pray.’
“The raja, the priests, and the holy men gathered round the body, and after several had been invited to take up the word and modestly declined in favour of some better qualified speaker, a voice began to intone, while, from time to time, the rest of the company said ‘Amîn.’
“Just then it began to rain a little, and those who had no umbrellas ran for protection to the catafalque and sheltered themselves under its overhanging eaves, while a lively interchange of badinage passed between those who, for the moment, had nothing to do. This was the sort of conversation that reached my ears.
“‘Now, then, all you people, come and pray.’
“‘Why don’t you pray yourself?’
“‘We did all our praying yesterday; I don’t believe you have done any. Now is the time, with all these holy men here.’
“‘I dare say; but you don’t suppose I’m going out into the rain to pray: I’m not a priest.’
“‘No one thought you were; but that is no reason why you should not pray.’
“‘Never mind about me, tell these other people; but you need not bother now, for they’ve got it over.’
“And all the time the monotonous voice of the priest muttered the guttural Arabic words, as though these frivolous talkers were a mile off, instead of within a few feet of him and those who stood round the coffin.
“No one could have helped being struck by the curious incongruity of the scene at that moment. I stood in a place of graves, with an open sepulchre at my feet. The stage was one of extraordinary beauty, the players singularly picturesque. That high bluff, above the glistening river, circled by forest-clad hills of varying height, one needle-like point rising to at least 6000 feet. Many old graves lay beneath the shadow of graceful, wide-spreading trees, which carried a perfect blaze of crimson blossoms, lying in huge masses over dark green leaves, as though spread there for effect. Groups of brown men, clad in garments of bright but harmoniously toned colours, stood all about the hill. On the very edge of the bluff, towards the river, was the gaily caparisoned, quaintly constructed catafalque, a number of men and boys sitting in it and round its edge, smoking, laughing, and talking. Within a dozen feet of them, the closely packed crowd of priests and holy men praying round the coffin. The band and the guard had been told to march off, and they were wending their way round a hillside in middle distance; while the strains of a quick step, the monotone of rapidly uttered prayer, the conversation and laughter of the idlers, crossed and re-crossed each other in a manner that to me was distinctly bizarre. Seen against that background and lighted by the fiery rays of a dying Eastern sun, the scarlet uniforms of the bandsmen, the dark blue of the escort, the long white coats of the priests, and the many-coloured garments of the two or three hundred spectators scattered about the graves, completed a picture not easily forgotten.
“Just then a move was made to the sepulchre, and two ropes were stretched across it, while some men began to lift the coffin.
“‘What are you doing?’ said the uncle of the dead boy. ‘If you put him in like that how will his head lie?’
“The bearers immediately let the coffin down, and another man in authority said, ‘Well, after all, how should his head lie?’
“‘Towards the west,’ said the uncle.
“‘No, it should not,’ replied the other; ‘it should be to the north, and then he looks towards the west.’
“Several people here joined in the argument, and it was eventually decided that the head must be towards the north; and then, as the body was lying on its right side, the face would look towards Mecca.
“‘Well, who knows at which end of the box his head is?’
“Various guesses were hazarded, but the uncle said that would never do, and he would see for himself. So the wreaths and garlands of ‘blue chempaka,’ the flower of death, the gorgeous silks and cloths of gold, were all thrown off, the heavy cover was lifted up, and the uncle began to feel about in the white grave-clothes for the head of the corpse.
“‘Ha! here it is,’ he said; ‘if we had put him in without looking, it would have been all wrong, and we should have had a nice job to get him out again.’
“‘Well, you know all about it now,’ said a bystander, ‘so we may as well get on.’
“The cover was accordingly replaced, the box turned with the head to the north, and then, with a deal of talk and superabundance of advice, from near and from far, the poor body was at last lowered into the grave. Once there the corpse lies on the earth, for the coffin has no bottom. The reason is obvious.
“You have probably never been to a funeral, and if so, you do not know the horrible sound of the first spadesful of earth as they fall, with dull blows, on that which is past feeling and resistance. The friends who stand round the grave shudder as each clod strikes the wood under which lies their beloved dead. Here it was different, for two men got into the grave and held up a grass mat, against which the earth was shovelled while the coffin was protected. There was hardly any sound, and, as the earth accumulated, the men spread it with their hands to right and left, and finally over the top of the coffin, and then the rest of the work was done rapidly and quietly. When filled in, two wooden pegs, each covered with a piece of new white cloth, were placed at the head and foot of the grave. These are eventually replaced by stones.
“Then, as the officers of the raja’s household began to distribute funeral gifts amongst the priests, the holy men, and the poor, my friend and I slowly retraced our steps, and, with much quiet dignity, the father thanked me for joining him in performing the last offices to his dead son.
“‘His sufferings were unbearable,’ he said; ‘they are over now, and why should I regret?’
“Truly death was best, I could not gainsay it; but that young life, so horribly and prematurely ended, seemed to have fallen into the snare of a civilisation that cannot be wholly appreciated by primitive people. They do not understand why the burning moral principles of a section of an alien race should be applied to communities that have no sympathy with the principles, or their application to different conditions of society.”
XI
OF CHANGE AND DECAY
THERE is a subject which has an abiding interest for all men and women who are not too old to love; it is Constancy. I suppose there are few questions on which any half-dozen intelligent people will express such different opinions, and it is doubtful whether any of the six (unless there be amongst them one who is very young and inexperienced) will divulge his, or her, true thoughts thereanent. Almost all women, and most men, seem to think they are morally bound to declare themselves to be very mirrors of constancy, and each is prepared to shower scorn and indignation on the erring mortal convicted of change of feeling. The only feeling I here refer to is the declared love of man for woman, of woman for man.
The other day a friend, writing to me, said, with admirable candour, “Do not think my heart is so small that it can only contain love for one man,” and I know that she means one man at a time. The maze surrounding this suggestion is attractive; let us wander in it for awhile, and if we become bewildered in its devious turns, if we lose ourselves in the intricacies of vague phrases, we may yet win our way back to reason by the road of hard, practical fact.
In the spring of life, when the fancies of the young man and the girl “lightly turn to thoughts of love,” I suppose the average lover honestly believes in the doctrine of eternal constancy, for himself and the object of his affections, and words will almost fail him and her to describe their contempt for the frail creature who has admitted a change of mind; worse still, if the change includes a confession of love for a new object. Coquette, jilt, faithless deceiver, breaker of hearts, ruthless destroyer of peace of mind,—words of opprobrium are not sufficient in quantity, or poisonous enough in quality, to satisfy those from whose lips they flow with the violence and destructive force of a river in flood.
Now, suppose this heaven-mated couple proceeds to extremities—that is, to marriage. And suppose that, after quite a short time, so short that no false note has ever been heard to mar the perfect harmony of their duet of mutual praise and rapture, one of them dies, or goes mad, or gets lost, or is put into prison for a long term of years;—will not the other find a new affinity? It happens so often that I think it must be admitted as a very likely possibility. When convention permits of an outward and visible application, and plaster is put over the wound, most of the very virtuous say, “and an excellent thing, too.”
There, then, we arrive at once at the possibility of change; the possibility of A, who once swore deathless love and fealty to B, swearing the same deathless love and fealty to X. It happens, and it has high approval.
Now go a little step further, and suppose that the excellent couple of whom I first spoke perpetrate matrimony, and neither of them dies, or goes mad, or gets into prison. Only, after a longer or shorter time, they become utterly bored with each other; or one finds the other out; or, what is most common, one, and that one usually the woman, for divers reasons, comes to loathe the married state, all it implies and all it exacts. Just then Satan supplies another and a quite different man, who falls naturally into his place in the situation, and the play runs merrily along. B’s deathless love and fealty for A are thrown out of the window, and what remains is pledged, up to the very hilt, to that spawn of the Evil One, the wrecker of happy homes, Z. It can hardly be denied that this also happens.
I come, then, to the case of the affianced but unmarried lovers, where one, or both, perceives in time that the other is not quite all that fancy painted; realises that there is a lover, “for showy,” and a disagreeable companion and master “for blowy”: a helpful daughter, a charming sweetheart one day, and a very selfish, not to say grasping, spit-fire on another. Or, across the distant horizon, there sails into the quiet waters of this love-locked sea a privateer, with attractions not possessed by the ordinary merchant vessel, and, when the privateer spreads its sails again, it carries with it a willing prize, leaving behind a possibly better-found and more seaworthy craft to indulge its wooden frame with a burst of impotent fury and despair. B’s deathless love has been transplanted to a more congenial soil, and, after a space, A will find another and a better helpmate, and both will be satisfied,—for a time.
If one may love, and marry, and lose, and love again; if one may love, and promise to marry, but, seeing the promise means disaster, withdraw it, to love elsewhere; if one may love and the love be choked to death, or frozen to entire absence of feeling, and then revive under the warmth of new sympathy to live and feel again—if all these things may be, and those to whom the experience comes are held to be no more criminal than their fellows, surely there may be love, real love, honestly given with both hands, as honestly clasped and held, and yet—and yet—a time may come when, for one of a thousand reasons, or for two or three, that love will wane and wane until, from illumining the whole firmament of those within its radiance, it disappears and leaves nothing but black, moonless night. But, by-and-by, a new moon of love may rise, may wax to equal splendour, making as glorious as before everything on which it shines; and the heart, forgetting none of the past, rejoices again in the present, and says, “Life is good; let me live it as it comes.” If that be possible, the alternate day and night of love and loss may succeed each other more than twice or thrice, and yet no charge, even of fickleness, may fairly lie at the door of him or her to whom this fate may come unsought.
To love, as some can love, and be loved as well in return; to trust in the unswerving faith, the unassailable loyalty, the unbounded devotion of another, as one trusts in God, in the simple laws of nature, in anything that is absolutely certain; and then to find that our deity has feet of clay, that our perfect gem has, after all, a flaw, is a very bad experience. Worse than all, to lose, absolutely and for ever, and yet without death, a love that seemed more firmly rooted and grounded in us than any sacred principle, more surely ours than any possession secured by bolt and bar—that is a pain that passeth the understanding of those who have not felt it. Add to this the knowledge that this curse has come upon us as the result of our own work—folly, blind, senseless, reckless confidence, or worse—that is the very acme of human suffering. It is not a thing to dwell upon. On the grave of a love that has surpassed, in the perfection of its reality, all the dreams of imagination, and every ideal conjured out of depths of passionate romance, grow weeds which poison the air and madden the brain with grisly spectres. It is well to “let the dead bury their dead”—if we only can.
There, I am at the end; or is it only the close of a chapter? I suppose it must be the latter, for I have but now come to my friend’s proposition, namely, that of love distributed amongst a number of objects; all perhaps different, yet all in their way, let us hope, equally worthy. I know how she explains it. She says she loves one man because he appeals to her in one way, another in another; and as there are many means of approach to her heart, so there are many who, by one road or another, find their way to it. After all, she is probably more candid than singular in the distribution of her affection. How many worldlings who have reached the age of thirty can say that they have not had a varied experience in the elasticity of their affections, in the variety of shrines at which they have worshipped? Aphrodite and Athene and Artemis for the men; Phœbus and Ares and Hermes for the women; and a host of minor deities for either. Minor chords, delicate harmonies, charming pages of melody between the tragic scenes, the carefully scored numbers, the studied effects, which introduce the distinguishing motifs of the leading characters, in that strange conception wherein is written all the music of their lives.
We are told that the sons of God took unto themselves wives from the daughters of men. Do you believe they left no wives, no broken faith, in heaven, before they came to earth to seek what they could not find above the spheres? What form of marriage ceremony do you suppose they went through with those daughters of men? Was it binding until death, and did that last trifling incident only open the door to an eternity of wedded bliss in the heaven from which earthly love had been able to seduce these sons of God? I fear there is proof of inconstancy somewhere. There is clear evidence of a desire for change, and that is usually taken to be a synonym for inconstancy, as between the sexes. The daughters of men have something to answer for, much to be proud of; but I hardly see why either they, or their menkind, who never drew any loving souls down from the safe heights of heaven to be wives to them, should be expected to make a choice of a partner early in life and never waver in devotion to that one, until death has put them beyond the possibility of temptation. It does happen sometimes; it is beautiful, enviable, and worthy of all praise. But when the heart of man or woman, following that most universal law of nature, change, goes through the whole gamut of feeling, from indifference to passionate love, and later retraces its steps, going back over only a few of them, or to a place, beyond indifference, where dislike is reached, there seems no good reason why that disappointed, disillusioned soul should be made the object of reproach, or the mark for stones, cast by others who have already gone through the same experience or have yet to learn it.
If we claim immortality, I think we must admit our mutability. Perhaps the fault is not all ours. It is written:—
“Alas for those who, having tasted once
Of that forbidden vintage of the lips
That, press’d and pressing, from each other draw
The draught that so intoxicates them both,
That, while upon the wings of Day and Night
Time rustles on, and Moons do wax and wane,
As from the very Well of Life they drink,
And, drinking, fancy they shall never drain.
But rolling Heaven from His ambush whispers,
So in my licence is it not set down:
Ah for the sweet societies I make
At Morning, and before the Nightfall break;
Ah for the bliss that coming Night fills up,
And Morn looks in to find an empty Cup!”
I do not seek to persuade you; it is a subject we often discuss, on which we never agree. I only state the facts as I know them, and I am for the truth!—even though I wish it were not true—rather than for a well-sounding pretence, which usually covers a lie. I have believed; I have seen what, with my life, I would have maintained was perfect, changeless love; and I have seen that love bestowed, in apparently equal measure, on another; while, sometimes, the first affection has died utterly, or, at others, it has never died at all, and the wavering heart, divided in allegiance, has suffered agonies of remorse, and at last begged one object of its devotion to shun it for ever, and so help it “to be true to some one.”
There you find a result almost the same as that so candidly confessed by my friend; but the phases through which either will pass to arrive at it are utterly different. Fate and circumstances, the prolonged absence of the lover, misunderstandings, silence, and the ceaseless, wearing efforts of another to take the place of the absent—the absent, who is always wrong;—these things will loosen the tightest bond, when once the enemy at the gate has established a feeling of sympathy between himself and the beleaguered city. If at last there is a capitulation, it is only when the besieged is au bout de ressources; only made in extreme distress, only perhaps under a belief of abandonment by one on whom the city relied for assistance in its dire need.
My candid friend has no regrets, passes through no phases of feeling, sees no harm, means none, and for herself is probably safe. Only her heart is large and warm; she desires sympathy, intellectual companionship, amusement, passionate adoration. She gets these things, but not all from the same man, and she is prepared to give love in return for each, but it is love with a wise reservation. Sometimes she cannot understand why the objects of her catholic affections are not equally satisfied with the arrangement, and she thinks their discontent is unreasonable. She will learn. Possibly, as she acquires knowledge, she may change. Nothing is more certain than that there is, if not always, very very often, the widest difference in the world between the girl of twenty and the woman of thirty. It is a development, an evolution,—often a startling one,—and if men more often realised what is likely to come, waited for it, and understood it when it arrived, there would be a deal less unhappiness in the world.
That, however, is another question, about which I should like to talk to you on another day, for it has interest.
Of love, and change in the object of love, I think you will not deny the possibility. If you have never known such change, you are the exception, and out of your strength you can afford to deal gently with those weaker vessels whose feelings have gone through several experiences. But has your faith never wavered? Have your affections been set on one man, and one only; and are they there to-day, as strong, as single-hearted, as true and as contented as ever? I wonder; pardon me if I also doubt!
I have spoken only of those cases where the love that was has ceased to be; ceased altogether and gone elsewhere, or so changed from what it was, that it no longer knits together those it once held to the exclusion of all others. But I might remind you that there are many other phases, all of which imply change, or at least such difference as must be counted faithlessness. Your quick intelligence can supply a multitude of instances from the unfortunate experiences of your friends, and I will only cite one that is not altogether unheard of. It is this; when two people are bound by the ties of mutual love, and fate divides them by time and distance, it sometimes happens that one will prove faithless in heart, while remaining firmly constant in deed. That is usually the woman. The other may be faithless in deed; but he says to himself (and, if he has to confess his backsliding, he will swear the same to his lady) that his affections have never wavered. He often does not realise that this statement, the truth of which he takes such trouble to impress upon his outraged goddess, adds to the baseness of his deed. It is curious, but it is true, that the woman, if she believes, will pardon that offence, while she would not forgive the heart-faithlessness of which she is herself guilty. He is not likely to learn that her fealty has wandered; he takes a good deal for granted, and he does not easily believe that such things are possible where he is concerned; but, should he suspect it, should she even admit that another has aroused in her feelings akin to those she had hitherto only felt for him, he will hold that aberration from the path of faith rather lightly, though neither tears nor blood could atone for a faithless deed, such as that of which he stands convicted.
Woman realises that if man’s lower nature takes him into the gutter, or even less unclean places, he will not hanker after whatever it was that attracted him when once his temptation is out of sight. She despises, but she estimates the disloyalty at its right value in a creature for whose want of refinement she learns to feel a certain contempt. Man, busy about many other things, treats as trivial a lapse which implies no smirch on his honour; and he, knowing himself and judging thereby, says, “Out of sight, out of mind.” It seldom occurs to him that, where the woman’s heart has been given away from him, he has already lost at least as much as his utmost dread; and even that is more likely to follow, than he to return to one who has never aroused in him any feeling of which he cares to think. Therefore, he is inclined rather to be amused than distressed; and, still mindful of his own experiences, he dismisses the matter from his thoughts with almost a sense of satisfaction. But he is wrong: is he not?
Of course I am not thinking of the jealous men. They are impossible people whom no one pities. They never see that, while they make themselves hateful to every one who is unhappily thrown into contact with them, they only secure their own misery. I believe there are men who are jealous of the door-mat. These are beyond the help of prayer.
XII
DAUGHTERS AND DESPOTISM
I AGREE with you that few things are more astonishing than the want of sympathy between parents and their daughters. Many fathers and mothers seem to be absolutely insensible to the thoughts, the desires, and the aspirations of those for whom they usually profess, and probably feel, a very great affection. There are two principal causes for this very common state of matters. One is the difference in age between parents and children. The fathers and mothers are losing, or have already lost, their interest in many of those things which are just beginning to most keenly interest their children. The children are very quick to see this, and the confidence they will give to a comparative stranger they withhold from parents, to whom they are too shy to confess themselves, because they dread ridicule, coldness, displeasure. The other cause of estrangement is the fact that parents will insist upon regarding their daughters as children until they marry, and sometimes even afterwards; and they are so accustomed to ordering and being obeyed, that they cannot understand independence of thought. Their children are always children to them; they must do exactly what they are told without question; they ought not to have any ideas of their own, and, if they are really good Christian children, well brought up and a credit to their parents, they must, before all things, be obedient and have no likes and dislikes, no opinions that are not those of their parents. As with crows, they must be feathered like the old birds and caw, always and only caw, if they wish to be heard at all.
It sounds, and it seems, unreasonable, and yet one sees it every day, and the amused or enraged spectator, with no fledglings of his own, is lost in wonderment at the crass stupidity of otherwise sensible people, who, while they do these things themselves, and glory in their own shame, will invite attention to the mote in their neighbour’s eye, which ought to be invisible to them by reason of the great beam in their own. I suppose it never occurs to them that they are all the time committing hateful and unpardonable crimes; that their want of intelligent appreciation is driving their children to resort to all kinds of concealment, subterfuge, and deceit; while home becomes often so hateful to a girl that she seizes the first opportunity of leaving it, and makes her life a long misery or something worse.
If the spectator dared, or cared, to speak the naked truth to a parent, I can imagine that dignified individual choking with respectable rage at the bare suggestion that he was in any sense responsible for his daughter’s regrettable conduct. Yet surely the father and the mother are blameworthy, if they decline to treat their grown-up daughters as intelligent creatures, with the instincts, the yearnings, the passions for which they are less responsible than their parents. “You must do this, because I was made to do it; and you must not do that, because I was never allowed to do it. You must never question my directions, because they are for your good; because you are younger than I am, and cannot therefore know as well as I do; because I am your mother and you are my daughter; and, in my day, daughters never questioned their mothers.” All this, and a great deal more, may be admirable; but it does not seem so. It may even answer sometimes; but that is rather cause for surprise than congratulation. It does fail, often and badly; but the parents are the last to realise the fact, and probably nothing would ever persuade them that the failure is due to their methods. If ever it comes home to parents that their revolted children have grown to hate them, they call them “unnatural,” and almost expect the earth to open and swallow them up, as happened to Korah and all his company.
To onlookers the position often seems intolerable, and they avoid it, lest they should be tempted to interfere and so make matters worse. Nowadays, intelligent opinion is not surprised when tyranny is followed by rebellion. The world is getting even beyond that phase. Both men and women demand that their opinions should be heard; and where, amongst English-speaking people, they can be shown to be in accordance with common-sense, with freedom of thought, and with what are called the Rights of Man, they usually prevail. Children do not often complain of tyranny, and they seldom revolt; but they bitterly resent being treated as if they were ten years old when they are twenty, when their intelligence, their education, and even their knowledge of the world entitle them to hold and express opinions. Nay, more, they are conscious of what is due to their own self-esteem, their family, and their order; and there are better ways of keeping them true to high purposes and lofty ideals than by treating them as children, whose intentions must always be suspected, because prone to naughtiness. The finer feelings are often strongest in youth; life and its experiences blunt them. While they are there, it is well to encourage them. Sympathy from an equal can easily do that; but, unless equality in speech be granted, the being who is held in bondage will be shy to express thoughts and aspirations that may be ridiculed, and will also resent the position of inferiority to which he or she is relegated for reasonless reasons.
In the relations between parents and children, perhaps the most surprising point is the absolute disregard of the pitiless vengeance of heredity. Men and women seem to forget that some of their ancestors’ least attractive attributes may appear in their descendants, after sparing a child or skipping a generation. The guiding traits (whether for good or evil) in most characters can be traced with unerring accuracy to an ancestor, where there is any record of family history. One child is predestined to be a musician, another a soldier, and a third a commonplace or remarkable sinner. Identical methods of education and treatment may not suit all equally well. Because a parent has lived only one life, the half-dozen children for whom he is responsible may not, even in the natural course of events, turn out to be exact replicas of their father, nor thrive on the food which reared him to perfection.
I do not pretend that there are not many exceptions; but the daughters who are the victims of parental zeal, or parental repression, are so numerous that, in England at any rate, they probably form the majority of their kind. Of those who marry, the greater number may be entirely well-mated. Every one must hope that it is so. Some there are who are not so fortunate; and some, again, begin well but end in disaster,—due to their own mistakes and defects, to those of their husbands, or to unkind circumstances. With the daughters who are favoured by Fortune we have no concern. For the others, there is only one aspect of their case with which I will bore you, and that because it seems to me to be to some extent a corollary to my last letter. If a girl has ideas and intelligence beyond those of her parents; if she has felt constraint and resented it; if she has exercised self-repression, while she longed for sympathy, for expansion, for a measure of freedom—such an experience, especially if it has lasted for any time, is not the best preparation for marriage. Married life—where man and woman are in complete sympathy, where mutual affection and admiration make self-sacrifice a joy, and trouble taken for the other a real satisfaction—is not altogether an easy path to tread, with sure and willing feet, from the altar to the grave. Many would give much to be able to turn back: but there is no return. So some faint and others die; some never cease from quarrelling; some accept the inevitable and lose all interest in life; while a few get off the road, over the barriers, break their necks or their hearts, or simply disappear out of the ken, beyond the vision, of their kind.
I think much of the unhappiness that comes to be a millstone round the necks of married people is due, primarily, to the deep ignorance of womankind so commonly displayed by mankind. It is a subject that is not taught, probably because no man would be found conceited enough to profess more than the most superficial knowledge of it. Some Eastern writers have gone into the question, but their point of view differs from ours, as do their climate, their religion, their temperament, habits, and moral code. Their teachings are difficult to obtain; they are written in languages not commonly understood, and they deal with races and societies that have little in common with Europeans. Michelet has, however, produced a book that may be read with advantage by all those who wish to acquire a few grains of knowledge on a subject that has such an enthralling interest at some period of most men’s lives. It is not exactly easy to indicate other aids to an adequate conception of the feminine gender, but they will not be found in the streets and gutters of great cities.
The school-boy shuns girls. He is parlously ignorant of all that concerns them, except that they cannot compete with him in strength and endurance. He first despises them for their comparative physical weakness; then, as he grows a little older, a certain shyness of the other sex seizes him; but this usually disappears with the coming of real manhood, when his instincts prompt him to seek women’s society. What he learns then, unless he is very fortunate, will not help him to understand and fully appreciate the girl who somewhat later becomes his wife—indeed, it is more likely to mislead him and contribute to her unhappiness. Unite this inexperienced, or over-experienced, youth with the girl who is ready to accept almost any one who will take her from an uncongenial home, and it says a good deal for the Western world that the extraordinary difficulties of the position should, in so large a proportion of cases, be overcome as well as they are.
In the rage for higher education, why does not some philanthropic lady, some many-times-married man, open a seminary for the instruction of inexperienced men who wish to take into their homes, for life and death, companions, of whose sex generally, their refined instincts, tender feelings, reckless impulses, strange cravings, changeful moods, overpowering curiosity, attitudes of mind, methods of attack and defence, signals of determined resistance or speedy capitulation, they know, perhaps, as little as of the Grand Llama. What an opportunity such a school would afford to the latest development of woman to impress her own views upon the rising generation of men! How easily she might mould them to her fancy, or, at least, plant in them seeds of repentance, appreciation, and constancy, to grow up under the care of wives for whose society the Benedictentiary would have somewhat fitted them.
It is really an excellent idea, this combination of Reformatory of the old man and Education of the new. Can you not see all the newspapers full of advertisements like this:—