IS THIS ALCESTE?
Minola's mind was a good deal disturbed by the various little events of the day, the incidents and consequences of her first visit in London. She began to see with much perplexity and disappointment that her life of lonely independence was likely to be compromised. She was not sure that she could much like the Moneys, and yet she felt that they were disposed and determined to be very kind to her. There was something ridiculous and painful in the fact that Mr. Augustus Sheppard's name was thrust upon her almost at the first moment of her crossing for the first time a strange threshold in London; then there was Mary Blanchet's brother turning up; and Mary Blanchet herself was evidently falling off from the high design of lonely independence. Again, there was Mr. Heron, who now knew where she lived, and who often went to the British Museum, and who might cross her path at any hour. Sweet, lonely freedom, happy carelessness of action, farewell!
Mr. Heron was especially a trouble to Minola. The kindly, grave expression on his face when he heard of her living alone declared, as nearly as any words could do, that he considered her an object of pity. Was she an object of pity? Was that the light in which any one could look at her superb project of playing at a lifelong holiday? And if people chose to look at it so, what did that matter to her? Are women, then, the slaves of the opinion of people all around them? "They are," Minola said to herself in scorn and melancholy—"they are; we are. I am shaken to the very soul, because a young man, for whose opinion on any other subject I should not care anything, chooses to look at me with pity!"
The night was melancholy. When the outer world was shut out, and the gas was lighted, and the two women sat down to work and talk, nothing seemed to Minola quite as it had been. The evident happiness and passing high spirits of the little poetess oppressed her. Mary Blanchet was so glad to be making acquaintances, and to have some prospect of seeing the inside of a London home. Then Minola's kindlier nature returned to her, and she thought of Mary's delight at seeing her brother, and how unkind it would be if she, Minola, did not try to enter into her feelings. Her mind went back to her own brother, to their dear early companionship, when nothing seemed more natural and more certain than that they two should walk the world arm-in-arm. Now all that had come to an end—faded away somehow; and he had gone into the world on his own account, and made other ties, and forgotten her. But if he were even now to come back, if she were to hear in the street the sound of the peculiar whistle with which he always announced his coming to her—oh, how, in spite of all his forgetfulness and her anger, she would run to him and throw her arms around his neck! Why should not Mary Blanchet love her brother, and gladden when he came?
"What is your brother like, Mary, dear?" she said gently, anxious to propitiate by voluntarily entering on the topic dearest to her friend.
"Oh, very handsome—very, very handsome!"
Miss Grey smiled in spite of herself.
"Now, Minola, I know what you are smiling at; you think it is my sisterly nonsense, and all that; but wait until you see."
"I'll wait," Minola said.
Miss Grey did not go out the next day as usual, although it was one of the soft, amber-gray, autumnal days that she loved, and the Regent's Park would have looked beautiful. She remained nearly all the morning in her own room, and avoided even Mary Blanchet. Some singular change had taken place within her, for which she could not account, otherwise than by assuming that it was begotten of the fear that she would be drawn, willingly or unwillingly, into uncongenial companionship, and must renounce her liberty. She was forced into a strange, painful, self-questioning mood. Was the whole fabric of her self-appointed happiness and independence only a dream, or, worse than a dream, an error? So soon to doubt the value and the virtue of the emancipation she had prayed for and planned for during years? Not often, perhaps, has a warm-hearted, fanciful, and spirited girl been pressed down by such peculiar relationship as hers at Keeton lately; a twice removed stepfather and stepmother, absolutely uncongenial with her, causing her soul and her youth to congeal amid dull repression. What wonder that to her all happiness seemed to consist in mere freedom and unrestricted self-development? And now—so soon—why does she begin to doubt the reality, the fulfilment of her happiness? Only because an impulsive and kindly young man, whom she saw for the first time, looked pityingly at her. This, she said to herself, is what our self-reliance and our emancipation come to after all.
It was a positive relief to her, after a futile hour or so of such questioning, when Mary Blanchet ran up stairs, and with beaming eyes begged that Minola would come and see her brother. "He is longing to see you—and you will like him—oh, you will like him, Minola dearest?" she said beseechingly.
Miss Gray went down stairs straightway, without stopping to give one touch to her hair, or one glance at the glass. The little poetess was waiting a moment, with an involuntary look toward the dressing table, as if Miss Grey must needs have some business there before she descended, but Miss Grey thought nothing of the kind, and they went down stairs together.
Minola expected, she could not tell why, to see a small and withered man in Mary Blanchet's brother. When they were entering the drawing-room, he was looking out of the window, and had his back turned, and she was surprised to see that he was decidedly tall. When he turned around she saw not only that he was handsome, but that she had recognized the fact of his being handsome before. For he was unmistakably the ideal poet of schoolgirls whom she had met at Mr. Money's house the day before.
The knowledge produced a sort of embarrassment to begin with. Minola was about to throw her soul into the sacrifice, and greet her friend's brother with the utmost cordiality. But she had pictured to herself a sort of Mary Blanchet in trousers, a gentle, old-fashioned, timid person, whom, perhaps, the outer world was apt to misprize, if not even to snub, and whom therefore it became her, Minola Grey, as an enemy and outlaw of the common world, to receive with double consideration. But this brilliant, self-conceited, affected, oppressively handsome young man, on whom she had seen Lucy Money and her mother hanging devotedly, was quite another sort of person. His presence seemed to overcharge the room; the scene became all compound of tall, bending form and dark eyes.
"I am glad to see you, Mr. Blanchet," Miss Grey began, determined not to be put out by any self-conceited poet and ideal of schoolgirls. "I must be glad to see you, because you are Mary's brother."
"You ought rather to be not glad to see me for that reason," he said, with a deprecating bow and a slight shrug of the shoulders, "for I have been a very neglectful brother to Mary."
"So I have heard," Miss Grey said, "but not from Mary. She always defended you. But I have seen you before, Mr. Blanchet, have I not?"
"At Mrs. Money's yesterday? Oh, yes; I only saw you, Miss Grey. I went there to see you, and only in the most literal way got what I wanted."
"But, Herbert, you never told me that you were going, or that you knew Mrs. Money," his sister interposed.
"No, dear; that was an innocent deceit on my part. You told me that Miss Grey had gone there, and as I knew the Moneys I hurried away there without telling you. I wanted to know what you were like, Miss Grey, before seeing my sister again. I hope you are not angry? She is so devoted to you that she painted you in colors the most bewitching; but I was afraid her friendship was carrying her away, and I wanted to see for myself when she was not present."
Miss Grey remained resolutely silent. She thought this beginning particularly disagreeable, and began to fear that she should never be able to like Mary Blanchet's brother. "Oh, why do women have brothers?" she asked herself. There seemed something dishonest in Mr. Blanchet's proceeding despite the frank completeness of his confession.
"Well, Herbert, confess that I didn't do her justice; didn't do her common justice," the enthusiastic Mary exclaimed.
"If Miss Grey would not be offended," her brother said, "I would say that I see in her just the woman capable of doing the kind and generous things I have heard of."
"Yes; but we mustn't talk about it," the poetess said, with tears of gratefulness blinking in her eyes; "and we'll not say a word more about it, Minola; not a word, indeed, dear." And she put a deprecating little hand upon Minola's arm.
Then they all sat down, and Herbert Blanchet began to talk. He talked very well, and he seemed to have put away most of the airs of affectation which, even in her very short opportunity of observation, Minola had seen in him when he was talking to the Money girls.
"You have travelled a great deal," Miss Grey said. "I envy you."
"If you call it travelling. I have drifted about the world a good deal, and seen the wrong sides of everything. I make it pay in a sort of way. When any place that I know is brought into public notice by a war or something of the kind, I write about it. Or if a place is not brought into any present notice by anything, I write about it, and take a different view from anybody else. I have done particularly well with Italy, showing that Naples is the ugliest place in all the world; that the Roman women have shockingly bad figures, and that the climate is wretched from the Alps to the Straits of Messina.
"But you don't think that?" Mary Blanchet said wonderingly.
"Don't I? Well, I don't know. I almost think I do for the moment. One can get into that frame of mind. Besides, I really don't care about scenery. I don't observe it as I pass along. And I like to say what other people don't say, and to see what they don't see. Of course I don't put my name to any of these things; they are only done to make a living. I live on such stuff as that. I live for Art."
"It is glorious to live for art," his sister exclaimed, pressing her thin, tiny hands together.
Mr. Blanchet did not seem to care much about his sister's approval.
"My art isn't yours, Mary," he said, with a pitying smile. "Pictures of flowers and little children saying their prayers, and nice poems about good young men and women, are your ideas of painting and poetry, I am sure. You are a lover of the human race, I know."
"I hope I love my neighbors," Mary said earnestly.
"I hope you do, dear. All good little women like you ought to do that. Do you love your neighbor, Miss Grey?"
"I don't care much for any one," Miss Grey answered decisively, "except Mary Blanchet. But I have no particular principle or theory about it, only that I don't care for people."
Although Miss Grey had Alceste for her hero, she did not like sham misanthropy, which she now fancied her visitor was trying to display. Perhaps too she began to think that his misanthropy rather caricatured her own.
Miss Blanchet, on the contrary, was inclined to argue the question, and to pelt her brother with touching commonplaces.
"The more we know people," she emphatically declared, "the more good we see in them. In every heart there is a deep spring of goodness. Oh, yes!"
"There isn't in mine, I know," he said. "I speak for myself."
"For shame, Herbert! How else could you ever feel impelled to try and do some good for your fellow creatures?"
"But I don't want to do any good to my fellow creatures. I don't care about my fellow creatures, and I don't even admit that they are my fellow creatures, those men and those women too that one sees about. Why should the common possession of two legs make us fellow creatures with every man, more than with every bird? No, I don't love the human race at all."
"This is nonsense, Minola; you won't believe a word of it," the little poetess eagerly said, divided between admiration and alarm.
"You good, little, innocent dear, is it not perfectly true? What did I ever do for you, let me ask? There, Miss Grey, you see as kind an elder sister as ever lived. I remember her a perfect mother to me. I dare say I should have been dead thirty years ago but for her, though whether I ought to thank her for keeping me alive is another thing. Anyhow, what was my way of showing my gratitude? As soon as I could shake myself free, I rambled about the world, a very vagrant, and never took any thought of her. We are all the same, Miss Grey, believe me—we men."
"I can well believe it," Miss Grey said.
"Of course you can. In all our dealings with you women we are just the same. Our sisters and mothers take trouble without end for us, and cry their eyes out for us, and we—what do we care? I am not worse than my neighbors. But if you ask me, do I admire my fellow man, I answer frankly, no. Not I. What should I admire him for?"
"One must live for something," the poetess pleaded, much perplexed in her heart as to what Miss Grey's opinion might be about all this.
"Of course one must live for art; for music and poetry, and colors and decoration."
"And Nature?" Mary Blanchet gently insinuated.
"Nature—no! Nature is the buxom sweetheart of ploughboy poets. We only affect to admire Nature because people think we can't be good if we don't. No one really cares about great cauliflower suns, and startling contrasts of blazing purple and emerald green. There is nothing really beautiful in Nature except her decay; her rank weeds, and dank grasses, and funereal evening glooms."
While he talked this way he was seated on the piano stool, with his face turned away from the piano, on whose keys he touched every now and then with a light and seemingly careless hand, bringing out only a faint note that seemed to help the conversation rather than to interrupt it. He was very handsome, Minola could not help thinking, and there was something in his colorless face and deep eyes that seemed congenial with the talk of glooms and decay. Still, true to her first feeling toward all men, Minola was disposed to dislike him, the more especially as he spoke with an air of easy superiority, as one who would imply that he knew how to maintain his place above women in creation.
"I thought all you poets affected to be in love with Nature," she said. "I mean you younger poets," and she emphasized the word "younger" with a certain contemptuous tone, which made it just what it meant to be—"smaller poets."
"Why younger poets?"
"Well, because the elder ones I think really were in love with Nature, and didn't affect anything."
He smiled pityingly.
"No," he said decisively, "we don't care about Nature—our school."
"I am from the country; I don't think I know what your school is."
"We don't want to be known in the country; we couldn't endure to be known in the country."
"But fame?" Minola asked—"does fame not go outside the twelve-mile radius?"
"Oh, Miss Grey, do pray excuse me, but you really don't understand us; we don't want fame. What is fame? Vulgarity made immortal."
"Then what do you publish for?"
He rose from his seat and seized his hair with both hands; then constrained himself to endurance, and sat down again.
"My dear young lady, we don't publish; we don't intend to publish. No man in his senses would publish for us if we were never so well inclined. No one could sell six copies. The great, thick-headed public couldn't understand us. We are satisfied that the true artist never does have a public—or look for it. The public can have their Tennysons, and Brownings, and Swinburnes, and Tuppers, and all that lot——"
"That lot!" broke in Miss Blanchet, mildly horrified—"that lot! Browning and Tupper put together!"
"My dear Mary, I don't know one of these people from another; I never read any of them now. They are all the same sort of thing to me. These persons are not artists; they are only men trying to amuse the public. Some of them, I am told, are positively fond of politics."
"Don't your school care for politics?" Miss Grey asked, now growing rather amused.
"Oh, no; we never trouble ourselves about such things. What can it matter whether the Reform bill is carried—is there a Reform bill going on now?—I believe there always is—or what becomes of the Eastern Question, or whether New Zealand has a constitution? These are questions for vestrymen, not artists; we don't love man."
"There I am with you," Miss Grey said; "if that alone were qualification enough, I should be glad to be one of your fraternity, for I don't love man; I think he is a poor creature at his best."
"So do I," said the poet, turning toward her with eyes in which for the moment a deep and genuine feeling seemed to light up; "the poorest creature, at his best! Why should any one turn aside for a moment from his path to help such a thing? What does it matter, the welfare of him and his pitiful race? Let us sing, and play, and paint, and forget him and the destiny that he makes such a work about. Wisdom only consists in shutting our ears to his cries of ambition, and jealousy, and pain, and being happy in our own way and forgetting him."
Their eyes met for a moment, and then Minola lowered hers. In that instant a gleam of sympathy had passed from her eyes into his, and he knew it. She felt a little humiliated somehow, like a proud fencer suddenly disarmed at the first touch of his adversary. For, as he was speaking scorn of the human race, she was saying to herself, "This man, I do believe, has suffered deeply. He has found people cold, and mean, and selfish—as I have—and he feels it, and cannot hide it. I did him wrong; he is not a fribble or sham cynic, only a disappointed dreamer." The sympathy which she felt showed itself only too quickly in her very eloquent eyes.
Herbert Blanchet rose after an instant of silence and took his leave, asking permission to call again, which Miss Grey would have gladly refused if she could have stood up against the appealing looks of Mary. So she had to grant him the permission, thinking as she gave it that another path of her liberty was closed.
Mary went to the door with her brother, and, much to Minola's gratification, remained a long time talking with him there.
Miss Grey went to the piano and began to sing; softly to herself, that she might not be heard outside. The short autumnal day was already closing in London. Out in the country there would be two hours yet of light before the round, red sun went down behind the sloping fields, with the fresh upturned earth, and the clumps of trees, but here, in West-Central regions of London, the autumn day dies in its youth. The dusk already gathered around the singer, who sang to please or to soothe herself. In any troubled mood Miss Grey had long been accustomed to clear her spirits by singing to herself; and on many a long, dull Sunday at home—in the place that was called her home—she had committed the not impious fraud of singing her favorite ballads to slow, slow time, that they might be mistaken for hymns and pass unreproved. Her voice and way of singing made the song seem like a sweet, plaintive recitative, just the singing to hear in the "gloaming," to draw a few people hushed around it, and hold them in suspense, fearful to lose a single note, and miss the charm of expression. In truth, the charm of it sprang from the fact that the singer sang to express her own emotions, and thus every tone had its reality and its meaning. When women sing for a listening company, they sing conventionally, and in the way that some teacher has taught, or in what they believe to be the manner of some great artist; or they sing to somebody or at somebody, and in any case they are away from that truthfulness which in art is simply the faithful expression of real emotion. With Minola Grey singing was an end rather than a means; a relief in itself, a new mood in itself; a passing away from poor and personal emotions into ideal regions, where melancholy, if it must be, was always divine; and pain, if it would intrude, was purifying and ennobling. So, while the little poetess talked with her brother in the dusk, at the doorway, with the gas lamps just beginning to light the monotonous street, Minola was singing herself into the pure blue ether, above the fogs, and clouds, and discordant, selfish voices.
She came back to earth with something like a heavy fall, as Mary Blanchet ran in upon her in the dark and exclaimed—
"Now, do tell me—how do you like my brother?"
To say the truth, Miss Grey did not well know. "I wonder is he an Alceste?" she asked herself. On the whole, his coming had made an uncomfortable, anxious, uncanny impression upon her, and she looked back with a kind of hopeless regret on the days when she had London all to herself, and knew nobody.