It was with hearts full of emotion that we left the next morning the long valley of our delight, with its golden sunshine, its quiet hospitality, its unforgettable memories. Shall I ever go there again? Maybe when someday my lonely journey ends, and I sit waiting my overtaking by the “happier things” I have left behind. Then, perhaps, but not before. And, in the meantime, on what butterfly wings hovers my beautiful faithful Psyche among those ruined “Courts of Love”?
CHAPTER XXI
I am not going to relate in detail the processes of our homeward journeying. One must necessarily in leaving Paradise put on the common vesture of mortality; and, though the deathless glamour of past days remained to us for all eternity, a sense of the finite conditions of life, of its partings and uncertainties, returned to possess us, like a premonition, the moment we stepped beyond the bounds of our love-haunted Eden. Wherefore, having fully depicted that sovereign realm of delight, it would be a work of rather sad supererogation to dwell at length on our sojournings, as we made our way easily northward, in the subkingdoms of happiness. Beautiful it all was, but with a beauty more of evening than of sunrise. We were drawing to the night that has no voice but that of lonely introspection.
From les Baux we walked over the Alpines, six miles or so, to St. Remy, passing by the way those two famous fragments, tomb and triumphal arch, which are all that remains of a once prosperous Roman town. Standing solitary under the hills, they would seem to have been spared, in their chance juxtaposition, as a symbol and epitome to all future generations of the glory and vanity of the human story: Life’s victory, Death’s victory over Life, and Time, the last and mightiest, the conquerer of both. I might have read into them, had I possessed the seer’s vision, the moral of all idylls in the world, including our own.
From St. Remy the balmy we took, having lunched and wandered an hour or two about the place, the prosaic motor-omnibus to the fruity little town of Châteaurenard, whence we bowled by the long white road, dusty and monotonous with its eternal plantations of esparto grass, into Avignon, reaching that city after dark, and in comfortable time for dinner at the Hôtel du Louvre, where we had elected to pitch our camp. Old house of the Templars (one meals, actually, in the very vaulted refectory of that ancient order), we felt, enjoying its pleasant hospitality, so little remote as yet from the spirit of antique romance, that our ex-Paradisian “fall” was hardly enough to disturb or abash us. We had fallen “soft,” indeed, and, during the three or four days we stayed there, lived in a somewhat renewed glamour of enchantment. The year was now drawing on and in, closing upon the last days of October; but still the season moved in golden accord with our mood, showering peace and quiet sunshine upon our heads. Fifine had of course as a child lifted her trivial skirts and pointed her pretty toes to the “L’on y danse tout en rond,” and nothing now in all the grey old city delighted her so much as the broken bridge, on whose imagined stones the feet of countless generations of infants have danced and pattered. It moved her more than the mighty palace of the Popes, than the Cathedral, than the stupendous ramparts, than the great ruined fort of St. André, looming misty and gigantic on its hill across the river—though there, when we came to visit it, the old baker’s dies for stamping the loaves of bread outside the ovens did fascinate her almost as much. They impressed her so, she said, with their suggestion of domestic fitness and tidiness.
For Fifine was tidy: have I never remarked upon it? Our difference in that respect was her perpetual lament. She could never be at ease in the presence of casual litter; a piece of paper flung in a grate, a picture hung crooked on a wall, would spoil the whole æsthetic value of a room to her; she folded her clothes at night; her toilette accessories had each its definite place on her dressing table, and any natural disorder was no sooner done with than she must be removing its evidences. Tidying-up was an obsession with her; I used to laugh at her about it, but it was no good.
“What is the use,” I would say, “of sweeping up dust only to resettle, of making clear spaces for the fresh deposits that are sure to follow? It is a purely human monomania that of tidiness; nothing in nature sets us the example.”
“I daresay,” she would answer. “But dogs and cats and birds and trees have no sense of preparing for anything; and I, as a human being, have.”
“What are you preparing for?”
“I don’t know—the next world perhaps. It is just an instinct, like washing your hands.”