The clock struck seven, reminding me of the dinner-hour, reminding me that I should have to dine alone that evening. To avoid dining alone I should not have lingered in St. James's Park, but if I had not lingered I should have missed an exquisite hour of meditation, and meditations are as necessary to me as absinthe to the absinthe-drinker. Only some little incident was wanting--a meeting with one whom one has not seen for a long time, a man or a woman, it would not matter which, a peg whereon to hang the description of the dusk among the trees, but I had met no friend in the Park. But one appeared on the threshold of St. James's Street. There I met a young man, a painter, one whose pictures interested me sometimes, and we went to a restaurant to talk art.
"After dinner," I said, "we will get the best cigars and walk about the circus. Every Sunday night it is crowded; we shall see the women hurrying to and fro on love's quest. The warm night will bring them all out in white dresses, and a white dress in the moonlight is an enchantment. Don't you like the feather boas reaching almost to the ground? I do. Lights-o'-love going about their business interest me extraordinarily, for they and the tinkers and gipsies are the last that remain of the old world when outlawry was common. Now we are all socialists, more or less occupied with the performance of duties which obtain every one's approval. Methinks it is a relief to know that somebody lives out of society. I like all this London, this midnight London, when the round moon rises above the gracious line of Regent Street, and flaming Jupiter soars like a hawk, following some quest of his own. We on our little, he on his greater quest."
The night was hot and breathless, like a fume, and upon a great silken sky the circular and sonorous street circled like an amphitheatre.... I threw open my light overcoat, and, seizing the arm of my friend, I said:
"He reminds me of a Turk lying amid houris. The gnawing, creeping sensualities of his phrase--his one phrase--how descriptive it is of the form and whiteness of a shoulder, the supple fulness of the arm's muscle, the brightness of eyes increased by kohl! Scent is burning on silver dishes, and through the fumes appear the subdued colours of embroidered stuffs and the inscrutable traceries of bronze lamps. Or, maybe, the scene passes on a terrace overlooking a dark river. Behind the domes and minarets a yellow moon dreams like an odalisque, her hand on the circle of her breast; and through the torrid silence of the garden, through the odour of over-ripe fruit and the falling sound thereof, comes the melancholy warble of a fountain. Or is it the sorrow of lilies rising through the languid air to the sky? The night is blue and breathless; the spasms of the lightning are intermittent among the minarets and the domes; the hot, fierce fever of the garden waxes in the almond scent of peaches and the white odalisques advancing, sleek oracles of mood.... He reminds me of the dark-eyed Bohemian who comes into a tavern silently, and, standing in a corner, plays long, wild, ravishing strains. I see him not, I hardly hear him; my thoughts are far away; my soul slumbers, desiring nothing. I care not to lift my head. Why should I break the spell of my meditations? But I feel that his dark eyes are fixed upon me, and little by little, in spite of my will, my senses awake; a strange germination is in progress within me; thoughts and desires that I dread, of whose existence in myself I was not aware, whose existence in myself I would fain deny, come swiftly and come slowly, and settle and absorb and become part of me.... Fear is upon me, but I may not pause; I am hurried on; repudiation is impossible, supplication and the wringing of hands are vain; God has abandoned me; my worst nature is uppermost. I see it floating up from the depths of my being, a viscous scum. But I can do nothing to check or control.... God has abandoned me.... I am the prey to that dark, sensual-eyed Bohemian and his abominable fiddle; and seizing my bank-notes, my gold and my silver, I throw him all I have. I bid him cease, and fall back exhausted. Give me "The Ring," give me "The Ring." Its cloud palaces, its sea-caves and forests, and the animality therein, its giants and dwarfs and sirens, its mankind and its godkind--surely it is nearer to life! Or go into the meadows with Beethoven, and listen to the lark and the blackbird! We are nearer life lying by a shady brook, hearing the quail in the meadows and the yellow-hammer in the thicket, than we are now, under this oppressive sky. This street is like Klinsor's garden; here, too, are flower-maidens--patchouli, jessamine, violet. Here is the languorous atmosphere of "Parsifal." Come, let us go; let us seek the country, the moon-haunted dells we shall see through Piccadilly railings. Have you ever stood in the dip of Piccadilly and watched the moonlight among the trees, and imagined a comedy by Wycherley acted there, a goodly company of gallants and fine ladies seated under the trees watching it? Every one has come there in painted sedan-chairs; the bearers are gathered together at a little distance."
"My dear friend, you're talking so much that you don't see those who are passing us. That girl, she who has just turned to look back, favours heliotrope; it is delicious still upon the air; she is as pretty a girl as any that ever came in a sedan-chair to see a comedy by Wycherley. The comedy varies very little: it is always the same comedy, and it is always interesting. The circus in a sultry summer night under a full moon is very like Klinsor's garden. Come, if you be not Parsifal."
[CHAPTER XIII]
RESURGAM
I was in London when my brother wrote telling me that mother was ill. She was not in any immediate danger, he said, but if a change for the worse were to take place, and it were necessary for me to come over, he would send a telegram. A few hours after a telegram was handed to me. It contained four words: "Come at once.--Maurice." "So mother is dying," I muttered to myself, and I stood at gaze, foreseeing myself taken into her room by a nurse and given a chair by the bedside, foreseeing a hand lying outside the bed which I should have to hold until I heard the death-rattle and saw her face become quiet for ever.
This was my first vision, but in the midst of my packing, I remembered that mother might linger for days. The dear friend who lies in the church-yard under the downs lingered for weeks; every day her husband and her children saw her dying under their eyes: why should not this misfortune be mine? I know not to what God, but I prayed all night in the train, and on board the boat; I got into the train at the Broadstone praying. It is impossible, at least for me, to find words to express adequately the agony of mind I endured on that journey. Words can only hint at it, but I think that any one possessed of any experience of life, or who has any gift of imagination, will be able to guess at the terror that haunted me--terror of what?--not so much that my mother might die, nor hope that she might live, but just that I might arrive in time to see her die. In this confession I am afraid I shall seem hard and selfish to some; that will be because many people lack imagination, or the leisure to try to understand that there are not only many degrees of sensibility, but many kinds, and it is doubtful if any reader can say with truth any more than that my sensibility is not his or hers. It is my privilege to be sympathetic with ideas I do not share, and in certain moods I approach those who take a sad pleasure in last words, good-byes, and at looking on the dead. In my present mood it seems to me that it is not unlikely that my mother's last good-bye and her death appeared to me more awful in imagination than it would have ever done in reality. Indeed, there can be hardly any doubt that this is so, for we are only half-conscious of what is happening. Reality clouds, our actions mitigate, our perception; we can see clearly only when we look back or forwards. There is something very merciful about reality; if there were not, we should not be able to live at all.