This tale always brings to me that many men, in some sudden moment which even M. Maeterlinck would hesitate to define as "a treasure of the humble," hear the playing of a tune such as that, which tells them of some ending, unknown and indefinite, just as, in the moments of greatest love, a man will feel for a terrible second the shivering white ice of sanity, which tells him a different tale to that which he is murmuring to the woman in his arms. Men who have heard it must have become morose with the fear this distant dirge brought upon them; but of that foreboding nothing certain can be known, and it is only in such a mood as this, and to a Shelmerdene of women, that a fool will loosen his foolishness to inquire into such things. Clarence Mangan must have heard the tune as he lay drunk and wretched in his Dublin garret, for there is more than Celtic gloom in the dirge of his lines. John Davidson, whose poetry you so love, and who wrote in a moment of madness "that Death has loaded dice," must have heard it, perhaps when first he came to venture his genius in London, a young man with a strange, bad-tempered look in his eyes; and he must have heard the exulting notes, as clearly as did Manus MacCodrum, when he walked into the sea from Cornwall. Charles Meryon must have heard it as he walked hungrily about the streets of Paris, and wondered why those gargoyles—strange things to beautify!—on Notre Dame, into which he had put so much life, could not scream aloud to the people of Paris that a genius was dying among them for lack of food and praise. Do you remember, Shelmerdene, how you and I, when first I began to know you, stood before a little imp of wonderfully carved onyx stone which leered at us from the centre of your mantelpiece, and I said that it was like one of those gargoyles of Meryon's; and that afternoon I told you about his life and death, and when I had finished you said that I told the tale as though I enjoyed it, instead of being frightened by the tragedy of it. But I admired your imp of onyx stone very much, telling you that I loved its ravenous mouth and reptile claws, because they looked so helplessly lustful after something unattainable; and that same night I found a little black-and-gold box awaiting me in my rooms, in which was the imp of onyx stone, and a note saying that I must put it on my table because it would bring me luck. For a second I did not believe your words, but thought that you had given it to me to be a symbol for my helplessness, for I had said that it lusted after something utterly unattainable. But the second passed, and I found later that you had forgotten those words, and had sent it to me because I liked it.... I would like to spend these glorious spring days away from London with you, in quietness, perhaps in Galway somewhere; but if you cannot come away with me to-morrow, I will take you out to dinner instead, and we will talk about yourself and the ci-devants who have loved you; and though I have no money at all now, I am quite sure that to-morrow will bring some.
Sure enough a few hours later I awoke to a bright spring morning, which brought happiness in itself, even without the help of a cheque which a recreant editor had at last thought fit to send me. As I walked out into the blaze of sunshine on the King's Road, I felt that I must surely be a miserable fellow to let my ill-nature so often oppress me that only very seldom I was allowed to enjoy such mornings as this; mornings which seem to spring suddenly out at you from a night of ordinary sleep, when, as you walk through streets which perhaps only the day before you hated bitterly, the spring sun wholly envelops your mind and comes between yourself and your pretty dislikes, and the faces of men and women look brown, and red, and happy as the light and shadow play on them; such a day was this, a pearl dropped at my feet from the tiara of some Olympian goddess.
Later I telephoned to Shelmerdene to ask her to lunch with me instead of dine, as the day was so beautiful; but she said that she had already promised to lunch with some one, a man who had loved her faithfully for more than ten years, and as all he wanted from her was her company over lunch on this particular day of the week, she could not play him false, even though the day was so beautiful. But I told her that I would not be loving her faithfully for ten years, and that she must take the best of me while she could, and that on such a day as this it would be a shame to lunch with an inarticulate lover; for a man who had loved her faithfully for more than ten years, and wanted only her company over lunch once a week, must be inarticulate, or perhaps a knave whose subtle cunning her innocence had failed to unveil. So in the end we lunched together in Knightsbridge, and then walked slowly through the Park.
The first covering of spring lay on every thing. The trees, so ashamed—or was it coyness?—were they of their bareness in face of all the greenness around them, were doing their best to hurry out that clothing of leaves which, in a few weeks' time, would baffle the rays of the sun which had helped their birth; and there was such a greenness and clearness in the air and on the grass, and about the flowers which seemed surprised at the new warmth of the world, hesitating as yet to show their full beauty for they were afraid that the dark winter was playing them a trick and would suddenly lurch clumsily upon them again, that the Park has never seemed to me so beautiful as on that spring afternoon when a careless happiness lay about everything.
So far I have not said a word about Shelmerdene, except that she had found a man—or, rather, he had tiresomely found her—to love her faithfully for ten years, and she had so affected him that he thought a weekly lunch or dinner was the limit of his destiny with her. And yet, had he searched himself and raked out the least bit of gumption, he would have found he was tremendously wrong about her—for there were pinnacles to be reached with Shelmerdene unattainable within the material limits of a mere lunch or dinner. She was just such a delightful adventuress as only a well-bred mixture of American and English can sometimes make; such a subtle negation of the morals of Boston or Kensington that she would, in the searching light of the one or the other, have been acclaimed the shining light of their William Morris drawing-rooms. She drew men with a tentative, all-powerful little finger, and mocked them a little, but never so cruelly that they weren't, from the inarticulate beginning to the inevitable end, deliriously happy to be miserable about her. She was a Princess Casassimma without anarchical affectations; and like her she was almost too good to be true.
So much then, for Shelmerdene; for if to cap it all, I should go on to say that she was beautiful I would be held to have been an infatuated fool. Which, perhaps, I carelessly was, since I can't even now exactly fix upon the colour of her hair, doubting now in memory as I must have done actually in those past days with her, whether it was brown or black or, as sometimes on a sofa under a Liberty-shaded lamp, a silver-tinted blue, so wonderfully deep.... Perhaps destined, in that future when Shelmerdene is at last tired of playing at life, to be the "blue silver" of the besotted madman to whom she, at the weary end, with but a look back at the long-passed procession of ci-devants, will thankfully give herself. Dies iræ, dies illa....
The London Venture: III
