Othmar

by Ouida

'And Flaubert lived above that water,' thought Othmar dreamily, 'and from his great window saw through his green poplar boughs on to it at sunrise and at sunset, and in the light of the moon like this, and yet he could get nothing of its serenity, and could hear none of its songs, but must vex his soul over the sordid troubles of "Bouvard et Pécuchet." The Seine ought to have been to him a Muse with hands full of meadow-sweet and lips vocal with tender folk-songs. If he had had more genius it would have been so. The village has its Mme. Bovary, no doubt, under its low red roof covered up with apple-boughs; but the village has also its Dorothea—if one be Goethe and not Flaubert.'

The idle thoughts passed dreamily through his brain as he leaned over the coping of the bridge. He had stood there so long and so aimlessly that one of the street-guards came up to him with suspicion, but recognising him, went onward, leaving him undisturbed.

'If I were that archimillionnaire,' thought the man, 'it would be the inside of Bignon's that would have me at this hour, and not the outside of a bridge.'

That the man who can command all indulgence of the appetites may not care to so indulge them, always seems to the man who cannot command such indulgence the most inexplicable of mysteries. The poor man drinks all day long when he has a chance; he wonders why does the rich man only take a few glasses of claret when he could be drunk the whole year if he chose?

Othmar, unwitting of the guard's commentary, continued to gaze down the river, repeating in his thoughts the Greek of Bion's sonnet to Hesperus. He was wishing vaguely that he had had the gift of poetical expression; he knew that he thought as poets think, but nature had denied him the power of giving metrical utterance to them. He would sooner, he believed, on such moonlit nights as these, have been able to express what he felt, to portray what he fancied, than have had all the millions which fate had allotted to him. Even a second-rate poet can have such happiness in the fancies he plays with and the figures in which he shapes them on the empty paper. Othmar, from his earliest boyhood, had been haunted with all those imaginings which make the heaven of those who can lose themselves in them, and find complete clothing of eloquence for them. But they remained mute within him; they were rather painful than consoling to him; when he recalled passages of Shelley, of Musset, of Heine, of Leopardi, it seemed to him that the tongue in which they spoke was so familiar to him that it should have been his own, and yet he had forgotten it or could not learn it, in some way could never make it his.

'You are a poète manqué. What a misfortune!' his wife had said to him very often with good-humoured derision. But he himself knew that if he had had the poet's faculty of rhythmical expression there would have been no force of circumstances which could have killed it in him. Why he loved music with so strong a passion was, that in it all he would fain have said was said for him.

'If I were going home now,' he thought, 'to some dark old garret in some crowded cité des pauvres, and yet could write a ballad of the Seine on a summer night, so that all the world should listen——'

It seemed to him that it would be infinitely more like happiness than to lend to kings, and baffle ministers, and strengthen cabinets, and give the sinews of war to nations, as he was able to do in that great white pile over in the town on the right, which was known to all Paris as the Maison d'Othmar. And yet what beautiful poems the world already possessed, and how seldom it cared to think of one of them!

Some bright-eyed scholar, some dreaming maiden, some sighing lover: was not this the sole public of the great singers, whose songs, bound in pomp and pride, lay unopened on the shelves of so many libraries?