Little Dinners With the Sphinx, and Other Prose Fancies

by Richard Le Gallienne

And, indeed, it was true that butterflies were something more to Laleham than entomology. They were rather a poetic than a scientific passion. There was a strong vein of the mystic and poetic in his nature to which in some way, mysterious even to himself, these strange little painted things had from childhood appealed. As the smallest boy, he had proved himself a passionist of the solitudes of nature, by lone woodland truancies and long tramps through that gipsy wilderness, which England, with all its lawns and market-gardens and nurseries, has so remarkably preserved. And, from the first moment that he found himself alone, hushed and watching and listening, and a little afraid, in the belt of mighty beeches that was perhaps the chief honour of his pedigree, there had seemed a spell, an enchantment, over these lonely leaves, these gnome-like shapes of mottled bole, and these twisted roots that seemed to have become so through some mysterious agonies of ancient torture—though indeed, to most folk there was nothing there but leaves and the famous Laleham covers.

He had never forgotten the day when that spell of exquisite silence and dappled sunshine—the whole woodland with its finger on its lip—had suddenly become embodied in a tiny shape of coloured velvet wings that came floating zig-zag up the dingle, swift as light, aery as a perfume, soft and silent as the figured carpet in some Eastern palace. With what awe he watched it, as at length it settled near him on a sunlit weed, with what a luxury of observation his eyes noted its sumptuous unearthly markings, and what an image of wonder and exquisite mystery it there and forever left upon his mind. In a moment it was up and away upon its uncharted travel through the wood. Instinctively, he ran in pursuit. But it was too late. He had lost his first butterfly.

For Laleham, from that moment, all the beauty of the world, and the mystery and the elusiveness of it, were symbolised in a butterfly. From that moment it seemed to him that the success of life was—the catching of a certain butterfly.

He was now thirty years old and had caught many butterflies, caught them in every part of the world, and the adventures he had met with in the apparently insignificant chase, were they to be written, would fully justify the defence he sometimes made of what the world called his whimsical hobby. “You must not look upon my butterflies as trivial,” he would say. “The study of much smaller things has made modern science; and a butterfly may well lead you to the ends of the earth—and even lose you among the stars. You never know where it may take you. There is no hunting more full of exciting possibilities. If you dare follow a butterfly, you dare go anywhere; and no quarry will lead you into stranger places, or into such beautiful unexpected adventures.”

At thirty he was still unmarried. Life was still for him a lonely woodland, through which he chased the one butterfly he had never been able to capture. The butterflies of the world were in his marvellously arranged cabinets,—rainbow upon rainbow of classified wings—but one butterfly was not there. The butterfly, indeed, might possibly have been had by exchange with other collectors, though it was one so rare, and so beyond equivalent in any form, that the man who had been fortunate enough to come into possession of it seldom cared to part with it.

Besides, though occasionally Laleham had resorted to this means of supplying a missing species, it was a course he seldom took. Nearly every butterfly in his vast flower-garden of shimmering wings had been caught by his own hand. There was no country in the world he had not visited in his determined dream of being, one might say, the Balzac of the butterfly; and it was only the commoner sort of butterfly he had occasionally obtained by exchange. The butterfly that was missing from his collection he made it a point of honour, and indeed, in course of time, a sort of superstition, to capture for himself. To the ordinary and non-entomological observer, untouched by Laleham’s mystic passion, there would seem little enough to account for his preoccupation in the quite insignificant object of it, a tiny blue butterfly, to ordinary eyes not differing from any other tiny blue butterfly, and in fact only to be known for what it was by a mystic marking almost imperceptible, hidden beneath its wings. Not even the collector himself could be sure of what he was pursuing, on account of the butterfly’s resemblance to another species comparatively common, exactly like, except for that hidden signature, that distinguishing hall-mark. If one were to depreciate the value of this illustrious insect, and say that its sole distinction was that of rarity, the collector would only smile, and could afford to, perhaps. Rarity! only rarity! Was not that enough! Had not mankind agreed, throughout recorded history, that rarity alone, unaccompanied by any other precious characteristic, is of all qualifications, the qualification of immortality; and is not rarity of all values the ideal value, a value not measurable by the eye, or any method of external judgment, a value of the soul. Besides, what are the highest prizes in any chase or contest whatsoever—a simple wreath of laurel, the antlers of a deer, objects in themselves only symbolically valuable. Why, therefore, should not the ambitious pursuing spirit of man stake its fortunes on a butterfly—for what could be more typical of its own wandering course and ever changing goal.

The Laleham butterfly, as it is now called, and as not seldom happens with other rare things in nature—this being, I may add, not the least of nature’s mysterious whims—had never been found except in one remote corner of England, a fenny country producing a hardly less rare variety of flowering rush on which its caterpillar alone could feed. It was a country of boundless marshy levels, and peaty solitudes, a country of herons, and long dark-eyed pools, which, flashing every few yards under the boundless sky, filled the loneliness with magic mirrors. For the gay it was a dreary land, but for those who have found “nought so sweet as melancholy” it was melancholy only as great music is melancholy, and its loneliness was that of some splendid raven-haired widow with her tragic gaze upon the sky. It was a thinly populated region, with here and there an inn and a few cottages taking shelter under the wing of some mouldering grange. It was, in short, one of the sad beautiful ends of the earth. Here it was, and here alone, that Laleham’s butterfly had chosen to dwell, to secret itself, indeed, as though in a place so remote it might hope to preserve its fragile aristocratic race from extinction. Yet, though it was known to inhabit this solitude, not a dozen living people had ever seen it, and only two had caught it for many years; for there again it illustrated another mystery of nature, the persistent survival of a rare type, in such unchangeably small numbers as almost to risk extinction, as it were, for the purpose of aristocracy. For at least two hundred years, as long as it had been known at all, the Laleham butterfly had existed apparently in the same small family, only propagating itself sufficiently to keep its race and name upon the earth, and no more. It had not become rare by process of extinction, but because nature apparently had made few of it from the beginning. Happily this aristocratic law of nature is not only applied to butterflies. In fact one might justly say the same of the family that had dwelt in an old embattled house which had stood here sinking deeper and deeper into the solitude since the days of Richard II. Noctorum, the house was called, as was the cluster of cottages around it—a name appropriately dark and mysterious, like the cry of owls at night across the fen.

In this old house of Noctorum, which had been built by his ancestors and inhabited by Fantons ever since, lived studious old Sir Gilbert Fanton, Baronet, alone most of the year round with his gout and his books, and one beautiful daughter hardly yet a woman. A young wife, dead now many years, had left him with two sons, both soldiers, and therefore seldom at home, and one great-eyed little girl, who, far from finding the solitude of her life irksome, had taken kindly to it, and had more and more, year by year, seemed to embody the solemn beauty of her melancholy surroundings. Laleham had been a friend of young Christopher Fanton’s at Oxford, and had, several years before, come down to Noctorum with the young soldier in quest of the butterfly which was the legendary glory of the district.

Though Sir Gilbert was a much older man than himself, he had found in him a scholar with mystic tendencies similar to his own, and, when the sons had gone to the wars, Laleham continued to come down to visit the father, and incidentally to pursue the quest of his butterfly. Then he had taken a trip about the world, visiting the tropical haunts of his hobby, which had lasted so long that when again he returned to England it had been three years since he had visited his old friend. Besides, he had once more returned from his pilgrimage without that mystic butterfly which continued still to evade his persevering pursuit. In every part of the world he had sought it, but still, so far as he could hear, the one place in which it might be found was the marshes of Noctorum. So, thinking less of his quest than of his friend, he determined to run down and see what progress Sir Gilbert was making with his great book on the folk-lore of the fens—for fairies and hobgoblins were Sir Gilbert’s particular substitute for idleness. He found Sir Gilbert boyishly happy over his recent discovery of an indigenous and heretofore unrecorded variant of the story of Cupid and Psyche.

“Think of it!” exclaimed the old scholar, “here in this land of clods and pitchforks, uncouth in form indeed, but still the old dainty fancy, the old Greek fairy tale in homespun. Isn’t it strange how these frail shapes of story, frail as moonbeams, are still hardy enough to make their way from land to land, and take on the disguises of the peoples, rough or gentle, among which, like a thistledown, they happen to settle.”