Little Dinners With the Sphinx, and Other Prose Fancies

by Richard Le Gallienne

I suppose that it is the humiliated sense of this transitoriness of what had seemed an immortal feeling that makes men and women who have loved and lost each other, as Miranda and I, return those letters, which have thus come to seem the ludicrously earnest records of an illusion.

The two people feel that they have been tricked into these solemn utterances of the heart, as if Life had been playing a game with them, which they, unsuspecting, had taken seriously. They feel a little silly, as one does when some jocular friend, as we say, takes us in with some mock-serious story. We sit, attentive and eager, while he talks, and believe every word, and then suddenly the stealing smile upon his face tells us that we have been fooled. So we sit and listen to Love telling his old tale, as if he had never told it before, with such lit young eyes and such irresistible persuasion; and then, suddenly—there comes the smile stealing over his face, and we look at each other and know that we have been fooled.

This is not my view of the matter, but I conceive that it is the view of those who, like Miranda, wish to obliterate the records of an old dream. For my part, the fact of a feeling passing away is nothing against the reality of that feeling. All feelings must sooner or later pass away:

The sunrise blooms and withers on the hill
Like any hill-flower, and the noblest troth
Dies here to dust....

That the rose must shed its petals and turn to a lonely autumn berry is surely nothing against the reality of the rose. It was real enough in June.

Yes, it is because I feel so deeply the reality of this dream that has passed away that I wish Miranda would let me keep her beautiful record of it. If it had been real no other way, it would be real in her words, for beautiful words make all things real, and are, perhaps, the longest lived of all realities. So long as Miranda’s letters survive, our dream is not dead. It has only ascended into the finer life of words. But once her letters are gone, the dream is dead indeed; for, even though my poor letters should survive—well! I never could write a love-letter. The writing of love-letters is a woman’s art, and Miranda, in these precious pages which she demands of me, has proven herself a great artist.

As I think of this, of the art I mean, with which she has embodied our dream, I wonder if I have any right to return her letters; whether, in fact, it is not my duty, in defiance of misapprehension, to retain and guard them in the interests of art, and, even, humanity. For, you see, there is but one fate for Miranda’s letters the moment they leave my hands to return to hers—the crematorium. She will probably burn them with charming fanciful rites, after her whimsical, picturesque nature; load the bier on which they are consumed with cassia and myrrh and all the chief spices—but, however sweet-smelling the savour with which they return to the elemental spaces from which they drew down their radiant energy, there will, none the less, remain of them upon the earth, but a little fluttering pile of perfumed ashes—the ashes of a dream.

Now, have I the right to allow such destruction of a beautiful thing, such a holocaust of heavenly words? My mind misgives me no little as to this. Meanwhile, I shall temporise with Miranda, make some plausible excuse for delay, if only that I may read through the fairy tale once more from beginning to end, before, if needs must, I send it back to her.

Another problem: I am wondering, as I turn over page after page of our brilliantly written past, whether Miranda will expect me to return also the many flowers that every now and again fall out from between the fragrant sheets. Even supposing that she can remember every letter she has written to me, and is capable of detecting me should I filch a single one, she can hardly remember the flowers of eight summers! Yes, eight summers. I said that our dream was a very long and beautiful one; and, indeed, it is hard to understand why, when a dream has lasted so long, it should not last forever. But such is the way of dreams, and surely Miranda and I were fortunate in that ours lasted so long.

Here is a flower I certainly shall keep, whatever happens. This arrowhead, with its keen, beautiful leaf beside it. Do you remember the day we gathered this, Miranda? How I climbed down from the little bridge, and picked my way over the stones of the brook that went singing out of the sun into the cool darkness? It grew right in the shadow of the rough stone arch, and when I came out with it in my hand, there were you standing on a stepping-stone just behind me; and some treacherous gold pin had loosened the wheatsheaf of your hair, and, as we stood together on those quaking stones in the middle of the little stream, we looked into each other’s eyes. And just then a catbird began singing in a meadow nearby. Do you remember? And may I keep this arrowhead, Miranda?