Dear Jerry:I can't resist, in spite of your warning, letting you know how deeply we appreciate your generous offer for the children. You know, of course, that we never felt the slightest claim. It would not have been so much, anyway, if it had been divided, and father always felt that people had a right to leave their money as they chose, if they had any rights in it at all, he said. I believe he thought it ought to go to the State, or something. He and Mr. C—l S—z used to talk about it evenings, I remember.But to provide so generously for them in your will—it was truly kind and Walter feels it very much. I hope it will be long before they get it, Jerry. Of course Roger will have a son some day and then you will be giving it to Roger Bradley, as you say, and it won't have been out of the family really—you were just like one of us for so many years. And dearer to Uncle Win than any of us, I am sure.With deepest gratitude again from Walter and myself, and hopes that you are quite well now,
Dear Jerry:
I can't resist, in spite of your warning, letting you know how deeply we appreciate your generous offer for the children. You know, of course, that we never felt the slightest claim. It would not have been so much, anyway, if it had been divided, and father always felt that people had a right to leave their money as they chose, if they had any rights in it at all, he said. I believe he thought it ought to go to the State, or something. He and Mr. C—l S—z used to talk about it evenings, I remember.
But to provide so generously for them in your will—it was truly kind and Walter feels it very much. I hope it will be long before they get it, Jerry. Of course Roger will have a son some day and then you will be giving it to Roger Bradley, as you say, and it won't have been out of the family really—you were just like one of us for so many years. And dearer to Uncle Win than any of us, I am sure.
With deepest gratitude again from Walter and myself, and hopes that you are quite well now,
Yours always,
Alice Bradley Carter.
That winter had been my introduction to Egypt. I have never since let more than three winters, at most, go by without revisiting the strange, haunted place; next to Nippon the fairy country it is dearest to me of all the warm corners of the earth—and I have dragged my twinging, tortured muscles to them all. Only last winter—for many months have passed since I copied those last letters into my manuscript, and I paid dear for a last attempt at a February in New York—I strolled through Cairo streets, drew gratefully into my nostrils the extraordinary mixture of odours that differentiates Cairo from every place in the world (how the great cities are stamped indelibly each with her own nameless atmosphere, by the way! And yet not quite nameless, for London's is based on street mud and flower-trays, Rome is garlic and incense, Paris is watered asphalt, New York is untended horses and tobacco-smoke, and Tokyo is rice straw) and as I strolled, a strange thing happened to me.
I was passing by a street-seller of scarabs, a treacherous-looking wretch, whose rolling eyes glanced covetously at the scarab—better than any of his—that I wore at my scarf-knot, and pressed against him to avoid a great black with a tray of brass bowls and platters on his head. Just ahead of me a lemonade-merchant uttered his wailing, minor cry, and as the crowd jostled in the narrow, dirty lane, my eye was caught by a coffee-coloured woman, a big Juno, with flashing teeth and a neck like a bronze tower. Across her shoulders sat a naked baby who held his balance by histwo chubby hands buried in her thick black hair, one leg dropping over each splendid breast. She caught my eye, and laughed outright as the child kicked out with one fat foot and struck the brasses on the tray so that it tipped and swayed dangerously.
I stood there, lost in a maze of Cairo streets, and the babel of the shrieking, blue-clad donkey-boys was the scream of gulls to my ears and the sun on the swaying brass platters was the reflection of a polished sun-dial. The turquoises on the scarab-seller's tray were turquoises about Margarita's waist, the lemonade was borne by Caliban, and the child that rode astride those strong shoulders had hair like corn-silk burned in the sun and eyes as blue as any turquoise! For so had she held her baby, walking with that free, noble stride, and so she had laughed and met my eyes, and so the child had clutched her hair, in the summer just passed.
So vivid was the impression that I stood, as I say, in a maze, and the scarab-seller and he of the brass tray cursed me heartily as they struggled for balance in the pushing, screaming, reeking crowd. How meaningless that phrase, "real life!" Years and years of actual happenings in my life have been less real than those seconds in the Cairo streets, when down the alley-ways of sound and sight, across the intricate network of that spongy, grey tissue in my skull, this tiny, deathless, unimportant memory led my soul away from the present and left me, an unconscious, stupid, mechanical toy, to block the Cairo traffic, while I—the real I—lived far away. Truly the poets and the children are our only realists, and Time and Space have fooled the rest of us unmercifully.
I find that trivial recollections of this sort interest me far more in the recording than my sensations as a wealthy man. These last were, indeed, strikingly few. Beyond the pleasure of buying old Jeanne a Cashmere shawl, the hidden ambition of her life, and giving orders for Harriet's hospital (for I seemed to have brought the natives of North Carolinadown on my shoulders, somehow—and that without the faintest interest in them!) my amazing good fortune made less impression upon me, as a matter of fact, than Uncle Winthrop's first legacy. What was there for me to do with it? Roger refused to touch a penny; my mother, beyond a little increase in her charity fund and a pony phæton, was merely bewildered when asked to make any suggestions, and would have handed purses to every tramp in New England if she had been given the means; my father's people were well-to-do, and the conferring of benefactions has always been difficult for me, anyway. The only way for me would be to drop gold-pieces on needy thresholds by night and run away—a startling occupation for a rheumatic bachelor, surely! I do not know how to receive thanks—they embarrass me frightfully. To stand smugly with a philanthropic smile while the widow and the orphan weep around my knees, is something I should be forever unable to achieve. Harriet's hospital was not a charity—it was something to keep the ridiculous creature busy—her yacht, her picture gallery, her stud-farm, if you will.
As for me, I had none of these tastes. I bought the one or two pictures I had always wanted, that were within my means (most of them weren't within anybody's!) I put a piano in my new rooms, laid in a little wine for my appreciative friends, bespoke the unshared services of Hodgson, who was unfortunately necessary to me now that every sudden damp day crippled my right shoulder (he came to me wearing one of my old suits, by the way) and put a new steam-launch into Roger's concealed boat-house. I presented Margarita with another and a larger gift of pearls, it is true, but without one-tenth of the choking excitement with which I had clasped that first single one upon her neck.
The lady herself, however, balanced this equation; she was greatly delighted, and if she had not, perhaps, perfectly appreciated the first offering, more than atoned by her rapturous recognition of the second.
"And how they must have cost!" she cried. "Jerry, you are too generous—but I do love them!"
To think of Margarita's estimating the value of a gift!
We had famous talks that August, while Roger sweated at his new task—making an island for us, no less!—andpetite Mariegathered shells and buried them in tiny, wave-washed graves.
She took to reading that summer, and I readPendennisandDavid Copperfieldaloud and she embroidered great grey butterflies all over her grey gown forFaust, and the big brindled hound slept at our feet near the beehives.
"Which do you like best?" I asked her curiously.
"Oh, the one about Mr. Pendennis is the prettiest," she answered promptly, "I should have liked the man that made that book the best. But Mr. Dickens knows about more things. He makes more different kinds of people."
"Thackeray has been called cynical," I suggested.
"What is that, Jerry?"
I explained, and she shook her head.
"O no, that is not cynical. That is the way things are, Jerry. Only everybody does not say so."
"Do you think," I asked, "that people really talk the way Mr. Micawber talks? I never heard anybody. And certainly nobody ever talked like his wife."
"No," she said thoughtfully, "I never did, either. But there must be a good many peoplelikethem, Jerry, I am sure. And if they knew as many long words as Mr. Dickens, that is the way theywouldtalk, I think."
I have never heard a better criticism of the literary giant of the nineteenth century.
She never made the slightest secret of her affection for me nor of our thorough comprehension of each other and our similarity of tastes. Quiet always, or almost always, with Roger, with me she chattered like a bird, and I could give her opinion on many matters of which he knew nothing.
"Jerry and I like Botticelli and caviar sandwiches andstreet songs and Egypt, and Roger does not," she told Clarence King once—I can hear him roar now.
"I can talk better to you than to Roger," she confided to me one day on the rocks; "if it were the custom to have two husbands, Jerry, I should like you for the other—but it is not," she added mournfully.
I agreed to this with regret and she went on thoughtfully.
"You see, Roger would not like it, even if itwasthe custom, so I could not, anyway."
"That is very amiable of you," I said.
"It is strange how I always think of what he would like," she added, with perfect sincerity, I am sure. "One day when he would not let me have any more bread—it was so bad for my voice, you know—I got very angry and spoke crossly to him, but still he would not, and I told him that since he did not want me to sing he had better let me spoil my voice, if I wanted to—and you would think he would, would you not, Jerry?"
"No," I answered soberly, "no, Margarita, I wouldn't. He knew you really wanted your voice more than the bread, so he gave you what you wanted."
"Yes. But that day I was so angry, I planned how much more free I should be if he were to die—was it not terrible, Jerry?—and then I got so interested I could not stop, and I made a dying sickness for him like my father's, and Miss Buxton came, and then I got a black frock like Hester when my father died, and then we—you and I—made a grave for him with my father's grave on the little point, and then (this was all in my mind, you see, Jerry) I was so sad I cried and cried—as I do inMarguerite, all over my cheeks, and then, what do you think?"
"Heavens, child, what can I think? I don't know," I said unsteadily, revolving God knows what of possibilities in my presumptuous and selfish heart.
"Why," she said simply, "I felt so badly that I went to Roger (in my mind) to tell him about it and show him thebeautiful grave we had made and my black frock (I had a little pointed bonnet with white under the front, like the widows in Paris) and suddenly I remembered that I could not show him—he would be dead! You see that would have been very bad, for I had been planning all the time that he would be there to—to—well,that he would be there! You see what I mean, don't you, Jerry? Roger has to be there."
"Yes, I see," I said, very low, filled with sickening shame, "he has to be there, my dear."
"And so I stopped all that dying sickness directly," she continued comfortably, "because it was too silly, if I could not tell him about it afterwards, you see.
"And yet he was very cross to me about the bread," she burst out childishly. "Why do I think he has to be there, Jerry? He cannot talk to me nearly so nicely as you can—he does not understand. Why must he be there?"
I choked and laughed at once.
"Because you love him, you silly Margarita!" I declared.
"That must be it," she agreed, with a serious, long look at me out of those deep-sea coloured eyes.
Ah, me!
How we worked at that canal! Caliban and two swarthy Italians and Roger and I—for I marked out the course of it in an artfully natural curve and put in the stakes. There were eighty-odd feet across the part of the peninsula we selected, and it bade fair to wear us all out and last forever, till I seized the occasion of a business trip that took Roger away for four days and hired a great gang of labourers who finished it all up, so that he walked into his island home across a foot-bridge, to his great and boyish delight. What a big boy he was, after all! Not that I did not share his pleasure in the Island: it gave me a delicious feeling of security and distance from the rest of the world. With the help of the gang I had been able to widen our channel considerably and it took a very respectable bridge indeed to span the gap. We had made plans for a regular drawbridge, but laterwe abandoned them, and chopped even the old one down. The water has washed and washed and worn away since, on the island side, and now one must be bent upon a swim indeed who cares to venture among the jagged ledges and mill-races that my blasting made.
We piped our spring too—a beauty—up through the dairy cellar to the kitchen, and Caliban was saved many a weary trip. Some years afterward I took my chance during another absence of the lord of the Island, and a hurried and astonished set of plumbers installed a luxurious bathroom in either ell of the cottage—a surprise for his birthday. Profiting by a winter in Bermuda, I copied their roof reservoirs, allowing one to each ell, sanded without, whitewashed within, an architectural measure which made the skyline even more rocky and wild, in appearance, from the water. Before we left, that autumn, we planted fifty evergreens, pines, hemlocks and spruces, in a broad belt just opposite the Island, masking it completely from the shore, and hardly a year passed after that without thickening and lengthening that concealing wall. Oh, we guarded our jewel, I can tell you!
It was that summer, I think, that Whistler came to us and drew that series of sepia sketches that frames the big fireplace. They are on the plaster itself—a sort of exquisite fresco—and Venice sails, Holland wind-mills and London docks cluster round the faded bricks with an indescribably fascinating effect. At my urgent request I was allowed to protect them with thin tiles of glass riveted through the corners into the plaster: how the collectors' mouths water at the sight of them!
Stevenson came a few years later: all the quaint comforts and intimate beauties hidden away behind the boulders plainly caught his elfish, childlike fancy—it was he who made the little grotto beyond the asparagus bed, lined the pool in it with unusual shells and coloured pebbles, fitted odd bits of looking-glass here and there, and wrote a poem on a smooth stone at the door for little Mary, to whom he dedicated it.
"The purple pool of mussel shells,All full of salty ocean smells,The coral branches in the wall—And you the mermaid queen of all ..."
"The purple pool of mussel shells,All full of salty ocean smells,The coral branches in the wall—And you the mermaid queen of all ..."
She used to recite it all very charmingly. Roger never wanted it printed in theChild's Garden of Verses, where it properly belongs—one of the best of them, in my opinion.
He and Margarita talked together by the hour and I have seen his dog-like brown eyes fixed on her an hour at a time. I asked him once if he intended to "put her in a story"—the quaint query of the layman, so strangely irritating to the book-man—and he shook his loose-locked head slowly.
"They say I can't do women, you know," he said, "and nobody would believe her if I put her in, she's too artistically effective."
And here am I doing it! Fools rush in ...
It may seem odd that Roger and I should not discuss the opera business, but we didn't. That it hurt him I knew, for I knew Roger. Anglo-Saxon to the backbone, the position which his wife as a successful operatic star must put him in could be nothing but highly distasteful to him. It is one thing to snatch your wife from the stage, as Margarita's noble grandfather had done, and enjoy her in your home; it is quite another to see her snatched from your home to that stage, after you have married her. But I have never known a juster man, and though he talked little of the "rights" of women, and then in a brief, blunt fashion that would have exasperated the fast-emerging sex most terribly, he nevertheless respected the rights of every human creature most scrupulously. Though he had the private appreciation of the unmistakable good points of the harem-seclusion shared by every healthy male, he would never have shut Margarita into a New York house or a honeymoon-island against her will, and I think he was too proud to reason with her on the only lines open to him. I think, too, that his quiet refusal to take any strong measures may have been based,partly, on the full appreciation of the risk he ran in marrying such a bundle of possibilities as Margarita. One of the greatest passions that ever (I firmly believe) mated two people had whirled him out of the conventional current of his life, and because it had, in its course, brought him into the rapids, he was enough of a man to set his teeth and take it quietly, knowing that when he left the calm, green-bordered stream for the adventure of flood tide, he did it with his eyes open—a grown man. Or so, at least, I take it that he reasoned: he acted as if he had.
Again, it would have been difficult for me to discuss the matter for another reason than Roger's perfectly characteristic reserve. Much as I regretted that this issue should have arisen in Roger's household, like Sue Paynter I had a secret sympathy with Margarita. Roger was never fond of the stage, and I was. He preferred chamber-music and symphony to opera, and was never deeply sensible to the solo voice, though a good critic of it. The glamour of the stage—that lime-light that has eternally dazzled the sons of Adam—had little effect upon him: he was the last man in the world to marry an actress. Now, I was not. Judie, the naughty creature, had once her charm for me. I have stood in a crowd to see the Jersey Lily, and the Queen of English comediennes could have had me for a turn of her thick lashes—before I knew Margarita. My paternal grandmother was part French, and I have always observed that a mixture of blood predisposes its inheritors to dramatic triumphs—or enjoyments, if no more.
So he dug at his canal and Margarita practised her Jewel Song (it was a shade high for her: she was not a pure soprano, but had one of those flexible mezzos that tempt their trainers to all sorts oftours-de-force) and Dolledge tended Mary and Miss Jencks developed Caliban.
The good woman was utterly unhappy without some subject on which to exercise her really remarkable powers of education. Mary's attendant resented bitterly any rivalin her certainly well-filled sphere, and Margarita was far beyond her one-time mentor now, and regarded her with the affectionate tolerance of a princess for her old nurse. This was hard on the devoted Barbara, for she adored Margarita, and to find oneself gently sliding to the foot of the pedestal, when one has not so long ago been occupied in moulding the statue, cannot be very enlivening, though one be never so philosophical.
In truth I had at that time a strange sensation: I found that I had insensibly drifted into a state of mind in which we five, Roger, Miss Jencks, Dolledge, Caliban and I seemed to be at home, contented, occupied, attached by every interest domestic and romantic, to the spot that was dearest on earth to us, while Margarita, a brilliant bird of passage, but lingered with us for the moment, before she took up her journey through the world—for that she was destined for the world, who could doubt? We were, to use the homely old figure, like a circle of motherly hens, staring fatalistically, sadly or disgustedly, according to our several barnyard temperaments, at our daring, iridescent duckling as she breasted the (to her) familiar flood.
For it was familiar: there are people for whom—taken though they may have been from the most secluded corner of the earth, unprepared, undisciplined, unwarned, the great world, the glitter of its footlights, the shock of its tournaments, the cruelty of its victories, the coldness of its neglect, have absolutely no terrors. They face it superbly, as one should face a mob, and the great world, like any proper mob, licks their feet and fawns on them. Admiration is their due; devotion is no more than the sky above them or the earth under them; they keep the divine, expectanthauteurof childhood and rule us, like the children, through our pity and our wonder. And Margarita was one of these.
But to go back to Miss Jencks and Caliban. It was Harriet Buxton who had suggested that the boy was not so deaf as we had thought, only stupid, and that his dumbness might yield to the methods then being so successfully used with that afflicted child who has since triumphed so brilliantly over more than human obstacles. Although, as Harriet pointed out, I have always felt that too much credit was given in that case to the pupil and too little to the teacher. The distance between English words of one syllable and Greek tragedy is only a matter of time: the distance between blank chaos and those one-syllabled words might well have seemed eternal!
Not that Miss Jencks had quite such a task ahead of her. Caliban had been trained into habits of relentless cleanliness, and an almost mechanical regularity of routine work. It was his clumsy hands that had arranged the flaming nasturtiums in the silver bowl under the Henner etching, his rude pantomime that purchased the bi-weekly bone for the mysteriously named Rosy, his weather wisdom that was sought when it was a question of an extended sailing party. In fact, I am inclined to think, in view of his subsequent progress, that some of his ignorance was feigned, as is often the case in these instances of arrested mental development. However that may have been, on the occasion of this visit I found him marvellously improved, his hair cut, his nondescript garments evolved into a modest sort of livery, his vocabulary no longer a series of grunts, his very pantomime moreelastic. Margarita never changed her old methods of communication with him, but the rest of us, at Miss Jencks's earnest entreaty, fatigued ourselves amiably in order to elicit the guttural "yes" and "no" and "do not know" she had so laboriously taught him.
Best of all, his disposition had altered to a very considerable extent, and this improvement on his old surliness was of the greatest assistance to us on the occasion I must now narrate.
It was I—strangely fated to discover so many of the links in this wonderfully twined chain of Margarita's life—who stumbled by the merest chance on the last one really needed to complete the story. Zealous for the perfection of our Island, I selected a deep gully, filled with heavy boughs and loose unsightly rocks, as the next point for improvement, and bespoke the services of Caliban for the purpose. Greatly to my surprise, for he was attached to me, and always showed pleasure at rowing me over for my visits, he refused point blank to help me and even tried, in a series of clumsy ruses, to start me at work elsewhere. Vexed, but quite unsuspicious, I set to work by myself at pulling off the upper boughs, trusting to shame him into helping me with the stones, which seemed to have been tossed there in a sort of midden. When he found that I was persistent in my plan, he sat down at the edge of the gully, buried his face in his clumsy hands and wept silently, shuddering at every bough I lifted. Greatly interested now, I called Roger, and we worked together, assisted by the good-natured Italian retained now as gardener and assistant boatman (his name was Rafaello, and he was a not-too-unhappy bachelor, for, as he said, a girl who would run off with a man's rival a week before the wedding would have made but a doubtful wife for the most patient of husbands!)
As we neared the bottom of the gully Caliban grew more and more excited: now he would peer in fearfully, now run off a few yards, but he could never get very far away, for greatas was his terror and sorrow, curiosity was stronger and he must be near, it seemed, at all costs.
AH, FAITHFUL CALIBAN, WHAT HOURS OF TERRIBLE TUITION MADE THY TASK CLEAR TO THEE!AH, FAITHFUL CALIBAN, WHAT HOURS OF TERRIBLE TUITION MADE THY TASK CLEAR TO THEE!
Suddenly, as the last rotting bough was lifted from one end of the gully, my eye was caught by a series of stones wonderfully matched in size, eight or ten of them arranged in a sort of rough cross, and when with a quick thrill of apprehension I pushed aside the withered pine tree that covered the rest of the stones, the foot of the cross elongated, and the symbol of Calvary was seen to extend over a slightly raised oblong mound of earth. There was no mistaking that shape nor those dimensions; whoever has heard the rattle of that last remorseless handful and struggled with that almost nauseating rebellion at the sight of the raw clods, so unsightly in the smooth, peaceful green, knows that mound for what it is, and we knew this. Silently we cleared away the rest, and then the grave I had discerned fell into its true and illuminating relation to two other and evidently older crosses—at the feet of both and at right angles to them. In her death as in her life that gaunt, austere Hester was faithful, and like the stone hound at the ancient knight's bier she guarded her master's last sleep.
We took off our caps reverently; we needed no monument, no epitaph to name for us those exiled, unblessed graves. Prynne had made the first cross, we knew, twenty-seven years ago; Hester had made the second a few days before Roger visited the island. And the third? Ah, faithful Caliban, what hours of terrible tuition made thy task clear to thee? I shudder at the picture of that indefatigable New England woman illustrating in terrible pantomime the duties that would devolve upon her loutish servant at her death. But the lesson had been learned, the third coffin taken from the boat-house, the body laid within it at the graveside, carried swiftly from the house wrapped in a sheet, the lid nailed down, the earth filled in.
Gaspingly he verified my quiet questions and surmises—I have enough New England blood to know what ghastlyforethought we are capable of!—and slowly he calmed himself, seeing that we were neither frightened nor angry ...
One end of the island repeats on a tiny scale the formation of the original peninsula. Three quaint red cedars stand pointed and forever green, more like the cypresses of Italy than anything in America; around its rocky beach the waves beat incessantly, but its grass is fresh and green, for there is a little spring there. Under the cypresses lie three flat graves, two side by side, one across their feet, and over each lies a flat carved table of marble—rich carvings that once stretched under three heavy mullioned windows over the back doors of an old Italian palace. There are only initials on these tables, initials and the numerals of years, but they are not utterly unblest. Good Parson Elder read the most beautiful burial service in the world over them, broken by the tears of a trusty servant; the children and the children's children of the crumbling bodies under two of those tables stood over them hand in hand; and Nature, who bears no grudge nor ever excommunicates the fruitful, brings to the sunlight every year the yellow daffodils and white narcissus, the wild rose and beach bayberry, the marigold and asters that love has planted there.
It may be that further clues, more detailed accounts of that secret island life, were hidden in those coffins; we never tried if it was so. Unknown and lonely they lived, unknown and lonely they had wished to lie in death, and so we left them, safe even from ourselves, who loved them for the wonderful child they had given us. And I like to think that God is no less forgiving than the Nature through which he tries to lead us to him.
They left in October that year; Margarita to get ready for herdébut, Roger, quiet and inscrutable, to work, as he said, at his treatise on Napoleon. He had grown deeply interested in this and spent most of his leisure at it, and it had gone far beyond his first idea of an essay. I did not go with them, but took the occasion for a filial visit to my mother and a grudging journey to North Carolina, where I stared uncomprehendingly at the chaotic hospital, a litter of bricks and scantling, listened to tiresome and enthusiastic statistics from young Collier and Dr. McGee, distributed papers of sweets to a ward of convalescent and sticky infants, and refused to take a toilsome journey around the borders of my one-time coal-lands. They were no longer mine—why should I care to view them?
Just before I left for Paris, where Captain Upgrove was to join me, I remembered some drawings I had planned to make in order to get the dimensions of the rambling, old-fashioned garden behind the house where I intended to put a certain ancient shallow stone basin I had in mind, and then beg Roger to pipe the spring into it for a sort of fountain-pool. There was such a basin on an old, decaying estate some miles out of our old school-town: Roger and I knew it well, for we had often been invited there by a friend of my mother's to drink tea and eat rusk and fresh butter andconfiture(of field strawberries—delicious!) and—of all things—broiled bacon, because Roger was devotedly fond of it and never got it at school. How many June half-holidays have wehung over that old carved basin, teasing the goldfish, stopping up the tiny fountain till it spouted all over us, sailing beetles across it on linden leaves, or lolling full-fed and lazy, smoking contraband cigarettes of caporal! I knew well how pleased he would be when he saw that battered dolphin that threw the water and the funny little stone frogs at each corner, and I had a shrewd idea that old Mrs. Y—— would not object to parting with it, moss and lichen and all, if one made it worth her while!
A cold, rainy week—the delayed equinox—caught and held me on the island, huddled over the fire, and it was then that I conceived the famous idea of the furnace. I had planned many a pleasant autumn there, for it was now the best of America to me, and if such weeks as this were possible (and probable) there would be little comfort for me away from the chimney corner—which has never been my favourite post, by the way. Caliban and Agnès, the cook, a kindly Normandy woman, did their best for me and for the ravenous gang of workmen that laboured (in the slight intervals between their meals!) at the monstrous, many-mouthed iron tube in the cellar; while I chafed and scolded at the delays, unwilling to leave the men, weary of my dear Island now its chief jewel was gone, irritated by the tramping feet and tuneless whistling where I had heard so much the patter ofpetite Marie'sslippers and the rich melody of her mother's voice.
It was then that I fell upon Lockwood Prynne's library and learned more of his mind, I believe, than anyone else could ever know. I wish I had known the man himself. The little I have been able to find out about him in the South (the war practically wiped out the family) only confirmed my first idea of him. I actually succeeded in tracking an old album of daguerreotypes to a shiftless darkey cabin and identifying a picture of him as a boy from a half-blind negro mammy, with one of his father in full uniform and a singularly beautiful head that I am sure from the likeness ofthe brow and the set of the eyes must have been his mother, though here the old slave could not or would not help me. I rescued, too, for Margarita, a rich carved mahogany chair from a cow stall ("ole Marse Lockwood's pay chair") and a graceful, brass-handled serving-table, "what his grandpa done leave fo' li'l Marse Lockwood fer ter rec'leck' him by." I picked up a silver cup, at a roadside auction (and bid high for it against a Fifth Avenue dealer) engraved with his mother's coat-of-arms, and shamelessly inveigled Margarita into taking it, later, and giving me in return the silver bowl that stood for so long under the Henner etching. It stands there still, but not in the old place. Not Caliban, but Hodgson fills that bowl to-day and every day that I am in America with the most beautiful flowers Uncle Winthrop's money can buy; though Lockwood Prynne no longer lies in the army cot that faces it, one of his best friends does—a friend who loves him no less, that he never saw his face.
Well, we got that furnace in and fifty tons of coal, too, towed over in an old scow and binned down in the cellar, and when I saw the bills for this last, I received the impression (which I have never been able wholly to abandon) that I must have been underpaid for those coal-lands!
Many a time have we discussed it since, with a curious, frightened wonder: why should that furnace have seemed so all-important to me? At best we expected to spend but few days at the Island when it could have been necessary; Margarita had grown up among Atlantic winters and had more times than she could count broken the ice in her bedroom ewer; such a luxurious whim would never have occurred to Roger, who, like most men of his type, expected every one to be as hardy as himself—how many generations of his ancestors had stoically toasted their shins while their backs were freezing! It must be, as Margarita teasingly insists, that my pathetic care for my rheumatic old bones was at the bottom of it all, and that I was rapidly assimilating one of the cardinal doctrines of the swollenpurse, that no sum could be ill spent when spent for my comfort.
Well, well, let it go at that—to use the bluff, pertinent phrase of the present day. Though Barbara Jencks would have died before she had let it go at anything like that, I assure you, and has spent many an eager moment of shy, persistent effort to make me comprehend the inscrutable and sleepless interest of Providence, an interest which had intended, from the time of the Exodus, if I seize her idea correctly, that a hot-air plant should complete the summer home of Roger Bradley—a man who had less interest in Providence than anyone I know! Poor Barbara! As I hung about the house that mellow autumn, I fell, more than once, into musing laughter, as here and there some piece of furniture, some picture or dish or oddment brought back to me her uncounted, endless assaults on Margarita's simple, healthy and (to the orthodox English woman) baseless scheme of existence. Not that it should have been dignified by so philosophical a term as "scheme": Margarita was given to the practice of life, not its theory. I never tired of watching the extraordinary effect of her downright mental processes upon the mass of perfunctory, inherited ideas whose edges, once sharp-milled and fresh from some startling Mint, we have dulled and misshapen with generations of unthinking, accustomed barter.
For instance, a treasure of a Spode fruit dish that I had picked up at a dewy Devonshire farm, all clotted cream and apple-cheeked children, caught my eye as it lay on the piano, and I found myself chuckling as I recalled the unfortunate eddy of doctrine into which the innocent bit of china had whirled us. Margarita had asked what the quaint Scriptural figures upon it illustrated, and Miss Jencks, every ready, had explained to her the parable of the labourers in the vineyard and the marvel of the late comer's good fortune.
"And that is a very beautiful thought, my dear," she concluded, "is it not?"
Margarita stared at her in frank surprise.
"Beautiful?" she echoed, "you call it beautiful that so many poor men should work hard so long, and then have to see the lazy ones who came in late be paid as much as they for one-tenth as much work? I do not know what you mean by beautiful; it was certainly very unfair."
"My dear, my dear!" poor Barbara fluttered, "it had the approval of our Lord, remember."
"He was probably not one of the ones who had worked all day, then," Margarita replied blandly.
"It was not an actual occurrence," said Miss Jencks, a little coldly, as Roger's irrepressible chuckle echoed from the porch outside, "it was merely a parable—a lesson."
"Oh!" (The exquisite, falling melody of that simple monosyllable expressed so perfectly, through such a trained larynx, all the sudden lack of interest!) "It never happened, then? So of course it does not matter. But why do you call it a lesson, Miss Jencks?"
"Because it teaches Christian charity," said Barbara firmly.
Margarita turned away and dismissed the subject.
"If I ever hired myself to anybody, I would rather he had been taught fairness than Christian charity," she observed, and left Miss Jencks clutching the fruit plate pathetically, her eyes fixed hopelessly on me. For it was always my delicate task to soothe the poor lady after these theological encounters: Roger's uncompromising treatment of the situation had a way of uncomfortably resembling his wife's!
"You know, dear Miss Jencks," I began, as seriously as I could, "she is not really cynical—she is no more irreverent than a child would be. Surely some of your pupils, sometimes ..."
"Never, Mr. Jerrolds, never!" the bulwark of the Governor-General's family protested tearfully, "never, I assure you!"
"Well, well," I said, "it's all the same—they might have.You see, she pays these things the great compliment of taking them seriously—and literally. And they wouldn't work, Miss Jencks, some of them, if one tried them, you know. Just consider the labour unions for one thing: suppose Roger were to pay off his workmen on that principle—they'd fling his money in his face."
HE SKETCHED HER IN CHARCOAL, DRESSED (HE WOULD HAVE IT) IN BLACKHE SKETCHED HER IN CHARCOAL, DRESSED (HE WOULD HAVE IT) IN BLACK
"Then what would you say to the Prodigal Son?" she shot at me defiantly.
"I say that it's very beautiful and that I'm old enough to hope it may be true," I told her, "but for heaven's sake, Miss Jencks, don't try Mrs. Bradley with it—not just now, at any rate!"
Then there was her guitar, a small one, of lemon-coloured pear wood, curiously inlaid: Whistler got it for her in one of those old pawn shops near the London wharves, and we used to wonder what happy sailor, burnt and eager for the town, had brought it for what waiting girl all the long miles, and how it had crept at last, ashamed and stained, into that dingy three-balled tomb of so many hopes and keepsakes. He sketched her in charcoal, dressed (he would have it) in black, with a Spanish comb in her hair and the guitar on a broad ribbon of strange deep Chinese blue; behind her, on an aerially slender perch, stands a gaudy Mexican parrot. It does not look like her to us who know her well (though, curiously enough, all strangers consider it an extremely fine likeness) but as atour de forceit is remarkable, and amongst the plain, Saxon furnishings of the Island living-room it stands out with an extraordinary vividness—an unmistakable bit of Southern Europe, the perfectly conscious sophistication of old cities and sunny, secret streets, worn uneven and discoloured before Raleigh started across seas.
Roger never liked it, I believe, and I have always suspected the impish James of deliberately putting us face to face with Margarita's foreign strain and the tiny, deep gulf that cut her off, in some parts of her nature, so hopelessly from us. And he made us see it, too, that Puck of all painters, even as hehad intended, and we were forced to thank him for it, for it was too beautiful to have gone undone, and he knew it. And Jimmie's dead, worse luck, and one of his most devoted collectors told me last week that he really thought the psychological moment for selling out had arrived, for he'd never go any higher! And we're all grass, that to-day is and to-morrow goes into the oven, and there's no doubt of it, my brothers.
But how she used to singO sole mio, with that sweet, piercing Italian cry, a realcri du cœur(except for the trifling fact that there was no more heart in it, really, than there is in most Italian singing! I suppose that while the art of song remains among the children of men, that particular child who is able to throw his voice most easily into what Mme. M——i used to call "ze frront of ze face" and detach it from the throat, where the true feelings lie gripped, will continue to thrill the other children with his or her "heart in the voice!") And how she would drag the rhythm, deliciously, intentionally, and shade the downward notes, and hang a breath too long on the phrase-ends, as only Italians dare! And how the distilled essence of Italy dripped out of those luscious, tender, mocking folk-songs, till the vineyards steeped before us, and the white city-squares baked in the noon sun, and the ardent sailor sang to his brown girl over the quaint, bobbing, weighted nets!
The men who dug the ice-house and piled the coast wall and blasted out trenches for draining would stop and lean on their picks, when her resonant, golden humming, like a drowsy contralto bee, floated out from the verandah vines to them: I have seen their faces clear and their dull eyes focus suddenly on some distant, darling memory, while they dropped back for a precious minute into the past that you think is all bread and cheese and beer, because, forsooth, they never sat beside you in white gloves when Margarita sang!
Go to—there was Spring and a girl for every man of them, once, and both were the same as yours.
I had to go into her room at that time, to make sure that the floor should not be unduly marred and that, according to the best of my poor judgment (Roger should have planned it all, as a matter of fact) the registers might be inserted in the best places; and as I moved among the dainty luxuries that replaced the almost sordid bareness of that room when I had first seen it, I realised, with surprise but with clear certainty, that the change was only apparent, not deep or inherent. They were all there, to be sure, the pretty paraphernalia that modern woman (and ancient, too, for the matter of that!) has found necessary to preserve and augment her mystery and charm; ivory and silver and crystal and fluted frills and scented silk. Oh, yes, they were all there, but there was no atmosphere of Margarita amongst them all: she had escaped out of them and given them the slip as effectually as in the old, bare days of the brush and comb and the print gown on a peg in the unscented closet. She was simply not there, that was all, and the most infatuated lover in all the Decameron would have felt that here was not the place for self-indulgent raptures. Margarita used her sleeping-room as a snail uses his shell or a bird its nest: it was impersonal, deserted, out of commission, now—the room, merely, of a beautiful woman, who might have been any woman, with a woman's need of comfort, warmth, clear air, and cleanliness pushed to an arrogance of physical purity.
My mother's bedroom was her own as definitely as her blue-veined, pointed hands; Sue Paynter's, into which I went once to lift out her little son in one of his illnesses, was like no one's else in the world, individual, intense; even old Madam Bradley's, in its clear whites and polished dark wood, translated to my boyish, awed soul, a sense of her impenetrable character.
But not so Margarita's. It was furnished and decorated in grey-blue tints, because I had suggested this. It had odd touches of greyish rose, because Whistler had insisted on it. It was fitted with old mahogany, because Rogerliked this and collected it here and there. But of all the personality that her father-lover had known how to build into his home of exile, there was absolutely none.
Was it because there were no work-baskets, spilling lace and bits of ribbon, no photographs, no keepsakes, hideous perhaps, but dear for what they represent, no worn girlhood's books, no shamefaced toys, lingering from the nursery, no litter of any other member of her family? Perhaps. Mme. Modjeska, then, and even now one of the greatest actresses on our stage, called it an unwomanly room, but I am not quite sure that this is precisely what she meant.
No, the most vivid impression the room could make upon me was one that brings a reminiscent chuckle even to-day. As my eye fell on the antique dressing-table, I seemed to see, suddenly and laughably, Margarita, sweeping down the stairs, enveloped in a billowypeignoir, her hair loose, her eyes flashing furiously, in her extended finger and thumb, held as one would hold a noxious adder, a thin navy-blue necktie.
"Is that yours?" she demanded tragically of her husband.
"Why, yes, I believe it is," said Roger, with the grave politeness that years of intimacy could never take from him.
"I found iton my dressing-table!" she thundered, and her voice echoed like an angry vault, "on—my—dressing-table!"
She dropped it like a toad at his feet, swept us all with the lightning of her eyes, coldly, distastefully, and swam up the stairs, an avenging goddess, deaf to Roger's matter-of-fact apology, blind to Miss Jencks's deprecating blushes. As for me, so under the spell of that voice have I always been, that I swear I thought her hardly used—the darling vixen!