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(front)
BY
(front)
LONDON: BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
(contents)
(illustrations)
They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood.
Nello was a little Ardennois--Patrasche was a big Fleming. They
were both of the same age by length of years, yet one was still young, and
the other was already old. They had dwelt together almost all their
days: both were orphaned and destitute, and owed their lives to the
same hand. It had been the beginning of the tie between them, their first
bond of sympathy; and it bad strengthened day by day, and had grown with
their growth, firm and indissoluble, until they loved one another very
greatly.
Their home was a little hut on the edge of a little village--a
Flemish village a league from Antwerp, set
amidst flat breadths of pasture and corn-lands, with long lines of poplars and of alders bending in the breeze on the edge of the great canal which ran through it.
It had about a score of houses and homesteads, with shutters of bright
green or sky-blue, and roofs rose-red or black and white, and
walls whitewashed until they shone in the sun like snow. In the centre of
the village stood a windmill, placed on a little moss-grown
slope: it was a landmark to all the level country round.
It had once been painted scarlet, sails and all, but that had been in
its infancy, half a century or more earlier, when it had ground wheat for
the soldiers of Napoleon; and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by wind and
weather. It went queerly by fits and starts, as though rheumatic and stiff
in the joints from age, but it served the whole neighborhood, which would
have thought it almost as impious to carry grain elsewhere as to attend any
other religious service than the mass that was performed at the altar of
the little old gray church, with its conical steeple, which stood opposite
to it, and whose single bell rang morning, noon, and night with that
strange, subdued, hollow sadness which every bell that hangs in the Low
Countries seems to gain as an integral part of its melody.
Within sound of the little melancholy clock almost from their birth
upward, they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrasche, in the little hut on
the edge of the village, with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising in the
north-east, beyond the great green plain of seeding grass and
spreading corn that stretched away from them like a tideless, changeless
sea.
It was the hut of a very old man, of a very poor man--of old
Jehan Daas, who in his time had been a soldier, and who remembered the wars
that had trampled the country as oxen tread down the furrows, and who had
brought from his service nothing except a wound, which had made him a
cripple.
When old Jehan Daas had reached his full eighty, his daughter had died
in the Ardennes, hard by Stavelot, and had left him in legacy her
two-year- old son. The old man could ill contrive to support
himself, but he took up the additional burden uncomplainingly, and it soon
became welcome and precious to him. Little Nello--which was but a pet
diminutive for Nicolas--throve with him, and the old man and the
little child lived in the poor little hut contentedly.
It was a very humble little mud-hut indeed, but it was clean and
white as a sea-shell, and stood in a small plot of
garden-ground that yielded beans and herbs and pumpkins.
They were very poor, terribly poor--many a day they had nothing at
all to eat. They never by any chance had enough: to have had enough
to eat would have been to have reached paradise at once. But the old man
was very gentle and good to the boy, and the boy was a beautiful, innocent,
truthful, tender-hearted creature; and they were happy on a crust
and a few leaves of cabbage, and asked no more of earth or heaven; save
indeed that Patrasche should be always with them, since without Patrasche
where would they have been?
For Patrasche was their alpha and omega; their treasury and granary;
their store of gold and wand of wealth; their bread-winner and
minister; their only friend and comforter. Patrasche dead or gone from
them, they must have laid themselves down and died likewise. Patrasche was
body, brains, hands, head, and feet to both of them: Patrasche was
their very life, their very soul.
For Jehan Daas was old and a cripple, and Nello was but a child; and
Patrasche was their dog.
A dog of Flanders--yellow of hide, large of head and limb, with
wolf-like ears that stood erect, and legs bowed and feet widened in
the muscular development wrought in his breed by many generations of hard
service, Patrasche came of a race which had toiled hard
and cruelly from sire to son in Flanders many a century--slaves of slaves, dogs of the people, beasts of the shafts and the harness, creatures that lived straining their sinews in the gall of the cart, and died breaking their hearts on the flints of the streets.
Patrasche had been born of parents who had labored hard all their days
over the sharp-set stones of the various cities and the long,
shadowless, weary roads of the two Flanders and of Brabant. He had been
born to no other heritage than those of pain and of toil. He had been fed
on curses and baptized with blows. Why not? It was a Christian country, and
Patrasche was but a dog.
Before he was fully grown he had known the bitter gall of the cart and
the collar. Before he had entered his thirteenth month he had become the
property of a hardware-dealer, who was accustomed to wander over the
land north and south, from the blue sea to the green mountains. They sold
him for a small price, because he was so young.
This man was a drunkard and a brute. The life of Patrasche was a life of
hell.
His purchaser was a sullen, ill-living, brutal Brabantois, who
heaped his cart full with pots and pans and flagons and buckets, and other
wares of crockery
and brass and tin, and left Patrasche to draw the load as best he might, whilst he himself lounged idly by the side in fat and sluggish ease, smoking his black pipe and stopping at every wineshop or café on the road.
Happily for Patrasche--or unhappily--he was very strong:
he came of an iron race, long born and bred to such cruel travail; so that
he did not die, but managed to drag on a wretched existence under the
brutal burdens, the scarifying lashes, the hunger, the thirst, the blows,
the curses, and the exhaustion which are the only wages with which the
Flemings repay the most patient and laborious of all their fourfooted
victims.
One day, after two years of this long and deadly agony, Patrasche
was going on as usual along one of the straight, dusty, unlovely roads that
lead to the city of Rubens.
It was full midsummer, and very warm. His cart was very heavy, piled
high with goods in metal and in earthenware. His owner sauntered on without
noticing him otherwise than by the crack of the whip as it curled round his
quivering loins.
The Brabantois had paused to drink beer himself at every wayside house,
but he had forbidden Patrasche to stop a moment for a draught from the
canal. Going
along thus, in the full sun, on a scorching highway, having eaten nothing for twenty-four hours, and, which was far worse to him, not having tasted water for near twelve, being blind with dust, sore with blows, and stupefied with the merciless weight which dragged upon his loins, Patrasche staggered and foamed a little at the mouth, and fell.
He fell in the middle of the white, dusty road, in the full glare of the
sun; he was sick unto death, and motionless. His master gave him the only
medicine in his pharmacy--kicks and oaths and blows with a cudgel of
oak, which had been often the only food and drink, the only wage and
reward, ever offered to him.
But Patrasche was beyond the reach of any torture or of any curses.
Patrasche lay, dead to all appearances, down in the white powder of the
summer dust.
After a while, finding it useless to assail his ribs with punishment and
his ears with maledictions, the Brabantois--deeming life gone in him,
or going so nearly that his carcass was forever useless, unless indeed some
one should strip it of the skin for gloves--cursed him fiercely in
farewell, struck off the leathern bands of the harness, kicked his body
aside into the grass, and, groaning and muttering in
savage wrath, pushed the cart lazily along the road up hill, and left the dying dog for the ants to sting and for the crows to pick.
It was the last day before Kermesse away at Louvain, and the Brabantois
was in haste to reach the fair, and get a good place for his truck of brass
wares.
He was in fierce wrath, because Patrasche had been a strong and
much-enduring animal, and because he himself had now the hard task
of pushing his charette all the way to Louvain. But to stay to look after
Patrasche never entered his thoughts: the beast was dying and
useless, and he would steal, to replace him, the first large dog that he
found wandering alone out of sight of its master. Patrasche had cost him
nothing, or next to nothing, and for two long, cruel years had made him
toil ceaselessly in his service from sunrise to sunset, through summer and
winter, in fair weather and foul.
He had got a fair use and a good profit out of Patrasche: being
human, he was wise, and left the dog to draw his last breath alone in the
ditch, and have his bloodshot eyes plucked out as they might be by the
birds, whilst he himself went on his way to beg and to steal, to eat and to
drink, to dance and to sing, in the mirth at Louvain. A dying dog, a dog of
the
cart -- why should he waste hours over its agonies at peril of losing a handful of copper coins, at peril of a shout of laughter.
Patrasche lay there, flung in the grass-green ditch.
It was a busy road that day, and hundreds of people, on foot and on
mules, in wagons or in carts, went by, tramping quickly and joyously on to
Louvain. Some saw him, most did not even look: all passed on. A dead
dog more or less--it was nothing in Brabant: it would be nothing
anywhere in the world.
After a time, among the holiday-makers, there came a little old
man who was bent and lame, and very feeble. He was in no guise for
feasting: he was very poorly and miserably clad, and he dragged his
silent way slowly through the dust among the pleasure-seekers.
He looked at Patrasche, paused, wondered, turned aside, then kneeled
down in the rank grass and weeds of the ditch, and surveyed the dog with
kindly eyes of pity.
There was with him a little rosy, fair-haired, dark-eyed
child of a few years old, who pattered in amidst the bushes, that were for
him breast-high, and stood gazing with a pretty seriousness upon the
poor, great, quiet beast.
Thus it was that these two first met--the little Nello and the big
Patrasche.
The upshot of that day was, that old Jehan Daas, with much laborious
effort, drew the sufferer homeward to his own little hut, which was a
stone's throw off amidst the fields, and there tended him with so
much care that the sickness, which had been a brain seizure, brought on by
heat and thirst and exhaustion, with time and shade and rest passed away,
and health and strength returned, and Patrasche staggered up again upon his
four stout, tawny legs.
Now for many weeks he had been useless, powerless, sore, near to death;
but all this time he had heard no rough word, had felt no harsh touch, but
only the pitying murmurs of the child's voice and the soothing caress
of the old man's hand.
In his sickness they too had grown to care for him, this lonely man and
the little happy child.
He had a corner of the hut, with a heap of dry grass for his bed; and
they had learned to listen eagerly for his breathing in the dark night, to
tell them that he lived; and when he first was well enough to essay a loud,
hollow, broken bay, they laughed aloud, and almost wept together for joy at
such a sign of his sure restoration; and little Nello, in delighted glee,
hung round his rugged neck with chains of
marguerites, and kissed him with fresh and ruddy lips.
So then, when Patrasche arose, himself again, strong, big, gaunt,
powerful, his great wistful eyes had a gentle astonishment in them that
there were no curses to rouse him and no blows to drive him; and his heart
awakened to a mighty love, which never wavered once in its fidelity whilst
life abode with him.
But Patrasche, being a dog, was grateful. Patrasche lay pondering long
with grave, tender, musing brown eyes, watching the movements of his
friends.
Now, the old soldier, Jehan Daas, could do nothing for his living but
limp about a little with a small cart, with which he carried daily the
milk- cans of those happier neighbors who owned cattle away into the
town of Antwerp.
The villagers gave him the employment a little out of charity--more
because it suited them well to send their milk into the town by so honest a
carrier, and bide at home themselves to look after their gardens, their
cows, their poultry, or their little fields. But it was becoming hard work
for the old man. He was eighty-three, and Antwerp was a good league
off, or more.
Patrasche watched the milk-cans come and go that
one day when he had got well and was lying in the sun with the wreath of marguerites round his tawny neck.
The next morning, Patrasche, before the old man had touched the cart,
arose and walked to it and placed himself betwixt its handles, and
testified, as plainly as dumb show could do, his desire and his ability to
work in return for the bread of charity that he had eaten. Jehan Daas
resisted long, for the old man was one of those who thought it a foul shame
to bind dogs to labour for which Nature never formed them.
But Patrasche would not be gainsaid: finding they did not harness
him, he tried to draw the cart onward with his teeth.
At length Jehan Daas gave way, vanquished by the persistence and the
gratitude of this creature whom he had succoured. He fashioned his cart so
that Patrasche could run in it, and this he did every morning of his life
thenceforward.
When the winter came, Jehan Daas thanked the blessed fortune that had
brought him to the dying dog in the ditch that fair-day of Louvain;
for he was very old, and he grew feebler with each year, and he would ill
have known how to pull his load of milk-cans over the snows and
through the deep ruts in the mud if it
had not been for the strength and the industry of the animal he had befriended.
As for Patrasche, it seemed heaven to him.
After the frightful burdens that his old master had compelled him to
strain under, at the call of the whip at every step, it seemed nothing to
him but amusement to step out with this little light green cart, with its
bright brass cans, by the side of the gentle old man who always paid him
with a tender caress and with a kindly word. Besides, his work was over by
three or four in the day; and after that time he was free to do as he
would--to stretch himself, to sleep in the sun, to wander in the
fields, to romp with the young child, or to play with his
fellow-dogs. Patrasche was very happy.
Fortunately for his peace, his former owner was killed in a drunken
brawl at the kermesse of Mechlin, and so sought not after him nor disturbed
him in his new and well-loved home.
A few years later, old Jehan Daas, who had always been a cripple, became
so paralyzed with rheumatism that it was impossible for him to go out with
the cart any more.
Then little Nello, being now grown to his sixth year of age, and knowing
the town well from having accompanied his grandfather so many times, took
his place beside
the cart, and sold the milk and received the coins in exchange, and brought them back to their respective owners with a pretty grace and seriousness which charmed all who beheld him.
The little Ardennois was a beautiful child, with dark, grave, tender
eyes, and a lovely bloom upon his face, and fair locks that clustered to
his throat; and many an artist sketched the group as it went by
him--the green cart with the brass flagons of milk, and the great
tawny-coloured, massive dog, with his belled harness that chimed
cheerily as he went, and the small figure that ran beside him, which had
little white feet in great wooden shoes, and a soft, grave, innocent, happy
face like the little fair children of Rubens.
Nello and Patrasche did the work so well and so joyfully together that
Jehan Daas himself, when the summer came and he was better again, had no
need to stir out, but could sit in the doorway in the sun and see them go
forth through the garden wicket, and then doze, and dream, and pray a
little, and then awake again as the clock tolled three and watch for their
return. And on their return Patrasche would shake himself free of his
harness with a bay of glee, and Nello would recount with pride the doings
of the day; and they would all go in together to their meal of rye bread
and milk or soup, and would see the shadows
lengthen over the great plain, and see the twilight veil the fair cathedral spire; and then lie down together to sleep peacefully while the old man said a prayer.
So the days and the years went on, and the lives of Nello and Patrasche
were happy, innocent, and healthful.
Corn and colza, pasture and plough, succeed each other on the
characterless plain in wearying repetition, and save by some gaunt gray
tower, with its peal of pathetic bells, or some figure coming athwart the
fields, made picturesque by a gleaner's bundle or a woodman's
faggot, there is no change, no variety, no beauty anywhere; and he who has
dwelt upon the mountains or amidst the forests feels oppressed as by
imprisonment with the tedium and the endlessness of that vast and dreary
level.
But it is green and very fertile, and it has wide horizons that have
a certain charm of their own even
in their dulness and monotony; and among the rushes by the water-side the flowers grow, and the trees rise tall and fresh where the barges glide with their great hulks black against the sun, and their little green barrels and vari-colored flags gay against the leaves.
Anyway, there is greenery and breadth of space enough to be as good as
beauty to a child and a dog; and these two asked no better, when their work
was done, than to lie buried in the lush grasses on the side of the canal,
and watch the cumbrous vessels drifting by, and bringing the crisp salt
smell of the sea among the blossoming scents of the country
summer.
True, in the winter it was harder, and they had to rise in the darkness
and the bitter cold, and they had seldom as much as they could have eaten
any day, and the hut was scarce better than a shed when the nights were
cold, although it looked so pretty in warm weather, buried in a great
kindly-clambering vine, that never bore fruit, indeed, but which
covered it with luxuriant green tracery all through the months of blossom
and harvest.
In winter the winds found many holes in the walls of the poor little
hut, and the vine was black and leafless, and the bare lands looked very
bleak and drear without, and sometimes within the floor was flooded
and then frozen. In winter it was hard, and the snow
numbed the little white limbs of Nello, and the icicles cut the brave, untiring feet of Patrasche.
But even then they were never heard to lament, either of them. The
child's wooden shoes and the dog's four legs would trot
manfully together over the frozen fields to the chime of the bells on the
harness; and then sometimes, in the streets of Antwerp, some housewife
would bring them a bowl of soup and a handful of bread, or some kindly
trader would throw some billets of fuel into the little cart as it went
homeward, or some woman in their own village would bid them keep a share of
the milk they carried for their own food; and they would run over the white
lands, through the early darkness, bright and happy, and burst with a shout
of joy into their home.
So, on the whole, it was well with them, very well; and Patrasche,
meeting on the highway or in the public streets the many dogs who toiled
from daybreak into nightfall, paid only with blows and curses, and loosened
from the shafts with a kick to starve and freeze as best they
might--Patrasche in his heart was very grateful to his fate, and
thought it the fairest and the kindliest the world could hold. Though he
was often very hungry indeed when he lay down at night; though he had to
work in the heats of summer noons and the rasping chills of winter dawns;
though his
feet were often tender with wounds from the sharp edges of the jagged pavement; though he had to perform tasks beyond his strength and against his nature--yet he was grateful and content: he did his duty with each day, and the eyes that he loved smiled down on him. It was sufficient for Patrasche.
There was only one thing which caused Patrasche any uneasiness
in his life, and it was this. Antwerp, as all the world knows, is full at
every turn of old piles of stones, dark and ancient, and majestic, standing
in crooked courts, jammed against gateways and taverns, rising by the
water's edge, with bells ringing above them in the air, and ever and
again out of their arched doors a swell of music pealing.
There they remain, the grand old sanctuaries of the past, shut in amidst
the squalor,
the hurry, the crowds, the unloveliness, and the commerce of the modern
world, and all day long the clouds drift and the birds circle and the winds
sigh around them, and beneath the earth at their feet there
sleeps--RUBENS.
And the greatness of the mighty Master still rests upon Antwerp, and
wherever we turn in its narrow streets his glory lies therein, so that all
mean things are thereby transfigured; and as we pace slowly through the
winding ways, and by the edge of the stagnant water, and through the
noisome courts, his spirit abides
with us, and the heroic beauty of his visions is about us, and the stones that once felt his footsteps and bore his shadow seem to arise and speak of him with living voices. For the city which is the tomb of Rubens still lives to us through him, and him alone.
Without Rubens, what were Antwerp? A dirty, dusky, bustling mart, which
no man would ever care to look upon save the traders who do business on its
wharves. With Rubens, to the whole world of men it is a sacred name, a
sacred soil, a Bethlehem, where a god of Art saw light, a Golgotha, where a
god of Art lies dead.
It is so quiet there by that great white sepulchre--so quiet, save
only when the organ peals and, the choir cries aloud the Salve Regina or
the Kyrie Eleison. Sure no artist ever had a greater gravestone than that
pure marble sanctuary gives to him in the heart of his birth-place
in the chancel of St. Jacques?
O nations! closely should you treasure your great men, for by them alone
will the future know of you. Flanders in her generations has been wise. In
his life she glorified this greatest of her sons, and in his death she
magnifies his name. But her wisdom is very rare.
Now, the trouble of Patrasche was this.
Into these great, sad piles of stones, that reared
their melancholy majesty above the crowded roofs, the child Nello would many and many a time enter, and disappear through their dark arched portals, whilst Patrasche, left without upon the pavement, would wearily and vainly ponder on what could be the charm which thus allured from him his inseparable and beloved companion.
Once or twice he did essay to see for himself, clattering up the steps
with his milk-cart behind him; but thereon he had been always sent
back again summarily by a tall custodian in black clothes and silver chains
of office; and fearful of bringing his little master into trouble, he
desisted, and remained couched patiently before the churches until such
time as the boy reappeared.
It was not the fact of his going into them which disturbed
Patrasche: he knew that people went to church: all the village
went to the small, tumbledown, gray pile opposite the red windmill. What
troubled him was that little Nello always looked strangely when he came
out, always very flushed or very pale; and whenever he returned home after
such visitations would sit silent and dreaming, not caring to play, but
gazing out at the evening skies beyond the line of the canal, very subdued
and almost sad.
What was it? wondered Patrasche.
He thought it could not be good or natural for the little lad to be so
grave, and in his dumb fashion he tried all he could to keep Nello by him
in the sunny fields or in the busy market-place.
But to the churches Nello would not go: most often of
all would he go to the great cathedral; and Patrasche, left without on the
stones by the iron fragments of Quentin Matsys's gate, would stretch
himself and yawn and sigh, and even howl now and then, all in vain, until
the doors closed and the child perforce came forth again, and winding his
arms about the dog's neck would kiss him on his broad,
tawney-colored forehead, and murmur always the same words:
"If I could only see them, Patrasche!--if I could only see
them!"
What were they? pondered Patrasche, looking up with large, wistful,
sympathetic eyes.
One day, when the custodian was out of the way and the doors left ajar,
he got in for a moment after his little friend and saw. "They"
were two great covered pictures on either side of the choir.
Nello was kneeling, wrapt as in an ecstasy, before the
altar-picture of the Assumption, and when he noticed Patrasche, and
rose and drew the dog gently out into the air, his face was wet with tears,
and he
looked up at the veiled places as he passed them, and murmured to his companion, "It is so terrible not to see them, Patrasche, just because one is poor and cannot pay! He never meant that the poor should not see them when he painted them, I am sure. He would have had us see them any day,--every day: that I am sure. And they keep them shrouded there--shrouded in the dark, the beautiful things!--and they never feel the light, and no eyes look on them, unless rich people come and pay. If I could only see them, I would be content to die."
But he could not see them, and Patrasche could not help him, for to gain
the silver piece that the church exacts as the price for looking on the
glories of the "Elevation of the Cross" and the "Descent
of the Cross" was a thing as utterly beyond the powers of either of
them as it would have been to scale the heights of the
cathedral-spire.
They had never so much as a sou to spare: if they cleared enough
to get a little wood for the stove, a little broth for the pot, it was the
utmost they could do. And yet the heart of the child was set in sore and
endless longing upon beholding the greatness of the two veiled Rubens.
The whole soul of the little Ardennois thrilled and stirred
with an absorbing passion for art.
Going on his ways through the old city in the early days before the sun
or the people had seen them, Nello, who looked only a little
peasant-boy, with a great dog drawing milk to sell from door to
door, was in a heaven of dreams whereof Rubens was the god. Nello, cold and
hungry, with stockingless feet in wooden shoes, and the winter winds
blowing among his curls and lifting his poor thin garments, was in a
rapture of meditation, wherein all that he saw was the beautiful fair face
of the Mary of "The Assumption," with the waves of her golden
hair lying upon her shoulders, and the light of an eternal sun shining down
upon her brow. Nello, reared in poverty, and buffeted by fortune, and
untaught in letters, and unheeded by men, had the compensation or the curse
which is called Genius.
No one knew it. He as little as any. No one knew it.
Only indeed Patrasche, who, being with him always, saw him draw with
chalk upon the stones any and every thing that grew or
breathed,--heard him on his little bed of hay murmur all manner of
timid, pathetic prayers to the spirit of the great Master; watched his gaze
darken and his face radiate at the evening glow of sunset or the rosy
rising of the dawn; and felt many and many a time the tears of a strange,
name-
less pain and joy, mingled together, fall hotly from the bright young eyes upon his own wrinkled yellow forehead.
"I should go to my grave quite content if I thought, Nello, that
when thou growest a man thou could'st own this hut and the little
plot of ground, and labour for thyself, and be called Baas by thy
neighbours," said the old man Jehan many an hour from his bed.
For to own a bit of soil, and to be called Baas--master--by
the hamlet round, is to have achieved the highest ideal of a Flemish
peasant; and the old soldier, who had wandered over all the earth in his
youth, and had brought nothing back, deemed in his old age that to live and
die on one spot in contented humility was the fairest fate he could desire
for his darling.
But Nello said nothing.
The same leaven was working in him that in other times begat Rubens, and
Jordaens, and the Van Eycks, and all their wondrous tribe, and in times
more recent begat--in the green country of the Ardennes, where the
Meuse washes the old walls of Dijon--the great artist of the
Patroclus, whose genius is too near us for us aright to measure its
divinity.
Nello dreamed of other things in the future than of tilling the little
rood of earth, and living under the
wattle roof, and being called Baas by neighbours a little poorer or a little less poor than himself. The cathedral spire, where it rose beyond the fields in the ruddy evening skies or in the dim, gray, misty mornings, said other things to him than this. But these he told only to Patrasche, whispering, childlike, his fancies in the dog's ear when they went together at their work through the fogs of the daybreak, or lay together at their rest among the rustling rushes by the water's side.
For such dreams are not easily shaped into speech to awake the slow
sympathies of human auditors; and they would only have sorely perplexed and
troubled the poor old man bedridden in his corner, who, for his part,
whenever he had trod the streets of Antwerp, had thought the daub of blue
and red that they called a Madonna, on the walls of the wine-shop
where he drank his sou's worth of black beer, quite as good as any of
the famous altar-pieces for which the stranger-folk traveled
far and wide into Flanders from every land on which the good sun shone.
There was only one other beside Patrasche to whom Nello could talk at
all of his daring fantasies. This other was little Alois, who lived at the
old red mill on the grassy mound, and whose father, the miller, was the
best-to-do husbandman in all the village.
Little Alois was only a pretty baby with soft round,
rosy features, made lovely by those sweet dark eyes that the Spanish rule has left in so many a Flemish face, in testimony of the Alvan dominion, as Spanish art has left broadsown throughout the country, majestic palaces and stately courts, gilded house-fronts and sculptured lintels--histories in blazonry and poems in stone.
Little Alois was often with Nello and Patrasche. They played in the
fields, they ran in the snow, they gathered the daisies and bilberries,
they went up to the old gray church together, and they often sat together
by the broad wood-fire in the mill-house.
Little Alois, indeed, was the, richest child in the hamlet. She had
neither brother nor sister; her blue serge dress had never a hole in it; at
kermesse she had as many gilded nuts and Agni Dei in sugar as her hands
could hold; and when she went up for her first communion, her flaxen curls
were covered with a cap of richest Mechlin lace, which had been her
mother's and her grandmother's before it came to her. Men spoke
already, though she had but twelve years, of the good wife she would be for
their sons to woo and win; but she herself was a little, gay, simple child,
in nowise conscious of her heritage, and she loved no playfellows so well
as Jehan Daas' grandson, and his dog.
One day her father, Baas Cogez, a good man, but
somewhat stern, came on a pretty group in the long meadow behind the mill, where the aftermath had that day been cut.
It was his little daughter sitting amidst the hay, with the great tawny
head of Patrasche on her lap, and many wreaths of poppies and blue
cornflowers round them both: on a clean smooth slab of pine wood the
boy Nello drew their likeness with a stick of charcoal.
The miller stood and looked at the portrait with tears in his eyes, it
was so strangely like, and he loved his only child closely and well. Then
he roughly chid the little girl for idling there whilst her mother needed
her within, and sent her indoors crying and afraid: then, turning, he
snatched the wood from Nello's hands.
"Dost do much of such folly?" he asked, but there was a
tremble in his voice.
Nello coloured and hung his head. "I draw everything I see,"
he murmured.
The miller was silent: then he stretched his hand out with a franc
in it.
"It is folly, as I say, and evil waste of time:
nevertheless, it is like Alois, and will please the house-mother.
Take this silver bit for it, and leave it for me."
The colour died out of the face of the young Arden-
nois; he lifted his head and put his hands behind his back.
"Keep your money and the portrait both, Baas Cogez," he
said, simply. "You have been often good to me."
Then he called Patrasche to him, and walked away across the fields.
"I could have seen them with that franc," he
murmured to Patrasche, "but I could not sell her picture--not
even for them."
Baas Cogez went into his mill-house sore troubled in his
mind.
"That lad must not be so much with Alois," he said to his
wife that night. "Trouble may come of it hereafter: he is
fifteen now, and she is twelve; and the boy is comely of face and
form."
"And he is a good lad and a loyal," said the housewife,
feasting her eyes on the piece of pine wood where it was throned above the
chimney with a cuckoo clock in oak and a Calvary in wax.
"Yea, I do not gainsay that," said the miller, draining his
pewter flagon.
"Then, if what you think of were ever to come to pass," said
the wife, hesitatingly, "would it matter so much? She will have
enough for both, and one cannot be better than happy."
"You are a woman, and therefore a fool," said the miller,
harshly, striking his pipe on the table. "The lad is nought but a
beggar, and, with these painter's fancies, worse than a beggar. Have
a care that they are not together in the future, or I will send the child
to the surer keeping of the nuns of the Sacred Heart."
The poor mother was terrified, and promised humbly to do his will. Not
that she could bring herself altogether to separate the child from her
favorite playmate, nor did the miller even desire that extreme of cruelty
to a young lad who was guilty of nothing except poverty. But there were
many ways in which little Alois was kept away from her chosen companion;
and Nello, being a boy, proud and quiet and sensitive, was quickly wounded,
and ceased to turn his own steps and those of Patrasche, as he had been
used to do with every moment of leisure, to the old red mill upon the
slope.
What his offence was he did not know: he supposed he had in some
manner angered Baas Cogez by taking the portrait of Alois in the meadow;
and when the child who loved him would run to him and nestle her hand in
his, he would smile at her very sadly and say with a tender concern for her
before himself,--
"Nay, Alois, do not anger your father. He thinks
that I make you idle, dear, and he is not pleased that you should be with me. He is a good man and loves you well: we will not anger him, Alois."
But it was with a sad heart that he said it, and the earth did not look
so bright to him as it had used to do when he went out at sunrise under the
poplars down the straight roads with Patrasche.
The old red mill had been a landmark to him, and he had been used to
pause by it, going and coming, for a cheery greeting with its people as her
little flaxen head rose above the low mill-wicket, and her little
rosy hands had held out a bone or a crust to Patrasche.
Now the dog looked wistfully at a closed door, and the boy went on
without pausing, with a pang at his heart, and the child sat within with
tears dropping slowly on the knitting to which she was set on her little
stool by the stove; and Baas Cogez, working among his sacks and his
mill-gear, would harden his will, and say to himself, "It is
best so. The lad is all but a beggar, and full of idle, dreaming fooleries.
Who knows what mischief might not come of it in the future?"
So he was wise in his generation, and would not have the door unbarred,
except upon rare and formal occasions, which seemed to have neither warmth
nor
mirth in them to the two children, who had been accustomed so long to a daily, gleeful, careless, happy interchange of greeting, speech, and pastime, with no other watcher of their sports or auditor of their fancies than Patrasche, sagely shaking the brazen bells of his collar and responding with all a dog's swift sympathies to their every change of mood.
All this while the little panel of pine wood remained over the chimney
in the mill-kitchen with the cuckoo clock and the waxen Calvary, and
sometimes it seemed to Nello a little hard that whilst his gift was
accepted he himself should be denied.
But he did not complain: it was his habit to be quiet: old
Jehan Daas had said ever to him, "We are poor: we must take
what God sends--the ill with the good: the poor cannot
choose."
To which the boy had always listened in silence, being reverent of his
old grandfather; but nevertheless a certain vague, sweet hope, such as
beguiles the children of genius, had whispered in his heart, "Yet the
poor do choose sometimes--choose to be great, so that men cannot say
them nay."
And he thought so still in his innocence; and one day, when the little
Alois, finding him by chance alone among the corn-fields by the
canal, ran to him and held him close, and sobbed piteously because the
mor-
row would be her saint's day;,and for the first time in all her life her parents had failed to bid him to the little supper and romp in the great barns with which her feast-day was always celebrated, Nello had kissed her and murmured to her in firm faith,--
"It shall be different one day, Alois. One day that little bit of
pine wood that your father has of mine shall be worth its weight in silver;
and he will not shut the door against me then. Only love me always, dear
little Alois; only love me always, and I will be great."
"And if I do not love you?" the pretty child asked, pouting
a little through her tears, and moved by the instinctive coquetries of her
sex.
Nello's eyes left her face and wandered to the distance, where in
the red-and-gold of the Flemish night the cathedral spire
rose.
There was a smile on his face so sweet and yet so sad that little Alois
was awed by it.
"I will be great still," he said under his
breath--"great still, or die, Alois."
"You do not love me then!" said the little spoilt child,
pushing him away; but the boy shook his head and smiled, and went on his
way through the tall yellow corn, seeing as in a vision some day in a fair
future when he should come into that old familiar land and
ask Alois of her people, and be not refused or denied, but received in honor, whilst the village folk should throng to look upon him and say in one another's ears, "Dost see him? He is a king among men, for he is a great artist and the world speaks his name; and yet he was only our poor little Nello, who was a beggar, as one may say, and only got his bread by the help of his dog."
And he thought how he would fold his grandsire in furs and purples, and
pourtray him as the old man is pourtrayed in the Family in the chapel of
St. Jacques; and of how he would hang the throat of Patrasche with a collar
of gold, and place him on his right hand, and say to the people,
"This was once my only friend;" and of how he would build
himself a great white marble palace, and make to himself luxuriant gardens
of pleasure, on the slope looking outward to where the cathedral spire
rose, and not dwell in it himself; but summon to it, as to a home, all men
young and poor and friendless, but of the will to do mighty things; and of
how he would say to them always, if they sought to bless his name,
"Nay, do not thank me--thank Rubens. Without him, what should I
have been?"
And these dreams, beautiful, impossible, innocent, free of all
selfishness, full of heroical worship, were so
closely about him as he went that he was happy--happy even on this sad anniversary of Alois' saint's day, when he and Patrasche went home by themselves to the little dark hut and the meal of black bread, whilst in the mill-house all the children of the village sang and laughed, and ate the big round cakes of Dijon and the almond gingerbread of Brabant, and danced in the great barn to the light of the stars and the music of flute and fiddle.
"Never mind, Patrasche," he said, with his arms round the
dog's neck, as they both sat in the door of the hut, where the sounds
of the mirth at the mill came down to them on the night
air--"never mind. It shall all be changed by and by."
He believed in the future: Patrasche, of more experience and of
more philosophy, thought that the loss of the mill supper in the present
was ill compensated by dreams of milk and honey in some vague
hereafter.
And Patrasche growled whenever he passed by Baas Cogez.
"THIS is Alois's name-day, is it not?"
said the old man Daas that night from the corner where he was stretched
upon his bed of sacking.
The boy gave a gesture of assent: he wished that the old
man's memory had erred a little, instead of keeping such exact
account.
"And why not there?" his grandfather pursued. "Thou
hast never missed a year before, Nello."
"Thou art too sick to leave," murmured the lad, bending his
handsome young head over the bed.
"Tut! tut! Mother Vulette would have come and sat with me, as she
does scores of times. What is the cause, Nello?" the old man
persisted. "Thou surely hast not had ill words with the little
one?"
"Nay; grandfather--never," said the boy quickly, with a
hot colour in his bent face. "Simply and truly, Baas Cogez did not
have me asked this year. He has taken some whim against me."
"But thou hast done nothing wrong?"
"That I know--nothing. I took the portrait of Alois on a
piece of pine: that is all."
"Ah!"
The old man was silent: the truth suggested itself to him with the
boy's innocent answer. He was tied to a bed of dried leaves in the
corner of a wattle hut, but he had not wholly forgotten what the ways of
the world were like.
He drew Nello's fair head fondly to his breast with a tenderer
gesture.
"Thou art very poor, my child," he said with a quiver the
more in his aged, trembling voice--"so poor! It is very hard for
thee."
"Nay, I am rich," murmured Nello; and in his innocence he
thought so--rich with the imperishable powers that are mightier than
the might of kings. And he went and stood by the door of the hut in the
quiet autumn night, and watched the stars troop by and the tall poplars
bend and shiver in the wind.
All the casements of the mill-house were lighted, and every now
and then the notes of the flute came to him. The tears fell down his
cheeks, for he was but a child, yet he smiled, for he said to himself,
"In the future!"
He stayed there until all was quite still and dark, then he and
Patrasche went within and slept together, long and deeply, side by
side.
Now he had a secret which only Patrasche knew.
There was a little out- house to the hut, which no one entered but himself--a dreary place, but with abundant clear light from the north. Here he had fashioned himself rudely an easel in rough lumber, and here on a great gray sea of stretched paper he had given shape to one of the innumerable fancies which possessed his brain.
No one had ever taught him anything; colours he had no means to buy; he
had gone without bread many a time to procure even the few rude vehicles
that he had here; and it was only in black or white that he could fashion
the things he saw. This great figure which he had drawn here in chalk was
only an old man sitting on a fallen tree--only that. He had seen old
Michel the woodman sitting so at evening many a time.
He had never had a soul to tell him of outline or perspective, of
anatomy or of shadow, and yet he had given all the weary, worn-out
age, all the sad, quiet patience, all the rugged, careworn pathos of his
original, and given them so that the old lonely figure was a poem, sitting
there, meditative and alone, on the dead tree, with the darkness of the
descending night behind him.
It was rude, of course, in a way, and had many faults, no doubt; and yet
it was real, true in Nature
true in art, and very mournful, and in a manner beautiful.
Patrasche had lain quiet countless hours watching its gradual creation
after the labour of each day was done, and he knew that Nello had a
hope--vain and wild perhaps, but strongly cherished--of sending
this great drawing to compete for a prize of two hundred francs a year
which it was announced in Antwerp would be open to every lad of talent,
scholar or peasant, under eighteen, who would attempt to win it with some
unaided work of chalk or pencil. Three of the foremost artists in the town
of Rubens were to be the judges and elect the victor according to his
merits.
All the spring and summer and autumn Nello had been at work upon this
treasure, which, if triumphant, would build him his first step toward
independence and the mysteries of the art which he blindly, ignorantly, and
yet passionately adored.
He said nothing to any one: his grandfather would not have
understood, and little Alois was lost to him. Only to Patrasche he told
all, and whispered, "Rubens would give it me, I think, if he
knew."
Patrasche thought so too, for he knew that Rubens had loved dogs or he
had never painted them with such exquisite fidelity; and men who loved dogs
were, as Patrasche knew, always pitiful.
The drawings were to go in on the first day of December, and the
decision be given on the twenty-fourth, so that he who should win
might rejoice with all his people at the Christmas season.
In the twilight of a bitter wintry day, and with a beating heart, now
quick with hope, now faint with fear, Nello placed the great picture on his
little green milk-cart, and took it, with the help of Patrasche,
into the town, and there left it, as enjoined, at the doors of a public
building.
"Perhaps it is worth nothing at all. How can I tell?" he
thought, with the heart-sickness of a great timidity.
Now that he had left it there, it seemed to him so hazardous, so vain,
so foolish, to dream that he, a little lad with bare feet, who barely knew
his letters, could do anything at which great painters, real artists, could
ever deign to look.
Yet he took heart as he went by the cathedral: the lordly form of
Rubens seemed to rise from the fog and the darkness, and to loom in its
magnificence before him, whilst the lips, with their kindly smile, seemed
to him to murmur, "Nay, have courage! It was not by a weak heart and
by faint fears that I wrote my name for all time upon Antwerp."
Nello ran home through the cold night, comforted.
He had done his best: the rest must be as God willed, he thought, in that innocent, unquestioning faith which had been taught him in the little gray chapel among the willows and the poplar-trees.
The winter was very sharp already. That night, after they reached the
hut, snow fell; and fell for very many days after that, so that the paths
and the divisions in the fields were all obliterated, and all the smaller
streams were frozen over, and the cold was intense upon the plains. Then,
indeed, it became hard work to go round for the milk, while the world was
all dark, and carry it through the darkness to the silent town.
Hard work, especially for Patrasche, for the passage of the years, that
were only bringing Nello a stronger youth, were bringing him old age, and
his joints were stiff, and his bones ached often. But he would never give
up his share of the labour. Nello would fain have spared him, and drawn the
cart himself, but Patrasche would not allow it. All he would ever permit or
accept was the help of a thrust from behind to the truck as it lumbered
along through the ice-ruts. Patrasche had lived in harness, and he
was proud of it. He suffered a great deal sometimes from frost, and the
terrible roads, and the rheumatic pains of his limbs, but he only drew his
breath hard and bent
his stout neck, and trod onward with steady patience.
"Rest thee at home, Patrasche--it is time thou didst
rest--and I can quite well push in the cart by myself," urged
Nello many a morning; but Patrasche, who understood him aright, would no
more have consented to stay at home than a veteran soldier to shirk when
the charge was sounding; and every day he would rise and place himself in
his shafts, and plod along over the snow through the fields that his four
round feet had left their print upon so many, many years.
"One must never rest till one dies," thought Patrasche; and
sometimes it seemed to him that that time of rest for him was not very far
off. His sight was less clear than it had been, and it gave him pain to
rise after the night's sleep, though he would never lie a moment in
his straw when once the bell of the chapel tolling five, let him know that
the daybreak of labour had begun.
"My poor Patrasche, we shall soon lie quiet together, you and
I," said old Jehan Daas, stretching out to stroke the head of
Patrasche with the old withered hand which had always shared with him its
one poor crust of bread; and the hearts of the old man and the old dog
ached together with one
thought: When they were gone, who would care for their darling ?
One afternoon, as they came back from Antwerp, over the snow, which had
become hard and smooth as marble over all the Flemish plains, they found
dropped in the road a pretty little puppet--a
tambourine-player, all scarlet and gold, about six inches high, and,
unlike greater personages when Fortune lets them drop, quite unspoiled and
unhurt by its fall. It was a pretty toy. Nello tried to find its owner,
and, failing, thought that it was just the thing to please Alois.
It was quite night when he passed the mill-house: he knew
the little window of her room. It could be no harm, he thought, if he gave
her his little piece of treasure-trove, they had been
play-fellows so long.
There was a shed with a sloping roof beneath her casement: he
climbed it and tapped softly at the lattice: there was a little light
within.
The child opened it and looked out half frightened.
Nello put the tambourine-player into her hands.
"Here is a doll I found in the snow, Alois. Take it," he
whispered--"take it, and God bless thee, dear!"
He slid down from the shed-roof before she had time to thank him,
and ran off through the darkness.
That night there was a fire at the mill. Out-buildings and much
corn were destroyed, although the mill itself and the dwelling-house
were unharmed. All the village was out in terror, and engines came tearing
through the snow from Antwerp. The miller was insured, and would lose
nothing: nevertheless, he was in furious wrath, and declared aloud
that the fire was due to no accident, but to some foul intent.
Nello, awakened from his sleep, ran to help with the rest: Baas
Cogez thrust him angrily aside.
"Thou wert loitering here after dark," he said roughly.
"I believe, on my soul, that thou dost know more of the fire than any
one."
Nello heard him in silence, stupefied, not supposing that any one could
say such things except in jest, and not comprehending how any one could
pass a jest at such a time.
Nevertheless, the miller said the brutal thing openly to many of his
neighbours in the day that followed; and though no serious charge was ever
preferred against the lad, it got bruited about that Nello had been seen in
the mill-yard after dark on some unspoken errand, and that he bore
Baas Cogez a grudge for forbidding his intercourse with little Alois; and
so the hamlet, which followed the sayings of its richest landowner
servilely, and whose families all hoped to
secure the riches of Alois in some future time for their sons, took the hint to give grave looks and cold words to old Jehan Daas's grandson.
No one said anything to him openly, but all the village agreed together
to humour the miller's prejudice, and at the cottages and farms where
Nello and Patrasche called every morning for the milk for Antwerp, downcast
glances and brief phrases replaced to them the broad smiles and cheerful
greetings to which they had been always used. No one really credited the
miller's absurd suspicion, nor the outrageous accusations born of
them, but the people were all very poor and very ignorant, and the one rich
man of the place had pronounced against him. Nello, in his innocence and
his friendlessness, had no strength to stem the popular tide.
"Thou art very cruel to the lad," the miller's wife
dared to say, weeping, to her lord. "Sure he is an innocent lad and a
faithful, and would never dream of any such wickedness, however sore his
heart might be."
But Baas Cogez being an obstinate man, having once said a thing, held to
it doggedly, though in his innermost soul he knew well the injustice that
he was committing.
Meanwhile, Nello endured the injury done against him with a certain
proud patience that disdained to
complain: he only gave way a little when he was quite alone with old Patrasche. Besides, he thought, "If my picture should win! They will be sorry then, perhaps."
Still, to a boy not quite sixteen, and who had dwelt in one little world
all his short life, and in his childhood had been caressed and applauded on
all sides, it was a hard trial to have the whole of that little world turn
against him for naught. Especially hard in that bleak, snow-bound,
famine-stricken winter-time, when the only light and warmth
there could be found abode beside the village hearths and in the kindly
greetings of neighbours. In the winter-time all drew nearer to each
other, all to all, except to Nello and Patrasche, with whom none now would
have anything to do, and who were left to fare as they might with the old
paralysed, bedridden man in the little cabin, whose fire was often low, and
whose board was often without bread, for there was a buyer from Antwerp who
had taken to drive his mule in of a day for the milk of the various
dairies, and there were only three or four of the people who had refused
his terms of purchase and remained faithful to the little green cart. So
that the burden which Patrasche drew had become very light, and the
centime-pieces in Nello's pouch had become, alas! very small
likewise.
The dog would stop, as usual, at all the familiar gates, which were now
closed to him, and look up at them with wistful, mute appeal; and it cost
the neighbours a pang to shut their doors and their hearts, and let
Patrasche draw his cart on again, empty. Nevertheless, they did it, for
they desired to please Baas Cogez.
Noël was close at hand.
The weather was very wild and cold. The snow was six feet deep, and the
ice was firm enough to bear oxen and men upon it everywhere. At this season
the little village was always gay and cheerful. At the poorest dwelling
there were possets and cakes, joking and dancing, sugared saints and gilded
Jésus. The merry Flemish bells jingled everywhere on the horses;
everywhere within doors some well-filled soup-pot sang and
smoked over the stove; and everywhere over the snow without laughing
maidens pattered in bright kerchiefs and stout kirtles, going to and from
the mass. Only in the little hut it was very dark and very cold.
Nello and Patrasche were left utterly alone, for one night in the week
before the Christmas Day, Death entered there, and took away from life
forever old Jehan Daas, who had never known life aught save its poverty and
its pains. He had long been half dead,
incapable of any movement except a feeble gesture, and powerless for anything beyond a gentle word; and yet his loss fell on them both with a great horror in it: they mourned him passionately. He had passed away from them in his sleep, and when in the gray dawn they learned their bereavement, unutterable solitude and desolation seemed to close around them. He had long been only a poor, feeble, paralyzed old man, who could not raise a hand in their defence, but he had loved them well: his smile had always welcomed their return. They mourned for him unceasingly, refusing to be comforted, as in the white winter day they followed the deal shell that held his body to the nameless grave by the little gray church. They were his only mourners, these two whom he had left friendless upon earth--the young boy and the old dog.
"Surely, he will relent now and let the poor lad come
hither?" thought the miller's wife, glancing at her husband
where he smoked by the hearth.
Baas Cogez knew her thought, but he hardened his heart, and would not
unbar his door as the little, humble funeral went by. "The boy is a
beggar," he said to himself: "he shall not be about
Alois."
The woman dared not say anything aloud, but when the grave was closed
and the mourners had gone, she put a wreath of immortelles into
Alois' hands and bade
her go and lay it reverently on the dark, unmarked mound where the snow was displaced.
Nello and Patrasche went home with broken hearts. But even of that poor,
melancholy, cheerless home they were denied the consolation. There was a
month's rent over-due for their little place, and when Nello
had paid the last sad service to the dead he had not a coin left. He went
and begged grace of the owner of the hut, a cobbler who went every Sunday
night to drink his pint of wine and smoke with Baas Cogez. The cobbler
would grant no mercy. He was a harsh, miserly man, and loved money. He
claimed in default of his rent every stick and stone, every pot and pan, in
the hut, and bade Nello and Patrasche be out of it on the morrow.
Now, the cabin was lowly enough, and in some sense miserable enough, and
yet their hearts clove to it with a great affection. They had been so happy
there, and in the summer, with its clambering vine and its flowering beans,
it was so pretty and bright in the midst of the sun-lighted fields!
There life in it had been full of labour and privation, and yet they had
been so well content, so gay of heart, running together to meet the old
man's never-failing smile of welcome!
All night long the boy and the dog sat by the fireless hearth in the
darkness, drawn close to-
gether for warmth and sorrow. Their bodies were insensible to the cold, but their hearts seemed frozen in them.
When the morning broke over the white chill earth it was the morning of
Christmas Eve. With a shudder, Nello clasped close to him his only friend,
while his tears fell hot and fast on the dog's frank forehead.
"Let us go, Patrasche--dear, dear Patrasche," he murmured.
"We will not wait to be kicked out: let us go."
Patrasche had no will but his, and they went sadly, side by side, out
from the little place which was so dear to them, and in which every humble,
homely thing was to them precious and beloved. Patrasche drooped his head
wearily as he passed by his own green cart: it was no longer
his--it had to go with the rest in the dues of debt, and his brass
harness lay idle and glittering on the snow. The dog could have lain down
beside it and died for very heart-sickness as he went, but whilst
the lad lived and needed him Patrasche would not yield and give way.
They took the old accustomed road into Antwerp. The day had yet scarce
more than dawned, most of the shutters were still closed, but some of the
villagers were about. They took no notice whilst the dog and the boy passed
by them. At one door Nello paused and
looked wistfully within: his grandfather had done many a kindly turn in neighbour's service to the people who dwelt there.
"Would you give Patrasche a crust?" he said, timidly.
"He is old, and he has had nothing since last forenoon."
The woman shut the door hastily, murmuring some vague saying that wheat
and rye were very dear that season. The boy and the dog went on again
wearily: they asked no more.
By slow and painful ways they reached Antwerp as the chimes tolled
ten.
"If I had anything about me I could sell to get him bread!"
thought Nello, but he had nothing except the wisp of linen and serge that
covered him, and his pair of wooden shoes.
Patrasche understood, and nestled his nose into the lad's hand, as
though to pray him not to be disquieted for any woe or want of his.
The winner of the drawing prize was to be proclaimed at noon, and to the
public building where he had left his treasure Nello made his way. On the
steps and in the entrance-hall there was a crowd of
youths--some of his age, some older, all with parents or relatives or
friends. His heart was sick with fear as he went among them, holding
Patrasche close to him. The great bells of the city clashed out the hour
of noon with brazen clamor. The doors of the inner hall were opened; the eager, panting throng rushed in: it was known that the selected picture would be raised above the rest upon a wooden dais.
A mist obscured Nello's sight, his head swam, his limbs almost
failed him. When his vision cleared he saw the drawing raised on
high: it was not his own! A slow, sonorous voice was proclaiming
aloud that victory had been adjudged to Stephen Kiesslinger, born in the
burgh of Antwerp, son of a wharfinger in that town.
When Nello recovered his consciousness he was lying on the stones
without, and Patrasche was trying with every art he knew to call him back
to life. In the distance a throng of the youths of Antwerp were shouting
around their successful comrade, and escorting him with acclamations to his
home upon the quay.
The boy staggered to his feet and drew the dog into his embrace.
"It is all over, dear Patrasche," he murmured--"all
over!"
He rallied himself as best he could, for he was weak from fasting, and
retraced his steps to the village. Patrasche paced by his side with his
head drooping and his old limbs feeble from hunger and sorrow.
The snow was falling fast: a keen hurricane blew
from the north: it was bitter as death on the plains. It took them long to traverse the familiar path, and the bells were sounding four of the clock as they approached the hamlet. Suddenly Patrasche paused, arrested by a scent in the snow, scratched, whined, and drew out with his teeth a small case of brown leather. He held it up to Nello in the darkness. Where they were there stood a little Calvary, and a lamp burned dully under the cross: the boy mechanically turned the case to the light: on it was the name of Baas Cogez, and within it were notes for six thousand francs.
The sight roused the lad a little from his stupor. He thrust it in his
shirt, and stroked Patrasche and drew him onward. The dog looked up
wistfully in his face.
Nello made straight for the mill-house, and went to the
house-door and struck on its panels. The miller's wife opened
it weeping, with little Alois clinging close to her skirts.
"Is it thee, thou poor lad?" she said kindly through her
tears. "Get thee gone ere the Baas see thee. We are in sore trouble
to-night. He is out seeking for a power of money that he has let
fall riding homeward, and in this snow he never will find it; and God knows
it will go nigh to ruin us. It
is Heaven's own judgment for the things we have done to thee."
Nello put the note-case in her hand and signed Patrasche within
the house.
"Patrasche found the money to-night," he said
quickly. "Tell Baas Cogez so: I think he will not deny the dog
shelter and food in his old age. Keep him from pursuing me, and I pray of
you to be good to him."
Ere either woman or dog knew what he meant he had stooped and kissed
Patrasche: then closed the door hurriedly on him, and disappeared in
the gloom of the fast-falling night.
The woman and the child stood speechless with joy and fear:
Patrasche vainly spent the fury of his anguish against the
iron-bound oak of the barred house-door. They did not dare
unbar the door and let him forth: they tried all they could to solace
him. They brought him sweet cakes and juicy meats; they tempted him with
the best they had; they tried to lure him to abide by the warmth of the
hearth; but it was of no avail. Patrasche refused to be comforted or to
stir from the barred portal.
It was six o'clock when, from an opposite entrance, the miller at
last came, jaded and broken, into his wife's presence. "It is
lost for ever," he said, with
an ashen cheek and a quiver in his stern voice. "We have looked with lanterns everywhere: it is gone--the little maiden's portion and all!"
His wife put the money into his hold, and told him how it had come back
to her. The strong man sank trembling into a seat and covered his face,
ashamed and almost afraid.
"I have been cruel to the lad," he muttered at length:
"I deserved not to have good at his hands."
Little Alois, taking courage, crept close to her father and nestled
against him her fair curly head.
"Nello may come here again, father?" she whispered.
"He may come to-morrow as he used to do?"
The miller pressed her in his arms: his hard, sun-burned
face was very pale and his mouth trembled. "Surely, surely," he
answered his child. "He shall bide here on Christmas Day, and any
other day he will. In my greed I sinned, and the Lord chastened me
gently: God helping me, I will make amends to the boy--I will
make amends."
Little Alois kissed him in gratitude and joy, then slid from his knees
and ran to where the dog kept watch by the door.
"And to-night I may feast Patrasche?" she cried in a
child's thoughtless glee.
Her father bent his head gravely: "Ay, ay: let the
dog have the best;" for the stern old man was moved and shaken to his heart's depths.
It was Christmas Eve, and the mill-house was filled with
oak-logs and squares of turf, with cream and honey, with meat and
bread, and the rafters were hung with wreaths of evergreen, and the Calvary
and the cuckoo-clock looked out from a red mass of holly. There were
little paper-lanterns, too, for Alois, and toys of various fashions
and sweetmeats in bright-pictured papers. There were light and
warmth and abundance everywhere, and the child would fain have made the dog
a guest honored and feasted.
But Patrasche would neither lie in the warmth nor share in the cheer.
Famished he was and very cold, but without Nello he would partake neither
of comfort nor food. Against all temptation he was proof, and close against
the door he leaned always, watching only for a means of escape.
"He wants the lad," said Baas Cogez. "Good dog! good
dog! I will go over to the lad the first thing at
day-dawn."
For no one but Patrasche knew that Nello had left the hut, and no one
but Patrasche divined that Nello had left him there, to to face starvation
and misery alone.
The mill-kitchen was very warm: great logs crackled
and flamed on the hearth; neighbours came in for a glass of wine and a slice of the fat goose baking for supper. Alois, gleeful and sure of her playmate back on the morrow, bounded and sang, and tossed back her yellow hair. Baas Cogez, in the fulness of his heart, smiled on her through moistened eyes, and spoke of the way in which he would befriend her favourite companion; the house- mother sat with calm contented face at the spinning-wheel; the cuckoo in the clock chirped mirthful hours. Amidst it all Patrasche was bidden with a thousand words of welcome to tarry there a cherished guest, and he would not. Neither peace nor plenty could allure him where Nello was not.
When the supper smoked on the board, and the voices were loudest and
gladdest, and the Christ-child brought choicest gifts to Alois,
Patrasche, watching always an occasion, glided out when the door was
unlatched by a careless new-comer, and as swiftly as his weak and
tired limbs would bear him sped over the snow in the bitter, black night.
He had only one thought--to follow Nello. A human friend might have
paused for the pleasant meal, the cheery warmth, the cosy slumber; but that
was not the friendship of Patrasche. He remembered a bygone time, when an
old man and a little child had found him sick unto death in the wayside
ditch.
Snow had fallen freshly all the evening long; it was now nearly ten; the
trail of the boy's footsteps was almost obliterated. It took
Patrasche long and arduous labour to discover any scent by which to guide
him in pursuit. When at last he found it, it was lost again quickly; and
lost and recovered, and again lost and again recovered, a hundred times,
and more.
The night was very wild. The lamps under the wayside crosses were blown
out: the roads were sheets of ice; the impenetrable darkness hid
every trace of habitations; there was no living thing abroad. All the
cattle were housed, and in all the huts and homesteads men and women
rejoiced and feasted. There was only Patrasche out in the cruel
cold--old and famished and full of pain, but with the strength and the
patience of a great love to sustain him in his search.
The trail of Nello's steps, faint and obscure as it was under the
new snow, went straightly along the accustomed tracks into Antwerp. It was
past midnight when Patrasche traced it over the boundaries of the town and
into the narrow, tortuous, gloomy streets. It was all quite dark in the
town. Now and then some light gleamed ruddily through the crevices of
house-shutters, or some group went homeward with lanterns chanting
drinking-songs. The streets were all white
with ice: the high walls and roofs loomed black against them. There was scarce a sound save the riot of the winds down the passages as they tossed the creaking signs and shook the tall lamp-irons.
So many passers-by had trodden through and through the snow, so
many divers paths had crossed and recrossed each other, that the dog had a
hard task to retain any hold on the track he followed. But he kept on his
way, though the cold pierced him to the bone, and the jagged ice cut his
feet, and the hunger in his body gnawed like a rat's teeth. He kept
on his way--a poor gaunt, shivering, drooping thing, that no one
pitied as he went--and by long patience traced the steps he loved into
the very heart of the burgh and up to the steps of the great cathedral.
"He is gone to the things that he loved," thought
Patrasche: he could not understand, but he was full of sorrow and of
pity for the art-passion that to him was so incomprehensible and yet
so sacred.
The portals of the cathedral were unclosed after the midnight mass. Some
heedlessness in the custodians, too eager to go home and feast or sleep, or
too drowsy to know whether they turned the keys aright, had left one of the
doors unlocked. By that accident the foot-falls Patrasche sought had
passed through into the
building, leaving the white marks of snow upon the dark stone floor. By that slender white thread, frozen as it fell, he was guided through the intense silence, through the immensity of the vaulted space--guided straight to the gates of the chancel, and, stretched there upon the stones, he found Nello. He crept up noiselessly, and touched the face of the boy. "Didst thou dream that I should be faithless and forsake thee? I--a dog?" said that mute caress.
The lad raised himself with a low cry and clasped him close.
"Let us lie down and die together," he murmured. "Men
have no need of us, and we are all alone."
In answer, Patrasche crept closer yet, and laid his head upon the young
boy's breast. The great tears stood in his brown, sad eyes: not
for himself--for himself he was happy.
They lay close together in the piercing cold. The blasts that blew over
the Flemish dykes from the northern seas were like waves of ice, which
froze every living thing they touched. The interior of the immense vault of
stone in which they were was even more bitterly chill than the
snow-covered plains without. Now and then a bat moved in the
shadows--now and then a gleam of light came on the ranks of carven
figures. Under the Rubens they lay together, quite
still, and soothed almost into a dreaming slumber by the numbing narcotic of the cold. Together they dreamed of the old glad days when they had chased each other through the flowering grasses of the summer meadows, or sat hidden in the tall bulrushes by the water's side, watching the boats go seaward in the sun.
No anger had ever separated them; no cloud had ever come between them;
no roughness on the one side, no faithlessness on the other, had ever
obscured their perfect love and trust. All through their short lives they
had done their duty as it had come to them, and had been happy in the mere
sense of living, and had begrudged nothing to any man or beast, and had
been quite content because quite innocent. And in the faintness of famine
and of the frozen blood that stole dully and slowly through their veins, it
was of the days they had spent together that they dreamed, lying there in
the long watches of the night of Noël.
Suddenly through the darkness a great white radiance streamed through
the vastness of the aisles; the moon, that was at her height, had broken
through the clouds; the snow had ceased to fall; the light reflected from
the snow without was clear as the light of dawn. It fell through the arches
full upon the two pictures above, from which the boy on his entrance had
flung
back the veil: the Elevation and the Descent of the Cross were for one instant visible.
Nello rose to his feet and stretched his arms to them: the tears
of a passionate ecstasy glistened on the paleness of his face.
"I have seen them at last!" he cried aloud. "O God, it
is enough!"
His limbs failed under him, and he sank upon his knees, still gazing
upward at the majesty that he adored. For a few brief moments the light
illumined the divine visions that had been denied to him so
long--light, clear and sweet and strong as though it streamed from the
throne of Heaven.
Then suddenly it passed away: once more a great darkness covered
the face of Christ.
The arms of the boy drew close again the body of the dog.
"We shall see His face--there," he
murmured; "and He will not part us, I think; He will have
mercy."
As the day grew on there came an old, hard-featured man, who wept
as women weep.
"I was cruel to the lad," he muttered, "and now I
would have made amends--yea, to the half of my substance--and he
should have been to me as a son."
There came also, as the day grew apace, a painter who had fame in the
world, and who was liberal of hand and of spirit.
"I seek one who should have had the prize yesterday had worth
won," he said to the people,--"A boy of rare promise and
genius. An old wood-cutter on a fallen tree at eventide--that
was all his theme.
But there was greatness for the future in it. I would fain find him, and take him with me and teach him art."
And a little child with curling fair hair, sobbing bitterly as she clung
to her father's arm, cried aloud, "Oh, Nello, come! We have all
ready for thee. The Christ-child's hands are full of gifts,
and the old piper will play for us; and the mother says thou shalt stay by
the earth and burn nuts with us all the Noël week long--yes, even
to the Feast of the Kings! And Patrasche will be so happy! Oh, Nello, wake
and come!"
But the young pale face, turned upward to the light of the great Rubens
with a smile upon its mouth, answered them all, "It is too
late."
For the sweet, sonorous bells went ringing through the frost, and the
sunlight shone upon the plains of snow, and the populace trooped gay and
glad through the streets, but Nello and Patrasche no more asked charity at
their hands. All they needed now Antwerp gave unbidden.
Death had been more pitiful to them than longer life would have been. It
had taken the one in the loyalty of love, and the other in the innocence of
faith, from a world which for love has no recompense, and for faith no
fulfilment.
All their lives they had been together, and in their
deaths they were not divided: for when they were found the arms of the boy were folded too closely around the dog to be severed without violence, and the people of their little village, contrite and ashamed, implored a special grace for them, and, making them one grave, laid them to rest there side by side--for ever.
All for a branch of lilac. You do not believe? Chut! Men have been shot
many a time for as little. A glance, a smile, a tear, a withered flower. So
little. And yet so much when they are a woman's. So much. All
one's present, all one's past, all one's future.
There is the lilac--look! There is no colour, no fragrance, no
loveliness in it now. It is so pale, so faded, so scentless. So
faded--just like a love that is dead.
People say that men cannot love in these days. It is a lie. Rich
men--perhaps not. But the poor!--Then, women do not care for
that.
You asked me my story. Why? To have a history is a luxury for the rich.
What use can one be to the
poor? If they tell it, who listens? And I have been very poor, always. Yet I was happy till that lilac blossomed one fair spring day.
I am a comedian. My mother was one before me. My father--oh,
ta-ta-ta! That is another luxury for the wealthy.
My mother was quite obscure always. A little humble player. She passed
with a little wandering troupe, at certain seasons, from town to town, from
province to province.
I remember, when I was very small, being carried on her shoulders or
about her waist along the dusty roads, and catching at the butterflies in
the sunshine as we went.
I was a little, round, brown, mischievous child--very ugly, I am
sure, as I am now and have ever been. But to her, no doubt--dear
soul!--I had beauty.
I must have plagued her sorely, always on the move as she was; but she
never made me think myself a nuisance. However tired she might be, she was
never too tired to romp and gambol with me. Poor little white, bright,
thin-cheeked mother! I see her now, dancing in her spangles with the
red paint on, and the bird-like eyes of her always seeking the
plump, rough boy who only pulled her dress to pieces when he was hungry, or
pommeled her with his sunburnt fists when
he was cross and tired. And he was often both tired and hungry: that I remember also. But it was not her fault. Poor little mother! She would have danced her feet to the bone to keep me like a baby prince, if it had been possible for dancing to have brought in wealth.
Poor little mother! She had a heavy fall from some scaffolding when I
was five years old; but I can see her now, as though it were yesterday, in
her scarlet bodice and her silvered skirts, running off the stage the
moment she was free to take me in her arms and cover me with kisses.
And, as I remember her, I think she must have been full of
grace--such grace as a bird's is on a bough full of summer leaf;
but if I am right, the people whom she danced for were wrong, for the
public never saw anything particular in her, and she died as she had
lived--a strolling player to the last.
"Piccinino" was the last word she spoke; Piccinino was the
name she always called me; Piccinino I remained. I must have had some other
name, of course, that the law gave me. But the law and I were never close
friends, and I never asked my debts to it.
The little troupe of comedians whom my mother had been associated with
were very good to me. There is so very much goodness in all Bohemians.
They are always kindly, generous, sympathetic, compassionate. I was a little motherless, penniless, desolate wretch of five years old; ugly, too--brown and ugly, as you see me now, very much. I have had a face too good for comedy, too good to make the people laugh, for it ever to have been anything except grotesque and unlovely. But they were as good to me as though I had been beautiful to the sight and had inherited a patrimony.
The old men and the young, the heldames and the pretty women of the
little company, vied with each other in charity and hospitality. True, they
were all very poor, but what they had they never grudged to me. They took
me with them everywhere, and never even dreamed of turning off the cost and
trouble of me upon that bitter stepmother--the state.
As I grew older I took to the stage myself. I could not have imagined
life lived to any other music than that of the little shrill
reed-pipe and deep-rolling drum, that had drowned my first
cries at my birth; and had awakened my laughter so many and many a time
later on, that it seemed to me that their cheery sounds were as needful to
all sense of existence as was the very light of the sun itself.
There were little things that a child could do, little parts that a
child could play, and these I had and
these I did almost from the time my mother left me alone in the world. They said I did them well. I do not know about that. I only know that the boards of our little travelling theatre always seemed the natural home to me, and that I was never afraid of the innumerable eyes of the largest audience: they always seemed to me the eyes of friends--of the only friends that I had upon earth.
It was so pleasant, too, to make them laugh. I, a little child, a little
ugly fellow, whom the children of the towns and villages hooted as I passed
up their streets, could hold all these mature men and women, all these
fathers of families and grandsires and granddames, shaking and shouting
with laughter at the pranks of my mirth and my talent. It was my revenge,
and it was sweet to me. Those children who hooted me, who sometimes stoned
me, who called me "mountebank," and yelled at me for my
ugliness,--they could not make their elders laugh at will. But I
could.
I did not bear the children, my foes, any malice. I was what they called
good-tempered, and whether I were on or off the stage I was gay at
heart almost always at that time, and every other time indeed till that
lilac blossomed two years ago.
It was a merry life we led. Very poor, oh yes, and hard in many ways. We
had to tramp in all weathers
from place to place, timing ourselves to reach this hamlet or that town by such and such a saint's day or festivity. We had to sleep very often in haylofts or even in cattle-sheds, for usually such taverns as we alone could afford to go to were full to overflowing at any feast-time or market-season. At other periods, too, we did not always make enough to leave anything to be divided amongst ourselves after all expenses of setting up and lighting our little portable playhouse were paid; and old Vico Mathurin, our head and chief, was as honest as the day, and would cheat no man of a sou though he starved for it.
But what did that matter? We were a cheerful little fraternity, loving
one another, only vying with each other in good-natured rivalry; and
always ready, each of us, to make the best of all chances and all
circumstances. We often thought, as we went through the towns, how much
happier and freer we were than those were who dwelt in them, bound to one
spot, mewed under one roof, seeing one landscape always, looking always to
find a grave in the self-same place where they were born, whilst we
went and came as we chose, never tarried long enough in one place to grow
weary of it, seldom saw the fruit ripen on the same trees where we saw it
blossom, and had nothing between us and the width of the skies.
I dare say the townspeople pitied us as homeless vagrants. No doubt. But
we never pitied ourselves. So we must have been happy? Wisely or
unwisely?
I was but a little creature when I went first on the stage, but I was
born a Bohemian, and I was content--more than content, full of
joy--as I pattered along by Vico Mathurin's side, my little bare
feet deep in the summer dust or splashing into puddles of the autumn
rain.
Full of joy, for Mathurin would pat me on the head and prophesy wondrous
things of my talent; and then pretty, blue-eyed Euphrasie would kiss
me and weave the roadside grasses into crowns for me, and big Francisque,
her lover, would raise me for a ride on his stout shoulder; and ever and
again a lark would sing, or a rabbit would scud across the path, or an old
peasant would drop me a handful of mulberries or a clump of honeycomb
wrapped in a green leaf; or some other little homely, innocent, simple
pleasure would blossom in my way as the country wild-flowers sprang
up beneath my steps.
In the winter, it is true, it was more severe. Winter tries hardly all
the wandering races: if the year were all summer, all the world would
be Bohemians.
But even in the winter there was so much that
was mirthful and pleasant one could not be sad or despondent. Usually in the winter we tarried in some southerly town; and if one were cold, some good creature sitting at her chestnut-stall in the street would be sure to thrust some fine nuts smoking into my hands with a smile, or pretty Euphrasie would catch me in her arms and warm my cheek upon her beating heart; and then big Francisque would pretend a ferocious jealousy, and take a terrible vengeance by pelting me with gilded gingerbreads from the fairy booths until I cried for quarter, while Vico Mathurin, the gentle good old man, would, if he had a chance to do so unperceived, slip his share of the frugal meal into my plate, and make believe that some friend at a wineshop had so feasted him at breakfast that he had no appetite nor power left for more. Ah, dear people, dear people! are you with the dead? I wonder. I shall know soon.
So my childhood and boyhood went away very happily. Poverty I did not
mind, for it was a poverty so contented and mirthful, and I had never known
anything else; and ugliness I did not regret, for they all told me that my
physiognomy was the most ductile and expressive for the comic mummeries
which were the special vein of my stage-talent.
Only now and then, when the little dark-eyed girls
of some religious procession with their white lilies and their upraised crosses shrank a little from me under their white clouds of muslin,--only then did I wish that I were straight of feature and comely to the eye, as most lads were.
"It is stupid to be as ugly as that," said one little
pretty, fair creature to me once on a confirmation-day, pushing me
aside in the street on to the sharp-set stones of the roadway. I
stumbled and I winced, she was so fair and angel-like.
But that night she came, my little angel, still with her white rosebuds
on her yellow curls, to the theatre which we had set up in the
market-place--came with her parents, who were rich tanners in
the town. I saw her; I saw nothing but her: she laughed, she cried,
she applauded: she was scarlet with wonder, beside herself with
glee.
They told me--Mathurin and Francisque, my teachers and
masters--that I had never played so well, so wonderfully for my years,
as I played that night. I laughed as I heard them, an hysterical, choking
laugh, I remember, not seeing them, only seeing in the sea of faces one
little golden head crowned with white rosebuds.
"Ask her now if it be stupid to be ugly," I
said to them; then I fainted.
You do not care to hear all this. What does it matter? Whether I
suffered or enjoyed, loved or hated, is of no consequence to any one. The
dancing-dog suffers intensely beneath the scourge of the stick, and
is capable of intense attachment to any one who is merciful enough not to
beat him; but the dancing-dog and his woe and his love are nothing
to the world: I was as little.
There is nothing more terrible, nothing more cruel, than the waste of
emotion, the profuse expenditure of fruitless pain, which every hour, every
moment, as it passes, causes to millions of living creatures. If it were of
any use who would mind? But it is all waste, frightful waste, to no end, to
no end.
I wander: I cannot help it. I must tell of myself in my own way,
or not at all.
Thus I grew up with these gay, kindly, tendersouled people, who were
outcasts in the sight of most men. When I was about fifteen years of age
the old man died--died of cold, I believe. He gave his
little scaldino and his one thick cloak to
warm
the feet of a poor young creature who had hardly recovered from
child-birth, and who lay shivering on a bed of straw in a wayside
hut; and having done this, saying nothing to any one, he lay shivering all
night in his garret in a bitter frost,
till his heart ceased its slow gentle beating for ever,
His loss broke up the little troop. Its members held loosely together
for a while, but the keystone which had united the whole had fallen when
Mathurin died, and the several pieces of the little structure dropped
asunder one by one. Francisque and Euphrasie bethought themselves late in
the day of getting the sanction of priests on their love, and wedded one
another and went somewhere southward, I forget whither, and together opened
a café and flower-shop, thinking it time to get a roof over
their heads and a place in the reputable world as middle age crept upon
them. The others all went right and left, east and west, as they would. I
went first with some, then with others.
Euphrasie would have had me go to live with them and help to plant her
flower seeds and bind up her carnations, but I would not leave the old ways
of the old life. A roof?--what could that matter to me, young and
strong and gifted with one talent, as all people said?
Besides, I had been born a Bohemian: the wanderer's, the
stroller's blood was in me strong and ardent. I loved the freedom and
the change--ay, I loved the very risks and deprivations--of the
career I had always followed, and I was resolved that there should
never be any music sweeter in my ear than the sounds of the old reed-pipe and the brazen drum which had greeted my young senses in my cradle. I was eighteen: I was full of health and strength. I had a talent that at least was good for this--to make the people laugh. I do not need to say I had no fear of the future: I loved the career of a comedian, and I would not have exchanged its gayety and carelessness and freedom for anything--nay, not for an empire.
My early instructor, Mathurin, although he had remained an obscure
stroller to the last, had been a man of accurate judgment and of genuine
taste. He had reared me to discern the difference between a graceful
fooling and a witless buffoonery: he had taught me to aim always at
raising the pure mirth and the happy glee of the populace by legitimate
means, and not by the vile medium of obscene jests and of lascivious
side-play. I was a comic actor, as he had been: yes, but this
I can say, as he did before me--that never by me were the people the
worse for the laughter I raised.
What does that matter, either? you say. Not much to any one; only, when
one is to die at break of day, it is not unpleasant to remember that no
girl's mind was the baser, no man's impulses were the lewder,
for the way one has followed one's art.
I joined various troops of wandering players after the old band broke up
at Mathurin's death. I was successful, in my way, with the people. I
never attracted notice enough to be called to any city or sought by any
impresario.
I do not think I was ever coarse enough for the famous theatres. Nay, I
speak in sober earnest, not in any irony. The taste of cities requires
indecent gesture, and sees no point in a jest unless it have some foul
meaning hidden in its équivoque. Now,
my
fooling was cleanly and honest in its mirth--simple, I dare say, but,
as far as I could make it, harmless. When the tired hordes of the labouring
classes and the stupid, open-mouthed peasantry crammed the wooden
booth to overflowing, and laughed at me till they lifted the canvas roofing
with the loud gusts of their expanding lungs, they were never the worse for
that momentary oblivion of their hunger and
travail--never:--that I know.
So I spent my life for ten years--spent it till that lilac
bloomed.
Oh, do not think I was a saint. I had plenty of follies, plenty of sins.
I loved a draught of wine, a fling at dominoes, a kiss of ripe lips, a
dance with limber limbs: I loved all these as well as any man, and
had my share of them. But what I would
say is, that in my art I always tried to do good. Vico Mathurin had always led me to see that any career may be ennobled by the leading of it, and he had always held that though the world may rate it low, the art of the comic player may have a noble aim if it aspire ever to make the weary and overtasked multitude forget for a little season the gall of heavy harness and the toil of flinty roads.
"See you here," he would say to me many a time when I was a
boy. "These people come and look at us and hearken to us, and laugh
and are glad for a little space: then, when they go back into their
cabins or their attics, some little trill of our song will stay on their
famished lips, some little bubble of laughter at the memory of one of our
jokes will remain with them amidst their poverty and their hard work; and
these will be like a stray sunbeam in a cellar in the darkness of their
lot. Think of that, think of that, Piccinino, and it will not hurt you when
any scoffer casts at you, as a term of scorn, your title of strolling
player."
And these words of my dear old master abode with me always, and as far
as I could I trod closely in his footsteps; and in many places where he had
been known the people welcomed me and loved me a little for his sake.
I never left France: we who speak only to the
populace cannot go where the populace have another tongue than ours. But France is so wide, and I was for ever on the move--in the north for the harvest, in the centre for the vintage, in the south for the winter season; going whithersoever there was a festival or a bridal or a great market, or a holiday of any sort that made the townsfolk or the villagers in festal trim and in the mood to smile.
When I sit in the gloom here I see all the scenes of that pleasant life
pass like pictures before me.
No doubt I was often hot, often cold, often footsore, often ahungered
and athirst: no doubt: but all that has faded now. I only see
the old, lost, unforgotten brightness; the sunny roads, with the wild
poppies blowing in the wayside grass; the quaint little red roofs and
peaked towers that were thrust upward out of the rolling woods; the clear
blue skies, with the larks singing against the sun; the quiet, cool,
moss-grown towers, with old dreamy bells ringing sleepily above
them; the dull casements opening here and there to show a rose like a
girl's cheek, and a girl's face like the rose; the little
wineshops buried in their climbing vines and their tall,
many-coloured hollyhocks, from which sometimes a cheery voice would
cry, "Come, stay for a stoup of wine, and pay us with a
song."
Then, the nights when the people flocked to us, and the little tent was
lighted, and the women's and the children's mirth rang out in
peals of music; and the men vied with each other as to which should bear
each of us off to have bed and board under the cottage roof, or in the old
mill-house, or in the weaver's garret; the nights when the
homely supper-board was brightened and thought honoured by our
presence; when we told the black-eyed daughter's fortunes, and
kept the children round-eyed and flushing red with wonder at strange
tales, and smoked within the leaf-hung window with the father and
his sons; and then went out, quietly, alone in the moonlight, and saw the
old cathedral white and black in the shadows and the light; and strayed a
little into its dim aisles, and watched the thorn-crowned God upon
the cross, and in the cool, fruit-scented air, in the sweet silent
dusk, moved softly with noiseless footfall and bent head, as though the
dead were there.
Ah, well! they are all gone, those days and nights. Begrudge me not
their memory. I am ugly, and very poor, and of no account; and I die at
sunrise, so they say. Let me remember whilst I can: it is all
oblivion there. So they say.
But happiness depends so much upon one's self. That is a
threadbare saying of the preachers. Yes, I know. But it is true, for all
that.
So long as one has no regret, one can be happy; and as for me, I envied
no man. This was ignorance, no doubt. If I had ever known what wealth and
its powers and its pleasures were like, no doubt I should have hungered for
them like the rest of men. But I had never known, and it was not in my
nature merely to be jealous of possession. If I had been crippled, I should
have passionately envied those who still walked at will straightly and
swiftly whither they would. But it was not in me, whilst I could march as I
pleased, strongly and fast, through the seeding grasses, over the
sun-swept plains, amongst the red and gold leaves of autumn, and
over the white fields of the midwinter snows,--it was not in me then,
I say, to envy the men
who rolled on wheels or were borne by horses. It was not in me: it would have seemed to me peevish, childish, ingrate, mean.
This was my ignorance, no doubt. Men, I have noticed, knowing much, do
envy much--almost always.
One day in the early spring-time, I came with my troop into a
little town that stood on the Loire River--a little old, gray town,
high on a rock, circled by crumbling walls, all blossoming everywhere just
then with bud and leaf, all over its moat and its ramparts, in its streets
and its casements: its very ditches were white with
lilies-of-the-valley, and its very roofs were yellow
with flowering houseleeks, while at every nook and comer over the walls of
its gardens the lilacs, white and purple, were in bloom. I can smell them
now: in the ditch that they will bury me in, I shall smell them
still, I think.
We entered the gates at high noon, and set up our play-house in
the market-square.
The morrow would be a fête-day, and the town was stirred
from the gray torpor and stillness of its extreme old age, and was alive
and gay with country-people and its own small population, all afoot
and thronging the wooden stalls of the fair, and the crooked steep alleys
that crossed and recrossed each other up the slope of the place.
As I went up one of these, bearing my share of the framework and the
canvas of our play-house, with the reed-pipe and the old drum
sounding merrily as ever before our tired steps, I heard a voice above me,
the clear, high voice of a woman.
"How ugly he is, that one!" it cried with a laugh.
"His face alone is a burlesque. He will make the very dogs in the
streets die of laughter."
"Hush!" said a voice that was lower in tone and fuller.
"Who knows? He may hear. And he looks so weary and so
tired!"
The other voice laughed on in its cruel and saucy glee:
"Pooh! He is too ugly to live! Why does God make such
creatures?"
And across the eyes the fragrance of lilac in full blossom struck me a
cool, refreshing blow.
She who spoke last had broken a branch of the sweet spring flower and
cast it down to me in merry scorn, so that it fell across the timber on
which my hands were clasped. There was a little saffron-hued
butterfly upon it, I remember, and one golden-brown bee. The bee
paused a moment upon my wrist and then flew from me; the butterfly remained
upon the blossoms.
I looked up. An old man, a gardener, who had
chidden her and the bright creature who had thrown the sweet blossom and the harsh words at me, leaned over the old gray, moss-grown wall. The lilac boughs were all about her--above, beneath, around. Her golden head glistened in the sunlight. She had a knot of lilacs in her breast.
Can I describe her? No: think of the woman who to you, above all
others of her sex, has meant--Love.
She was but a young girl of the people, the orphan daughter of a poor
wood-carver, simply clad in the garb of her province, spending a
momentary rest from her daily labour in leaning over the old garden wall to
watch the strange strollers pass by with pipe and beat of drum; but to me
she became the world.
It is so strange! We see a million faces, we hear a million voices, we
meet a million women with flowers in their breasts and light in their fair
eyes, and they do not touch us. Then we see one, and she holds for us life
or death, and plays with them idly so often--as idly as a child with
toys. She is not nobler, better or more beautiful than were all those we
passed, and yet the world is empty to us without her.
I went on up the street. I held the bough of lilac in my hand.
Yes: this bough, poor faded, scentless thing! And that morning it
was so bright, so full of odour, so
eagerly kissed by the butterfly and the bee. Two years ago, just two years ago! Are the lilacs in flower there, I wonder, now? Surely; and she gathers them and throws them to her lover. Why not?
Shall she think of the bough that is dead--of the bough that
blossomed last season--so long ago, so long ago? No. The lilac flowers
live but a day. But that brief day is longer than a woman's memory, I
think.
I went on up the street.
That night!--how I played I cannot tell. I did not know what I did.
All about me was the smell of the lilac trees, and in the sea of faces
below I looked only for hers. She was not there.
When the stage wanted me no longer, and the audience had flocked out,
loud in eager praises of us, I shook myself free of all my comrades and of
the hearty townsfolk, and went back to that little steep street full of the
smell of the lilacs.
There was a clear, full moon. The lilacs were all colourless in it, and
their scent was heavy on the wind. Some rill of water within the garden
walls was falling with musical and even measure. An owl flew by me with
swift white wing gleaming silver-bright in the lustre of the stars.
Why do I speak of these things? They are nothing now. And yet they are with
me always.
I walked there to and fro all night. At sunrise I went away ashamed.
What was a bough of lilac to make me a fool, thus?
At daybreak I asked a stone-cutter, as he went by me to his work,
who dwelt behind those old crumbling walls. He told me no one. They were
the walls of an old monastic garden, into which any one might stray at
pleasure. I asked him no more. I felt a strange silence and shyness upon
me.
I went home to the little miserable tavern where my people had found
lodging, and went up to my garret there, and looked at the lilac bough, and
bent my head and kissed it foolishly. I felt as though it were my fate in
some way.
I had placed it in water, and kept it in the shade, but already it had
withered, and the yellow butterfly was dead.
All that day through I endeavoured to find the woman who had dropped it
into my hands, but I had no success. It was a festal day, and the streets
were full of people, bright with banners and streamers, crucifixes and
images, white-robed singing-boys and gay little children with
their heads crowned with spring flowers. But I did not light, amongst all
the faces, on the face for which I sought. She
must have been there, but in some way or other she had escaped me.
Night came, and I went again upon the stage. I was still incessantly
pursued by one image.
"What are you looking for, Piccinino?" my companions asked
me.
I laughed stupidly, and answered them, "A bough of
lilac."
They stared, and thought me out of my wits, for all over the town, in
the little gardens and in the shrubberies on the ramparts, and against the
old stone gateways, the lilacs, white and purple, were in bloom, and
amongst their tender green leafage the mated birds were nestling.
I went on the boards as usual. I remember well the little piece we
performed that evening. It was a very simple little scene of humour,
wherein I played the chief part--a part which always suited me--a
poor cobbler, who, old and ugly and crippled, loves a young girl of his
village, and is the butt and laughing-stock of all the village youth
for his misplaced and despised passion.
The part was a very droll one, and I was always accustomed to play it
amidst shrieks of laughter from my audiences at the follies and
presumptions of the old, crippled, ugly, withered shoemaker, who had
dared to lift his eyes and his thoughts to the loveliest and most mischievous maiden in his village.
This night, however, I played it in a different spirit. The sounds of
those words, "How ugly he is!" were ringing in my ears, and my
brain was giddy with them.
They shouted me a vociferous welcome when I appeared. I was popular in
the place, and the piece was popular likewise. The presumption of emotion
in any creature unlovely and aged has always been a favourite theme with
the populace for gibes and mockery. It must seem very ridiculous, no doubt.
And yet it is not the young, not the handsome, who feel most.
This night I played the part differently.
I did not know what possessed me. It had been a comic part always:
I had always been a comic actor. Neither in the part nor in me had ever any
one seen on the stage aught except farcical drolleries, absurd situations,
ludicrous aspects. And yet that night suddenly I changed, and the part with
me, and I was powerless to help it.
I was compelled by an impulse stronger than myself to transform the
character into something higher, nobler, infinitely sadder than the poor
old fool whom it had been my amusement to portray and theirs to applaud. I
cannot tell how it was. I changed no
action, altered no single word, and yet the part I played ceased to be contemptible, farcical, absurd: it became full of pathos, dignity almost--I might say, of heroism. That poor old, feeble, ill-favoured, poverty-stricken man, had a heart that could love infinitely and infinitely despair--a heart which knew itself deeper and truer and keener in loyalty and suffering than any heart that beat around him with the joyous vain throbs of an exultant youth, and yet which only made him the standing jest of all his little world, the jeered-at dotard mocked by the gay lips of the very creature for whom he would have died a thousand deaths.
That was how I read the character now: this was how I played it;
and when my last words were spoken, I, looking for the first time that
night on the crowd before me, saw that they were breathless, tremulous,
very still--saw that I, their paid buffoon, their hired jester, had
not made them laugh, but made them weep.
They did not know what ailed them, but by that strange tie which unites
the actor with his audience, the vague and bitter pain in me communicated
itself to them, and they wept where they had mocked, they sorrowed where
they had scoffed.
"What possessed you, Piccinino?" my comrades said to me,
clustering around when the piece was over.
"Who could have thought you had it in you? A part like that, too! Why, the people cried like children--all of them, old and young. What could possess you, eh?"
I laughed foolishly again, I know, for my own throat was husky and my
own eyes were dim.
"It is all the fault of a branch of lilac," I muttered to
them, laughing off my folly. They must have thought me mad, I suppose. I
thought myself so.
My chief came and stared at me curiously, then struck me a kindly blow
upon the shoulders.
"Peste, Piccinino!" he swore with a good-humoured
oath of wonder, "you will be a tragic actor, after all, I should not
be surprised. But another time do not make my whole house cry like women
when we advertise a comic entertainment. Our trade is to make folk
laugh: do not forget that, my friend, again."
I was silent. I could not offer any explanation of what had so strangely
and so unwontedly moved me.
It had all come of a branch of lilac. But then who would believe that?
People never will believe what is true.
Well, it appeared later on that, although the impresario of our troupe
of jesters had feared the anger of the audience for being mournful when we
had promised to be gay, he had feared it needlessly. This little
piece, which my change of mood had changed from farce to poetry, pleased them none the less in its altered aspect. They knew me well, had known me when I was a little round, sunburnt child; and it was wonderful to these simple people that their odd, ugly old friend Piccinino should have any such powers in him.
"We knew he could always make us laugh, but he makes us weep too,
the droll one! Who knows? He may be great one day. He may even go to
Paris," they said to one another as they left the theatre.
And they clustered round me and embraced me, and pressed me to go drink
and smoke with them; but seeing that I was silent and in no mood for
boisterous company, forbore to solicit me, and went away shaking their
heads sadly, and yet proudly withal; for I was their old friend
Piccinino: their graybeards had given me pears and peaches when I was
a little lad; their elders had all seen me toddle by my poor mother's
side, holding on to her spangled skirts; and now I had genius, their
wiseacres said, and genius was something very vague in their minds, very
audacious, very terrible--an honour and yet a plague.
The next time we were to play that piece I would fain have had it
changed and have gone back to my old fooling; but I was not master of the
troupe, and
the townspeople, it seemed, clamoured for me, Piccinino, to play the part a second time with that new talent which time or chance, as they thought, had developed in me. So we played it.
Genius can do as it likes with its world, but we poor folk, who had only
a little rifle of talent, for which we could not always even find any
market at all,--we could only obey our little shred of the public
obediently, and give it what it asked.
That night, when I went on the stage, I felt that she was there before I
saw her--there amidst the populace, with that bright golden head of
hers rising out from the sea of the swarthy peasant faces, and the sweet,
saucy child's eyes laughing upon me across the yellow smoky flicker
of the dull oil lamps.
I saw her: I stammered, I stumbled, I felt blind and dizzy. My
comrades playing with me hissed sharply in my ear, "What ails thee,
Piccinino? Art mad, or drunk, or ill, or what?" They did not rouse
me. I stood staring dully across the little play-house.
The people grew angry at the pause and at the silence. Their favour was
my daily bread; their wrath would be my ruin. Yet they did not stir me. I
did not see them; I only saw the face that had laughed on me from the
lilacs.
Across the rising uproar in the tent there came to me a small, soft,
silvery sound. It was the sound of her voice, and it murmured with a cruel
glee,--
"So ugly and so stupid, too! That is surely too much in one
creature!"
And then she laughed again, the pretty, babyish, mutinous laugh with
which she had tossed me the lilac-bough.
That one sound roused me, like a thorn thrust in an open wound. I
rallied; I forced myself into the part I played; I knew little, nothing,
all the time, of where I was or of what I did, and the audience was gone to
me: I only saw one face. But to this one I played with all the soul
that was in me; and they told me that I eclipsed myself,--that I held
the people breathless and almost afraid. This, from my own knowledge, I
cannot say, of course. I only know that they shouted for me, at the end,
again and again; that, in their rude fashion, they did me all the homage
they could; that they waved their kerchiefs and their caps at me; that they
screamed their vivas at me until their lungs were weary; and that they
clutched at me, with a hundred eager hands, to lead me out amidst them to
the noisy honours of the tavern. But I shook myself free of
them--churlishly, I fear--upon some plea of sickness, and got out
alone,
and hid myself and watched the women depart from the wooden booth of the play-house.
But I was too late. My kindly tormentors had robbed me of the only
recompense I cared for. She was gone, and I could not tell whether or no I
had gained my triumph there,--whether or no the sunny, cruel eyes had
moistened into tears as the eyes of all the other women had done that
night.
I went away sick at heart, despite that victory on which my old
companions so generously felicitated me. A victory over these poor boors
who knew not one letter from another! What was it worth?
In the great cities, no doubt, they would have hissed down my acting.
For the first time, my career seemed miserable, and any successes in it
seemed ridiculous either to seek or to prize. For, in imagination, I
followed the bright creature to her home, and saw her unloose her thick
light hair before her mirror, and heard her laugh in her solitude as she
thought of me, an ugly wretch who fancied if ploughmen laughed at him, or
kitchen-wenches wept, that he had fame!
For the first time since I had awakened in my poor mother's arms
to the summons of the pipe and the drum, the life I had led seemed vile to
me,--foolish and wretched, and of no result.
As I went home in the darkness, her laughter
seemed all about me,--in the leaves, in the fountains, in the little low winds, in the tremulous singing of the grass-hidden insects.
All of them seemed to laugh at me with her laughter, and shout in chorus
with all their tiny, tender voices, in a derision the more cruel because
coming from things so slight and fair. "So ugly and so stupid too!
Why does God make such creatures?"
Ah, why indeed? Often have I asked that also.
My story is nothing new, you see. It is such a common one. I was a
fool.
That night my chief followed me up into the garret where I slept, and
told me that he would give me some increase of payment, and that he thought
that we might tarry full a month in this small town, since I was so popular
with the people, and the district was in a manner rich; its tanners, its
vine-dressers, its husbandmen were well to do, and, for our country,
it was populous, and from the many hamlets round there would be, most
likely, audiences for us all the summer season through.
I did not question his judgment. I caught eagerly at his will to stay.
For me, I knew the whole earth now only held one road worth the
treading--the road where the lilacs blossomed.
Well, we stayed on till the lilacs faded, as he had said, and long ere
the month was out I had found her name and her dwelling. I do not care to
say her name: let it die with me. After I saw her that first day it
was always "She" in my thoughts. The world held for me only one
woman.
She lived in a high old house, in a gray, dusky street, in the topmost
corner of it, close against the sky. The old garden was near, and she went
thither often. She had no friends. She got her bread by making lace. She
sat at her lattice, with her golden hair bound up in the
gold-coloured kerchief, with her small rosy hands flying in and out
among the bobbins, and the senseless pillow close-pressed against
the white warmth of her breast.
I have often watched her so, hidden myself in some old dark doorway or
some crumbling arch opposite and far below. And all the time the lilacs
were in blossom. She always had a great sweet cluster of them set in a
brown, broken jar upon the stone sill of her window. And while I watched
there below, the winds would shake some breath of their fragrance out to
me, and the little blue butterflies would fly to and fro betwixt me and the
lattice; and, like a fool, I would tell myself that she would hardly, sure,
have flung me a bough of her
favourite flower if she had thought me so utterly hideous and ridiculous as her words had said.
I was very shy and silent. I had been bold enough in my day. I had never
cared what audacious jest I passed, what careless impudence I attempted
with any woman. My very knowledge of how absolutely I, poor and
ill-favoured, was nothing to all their sex, had made me reckless and
dauntless in my ways with them.
Such kisses as I had ever tasted had all been bought; such lips as had
smiled on me had only smiled because even my small guerdon was the only
thing which stood between them and starvation: and although my memory
of my mother had kept me less vicious than my mode of life might have made
me, yet I had never been over-modest where female creatures were in
question. But with her,--I did not know what ailed me, I was so timid,
so dumb-stricken, so unlike what I had ever been.
Partly, no doubt, it was the knowledge of her scorn that silenced me.
But chiefly it was that she had been to me, from the first instant I had
seen her, a creature inexpressibly beautiful and full of sanctity, as far
above me as though she had been a sovereign in her palace and amidst her
guards, instead of a girl of the populace weaving lace at her casement in
an attic.
All her people were dead. She was sixteen years
old, and she was poor. So much I learned. I had not courage to speak her name, or to ask much of her. I fancied every one must see the blood coming and going in my foolish face if I but spoke of her by chance to any neighbour.
One old woman, who had a fruit-stall in the street, shrugged her
shoulders and thrust out her mouth, and muttered some evil words against
her, and would have told me something, I remember now, one day. But I knew
what the venom of women was: I would not hear; I could not bear to
look to play the spy on her. Otherwise, perhaps---- But it was
not to be.
Men, when they stumble to their fate, are blind and deaf: it is
the will of God.
She seemed to me to live quite innocently and most simply, for she, too,
was very poor. Poverty for myself I had never esteemed as any sort of
ill: I thought that in it men were healthy, strong, untempted, and
most manlike. But it made my heart ache to watch that little bare chamber
which was all her home.
She was so infinitely lovely, so golden-bright, so
rose-like, so dainty in hue and shape, that it seemed to me she
ought to be housed as graciously as a butterfly in a lily cup, as a little
blue warbler in a summer nest of leaves.
She soon espied me where I kept my vigil. She
would laugh a little and glance at me with her sweet mischievous eyes, and now and then would nod her head with some charming little gesture, half of invitation, half of derision and disdain. And yet she was coy too.
She would take her way to mass in early morning, with a string of red
dried berries round her throat for rosary, and would go counting them, with
her white lids and her long dark eyelashes cast downward, nor look to right
or left of her, seeming ever absorbed in earnest prayer.
God in heaven! who teaches women? This one had not fully spent her
seventeenth year; she had been the child of poor labouring people, her
father a hewer of wood, her mother a weaver of lace; she had seen naught of
any world except this little one of the gray quiet old town set on the
river-rock; and yet who could have taught her any wile which she had
not by nature of her sex's science? No one--not even him by whom
the mother of Cain was tempted, as priests say.
It is strange--strange and most terrible. And still I think they
know not what they do. They are subtle for very play; they are cruel for
mere sport; they devour what loves them by their simple instinct, as the
young kitten dailies with its mouse.
Others have said this all much better than I say it? Oh yes, no
doubt--only to every man, when he suffers, it seems new, and he thinks
no wound was ever yet so deep, or dealt in such utter wantonness, as his
has been.
My lilac bough was withered and colourless as dust, but in its stead
there budded for me the wonder-flower of a supreme happiness. She
came oftentimes to our play-house with some of the townspeople, and
I thought, or cheated myself into thinking, that after she had seen me act
she grew to despise me less.
The nights she was not there I played ill, very ill, I know: our
chief rated me gravely many a time. But when she was there, though I saw
nothing of any audience, save only the bright ring of her hair in the
lamplight, that glistened like the nimbus about the heads of saints, I know that I performed my part with a fire and a soul in me which were wholly inspired by her.
"If he were not so uncertain he would be an artist fit even for
Paris," I heard the folk say round me; and my old chief said so
likewise.
I laughed to myself and felt heartsick; it was horrible to have
one's skill, one's brain, one's strength, one's
life, all ruled by the presence or absence of one human creature.
And yet so it was. If I could make her mouth part with mirth or fill her
eyes with wondering concern at the humour or the pathos of my
representation, I became for the time a great artist. If she were not
before me, the whole place was empty; I was dull, lifeless, stupid, and I
dragged my limbs with effort through the allotted part until the play was
over.
But she was often there. In common with the other players, I had a right
to admit some one when I would to the theatre free, and every morning she
found a pass upon her little deal table, with some simple gift of flowers
or fruit or other trifles, such as I could afford to get with the poor
pittance which was all to which my share in the profits of our
representations ever amounted.
She took all I offered, and I was more than repaid whenever she gave me
in return a saucy nod, a sunny smile. Sometimes she would deny me these,
and pass me by with a little shudder of aversion, or affect not even to see
me standing in her path.
I could not resent it; I had no title; I knew full well she thought me
too grotesque and ugly for any female thing to smile on twice in the same
day. I was content if she would let me follow her without rebuke, or gaze
at her without her putting her hands before her eyes, as though to screen
them from some sight repulsive to her. For this she did often, and then
would laugh with sauciest merriment at my misery, so that I never rightly
knew whether she hated me or no.
Until one day. It had been very warm. There was no wind to cool the air.
The yellow sun scorched that old dark, cool street into an amber glare, and
turned the dusky, sombre shadows to a russet gold.
The little sad caged birds opened their bills thirstily and gasped. The
red carnations in the window embrasures drooped sadly, and the dogs crept
faint and fevered into the shelter of every jutting doorway or projecting
gallery of the ancient houses. Between the roofs shone the blue cloudless
sky. I can see the quiver of the white dusty trees against it. I can hear
the slow
indolent murmur of the unseen river far below. I can smell the sickly heavy odour of the parched lilies in the heat. All the blinds and shutters were closed. No one was astir. The whole place seemed to sleep.
I only was awake and out--I only, who felt neither heat nor cold,
knew neither day nor night, but only looked up at that one little casement
in the roof to see the sunbeams illumine a girl's hand passing amidst
the threads, or to watch the moonbeams slanting in their purity upon the
dark closed lattice where she slept.
I was out in the burning noontide, pacing to and fro on the stony way,
lest by any chance she might be there, at the window, at her work. Long I
stayed in vain, moving up and down in the shadowless heat on the other side
of the street, as my custom was.
The garret window was empty, and the flowers in it, my flowers, were
dead. I had others in my hand, screened with wet leaves from the searching
sun-rays. I waited for her to come to the lattice ere I should lay
them down, as my wont was, in the entrance, upon the basin scooped above
the bench in the stone wall to hold the holy water.
But instead of leaning above there, high up against the heavens, she
came toward me--came down the street, drooping in the heat as the
roses drooped.
She had been out with some lace to the market-square.
She and I were all alone, facing one another suddenly in the silent,
sultry, sleepy noon beneath the eaves of the old houses. She had a kirtle
of green, I remember, and a bodice of white; and she had sheltered her
bright hair and her little yellow kerchief with some broad woven green
leaves. She looked herself like a flower blossoming out from the gray
wrinkled square stones of the pavement.
It might be the heat, it might be her fatigue, it might be--I know
not. Her face was paler than its wont, and her eyes were softer. I cannot
tell what it was: something gave me voice, and I spoke--spoke as
I gave her my poor little gift.
I knew how foolish it was: I knew how mad it was. I knew no woman
could ever look on me with any sentiment perhaps except disgust--with
nothing more than pity at the most. I knew a man's heart might break
for ever and no creature see aught except a jest in his despair if he were
vilely-featured and poor of habit and estate, as I was.
And yet I spoke, borne out of myself and swept away upon a flood of
words, irresistibly, senselessly, I know not how, as some impulse would
impel me on the stage sometimes, so that in the torrent of my
speech the hearers would be carried away, and forget that he who moved them was but an ugly, poor, and nameless comic player. I could not hope to move her thus, and yet I spoke. It would end all, I thought. I must do so, I knew. And yet I spoke in the old dim, quiet street, with no listeners anywhere except the dusky carnations drooping in the heat.
What I said I cannot tell, but I prayed to her as men should only pray
to their God, they say. I did not ask her for any love in answer: I
might as soon have dreamed of asking for the sun in heaven. But I begged
for a little pity, for a little patience: it was a crime, I knew, for
any creature ugly and poor as I to speak of love at all to any woman.
When my heart had spent itself and my voice had died on my parched dry
lips, I grew cold with deadly fear. I listened for her laughter, her cruel,
sweet, merciless, childlike, mocking laughter.
Instead, she was quite silent. Then suddenly she trembled and grew pale,
and was so still--so still. I heard the loud heavy beating of my own
heart in the silence: that was all the sound there was.
Suddenly she looked at me, and her mouth quivered, and she drew her
breath with a little, low, quick sob.
"I am all alone," she murmured, half with laughter, half
with tears--"I am all alone!"
What could I think?
I was so ugly, so grotesque, so poor, so utterly deserted by all
fortune; and yet the gray street, the yellow light, the red carnations
nodding at the window, the hard blue sky, with the white thirsty leaves
painted on it, all went round with me in a blind, sickly whirl. It was
impossible!--and yet she looked at me and laughed a little, with her
own old, sweet scorn at my madness, though her tears were falling.
"Yes, do you hear?" she said low in her throat, so softly,
and yet with such a pretty petulance. "Do you hear? You are so ugly,
so absurd: you have a mouth like a frog and eyes like a fish, and yet
you are good--you can say beautiful things, and--I am all
alone!"
And then I knew her meaning. Ah, God! If only I could have died that
day, when heaven itself seemed open to me!
Was it all a lie, then? I often wonder.
Nay, not all, I think. Perhaps not any of it. She was very young, and
she was very poor, and she was weary of her life; and even such a one as I
was welcome to her, since I loved her with such utter passion, and could
give her freedom, as she thought. Nay, I would not think it a
lie--then.
She never loved me. But she knew that I loved her, and perhaps the woe
of my words had moved her
to compassion; and perhaps she thought, "Better go with this poor fool and roam the world, and be a little glad, than waste all my fair years in loneliness, losing my sight over the cobwebs of laces that I only weave for other women's wear."
Perhaps, too, she had heard the people say that I had genius, and might
make a name for myself in the great cities of the earth some day; and so it
seemed to her that even my poor life might become worth the sharing; and
she surely knew that any harvest it might ever reap upon the fields of
wealth and fame would be garnered for her only, and into her lap only
poured.
Or perhaps she did not reason at all, did not at all reflect, but only
felt--felt some new impulse, vague and childish, stir at her heart on
hearing how I loved her--as never surely woman yet was loved by
man--and so leaned toward me and took the gift I gave, and wept a
little, and then softly laughed, not rightly knowing what she wished, nor
looking to the future.
Yes, that is likeliest. Yes, I would not think all was a
lie--then.
Well, I married her. Do you know what life was to me then? A
paradise--a fool's paradise, doubtless, but one without cloud,
or stain, or fear, or regret upon it whilst it lasted.
She loved me!
So she had said, so she had proved. It seemed so marvellous to me! Day
and night I thanked Heaven for it, for in Heaven I believed--now. What
but a God--pure and perfect as the priests said--could create
such a creature as this?
She seemed so wonderful to me, this white and golden thing, with her
snowy limbs, and rosy lips, and her smile like the sunlight, which yet were
all mine--only mine. When I looked at her in the first
faint morning light and watched her soft still slumber, I used to think
that this must be a dream--this wondrous ecstasy of mine, this
intoxication of possession.
What was I, a man so poor, so ill-favoured, so grotesque, so
destitute of any charm or grace which could win love, that I should have
been able to touch and gather such a rare blossom as this was to bloom upon
my heart?
With every night that fell, with every day that dawned, I blessed the
sacred chances which had led my footsteps thither in the month of
lilacs.
All the while I kept the dear branch by me, dead and scentless and
without colour as it was.
It would have seemed no miracle to me if any morning I had found it
bloom with fresh bud and leaf, for
that would have been not more miraculous than was the beauty and the joy into which my life had suddenly burst forth.
I do not know if ever she quite knew how much I loved her.
Poor men cannot show their love in those symbols of rich gifts which
women most value and most easily read. No doubt it seems hard and cold in
us that we do not lavish on our best beloved all that her heart
craves: no doubt it seems to a young, thoughtless female creature
that it is not so much the power lacking as the will when we forbear to
hang her neck with gems and fill her hand with gold. And when not only do
we fail in that, but when we are even powerless to feed the bright lips we
kiss with any save the scantiest fare, and stretch the fair limbs we
cherish on any save the poorest bed of straw,--then, I dare say, it
seems to her that if we truly loved we should discover some means, by some
periling of our body or our soul, to bestow on her the luxuries she
craves.
No doubt it seems so. And I was very poor. I could not change the manner
of my life. The only talent that I had was my talent on the stage, and
though I had some true dramatic power in me, I was obscure and nameless,
and could not, in a day nor
in a year, change my estate. The simple folk of the provinces applauded me, it is true, but to win applause in Paris!--one must be very great for that.
I had always loved the old life, as I say.
It had always seemed to me the freest and the gladdest that a man born
of the people could enjoy or could desire. But now it seemed to me to
alter, some way. It was not fit for her, and it would not give me what I
wished for her.
To tramp all along the sun-baked roads had been for me no
hardship; to be hungry and suffer thirst had been to me small pain; to go
to roost in some straw-yard or cattle-shed no difficult
matter when the taverns were all full. The rough jests, the rude revelries,
the drinking bouts, and the wine-shop
supper-tables,--these had all been welcome enough to me at the
end of a long day's travel afoot.
But now--she was so young, so fair to see, so delicate of frame, so
precious to me, that it was horrible to me to make her toil along the stony
shadowless highways, to lay down her dainty body on a truss of hay, to see
the glances of my comrades light on her, and to hear the jests of the
drunkards soil her ear. It poisoned the old life to me.
I had never wanted anything easier, choicer, better in any manner, for
myself; but for her--for her, for
the first time, I envied others; for her I looked with jealousy on the snow-white villas set within their gardens, and the gilded balconies of the pretty houses in the streets, and the silken standards fluttering from the gray towers of the nobles' châteaux, as we passed by them in our route.
Perhaps I should not have felt this had she herself been contented with
the life. But she was not.
When we give a woman a great love she so often repays us by teaching us
discontent!
Nay, I do not blame the woman. A man should not take his heart in his
hand to her, unless in the other hand he can take also idols of gold and
silver.
Before the lilac had dropped across the path I had only noticed the
different way of life of the rich to draw pleasure from it.
It had afforded me many pretty pictures as I had looked at it from the
outside, and I had never felt any desire to look at it more closely, or to
be angered with it because I stood without. When I had looked through the
gilt gateways into some rose-pleasaunce, where the great ladies
sauntered and pretty children played, I had always felt glad that there
were people so happy as that, and had passed on the better for the sight.
But now, when I saw such things, I only felt, "Why has my darling not
such rose-gardens as these,
and why should her children be born and nurtured in poverty instead of wealth?"
I did what I could to soften what seemed for such a one as she the
hardness and privations of our lot.
I was able to hire an old mule, which I could lead across the fields and
along the highlands where the stones and the sun had so sorely tried her.
By doing some turn at hand-labour in the towns where we tarried,
such as hewing wood or weeding garden-plats, or fetching heavy
weights, I was able also to get a little chamber for her in some quiet
place away from the boisterous life of the taverns. Sometimes some one
among the audiences would take some special interest in my performance, and
ask me what I would choose that he should give me--a bottle of wine, a
supper at the restaurant, a bundle of cigars?--and then I would thank
him and decline them all, and in their stead select some basket of rich
fruit or some cluster of rare flowers, and depart with it gratefully, and
take it home to her and enjoy her innocent surprise.
I did what I could--indeed I did what I could--but then that
uttermost was so little.
The love-gifts of one who is poor must always seem so small. How
can it be otherwise?
What a rich man can do every hour with a mere sign of the hand, a mere
stroke of the pen, a poor
man can only do so slowly, so labouriously--in such niggardly, foolish fashion, no doubt it seems--once a year maybe, on a fête-day. And that only by sore hard work of body and of mind; for when it is difficult to get enough even to live on, look you, how can one have surplus to spare for roses, and trinkets, and all pretty trifles such as pretty women love?
It is impossible. But then that very impossibility looks so harsh, so
narrow, so miserly, beside the easy lavishness of love that has gold at its
call. A woman can hardly believe that you care for her unless, at her
bidding, you know how to make all impossibilities possible.
And how can one be a magician without gold? I have heard that in old
times there were men who spent their years and lost their wits trying
always to transmute base metals, by fire and chemistry, into gold. I am
very sure that they would never have thought of it unless some woman whom
they loved had first wailed in their ear for some jewel they were too poor
to be able to gain for her.
I do not know what she could have expected in my life. I had never, from
the first, disguised to her how poor and often hard it was. But she had
seen it from the outside, and, I suppose, she had anticipated more
merriment and variety from it. At any rate, she was disap-
pointed, and nothing I could do would avail to render her content. One thing, indeed, she was very restless for, which I denied,--the sole denial I ever gave her of any wish she had. She desired to go upon the boards herself. Some of my comrades told her, thoughtlessly, that it was a sin, with such a face as hers, to sit behind the scenes in lieu of passing before them to delight an audience. And she would fain have gone. But I--I told her bitterly, the only time that ever I spoke violently to her, that I would sooner slay her with my own hand than see her give her loveliness to the lewd public gaze.
Ay, so I felt. For I loathed to see even the passers-by on the
high-road glance freely at her. I could have struck to earth even my
best friend amongst our own company when over-easily he parried
jests and exchanged gay phrases with her.
"You are a simpleton, Piccinino," the chief of my troop said
to me. "Chance has given you, in your wife, a lantern of Aladdin. But
in lieu of using the brightness of your lamp to get you gold, you hide it
and bury it in your bosom."
I understood him: he never said it twice to me. Nor were we ever
after friends.
My comrades did not regard me with all their old careless
amity,--any one of them.
"Have a care!" I heard them say one to another. "Our
old dancing-dog, Piccinino, can growl--ay, and bite, too, it
seems. One used to be able to plague him on all sides: he never
turned; but now----"
And yet I do not think that I was jealous of her in any foolish or
barbarous manner then. I begrudged her no pleasure that came through
others. I would have had her happy at any privation to me of body or of
mind. I loved her to trick out her delicate beauty in all the fantasies she
would, and make it radiant in the eyes of all men. But when a man is as
ugly as I am, and regards the creature that he loves as I regarded her,
with breathless adoration, as a thing sent by Heaven and too perfect to
tarry long with him on earth, he cannot choose but bitterly resent any
glance or any phrase which would seem to treat a possession so sacred as
though it were a thing of mere beauty or rarity, to be admired and coveted
by any chance observer. There are countries, I have heard, where women go
always thickly veiled, hiding their beauty from all men's eyes save
those of husband or father. I do not wish that it were so in France:
I would not desire that the loveliness God has given to be the delight of
his creatures should be secreted from view, casting none of its light or
glory on surrounding
objects. But, surely, if a man may not gaze at the stars without a reverent awe, much less should he be permitted to examine with a curious stare, or accost with familiar speech, one of those beings whose outward beauty was meant as the reflection of an inward purity and sacredness. Therefore it was that I watched closely all who came near her, seeking to shield her from all obtrusive looks or words, even such as she herself might not have noticed or understood. And sometimes, not knowing why I so acted, she would be impatient or angry, and perhaps go away and be silent or petulant, like a spoiled child when it is denied. But then she had so many other moods, when she would sing and laugh and be gay! Yes, I think she was not otherwise than happy then.
It was midwinter when a great thing happened to me,--a wonder which
I had all my life dreamed of as a glory quite impossible to ever fall to
such a one as myself. Whilst we were in the central provinces, playing in a
little town at the Noël season, a man from Paris, owning a theatre
there,--it was the theatre of the Folies-Marigny,--saw me
act in our wooden booth, and thought so much of it, that he sought me out
at the close of the performance.
"You are a fine actor," he said. "Has no one ever
found that out before now, that you stroll about with
a wooden show? Come with me and I will make you known in Paris."
I could not believe my ears. Yet he was quite serious, and had meant
every word he had said. I closed with his offer, dizzy with astonishment at
such fulfilment of my most golden dream; and then I went and told her.
She threw her arms round my throat and kissed me many times.
"Ah, now I shall be very happy!" she cried. "To be in
the world at last!"
And then she fell to a thousand pretty schemes for feasts and ornaments
and all sorts of brilliancies, as though I had become possessor of some
vast estate. But I had no thought to check her ecstasies or teach her
reason. I was too full of triumph, for her sake, myself.
I was so proud and glad that night! My head was so light that I was in
amity with all creation.
I bought a simple little supper and a stoup of Burgundy, and called my
comrades in to rejoice with us; and I purchased for her some bright gilded
papers of sugared meats, and a stove-forced rose, and a thread of
amber beads, for she was a very child in all these things; and my new chief
joined with us, and we kept the night right joyously.
It was the old Nuit des Rois I knew, and all the
town was dancing and feasting, and there were not beneath its many roofs any group gladder or gayer than the light-hearted people who gathered in my attic under the eaves, by the light of one little lamp.
The Burgundy wine was good, and she looked so fair with the
snow-born rose red in her breast, and I knew that all men envied me;
and we laughed long and lightly, and my heart was fearless and content as
we drank our pledge to the Future.
Ah, Heaven! the old saw may well say that the gods make us blind ere
they drive our stumbling fools' feet to our bitter fools'
end.
Well, that same week we went to Paris. There I played under my new
master: there I won success--in a humble manner.
It was a little theatre, of no great account, and its patrons came
chiefly from students and artists and sewing-girls, and their
like,--merry people and poor. Still, it was a theatre of Paris, a
public of Paris: it was a theatre, too, of fixed position and name,
builded of wood and stone and iron; and such a change was in itself
eminence for me, Piccinino, a strolling droll, who had never played under
any better roof than a sheet of canvas, which blew to and fro as it would
in all the four winds of the air.
It was eminence for me, and might lead--who could
say?--to great things--to the greatest, perhaps. It was so much to have one's foot planted at all, one's voice at all heard, amidst the busy throng and the loud clamours of the capital.
Certes, the theatre was every night filled from floor to roof, so I
cannot doubt that I did, in a measure, stand well with this volatile,
critical, hard-to-win public of Paris. They applauded me to
the echo, and for a season I dreamed golden dreams. Truly, I was not myself
altogether so much at ease as I had been under the old, malleable, mutable
roof, which had often, indeed, been in holes, through which the rains had
dropped, but which also had been so easily taken down, folded up, and borne
whithersoever one would, where the life of the hour might promise the
best.
I had been a country stroller always. I knew nothing of the great
city: the streets seemed to pen me in a prison, and the sea of gas to
suffocate me. But, still, I was making money: I was making
also--in a minor way, indeed, but still surely--a histrionic
repute. I had ambition,--for her,--and so, when I drank a pint of
red wine, I still pledged, with firm heart, my future.
She was so well content too.
We had a little bright rose-and-white room, gilded like a
sweetmeat box, set very high under the glittering
zinc roof of a house of many stories, shut in a narrow passage-way amongst many other buildings, close against the theatre.
It was terribly dear, and no bigger than a hazel-nut, and hot and
stifling always, being so high above the roof.
But she thought it a paradise--a paradise, because above the stove
there was a mirror, and opposite on the street, far down below, there was a
busy café that was thronged the whole day long; and beneath, on the
ground-floor, was a great magazine of laces and shawls and
such-like fineries, into which the keepers thereof let her peep from
time to time, and even handle the precious stuffs, for sake of her fair
eyes.
She thought it a paradise, I say; but I--I thought wistfully, many
and many a time, of our old clean, bare, wind-swept attics, with
their empty walls, and their quaint lattices, and their shadowy eaves, and
the little ancient towns where the old belfry bells were ringing in the
quiet provinces far away.
I had always been in the air, you see--in the sun and the rain, and
the open weather: even when I had played, it had been under a tent,
where every breeze that blew stirred the awning above my head, and made the
little round coloured lamps flicker and grow brighter and duller by turns.
I had led a hardy, free,
open-air life, and the imprisonment of a city--even of such a city as Paris--was, in a manner, grievous to me.
Not that I ever let her think so. Oh no: it would have been very
selfish. She was so content.
When I came home from the day-business of the stage at noon, I
would find her always looking down into the street below, leaning her
little soft face on her hands, and watching the tide of life in the
café opposite. It was always full, as I said: there was a
barrack hard by, and the place was always gay with uniforms and noisy with
the clatter and clash of steel, as the officers ate and drank at the tables
in front of the doors, under the gilded scrollwork and the green
shutters.
It was a pretty scene: it was no wonder that she watched it; and
no doubt I seemed to her a brute, and a fool to boot, when I pulled her,
one day, from her favourite seat and drew the sun-blinds sharply. I
could not bear the lewd bold looks those soldiers cast up at her.
She broke out into a low piteous sobbing, and wailed wearily to know
what had she done. I kissed her, and knelt to her, and besought her pardon,
and blamed my jealous passion, and cursed the world which was not worthy of
a look from her.
And then she laughed--no doubt I seemed a fool
to her--such a fool, good God!--and shut her hands upon my mouth to silence me, and broke from me and threw the shutter open wide again, laughing still, to get her way thus wilfully.
The cuirassiers in the courtyard of the café down beneath laughed
too. A man poor and ugly and jealous--jealous of his wife--is a
thing ridiculous to all, no doubt.
They thought me jealous, and they laughed, those handsome, careless, gay
youngsters, drinking their breakfast wines under the green
vine-leaves and the gold scrollwork; but their thought did me wrong.
I was never jealous then: jealousy can only be born of suspicion, and
I had in her a spotless, implicit, perfect faith, to which suspicion was
impossible.
But she was to me so sacred and so precious, that a light look or a
loose word cast at her cut me like a sword. The face that had first looked
on me amidst the lilac-blossoms always seemed to me a thing of
sanctity, a gift of Heaven. I would fain have had the city crowds bend
before it as reverently as the poor peasants bend before the images of
Mary.
I was never jealous. It had seemed wonderful to me that she could give
her beauty to any creature so ungainly in person and so ill-favoured
by fortune as myself--a miracle, indeed, for which I thanked Heaven
daily. But that, having thus bestowed herself, she would be faithless, was a thought against her of which I never once was guilty. I am thankful to remember that--now.
Thankful to have been a dolt, a fool, a madman? you will say. Ah, well!
it is our moments of blindness and of folly that are the sole ones of
happiness for all of us on earth. We only see clearly, I think, when we
have reached the depths of woe.
The time went by in Paris, and I was successful in my own small way, and
she was happy. I am sure she was happy--then. She was very young and
very ignorant, and the little suppers at some cheap restaurant in the
woods, the simple ornaments and dresses I could alone afford her, the mere
sense of the stir and glow and glitter and change that were all around,
sufficed to amuse her and keep her contented--then.
Besides, she had also what is very dear to every female thing--she
had admiration everywhere, from the errand boys who cried aloud her praises
in street slang, to the titled soldiers who doffed their caps to her from
the café-court below, and would, no doubt, have heaped upon
her flowers and bonbons, and jewels and rare gifts, had I not stood betwixt
her and their smiles.
They jeered at me and jested about me many a time I knew, but I turned a
deaf ear: for her sake I would not be embroiled; and though very
surely they despised me--me, the poor, ugly comedian who owned a thing
so fair--yet they did not openly provoke me.
The grief I had--and it was one I could not change--was that I
was compelled to leave her so often in solitude.
With rehearsal and performance the theatre usurped almost all the hours.
But I made her chamber as bright as it was possible, and bands played and
troops passed by, and showmen exhibited their tricks, and churchmen defiled
with banners and crucifixes all day long through the busy street
below: she said it was amusement enough to watch it all, and she told
me she was content, and I had no suspicion. She said she was so well
pleased sitting there at the little window among the plants of musk and the
red geranium blossoms, watching that stream of street-life, which
seemed to me so tawdry, so dusty, so deafening, but which, I know well,
almost always seems paradise to women, who are seldom poets, and who are
almost never, one may say, artists.
All this while I gave offence and even, in some sense, lost friends in
many quarters, because I kept
her thus sacredly and would have none of the women of our stage associate with her. I have often thought since that this was wrong and harsh in me.
What right had I to judge? Priestly benison had never hallowed my poor
mother's loves, and yet a gentler and truer little soul never dwelt
in human body. What right had I to judge?
This poor, gay, frail, light-hearted sisterhood, which had been
about me always--had I not seen in it sacrifice, tenderness,
generosity, even heroism, many and many a time, from the first days of my
orphanage, when the blue-eyed Euphrasie had sold her necklace of
beads to get my motherless mouth bread by the weary wayside?
Had I not beheld, time out of mind, a stanch patience under poverty and
ill-usage, a cheery contentment under all the evils of adversity, a
genuine mirth that laughed through tears, a tender goodness to all comrades
in misfortune,--all these virtues and others likewise in those dear
friends of my childhood and manhood whom I banned from her because their
life was defiled by one frailty?
Yes: it was harsh in me, and presumptuous and ungrateful:
that I knew too late; and yet it was because I held my lustre lily so
soilless that I could not bear a profane breath to stir the air it dwelt
in.
Well, if this were sin in me--sin of ingratitude and of
pharisaism,--it has been punished.
So our life in Paris went by until the weeks grew into months, and in
all the gardens of the city, and all about the palaces, and in the parks
and woods, the lilac-trees were blossoming with the sweet odours
that seemed born to me of paradise.
It might be foolish,--for I was quite poor still, since the
expenses of my new and greater life were more than equal to its
profits,--but I spent many silver pieces to fill her little chamber
every day freshly with endless masses, white and purple, of those flowers
all the while they lasted. They were to me the symbol of the greatest
happiness that ever man had known on earth.
I loved them so well that I was almost superstitious about them; and
when they were faded and had lost their colour, I hardly liked to cast them
aside to go into the dust-cart; and when their fallen petals strewed
by millions the green paths through the woods and on the edge of the river,
I could never crush them as I passed along without regret.
When the last lilac-blossom had died that spring, the troop with
which I was associated had offers made to it which its leader deemed too
advantageous to reject. His lease of the theatre in Paris had expired
in the first days of May, and with the beginning of the month he changed his quarters and took us eastward to the little town of Spa, where lucrative promises had tempted him to pass the season.
I knew it well. In the old times, with my dear old Mathurin, we had
often passed through it on our way from Lorraine and Luxembourg to play at
the various kermesses of the pretty hill hamlets of the Meuse district and
the villages and bourgs of the wide Flemish plains farther northward.
But that had been many years before, and then we had set up our littie
wooden and leathern booth humbly in some retired quarter, where the poor
people of the place could come to us, for we had no means or hopes of
attracting the rich, gay crowd of foreign residents. The
wood-carvers and wood-cutters from all the villages round
about had used to throng to us; but the mass of fashion and frivolity that
scattered its gold in the town we had never approached in any way, we,
simple strollers, playing in a tent which any one might enter for a few
centimes a head.
But now it was all different.
I had an established repute, if not a very great one: I belonged
to a settled management; I had the aroma of Paris upon my name; I played at
the theatre which all the fashionable guests frequented; and I could
afford to dwell, no longer at some miserable tavern in a stifling lane, half stable and half wine-shop, but in a cheery and sunshiny little apartment that looked out upon the trees of the avenue of Marteau.
My spirits rose as I came once more amongst the woods and fields, and
heard the waters brawl and murmur their pleasant song over the stones. The
unaccustomed life of the great city had stifled and depressed me, but in
this mountain air I could breathe again.
I was even childishly happy: I could have sung aloud in very
gaiety of heart to the chiming bells of the Flemish teams and the carillons
of the churches. The leaves, the streams, the hills, the skies, all seemed
to sparkle and to smile. It was warm and light and fresh: the woods
were full of wild flowers, the fields were green with the long
hay-grasses, the sweet smell of the firs came into the valley on
every breath that blew. Ah God! how happy I felt!
In the oldest part of the little place there lived an old man and his
wife, who maintained themselves by painting fans and silk-reels and
bonbon-boxes and the like toys, such as are made in that
neighbourhood.
They had been good to me when I had come
thither, a mere lad, with Mathurin. I went to see them, and took her with me. They would scarce believe that the boy Piccinino whom they had known, could be an artist great enough to be playing to all the nobles and gentry in the theatre in the town, which, to them, appeared the grandest building of the sort that any kingdom in the universe could hold.
These old people looked long and with devout eyes of wonder at the young
beauty of my wife.
"Thou art a happy soul, Piccinino," said the old man,
heartily; and would make a present to her-though I knew he could ill
afford it--of a little black fan on which he had just painted with
much grace and truthfulness a group of white and purple violets.
The old woman looked up sharply through her spectacles, and said
nothing.
"What will she care for it?--it is not jewelled and
gilded," she muttered, as she went on with her spinning in the
doorway in the sun.
I have often wondered since how it is that the eyes of women at a glance
read the souls of other women, so cruelly, as it seems to us, and yet so
surely.
It was a pretty little fan: it had cost him much labour, though it
could only have sold for a franc or two. It was a plaything as graceful as
if it had been encrusted with diamonds--more so, I think, for the
old man had studied the forest flowers till he could portray them to the very life.
But a few days later the kindly little gift was lost: she dropped
it from the balcony, and it fell shivered to atoms on the ground.
I reproached her gently for her carelessness.
"To give thee the fan," I urged, "he will, I know
well, have to go for many a day without a bit of meat to boil with his
beans and lentils in the soup-pot."
She only laughed.
"It was worth nothing," she answered me.
I picked up the poor little broken plaything in the street below, and
put the pieces aside and kept them. It was only the carelessness of her
youth and of her sex, I told myself. But for the first time that day there
seemed to me a dissonance in the chiming bells and the murmuring streams, a
shadow on the sparkling sunshine, a taint in the sweet young summer odours
of the wood-clothed hills.
Why should she value my love, I thought, more than the little broken
fan? It was hardly worth more to her in any sense of wealth.
There were two or three of the artists of my company who used generally
to go with us: one of them sang well--he was of the south. There
were two young painters, brothers, poor but full of talent, and full of
mirth and hope: these would accompany us also. We were a gay,
light-hearted, merry little group enough, and raised the echoes of
the rocks many a time with our part-singing, and many a time brought
some great, white, mild-eyed bull from out the woods to gaze at us
with grave eyes in amazement at our laughter.
They were happy times, full of harmless gaiety and blissful belief in
the fortunes of the future, in that
pleasantest season of the earliest summer, when the first dog-roses were budding on the briers, and the abundant dews of the morning silvered every blade of grass, and were shaken off in a million drops from every stem of cowslip or bough of hawthorn that one gathered. This was yet in earliest summer, whilst the visitors were still few in numbers, and all the green alleys and pretty promenades and shadowy bridle-paths seemed almost all our own, and the fresh mountain air blew through the place cool and strong, untainted by the perfumes and the powders and the bouquets and the wine-odours of fashion.
But very soon this changed. Very soon the avenue grew gay with equipages
and riding-parties. Very soon the nobles and the idlers flocked into
the little valley-town, and all was movement and colour and change
from noon to midnight. Of course for the theatre I was glad: the
house filled nightly; our bright little comic pieces charmed an idle
audience of fainéants. I was well received and became popular, and
disputed with the Redoute in power of attraction. Of course I was glad of
this.
My impressario was well pleased with me, and offered me an increase of
salary from midsummer. I even came to be noted enough for people to point
me out when I passed into the paths or lingered to
hear the music in the pretty Promenade des Sept Heures.
"There!" they would say to one another, "do you see
him, that quaint, misshapen, ugly fellow? That is Piccinino, the French
player. Have you seen him in Le Chevreuil? Myself, I like him
better than Ravel."
Then would the other answer.
"Yes, he is clever, no doubt; but what an ugly beast! And that
pretty creature--she is his wife they say."
And then they would laugh, and the music would seem all discord to
me.
Not that I heeded the taunt about my ill looks: I had become long
used to that. I knew so well that I was ugly: that could not wound
me. It was the way in which they spoke of her, as if, because I was not
handsome, I had no title to her. And indeed it seemed so to myself
sometimes.
now that the world had come about us, and that we could no more go and
laugh and sing and drink our little cheap wine in the green woods by
ourselves without meeting scores of brilliant, languid, graceful people,
who stared at us coldly, and then turned aside and laughed.
won; he played recklessly at the tables, and won there also, because he
could so well afford to lose; he was sought and adored by many of the
elegant and weary women there; he was very rich and very attractive:
he was a man, in a word, of whom the world always talked.
trailing trains of velvet and of satin: she wanted, in a word, to be
entirely other than she was. It is a disease, very common, no doubt, but it
is mortal always.
was, but whilst her hands moved with their old skill, the tears dropped on
the network.
fast parties were not the same--never quite the same.
forsake his own people for us always, whenever he could. He would fain have
had us go in return to brilliant suppers and the like that he gave in his
rooms at the D'Orange, and at which they said that he was accustomed
to spare no extravagance. My fellow-artists went to them, but not
I: I had no means to return such costly courtesies, and it had always
been my habit to refuse what I could not repay.
bread with Carolyié once. But it was not because I ever had an evil
thought of him.
were not such as I had acted in when I had gone about with my little wooden
theatre; which, indeed, I had written chiefly myself. The studying so many
new characters, and the rehearsal of them, occupied much of my
day-time, and left me but little leisure as the season advanced.
and had shaken my hand with cordiality. And from that time he had sent no
gifts to her. But I fancied that to me he, on afterthought, resented the
words I had spoken.
the year, crowded nightly as it was, and I did not attempt to press her to
accompany me.
and mignonettes and carnations, and all fragrant midsummer things that were
growing in the warmth and the moisture. Clouds in all manner of lovely
shapes swept above the green hills, and seemed to rest on them.
and the sounds of the music and the falling waters, and the singing of many
little birds, into the dusky den where I dressed for my part in the
playhouse!
the deserted houses. Here and there the little coloured lamps glimmered.
Here and there a woman leaned from a balcony.
the lace-work that had fallen beside it, all unfinished and
untangled. I can see that always, always.
killed in me. My career was gone. My dawning repute was already a thing of
the past, forgotten by all men. You see she had destroyed all for
me--utterly.
that last night, in the fulness of my joy, I had blessed God!
to tell of all these wanderings, none of which bore any fruit.
they should have stabbed me. I avoided everyone and everything which could
remind me of what I had been, and I was morose, and perhaps in a manner
mad; I do not know.
heard all along the roads, as I went, sad, sullen murmurs of our bitter
disasters. It was not the truth exactly that was ever told at the poor
wine-shops and about the harvest-fields, but it was near
enough to the truth to be horrible.
such changes in us, it will be very unjust. We cannot escape from them.
and much of it was the proud blue blood of the old nobility. We should have
saved France, I am sure, if there had been any one who had known how to
consolidate and lead us. No one did; so it was all of no use.
The comedians and the artists did their full duty by France: the
derided kingdom of Bohemia sent hundreds of its brightest leaders in loyal
answer to the call of Death.
little space we saw the granite mass roll back from us, and we thought that
we had won.
by; he seized his fallen sabre; he swept onward with his troops; I charged
in line with my own men. With the roar of the firing in my ear, and the
shouts of our fancied triumph, I pressed onward and downward into the ranks
of the enemy: then I dropped senseless.
had I been a man in power there, sooner than sign the surrender I would
have burned Paris as the Russians did Moscow.
under the roof; the front and back walls had been torn away; I saw the day
through them; some of the gilding of the mirror still clung there.
that I joined with them. I was no politician: I hardly asked them
what they meant. I cast in my lot with theirs because I was of them, and
because it would have seemed to me a cowardice to desert them.
into a knot of horsemen on the Neuilly road, and emptied more than one
saddle.
had fallen pell-mell amidst the broken mirrors, the shattered
gilding, the scorched pictures: perhaps under the mountains of
cinders and of ruin the charred bodies of the dwellers and the owners might
be lying: no one knew.
of blood, always rising higher and higher: the corpses were strewn in
all directions. Some lay in the aisles of the churches, some on the steps
of the high altars. You know, you know: I need not tell it.
with blood, but it was the dress of a soldier of rank. As he came the glare
of the fires in front shone full on his face--his beautiful
face: I knew it in an instant.
the grasses; how the cicala sang her song in the moist, sultry eves; how
the women from the wells came trooping by, stately as monarchs, with their
water-jars upon their heads; how the hot hush of the burning noons
would fall, and all things droop and sleep except ourselves; how swift
amongst us would dart the little blue-winged birds, and hide their
heads in our white breasts and drink from our hearts the dew, and then
hover above us in their gratitude, with sweet faint music of their wings,
till sunset came.
mosses torn as we were from their birth-nests under the great cedars
that rose against the radiant native skies.
rose was the purest, the sweetest, the haughtiest of all her sisterhood ere
she went thither. But, though honour is well, no doubt, yet it surely is
better to blow free in the breeze and to live one's life out, and to
be, if forgotten by glory, yet also forgotten by pain. Nay, yet: I
have known a rose, even a rose who had but one little short life of a
summer day to live through and to lose, perish glad and triumphant in its
prime because it died on a woman's breast and of a woman's
kiss. You see there are roses as weak as men are.
flowers can live and die together; so can the poor amongst you; but we of
the cultivated garden needs must part and die alone.
thought my death would come under the crushing weight of those clanging
heels.
grateful to the God who made me, because I had not lived in vain, but often
saw sad eyes, half blinded with toil and tears, smile at me when they had
no other cause for smiles.
many a blossom of sweetness in that little nook under the roof.
home, and gave it a kinship with the glimpse of the blue sky above its pent
roofs.
smile when my lover the wind roused me from sleep with each spring, and
said in my ear, "Arise! for a new year is come."
worse than alone--with an old grandam, deaf and quite blind, who could
do nothing for her own support, but sat all day in a wicker chair by the
lattice or the stove, according as the season was hot or cold, and mumbled
a little inarticulately over her worn wooden beads.
day long, no matter how sweet the summer day might be, or how hot the tired
eyes.
my floral nation in it, save a poor colourless stone-wort, who got a
dismal living in the gutter of the roof, yet who too, in his humble way,
did good and had his friends, and paid the sun and the dew for calling him
into being.
window? That in thousands of garrets men may be dying by inches for lack of
bread, lack of hope, lack of justice, is not enough to draw any eyes upward
to them from the pavement.
colouring done to make up the due amount of labour; and she sat at her
little deal table, with her little feeble lamp, with her beautiful hair
coiled up in a great knot and her pretty head drooping so wearily--as
we do in the long days of drought--but never once looking off, nor
giving way to rebellion or fatigue, though from the whole city without
there came one ceaseless sound, like the sound of an endless sea; which
truly it was--the sea of pleasure.
pushed away a brick to give me a ray more of light. So I ceased to try and
produce for their good; and I only took just so much trouble as would keep
life in me myself. It will be the same with this man."
to my side by the open lattice. It was very late: her work was done
for the night. She stood a moment, with her lips rested softly on me,
looking down on the pavement that glistened like silver in the sleeping
rays of the moon.
find a little more time to go to mass in the cathedral, and be able to buy
a pretty blue-and-white home of porcelain for you, I should
ask nothing more of the blessed Mary--nothing more upon
earth."
working-girl, born of Breton peasants, and owning as her sole
treasures two silver ear-rings and a white rose.
stairs. He played to her in the grey of the evening on a quaint simple
flute, a relic of his boyhood, the sad, wild, touching airs of his own
southern mountains--played at his open window while the lamps burned
through the dusk, till the people listened at their doors and casements,
and gathered in groups in the passage below, and said to one another,
"How clever he is!--and yet he starves."
right and my deathless remembrance--all that no woman can love as a
rose can love them.
dust that drifted up from the pavement, and hearing little all day long
save the quarrels of the sparrows and the whirr of the engine-wheels
in a baking-house close at hand.
cabbage leaf full of cherries, having, I doubt not, gone herself without in
order to bring the ruddy fruit to them.
of the people: she had quick emotions and innocent impulses; she had
led her life straightly because it was her nature, as it is of the
lilies-her namesakes, my cousins--to grow straight to the
light, pure and spotless. But she was of the populace: she was frank,
fearless, and strong, despite all her dreams. She was glad, and she sought
not to hide it.
have seen my sisters' white breasts glow to a wondrous wavering
warmth as the sun of the west kissed them. She drew her breath with a quick
sigh. She did not answer him in words, but with a sudden movement of
exquisite eloquence, she broke from me my fairest and my last-born
blossom and threw it from her lattice into his.
that Paris made possible in their young and burdened lives, and which could
have been thus possible in no other city of the earth.
for his wedding-gift, and all the little that she made was taken for
the food and wine of the bedridden old grandam in that religious execution
of a filial duty which is so habitual in the French family-life,
that no one dreams of counting it as any virtue.
them with all the nameless mystical charm and the exquisite grace of touch
which belong to the man who is by nature a great artist. The little trade
could not at its best price bring much, but it brought bread; and we were
happy.
hidden--looked at all this from behind my blossoms, and then gave up
the open air and the evening stroll that were so dear a pastime to her, and
whispered to René, "Play, or they will be
disappointed."
in the booths of the fairs, at fifty centimes apiece--than we, the
roses, can help being fragrant and fair.
prettiest of them all, with a tambourine-girl dancing in a wreath of
Provence roses. René had copied me with loving fidelity in the
flowers, and with a sigh had murmured as he cast the box aside when
finished, "That ought to fetch at least a franc!" But he had
got no more than the usual two sous for it.
and her breast heave. I too trembled in all my leaves: were
recognition and the world's homage coming to René at last?
must be. So must that little study of the beggar-boy looking through
the gilded gates into the rose-gardens--it is charming,
charming. Your price for those?"
the easel and his head bent on his chest. The room, I think, swam round
him.
a mere pinch of dust to what you will make in six months'
time,--if--if--you hear me?--your name is brought
before the public of Paris in my galleries and under my auspices. I suppose
you have heard something of what I can do, eh? Well, all I can do I will do
for you; for you have a great talent, and without introduction, my friend,
you may as well roll up your pictures and burn them in your stove to save
charcoal? You know that?"
that when he stretched his hands out with such passionate desire to touch
the hem of the garment of Fortune and catch the gleam of the laurels of
Fame, he might be in truth only holding them out to fresh fetters.
lustre of happiness and grew troubled with a sort of cloud of perplexity.
He did not seem to understand.
chose; but he, the old man who spoke, could assure him that nothing would
be so lucrative to him as those bacchantes in wreaths of roses and young
tambourine-players gorge au vent
dancing
in a bed of violets, and beautiful marquises, powdered and jewelled,
looking over their fans, which he had painted for those poor little
two-sous boxes of the populace, and the like of which, exquisitely
finished on enamel or ivory, set in gold and tortoise-shell rimmed
with pearls and turquoises or opals and diamonds, would deceive the finest
connoisseur in Europe into receiving them as--whatever they might be
signed and dated,
one did! If that poor little two-sous box had been less lavishly and
gracefully decorated, it would never have arrested his eyes in the
bonbon-booth at St. Cloud. The old man paused to take snuff and
receive an answer.
of the man who held the scales of his fate, and could weigh out for his
whole life's portion either fame and fortune or obscurity and
famine.
endless light of summer suns on palace terraces, and I drooped and shivered
and sickened, and was twice captive and twice exiled; and knew that I was a
little nameless, worthless, hapless thing, whose fairest chaplet of blossom
no hand would ever gather for a crown.
Give not up our lives for a mere phantasy of honour."
whom Lili loved had tried to write his title to the immortality of fame,
were at last finished--finished,--for the rats ate them.
lost René--we saw his face no more. Yet he could not be in his
grave, I knew, for Lili, clasping my barren branches to her breast, would
murmur, "Whilst he still lives I will live--yes, yes,
yes!"
Regnault in the sortie yesterday. He could not speak: he had only
strength to give me this for you. Be comforted: he has died for
Paris."
more return--for me the sun can never again be shining--for me
the greenest garden world is barren as a desert.
men and maidens went on every holy day and feast-day in the
summer-time to seek for wood-anemones, and lilies of the
pools, and the wild campanula, and the fresh dog-rose, and all the
boughs and grasses that made their house-doors like garden bowers,
and seemed to take the cushat's note and the linnet's song into
their little temple of God.
winds that arose and blew and swept the lands around it, but never came
near enough to harm it, lying there, as it did, in its loneliness like any
lark's nest.
bitter wintry night, of how a king had been slain to save the people; and
she remembered likewise--remembered it well, because it had been her
betrothal-night and the sixteenth birthday of her life--how a
horseman had flashed through the startled street like a comet, and had
called aloud, in a voice of fire, "Gloire! gloire!
gloire!--Marengo! Marengo! Marengo!" And how the village had
dimly understood that something marvellous for France had happened afar
off, and how her brothers, and her cousins, and her betrothed, and she with
them, had all gone up to the high slope over the river, and had piled up a
great pyramid of pine-wood and straw and dried mosses, and had set
flame to it, till it had glowed in its scarlet triumph all through that
wondrous night of the sultry summer of victory.
had known, we should not have gone up and lit the bonfire."
heirloom and a nuptial gift. She was always shod in her wooden sabots, and
she always walked abroad with her staff of ash.
tunes in the other hemisphere, had left her a little money, and she had a
little cottage and a plot of ground, and a pig, and a small orchard. She
was well-to-do, and could leave it all to Bernadou; and for
ten years she had been happy, perfectly happy, in the coolness, and the
sweetness and the old familiar ways and habits of the Berceau.
long as she shall live, and to get up with the lark, and to go to mass
every Sunday, and to be a loyal son to your country. Nothing
more."
devouring. Of all forms of government he was alike ignorant. So long as he
tilled his little angle of land in peace, so long as the sun ripened his
fruits and corn, so long as famine was away from his door and his
neighbours dwelt in good-fellowship with him, so long he was happy,
and cared not whether he was thus happy under a monarchy, an empire, or a
republic.
within in the winter-time with melody, and in the summer gay without
as a king's parterre.
store of linen, no piece of silver plate, no little round sum in money with
the poor child. But what does it matter? We have enough for three. It is
wicked indeed for parents to live so that they leave their daughter
portionless, but it is no fault of the child's. Let them say what
they like, it is a reason the more that she should want a roof over her
head and a husband to care for her good."
same person, and has plucked the leaves of a daisy away to learn
one's fortune, spoken words are not very much wanted.
murmured; "for I am very old, Margot, and he is alone, all
alone."
live on and on and on in the Berceau, and sometimes perhaps think a little
of me when the nights are long and they sit round the fire."
wedded, going with their friends one sunny morning up the winding
hill-path to the little grey chapel whose walls were hidden in ivy,
and whose sorrowful Christ looked down through the open porch across the
blue and hazy width of the river.
tional reverence for her husband and his home, that Reine Allix day by day
blessed the fate that had brought to her this fatherless and penniless
child.
wheel, and ever and again watching the flame reflected on the fair head of
Bernadou or in the dark, smiling eyes of Margot.
talk a little, and tumbled like a young rabbit amongst the flowering
grasses.
the stones of the street, and above all the great calm heavens and the glow
of the sun that had set.
her old master. None of them knew why, yet the sight of him made the air
seem cold and the night seem near.
and chattered, and, standing outside their doors in the cool nights,
thought that some good had come to them and theirs.
could say not?--with epaulettes and ribbons of honour.
and scarcely drew rein as they shouted to the cottagers to know whether
they had seen go by a man running for his life.
soms of our maiden-hood--were sent to be bought and sold in
Paris. We sinned therein, and this is the will of God."
his fields barren, and his orchard uncared for, and his wife to sicken and
starve, and his grandmother to perish alone in her ninety-third
year. They jeered and flouted and upbraided him, those patriots who
screamed against the fallen Empire in the wineshop, but he looked them
straight in the eyes, and held his peace, and did his daily work.
nerves his arm. Neither he nor Reine Allix could see that a man's
duty might lie from home; but in that home both were alike ready to dare
anything and to suffer everything.
base gay life in the city; mandates from the government of defence sent to
every hamlet in the country; stray news-sheets brought in by
carriers, or hawkers, and hucksters,--all these by degrees told them
of the peril of their country--vaguely, indeed, and seldom truthfully,
but so that by mutilated rumours they came at last to know the awful facts
of the fate of Sedan, the fall of the Empire, the siege of Paris.
in such matters. The child slept soundly in its cradle by the hearth,
smiling while it dreamed. Margot spun at her wheel. Reine Allix sat by the
fire, seldom lifting her head from her long knitting-needles, except
to cast a look on her grandson or at the sleeping child. The little wooden
shutter of the house was closed. Some winter roses bloomed in a pot beneath
the little crucifix. Bernadou's flute lay on a shelf: he had
not had heart enough to play it since the news of the war had come.
we must die, let us die here," she said, in a voice that
was low, and soft, and grave.
upon them. They dared not flee: even in their own woods the foe might
lurk for them. One man indeed did cry aloud, "Shall we stay here in
our houses to be smoked out like bees from their hives? Let us
fly!"
will," murmured old Mathurin. "What can we do? We have no
arms--no powder, hardly--no soldiers--no defence."
humble grace to the dire foe. "If we do otherwise," they said,
"the soldiers will surely slay us, and what can a miserable little
hamlet like this achieve against cannon and steel and fire?"
one shot fired--nay, only one musket found--and the enemy puts a
torch to the whole place?"
bury it with the rest under the altar in the old chapel on the hill.
threshold, and drew his head down to hers and kissed him between the
eyes.
fatigue and pain. At night he had broken from them and had fled: they
were close at hand, he said, and had burned the town from end to end
because a man had fired at them from a housetop. That was all he knew.
blown in millions by the wind. The little houses on either side the road
were dark, for the dwellers in them dared not show any light that might be
a star to allure to them the footsteps of their foes. Bernadou sat with his
arms on the table, and his head resting on them. Margot nursed her
son: Reine Allix prayed.
dowers cast aside in derision or trampled into a battered heap. They saw
the pet lamb of their infants, the silver ear-rings of their brides,
the brave tankards they had drunk their marriage wine in, the tame bird
that flew to their whistle, all seized for food or seized for spoil.
country, and the woestricken faces of their neighbours, and the moving
soldiery with their torches, and the quivering forms of the
half-dying horses.
and then she laughed--a laugh so terrible that the blood of the
boldest there ran cold.
for her mind was gone, and she fancied that he only slept.
and regained consciousness; she remembered all, she understood all:
she knew that he was dead.
ran bleating with the wool burning on their living bodies. The little caged
birds fluttered helpless, and then dropped, scorched to cinders. The aged
and the sick were stifled in their beds. All things perished.
When I moved in the crowded alleys amidst those
I knew they thought so: I wondered often if she did likewise.
So, though I had success and fair promise of the future from my present
popularity, I was ill at ease
Page 134
Amongst these--we met him often--was a young noble of the
southern provinces, the Marquis de Carolyié, a cavalry soldier and a
man of wealth. He was as beautiful as a woman: he was beautiful
living--and dead. I see his face now, there where the lilac flowers
are.
What? I am alone in my cell, you say, and it is late in the autumn, and
the lilac trees are all torn with shot and ploughed up with
cannon-bails all over France, and will blossom no more this year,
nor any other year, but are all killed--for ever, for ever!
You think that my brain wanders? It is not so. You cannot see the dead
man's face, you cannot smell the lilac flowers, but I can. No, I am
not mad. I am quite calm. I will tell you how it all happened. Let me go on
in my own way.
This young Marquis de Carolyié came into the Ardennes with the
midsummer. We saw him very often, a dozen times a day. Every one is always
seeing every one else in Spa.
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I held aloof as much as I could from the gay world. I had nothing in
common with it, and no means to shine amidst it. Besides, every evening I
was playing at the theatre; and as I knew no woman with whom to leave my
wife, I took her with me to the playhouse, and whilst I was upon the stage
she stayed in my dressing-chamber.
It was dull, I knew, very dull for her: she wanted to be at the
Kursaal and at the balls, I knew, but none of the women there of any fair
repute would have associated with her, a girl of the populace, the wife of
a comic actor; and with those of light fame I would never let her exchange
a word. So we went hardly at all into any of the resorts of the idle
people, yet we saw them and they saw us in the promenades, by the bands of
music and in the woods; and so we came a dozen times a day by chance across
Carolyié's path, or he, by design, across ours.
He lodged at the D'Orange, and could have had no call to pass and
repass, as he did, down our avenue; but this he would do, either riding or
on foot, continually.
I noticed him at first for his great beauty: people as ugly as I
am are sure to note any singular physical perfection. He rode in the
steeple-chases too, and
Page 136
I ought to have said ere now that she had her first anger against
me--or at least the first she showed--on the score of the
gaming-tables. She had urged me with the prettiest and most
passionate insistence to try and make my fortune in a night at the
roulette-ball. And I had refused always.
I was no better than other men; I did not condemn what they did; but
gaming had no charm for me, and it seemed to me that in one who had so
little as I it would be utter madness to court ruin by staking that little
on the chance of an ivory ball. And my resolve on this point was very
bitter to her.
It seemed to her so cruel in me, when by one lucky hazard I might make
in an hour as much as it took me years to earn. She wanted dresses,
cachemires, laces, jewels, like those of the great ladies that she saw; she
wanted to sweep along the grassy roads with carriage-horses in
gilded harness and with chiming bells, like the aristocratic teams that
trotted by; she wanted to go to the Redoute of an evening in
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She was a soft, dainty, mignonne thing, full of natural grace, though
she had been but a little Loirais peasant girl making lace in a
garret: she would have taken kindly to affluence and luxury, and
would have looked at home in them, no doubt. But how could I give her them?
It was impossible.
I could not run the chance of fortune at the roulette-wheel when,
if I had lost my little all, she would have been cast a beggar on the
world.
So this was a difference and a barrier between us.
She would not pardon me, and I could not alter my resolve against my
reason and my conscience.
But I think her thoughts were first drawn to Carolyié because she
heard from some of our people how recklessly he played at nights, and how
continually he won.
Well, one evening he came behind the scenes at our theatre. He knew our
chief, it seemed, and was made welcome. He paid me many courteous
compliments. He was so frank, so easy, so kindly in his ways, I could not
choose but like him. Still, I shut the door of my dressing-room in
his face.
She was there, making lace for herself, as her habit
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"It is so dull!" she murmured piteously. "It is so
dull! You do not think of that, you! You are on the stage there, in the
light, with all the people before you applauding you, and calling you on;
but here! It is miserable, miserable! I can hear them laugh and shout and
clap their hands, while I am all alone!"
I could not bear to see her so. I took blame to myself for my cruel
carelessness. The next night I asked for a stage-box for her, and
she passed the hours that I played in front. Whilst I was acting I saw
Carolyié with her. It seemed that he had requested my chief to take
him thither, which had been done. I joined them between the acts.
He told us that he was very weary of the daily round of gaieties, as
they were called. He begged us to let him join us in our little breakfast
parties in the woods. He had heard us singing often, he had said, and had
longed to get away from his friends and join us and laugh with us. I
assented willingly.
I liked the young man, and his gallant, gracious ways and candid eyes,
that were blue as the cornflowers. I had no thought of any evil, and I had
a perfect faith in her.
So the next day he went with us. But our break-
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He brought his carriage, with its four black horses with their Flemish
collars and silver bells, and he would have us drive with him; and when the
others came on foot, heated and dusty, and joined us at
Géronstère, it was not quite the same. My comrades were never
quite so merrily absurd in their vagaries, nor did the buffo songs sound
ever quite so joyously as they had done when we had all walked up the hilly
road together, shouting and rallying one another, and gathering ferns and
foxgloves for our caps, like children out of school.
It was no fault of the Marquis de Carolyié; he was cordial and
gay and familiar, as though he were a Bohemian like ourselves; but yet,
with those horses champing in the background in their silver harness, with
the champagne that he had brought superseding our cheap little thin wine,
with the bearskins and tigerskins that his servants spread for our seats
over the green hill-mosses;--with all this some subtle charm of
mirth had fled, some sense of inequality, of difference, had arisen.
I think he must have found us nearly as dull as he said that his own
great world was.
He took greatly to our company, however; he would
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They thought, no doubt, that I kept her away from jealous fear, but I
had no feeling of the kind: that I swear. I liked the young man, and
I had no suspicion of evil. It was only that I had always been in a manner
proud amongst those whom birth and wealth made my superiors in station, and
I could not become a debtor.
It seemed to me that it would have a very ill look if I, a man ugly and
poor, and struggling in my first efforts after fame, should accept the
gifts and banquets of this rich young aristocrat. I knew well how my
companions would all laugh and sneer and shrug their shoulders, and mutter,
"They ask Peccinino because his wife has a fair face; and the fool
goes. Oh ho! he knows how his bread is buttered!"
I knew the sort of scoffs that they would surely cast; and I thought it
worthy neither of her innocence nor of my honesty to incur them; so that I
never broke
Page 141
Here again there arose matter of difference betwixt her and myself. She
thought me harsh and cruel and tyrannous that I would not accept for myself
or her the many brilliant offers of the young Marquis; and I--I could
not tell her the real reasons which influenced me; I could not soil her ear
with the things that mean, vile tongues would say; and so my motives
doubtless seemed to her but poor ones, and perhaps she fancied that I
crossed her will and denied her pleasure from sheer caprice or
hardness.
For a while she reproached me bitterly; for many days she would upbraid
me in her pretty and impetuous manner, with her petulant, childlike anger
continually; she would take no enjoyment in any scheme that I proposed nor
any toy I bought for her; she would tell me always that I hated to see her
happy.
It was a cruel saying, for she knew, as God knew, that I would have laid
down my life any day to give her joy. But she was disappointed, and blind
to justice, and angered like a spoilt child that is denied a plaything; the
glitter of the young man's gay and gracious life had dazzled her.
After a week or two had lapsed, however, she ceased to reproach me
aloud.
Page 142
She grew very silent, and seemed strangely softened into obedience to my
desires on all subjects. She did not care to go out nearly so much as she
used to do. It was with some trouble that I prevailed on her to go forth at
the hours when the bands played.
She would sit all day long by the window of our little chalet in the
Marteau Road, working at her lace, with a cluster of flowers on the table
before her. She talked little; she did everything I asked her; she was
often in reverie, musing, with a smile upon her lips, and when I spoke to
her after some minutes' silence, she would start up as if awaking
suddenly from a dream.
I thought she was not well, and grew anxious, but she assured me that
she ailed nothing; and indeed I had never seen her sweet eyes clearer or
the rose bloom brighter on her cheeks. I thought it was the mountain air
perhaps which was too strong, and made her listless.
Of course I had to leave her very often. I could not anyway avoid it. We
were the only company at Spa: and to amuse the fastidious audience
for which we played, we were obliged to change our little pieces almost
every night.
This entailed on us great fatigue, and most of all on me, because the
kind of pieces that we now performed
Page 143
Of an evening she would always go with me to the theatre, and sit in the
little baignoir which they assigned
her:
occasionally, when I joined her in the entr'actes, I found
Carolyié there, but not very often. He somewhat avoided me. I
supposed that I might have given him some cause for offence in my
persistent refusal of the many invitations which he had pressed upon me in
the beginning of the summer.
Once, too, in quite the earliest days of his appearance there, he had
sent her a magnificent bouquet of rare flowers; and I had taken him aside,
and spoken to him frankly.
"You mean well and in all kindness, I know," I said to him,
"but do nothing of this sort with us. Remember that what is a mere
pretty grace of courtesy amongst your equals is to people poor and obscure
as we are a debt that we can ill carry without losing the only honour that
we have--our title to respect ourselves."
He had seemed moved, and had coloured a little,
Page 144
One night, when the summer was well advanced, I was to play in a quite
new piece, in which it was thought that I should achieve a signal
success.
There were some very great people at that time in Spa; for want of
something to do they came to our little entertainments. The favour with
which they received and spoke of me was something very promising, and made
me more and more valued by my chief. On the whole, life was very good and
pleasant to me at that time, and many whose words were of weight said that
I should become with time and practice one of the best comedians of the
country.
That night she pleaded that she was not quite well--she had a
headache from the heat of the past day, and feared the suffocating
atmosphere of the theatre.
She smiled and sang a little to herself, and told me she would sit by
the open window in the little alcove which she had made peculiarly her own,
and wait for me and hear the tidings of the night's triumphs when I
returned.
I knew the theatre was oppressive at this season of
Page 145
I took her an immense knot of white roses which I had bought in the
town. She set them in a large blue jar, and said their fragrance and
freshness had already done her good. She kissed me, and threw her arms
about my neck, and murmured, with a little tender laugh, "Au revoir,
au revoir!" and then bade me go or I should be late.
I left her sitting in the window, the unlit lamp, with a small crucifix
against it, on the table by her, with the jar of roses.
She had her frame and bobbins, and was working at her lace. She looked
at me from the open lattice, and waved me a second adieu.
I had no thought, no suspicion. I only said to myself, "Surely she
has learned to love me a little now."
It is an old old story, you will say. Yes, very old.
I left her, and went to the theatre. I remember walking down the avenue
in the brilliant sunlight. It had rained at noonday. It was a red and
golden evening, very beautiful. The band was playing in the Place Royale.
Every one was out. From the little gardens there were all sorts of sweet
scents from roses
Page 146
I saw the people go in and out of the gaming-rooms. I pitied them
for wasting this divine weather, which they were all free to enjoy as they
would, in that feverish atmosphere. Amongst them there came out
Carolyié. He appeared to avoid or not to see me; he passed by on the
other side, and went on to dine at Baas-Cogez.
Some one near me said,
"What good-fortune that young man has! He wins every day.
If he goes on like that one week more, he will break the bank."
Another added,
"Because he wants nothing, he gets everything."
I heard, but I did not envy him: I envied no one. I would not have
changed places with a king, though I was but a poor actor going to his
work, to be shut up in a steaming theatre to amuse others with the tricks
of gesture and of language. I would not have exchanged my lot for that of
an emperor.
I was so happy that night, as I went on through the town, away from the
smell of the gardens and woods,
Page 147
The new piece was called Le Pot de Vin de Thibautin. It was
very absurd and humourous, and yet graceful. I have never played in it
since, and yet every line of it is burnt into my mind.
I had a fresh and genuine success in the part of Thibautin.
I was recalled five times, and the house, which was a full one,
applauded me to the echo. A great duke who was there, a foreigner, came
behind the scenes and gave me a gold snuff-box of his own, and spoke
very high words of praise. I knew my future was sure: I had a
reputation which would grow with every year in France. I went from the
theatre a happy man.
It was still very warm--a beautiful dark, starless night. The
clouds were heavy: there was a sort of hush in the air. There was
only just light enough in the little town to make deeper by contrast the
circle of the hills. The flowers scented the air more strongly still than
at sunset: they were heavy with great dews.
All was so quiet. Everyone was in the ballroom or the card-room.
The casements stood wide open in
Page 148
I went on down the avenue of Marteau.
In the stillness I could hear the brook running over the stones, and the
rustle of the leaves in the water as the wind stirred them.
I looked up at the windows of my little rooms. The light shone through
their green shutters. The vine that climbed around them was dark against
the reflection. I looked up, and, though I had known little of God in the
life that I had led, I blessed Him.
Yes, I blessed God that night.
I opened the door, and went up the stairs, and entered my own chamber. I
looked for her in her accustomed place, near the lamp, in the alcove, where
the great jar of white roses stood. She was not there.
I need not tell you any more, the story is so old, so old.
For many weeks after that night I knew nothing. I was mad, I believe.
They say so. I cannot tell; I remember nothing; only that blank deserted
room, and the great mass of white roses, and the lamp with the little
crucifix under it, and the empty chair with
Page 149
She had gone without any word or any sign; and yet it was all so plain.
Everyone had foreseen it, so they said--everyone except myself.
From that night nothing more was ever seen or heard in that place of him
or of her: the people of the house knew nothing; so at least they
said. But on the floor, under the mirror, there was a torn letter, which
had been forgotten or mislaid.
Not many words were in it, but they were words enough to tell me that
when she had kissed me on the mouth, and smiled, and sent me on my way to
play in my new part that evening at sunset, she had known that when the
night fell she would betray me.
It is a woman's way, they say.
I might be really mad: they told me that I was; it may be so. I
think it was quite late in autumn when I had any sense or consciousness of
what I did or what I spoke. The place was all deserted, the woods were
brown, the music was silent, the flowers were dead.
I awoke stupidly, as it were, but yet I was quite calm, and I knew what
had chanced to me. It seemed to me that I had lived many years since that
horrible night. My hair was gray. I felt feeble and grown old.
Page 150
Life was ended for me, you know. I wondered why I was not dead as others
were, and quiet in my grave.
When they let me go I walked out into the forsaken streets: they
looked so strange--there was scarcely a soul in them, and the shutters
of the houses were closed. I had only one idea--to follow them, to
find them. And I had lost so much time: it was now nearly winter.
My chief and his troop had all gone, of course. What little money I had
had people had taken whilst I was unconscious. They told me I owed my life
to charity. My life! I laughed aloud in their faces.
They were afraid of me: they thought I was mad still. But I was
not. I knew what I did, and I had one fixed purpose left, which was quite
clear to me, and for which alone I endured to live an hour.
I was a fool--oh yes!--and she was worthless. No doubt, no
doubt. But then--I loved her.
Not that I ever dreamed of winning her back. Nay, do not think so base a
thought of me. My life had been upright and without shame in the sight of
men: I would not have stained it with any weakness so unmanly and so
foul. But I had a purpose, and that one purpose gave me nerve and
strength.
In the gray of the morning I left the town. I had not a coin in the
world. My one little talent was
Page 151
But no doubt she never counted the cost. They do not think, those fair,
soft, smiling things.
When I had come into that valley I had had an honest past, a precious
present, a hopeful future. When I left it--
Well, it matters not now. I died then. The bullets to-morrow for
me can have no pain.
It signifies little to tell you how I have subsisted betwixt the time
that I quitted the little town in the mountains, and this day when I lie
under sentence of death.
My old career had become to me abhorrent, impossible. Such skill as I
had been master of had perished out of me. If I had gone upon the stage, I
could not have said a word nor moved a limb. The old pursuit, the old
pleasure, familiar and dear to me from my childhood, was all withered up
for ever.
Men have played--and women too, I know--a thousand times with
hearts broken and bleeding, and the world has applauded them. But with me
any talent I had ever possessed was gone for ever: to have passed
within a playhouse would have made me mad, I think. That last night I had
been so happy--
Page 152
I lived--no matter how. The life of a very wretched creature, but
still not the life of a beggar. The manner of my existence from my birth up
had taught me to live almost upon nothing, and had taught me also many ways
of providing for myself such scanty daily bread as I was forced to eat.
All the winter long I sought for tidings of her--and him. But the
land was wide, and months had gone by, and I had no knowledge of where he
dwelt, and I gleaned nothing that was of any service to me.
When I reached Paris I abode there for a while. I reasoned that soon or
late--being of fair fortune and of lofty rank--he would of a
surety come thither. So I waited.
I waited all through the winter, but he did not come. I worked my way
into his own south-country, and tried to find traces of him. I saw
his great palace amongst pine forests, the palace as of a prince, but I
learned that he had not been there for several seasons. He had deserted it
almost utterly for the world of cities.
They said that he was in Italy.
I travelled thither, but there I was always too late: he had left
each city before I entered it. It is no use
Page 153
Once, in Venice, I only missed him by a day: a gondolier told me
that he had a woman with him fair as a rose.
Ah, God! that was in the sweet time of spring. Everywhere the lilacs
were in flower.
I lived to hear that and to see the trees blossom. How can the bullets
hurt me to-morrow?
Let me make an end quickly. I lived, wretchedly, indeed, but still I
lived on: I would not lie down and die without my vengeance.
The summer came, and with summer war. When it was declared I was on the
frontier. I hastened into my own country as well as I could, being on foot
always, and having to work my way from village to village, day by day.
I had lost everything. I had become feeble, stupid, dull: I was
what they call a monomaniac, I think. I thought always I saw her face
looking toward me amidst the lilac clusters. I never spoke to anyone of
her, but that was what I saw, always.
I had lost all the mind I had ever had, and when I met any of my old
comrades I shunned them.
Some of them wanted to pity me, to assist me. They meant well, no doubt,
but I would sooner that
Page 154
But when I heard of war I seemed to myself to awake. It seemed to call
to me like a living creature. I was good for nothing else, but I could
still strike, I thought. Besides, I knew he was a soldier. It would go hard
if I found him not somewhere in the mêlée.
And indeed I loved France: still, in the misery of my life, I
loved her for all that I had had from her.
I loved her for her sunny roads, for her cheery laughter, for her
vine-hung hamlets, for her contented poverty, for her gay sweet
mirth, for her pleasant days, for her starry nights, for her little bright
groups at the village fountain, for her old brown, humble peasants at her
wayside crosses, for her wide, wind-swept plains all red with her
radiant sunsets. She had given me beautiful hours; she is the mother of the
poor, who sings to them so that they forget their hunger and their
nakedness; she had made me happy in my youth. I was not ungrateful.
It was in the heats of September that I reached my country. It was just
after the day of Sedan. I
Page 155
The blood-thirst which had been upon me ever since that night
when I found her chair empty seemed to burn and seethe, till I saw nothing
but blood--in the air, in the sun, in the water.
I had always been of a peaceful temper enough. I had always abhorred
contention. I had lived quietly, in amity and agreement at all times with
my fellow-creatures. It had used even to be a jest against me that
if any man were to rob me I should only think of how best I could shield
him from justice. But all that was changed.
I had become, as it were, a beast of prey. I wanted to
kill, to appease the sickly hot thirst always in me. You do
not know? Well, pray to God, if you have one, that you may never know.
No man, I think, is ever safe from coming to know it, if Fate so wills.
A day can change us so that the very mother who bore us would not recognise
her sons.
I hated myself, and yet I could not alter what I had become. If we are
held accountable hereafter for
Page 156
By the time I reached the centre of France, they were everywhere forming
new corps and bands of francs-tireurs. In one of these latter I
enrolled myself. I was strong of body and of good height, though somewhat
misshapen: they were glad of me. For me, I had only one idea--to
strike for the country, and, soon or late, to reach him.
I fought several times, they said--well, I do not know. Probably I
did, for I flew on them like a tiger--that I can remember--and of
personal pain or peril I had never any consciousness.
We lived in the woods. We hid by day: by night we scoured the
country. We made fierce raids, we stopped convoys, we cut telegraph wires,
we intercepted orderlies, we attacked and often routed the invaders'
cavalry. We knew that if taken we should be hanged like common murderers
for the guilt of patriotism, but I do not think any one of us ever paused
for that: we only attacked them with the greater desperation.
Sometimes, in the forests or on the highway we would find the body of
some of our comrades hung by the neck to a straight tree, though he had
been taken fighting fairly for his country's sake: such a sight
did not make us gentler. We poured out blood like water,
Page 157
Guerillas like us can do much, very much, but to do so much that it is
victory we must have a genius amidst us. And we had none. If the First
Bonaparte had been alive and with us, we should have chased the foe as
Marius the Cimbri.
I think other nations will say so in the future: at the present
they are all dazzled, they do not see clearly--they are all
worshipping the rising sun. It is blood-red, and it blinds them.
In time it became known that I fought, they said, like ten men in one.
They gave me an officer's grade in the real army. It was the doing of
Gambetta, I believe.
For me it made no difference. Place, name, repute,--what could
these be to me? I was dead--dead with my old life: it was a
devil, I thought, that inhabited my body, and drank himself with blood into
a likeness of humanity--as humanity is in war.
I was drafted from the free corps into the battalions of Bourbaki. I saw
more service, hard service, and the Republic said that I did well. By my
side there often fought, and often fell, old comrades of my own.
Page 158
Well, all this while I never saw his face, though continually I searched
for it, and for it alone, in the tempest of a charge and in the
slaughter-heaps after battle.
"Is it a brother you seek always?" men asked me often,
seeing how I would lift up face after face from amongst the dead upon a
battle-field, and let each one drop, and go on again upon my quest.
And I answered them always, "One closer than a brother."
For was he not?
But all this while I never saw his face.
France was a great sea in storm, on which the lives of all men were as
frail boats tossing to their graves: some were blown east, some
west: they passed each other in the endless night, and never knew,
the tempest blew so strong.
One day there was a bitter strife. It was in the time of our last
struggle. We were trying to cut our way through the iron wall that had
raised itself round Paris.
We failed, as the world knows, but we strove hard that day. At least all
those around me did, and for a
Page 159
In that moment, in the white thick shroud of smoke where I pressed
forward on foot with my comrades of the line, there came on with us, in a
beautiful fierce sweep, like lightning, a troop of horse half cut to
pieces, with many of its chargers riderless, and with its thinned ranks
hidden in clouds of blinding dust.
But shattered though it was, it charged for us: it was one of the
southern nobles' free corps of cavalry, the Cuirassiers of
Corrèze.
Close against me a grey horse, shot through the body, reeled and
fell: the rider of it sank an instant, then shook himself free and
rose.
It was he--at last!
He knew me, and I him, even in that mad moment.
I sprang upon him like a beast; my sword was at his throat; the smoke
was all around us; no one saw; he was disarmed and in my power.
My men shouted together, "En avant! en avant!" They thought
they were victorious.
I heard, I remembered: he too fought for France. I dared not slay
him. I let him go.
"Afterwards! afterwards!" I said in his ear. He knew well
what I meant.
He caught a loose charger that galloped snorting
Page 160
When the surgeon found me at dawn the next day, I had no wound on
me.
For the victory--it had lived only in vanquished soldiers'
dreams, as all the victories of France have lived in this bitter
season.
I woke to consciousness and to remembrance, saying again and again in my
heart, "Afterwards! afterwards!"
The time soon came.
I saw him no more then. The Cuirassiers of Corrèze passed
eastward. Those whom I served sent me into the capital. It was now the
beginning of the new year.
There soon came to us that deadliest hour when all we had done and
endured received as recompense the shame of the capitulation.
How long is it ago?--a day, a year?
I cannot tell. I was amongst those who held it a crime, an outrage, a
betrayal. I did not pretend to have any knowledge, any statecraft, but I
knew that,
Page 161
There were many who thought as I did, but we were not asked, were not
counted. We had but to hold our tongues, and stand quiet and see the
Germans enter Paris.
Then you know this other war came, the civil war. I was in the capital
still. It seemed to me that the people were in the right. I cannot argue,
but I think so still. They might go ill to work unwisely perhaps, but they
asked nothing unreasonable, and they were not at fault--in the
commencement, at least.
When the strife and carnage had ceased, I felt very strange. I felt as
men do who have been long in the great roar of a cataract, and who come
suddenly again where all is quiet. The calm seems to daze them. So the
stillness bewildered me.
I began to think that it had all been a dream, a nightmare; only I
remembered so well the look of his eyes into mine when my steel was at his
throat, and if I dropped asleep a while I always awoke muttering,
"Afterwards! afterwards!"
At this time I often went and looked at the house where I had dwelt with
her in Paris.
A shell had laid open the little rose-and-white room
Page 162
Another shell had struck the little gay theatre where I had played for
the first and last time in Paris: it was now a blank and smoking
ruin. And it had been such a little while ago!--Great Heaven!
At such times I asked myself why I had spared him.
I was dull and silent, and lived wholly to myself: all the people
I had known were slain or had perished of want.
I made no new friends, I dwelt aloof. Nevertheless, the day came when I
had to choose sides: whilst one lives at all on earth one cannot be a
coward.
I chose the side of the people; I cast in my lot with them; I remained
in Paris. They might be right, they might be wrong--I do not say; I
knew they were my class, my kind, my brethren. I abided by their
election.
The world will always say they were wrong because they failed: of
course; but I think they were only wrong in this--that they tried a
mighty experiment before the earth was ripe for it. It is fatal to be
before your time--always.
But it was not because I thought them very right
Page 163
All that horrible season went by slowly, slowly. It was but yesterday,
you say: it seems a thousand years ago.
I was cooped up in the city: it was much worse than the first
siege. I went out in many sorties. I made no doubt he was at Versailles,
and every day that I arose and went into the air I said in my soul,
"There will be no need to spare him--now."
On the bastions where the red flag was set, through the smoke of guns, I
used to stand hour after hour, and look across at the woods of Versailles,
and think to myself,--
"If only we might meet once more--only once more!"
For I was free now: his brethren fought against mine. It was the
thought that nerved my arm for the Commune.
I think it was with many as with me; or something like it.
I remember in that ghastly time seeing a woman put the match to a piece
whose gunner had just dropped dead. She fired with sure aim: her shot
swept straight
Page 164
"You have a good sight," I said to her.
She smiled.
"This winter," she said slowly, "my children have all
died for want of food--one by one, the youngest first. Ever since then
I want to hurt something--always. Do you understand?"
I did understand: I do not know if you do. It is just these things
that make revolutions.
This is only away from us by a day or so, you say? It is strange:
it seems to me half a lifetime.
It was a horrible season. The streets ran wine and blood. The populace
was drunk, and savage in its drunkenness. The palaces were pillaged, the
churches reeked with filth. I fought without the gates when I could:
when I could not, I shut myself in my garret, so that I should not see or
hear. So far as I had sense to feel, my heart was sick for France.
One day, when I was going from the fortifications through the
by-streets to the place that sheltered me, I passed through a street
which had been almost utterly destroyed by shell and fire.
The buildings were mere skeletons, the hearths and homes mere heaps of
calcined dust. The rafters, the bricks, the iron girders, the rubble and
the rubbish
Page 165
It was all desolate, dark, unutterably miserable.
Yet amidst it all there was one lovely living thing, surrounded
everywhere by devastation, but uncrushed, unharmed, untouched. In what had
once been a green and cherished little garden there sprang upward a young
lilac-tree in full flower, fragrant, erect, wet with sweet dews,
covered with blossoms--alone amidst the wreck.
For the first time since she had left me I fell on my knees and hid my
face in my hands, and wept--as women weep.
Soon after that the end came.
Paris was on fire in a thousand places. They slew the hostages:
they did strange and fearful things. You have seen them more clearly than
I. I was in the midst of the smoke, of the violence, of the flames, of the
bloodshed, of the ignorance, of the ferocity: I was too close to it
all to judge any of it aright.
Evil had become their good; and yet in the beginning of the time the
people had not been to blame.
Page 166
From the day they put the old priests to death I would fight no more for
the Commune.
But I knew that the Commune would fall, and so I would not forsake them.
I think many felt as I did--detested the acts into which the people
had plunged, but would not forsake them on the edge of ruin.
I would not fight again for them, but neither would I fight against
them: I went forth into the streets and stood and looked.
It seemed hell itself. The sky was black: everything else was
illumined by the fires.
The Versaillais were pouring in: I do not know how many hours or
days had gone. It seemed to me all night--all one endless night that
the endless flames illumined.
Little children ran past me with lighted brands in their hands, which
they flung into houses or cellars, laughing all the while. Women, black
with powder, with their hair loose and their breasts bare, streamed by me
like furies, shrieking curses till the shot struck them and they dropped
upon the stones.
From the windows, from the roofs, from the trees, the people fired upon
the soldiery: the soldiery raked the streets with their fire in
return, and stormed the dwellings, and threw the dead bodies out of the
casements. The roads were wet everywhere with a tide
Page 167
It will seem strange to you, but in all that horror I thought of the
lilac tree: I went and looked for it.
The street behind, the street before, were both burning. In the little
garden there had been a bitter strife: the dead lay there in pools of
blood by scores.
But the little lilac was still erect, its green boughs and its sweet
blossoms blowing in the wind.
There were some little birds that had their young in a nest in the lilac
boughs. They were uneasy; they twittered and fluttered about amongst the
leaves. It was so dark they thought that it was night. But the church
chimes were tolling noon.
I sat down on a pile of timber that had crushed the grasses at the roots
of the tree. I sat still there and waited. I could do nothing. I could not
fight for them: I would not fight against them.
Down the ruined, smoking street, as I sat thus, there came a soldier
hastily, with his sword drawn, glancing hither and thither rapidly, as one
who had lost his way or missed his men. His dress was splashed, torn,
covered with dust, and here and there
Page 168
God had delivered him into my hands. So I said in my soul, exultant. We
always charge our crimes upon God.
I sprang up and stood in his way.
"At last! at last!" I cried to him.
He wavered, paused, and looked at me bewildered: no doubt I was
greatly changed, and in the horrid scorching gloom he did not recognise my
features.
I gave him no breathing-space, but drew my sword and rushed on
him.
"Defend yourself!" I said in his ear ere I touched him. We
would fight until death--that I swore in my heart--but we would
fight fairly, man to man.
When I spoke he knew me. He was a brave man and loyal. He raised no
shout to rally his comrades. He took my challenge as I gave it. He threw
himself in a second into position.
"I am ready," he said, simply.
We were all alone. The fire was around us on all sides. The dead alone
were our spectators. The little lilac tree waved in the wind.
Page 169
Our swords crossed a score of times swift as the lightning: then,
in a moment as it seemed, he fell forward on my blade: his body
drooped and doubled like a broken bough.
The steel had passed through his breast-bone. I had my
vengeance.
It was a fair fight, man to man.
He looked up at me as he sank down dying on the stones.
A strange shadowy smile flickered over his mouth.
"You were revenged--before," he said slowly, each word
drawn feebly with his breath. "Did you not know? She betrayed me last
autumn to the Prussians; she had a lover amongst them greater than
I."
A rush of blood choked his voice: he lay silent, leaning upon one
hand. The flames shone upon his face, the smoke drove over us, the little
lilac tree blew in the breeze, the birds murmured to their young ones.
Then all at once the street grew full of men. They were his own
soldiery. They rushed on me to avenge his death. With the last effort of
life in him he raised himself, and signed them back.
"Do not touch him," he cried aloud to them. "It was I
who injured him: I fall in fair fight."
Page 170
Even as he spoke a shudder shook him, and he died.
His head was on the stones; his hair was soaked with the blood that had
already been shed there; a grey pallor stole over his face; and yet even
then he was still beautiful.
The lilac blossoms, loosened by the driving wind and by the fire's
heat, fell softly on him, one by one, like tears.
I did not stir; I stood there looking down at him. My hate of him had
died away with his young life: I only pitied him with an intense
passion of pity.
We both perished for a thing so vile.
His comrades and men heeded nothing of his words; they arrested me as
they would have done a common felon. I did not attempt to resist them. I
had broken my sword and cast it down by his body: its end was
accomplished, its fate was fulfilled: I had no further use for
it.
They have brought me hither; they have given me a full trial, so they
say, and to-morrow they will kill me.
What is the charge against me? That I, a soldier of the Commune, slew a
soldier of Versailles. It is enough, more than enough, in these days. I say
nothing. I am glad there should be an end.
Page 171
If you ask any grace for me, ask only this--;that the men who fire
on me shall not be the same men by whose side I fought so long for
France.
And when they throw my body in the ditch--see here!--let them
bury this branch of lilac with me.
It is of no value--it is dead.
Page 172A PROVENCE ROSE.
I.
I WAS a Provence rose.
A little slender rose, with leaves of shining green and blossoms of
purest white--a little fragile thing, but fair, they said, growing in
the casement in a chamber in a street.
I remember my birth-country well. A great wild garden, where
roses grew together by millions and tens of millions, all tossing our
bright heads in the light of a southern sun on the edge of an old, old
city--old as Rome--whose ruins were clothed with the wild
fig-tree, and the scarlet blossom of the climbing creepers growing
tall and free in our glad air of France.
I remember how the ruined aqueduct went like a dark shadow straight
across the plains; how the green and golden lizards crept in and out and
about amongst
Page 173
I remember-- But what is the use? I am only a rose; a thing born
for a day, to bloom and be gathered, and die. So you say: you must
know. God gave you all created things for your pleasure and use. So you
say.
There my birth was; there I lived--in the wide south, with its
strong, quivering light, its radiant skies, its purple plains, its fruits
of gourd and vine. I was young; I was happy; I lived: it was
enough.
One day a rough hand tore me from my parent stem and took me, bleeding
and drooping, from my birth-place, with a thousand other captives of
my kind. They bound a score of us up together, and made us a cruel
substitute for our cool, glad garden-home with poor leaves, all wet
from their own tears, and
Page 174
Then we were shut in darkness for I know not how long a space; and when
we saw the light of day again we were lying with our dear dead friends, the
leaves, with many flowers of various kinds, and foliage and ferns and
shrubs and creeping plants, in a place quite strange to us--a place
filled with other roses and with all things that bloom and bear in the rich
days of midsummer; a place which I heard them call the market of the
Madeleine. And when I heard that name I knew that I was in Paris.
For many a time, when the dread hand of the reaper had descended upon
us, and we had beheld our fairest and most fragrant relatives borne away
from us to death, a shiver that was not of the wind had run through all our
boughs and blossoms, and all the roses had murmured in sadness and in
terror, "Better the worm or the drought, the blight or the fly, the
whirlwind that scatters us as chaff, or the waterspout that levels our
proudest with the earth--better any of these than the
long-lingering death by famine and faintness and thirst that awaits
every flower which goes to the Madeleine."
It was an honour, no doubt, to be so chosen. A
Page 175
I awoke, I say, from my misery and my long night of travel, with my
kindred beside me in exile, on a flower-stall of the Madeleine.
It was noon--the pretty place was full of people; it was June, and
the day was brilliant. A woman of Picardy sat with us on the board before
her--a woman with blue eyes and ear-rings of silver, who bound
us together in fifties and hundreds into those sad gatherings of our pale
ghosts which in your human language you have called
"bouquets."
The loveliest and greatest amongst us suffered decapitation, as your
Marie Stuarts and Marie Antoinettes did, and died at once to have their
beautiful bright heads impaled--a thing of death, a mere mockery of a
flower--on slender spears of wire.
Page 176
I, a little white and fragile thing, and very young, was in no way
eminent enough amongst my kind to find that martyrdom which as surely
awaits the loveliest of our roses as it awaits the highest fame of your
humanity.
I was bound up amongst a score of others with ropes of gardener's
bass to chain me amidst my fellow-prisoners, and handed over by my
jailer with the silver ear-rings to a youth who paid for us with a
piece of gold-- whether of great or little value I know not now. None
of my own roses were with me: all were strangers. You never think, of
course, that a little rose can care for its birth-place or its
kindred; but you err.
O fool! Shall we not care for one another?-we who have so divine
a life in common, who together sleep beneath the stars, and together sport
in the summer wind, and together listen to the daybreak singing of the
birds, whilst the world is dark and deaf in slumber--we who know that
we are all of heaven that God, when He called away His angels, bade them
leave on the sin-stained, weary, sickly earth to now and then make
man remember Him!
You err. We love one another well; and if we may not live in union, we
crave at least in union to droop and die. It is seldom that we have this
boon. Wild
Page 177
All the captives with me were strangers: haughty, scentless
pelargoniums; gardenias, arrogant even in their woe; a knot of little,
humble forget-me-nots, ashamed in the grand company of
patrician prisoners; a stephanotis, virginal and pure, whose dying breath
was peace and sweetness; and many sprays of myrtle born in Rome, whose
classic leaves wailed Tasso's lamentation as they went.
I must have been more loosely fettered than the rest were, for in the
rough, swift motion of the youth who bore us my bonds gave way, and I fell
through the silver transparency of our prison-house, and dropped
stunned upon the stone pavement of a street.
There I lay long, half senseless, praying, so far as I had
consciousness, that some pitying wind would rise and waft me on his wings
away to some shadow, some rest, some fresh, cool place of silence.
I was tortured with thirst; I was choked with dust; I was parched with
heat.
The sky was as brass, the stones as red-hot metal; the sun
scorched like flame on the glare of the staring walls; the heavy feet of
the hurrying crowd tramped past me black and ponderous: with every
step I
Page 178
It was five seconds, five hours--which I know not. The torture was
too horrible to be measured by time.
I must have been already dead, or at the very gasp of death, when a
cool, soft touch was laid on me: I was gently lifted, raised to
tender lips, and fanned with a gentle, cooling breath-breath from
the lips that had kissed me.
A young girl had found and rescued me--a girl of the people, poor
enough to deem a trampled flower a treasure-trove.
She carried me very gently, carefully veiling me from sun and dust as we
went; and when I recovered perception I was floating in a porcelain bath on
the surface of cool, fresh water, from which I drank eagerly as soon as my
sickly sense of faintness passed away.
My bath stood on the lattice-sill of a small chamber; it was, I
knew afterward, but a white pan of common earthenware, such as you buy for
two sous and put in your birdcages. But no bath of ivory and pearl and
silver was ever more refreshing to imperial or patrician limbs than was
that little clean and snowy pattypan to me.
Page 179
Under its reviving influences I became able to lift my head and raise my
leaves and spread myself to the sunlight, and look round me.
The chamber was in the roof, high above the traffic of the
passage-way beneath; it was very poor, very simple, furnished with
few and homely things. True, to all our nation of flowers it matters
little, when we are borne into captivity, whether the prison-house
which receives us be palace or garret.
Not to us can it signify whether we perish in Sèvres vase of
royal blue or in kitchen pipkin of brown ware. Your lordliest halls can
seem but dark, pent, noisome dungeons to creatures born to live on the wide
plain, by the sunlit meadow, in the hedgerow, or the forest, or the green,
leafy garden way; tossing always in the joyous winds, and looking always
upward to the open sky.
But it is of little use to dwell on this. You think that flowers, like
animals, were only created to be used and abused by you, and that we, like
your horse and dog, should be grateful when you honour us by slaughter or
starvation at your hands.
To be brief, this room was very humble, a mere attic, with one smaller
still opening from it; but I scarcely thought of its size or aspect. I
looked at nothing but the woman who had saved me.
Page 180
She was quite young; not very beautiful, perhaps, except for wonderful
soft azure eyes and a mouth smiling and glad, with lovely curves to the
lips, and hair dark as a raven's wing, which was braided and bound
close to her head. She was clad very poorly, yet with an exquisite neatness
and even grace; for she was of the people no doubt, but of the people of
France. Her voice was very melodious; she had a silver cross on her bosom;
and though her face was pale, it had health.
She was my friend, I felt sure. Yes, even when she held me and pierced
me with steel, and murmured over me,--
"They say roses are so hard to rear thus, and you are such a
little thing; but do grow to a tree and live with me. Surely you can, if
you try."
She had wounded me sharply and thrust me into a tomb of baked red clay
filled with black and heavy mould. But I knew that I was pierced to the
heart that I might--though only a little offshoot gathered to die in a
day--strike root of my own and be strong, and carry a crown of fresh
blossoms.
For she but dealt with me as your world deals with you, when your heart
aches and your brain burns, and Fate stabs you, and says in your ear,
"O fool! to be great you must suffer."
Page 181
You to your fate are thankless, being human; but I, a rose, was not.
I tried to feel not utterly wretched in that little dull clay
cell: I tried to forget my sweet glad southern birth-place,
and not to sicken and swoon in the noxious gases of the city air.
I did my best not to shudder in the vapour of the stove, and not to grow
pale in the clammy heats of the street, and not to die of useless
lamentation for all that I had lost--for the noble tawny sunsets, and
the sapphire blue skies, and the winds all fragrant with the
almond-tree flowers, and the sunlight in which the yellow orioles
flashed like gold.
I did my best to be content and show my gratitude all through a parching
autumn and a hateful winter; and with the spring a wandering wind came and
wooed me with low, amorous whispers --came from the south, he said;
and I learned that, even in exile in an attic window, love may find us out
and make for us a country and a home.
So I lived and grew and was happy there, against the small, dim garret
panes, and my lover from the south came, still faithful, year by year; and
all the voices round me said that I was fair--pale indeed, and fragile
of strength, as a creature torn from its own land and all its friends must
be; but contented and glad, and
Page 182
"It is bitter to be mewed in a city," said once to me an
old, old vine who had been thrust into the stones below and had climbed the
house wall, heaven knew how, and had lived for half a century jammed
between buildings, catching a gleam of sunshine on his dusty leaves once
perhaps in a whole summer. "It is bitter for us. I would rather have
had the axe at my root and been burned. But perhaps without us the poorest
of people would never remember the look of the fields. When they see a
green leaf they laugh a little, and then weep --some of them. We, the
trees and the flowers, live in the cities as those souls amongst them whom
they call poets live in the world--exiled from heaven that by them the
world may now and then bethink itself of God."
And I believe that the vine spoke truly. Surely, he who plants a green
tree in a city way plants a thought of God in many a human heart arid with
the dust of travail and clogged with the greeds of gold.
So, with my lover the wind and my neighbour the vine, I was content and
patient, and gave many hours of pleasure to many hard lives, and brought
forth
Page 183
Had my brothers and sisters done better, I wonder, living in gilded
balconies or dying in jewelled hands?
I cannot say: I can only tell of myself.
The attic in which I found it my fate to dwell was very high in the air,
set in one of the peaked roofs of the quarter of the Luxembourg, in a very
narrow street, populous and full of noise, in which people of all classes,
except the rich, were to be found--in a medley of artists, students,
fruit-sellers, workers in bronze and ivory, seamstresses, obscure
actresses, and all the creators, male and female, of the thousand and one
airy arts of elegant nothingness which a world of pleasure demands as
imperatively as a world of labour demands its bread.
It would have been a street horrible and hideous in any city save
Florence or Paris: in Florence it would have been saved by colour and
antiquity--in Paris it was saved by colour and grace. Just a flash of
a bright drapery, just a gleam of a gay hue, just some tender pink head of
a hydrangea, just some quaint curl of some gilded woodwork, just the green
glimmer of my friend the vine, just the snowy sparkle of his neighbour the
water-spout,--just these, so little and yet so much, made the
crooked passage a bearable
Page 184
O wise and true wisdom! to redeem poverty with the charms of outline and
of colour, with the green bough and the song of running water, and the
artistic harmony which is as possible to the rough-hewn
pine-wood as in the polished ebony, "It is of no
use!" you cry. O fools! which gives you
perfume--we, the roses, whose rich hues and matchless grace no human
artist can imitate, or the rose-trémière, which mocks
us, standing stiff and gaudy and scentless and erect?
Grace and pure colour and cleanliness are the divinities that redeem the
foulness and the ignorance and the slavery of your crushed, coarse lives
when you have sight enough to see that they are divine. But that is so
seldom--so seldom.
In my little attic, in whose window I have passed my life, they were
known gods and honoured; so that, despite the stovepipe and the poverty,
and the little ill-smelling candle, and the close staircase without,
with the rancid oil in its lamps and its foetid faint odours, and the
refuse, and the gutters, and the gas in the street below, it was possible
for me, though a rose of Provenee and a rose of the open air freeborn, to
draw my breath in it and to bear my blossoms, and to
Page 185
Now, to greet a new year with a smile, and not a sigh, one must be
tranquil, at least, if not happy.
Well, I and the lattice, and a few homely plants of saxifrage and musk
and balsam who bloomed there with me, and a canary who hung in a cage
amongst us, and a rustic creeper who clung to a few strands of strained
string and climbed to the roof and there talked all day to the
pigeons,--we all belonged to the girl with the candid sweet eyes, and
by name she was called Lili Kerrouel, and for her bread she gilded and
coloured those little cheap boxes for sweetmeats that they sell in the
wooden booths at the fairs on the boulevards, while the mirlitons whirl in
their giddy go-rounds and the merry horns of the charlatans
challenge the populace.
She was a girl of the people: she could read, but I doubt if she
could write. She had been born of peasant parents in a Breton hamlet, and
they had come to Paris to seek work, and had found it for a while and
prospered; and then had fallen sick and lost it, and struggled for a while,
and then died, running the common course of so many lives amongst you. They
had left Lili alone at sixteen, or rather
Page 186
Her employers allowed Lili to bring these boxes to decorate at home, and
she painted at them almost from dawn to night. She swept, she washed, she
stewed, she fried, she dusted; she did all the housework of her two little
rooms; she tended the old woman in all ways; and she did all these things
with such cleanliness and deftness that the attics were wholesome as a
palace; and though her pay was very small, she yet found means and time to
have her linen spotless, and make her pots and pans shine like silver and
gold, and to give a grace to all the place, with the song of a happy bird
and the fragrance of flowers that blossomed their best and their sweetest
for her sake, when they would fain have withered to the root and died in
their vain longing for the pure breath of the fields and the cool of a
green woodland world.
It was a little, simple, hard life, no doubt--a life one would have
said scarce worth all the trouble it took to get bread enough to keep it
going. A hard life, colouring always the same eternal little prints all
Page 187
A hard life, with all the wondrous, glorious, wasteful, splendid life of
the beautiful city around it in so terrible a contrast; with the roll of
the carriages day and night on the stones beneath, and the pattering of the
innumerable feet below, all hurrying to some pleasure, and every moment
some burst of music or some chime of bells or some ripple of laughter on
the air.
A hard life, sitting by one's self in a little dusky garret in the
roof, and straining one's sight for two sous an hour, and listening
to an old woman's childish mutterings and reproaches, and having
always to shake the head in refusal of the neighbour's invitations to
a day in the woods or a sail on the river. A hard life, no doubt, when one
is young and a woman, and has soft shining eyes and a red curling
mouth.
And yet Lili was content.
Content, because she was a French girl; because she had always been
poor, and thought two sous an hour, riches; because she loved the helpless
old creature whose senses had all died while her body lived on; because she
was an artist at heart, and saw beautiful things round her even when she
scoured her brasses and washed down her bare floor.
Page 188
Content, because with it all she managed to gather a certain
"sweetness and light" into her youth of toil; and when she
could give herself a few hours' holiday, and could go beyond the
barriers, and roam a little in the wooded places, and come home with a knot
of primroses or a plume of lilac in her hands, she was glad and grateful as
though she had been given gold and gems.
Ah! In the lives of you who have wealth and leisure we, the flowers, are
but one thing among many: we have a thousand rivals in your
porcelains, your jewels, your luxuries, your intaglios, your mosaics, all
your treasures of art, all your baubles of fancy. But in the lives of the
poor we are alone: we are all the art, all the treasure, all the
grace, all the beauty of outline, all the purity of hue that they
possess: often we are all their innocence and all their religion
too.
Why do you not set yourselves to make us more abundant in those joyless
homes, in those sunless windows?
Now, this street of hers was very narrow, it was full of old houses,
that nodded their heads close together as they talked, like your old crones
over their fireside gossip.
I could, from my place in the window, see right into the opposite garret
window. It had nothing of
Page 189
For on that rainpipe the little dusty thirsty sparrows would rest and
bathe and plume themselves, and bury their beaks in the pale
stone-crop, and twitter with one another joyfully, and make believe
that they were in some green and amber meadow in the country in the cowslip
time.
I did not care much for the stone-crop or the sparrows; but in
the third summer of my captivity there with Lili the garret casement
opposite stood always open, as ours did, and I could watch its tenant night
and day as I chose.
He had an interest for me.
He was handsome, and about thirty years old; with a sad and noble face,
and dark eyes full of dreams, and cheeks terribly hollow, and clothes
terribly threadbare.
He thought no eyes were on him when my lattice looked dark, for his
garret, like ours, was so high that no glance from the street ever went to
it. Indeed, when does a crowd ever pause to look at a garret, unless by
chance a man have hanged himself out of its
Page 190
He thought himself unseen, and I watched him many a long hour of the
summer night when I sighed at my square open pane in the hot, sulphurous
mists of the street, and tried to see the stars and could not. For, between
me and the one small breadth of sky which alone the innumerable roofs left
visible, a vintner had hung out a huge gilded imperial crown as a sign on
his roof-tree; and the crown, with its sham gold turning black in
the shadow, hung between me and the planets.
I knew that there must be many human souls in a like plight with myself,
with the light of heaven blocked from them by a gilded tyranny, and yet I
sighed, and sighed, and sighed, thinking of the white pure stars of
Provence throbbing in the violet skies.
A rose is hardly wiser than a poet, you see: neither rose nor poet
will be comforted, and be content to dwell in darkness because a crown of
tinsel swings on high.
Page 191
II.
WELL, not seeing the stars as I strove to do, I took refuge in
sorrow for my neighbour. It is well for your poet when he turns to a like
resource. Too often I hear he takes, instead, to the wine cellar which
yawns under the crown that he curses.
My neighbour, I soon saw, was poorer even than we were. He was a
painter, and he painted beautiful things. But his canvases and the
necessaries of his art were nearly all that his empty attic had in it; and
when, after working many hours with a wretched glimmer of oil, he would
come to his lattice and lean out, and try as I had tried to see the stars,
and fail as I had failed, I saw that he was haggard, pallid, and weary unto
death with two dire diseases--hunger and ambition.
He could not see the stars because of the crown, but in time, in those
long midsummer nights, he came to see a little glow-worm amongst my
blossoms, which in a manner, perhaps, did nearly as well.
He came to notice Lili at her work.
Often she had to sit up half the night to get enough
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Not for want of coaxings, not for want of tempters, various and subtle,
and dangers often and perilously sweet, did Lili sit there in her solitude
earning two sous an hour with straining sight and aching nerves that the
old paralytic creature within might have bed and board without alms.
Lili had been sore beset in a thousand ways, for she was very fair to
see; but she was proud and she was innocent, and she kept her courage and
her honour; yea, though you smile--though she dwelt under an attic
roof, and that roof a roof of Paris.
My neighbour, in the old gabled window over the way, leaning above his
stone-wort, saw her one night thus at work by her lamp, with the
silver ear-rings, that were her sole heirloom and her sole wealth,
drooped against the soft hues and curves of her graceful throat.
Page 193
And when he had looked once, he looked every night, and found her there;
and I, who could see straight into his chamber, saw that he went and made a
picture of it all--of me, and the bird in the cage, and the little old
dusky lamp, and Lili with her silver ear-rings and her pretty
drooping head.
Every day he worked at the picture, and every night he put his light out
and came and sat in the dark square of his lattice, and gazed across the
street through my leaves and my blossoms at my mistress. Lili knew nothing
of this watch which he kept on her: she had put up a little blind of
white network, and she fancied that it kept out every eye when it was up;
and often she took even that away, because she had not the heart to deprive
me of the few faint breezes which the sultry weather gave us.
She never saw him in his dark hole in the old gable there, and I never
betrayed him--not I. Roses have been the flowers of silence ever since
the world began. Are we not the flowers of love?
"Who is he?" I asked of my gossip the vine. The vine had
lived fifty years in the street, and knew the stories and sorrows of all
the human bees in the hive.
"He is called René Claude," said the vine. "He
is a man of genius. He is very poor."
Page 194
"You use synonyms," murmured the old balsam who heard.
"He is an artist," the vine continued. "He is young.
He comes from the south. His people are guides in the Pyrenees. He is a
dreamer of dreams. He has taught himself many things. He has eloquence too.
There is a little club at the back of the house which I climb over. I throw
a tendril or two in at the crevices and listen. The shutters are closed. It
is forbidden by law for men to meet so. There René speaks by the
hour, superbly. Such a rush of words, such a glance, sucn a voice, like the
roll of musketry in anger, like the sigh of music in sadness! Though I am
old, it makes the little sap there is left in me thrill and grow warm. He
paints beautiful things too; so the two swallows say who build under his
eaves; but I suppose it is not of much use: no one believes in him,
and he almost starves. He is young yet, and feels the strength in him, and
still strives to do great things for the world that does not care a jot
whether he lives or dies. He will go on so a little longer. Then he will
end like me. I used to try and bring forth the best grapes I could, though
they had shut me away from any sun to ripen them and any dews to cleanse
the dust from them. But no one cared. No one gave me a drop of water to
still my thirst, nor
Page 195
I, being young and a rose, the flower loved of the poets, thought the
vine was a cynic, as many of you human creatures grow to be in the years of
your age when the leaves of your life fall sere.
I watched René long and often. He was handsome, he suffered much;
and when the night was far spent he would come to his hole in the gable and
gaze with tender, dreaming eyes, my pale foliage to the face of Lili. I
grew to care for him, and I disbelieved the prophecy of the vine; and I
promised myself that one summer or another, near or far, the swallows, when
they came from the tawny African world to build in the eaves of the city,
would find their old friend flown and living no more in a garret, but in
some art-palace where men knew his fame.
So I dreamed--I, a little white rose, exiled in the passage of a
city, seeing the pale moonlight reflected on the gray walls and the dark
windows, and trying to cheat myself by a thousand fancies into the faith
that I once more blossomed in the old sweet leafy garden-ways in
Provence.
One night--the hottest night of the year--Lili came
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For the first time she saw the painter René watching her from his
niche in the gable, with eyes that glowed and yet were dim.
I think women foresee with certain prescience when they will be loved.
She drew the lattice quickly to, and blew the lamp out: she kissed me
in the darkness. Because her heart was glad or sorry? Both, perhaps.
Love makes one selfish. For the first time she left my lattice closed
all through the oppressive hours until daybreak.
"Whenever a woman sees anything out of her window that makes her
eager to look again, she always shuts the shutter. Why, I wonder?"
said the balsam to me.
"That she may peep unsuspected through a chink," said the
vine round the corner, who could overhear.
It was profane of the vine, and in regard to Lili untrue. She did not
know very well, I dare say, why she withdrew herself on that sudden
impulse, as the pimpernel shuts itself up at the touch of a raindrop.
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But she did not stay to look through a crevice; she went straight to her
little narrow bed, and told her beads and prayed, and slept till the cock
crew in a stable near and the summer daybreak came.
She might have been in a chamber all mirror and velvet and azure and
gold in any one of the ten thousand places of pleasure, and been leaning
over gilded balconies under the lime leaves, tossing up little paper
balloons in the air for gay wagers of love and wine and jewels. Pleasure
had asked her more than once to come down from her attic and go with its
crowds; for she was fair of feature and lithe of limb, though only a
work-girl of Paris. And she would not, but slept here under the
eaves, as the swallows did.
"We have not sun enough, little rose, you and I," she would
say to me with a smile and a sigh. "But it is better to be a little
pale, and live a little in the dark, and be a little cramped in a garret
window, than to live grand in the sun for a moment, and the next to be
tossed away in a gutter. And one can be so happy anyhow--almost
anyhow!--when one is young. If I could only see a very little piece
more of the sky, and get every Sunday out to the dear woods, and live one
floor lower, so that the winters were not quite so cold and the summers not
quite so hot, and
Page 198
She had had the same simple bead-roll of innocent wishes ever
since the first hour that she had raised me from the dust of the street;
and it would, I doubt not, have remained her only one all the years of her
life, till she should have glided down into a serene and cheerful old age
of poverty and labour under that very same roof, without the blessed Mary
ever deigning to hearken or answer. Would have done so if the painter
René could have seen the stars, and so had not been driven to look
instead at the glowworm of her lamp as it was shining through my
leaves.
But after that night on which she shut-to the lattice so
suddenly, I think the bead-roll of her pure desires
lengthened--lengthened, though for some time the addition to it was
written on her heart in a mystical language which she did not try to
translate even to herself--I suppose fearing its meaning.
René made approaches to his neighbour's friendship soon
after that night. He was but an art-student, the son of a poor
mountaineer, and with scarce a thing he could call his own except an easel
of deal, a few plaster casts and a bed of straw. She was but a
Page 199
But for all that, no courtship could have been more reverential on the
one side or fuller of modest grace on the other, if the scene of it had
been a palace of princes or a château of the nobles.
He spoke very little.
The vine had said that at the club round the corner he was very
eloquent, with all the impassioned and fierce eloquence common to men of
the South. But with Lili he was almost mute. The vine, who knew human
nature well--as vines always do, since their juices unlock the secret
thoughts of men and bring to daylight their darkest passions--the vine
said that such silence, in one by nature eloquent, showed the force of his
love and its delicacy.
This may be so; I hardly know. My lover the wind, when he is amorous, is
loud, but then it is true his loves are not often very constant.
René chiefly wooed her by gentle service. He brought her little
lovely wild flowers, for which he ransacked the woods of St.
Germain's and Meudon. He carried the billets of her fire-wood
up the seven long, twisting, dirty flights of stairs. He fought for her
with the wicked old porteress at the door down
Page 200
He did starve very often, or at least he had to teach himself to keep
down hunger with a morsel of black chaff-bread and a stray roll of
tobacco. And yet I could see that he had become happy.
Lili never asked him within her door. All the words they exchanged were
from their open lattices, with the space of the roadway between them.
I heard every syllable they spoke, and they were on the one side most
innocent, and on the other most reverential. Ay, though you may not believe
it--you who know the people of Paris from the travesties of theatres
and the slanders of salons.
And all this time secretly he worked on at her portrait. He worked out
of my sight and hers, in the inner part of his garret, but the swallows saw
and told me.
There are never any secrets between birds and flowers.
Page 201
We used to live in Paradise together, and we love one another as exiles
do; and we hold in our cups the raindrops to slake the thirst of the birds,
and the birds in return bring to us from many lands and over many waters
tidings of those lost ones who have been torn from us to strike the roots
of our race in far-off soils and under distant suns.
Late in the summer of the year, one wonderful fête-day,
Lili did for once get out to the woods, the old kindly green woods of
Vincennes.
A neighbour on a lower floor, a woman who made poor scentless,
senseless, miserable imitations of all my race in paper, sat with the old
bedridden grandmother while Lili took her holiday-so rare in her
life, though she was one of the motes in the bright champagne of the
dancing air of Paris. I missed her solely on each of those few sparse days
of her absence, but for her I rejoiced.
"Je reste: tu t'en
vas," says the rose to the butterfly in the poem; and I
said so in my thoughts to her.
She went to the broad level grass, to the golden fields of the sunshine,
to the sound of the bees murmuring over the wild purple thyme, to the sight
of the great snowy clouds slowly sailing over the sweet blue freedom of
heaven--to all the things of my birth-
Page 202
But I was not jealous; nay, not though she had cramped me in a little
earth-bound cell of clay. I envied wistfully indeed, as I envied the
swallows their wings which cleft the air, asking no man's leave for
their liberty. But I would not have maimed a swallow's pinion had I
had the power, and I would not have abridged an hour of Lili's
freedom. Flowers are like your poets: they give ungrudgingly, and,
like all lavish givers, are seldom recompensed in kind.
We cast all our world of blossom, all our treasury of fragrance, at the
feet of the one we love; and then, having spent ourselves in that too
abundant sacrifice, you cry, "A yellow, faded thing!--to the
dust-hole with it!" and root us up violently and fling us to
rot with the refuse and offal; not remembering the days when our burden of
beauty made sunlight in your darkest places, and brought the odours of a
lost paradise to breathe over your bed of fever.
Well, there is one consolation. Just so likewise do you deal with your
human wonder-flower of genius.
Lili went for her day in the green midsummer world--she and a
little blithe, happy-hearted group of young
work-people--and I stayed in the garret window, hot and
thirsty, and drooping and pale, choked by the
Page 203
For it was some great day or other, when all Paris was
out en fête, and everyone was away from
his or her home, except such people as the old bedridden woman and the
cripple who watched her. So, at least, the white roof-pigeons told
me, who flew where they listed, and saw the whole splendid city beneath
them--saw all its glistening of arms and its sheen of palace roofs,
all its gilded domes and its white, wide squares, all its crowds,
many-hued as a field of tulips, and all its flashing eagles, golden
as the sun.
When I had been alone two hours, and whilst the old building was silent
and empty, there came across the street from his own dwelling-place,
the artist René, with a parcel beneath his arm.
He came up the stairs with a light and noiseless step, and pushed open
the door of our attic. He paused on the threshold a moment with the sort of
reverent hushed look on his face that I had seen on the faces of one or two
swarthy, bearded, scarred soldiers as they paused before the shrine at the
door of the little chapel which stood in my sight on the other side of our
street.
Page 204
Then he entered, placed the thing which he carried on a wooden chair
fronting the light, uncovered it, and went quietly out again without the
women in the inner closet hearing him,
What he had brought was the canvas I had seen grow under his hand, the
painting of me and the lamp and Lili. I do not doubt how he had done
it: it was surely the little attic window, homely and true in
likeness, and yet he had glorified us all, and so framed in my leaves and
my white flowers, the low oil flame and the fair head of my mistress, that
there was that in the little picture which made me tremble and yet be
glad.
On a slender slip of paper attached to it there was written,
"Il n'y a pas de nuit sans
étoile."
Of him I saw no more. The picture kept me silent company all that
day.
At evening Lili came. It was late. She brought with her a cool perfume
of dewy mosses and fresh leaves, and strawberry plants--sweet as
honey. She came in with a dark dreamy brilliance in her eyes, and long
coils of foliage in her hands.
She brought to the canary chickweed and a leaf of lettuce. She kissed me
and laid wet mosses on my parching roots, and fanned me with the breath of
her fresh lips. She took to the old women within a huge
Page 205
She had been happy, but she was very quiet. To those who love the
country as she did, and, thus loving it, have to dwell in cities, there is
as much of pain, perhaps, as of pleasure in a fleeting glimpse of the lost
heaven.
She was tired, and sat for a while, and did not see the painting, for it
was dusk. She only saw it when she rose to light the lamp: then, with
a little shrill cry, she fell on her knees before it in her wonder and her
awe, and laughed and sobbed a little, and then was still again, looking at
this likeness of herself.
The written words took her long to spell out, for she could scarcely
read, but when she had mastered them, her head sank on her breast with a
flush and a smile, like the glow of dawn over my own native Provence, I
thought.
She knew whence it came, no doubt, though there were many artists and
students of art in that street.
But then there was only one who had watched her night after night as men
watched the stars of old to read their fates in the heavens.
Lili was only a young ouvrière, she was only a girl
Page 206
With a gracious impulse of gratitude she turned to the lattice, and
leaned past me, and looked for my neighbour.
He was there in the gloom: he strove not to be seen, but a stray
ray from a lamp at the vintner's gleamed on his handsome dark face,
lean, and pallid, and yearning, and sad, but full of force and of soul,
like a head of Rembrandt's. Lili stretched her hands to him with a
noble, candid gesture and a sweet, tremulous laugh:
"What you have given me!--it is you?--it is
you?"it is you?"
"Mademoiselle forgives?" he murmured, leaning as far out as
the gable would permit.
The street was still deserted, and very quiet. The theatres were all
open to the people that night free, and bursts of music from many quarters
rolled in through the sultry darkness.
Lili coloured over all her fair pale face, even as I
Page 207
Then, as he caught it, she closed the lattice with a swift, trembling
hand, and fled to the little sleeping-closet where her crucifix and
her mother's rosary hung together above her bed.
As for me, I was left bereaved and bleeding. The dew which waters the
growth of your human love is usually the tears or blood of some martyred
life.
I was sacrificed for Lili.
I prayed, as my torn stem quivered, and my fairest begotten sank to her
death in the night and in the silence, that I might be the first and the
last to suffer from the human love born that night.
I, a rose--Love's flower.
Page 208
III.
NOW before that summer was gone, these two were betrothed to
one another, and my little, fair, dead daughter, the Rosebud, all faded and
scentless though her half-opened leaves were, remained always on
René's heart as a tender and treasured relic.
They were betrothed, I say,--not wedded, for they were so terribly
poor.
Many a day he, I think, had not so much as a crust to eat; and there
passed many weeks when the works on his canvas stood unfinished because he
had not wherewithal to buy the oils and the colours to finish them.
René was frightfully poor, indeed; but then, being an artist and
a poet, and the lover of a fair and noble woman, and a dreamer of dreams,
and a man God-gifted, he was no longer wretched.
For the life of a painter is beautiful when he is still young, and loves
truly, and has a genius in him stronger than calamity, and hears a voice in
which he believes say always in his ear, "Fear nothing. Men must
believe as I do in thee, one day. And meanwhile--we can
wait!"
Page 209
And a painter in Paris, even though he starve on a few sous a day, can
have so much that is lovely and full of picturesque charm in his daily
pursuits: the long, wondrous galleries full of the arts he adores;
the "réalité de
l'idéal" around him in that perfect world; the
slow, sweet, studious hours in the calm wherein all that is great in
humanity alone survives; the trance--half adoration, half aspiration,
at once desire and despair--before the face of the Mona Lisa; then,
without, the streets so glad and so gay in the sweet, living sunshine; the
quiver of green leaves among gilded balconies; the groups at every turn
about the doors; the glow of colour in market- place and peopled
square; the quaint gray piles in old historic ways; the stones, from every
one of which some voice from the imperishable Past cries out; the green and
silent woods, the little leafy villages, the winding waters garden girt;
the forest heights, with the city gleaming and golden in the
plain;--all these are his.
With these,--and youth,--who shall dare say the painter is not
rich--ay, though his board be empty and his cup be dry?
I had not loved Paris,--I, a little imprisoned rose, caged in a
clay pot, and seeing nothing but the sky-line of the roofs. But I
grew to love it, hearing from René and from Lili of all the poetry
and gladness
Page 210
City of Pleasure you have called her, and with truth; but why not also
City of the Poor? For what city, like herself, has remembered the poor in
her pleasure, and given to them, no less than to the richest, the treasure
of her laughing sunlight, of her melodious music, of her gracious hues, of
her million flowers, of her shady leaves, of her divine ideals?
Oh, world! when you let Paris die, you let your last youth die with her!
Your rich will mourn a paradise deserted, but your poor will have need to
weep with tears of blood for the ruin of the sole Eden whose sunlight
sought them in their shadow, whose music found them in their loneliness,
whose glad green ways were open to their tired feet, whose radiance smiled
the sorrow from their aching eyes, and in whose wildest errors and whose
vainest dreams their woes and needs were unforgotten.
Well, this little, humble love-idyl, which grew into being in an
attic of Paris, had a tender grace of its own; and I watched it with
tenderness, and it seemed to me fresh as the dews of the morning in the
midst of the hot stifling world.
They could not marry: he had nothing but famine
Page 211
But they spent their leisure-time together: they passed
their rare holiday hours in each other's society in the woods which
they both loved, or in the public galleries of art; and when the autumn
came on apace, and they could no longer sit at their open casements, he
still watched the gleam of her pale lamp as a pilgrim the light of a
shrine, and she, ere she went to rest, would push ajar the closed shutter
and put her pretty fair head into the darkling night and waft him a gentle
good-night, and then go and kneel down by her bed and pray for him
and his future before the cross which had been her dead mother's.
On that bright summer, a hard winter followed. The poor suffered very
much; and I, in the closed lattice, knew scarcely which was the
worse,-- the icy shivering chills of the snow-burdened air, or
the close noxious suffocation of the stove.
I was very sickly and ill, and cared little for my life during that
bitter cold weather, when the panes of the lattice were all blocked from
week's end to week's end with the solid silvery foliage of the
frost.
Page 212
René and Lili both suffered greatly: he could only keep
warmth in his veins by the stoves of the public libraries, and she lost her
work in the box trade after the New Year fairs, and had to eke out as best
she might the few francs she had been able to lay back in the old brown
pipkin in the closet.
She had, moreover, to sell most of the little things in her
garret: her own mattress went, though she kept the bed under her
grandmother. But there were two things she would not sell, though for both
was she offered money,--they were her mother's reliques and
myself.
She would not, I am sure, have sold the picture, either. But for that no
one offered her a centime.
One day, as the last of the winter solstice was passing away, the old
woman died.
Lili wept for her sincere and tender tears, though never in my
time--nor in any other, I believe, had the poor, old, querulous,
paralytic sufferer rewarded her with anything except lamentation and
peevish discontent.
"Now you will come to me?" murmured her lover,
when they had returned from laying the old dead peasant in the quarter of
the poor.
Lili drooped her head softly upon his breast.
Page 213
"If you wish it!" she whispered, with a whisper as soft as
the first low breath of summer.
If he wished it!
A gleam of pale gold sunshine shone through the dulled panes upon my
feeble branches; a little timid fly crept out and spread its wings; the
bells of the church rang an angelus; a child laughed in the street below;
there came a smile of greenness spreading over the boughs of leafless
trees; my lover, the wind, returned from the south, fresh from desert and
ocean, with the scent of the spice-groves and palm-aisles of
the east in his breath, and softly unclosing my lattice, murmured to me,
"Didst thou think I was faithless? See, I come with the
spring!"
So, though I was captive and they two were poor, yet we three were all
happy; for love and a new year of promise were with us.
I bore a little snowy blossom (sister to the one which slept lifeless on
René's heart) that spring, whilst yet the swallows were not
back from the African gardens, and the first violets were carried in
millions through the streets,--the only innocent imperialists that the
world has ever seen.
That little winter-begotten darling of mine was to be
Lili's nuptial- flower. She took it so tenderly from me, that
it hardly seemed like its death.
Page 214
"My little dear rose, who blossoms for me, though I can only cage
her in day, and only let her see the sun's rays between the stacks of
the chimneys!" she said softly over me as she kissed me; and when she
said that, could I any more grieve for Provence?
"What do they wed upon, those two?" said the old vine to
me.
And I answered him, "Hope and dreams."
"Will those bake bread and feed babes?" said the vine, as he
shook his wrinkled tendrils despondcntly in the March air.
We did not ask in the attic.
Summer was nigh at hand, and we loved one another.
René had come to us--we had not gone to him. For our garret
was on the sunny, his on the dark, side of the street, and Lili feared the
gloom for me and the bird; and she could not bring herself to leave that
old red-leaved creeper who had wound himself so close about the
rain-pipe and the roof, and who could not have been dislodged
without being slain.
With the Mardi Gras her trade had returned to her. René, unable
to prosecute his grand works, took many of the little boxes in his own
hands, and wrought on
Page 215
While he worked at the box-lids she had leisure for her household
labours: when these were done she would draw out her mother's
old Breton distaff, and would sit and spin. When twilight fell they would
go forth together to dream under the dewy avenues and the glistening stars,
or as often would wait within whilst he played on his mountain flute to the
people at the doorways in the street below.
"Is it better to go out and see the stars and the leaves
ourselves, or to stay in-doors and make all these forget the
misfortune of not seeing them?" said Lili, on one of those evenings
when the warmth and the sunset almost allured her to draw the flute from
her husband's hands and give him his hat instead; and then she looked
down into the narrow road, at the opposite houses, at the
sewing-girls stitching by their little windows, at the pale students
studying their sickly lore with scalpel and with skeleton, at the hot dusty
little children at play on the asphalte sidewalk, at the sorrowful darkened
casements behind which she knew beds of sickness or of paralyzed old age
were
Page 216
And he played, instead of going to the debating-club in the room
round the corner.
"He has ceased to be a patriot," grumbled the old vine.
"It is always so with every man when once he has loved a
woman!"
Myself, I could not see that there was less patriotism in breathing the
poetry of sound into the ears of his neighbours than in rousing the
passions of hell in the breasts of his brethren.
But perhaps this was my ignorance: I believe that of late years
people have grown to hold that the only pure patriotism is, and ought to
be, evinced in the most intense and the most brutalized form of one
passion--"Envy, eldest born of Hell."
So these two did some good, and were happy, though more than once it
chanced to them to have to go a whole day without tasting food of any
sort.
I have said that René had genius--a genius bold, true,
impassioned, masterful--such a genius as colours the smallest trifles
that it touches. René could no more help putting an ideal grace into
those little sweetmeat boxes--which sold at their very highest,
Page 217
Genius has a way of casting its pearls in the dust as we scatter our
fragrance to every breeze that blows. Now and then the pearl is caught and
treasured, as now and then some solitary creature pauses to smell the
sweetness of the air in which we grow, and thanks the God who made us.
But as ninety-nine roses bloom unthanked for one that is thus
remembered, so ninety-nine of the pearls of genius are trodden to
pieces for one that is set on high and crowned with honour.
In the twilight of a dull day a little, feeble, brown old man climbed
the staircase and entered our attic with shambling step.
We had no strangers to visit us: who visits the poor? We thought
he was an enemy: the poor always do think so, being so little used to
strangers.
René drew himself erect, and strove to hide the poverty of his
garments, standing by his easel. Lili came to me, and played with my leaves
in her tender, caressing fashion.
"You painted this, M. René Claude?" asked the little
brown old man.
He held in his hand one of the bonbon boxes, the
Page 218
The little old man sat down on the chair which Lili placed for him.
"So they told me, where I bought this. It was at a booth at St.
Cloud. Do you know that it is charming?"
René smiled a little sadly: Lili flushed with joy. It was
the first praise which she had ever heard given to him.
"You have a great talent," pursued the little man.
René bowed his handsome haggard face--his mouth quivered a
very little: for the first time Hope entered into him.
"Genius, indeed," said the stranger; and he sauntered a
little about and looked at the canvases, and wondered and praised, and said
not very much, but said that little so well and so judiciously that it was
easy to see he was no mean judge of art, and possibly no slender patron of
it.
As Lili stood by me, I saw her colour come and go
Page 219
"And I have been so afraid always that I had injured, burdened
him, clogged his strength in that endless strife!" she murmured below
her breath. "O, dear little rose! if only the world can but know his
greatness!"
Meanwhile the old man looked through the sketches and studies with which
the room was strewed.
"You do not finish your things?" he said abruptly.
René flushed darkly.
"Oil pictures cost money," he said, briefly,
"and--I am very poor."
Though a peasant's son, he was very proud: the utterance
must have hurt him much.
The stranger took snuff.
"You are a man of singular genius," he said simply.
"You only want to be known to get the prices of
Meissonier."
Meissonier!--the Rothschild of the studios, the artist whose
six-inch canvas would bring the gold value of a Raphael or a
Titian!
Lili, breathing fast and white as death with ecstasy, made the sign of
the cross on her breast: the delicate brown hand of René shook
where it leaned on his easel.
Page 220
They were both silent--silent from the intensity of their hope.
"Do you know who I am?" the old man pursued, with a cordial
smile.
"I have not that honour," murmured René.
The stranger, taking his snuff out of a gold box, named a name at which
the painter started. It was that of one of the greatest art-dealers
in the whole of Europe; one who at a word could make or mar an
artist's reputation; one whose accuracy of judgment was considered
infallible by all connoisseurs, and the passport to whose galleries was to
any unknown painting a certain passport also to the fame of men.
"You are a man of singular genius," repeated the great
purchaser, taking his snuff in the middle of the little bare chamber.
"It is curious--one always finds genius either in a cellar or in
an attic: it never, by any chance, is to be discovered midway on the
stairs--never in the mezzanino. But to
the
point. You have great delicacy of touch, striking originality of idea; a
wonderful purity yet bloom in your colour, and an exquisite finish of
minutiæ, without any weakness--a combination rare, very rare.
That girl yonder feeding white pigeons on the leads of a roof, with an atom
of blue sky, and a few vine leaves straying over the parapet--that is
perfectly conceived. Finished it
Page 221
René's worn young face coloured to the brows.
"Monsieur is too good," he muttered brokenly. "A
nameless artist has no price, except--"
"Honour," murmured Lili, as she moved forward with throbbing
heart and dim eyes. "Ah, monsieur, give him a name in Paris! We want
nothing else--nothing else!"
"Poor fools!" said the dealer to the snuff-box.
I heard him--they did not.
"Madame," he answered aloud, "Paris herself will give
him that the first day his first canvas hangs in my galleries. Meanwhile, I
must in honesty be permitted to add something more. For each of those
little canvases, the girl on the roof and the boy at the gate, I will give
you now two thousand francs, and two thousand more when they shall be
completed. Provided--"
He paused and glanced musingly at René.
Lili had turned away, and was sobbing for very joy at this
undreamed-of deliverance.
René stood quite still, with his hands crossed on
Page 222
The old man sauntered again a little about the place, looking here and
looking there, murmuring certain artistic disquisitions technical and
scientific, leaving them time to recover from the intensity of their
emotion.
What a noble thing old age was, I thought, living only to give hope to
the young in their sorrow, and to release captive talents from the prison
of obscurity!
We should leave the little room in the roof, and dwell in some bright
quarter where it was all leaves and flowers; and René would be
great, and go to dine with princes, and drive a team of belled horses, like
a famous painter who had dashed once with his splendid equipage through our
narrow passage; and we should see the sky always--as much of it as
ever we chose, and Lili would have a garden of her own, all grass, and
foliage, and falling waters, in which I should live in the open air all the
day long, and make believe that I was in Provenee.
My dreams and my fancies were broken by the sound of the old man's
voice taking up the thread of his discourse once more in front of
René.
"I will give you four thousand francs each for those two little
canvases," he repeated. "It is
Page 223
René indeed knew--none better. Lili turned on the old man
her sweet, frank Breton eyes, smiling their radiant gratitude through
tenderest tears,
"The saints will reward you, monsieur, in a better world than
this," she murmured softly.
The old man took snuff a little nervously.
"There is one condition I must make," he said with a
trifling hesitation--"one only."
"Ask of my gratitude what you will," answered René
quickly, while he drew a deep breath of relief and freedom--the breath
of one who casts to the ground the weight of a deadly burden.
"It is that you will bind yourself only to paint for
me."
"Certainly."
René gave the assent with eagerness. Poor fellow! it was a
novelty so exquisite to have any one save the rats to paint for. It never
dawned upon his thoughts
Page 224
"Very well," said the old man quietly, and he sat down again
and looked full in René's face, and unfolded his views for the
artist's future.
He used many words, and was slow and suave in their utterance, and
paused often and long to take out his heavy gold box; but he spoke well.
Little by little his meaning gleamed out from the folds of verbiage in
which he skilfully enwrapped it.
It was this.
The little valueless drawings on the people's sweetmeat boxes of
gilded cardboard had a grace, a colour, and a beauty in them which had
caught, at a fair-booth in the village of St. Cloud, the
ever-watchful eyes of the great dealer. He had bought
half-a-dozen of the boxes for a couple of francs. He had
said, "Here is what I want." Wanted for what? Briefly, to
produce Petitôt enamels and Fragonard cabinets, and perhaps now and
then a Greuze portrait--genuine eighteenth-century work. There
was a rage for it. René would understand?
René's dark southern eyes lost a little of their new
Page 225
The old man took more snuff, and used phrases clearer still.
There were great collectors--dilettanti of houses imperial, and
royal, and princely, and noble, of all the grades of greatness--who
would give any sum for bonbonnières and tabatières of
eighteenth-century work by anyone of the few famous masters of that
time. A genuine, incontestable sweetmeat box from the ateliers of the Louis
XIV. or Louis XV. period would fetch almost a fabulous sum. Then again he
paused, doubtfully.
René bowed, and his wondering glance said without words, "I
know this. But I have no eighteenth-century work to sell you:
if I had, should we starve in an attic?"
His patron coughed a little, looked at Lili, then proceeded to explain
still farther.
In René's talent he had discerned the hues, the grace, the
delicacy yet brilliancy, the voluptuousness and
the désinvolteure of the best
eighteenth-century work. René doubtless did other and higher
things which pleased himself far more than these airy trifles. Well, let
him pursue the greater line of art if he
Page 226
If René would do some half dozen of these at dictation and a
Greuze or Boucher head in a year, not more--more would be
perilous--paint and sign them, and produce them with any touches that
might be commanded; never ask what became of them when finished, nor
recognize them if hereafter he might see them in any illustrious
collection,--if René would bind himself to do this, he, the old
man who spoke, would buy his other paintings, place them well in his famous
galleries, and, using all his influence, would make him in a
twelvemonth's time the most celebrated of all the young painters in
Paris.
It was a bargain? Ah, how well it was, he said, to put the best of
one's powers into the most trifling things
Page 227
René stood motionless.
Lili had sunk into a seat, and was gazing at the tempter with
wide- open, puzzled, startled eyes. Both were silent.
"It is a bargain?" said the old man again. "Understand
me, M. René Claude. You have no risk, absolutely none, and you have
the certainty of fair fame and fine fortune in the space of a few years.
You will be a great man before you have a gray hair: that comes to
very few. I shall not trouble you for more than six
dix-huitième siècle enamels in the year-- perhaps
for only four. You can spend ten months out of the twelve on your own
canvases, making your own name and your own wealth as swiftly as your
ambition and impatience can desire. Madame here," said the acute
dealer with a pleasant smile--"Madame here can have a garden
sloping on the Seine and a glass-house of choicest
flowers--which I see are her graceful weakness--ere another
rose-season has time to come round, if you choose."
His voice lingered softly on the three last words.
Page 228
The dew stood on René's forehead, his hands clenched on the
easel:
"You wish me--to paint--forgeries of the Petitôt
enamels?"
The old man smiled unmoved:
"Chut, chut! Will you paint me little bonbonnières on
enamel or porcelain instead of on cardboard? That is all the question. I
have said where they go, how they are set: what they are called shall
be my affair. You know nothing. The only works of yours which you will be
concerned to acknowledge will be your own canvas pictures. What harm can it
do any creature? You will gratify a connoisseur or two innocently, and you
will meanwhile be at leisure to follow the bent of your own genius, which
otherwise--"
He paused: I heard the loud throbs of René's heart
under that cruel temptation.
Lili gazed at his tempter with the same startled terror and bewilderment
still dilating her candid eyes with a woeful pain.
"Otherwise," pursued the old man with merciless
tranquillity, "you will never see me any more, my friends. If you try
to repeat any story to my hindrance, no one will credit you. I am rich, you
are poor. You have a great talent: I shall regret to see it lost, but
I shall let it die--so."
Page 229
And he trod very gently on a little gnat that crawled near his foot, and
killed it.
A terrible agony gathered in the artist's face.
"O God!" he cried in his torture, and his eyes went to the
canvases against the wall, and then to the face of his wife, with an
unutterable yearning desire.
For them, for them,--his genius and his love,this sin
which tempted him looked virtue.
"Do you hesitate?" said the merciless old man. "Pshaw!
whom do you hurt? You give me work as good as that which you imitate, and I
call it only by a dead man's name: who is injured? What harm
can there be in humouring the fanaticism of fashion? Choose--I am in
haste."
René hid his face with his hands, so that he should not behold
those dear creations of his genius which so cruelly, so innocently,
assailed him with a temptation beyond his strength.
"Choose for me--you!" he muttered in his agony to
Lili.
Lili, white as death, drew closer to him.
"My René, your heart has chosen," she murmured
through her dry and quivering lips. "You cannot buy honour by a
fraud."
René lifted his head and looked straight in the eyes
Page 230
"Sir," he said slowly, with a bitter tranquil smile about
his mouth, "my garret is empty, but it is clean. May I trouble you to
leave it as you found it?"
So they were strong to the end, these two famished children of frivolous
Paris.
But when the door had closed and shut their tempter out, the revulsion
came: they wept those tears of blood which come from the
hearts' depths of those who have seen Hope mock them with a smile a
moment, to leave them face to face with Death.
"Poor fools!" sighed the old vine from his corner in the
gray, dull twilight of the late autumn day.
Was the vine right?
The air which he had breathed for fifty years through all his
dust-choked leaves and tendrils had been the air off millions of
human lungs, corrupted in its passage through millions of human lips, and
the thoughts which he thought were those of human wisdom.
The sad day died; the night fell; the lattice was closed; the flute lay
untouched.
Page 231
A great misery seemed to enfold us. True, we were no worse off than we
had been when the same day dawned. But that is the especial cruelty of
every tempter always: he touches the innocent closed eyes of his
victims with a collyrium which makes the happy blindness of content no
longer possible. If the tempted be strong to resist him, the tempter has
still his vengeance, for they are never again at peace as they were before
that fatal hour in which he showed them all that they were not, all that
they might be.
Our stove was not more chill, our garret not more empty; our darkness
not more dark amidst the gay, glad, dazzling city; our dusky roof and
looming crown that shut the sky out from us not more gloomy and
impenetrable than they had been on all those other earlier nights when yet
we had been happy. Yet how intensified millionfold seemed cold and
loneliness and poverty and darkness, all!--for we had for the first
time known what it was to think of riches, of fame, of homage, of light, as
possible, and then to lose them all for ever!
I had been resigned for love's sake to dwell amongst the roofs,
seeing not the faces of the stars, nor feeling ever the full glory of the
sun; but now----I had dreamed of the fair freedom of
garden-ways and the
Page 232
As with my life, so was it likewise with theirs.
They had been so poor, but they had been so happy: the poverty
remained, the joy had flown.
That winter was again very hard, very cold: they suffered
greatly.
They could scarcely keep together body and soul, as your strange phrase
runs: they went without food sometimes for days and days, and fuel
they had scarcely ever.
The bird in his cage was sold: they would not keep the little
golden singing thing to starve into silence like themselves.
As for me, I nearly perished of the cold: only the love I bore to
Lili kept a little life in my leafless branches.
All that cruel winter-time they were strong still, those children
of Paris.
For they sought no alms, and in their uttermost extremity neither of
them ever whispered to the other, "Go seek the tempter: repent,
be wise.
Page 233
"When the snow is on the ground, and the canvases have to burn in
the stove, then you will change your minds and come to me on your
knees," the old wicked, foul spirit had said, mocking them, as he had
opened the door of the attic and passed away creaking down the dark
stairs.
And I suppose he had reckoned on this; but if he had done so he had
reckoned without his host, as your phrase runs: neither René
nor Lili ever went to him, either on their knees or in any other wise.
When the spring came we three were still all living--at least their
hearts still beat and their lips still drew breath, as my boughs were still
green and my roots still clung to the soil. But no more to them or to me
did the coming of spring bring, as of old, the real living of life, which
is joy.
And my lover the wind wooed me no more, and the birds no more brought me
the rose-whispers of my kindred in Provenee. For even the little
pigeon-hole in the roof had become too costly a home for us, and we
dwelt in a den under the stones of the streets, where no light came and
scarce a breath of air ever strayed to us.
There the uncompleted canvases on which the painter
Page 234
All this while we lived--the man whose genius and misery were hell
on earth; the woman whose very purity and perfectness of love were her
direst torture; and I, the little white flower born of the sun and the dew,
of fragrance and freedom, to whom every moment of this blindness, this
suffocation, this starvation, this stench of putrid odours, this horrible
roar of the street above, was a moment worse than any pang of death.
Away there in Provence so many a fair rose-sister of mine bowed
her glad, proud, innocent head with anguish and shuddering terrors to the
sharp summons of the severing knife that cut in twain her life, whilst
I--I, on and on--was forced to keep so much of life as lies in
the capacity to suffer and to love in vain.
So much was left to them: no more.
"Let us compel Death to remember us, since even Death forgets
us!" René murmured once in his despair to her.
But Lili had pressed her famished lips to his: "Nay, dear,
wait: God will remember us even yet, I think."
It was her faith. And of her faith she was justified at last.
Page 235
There came a ghastlier season yet, a time of horror
insupportable--of ceaseless sound beside which the roar of the mere
traffic of the streets would have seemed silence--a stench beside
which the sulphur smoke and the gas fumes of a previous time would have
been as some sweet fresh woodland air--a famine beside which the daily
hunger of the poor was remembered as the abundance of a feast--a cold
beside which the chillness of the scant fuel and empty braziers of other
winters were recalled as the warmth of summer--a darkness only lit by
the red flame of burning houses--a solitude only broken by the
companionship of woe and sickness and despair--a suffocation only
changed by a rush of air strong with the scent of blood, of putridity, of
the million living plague-stricken, of the million dead lying
unburied.
For there was War.
Of year or day or hour I knew nothing. It was always the same blackness
as of night; the same horror of sound, of scent, of cold; the same misery;
the same torture. I suppose that the sun was quenched, that the birds were
dumb, that the winds were stilled for ever--that all the world was
dead: I do not know. They called it the Siege of Paris. I suppose
that they meant the Revolt of Hell.
Yet Lili lived, and I: in that dread darkness we had
Page 236
And she did live--so long, so long!--on a few draughts of
water and a few husks of grain.
I knew that it was long, for full a hundred times she muttered aloud,
"Another day? O God!--how long? how long?"
At last in the darkness a human hand was stretched to her, close beside
me.
A foul and fierce light, the light of flame, was somewhere on the air
above us, and at that moment glowed through the horrid gloom we dwelt in in
the bowels of the earth. I saw the hand and what it held to her: it
was a stranger's, and it held the little colourless dead rosebud, my
sweetest blossom, that had lain ever upon René's heart.
She took it--she who had given it as her first love-gift.
She was mute. In the glare of the flame that quivered through the darkness
I saw her standing quite erect and very still.
The voice of a stranger thrilled through the din from the world
above.
"He fought as only patriots can," it said softly and as
through tears. "I was beside him. He fell with
Page 237
On Lili's face there came once more the radiance of a perfect
peace, a glory pure and endless as the glory of the sun.
"Great in death!" she murmured. "My love, my love, I
come!"
I lost her in the darkness.
I heard a voice above me say that life had left her lips as the dead
rose touched them.
What more is there for me to tell?
I live, since to breathe, and to feel pain, and to desire vainly, and to
suffer always, are surest proofs of life.
I live, since that stranger's hand which brought my little dead
blossom as the message of farewell, had pity on me and brought me away from
that living grave. But the pity was vain: I died the only death that
had any power to hurt me when the human heart I loved grew still for
ever.
The light of the full day now shines on me; the shadows are cool, the
dews are welcome: they speak around me of the coming of spring, and
in the silence of the dawns I hear from the woods without the piping of the
nesting birds; but for me the summer can never
Page 238
For I am only a little rose, but I am in exile and France is
desolate.
Page 239A LEAF IN THE STORM.
I.
THE Berceau de Dieu was a little village in the valley of the
Seine.
As a lark drops its nest amongst the grasses, so a few peasant people
had dropped their little farms and cottages amidst the great green woods on
the winding river. It was a pretty place, with one steep, stony street,
shady with poplars and with elms; quaint houses, about whose roofs a cloud
of white and gray pigeons fluttered all day long; a little aged chapel with
a conical red roof; and great barns covered with ivy and thick creepers,
red and purple, and lichens that were yellow in the sun.
All around it there were the broad, flowering meadows, with the sleek
cattle of Normandy fattening in them, and the sweet dim forests where the
young
Page 240
The Berceau de Dieu was very old indeed.
Men said that the hamlet had been there in the day of the Virgin of
Orléans; and a stone cross of the twelfth century still stood by the
great pond of water at the bottom of the street, under the
chestnut-tree, where the villagers gathered to gossip at sunset when
their work was done.
It had no city near it, and no town nearer than four leagues. It was in
the green core of a pastoral district, thickly wooded and intersected with
orchards. Its produce of wheat, and oats, and cheese, and fruit, and eggs,
was more than sufficient for its simple prosperity. Its people were hardy,
kindly, labourious, happy; living round the little gray chapel in amity and
good-fellowship.
Nothing troubled it. War and rumours of war, revolutions and
counter-revolutions, empires and insurrections, military and
political questions,--these all were for it things unknown and unheard
of--mighty
Page 241
Even in the great days of the Revolution it had been quiet. It had had a
lord whom it loved in the old castle on the hill at whose feet it
nestled: it had never tried to harm him, and it had wept bitterly
when he had fallen at Jemappes, and left no heir, and the château had
crumbled into ivy-hung ruins.
The thunder-heats of that dread time had scarcely scorched it. It
had seen a few of its best youth march away to the chant of the
Marseillaise to fight on the plains of Champagne; and it had been visited
by some patriots in bonnets rouges and
soldiers in
blue uniforms, who had given it tricoloured cockades and bade it wear them
in the holy name of the Republic one and indivisible. But it had not known
what these meant, and its harvests had been reaped without the sound of a
shot in its fields or any gleam of steel by its innocent hearths; so that
the terrors and the tidings of those noble and ghastly years had left no
impress on its generations.
Reine Allix, indeed, the oldest woman amongst them all, numbering more
than ninety years, remembered when she was a child hearing her father and
his neighbours talk, in low awestricken tones, one
Page 242
These and the like memories she would sometimes relate to the children
at evening, when they gathered round her begging for a story.
Otherwise, no memories of the Revolution or the Empire disturbed the
tranquillity of the Berceau; and even she, after she had told them, would
add:
"I am not sure now what Marengo was. A battle, no doubt, but I am
not sure where nor why. But we heard later that little Claudis, my
aunt's youngest born, a volunteer, not nineteen, died at it. If we
Page 243
This woman, who had been born in that time of famine and flame, was the
happiest creature in the whole hamlet of the Berceau.
"I am old: yes, I am very old," she would say, looking
up from her spinning-wheel in her house-door, and shading her
eyes from the sun, "very old--ninetytwo last summer. But when
one has a roof over one's head, and a pot of soup always, and a
grandson like mine, and when one has lived all one's life in the
Berceau de Dieu, then it is well to be so old. Ah, yes, my little
ones--yes, though you doubt it, you little birds that have just tried
your wings--it is well to be so old. One has time to think, and thank
the good God, which one never seemed to have a minute to do in that work,
work, work, when one was young."
Reine Allix was a tall and strong woman, very withered, and very bent,
and very brown, yet with sweet, dark, flashing eyes that had still light in
them, and a face that was still noble, though nearly a century had bronzed
it with its harvest suns and blown on it with its winter winds.
She wore always the same garb of homely dark-blue serge, always
the same tall white headgear, always the same pure silver ear-rings,
that had been at once an
Page 244
She had been born in the Berceau de Dieu; had lived there and wedded
there; had toiled there all her life, and never left it for a greater
distance than a league or a longer time than a day.
She loved it with an intense love: the world beyond it was nothing
to her: she scarcely believed in it as existing. She could neither
read nor write. She told the truth, reared her offspring in honesty, and
praised God always--had praised Him when starving in a bitter winter
after her husband's death, when there had been no field-work,
and she had had five children to feed and clothe; and still praised Him now
that her sons were all dead before her, and all she had living of her blood
was her grandson Bernadou.
Her life had been a hard one.
Her parents had been hideously poor. Her marriage had scarcely bettered
her condition. She had laboured in the fields always, hoeing and weeding,
and reaping, and carrying wood, and driving mules, and continually rising
with the first streak of the daybreak. She had known fever and famine, and
all manner of earthly ills. But now in her old age she had peace.
Two of her dead sons, who had sought their for-
Page 245
Bernadou was very good to her.
The lad, as she called him, was five-and-twenty years old,
tall and straight and clean-limbed, with the blue eyes of the North,
and a gentle frank face. He worked early and late in the plot of ground
that gave him his livelihood. He lived with his grandmother, and tended her
with a gracious courtesy and veneration that never altered. He was not very
wise; he also could neither read nor write; he believed in his priest and
his homestead, and loved the ground that he had trodden ever since his
first steps from the cradle had been guided by Reine Allix.
He had never been drawn for the conscription, because he was the only
support of a woman of ninety: he, likewise, had never been
half-a-dozen kilometres from his birth-place.
When he was bidden to vote, and he asked what his vote of assent would
pledge him to, they told him,--
"It will bind you to honour your grandmother so
Page 246
And thereat he had smiled and straightened his stalwart frame, and gone
right willingly to the voting-urn.
He was very stupid in these things: and Reine Allix, though
clear-headed and shrewd, was hardly more learned in them than
he.
"Look you," she had said to him oftentimes, "in my
babyhood there was the old white flag upon the château. Well, they
pulled that down and put up a red one. That toppled and fell, and there was
one of three colours. Then somebody with a knot of white lilies in his hand
came one day and set up the old white one afresh; and before the day was
done that was down again, and the tricolour again up where it is still. Now
some I know fretted themselves greatly because of all these changes of the
flags, but as for me, I could not see that any one of them mattered:
bread was just as dear, and sleep was just as sweet, whichever of the three
was uppermost."
Bernadou, who had never known but the flag of three colours, believed
her, as, indeed, he believed every word that those kindly and resolute old
lips ever uttered to him.
Page 247
He had never been in a city, and only once, on the day of his first
communion, in the town four leagues away. He knew nothing more than this
simple, cleanly, honest life that he led. With what men did outside his
little world of meadow-land and woodland he had no care nor any
concern.
Once a man had come through the village of the Berceau, a travelling
hawker of cheap prints,--a man with a wild eye and a restless
brain,--who told Bernadou that he was a downtrodden slave, a clod, a
beast like a mule, who fetched and carried that the rich might
fatten,--a dolt, an idiot, who cared nothing for the rights of man and
the wrongs of the poor.
Bernadou had listened with a perplexed face: then, with a smile,
that had cleared it like sunlight, he had answered in his country
dialect:--
"I do not know of what you speak. Rights? Wrongs? I cannot tell.
But I have never owed a sou; I have never told a lie; I am strong enough to
hold my own with any man that flouts me; and I am content where I am. That
is enough for me."
The pedler had called him a poor-spirited beast of burden, but
had said so out of reach of his arm, and by night had slunk away from the
Berceau de Dieu, and had been no more seen there to vex the quiet
contentment of its peaceful and peace-loving ways.
Page 248
At night, indeed, sometimes, the little wine-shop of the village
would be frequented by some halfdozen of the peasant proprietors of the
place, who talked Communism after their manner, not a very clear one, in
excited tones and with the feverish glances of conspirators. But it meant
little, and came to less.
The weather and the price of wheat were dearer matters to them; and in
the end they usually drank their red wine in amity, and went up the village
street arm in arm, singing patriotic songs until their angry wives flung
open their lattices and thrust their white headgear out into the moonlight,
and called to them shrewishly to get to bed and not make fools of
themselves in that fashion; which usually silenced and sobered them all
instantly; so that the revolutions of the Berceau de Dieu, if not quenched
in a wine-pot, were always smothered in a nightcap, and never, by
any chance, disturbed its repose.
But of these noisy patriots, Bernadou was never one. He had the
instinctive conservatism of the French peasant, which is in such direct and
tough antagonism with the feverish Socialism of the French artisan.
His love was for the soil--a deep-rooted love as the oaks
that grew in it. Of Paris he had a dim, vague dread, as of a superb beast
continually draining and
Page 249
This wisdom, which the pedler called apathy and cursed, the young man
had imbibed from Nature and the teachings of Reine Allix.
"Look at home and mind thy work," she had said always to
him. "It is labour enough for a man to keep his own life clean and
his own hands honest. Be not thou at any time as they are who are for ever
telling the good God how He might have made the world on a better plan,
while the rats gnaw at their haystacks and the children cry over an empty
platter."
And he had taken heed to her words; so that in all the countryside there
was not any lad truer, gentler, braver or more patient at labour than was
Bernadou; and though some thought him mild even to foolishness, and meek
even to stupidity, he was no fool; and he had a certain rough skill at
music, and a rare gift at the culture of plants, that made his little home
bright
Page 250
At any rate, Reine Allix and he had been happy together for a quarter of
a century under the old gray thatch of the wayside cottage, where it stood
at the foot of the village-street, with its great sycamores spread
above it. Nor were they less happy when in mid-April, in the
six-and-twentieth year of his age, Bernadou had come in with
a bunch of primroses in his hand, and had bent down to her and saluted her
with a respectful tenderness, and said, softly and a little shyly,
"Gran'mère, would it suit you if I were ever--to
marry?"
Reine Allix was silent a minute and more, cherishing the primroses and
placing them in a little brown cupful of water. Then she looked at him
steadily with her clear dark eyes:
"Who is it, my child?"
He was always a child to her, this last-born of the numerous
brood that had once dwelt with her under the spreading branches of the
sycamores, and had now all perished off the face of the earth, leaving
himself and her alone.
Bernadou's eyes met hers frankly:
"It is Margot Dax: does that please you,
gran'mère, or no?"
Page 251
"It pleases me well," she said simply. But there was a
little quiver about her firm-set mouth, and her aged head was bent
over the primroses. She had foreseen it; she was glad of it; and yet, for
the instant it was a pang to her.
"I am very thankful," said Bernadou, with a flash of joy on
his face.
He was independent of his grandmother: he could make enough to
marry upon by his daily toil, and he had a little store of gold and silver
in his bank in the thatch, put by for a rainy day; but he would have no
more thought of going against her will than he would have thought of
lifting his hand against her. In the primitive homesteads of the Berceau de
Dieu, filial reverence was still accounted the first of virtues, yet the
simplest and the most imperative.
"I will go see Margot this evening," said Reine Allix, after
a little pause. "She is a good girl, and a brave, and of pure heart
and fair name. You have chosen well, my grandson."
Bernadou stooped his tall, fair, curly head, and she laid her hands on
him and blessed him.
That evening, as the sun set, Reine Allix kept her word, and went to the
young maiden who had allured the eyes and heart of Bernadou.
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Margot was an orphan: she had not a penny to her dower; she had
been brought up on charity, and she dwelt now in the family of the largest
landowner of the place, a miller, with a numerous offspring, and several
head of cattle, and many stretches of pasture and of orchard.
Margot worked for a hard master, living, indeed, as one of the family,
but sharply driven all day long at all manner of house-work and
field-work. Reine Allix had kept her glance on her, through some
instinctive sense of the way that Bernadou's thoughts were turning,
and she had seen much to praise, nothing to chide, in the young
girl's modest, industrious, cheerful, uncomplaining life.
Margot was very pretty too, with the brown oval face, and the great
black soft eyes, and the beautiful form of the southern blood that had run
in the veins of her father, who had been a sailor of Marseilles, whilst her
mother had been a native of the Provençal country. Altogether, Reine
Allix knew that her beloved one could not have done better or more wisely,
if choose at all he must.
"Some people indeed" she said to herself as she climbed the
street whose sharp-set flints had been trodden by her wooden shoes
for ninety years--"Some people would mourn and scold because
there is no
Page 253
So she climbed the steep way and the slanting road round the hill, and
went in by the door of the mill-house, and found Margot busy in
washing some spring lettuces and other green things in a bowl of bright
water.
Reine Allix, in the fashion of her country and her breeding, was about
to confer with the master and mistress ere saying a word to the girl, but
there was that in Margo's face and in her timid greeting that lured
speech out of her.
She looked long and keenly into the child's downcast countenance,
then touched her with a tender smile:
"Petite Margot, the birds told me a little secret to-day.
Canst guess what it is? Say?"
Margot coloured and then grew pale. True, Bernadou had never really
spoken to her, but still, when one is seventeen, and has danced a few times
with the
Page 254
At sight of her the eyes of the old woman moistened and grew dimmer than
age had made them. She smiled still, but the smile had the sweetness of a
blessing in it, and no longer the kindly banter of humour.
"You love him, my little oneS" she said, in a soft hushed
voice.
"Ah, Mère Allix!" Margot could not say more. She
covered her face with her hands, and turned to the wall, and wept with a
passion of joy.
Down in the Berceau there were gossips who would have said, with wise
shakes of their heads, "Tut, tut! how easy it is to make believe in a
little love when one is a serving-maid, and has not a sou, nor a
roof, nor a friend in the world, and a comely youth,
well-to-do, is willing to marry us!"
But Reine Allix knew better. She had not lived ninety years in the world
not to be able to discern between true feeling and counterfeit. She was
touched, and drew the trembling frame of Margot into her arms, and kissed
her twice on the closed, blue-veined lids of her black eyes.
"Make him happy, only make him happy," she
Page 255
And the child crept to her, sobbing for very rapture that she,
friendless, homeless, and penniless, should be thus elected for so fair a
fate, and whispered through' her tears, "I will."
Reine Allix spoke in all form to the miller and his wife, and with as
much earnestness in her demand as though she had been seeking the hand of
rich Yacobé, the tavern-keeper's only daughter. The
people assented: they had no pretext to oppose, and Reine Allix wrapt
her cloak about her and descended the hill and the street just as the
twilight closed in and the little lights began to glimmer through the
lattices and the shutters and the green mantle of the boughs, whilst the
red fires of the smithy forge glowed brightly in the gloom, and a white
horse waited to be shod, with a boy in a blue blouse seated on its back and
switching away with a branch of budding hazel the first grey gnats of the
early year.
"It is well done, it is well done," she said to herself,
looking at the low rosy clouds and the pale gold of the waning sky.
"A year or two, and I shall be in my grave. I shall leave him easier
if I know he has some creature to care for him, and I shall be quiet in my
coffin, knowing that his children's children will
Page 256
She went in, out of the dewy air, into the little low, square room of
her cottage, and went up to Bernadou and laid her hands on his
shoulders.
"Be it well with thee, my grandson, and with thy sons' sons
after thee," she said solemnly. "Margot will be thy wife. May
thy days and hers be long in thy birth-place!"
II.
A MONTH later they were married.
It was then May.
The green nest of the Berceau seemed to overflow with the singing of
birds and the blossoming of flowers. The cornlands promised a rare harvest,
and the apple orchards were weighed down with their red and white blossoms.
The little brown streams in the woods brimmed over in the grass, and the
air was full of a sweet mellow sunlight, a cool fragrant breeze, a
continual music of humming bees and soaring larks and mule-bells
ringing on the roads, and childish laughter echoing from the fields.
In this glad spring-time Bernadou and Margot were
Page 257
Georges, the baker, whose fiddle made merry melody at all the village
dances, played before them tunefully; little children, with their hands
full of wood-flowers, ran before them; their old blind poodle smelt
its way faithfully by their footsteps; their priest led the way upward with
the cross held erect against the light; Reine Allix walked beside them,
nearly as firmly as she had trodden the same road seventy years before in
her own bridal hour; in the hollow below lay the Berceau de Dieu, with its
red gables and its thatched roofs hidden beneath leaves, and its peaceful
pastures smiling under the serene blue skies of France.
They were happy--ah Heaven, so happy!--and all their little
world rejoiced with them.
They came home, and their neighbouts entered with them, and ate and
drank, and gave them good wishes and gay songs; and the old priest blessed
them with a father's tenderness upon their threshold; and the fiddle
of Georges sent gladdest dance-music flying through the open
casements, across the road, up the hill, far away to the clouds and the
river.
Page 258
At night, when the guests had departed, and all was quite still within
and without, Reine Allix sat alone at her window in the roof, thinking of
their future and of her past, and watching the stars come out, one by
another, above the woods. From her lattice in the eaves she saw straight up
the village street; saw the dwellings of her lifelong neighbours, the
slopes of the rich fields, the gleam of the broad grey water, the whiteness
of the crucifix against the darkened sky.
She saw it all--all so familiar, with that intimate association
only possible to the peasant who has dwelt on one spot from birth to
age.
In that faint light, in those deep shadows, she could trace all the
scene as though the brightness of the noon shone on it; it was all, in its
homeliness and simplicity, intensely dear to her.
In the playtime of her childhood, in the courtship of her youth, in the
joys and woes of her wifehood and widowhood, the bitter pains and sweet
ecstacies of her maternity, the hunger and privation of struggling,
desolate years, the contentment and serenity of old age,--in all these
her eyes had rested only on this small quaint leafy street, with its
dwellings close and low, like beehives in a garden, and its
pasture-lands and corn-lands, wood-girt and
water-fed, stretching as far as the sight could reach.
Page 259
Every inch of its soil, every turn of its paths, was hallowed to her
with innumerable memories: all her beloved dead were garnered there
where the white Christ watched them: when her time should come, she
thought, she would rest with them nothing loth.
As she looked the tears of thanksgiving rolled down her withered cheeks,
and she bent her feeble limbs and knelt down in the moonlight, praising God
that He had given her to live and die in this cherished home, and
beseeching Him for her children that they likewise might dwell in honesty,
and with length of days abide beneath that roof.
"God is good," she murmured as she stretched herself to
sleep beneath the eaves--"God is good. Maybe, when He takes me
to Himself, if I be worthy, He will tell His holy saints to give me a
little corner in His kingdom, that He shall fashion for me in the likeness
of the Berceau."
For it seemed to her that, than the Berceau, heaven itself could hold no
sweeter or fairer nook of Paradise.
The year rolled on, and the cottage under the sycamores was but the
happier for its new inmate.
Bernadou was serious of temper, though so gentle, and the arch gay
humour of his young wife was like perpetual sunlight in the house. Margot,
too, was so docile, so eager, so bright, and so imbued with devo-
Page 260
Bernadou himself spoke little: words were not in his way, but his
blue frank eyes shone with an unclouded radiance that never changed, and
his voice, when he did speak, had a mellow softness in it that made his
slightest speech to the two women with him tender as a caress.
"Thou art a happy woman, my sister," said the priest, who
was wellnigh as old as herself.
Reine Allix bowed her head and made the sign of the cross:
"I am, praise be to God!"
And being happy, she went to the hovel of poor Madelon Dreux, the
cobbler's widow, and nursed her and her children through a malignant
fever, sitting early and late, and leaving her own peaceful hearth for the
desolate hut with the delirious ravings and heart-rending moans of
the fever-stricken.
"How ought one to dare to be happy if one is not of use?"
she would say to those who sought to dissuade her from running such
peril.
Madelon Dreux and her family recovered, owing to her their lives, and
she was happier than before, thinking of them when she sat on the settle
before the wood-fire roasting chestnuts and spinning flax on the
Page 261
Another spring passed and another year went by, and the little home
under the sycamores was still no less honest in its labours or bright in
its rest.
It was one amongst a million of such homes in France, where a sunny
temper made mirth with a meal of herbs, and filial love touched to poetry
the prose of daily household tasks.
A child was born to Margot in the spring-time with the violets
and daisies, and Reine Allix was proud of the fourth generation, and as she
caressed the boy's healthy fair limbs, thought that God was indeed
good to her, and that her race would live long in the place of her
birth.
The child resembled Bernadou, and had his clear and candid eyes. It soon
learned to know the voice of "Gran'mère" and would
turn from its young mother's bosom to stretch its arms to Reine
Allix. It grew fair and strong, and all the ensuing winter passed its hours
curled like a dormouse or playing like a puppy at her feet in the chimney
corner.
Another spring and summer came, and the boy was more than a year old,
with curls of gold, and cheeks like apples, and a mouth that always smiled.
He could
Page 262
Reine Allix watched him, and her eyes filled.
"God is too good" she thought. She feared that she should
scarce be so willing to go to her last sleep under the trees on the
hillside as she had used to be. She could not help a desire to see this
child, this second Bernadou, grow up to youth and manhood; and of this she
knew it was wild to dream.
It was ripe midsummer.
The fields were all russet and amber with an abundance of corn. The
little gardens had seldom yielded so rich a produce. The cattle and the
flocks were in excellent health.
There had never been a season of greater promise and prosperity for the
little traffic that the village and its farms drove in sending milk and
sheep and vegetable wealth to that great city which was to it as a dim,
wonderful, mystic name without meaning.
One evening in this gracious and golden time the people sat out as usual
when the day was done, talking from door to door, the old women knitting or
spinning, the younger ones mending their husbands' or brothers'
blouses or the little blue shirts of their infants, the children playing
with the dogs on the sward that edged
Page 263
Reine Allix, like the others, sat before the door, for once doing
nothing, but with folded hands and bended head dreamily taking pleasure in
the coolness that had come with evening, and the smell of the limes that
were in blossom, and the blithe chatter of Margot with the neighbours.
Bernadou was close beside them, watering and weeding those flowers that
were at once his pride and his recreation, making the face of his dwelling
bright and the air around it full of fragrance.
The little street was quiet in the evening light, only the laughter of
the children and the gay gossip of their mothers breaking the pleasant
stillness: it had been thus at evening with the Berceau centuries
before their time--they thought that it would thus likewise be when
centuries should have seen the youngest-born there travel to his
grave.
Suddenly there came along the road between the trees an old man and a
mule: it was Mathins Rével the miller, who had been that day
to a little town four leagues off, which was the trade-mart and the
corn-exchange of the district. He paused before the cottage of Reine
Allix: he was dusty, travel-stained and sad. Margot ceased
laughing among her flowers as she saw
Page 264
"There is terrible news," he said, drawing a sheet of
printed words from his coat-pocket--"terrible news! We
are to go to war."
"War!" The whole village clustered round him. They had heard
of war, far-off wars in Africa and Mexico, and some of their sons
had been taken off like young wheat mown before its time; but it still
remained to them a thing remote, impersonal, inconceivable, with which they
had nothing to do, nor ever would have anything.
"Read!" said the old man, stretching out his sheet. The only
one there who could do so, Picot the tailor, took it and spelled the news
out to their wondering ears.
It was the declaration of France against Prussia.
There arose a great wail from the mothers whose sons were
conscripts.
The rest asked in trembling, "Will it touch us?"
"Us!" echoed Picot the tailor, in contempt. "How
should it touch us? Our braves will be in Berlin with another fortnight.
The paper says so."
Page 265
The people were silent: they were not sure what he meant by
Berlin, and they were afraid to ask.
"My boy! my boyl" wailed one woman, smiting her breast. Her
son was in the army.
"Marengo!" murmured Reine Allix, thinking of that
far-off time in her dim youth when the horseman had flown through
the dusky street and the bonfire blazed on the highest hill above the
river.
"Bread will be dear" muttered Mathins the miller, going
onward with his foot-weary mule.
Bernadou stood silent, with his roses dry and thirsty round him.
"Why art thou sad?" whispered Margot, with wistful eyes.
"Thou art exempt from war-service, my love?"
Bernadou shook his head.
"The poor will suffer somehow," was all he answered.
Yet to him, as to all in the Berceau, the news was not very terrible,
because it was so vague and distant--an evil so far off and
shapeless.
Picot the tailor, who alone could read, ran from house to house, from
group to group, breathless, gay and triumphant, telling them all that in
two weeks more their brethren would sup in the king's palace at
Berlin; and the people believed and laughed
Page 266
Only Reine Allix looked up the hill above the river, and murmured,
"When we lit the bonfire there, Claudis lay dead."
And Bernadou, standing musing amongst his roses, said with a smile that
was very grave,
"Margot, see here! When Picot shouted, 'À
Berlin!' he trod on my Gloire de Dijon rose and killed it."
The sultry heats and cloudless nights of the wondrous and awful summer
of the year eighteen hundred and seventy passed by, and to the Berceau de
Dieu it was a summer of fair promise and noble harvest, and never had the
land brought forth in richer profusion for man and beast.
Some of the youngest and ablest-bodied labourers were indeed
drawn away to join those swift trains that hurried thousands and tens of
thousands to the frontier by the Rhine. But most of the male population
were married, and were the fathers of young children, and the village was
only moved to a thrill of love and of honest pride to think how its young
Louis and Jean and Andrè and Valentin were gone full of high hope
and high spirit, to come back, maybe--who
Page 267
Why they were gone they knew not very clearly, but their superiors
affirmed that they were gone to make greater the greatness of France; and
the folk of the Berceau believed it, having in a corner of their quiet
hearts a certain vague, dormant, yet deep-rooted love, on which was
written the name of their country.
News came slowly and seldom to the Berceau.
Unless some one of the men rode his mule to the little town, which was
but very rarely, or unless some pedler came through the village with a
news-sheet or so in his pack, or rumours and tidings on his lips,
nothing that was done beyond its fields and woods came to it. And the truth
of what it heard it had no means of measuring or sifting.
It believed what it was told, without questioning; and as it reaped the
harvests in the rich hot sun of August, its peasants laboured cheerily in
the simple and firm belief that mighty things were being done for them and
theirs in the far eastern provinces by their great army, and that Louis and
Jean and André and Valentin and the rest--though, indeed, no
tidings had been heard of them--were safe and well and glorious
somewhere, away where the sun rose, in the sacked palaces of the German
king.
Page 268
Reine Allix alone of them was serious and sorrowful--she whose
memories stretched back over the wide space of near a century.
"Why art thou anxious, gran'mère?" they said to
her. "There is no cause. Our army is victorious everywhere; and they
say our lads will send us all the Prussians' corn and cattle, so that
the very beggars will have their stomachs full."
But Reine Allix shook her head, sitting knitting in the sun.'
"My children, I remember the days of my youth. Our army was
victorious then; at least they said so. Well, all I know is that little
Claudis and the boys with him never came back; and as for bread, you could
not get it for love or money, and the people lay dead of famine out on the
public roads."
"But that is so long ago, gran'mère!" they
urged.
Reine Allix nodded.
"Yes. It is long ago, my dears. But I do not think that things
change very much."
They were silent out of respect for her, but amongst themselves they
said, "She is very old. Nothing is as it was in her time."
One evening, when the sun was setting red over the reapen fields, two
riders on trembling and sinking horses went through the village, using whip
and spur,
Page 269
The people replied that they had seen nothing of the kind, and the
horsemen pressed on, jamming their spurs into their poor beasts'
steaming flanks.
"If you see him, catch and hang him," they shouted as they
scoured away: "he is a Prussian spy!"
"A Prussian!" the villagers echoed with a stupid
stare--"a Prussian in France!"
One of the riders looked over his shoulders for a moment:
"You fools! do you not know? We are beaten--beaten
everywhere--and the Prussian pigs march on Paris."
The spy was not seen in the Berceau, but the news brought by his
pursuers scared sleep from the eyes of every grown man that night in the
little village.
"It is the accursed Empire!" screamed the patriots of the
wine-shop.
But the rest of the people were too terrified and downstricken to take
heed of empires or patriots: they only thought of Louis and Jean and
André and Valentin; and they collected round Reine Allix, who said
to them, "My children, for love of money all our fairest fruits and
flowers--yea, even to the best blos-
Page 270
III.
THIS was all for a time that they heard.
It was a place lowly and obscure enough to be left in peace. The law
pounced down on it once or twice and carried off a few more of its men for
army-service, and arms were sent to it from its neighbouring town,
and an old soldier of the First Empire tried to instruct its remaining sons
in their use. But he had no apt pupil except Bernadou, who soon learned to
handle a musket with skill and with precision, and who carried his straight
form gallantly and well, though his words were seldom heard and his eyes
were always sad.
"You will not be called till the last, Bernadou," said the
old soldier: "you are married, and maintain your grandame and
wife and child. But a strong, muscular, well-built youth like you
should not wait to be called--you should volunteer to serve
France."
"I will serve France when my time comes," said Bernadou,
simply, in answer. But he would not leave
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"If he be called, he will not be found wanting," said Reine
Allix, who knew him better than did even the young wife whom he loved.
Bernadou clung to his home with a dogged devotion.
He would not go from it to fight unless compelled, but for it he would
have fought like a lion. His feeling for his country was a feeling for only
an indefinite shadowy existence that was not clear to him: he could
not love a land that he had never seen, a capital that was only to him as
an empty name; nor could he comprehend the danger that his nation ran, nor
could he desire to go forth and spend his life-blood in defence of
things unknown to him. He was only a peasant, and he could not read nor
greatly understand.
But affection for his birth-place was a passion with
him--mute indeed, but deep-seated as an oak. For his
birth-place he would have struggled as a man can only struggle when
supreme love as well as duty
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It was a narrow form of patriotism, yet it had nobleness, endurance, and
patience in it: in song it has been oftentimes deified as heroism,
but in modern philosophy it is derided, and in modern warfare it is
punished as the blackest crime.
So Bernadou tarried in his cottage till he should be called, keeping
watch by night over the safety of his village, and by day doing all he
could to aid the deserted wives and mothers of the place by the tilling of
their ground for them and the tending of such poor cattle as were left in
their desolate fields.
He and Margot and Reine Allix, between them, fed many mouths that would
otherwise have been closed in death by famine, and denied themselves all
except the barest and most meagre subsistence, that they might give away
the little they possessed.
And all this while the war went on, but seemed far from them, so seldom
did any tidings of it pierce the seclusion in which they dwelt. By and by,
as the autumn went on, they learned a little more.
Fugitives coming to the smithy for a horse's shoe; women fleeing
to their old village homes from their
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It did not alter their daily lives: it was still too far off, and
too impalpable. But a foreboding, a dread, an unspeakable woe settled down
on them.
Already their lands and cattle had been harassed to yield provision for
the army and large towns; already their best horses had been taken for the
siege-trains and the forage-waggons; already their
ploughshares were perforce idle, and their children cried because of the
scarcity of nourishment; already the iron of war had entered into their
souls.
The little street at evening was mournful and very silent: the few
who talked spoke in whispers, lest a spy should hear them, and the young
ones had no strength to play: they wanted food.
"It is as it was in my youth," said Reine Allix, eating her
piece of black bread and putting aside the better food prepared for her,
that she might save it, unseen, for "the child."
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It was horrible to her and to all of them to live in that continual
terror of an unknown foe--that perpetual expectation of some ghastly,
shapeless misery.
They were quiet--so quiet!--but by all they heard they knew
that any night, as they went to their beds, the thunder of cannon might
awaken them; any morning, as they looked on their beloved fields, they knew
that ere sunset the flames of war might have devoured them.
They knew so little, too: all they were told was so indefinite and
garbled that sometimes they thought the whole was some horrid
dream--thought so, at least, until they looked at their empty stables,
their untilled land, their children who cried from hunger, their mothers
who wept for the conscripts.
But as yet it was not so very much worse than it had been in times of
bad harvest and of dire distress; and the storm which raged over the land
had as yet spared this little green nest among the woods on the Seine.
November came.
"It is a cold night, Bernadou: put on more wood," said
Reine Allix. Fuel at the least was plentiful in that district, and Bernadou
obeyed.
He sat at the table, working at a new churn for his wife: he had
some skill at turnery and at invention
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Suddenly a great sobbing cry rose without--the cry of many voices,
all raised in woe together.
Bernadou rose, took his musket in his hand, undid his door, and looked
out. All the people were turned out into the street, and the women, loudly
lamenting, beat their breasts and strained their children to their
bosoms.
There was a sullen red light in the sky to the eastward, and on the wind
a low, hollow roar stole to them.
"What is it?" he asked.
"The Prussians are on us!" answered twenty voices in one
accord. "That red glare is the town burning."
Then they were all still--a stillness that was more horrible than
their lamentations.
Reine Allix came and stood by her grandson. "If
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He took her hand and kissed it. She was content with his answer.
Margot stole forth too, and crouched behind them, holding her child to
her breast. "What can they do to us?" she asked, trembling,
with the rich colours of her face blanched white.
Bernadou smiled on her: "I do not know, my dear. I think
even they can hardly bring death upon women and children."
"They can, and they will," said a voice from the crowd.
None answered. The street was very quiet in the darkness. Far away in
the east the red glare glowed. On the wind there was still that faint,
distant ravening roar, like the roar of famished wolves: it was the
roar of fire and of war.
In the silence Reine Allix spoke: "God is good. Shall we not
trust in Him?"
With one great choking sob the people answered: their hearts were
breaking. All night long they watched in the street--they who had done
no more to bring this curse upon them than the flower-roots that
slept beneath the snow. They dared not go to their beds: they knew
not when the enemy might be
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But the calm, firm voice of Reine Allix rebuked him: "Let
who will, run like a hare from the hounds. For me and mine, we abide by our
homestead."
And they were ashamed to be outdone by a woman, and a woman ninety years
old, and no man spoke any more of flight. All the night long they watched
in the cold and the wind, the children shivering beneath their
mothers' skirts, the men sullenly watching the light of the flames in
the dark, starless sky. All night long they were left alone, though far off
they heard the dropping shots of scattered firing, and in the leafless
woods around them the swift flight of woodland beasts startled from their
sleep, and the hurrying feet of sheep terrified from their folds in the
outlying fields.
The daybreak came, gray, cheerless, very cold. A dense fog, white and
raw, hung over the river: in the east, where the sun, they knew, was
rising, they could only see the livid light of the still towering flames
and pillars of black smoke against the leaden douds.
"We will let them come and go in peace if they
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Bernadou said nothing, but he straightened his tall limbs, and in his
grave, blue eyes a light gleamed.
Reine Allix looked at him as she sat in the doorway of her house.
"Thy hands are honest, thy heart pure, thy conscience clear. Be not
afraid to die if need there be," she said to him.
He looked down and smiled on her. Margot dung to him in a passion of
weeping. He clasped her close and kissed her softly, but the woman who read
his heart was the woman who had held him at his birth.
By degrees the women crept timidly back into their houses, hiding their
eyes, so that they should not see that horrid light against the sky, whilst
the starving children clung to their breasts or to their skirts, wailing
aloud in terror. The few men there were left, for the most part of them
very old or else mere striplings, gathered together in a hurried council.
Old Mathurin the miller and the patriots of the wine-shop were
agreed that there could be no resistance, whatever might befall
them--that it would be best to hide such weapons as they had and any
provisions that still remained to them, and yield up themselves and their
homes with
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Bernadou alone raised his voice in opposition. His eye kindled, his
cheek flushed, his words for once sprang from his lips like fire.
"What!" he said to them, "shall we yield up our homes and
our wives and our infants without a single blow? Shall we be so vile as to
truckle to the enemies of France, and show that we can fear them? It were a
shame, a foul shame: we were not worthy of the name of men. Let us
prove to them that there are people in France who are not afraid to die.
Let us hold our own so long as we can. Our muskets are good, our walls
strong, our woods in this weather morasses that will suck in and swallow
them if only we have tact to drive them there. Let us do what we can. The
camp of the francs-tireurs is but three leagues from us. They will
be certain to come to our aid. At any rate, let us die bravely. We can do
little--that may be. But if every man in France does that little that
he can, that little will be great enough to drive the invaders off the
soil."
Mathurin and the others screamed at him and hooted. "You are a
fooll" they shouted. "You will be the undoing of us all. Do you
not know that
Page 280
"I know," said Bernadou, with a dark radiance in his azure
eyes. "But then it is a choice between disgrace and the flames:
let us only take heed to be clear of the first--the last must rage as
God wills."
But they screamed and mouthed and hissed at him: "Oh yes!
fine talk, fine talk! See your own roof in flames if you will: you
shall not ruin ours. Do what you will with your own neck. Keep it erect or
hang by it, as you choose. But you have no right to give your neighbours
over to death, whether they will or no."
He strove, he pleaded, he conjured, he struggled with them half the
night, with the salt tears running down his cheeks, and all his gentle
blood burning with righteous wrath and loathing shame, stirred for the
first time in all his life to a rude, simple, passionate eloquence. But
they were not persuaded. Their few gold-pieces hidden in the
rafters, their few feeble sheep starving in the folds, their own miserable
lives, all hungry, woe-begone and spent in daily
terrors,--these were still dear to them, and they would not imperil
them. They called him a madman; they denounced him as one who would be
their murderer; they threw themselves on him and demanded his musket to
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Bernadou's eyes flashed fire; his breast heaved; his nerves
quivered; he shook them off and strode a step forward. "As you
live" he muttered, "I have a mind to fire on you, rather than
let you live to shame yourselves and me!"
Reine Allix, who stood by him silent all the while, laid her hand on his
shoulder.
"My boy," she said in his ear, "you are right, and
they wrong. Yet let not dissension between brethren open the door, for the
enemy to enter thereby into your homes. Do what you will with your own
life, Bernadou--it is yours--but leave them to do as they will
with theirs. You cannot make sheep into lions, and let not the first blood
shed here be a brother's."
Bernadou's head dropped on his breast.
"Do as you will" he muttered to his neighbours. They took
his musket from him, and in the darkness of the night stole silently up the
wooded chapel-hill and buried it, with all their other arms, under
the altar where the white Christ hung.
"We are safe now" said Mathurin the miller to the patriots
of the tavern. "Had that madman had his way, he had destroyed us
all."
Reine Allix softly led her grandson across his own
Page 282
"You did what you could, Bernadou," she said to him,
"let the rest come as it will."
Then she turned from him, and flung her cloak over her head and sank
down, weeping bitterly, for she had lived through ninety-three years
only to see this agony at the last.
Bernadou, now that all means of defence was gone from him, and the only
thing left to him to deal with was his own life, had become quiet and
silent and passionless, as was his habit. He would have fought like a
mastiff for his home, but this they had forbidden him to do, and he was
passive and without hope. He shut-to his door, and sat down with his
hand in that of Reine Allix and his arm around his wife.
"There is nothing to do but to wait," he said sadly.
The day seemed very long in coming.
The firing ceased for a while: then its roll commenced afresh, and
grew nearer to the village. Then again all was still.
At noon a shepherd staggered into the place, pale, bleeding, bruised,
covered with mire. The Prussians, he told them, had forced him to be their
guide, had knotted him tight to a trooper's saddle, and had dragged
him with them until he was half dead with
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Bernadou, who had gone out to hear his news, returned into the house and
sat down and hid his face within his hands.
"If I resist you are all lost," he muttered. "And yet
to yield like a cur!"
It was a piteous question, whether to follow the instinct in him and see
his birth-place in flames and his family slaughtered for his act, or
to crush out the manhood in him and live, loathing himself as a coward for
evermore?
Reine Allix looked at him, and laid her hand on his bowed head, and her
voice was strong and tender as music:
"Fret not thyself, my beloved. When the moment comes, then do as
thine own heart and the whisper of God in it bid thee."
A great sob answered her: it was the first since his earliest
infancy that she had ever heard from Bernadou.
It grew dark. The autumn day died. The sullen clouds dropped scattered
rain. The red leaves were
Page 284
Suddenly in the street without there was the sound of many feet of
horses and of men, the shouting of angry voices, the splashing of quick
steps in the watery ways, the screams of women, the flash of steel through
the gloom.
Bernadou sprang to his feet, his face pale, his blue eyes dark as
night.
"They are come!" he said under his breath. It was not fear
that he felt, nor horror: it was rather a passion of love for his
birth-place and his nation--a passion of longing to struggle
and to die for both. And he had no weapon!
He drew his house door open with a steady hand, and stood on his own
threshold and faced these, his enemies. The street was full of
them--some mounted, some on foot: crowds of them swarmed in the
woods and on the roads. They had settled on the village as vultures on a
dead lamb's body.
It was a little, lowly place: it might well have been left in
peace.
Page 285
It had had no more share in the war than a child still unborn, but it
came in the victors' way, and their mailed heel crushed it as they
passed. They had heard that arms were hidden and francs-tireurs
sheltered there, and they had swooped down on it and held it hard and fast.
Some were told off to search the chapel; some to ransack the dwellings;
some to seize such food and bring such cattle as there might be left; some
to seek out the devious paths that crossed and recrossed the fields; and
yet there still remained in the little street hundreds of armed men, force
enough to awe a citadel or storm a breach.
The people did not atempt to resist.
They stood passive, dry-eyed in misery, looking on whilst the
little treasures of their household lives were swept away for ever, and
ignorant what fate by fire or iron might be their portion ere the night was
done.
They saw the corn that was their winter store to save their offspring
from famine poured out like ditch-water. They saw oats and wheat
flung down to be trodden into a slough of mud and filth. They saw the
walnut presses in their kitchens broken open, and their old heirlooms of
silver, centuries old, borne away as booty. They saw the oak cupboards in
their wives' bed-chambers ransacked, and the homespun linen
and the quaint bits of plate that had formed their nuptial
Page 286
They saw all this, and had to stand by with mute tongues and passive
hands, lest any glance of wrath or gesture of revenge should bring the
leaden bullet in their children's throats or the yellow flame amidst
their homesteads. Greater agony the world cannot hold.
Under the porch of the cottage, by the sycamores, one group stood and
looked, silent and very still--Bernadou, erect, pale, calm, with a
fierce scorn burning in his eyes; Margot, quiet, because he wished her so,
holding to her rosy and golden beauty of her son; Reine Allix, with a
patient horror on her face, her figure drawn to its full height, and her
hands holding to her breast the crucifix.
They stood thus, waiting they knew not what, only resolute to show no
cowardice and meet no shame.
Behind them was the dull, waning glow of the wood-fire on the
hearth which had been the centre of all their hopes and joys; before them
the dim, dark
Page 287
Suddenly a voice arose from the armed mass:
"Bring me the peasant hither."
Bernadou was seized by several hands and forced and dragged from his
door out to the place where the leader of the Uhlans sat on a white charger
that shook and snorted blood in its exhaustion.
Bernadou cast off the alien grasp that held him, and stood erect before
his foes. He was no longer pale, and his eyes were clear and steadfast.
"You look less a fool than the rest," said the Prussian
commander. "You know this country well?"
"Well!"
The country in whose fields and woodlands he had wandered from his
infancy, and whose every meadow-path and wayside tree and
flower-sown brook he knew by heart as a lover knows the lines of his
mistress's face!
"You have arms here?" pursued the German.
"We had."
"What have you done with them?"
"If I had had my way, you would not need ask. You would have felt
them."
Page 288
The Prussian looked at him keenly, doing homage to the boldness of the
answer. "Will you confess where they are?"
"No."
"You know the penalty for concealment of arms is death?"
"You have made it so."
"We have, and Prussian will is French law. You are a bold
man: you merit death. But still, you know the country
well?"
Bernadou smiled, as a mother might smile were any foolish enough to ask
her if she remembered the look her dead child's face had worn.
"If you know it well," pursued the Prussian, "I will
give you a chance. Lay hold of my stirrup-leather and be lashed to
it, and show me straight as the crow flies to where the weapons are hidden.
If you do, I will leave you your life. If you do not--"
"If I do not?"
"You will be shot."
Bernadou was silent: his eyes glanced through the mass of soldiers
to the little cottage under the trees opposite: the two there were
straining to behold him, but the soldiers pushed them back, so that in the
flare of the torches they could not see, nor in the tumult hear. He thanked
God for it.
Page 289
"Your choice?" asked the Uhlan, impatiently, after a
moment's pause.
Bernadou's lips were white, but they did not tremble as he
answered, "I am no traitor." And his eyes as he spoke went
softly to the little porch where the light glowed from that hearth beside
which he would never again sit with the creatures he loved around him.
The German looked at him: "Is that a boast or a
fact?"
"I am no traitor," Bernadou answered simply once more.
The Prussian gave a sign to his troopers. There was the sharp report of
a double shot, and Bernadou fell dead. One bullet pierced his brain, the
other was bedded in his lungs. The soldiers kicked aside the warm and
quivering body. It was only a peasant killed!
With a shriek that rose above the roar of the wind, and cut like steel
to every human heart that beat there, Reine Allix forced her way through
the throng, and fell on her knees beside him, and caught him in her arms,
and laid his head upon her breast, where he had used to sleep his softest
sleep in infancy and childhood.
"It is God'will! it is God's will!" she
muttered;
Page 290
Margot followed her and looked, and stood dry-eyed and silent;
then flung herself and the child she carried in her arms beneath the hoof
of the white charger.
"End your work!" she shrieked to them. "You have
killed him--kill us. Have you not mercy enough for that?"
The horse, terrified, and snorting blood, plunged and trampled the
ground: his fore foot struck the child's golden head and
stamped its face out of all human likeness. Some peasants pulled Margot
from the lashing hoofs; she was quite dead, though neither would nor bruise
was on her.
Reine Allix neither looked nor paused. With all her strength she had
begun to drag the body of Bernadou across the threshold of his house.
"He shall lie at home, he shall lie at home," she muttered.
She would not believe that already he was dead.
With all the force of her earliest womanhood she lifted him, and half
drew half bore him into the home that he had loved, and laid him down upon
the hearth, and knelt by him, caressing him as though he were once more a
child, and saying softly. "Hush!"
Page 291
Without, the tumult of the soldiery increased: they found the arms
hidden under the altar on the hill; they seized five peasants to slay them
for the dire offence. The men struggled, and would not go as the sheep to
the shambles. They were shot down in the street before the eyes of their
children. Then the order was given to fire the place in punishment, and
leave it to its fate.
The torches were flung with a laugh on the dry thatched
roofs--brands snatched from the house-fires on the hearths were
tossed amongst the dwelling-houses and the barns. The straw and
timber flared alight like tow.
An old man, her nearest neighbour, rushed to the cottage of Reine Allix
and seized her by the arm.
"They fire the Berceau," he screamed. "Quick! quick!
or you will be burned alive!"
Reine Allix looked up with a smile: "Be quiet! Do you not
see? He sleeps."
The old man shook her, implored her, strove to drag her away--in
desperation pointed to the roof above, which was already in flames.
Reine Allix looked: at that sight her mind cleared
Page 292
"Go in peace and save yourself," she said in the old, sweet,
strong tones of an earlier day. "As for me, I am very old. I and my
dead will stay together at home."
The man fled, and left her to her choice.
The great curled flames and the livid vapours closed around her:
she never moved. The death was fierce but swift, and even in death she and
the one whom she had loved and reared were not divided.
The end soon came.
From hill to hill the Berceau de Dieu broke into flames. The village was
a lake of fire, into which the statue of the Christ, burning and reeling,
fell. Some few peasants, with their wives and children, fled to the woods,
and there escaped one torture to perish more slowly of cold and famine. All
other things perished. The rapid stream of the flame licked up all there
was in its path. The bare trees raised their leafless branches on fire at a
thousand points. The stores of corn and fruit were lapped by millions of
crimson tongues. The pigeons flew screaming from their roosts and sank into
the smoke. The dogs were suffocated on the thresholds they had guarded all
their lives. The calf was stifled in the byre. The sheep
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The Berceau de Dieu was as one vast furnace, in which every living
creature was caught and consumed and changed to ashes.
The tide of war has rolled on and left it a blackened waste, a smoking
ruin, wherein not so much as a mouse may creep or a bird may nestle. It is
gone, and its place can know it never more.
Never more.
But who is there to care?
It was but as a leaf which the great storm withered as it passed.
THE END.
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.