Part 20

Will walked about in a state of acute misery. What could it be? What could have happened? What could this painter, this George Aymer, this thorough-paced rascal with the beautiful face, this man of whom Johannah, in days gone by, “had seen a great deal,” so that her friends had feared “she might end by marrying him”—what could he have called upon her for? What could have passed between them? Why had she disappeared? Where was she now? Where was he? Where was Madame Dornaye, who had gone to look for her? Could—could it possibly be—that he—this man notorious for his corruption even in the corruptest world of Paris—could it be that he was the man Johannah meant when she had talked of the man she was in love with? And Will, fatuous imbecile, had vainly allowed himself to imagine.... Oh, why did she not come back? What could be keeping her away from him all this time?... “I have had a hundred, I have had a hundred.” The phrase echoed and echoed in his memory. She had said, “I have had a hundred love affairs.” Oh, to be sure, in the next breath, she had contradicted herself, she had said, “No, I haven’t.” But she had added, “Everybody has had at least one.” So she had had at least one. With this man, George Aymer? Madame Dornaye said she had broken with him, ceased to see him. But—it was certain she had seen him to-day. But—lovers’ quarrels are made up; lovers break with each other, and then come together again, are reunited. Perhaps... Perhaps... Oh, where was she? Why did she remain away in this mysterious fashion? What could she be doing? What could she be doing?

The dressing-bell rang, and he went to dress for dinner.

“Anyhow, I shall see her now, I shall see her at dinner,” he kept telling himself, as he dressed.

But when he came downstairs the drawing-room was still empty. He walked backwards and forwards.

“We shall have to dine without our hostess,” Madame Dornaye said, entering presently. “Jeanne has a bad headache, and will stay in her room.” VII

Will left the house early the next morning, and went out into the garden. The sun was shining, the dew sparkled on the grass, the air was keen and sweet with the odours of the earth. A mile away the sea glowed blue as larkspur; and overhead innumerable birds gaily piped and twittered. But oh, the difference, the difference! His eyes could see no colour, his ears could hear no music. His brain felt as if it had been stretched and strained, like a thing of india-rubber; a lump ached in his throat; his heart was sick with the suspense of waiting, with the questionings, the fears, suspicions, that had beset it through the night.

“Will!” Johannah’s voice called behind him.

He turned.

“Thank God!” The words came without conscious volition on his part. “I thought I was never going to see you again.”

“I have been waiting for you,” said she.

She wore her garden-hat and her white frock; but her face was pale, and her eyes looked dark and anxious.

He had taken her hand, and was clinging to it, pressing it, hard, so hard that it must have hurt her, in the violence of his emotion.

“Oh, wait, Will, wait,” she said, trying to draw her hand away; and her eyes filled with sudden tears.

He let go her hand, and looked into her tearful eyes, helpless, speechless, longing to speak, unable, in the confusion of his thoughts and feelings, to find a word.

“I must tell you something, Will. Come with me somewhere—where we can be alone. I must tell you something.”

She moved off, away from the house, he keeping beside her. They passed out of the garden, into the deep shade of the park.

“Do you remember,” she began, all at once, “do you remember what I said yesterday, about my motto? That my motto was ’Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold’.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I am going to be very bold indeed now, Will. I am going to tell you something—something that will make you hate me perhaps—that will make you despise me perhaps,” she faltered.

“You could not possibly tell me anything that could make me hate you or despise you. But you must not tell me anything at all, unless it is something you are perfectly sure you will be happier for having told me,” he said.

“It is something I wish to tell you, something I must tell you,” said she. Then after a little pause, “Oh, how shall I begin it?” But before he could have spoken, “Do you think that a woman—do you think that a girl, when she is very young, when she is very immature and impressionable, and very impulsive, and ignorant, and when she is alone in the world, without a father or mother—do you think that if she makes some terrible mistake, if she is terribly deceived, if somebody whom she believes to be good and noble and unhappy and misunderstood, somebody whom she—whom she loves—do you think that if she makes some terrible mistake—if she—if she—oh, my God!—if——-” She held her breath for a second, then suddenly, “Can’t you understand what I mean?” she broke down in a sort of wail, and hid her face in her hands, and sobbed.

Will stood beside her, holding his arms out towards her. “Johannah! Johannah!” was all he could say.

She dropped her hands, and looked at him with great painful eyes. “Tell me—do you think that a woman can never be forgiven? Do you think that she is soiled, degraded, changed utterly? Do you think that when she—that when she did what she did—it was a sin, a crime, not only a terrible mistake, and that her whole nature is changed? Most people think so. They think that a mark has been left upon her, branded upon her; that she can never, never be the same again. Do you think so, Will? Oh, it is not true; I know it is not true. A woman can leave that mistake, that terror, that horror—she can leave it behind her as completely as she can leave any other dreadful thing. She can blot it out of her life, like a nightmare. She isn’t changed—she remains the same woman. She isn’t utterly changed, and soiled, and defiled. In her own conscience, no matter what other people think, she knows, she knows she isn’t. When she wakes up to find that the man she had believed in, the man she had loved, when she wakes up to find that he isn’t in any way what she had thought him, that he is base and evil and ignoble, and when all her love for him dies in horror and misery—oh, do you think that she must never, never, as long as she lives, hold up her head again, never be happy again, never love any one again? Look at me, Will. I am myself. I am what God made me. Do you think that I am utterly vile because—because———” But her voice failed again, and her eyes again filled with tears.

“Oh, Johannah, don’t ask me what I think of you. I could not tell you what I think of you. You are as God made you. God never made—never made any one else so splendid.”

And in a moment his arms were round her, and she was weeping her heart out on his shoulder.

ROOMS

Would Madame like a little orange-flower water in her milk?” the waiter asked. Madame thought she would, and the waiter went off to fetch it.

We were seated on the terrace of a café at Rouen, a café on the quays. There was a long rank, three deep, of small marble tables, untenanted for the most part, sheltered by a bright red-and-white striped awning, and screened from the street by a hedge of oleanders in big green-painted tubs; so that one had a fine sense of cosiness and seclusion, of refreshing shade and coolness and repose. Beyond the oleanders, one was dimly conscious of hot sunshine, of the going and coming of people on the pavement, of the passing of carts and tram-cars in the grey road, and then of the river—the slate-coloured river, with its bridges and its puffing penny steamboats, its tall ships out of Glasgow or Copenhagen or Barcelona, its high green banks, farther away, where it wound into the country, and the pure sky above it. From all the interesting things the café provided, lucent-tinted syrups, fiery-hearted, aromatic cordials, Madame (with subtle feminine unexpectedness) had chosen a glass of milk. But the waiter had suggested orange-flower water, to give it savour; and now he brought the orange-flower water in a dark-blue bottle.

It was partly, I daresay, the sight of the dark-blue bottle, but it was chiefly, perhaps, the smell of the orange-flower water, that suddenly, suddenly, whisked my thoughts far away from Rouen, far away from 1897, back ten, twenty, I would rather not count how many years back in the past, to my childhood, to Saint-Graal, and to my grandmother’s room in our old rambling house there. For my grandmother always kept a dark-blue bottle of orange-flower water in her closet, and the air of her room was always faintly sweet with the perfume of it.

Suddenly, suddenly, a sort of ghost of my grandmother’s room rose before me; and as I peered into it and about it, a ghost of the old emotion her room used to stir in me rose too, an echo of the old wonder, the old feeling of strangeness and mystery. It was a big room—or, at least, it seemed big to a child—a corner room, on the first floor, with windows on two sides. The windows on one side looked through the branches of a great elm, a city of birds and squirrels, out upon the lawn, with the pond at the bottom of it. On the other side, the windows looked over the terrace, into the shrubberies and winding paths of the garden. The walls of the room were hung with white paper, upon which, at regular intervals, was repeated a landscape in blue, a stretch of meadow with cows in it, and a hillside topped by a ruined castle. In a corner, the inmost corner, stood my grandmother’s four-post bed, with its canopy and curtains of dark-green tapestry. Then, of course, there was the fireplace, surmounted by a high, slender mantelpiece, on which were ranged a pair of silver candlesticks, a silver tray containing the snuffers and the extinguisher, and, in the middle, a solemn old buhl clock. From above the mantelpiece a picture looked down at you, the only picture in the room, the life-size portrait of a gentleman in a white stock and an embroidered waistcoat—the portrait of my grandfather, indeed, who had died long years before I was born, when my mother was a schoolgirl. And then there was the rest of the furniture of the room—a chair at each window, and between the various windows my grandmother’s dressing-table, her work-table, her armoire-à-glace, her great mahogany bureau, a writing-desk above, a chest-of-drawers below. In two or three places—besides the big double door that led into her room from the outer passage—the wall was broken by smaller doors, doors papered over like the wall itself, and even with it, so that you would scarcely have noticed them. One of these was the door of my grandmother’s oratory, with its praying-desk and its little altar. The others were the doors of her closets: the deep black closet, where her innumerable dresses were suspended, and the closets where she kept her bandboxes and her sunshades and her regiment of bottles—chief among them the tall dark-blue bottle of orange-flower water.

I don’t know, I can’t think, why this room should always have awakened in me a feeling of strangeness and mystery, why it should always have set me off day-dreaming and wondering; but it always did. The mahogany bureau, the tapestried four-post bed, the portrait of my grandfather, the recurrent landscape on the wall-paper, the deep black closet where the dresses hung, the faint smell of orange-flower water—each of these was a surface, a curtain, behind which, on the impenetrable other side of which, vaguely, wonderingly, I divined strange vistas, a whole strange world. Each of these silently hinted to me of strange happenings, strange existences, strange conditions. And vaguely, longingly, I would try to formulate my feeling into some sort of distinct mental vision, try to translate into my own language their occult suggestions. They were hieroglyphs, full of meaning, if only I could understand. Was it because the things in my grandmother’s room were all old things, old-fashioned things? Was the strange world they spoke of simply the world as it had been in years gone by, before I came into it, before even my mother and father came into it, when people long since dead were alive, important, the people of the day, and when these faded, old-fashioned things were fresh and new? I doubt if it could have been entirely this. There were plenty of old things in our house at Saint-Graal—in the hall, the library, the garret, everywhere; the house itself was very old indeed; yet no other part of it gave me anything like the same emotion.

My Uncle Edmond’s room, for instance, gave me a directly contrary emotion, though here, too, all the furniture was old-fashioned. It gave me a sense of brisk, almost of stern, actuality; of present facts and occupations; of alert, busy manhood. As I followed Alexandre into it, in the morning, when he went to dust it and put it in order, I was filled with a kind of fearful admiration: the fear, the admiration, of the small for the big, of the weak for the strong, of the helpless for the commanding. The arrangement of the room, the lines of the room, the very colours of the room, seemed strong, and commanding, and severe. Yet, when you came to examine it, the only really severe-looking object was the bedstead; this being devoid of curtains, its four varnished pillars shone somewhat hard and bare. For the rest, there was just the natural furniture of a sleeping-room: a dressing-table, covered with a man’s toilet accessories—combs and brushes, razors, scissors, shoehorns, button-hooks, shirt-studs, and bottles enclosing I know not what necessary fluids; a bigger table, with writing-materials on it, with an old epaulette-box used now to hold tobacco, and endless pipes and little pink books of cigarette-papers; a bureau like my grandmother’s; a glazed bookcase; and the proper complement of chairs. The walls of the room were painted white, and ornamented by two pictures, facing each other: two steel-engravings, companion-pieces, after Rembrandt, I believe. “Le Philosophe en Contemplation” was the legend printed under one; and under the other, “Le Philosophe en Méditation.” I can only remember that the philosopher had a long grey beard, and that in both pictures he was seated in a huge easy-chair. My Uncle Edmond had been in the army when he was a young man, and in his closets (besides his ordinary clothes and his countless pairs of boots) there were old uniform coats, with silver buttons, old belts, clasps, spurs, and then, best of all, three or four swords, and a rosewood case or two of pistols. Needless to say whether my awe and my admiration mounted to their climax when I peeped in upon these historic trophies. And just as the smell of orange-flower water pervaded my grandmother’s room, so another, a very different smell, pervaded my Uncle Edmond’s, a dry, clean smell, slightly pungent, bitter, but not at all unpleasant. I could never discover what it came from, I can’t even now conjecture; but it seemed to me a manly smell, just the smell that a man’s room ought to have. In my too-fruitless efforts to imitate Uncle Edmond’s room in the organisation of my own, it was that smell, more than anything else, which baffled me. I could not achieve the remotest semblance of it. Of course, I was determined that when I grew up I should have a room exactly like my uncle’s in every particular, and I trusted, no doubt, that it would acquire the smell, with time.

But of all the rooms at Saint-Graal, the one that gave you the thrillingest, the most exquisite emotion, was my mother’s. If my grandmother’s room represented the silence and the strangeness of the past, and my uncle’s the actuality and activity of the present, my mother’s room represented the Eternal Feminine, smiling at you, enthralling you, in its loveliest incarnation; singing to you, amid delicate luxuries, of youth and beauty and happiness, and the fine romance of mirth. In my mother’s room, for example, so far from being old-fashioned, the furniture was of the very latest, daintiest design, fresh from Paris. The wallpaper was cream-coloured, with garlands of pink and blue flowers trailing over it, and here and there a shepherd’s hat and a shepherd’s pipes tied together by a long fluttering blue ribbon. The chairs and the sofa were covered with chintz, gayer even, if that were possible, than this paper: chintz on which pretty little bright-blue birds flew about among poppies, red as scarlet, and pale-green leaves. The window-curtains and the bed-curtains were of the same merry chintz; the bed-quilt was an eider-down of the softest blush-rose silk; the bedstead was enamelled white, and so highly polished that you could see an obscure reflection of your features in it. And then, the dressing-table, with its wide bevelled mirror, and the glistening treasures displayed upon it!—the open jewel-case, and the rings, brooches, bracelets, necklaces, that sparkled in it; the silver-backed brushes, the silver-topped bottles, the silver-framed hand-glass; the hundred shining trifles. One whole side of the room had been converted into a vast bay-window; this looked due south, over the floweriest part of our flower-garden, over the rich green country beyond, miles away, to where the Pyrenees gloomed purple. As a shield against the sun the window was fitted with Venetian blinds, besides the curtains; and every morning, when I crept in from my own adjoining room, to pay my mother a visit, it was given me to witness a marvellous transformation scene. At first all was dark, or nearly dark, so that you could only distinguish things as shadowy masses. But presently my mother’s maid, Aurélie, arrived with the chocolate, and drew back the curtains, filling the room with a momentary twilight; then she opened the Venetian blinds, and suddenly there was a gush of sunlight, and the room gleamed and glittered like a room in a crystal palace. Sweet airs came in from the garden, bird-notes came in, the day came in, dancing and laughing joyously; and my mother and I joyously laughed back at it. Another transformation scene, at which I was permitted to assist, took place in this room in the evening, when my mother dressed for dinner. I would sit at a distance, not to be in the way, and watch the ceremony with eyes as round as O’s doubtless, and certainly with an enravished soul; while Aurélie did my mother’s hair (sprinkling it, as a culmination, with a pinch of diamond-dust, according to the mode of the period), and moved to and from the wardrobe, where my mother’s bewildering confections of silks and laces were enshrined, and her satin slippers glimmered in a row on their shelf. And after the toilet was completed, and my mother, in dazzling loveliness, had kissed me good-bye and vanished, I would linger a little, to gaze about the temple in which such miracles could happen; taking up and studying one by one the combs, brushes, powder-puffs, or what not, as you would study the instruments employed by a conjurer; and removing the stoppers from the scent-bottles, to inhale their delicious fragrance....

“Don’t you think,” asked my companion, “that it’s time you paid the waiter and we were off?”

I looked up, and suddenly there was Rouen—Rouen, the café on the quays, Madame’s empty glass of milk, and Madame herself questioning me from anxious eyes.

“Yes,” I said, “I think it’s time we were off; and what’s more, I’ll tell you this: every room in the universe has not only its peculiar physiognomy and its peculiar significance, but it wakes a particular sentiment also, and has a special smell.”

“Oh, I see,” said Madame; “that’s why you’ve been silent all this while.”

So I paid the waiter, and we took the puffing little steamboat, down the river, between its green banks and its flowery islets, back to La Bouille.

ROSEMARY FOR REMEMBRANCE I

I wonder why I dreamed last night of Zabetta. It is years since she made her brief little transit through my life, and passed out of it utterly. It is years since the very recollection of her—which for years, like an accusing spirit, had haunted me too often—like a spirit was laid. It is long enough, in all conscience, since I have even thought of her, casually, for an instant. And then, last night, after a perfectly usual London day and evening, I went to bed and dreamed of her vividly. What had happened to bring her to my mind? Or is it simply that the god of dreams is a capricious god?

The influence of my dream, at any rate,—the bittersweet savour of it,—has pursued me through my waking hours. All day long to-day Zabetta has been my phantom guest. She has walked with me in the streets; she has waited at my elbow while I wrote or talked or read. Now, at tea-time, she is present with me by my study fireside, in the twilight. Her voice sounds faintly, plaintively, in my ears; her eyes gaze at me sadly from a pale reproachful face.... She bids me to the theatre of memory, where my youth is rehearsed before me in mimic show. There was one—no, there were two little scenes in which Zabetta played the part of leading lady. II

I do not care to specify the year in which it happened; it happened a terrible number of years ago; it happened when I was twenty. I had passed the winter in Naples,—oh, it had been a golden winter!—and now April had come, and my last Neapolitan day. Tomorrow I was to take ship for Marseilles, on the way to join my mother in Paris.

It was in the afternoon; and I was climbing one of those crooked staircase alleys that scale the hillsides behind the town, the salita—is there, in Naples, a Salita Santa Margherita? I had lunched (for the last time!) at the Café d’.urope, and had then set forth upon a last haphazard ramble through the streets. It was tremulous spring weather, with blue skies, soft breezes, and a tender sun; the sort of weather that kindles perilous ardours even in the blood of middle age, and turns the blood of youth to wildfire.

Women sat combing their hair, and singing, and gossiping, before the doorways of their pink and yellow houses; children sprawled, and laughed, and quarrelled in the dirt. Pifferari, in sheep-skins and sandals, followed by prowling, gaunt-limbed dogs, droned monotonous nasal melodies from their bagpipes. Priests picked their way gingerly over the muddy cobble stones, sleek, black-a-vised priests, with exaggerated hats, like Don Basilio’s in the Barbiere. Now and then one passed a fat brown monk; or a soldier; or a white-robed penitent, whose eyes glimmered uncannily from the peep-holes of the hood that hid his face; or a comely contadina, in her smart costume, with a pomegranate-blossom flaming behind her ear, and red lips that curved defiantly as she met the covetous glances wildfire-and-twenty no doubt bestowed upon her—whereat, perhaps, wildfire-and-twenty halted and hesitated for an instant, debating whether to accept the challenge and turn and follow her. A flock of milk-purveying goats jangled their bells a few yards below me. Hawkers screamed their merchandise, fish, and vegetables, and early fruit—apricots, figs, green almonds. Brown-skinned, barelegged boys shouted at long-suffering donkeys, and whacked their flanks with sticks. And everybody, more or less, importuned you for coppers. “Mossou, mossou! Un piccolo soldo, per l’amor di Dio!” The air was vibrant with Southern human noises and dense with Southern human smells—amongst which, here and there, wandered strangely a lost waft of perfume from some neighbouring garden, a scent of jasmine or of orange flowers.