Part 1

LITTLE DINNERS

WITH THE SPHINX

AND

OTHER PROSE FANCIES

LITTLE DINNERS WITH THE SPHINX

AND

OTHER PROSE FANCIES

By RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

New York MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY 1907

COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY, NEW YORK.

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1907.

TO EVA

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Little Dinners with the Sphinx

1. On the Edge of the Starlight 3

2. The Mysticism of Gastronomy 9

3. On the Wearing of Opals 19

4. New Loves for Old 29

II. The Death of the Poet 41

III. The Butterfly of Dreams 79

IV. My Castle in Spain 105

V. Once-upon-a-time 121

VI. The Little Joys of Margaret 151

VII. What’s in a Name 175

VIII. Revisiting the Glimpses of the Moon 195

IX. Eva, the Woodland and I 231

X. The Dream Documents 253

Little Dinners With the Sphinx

I

ON THE EDGE OF THE STARLIGHT

The Sphinx and I had not met for quite a long time. We hadn’t dined together for--O I should think--four years; and it was strange to both of us to be sitting opposite to each other once more in the friendly glitter of a little dinner table--that glitter which is made up of skillfully mitigated electric light falling on various delicate objects of pleasure: the slim, fluted crystal of the wineglasses, the lustral linen, the tinkling ice in its silver jug, the moon-white roses, and the opals on the Sphinx’s long fingers.

We were both a trifle conscious, and we looked at each other half inquiringly across the table.

“Are we the same people?” presently asked the Sphinx.

“Of course, you are, my dear Sphinx; but I hope, for your sake, that I am not.”

“For my sake?”

“I mean that it is a poor compliment to a woman one adores always to bring the same man to dinner.”

“I see--you have haven’t changed a bit.... Yes, you have,” she added, after a pause. “Why, you’re growing grey. How have you managed that at your age?”

“‘Sorrows like mine would blanch an angel’s hair,’” I answered, with pathos, quoting from a noble sonnet of our own time.

“Sorrows! If you said pleasures, you would be nearer the mark. It is pleasure, not sorrow, that makes the butterfly’s wings turn grey.”

“One’s sorrows are one’s pleasures--are they not?” I retorted.

“Yes!” said the Sphinx, wistfully, “you are right. ‘Of our tears she hath made us pearls, and of our sobbing she hath made unto us a song’--who said that? Was it you?”

“Very likely,” said I.

“Yes! you are right,” she continued. “Our pleasures we could spare--but not our sorrows--our beautiful sorrows.”

“Sorrows,” I ventured, “are the opals of the soul.”

Then the Sphinx stretched her opalled hand across the table and patted mine and said, “You dear,” just as in the old days.

The tears came to my eyes.

“Mark your influence!” I said. “That is the first good thing I have said for four years.”

“What appalling faithfulness!” laughed the Sphinx. “But I would rather a man were faithful to me with his brain than with his heart. It means more. Faithful hearts are comparatively common--but when a man is faithful with his brain....”

“His hair turns grey,” I got in.

“Yes! Now tell me about your grey hair. I am sure you have some beautiful explanation to offer, some picturesque excuse, some vindicatory fancy.”

“Suppose I were to say that I grew it grey to please a girl who thought she would like it so?”

“I should believe you--for I never knew a man who would do so much for a woman as you!” answered the Sphinx, laughing. “And did--or rather does--she like it?”

“No,” I answered sadly, “she thought she would, but she doesn’t. She wants it brown again, but it is too late.”

“It will always be brown for me,” said the Sphinx.

Sentiment threatened us a moment, but the April cloud passed without falling.

“Tell me another reason,” asked the Sphinx, “you have plenty more I am sure.”

“To tell the truth there are several explanations,” I continued gravely. “I hardly know which to choose. The scientific one is probably this: Nature is beginning to retrench. She cannot afford any longer to keep up so expensive a house of life. Her bank account of vitality is no longer what it was. Time was when she poured her blood through one’s veins like a spendthrift, and kept up ever so fine and flashing a style. One’s members lived like princes in their pride, and there was colour and dash for all and to spare. But now nature feels that she can no longer afford this prodigality--she feels, as I said, the need of retrenchment. So, looking about the house of life, she says to herself: ‘Here I can spare a little,’ and ‘We can dispense with this,’ and ‘We can no longer afford that.’ Then, coming to the hair, she says sorrowfully: ‘This brown colour is very expensive, I can no longer afford it. We must be content with grey.’ Soon she will find the eyes too expensive to keep up in their present brightness, and the ears will have to be content with a reduced supply of sound....”

“For Heaven’s sake, stop,” said the Sphinx. “You give one the creeps. You are as bad as ‘Everyman,’ or ‘Holbein’s Dance of Death.’”

“Well, then, I’ll tell you the real reason,” I rejoined. “Two winters ago I played snowball with a little child I love. She managed to hit me here on my temple, and it hasn’t melted yet.”

“Just one more reason!”

“Well, the true reason is,” I said, really solemnly this time, “that I am passing out of the sunlight into the starlight.... Will you come with me?”

“I will,” said the Sphinx, after a pause, taking my hand.

II

THE MYSTICISM OF GASTRONOMY

“Even our digestion is governed by angels!” said William Blake--one of those picturesque phrases with which he was wont to flash on us the mystery that abides eternally just under the surface of the familiar. I have often recalled the phrase as I sat at dinner with the Sphinx; and not, of course, in any trivial, punning spirit, but seriously in regard to that sensitive mood of harmony, and of keen exhilarating intimacy, which seems to come over us when we thus sit at dinner together as it never comes at any other time.

“Why is it,” I asked her recently, after our old friendly waiter had welcomed us with the smile that we really believe he keeps just for us, and had seen us comfortably settled in our own quiet corner, “why is it that I always feel happier with you at dinner than at any other time?”

“You have the dinner as well,” answered the Sphinx, laughing, “on other occasions you have only--me.”

“Admitting the profundity of your explanation,” I rejoined, “I think there must be a still deeper one--but what it is I cannot say. For instance, we are happy together when we take a walk through the woods, or sit through the afternoon in the old garden, or read a book together. How happy we have been on the sea together, with no one but we two under the blue sky. Yet I have never felt so near to you, never so at harmony with you, as when we have sat at this table and looked into each other’s eyes over our wineglasses. Why is it?”

“Just what I say! Very evidently, by your own showing--it is dinner that makes the difference. Not in the woods you say, not in the garden, not with books, not on the sea--not anywhere but at dinner. _Ergo_, the only possible explanation is--dinner.”

“I am inclined to think you are right,” said I, “if only you will give the term dinner an inclusive significance, and not ascribe the whole miracle to the cooking.”

“The cooking has much to do with it, I am convinced,” persisted the Sphinx, looking more radiantly spiritual than I ever saw her look before. “It is so good that its part in the process passes to some extent unnoticed--though I trust the excellence of these mushrooms is not lost upon you. Were the _chef_ to be changed for the worse, I’m not so sure you would find that harmony you speak of.”

“Then I have owed more to the _chef_ than I have ever realised,” said I, raising my glass to her, and making that salute to her eyes which, however gay our mood, has always a curiously grave, almost sacramental, quality. “Still,” I continued presently, “I am not entirely convinced. Your argument has a negative force, I admit. Bad cooking, like any other extraneous annoyance, might, of course, distract us a little, and so superficially interrupt our harmony; but it is one thing to admit that, and another to say that it follows because bad cooking might destroy our harmony, good cooking therefore makes it. No, I am convinced that the miracle comes of a conflux of pleasant influences, good food and wine being amongst them, which never entirely meet together except at the dinner-table. First of all, the day is over. Its work is behind us. Its anxiety is locked up for the day. We meet the good hour in an attitude of gayety, and we meet it in an atmosphere of other gay people who have come to meet it in the same spirit. Then we meet it refreshed by the lustration of the evening toilet, and arrayed with regard to the pleasure of the eyes we specially aim to please....”

“Are they pleased to-night?” interrupted the Sphinx.

“Are they?” I rejoined. Then I continued my grave discourse: “As I said, we are all free and gay and beautiful and our faces set on pleasure. Then there is the music, the scarce-noted scents and the delicate shapes and colours of flowers, the prismatic glitter of glass, and the exhilarating snowiness of the table-linen....”

“Dave’s beaming smile,” added the Sphinx, referring to our waiter.

“Yes, calling up immediately all the happy dinners we have had at his table. If we were to meet him elsewhere in years to come, how his face would flash these evenings back to us! I believe I could count up the times we have been here by the wrinkles of kindness on his face.”

“I wonder if he really cares about us,” said the Sphinx, wistfully watching Dave as he expertly dismembered a roast duck at a side table. Presently the excellence of the duck turned her thoughts back again to our argument.

“Say what you will, with your conflux of pleasant influences,” she resumed, “roast duck is the real explanation.”

“Who would take you for such a materialist,” said I, “to look at you there, so radiantly delicate, so shiningly spirituelle?--”

“Roast duck,” laughed the Sphinx, “my spirituelle expression comes entirely of roast duck, believe me.”

I could almost believe her in that moment.

“Materialist yourself!” she retorted presently. “You will force me to turn metaphysician and expound to you the mysticism of gastronomy.”

“The metaphysics of duck!” I interjected.

“Precisely.”

“Proceed, then,” said I, and was silent.

“Well,” she began, “I am perfectly serious. It is you that are the materialist, not I, for the reason that the familiarity of the process of eating blinds you to its essentially mysterious nature; that process of transmutation of gastronomic alchemy, by which food is changed into genius and beauty, and the kitchen seen to be the power-house of the soul. After all, my gastronomic theory of the soul is merely one side of the same mystery which we see illustrated every day on another side by the doctor and the chemist. When we take a dose of medicine to tonic our nerves, we don’t laugh sceptically, or even give a thought to the wonder of its operation. Yet surely it is mystery itself that distillations from plants, and tinctures drawn from stones, should hold for us the keys of life and death, and exalt or depress our immortal spirits. Have you ever thought on the marvel that an almost infinitesimal quantity of certain juices distilled from some innocent-faced meadow-flower, a mere dewdrop of harmless-looking liquid, can shatter our life out of us like a charge of dynamite?...”

“A little more duck, m’m?” intervened Dave.

“The dynamics of duck,” I whispered gently. “Go on.”

“Well,” continued the Sphinx, laughing bravely, “the operation of food is exactly the same in its nature as the operation of medicines and poisons. For some unexplained reason, medicines and poisons influence us in certain ways. We don’t know how or why, we only know that they do. The influence of wine again is a part of the same mysterious process. Why should this Rudesheimer affect us differently from this water? Any one unfamiliar with the difference between wine and water would say it was absurd. But it is true for all that--and if you admit the influence of wine, and the influence of various other foreign substances, animal, vegetable and mineral, on the human organism, in the form of medicines, stimulants, poisons and such like, you cannot logically deny the possible influence, say, of duck. Therefore, I contend once more that the harmony between us of which you spoke is a music first composed in the kitchen, transferred to notation on the menu, and finally performed by us in a skillful duet of digestion....”

“Again,” added the Sphinx hastily, as I was preparing to make some comment;

“Again, you know that the intimate connection between supper and dreams is a scientific fact. If supper produces night-dreams, why shouldn’t lunch and dinner produce daydreams!”

“I surrender unconditionally to that,” I laughed, “you have won. We owe it all to the _chef_. We are but notes in his music--‘helpless pieces of the game he plays!’”

“A little more duck, sir?” intervened Dave, once more.

“Yes, Dave, I will,” said I, with emphasis.

III

ON THE WEARING OF OPALS

“How sad your eyes are to-night!” I said to the Sphinx a few evenings ago.

“Are they?” she smiled. “But then you know we are never so sad as our eyes.”

“Are you quite sure there is nothing wrong?” I asked.

“Perfectly.... I expect I have been looking too long at my opals.”

After a moment she added:

“I so often think of what you said about sorrows being the opals of the soul.”

“Fancy your remembering that!” said I, with mock modesty.

“It is strange,” the Sphinx went on, “how sorrow continues to be associated with the opal.”

“I have often marvelled at your courage in wearing so many. They gleam on your fingers like a whole armory of sorrow.”

“Is there any danger a woman wouldn’t dare for beauty’s sake? And in spite of the superstition, they are more fashionable than ever. Yet I don’t think there is a woman who wears them who does not feel in her heart that she is living under the rainbow of some beautiful doom, some romantic menace. Some day the genius of the stone will touch her heart, with its wand of sorrow, and her face will suddenly become like one of her rings, mysteriously lit with pathos.”

“I believe,” said I, “that it is on that very account that women wear them. It is the legend of the stone that attracts them almost more than its beauty. It has for them something of the attraction of sorcery, and suggests a commerce with those occult influences which in spite of ourselves we involuntarily think of as ruling the romantic side of our lives. There is just a spice of magic about all precious stones, and, as in the old fairy tales, a certain ring was supposed to give control over unseen powers, so even yet we unconsciously, or consciously, continue to attach superstitious significance to the wearing of a ring.”

“That is true,” said the Sphinx, “and any woman who wears rings with art, and not merely for indiscriminate display, sets a new ring on her finger with a certain thoughtfulness, if not hesitation. If it does not already mean something to her, it is going to mean something--and what will that meaning be! A ring that means nothing to one, however beautiful, hardly seems to belong to us. A ring is a personal possession or nothing ... except diamonds,” the Sphinx added, laughing, some particularly fine diamonds glittering at her throat; “diamonds are like one’s carriage--a part of one’s _entourage_.”

“They are the Three-per-Cents of Romance,” said I.

“Yes; one wears diamonds as one wears shoes. They mean nothing to one individually. They are social stones, even democratic. They are impervious to association. They are like the sun--every one loves sunlight, but no one has ever thought of sentimentally annexing the sun. The sun is not romantic. It is a wholesome, prosperous presence in our lives, but it is impossible to think of it as personally related to ourselves--whereas the moon, on the other hand, means just ‘us’ and no one else in the world to every romantic eye that looks up to it. The diamond is the sun of precious stones, the opal is the moon.”

“But what of the pearl?”

“The pearl is the Evening Star.”

“Tell me,” I said, “if I may ask, do your opals stand for sorrows gone by or for sorrows to come?”

“You mustn’t be so literal,” she answered, “one can hardly label one’s sorrows like that. Sorrow is temperamental, not accidental; it is attitude rather than history; it comes even more from within than from without. Some natures attract it--as the moon draws the sea. When I speak of my sorrows I do not mean my personal history--did you think my opals stood for so many disappointments?”

She laughed disdainfully.

“No,” she continued, “few of us, alas! are real enough to achieve the distinction of a great sorrow. A great sorrow is as rare as a great work of art. To know a really beautiful sorrow of our own, one needs to have a tragic simplicity of nature which belongs only to a few chosen temperaments; and if, indeed, a beautiful sorrow should come into our lives, who knows but that we should miss its beauty in its pain! Just as we have musicians to make our music for us, we have to rely on others for our sorrows.”

“It is strange how much more distinguished sorrow is than joy,” said I.

“Yes; and yet I suppose it is a part of what, resist it as we may, seems to be the natural law of renunciation. The weak nature may be crushed and lowered by renunciation, but the strong nature seems to be mysteriously refined. Perhaps, indeed, it is scarcely correct to speak of a weak nature renouncing. Things are taken from it rather than renounced. Renunciation implies will, and the exercise of strength. And thus to be able to do without implies an individual greatness and sufficiency from the beginning. We probably never renounce anything that we really need. Whatever the reason, however, there is no doubt that, as you say, the world is conscious of a certain distinction, and even romantic beauty attaching to sorrow which it does not associate with joy. Sorrow seems to imply a certain initiation into the arcana of human experience, a certain direct relation with the regent powers of our destiny, august and hidden, and only revealing their supernatural faces to this and that mortal here and there, henceforth stricken, and, so to say, ‘enchanted’, as one touched by the sacred lightning and yet alive among men.”

“I suspect,” said I, “that that is what, in a dim and trivial way, people mean when they speak of So-and-So looking ‘interesting’--because they look sad or even only ill.”

“No doubt. And, curious as it may sound, I don’t think we are ever quite satisfied with happiness--not, at all events, till we have known sorrow. Till then, in our happiest hours, we seem to be unconsciously waiting for sorrow. Perhaps that is because we instinctively feel that the rarest forms of joy can only be ours on the conditions of sorrow. Intense, complete joy is only possible to the sorrowful temperament ... to the nature sensitive to the sorrow that lives in all beautiful things....”

“To the opal temperament,” said I. The Sphinx smiled and continued:

“There again is another mystery. Why does sadness seem to lie at the heart of all beauty? Truth and Beauty seem indeed to be one in sadness. All the rarest types of beauty have something sad about them, some tragic look, or enigmatic wistfulness of expression, at the least a touch of loneliness. The gayest music can never be quite happy. Indeed, one might almost say that two qualities only are necessary to the highest beauty--strangeness and sadness: perhaps we might say only one and call it world-strangeness; a look of another world than ours, a look of spiritual exile. Perhaps there is the secret of beauty--sadness. Beauty is an exile in this world, a fallen spirit, and, whatever her embodiment, be it a face, a flower, or a gem, it carries with it always its look of exile.”

“Thus, again,” said I, smiling, “we see why opals are more beautiful than diamonds. The diamond is the stone of this world. It has the prosperous, contented look of that brilliant, unmysterious happiness which comes of good health and a bank account. There is no sadness at the cold heart of the diamond--just as there is no sadness in this glass of champagne, and therefore no appeal to the imagination, as with the sad distinguished wines. I doubt if people who wear opals should drink champagne.”

“Ah! but you see I wear diamonds, too,” laughed the Sphinx.

“Yes, there you are. Always the best of both worlds....”

“True,” said the Sphinx sadly, “but the best is only in one of them....”

“Truth fully now,” I asked, “are you quite sure in which?”

The Sphinx refused to commit herself, but “My opals know,” she answered, musingly turning them to the light.

IV

NEW LOVES FOR OLD

“How is it,” said the Sphinx one evening, “that you never bring a poem with you to dinner nowadays? Have you quite given up writing them?”

“Almost,” I answered.

“But you shouldn’t. It is lazy of you.”

“I suppose,” said I, “it is a kind of laziness--but I hardly think it is voluntary, or much under my control. In many ways I grow more active and industrious as I grow older. I do more work and I work more regularly. The laziness is certainly neither mental nor physical. It is rather emotional--yes! a laziness of the emotional faculties.”

“You cannot mean that you have stopped falling in love?”

“I’m inclined to think I have,” I laughed; “but that, like the poetry, is only one expression of the laziness I mean. Generally, while, as I say, I am less lazy in doing than of old, and while, as doctors would say, my mental faculties are active and unimpaired, I grow more and more lazy in feeling.”

“Tell me some more....”

“Well, I mean that, while my brain grows year by year more catholic in its sympathies, and sees more clearly all the time opportunities of feeling old and new, my heart and senses seem less and less inclined to second it with any energy of enthusiasm or excitement. The beauty of the world, for example, never seemed more beautiful to me than it does now. I can see far more beauty in it than I could when I was a boy, appreciate far more its infinite variety; nor has it lost in wonder, or mystery or holiness. All this I see, and thankfully accept--but it is seldom that I am set in a fine glow, or that I fall into a dream about it. My appreciation of it is no longer rapture. Yes, I have lost rapture.”

“Poor old thing!” laughed the Sphinx derisively, “but go on.”