Chapter 3

"You can scarcely imagine, George," he proceeded, "how I have longed to be engaged. All my life it has been my hope and goal. It is, I think, the ideal state of man. There was a chap with me when I was at Kimberley who first put the idea into my head. His ways were animated and cheerful even for a diamond field, where you know animation and cheerfulness are, so to speak, _de rigueur_. Whisky he affected, and jesting of the kind that paints cities scarlet. And he used every night, before festivities began, to write a long letter to some girl in England, and say, within limits, how bad he had been and how he longed to reform and be with her, and never, never do anything wrong any more. He poured all the higher and better parts of his nature into the letter, and folded it up and sealed it very carefully. And then he came to us in a singularly relieved frame of mind, and would be the life and soul of as merry a game of follow-your-leader as one can well imagine."

Pleasant reminiscences occupied him for a moment. "Every man should be engaged, I think, to at least one woman. It is the homage we owe to womankind, and a duty to our souls. His _fiancée_ is indeed the Madonna of a true-hearted man; the thought of her is a shrine at the wayside of one's meditations, and her presence a temple wherein we cleanse our souls. She is mysterious, worshipful, and inaccessible, something perhaps of the woman, possibly even propitious and helpful, and yet something of the Holy Grail as well. You have no rights with her, nor she with you; you owe her no definite duties, and yet she is singularly yours. A smile is a favour, a touch of her fingers, a faint pressure of your hand, is an infinite privilege. You cannot demand the slightest help or concern of her, so you ask it with diffident grace and there is an overflowing stream of gratitude from small occasions. Whatever you give her is a gift too, while a husband is just property, a mere draught-camel for her service. All your functions are decorative, you hang her shrine with flowers and precious stones. You treat her to art and literature, and as for vulgar necessities--some one else sees to that."

"Until you are married," began I.

"I am speaking of being engaged. Marriage is altogether a different thing. The essence of a proper engagement is reverence, distance, and mystery; the essence of marriage is familiarity. A _fiancée_ is a living eidolon; a wife, from my point of view at least, should be a confidential companion, a fellow-conspirator, an accessory after the fact, at least, to one's little errors; should take some share of the burthen and heat of the day with one, and have the humour to bear with a mood of vexation or a fit of the blues. I doubt, do you know, if the same kind of girl is suitable for engagements as for marriage. For an engagement give me something very innocent, a little awe-inspiring on that account, absolutely and tenderly worshipful, yet given to moods of caressing affection, and altogether graceful and beautiful. A man, I think, ought to be incapable of smoking or lounging in front of the girl he professes to love, so reverent ought his love to be. But for marriage let me have humour and some community of taste, a woman who can climb stiles and stand tobacco smoke, and who knows a good cook by her fruits.... It is a complicated business, this marrying.

"The familiarity of the marriage state, if it does not breed positive contempt on the part of the angel, engenders at times, I think, a considerable craving for change on the side of both parties. We men are poor creatures at the best--I always pity your Euphemia. Married people, for instance, always get too much of each other's conversation. They do not have sufficient opportunity to recuperate their topics from original sources. They get interested in outside people, merely from a perfectly legitimate desire to get some amusing novel ideas for each other, and then comes jealousy. I sometimes think that if Adam and Eve had been merely engaged, she would not have talked with the serpent; and the world had been saved an infinity of misery.

"No, George: engagements for me. It is the state we were made for. I have delayed this matter all too long. But, thank heaven, I am engaged at last--I hope for all the rest of my life. Now, will you not congratulate me?"

"It may be very nice as you put it, but engagements end as well as begin," I insisted. "You cannot be a law unto yourself in these matters. When will you get married?"

"Good Heavens!" exclaimed my uncle. "Get married and end this delightful state! You don't think she will want me to marry her, do you? Besides, she told me some time ago that she did not intend to marry again. It was only that encouraged me to suggest an engagement to her. Though she is a wonderful woman, George--a wonderful woman. Still, I think she looks at things very much as I do."

He paused thoughtfully. Then added with fervour, "At least I hope so."

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

A RHAPSODY

I found him in his own apartments, and strangely disordered. He went to and fro, raving--beginning so soon as I entered the room. I noticed a book half out of its cover, flung carelessly into the corner of the room.

"I am enchanted of an impalpable woman, George," he said, "I am in bonds to a spirit of the air. I can neither think nor work nor eat nor sleep because of her. Sometimes I go out suddenly, tramping through seething streets, through fog and drizzle or dry east wind, mourning for her sake. My life is rapidly becoming one colourless melancholy through her spells and twining sorceries. I sometimes wish that I were dead.

"Yet I have never seen her. Often, indeed, I imagine her, anon as of this shape, and anon of that. I know her only by her victims, those she slays daily, and daily revives to slay. They come to me with their complaints, mutilated, pathetic, terrible. I try to shut my ears to them in vain. I have tried wool, but it made little or no difference.

"The business always begins with the slamming of a door and a healthy footfall across the room. The piano is opened. Then some occasional noises--the falling of a piece of music behind the piano, perhaps, and its extraction by means of the tongs--I know it is tongs she uses by the clang. Then the music-stool creaks, and La Belle Dame is ready to play. She puts both her hands upon the key-board, and the treble shrieks apprehensively, and the bass roars like a city in revolt. After that this hush. Just this interval.

"Yet I sometimes think this hush is really the worst of it all. It is a voluminous apprehension, a towering impendency. You don't understand, George. You can't. The poor devil in Poe's 'Pit and the Pendulum' must have had a taste of my sensations. A first victim is being chosen. I have a vision of the spirits of composers small and great--standing up like suspects awaiting identification, while her eye ranges over them. Chopin tries to edge behind Wagner, a difficult and forbidding person, and Gounod seeks eclipse of Mendelssohn, who suddenly drops and crawls on all fours between Gounod's legs; Sullivan cowers, and even Piccolomini's iron-framed nerves desert him. She extends her hand. There is a frantic rush to escape. Have you ever seen a little boy picking dormice out of a cage? I always see this same nightmare during that dreadful pause, a vision of a writhing heap of kicking, struggling, maddened composers, and of a ghoulish piano grinning expectant, jaw raised--lid I mean--and showing all its black and yellow keys. ... A melancholy shriek. Do you hear, George? Tito Mattel is captured. A song.

"'Pum--So long the way--Pum--so dark the day--Pum--DEAR HEART! before you come.' So Tito Mattel comes pumming through the wall into my presence. I don't pity him. Indeed it is a positive relief that it is only Tito Mattel. The man's no deity at the best, and a little pulling out, and pulling crooked, and general patching together of limbs in the wrong place scarcely matters so far as he and my taste are concerned. Yet I always leave my work, George, when that begins, and walk about the room. I try to persuade myself that I need fresh air, but the autumnal day, the damp shiny street, has all the uninviting harshness of truth--I admit I do not. Tito flops about, is riddled with dropped notes and racked with hesitations, and presently becomes still. The murder is over.

"What next? That Study of Chopin's! This time the thing is more inspiring. Once upon a time it was a favourite of mine. Now it is a favourite of the unseen lady's. She plays it with spirit, and conjures up strange fancies in my brain. The noises that come through the wall now, quicker, thicker, louder, are full of a tale of weltering confusion, marine disaster, a ship in sore labour; there is a steady beating like the sound of pumps, and a trickle of treble notes. There are black silences, like thunderclouds, that burst into flashes of music. Now the poor melody swings up into the air--then comes one of those terrible pauses, and now down into the abyss. A crash, an ineffectual beating, a spasmodic rush. I seem to hear the pumps again, distant, remote, ineffectual. But that is not so; the struggle is over. Chopin's Study has been battered to pieces; only disarticulated fragments toss amidst the froth. High up the confusion of the stormy sky she drives in a sieve dropping notes--the witch of the storm. La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

"But the third piece in her repertory has begun--Rubinstein. This, at any rate, is familiar. She plays with the confidence born of long unpunished misdoing. That Rubinstein must indeed be sorry, and unless their elysium is like the library of the Linnæan Society, and fitted with double windows, all the great departed musicians must be sorry too, that he ever wrote a Melody in F. Daily from the altars of a thousand, of ten thousand, school pianos that melody cries to heaven. From the empire of the music master, upon which the sun never sets, day and night, week in week out, from year to year, Rubinstein's Melody in F streams up for ever. These school pieces are like the Latin ritual before the Reformation, they link all Christendom by a common use. As the earth spins, and the sunlight sweeps ever westward, that melody passes with the day. Now it is tinkling in a grey Moravian school, now it dawns upon the Adige and begins in Alsace, now it has reached Madrid, Paris, London. Then a devotee in some Connemara Establishment for Young Ladies sets to. Presently tall ships upon the silent main resound with it, and they are at it in the Azores and in Iceland, and then--one solitary tinkling, doubling, reduplicating, manifolding into an innumerable multitude--New York takes up the wondrous tale. On then with the dawn to desolate cattle ranches, the tablelands of Mexico, the level plains of Illinois and Michigan. So the great tide that started in Rubinstein's cranium proceeds upon its destiny. Always somewhere between the hours of eleven and two it comes back to me here, poor hunted composition, running its eternal world gauntlet, pursuing its Wandering Jew pilgrimage, and I curse and pity it as it goes by.... It has gone. The 'Maiden's Prayer' is next usually. Then one of the 'Lieder ohne Worte,' then the 'Dead March'--all of them but the meagre and mutilated skeletons of themselves; things of gaps and tatters, like gibbet trophies. They are as knocked about as a fleet coming out of action, they are as twisted and garbled as a Chinese war telegram; it is like an hospital for congenitally diseased compositions taking the air. And they have to hobble along sharply too; there is a certain cruel decision in the way the notes are struck, a Nurse Gillespie touch about this Invisible Lady. Or it may be the callousness of old habit, a certain sense of a duty overdone, a certain impatience at the long delay. You will hear.

"Listen!--_Tum Tum Ti-ti-tum_--No!--_tum_. Slight pause. Tum _tum twiddle_--vigorous crescendo--TUM. This is unusual! A stranger? A new piece for La Belle Dame Sans Merci? Her wonted reckless dash deserts her. She is, as it were, exploring a new region, and advances with mischievous coyness, with an affectation of a faltering heart, with hesitating steps. My imagination is stimulated by these dripping notes. I see her, as it were, on an uneven pavement; here the flags are set on end, there fungi have tilted them, a sharp turning of the page may reveal heaven knows what horrors; presently comes a black gap with a vault of dusty silence below. A pause, an incoherency, a repetition! She has encountered some difficulty, some slumbering coil of sharps and flats, and it raises its bristling front in her way.... She has fled back to the opening again. I begin to wonder what unhappy musician lies hidden in this new ruin, behind the bars of this melancholy confusion. There is something familiar but elusive, like a face that one has known and loved and lost and met again after the cruel changes of intervening years. It conjures up oddly enough a vision of a long room in the twilight, and an acacia in silhouette against the pale gold of the western sky. Ah! now I know!

"_That_ of all pieces!

"I must have my walk, George. I cannot bear to hear that old-familiar music so evilly entreated. But, all the same, the memory it has touched will vibrate and smart; to-day and to-morrow, and I know not for how many days, it will re-echo in my brain. All the old cloudy remorse that has subsided will be set astir again. I shall hear again a light touch upon the keys, see again the shadowy face against the sunset, try to recall the sound of a voice.... What evil spirit has put this mockery into the head of La Belle Dame? Surely without this----"

He made a dive at the folding doors and presently reappeared in his coat. It was the only intimation I ever had that my dear little uncle had such a thing as a Past.

ON A TRICYCLE

I sat on the parapet of the bridge, and swung my feet over the water that frothed and fretted at the central pier below. Above the bridge the stream broadened into a cress-bespangled pool, over which the sapphire dragon-flies hovered, and its earlier course was hidden by the big oak trees that bent towards each other from either bank. Through their speckled tracery of green one saw the hazy blue depths of the further forest. I was watching the proceedings of some quick-moving brown bird amid the rushes and marsh marigolds of the opposite bank.

"Pleasant," said a voice beside me.

I turned, and saw my uncle. He was disguised in a costume of reddish-brown cloth. "Golf here?" said I, and then I noticed the tricycle. "A vagrom man on wheels!"

Both the suit and the machine became him very well. The machine was low, and singularly broad between the wheels, and altogether equal to him, and it had chubby pneumatic tires and a broad and even imposing wallet.

"Yes," said he, following my eye. "It is a handsome machine, a full dress concern with all its plating and brown leather, and in use it is as willing and quiet as any tricycle could be, a most urbane and gentlemanly affair--if you will pardon the adjective. I am glad these things have not come too late for me. Frankly, the bicycle is altogether too flippant for a man of my age, and the tricycle hitherto, with its two larger wheels behind and a smaller one in front, has been so indecently suggestive of a perambulator that really, George, I could not bring myself to it. But a Bishop might ride _that_ thing."

He swung himself up upon the parapet beside me and lit a cigar.

"The bicycle for boys, George--or fools. The things will not keep up for a moment without you work at them, they need constant attention; I would as soon ride a treadmill. You cannot loaf with them, and the only true pleasure of cycling is to loaf. Yet only this morning did I meet an elderly gentleman with a beard fit for Abraham, his face all crimson and deliquescent with heat, and all distorted with the fury of his haste, toiling up a hill on one of these unstable instruments. When he saw me coming down in all my ease and dignity he damned at me with his bell. Now, I do not like to see a bicycle wobble under a load of years, and steer into the irascible. As years increase tempers shorten, and bicycles, even the best of bicycles, are seductively irritating.

"Besides, the devil of the Wandering Jew has power over all such as go upon two wheels. 'Onward,' he says, 'onward! Faster, thou man! This green and breezy earth is no abiding place for you!' And hard-breathing, crook-shaped, whirling, bell-banging lunatics try and race you. They whiz by, thinking indignities of your dignified progress, and sometimes saying them. Not one cyclist in a dozen, George, and seemingly not a solitary bicyclist, seems to think of anything but getting to the end of his pleasure. I meet these servants of the wheel at the inns, and they tell short stories and sketches about their pace, and show each other their shoes and saddles, and compare maps and roads; some even try to trade machines. They talk most indecently of the makes and prices. I would as soon ask a man who was his tailor or where he got his hair cut and how much he paid. One man I met was not so much a man as a hoarding, blatant about the Gaspipe Machine Company. For them no flowers exist, no wild birds, no trees, no landscapes, no historical memorials, and no geological associations, nothing but the roads they traverse and the bicycles they ride. Those that have other interests have them in the form of cheap portable cameras, malignant things that can find no beauty in earth or heaven."

"George," said my uncle, suddenly, and I knew he had come upon a great discovery; "real human beings are scarce in this world."

"You speak bitterly," said I. "I know what has happened. You are hot from an inn full of the viler type of cyclist, and I presume that, after their custom, they mocked at your machinery. But don't blacken a popular exercise on that account."

"But these men are so aggressive! I tell you, George, it requires moral courage to ride a tricycle about at a moderate pace, as a man of discretion should. They want to make a sport of it; they are race-struck, incapable of understanding a man who rides at seven miles an hour when he might ride at fifteen. Read their special papers. They mock and sneer at everything but pace; they worship the makes of '94 in the interests of their advertising columns; touring simply means hotel-touting to them, and landscape, deals in cameras; in the end they will kill cycling--indeed, they are killing it. It is not nice to be mocked at even when you are in the right; a blatant cad is like a rhinoceros, and admits of no parleying, only since you must not kill him you are obliged to keep out of his way. The common cyclist has already driven ladies off the roads by forcing the pace, the honeymoon tandem returns with its feelings hurt at his jesting, and now he is driving off all quiet men."

"All this," said I, "because they said something disrespectful about your machine at the last inn... You don't, I see, approve of the feminine bicycle?"

My uncle did his best to be calm and judicial.

"A woman in a hurry is one of the most painful sights in the world, for exertion does not become a woman as it does a man. Let us avoid all prejudice in this matter, George, and discuss it with open minds. She has, in the first place, a considerable length of hair, and she does it up into rich and beautiful shapes with things called hairpins and with curling irons. Very few people have hair that curls naturally, George. You are young, but you are married, and I see nothing improper in telling you these things. Well, when a woman rides about, exerting herself violently to keep a bicycle going, her hair gets damp and the pleasing curls lose their curliness and become wet, straggling bands of hair plastered over her venous forehead. And a tragic anxiety is manifest, an expression painful for a man to meet. Also her hairpins come out and fall on the road to wait for pneumatic tires, and her hair is no longer rich and beautiful in form. Then she gets dirty, horribly dirty, as though she had been used to sweep the roads with. And her skirts have to be weirdly altered, even to the divided skirt, so that when she rides she looks like a short, squat little man. She not only loses her beauty but her dignity. Now, for my own part, I think a man wants a woman to worship--it is a man's point of view, of course, but I can't help my sex--and the worshipping of these zouaves is incredible. She is nothing more than a shorter, fuller, and feebler man. Heaven help her! For the woman on the tricycle there are ampler excuses as well as ampler skirts, the exertion is not too violent for grace and coolness, and the offensive bulging above one narrow wheel is avoided. But women will never sacrifice so much for so little; worshipfulness, beauty, repose, and comfort for a paltry two or three miles more an hour of pace. They know too well the graces of delay. To do things slowly, George, is part of the art of living. Our sex learns that when its youthful fervour is over and all the things are done. But women are born wise."

"By the bye," said I, "how is Mrs Harborough?"

"Very well, thanks. How is Euphemia? Your bit of view, George, is pretty, but I think I will have some heather now. There is a common three miles ahead. This indeed is the true merit of cycling. For a view, a panorama; for one picture, a gallery. Your true artist in cycling sits by the roadside, and rides only by way of an interlude. As for the worship of the machine, I would as soon worship a scene-shifter."

He dropped off the bridge and mounted his machine, and was presently pursuing his smooth and noiseless way. As he vanished round the corner he sounded his gong. It was really a most potent, grave, and reverend gong, with a certain note of philosophical melancholy in its tone, as different from the vulgar tang of your common cycle as one can well imagine. It asked you, at your convenience, sir (or madam), to get out of the way, to stand aside and see a most worthy and dignified spectacle roll by, if so be you had the mind for it. As for any scolding insistence, any threat of imminent collision, there was none of it. It was the bell of a man who loved margins, who was at his ease, and would have all the world at its ease. More than anything else, it reminded me of the boom of some ivy-clad church tower, warning the world without unseemly haste that another hour had, with leisurely completeness, accomplished itself.

And so he passed out of my sight and was gone.

AN UNSUSPECTED MASTERPIECE

(AUTHORESS UNKNOWN)

He pushed it away from him.

"I felt as though I had disturbed the graves of the long departed," he said with a grimace, and then addressing the egg: "Forgive me the sacrilege: they sold you to me as new laid, a mere thing of yesterday. I had no idea I was opening the immemorial past. _De mortuis nihil nisi bonum_--to you at least the quotation will be novel. Or I might call you bad, you poor mummy.