Chapter 26
One morning, a day or two before his wife's complete recovery, he found a long personal letter from Martia by his bedside--a letter that moved him very deeply, and gave him food for thought during many weeks and months and years:
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"My Beloved Barty,--The time has come at last when I must bid you farewell.
"I have outstayed my proper welcome on earth as a disembodied conscience by just a hundred years, and my desire for reincarnation has become an imperious passion not to be resisted.
"It is more than a desire--it is a duty as well, a duty far too long deferred.
"Barty, I am going to be your next child. I can conceive no greater earthly felicity than to be a child of yours and Leah's. I should have been one long before, but that you and I have had so much to do together for this beautiful earth--a great debt to pay: you, for being as you are; I, for having known you.
"Barty, you have no conception what you are to me and always have been.
"I am to you but a name, a vague idea, a mysterious inspiration; sometimes a questionable guide, I fear. You don't even believe all I have told you about myself--you think it all a somnambulistic invention of your own; and so does your wife, and so does your friend.
"O that I could connect myself in your mind with the shape I wore when I was last a living thing! No shape on earth, not either yours or Leah's or that of any child yet born to you both, is more beautiful to the eye that has learned how to see than the fashion of that lost face and body of mine.
"_You_ wore the shape once, and so did your father and mother, for you were Martians. Leah was a Martian, and wore it too; there are many of them here--they are the best on earth, the very salt thereof. I mean to be the best of them all, and one of the happiest. Oh, help me to that!
"Barty, when I am a splendid son of yours or a sweet and lovely daughter, all remembrance of what I was before will have been wiped out of me until I die. But _you_ will remember, and so will Leah, and both will love me with such a love as no earthly parents have ever felt for any child of theirs yet.
"Think of the poor loving soul, lone, wandering, but not lost, that will so trustfully look up at you out of those gleeful innocent eyes!
"How that soul has suffered both here and elsewhere you don't know, and never will, till the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed; and I am going to forget it myself for a few decades--sixty, seventy, eighty years perhaps; such happy years, I hope--with you for my father and Leah for my mother during some of them at least--and sweet grandchildren of yours, I hope, for my sons and daughters! Why, life to me now will be almost a holiday.
"Oh, train me up the way I should go! Bring me up to be healthy and chaste and strong and brave--never to know a mean ambition or think an ungenerous thought--never to yield to a base or unworthy temptation.
"If I'm a boy--and I want to be a boy very much (although, perhaps, a girl would be dearer to your heart)--don't let me be either a soldier or a sailor, however much I may wish it as a Josselin or a Rohan; don't bring me up to buy or sell like a Gibson, or deal in law like a Bletchley.
"Bring me up to invent, or make something useful, if it's only pickles or soap, but not to buy and sell them; bring me up to build or heal or paint or write or make music--to help or teach or please.
"If I'm a girl, bring me up to be as much like Leah as you can, and marry me to just such another as yourself, if you can find him. Whether I'm a girl or a boy, call me Marty, that my name may rhyme with yours.
"When my conscience re-embodies itself, I want it never to know another pang of self-reproach. And when I'm grown up, if you think it right to do so, tell me who and what I once was, that I may love you both the more; tell me how fondly I loved you when I was a bland and fleeting little animalcule, without a body, but making my home in yours--so that when you die I may know how irrevocably bound up together we must forever be, we three; and rejoice the more in your death and Leah's and my own. Teach me over again all I've ever taught you, Barty--over and over again!
"Alas! perhaps you don't believe all this! How can I give you a sign.
"There are many ways; but a law, of necessity inexorable, forbids it. Such little entity as I possess would cease to be; it was all but lost when I saved your life--and again when I told you that you were the beloved of Julia Royce. It would not do for us Martians to meddle with earthly things; the fat would soon be in the fire, I can tell you!
"Try and trust me, Barty, and give me the benefit of any doubt.
"You have work planned out for many years to come, and are now yourself so trained that you can do without me. You know what you have still to say to mankind; never write a line about which you are not sure.
"For another night or two you will be my host, and this splendid frame of yours my hostelry; on y est tres bien. Be hospitable still for a little while--make the most of me; hug me tight, squeeze me warm!
"As soon as Leah is up and about and herself again you will know me no more, and no more feel the north.
"Ah! you will never realize what it is for me to bid you good-bye, my Barty, my Barty! All that is in your big heart and powerful brain to feel of grief belongs to me, now that you are fast asleep. And your genius for sorrow, which you have never really tested yet, is as great as any gift you possess.
"Happy Barty, who have got to forty years without sounding the great depths, and all through me! what will you do without your poor devoted unknown Martia to keep watch over you and ward--to fight for you like a wild-cat, if necessary?
"Leah must be your wild-cat now. She has it in her to be a tigress when you are concerned, or any of her children! Next to you, Leah is the darling of my heart; for it's your heart I make use of to love her with.
"I want you to tell the world all about your Martia some day. They may disbelieve, as you do; but good fruit will come of it in the future. Martians will have a freer hand with you all, and that will be a good thing for the earth; they were trained in a good hard school--they are the Spartans of our universe.
"Such things will come to pass, before many years are over, as are little dreamt of now, and all through your wanting to swallow that dose of cyanide at No. 36 Rue des Ursulines Blanches, and my having the gumption to prevent you!
"It's a good seed that we have sown, you and I. It was not right that this beautiful planet should go much longer drifting through space without a single hope that is not an illusion, without a single hint of what life should really be, without a goal.
"Why such darkness under so bright a sun! such blindness to what is so patent! such a deaf ear to the roaring of that thunderous harmony which you call the eternal silence!--you of the earth, earthy, who can hear the little trumpet of the mosquito so well that it makes you fidget and fret and fume all night, and robs you of your rest. Then the sun rises and frightens the mosquitoes away, and you think that's what the sun is for and are thankful; but why the deuce a mosquito should sting you, you can't make out!--mystery of mysteries!
"At the back of your brain is a little speck of perishable matter, Barty; it is no bigger than a needle's point, but it is bigger in you than in anybody else I know, except in Leah; and in your children it is bigger still--almost as big as the point of a pin!
"If they pair well, and it is in them to do so if they follow their inherited instinct, their children and their children's children will have that speck still bigger. When that speck becomes as big as a millet-seed in your remote posterity, then it will be as big as in a Martian, and the earth will be a very different place, and man of earth greater and even better than the Martian by all the greatness of his ampler, subtler, and more complex brain; his sense of the Deity will be as an eagle's sense of the sun at noon in a cloudless tropical sky; and he will know how to bear that effulgence without a blink, as he stands on his lonely summit, ringed by the azure world.
"Indeed, there will be no more Martians in Mars by that time; they are near the end of their lease; all good Martians will have gone to Venus, let us hope; if not, to the Sun itself!
"Man has many thousands of years before him yet ere his little ball of earth gets too cold for him; the little speck in his brain may grow to the size of a pea, a cherry, a walnut, an egg, an orange! He will have in him the magnetic consciousness of the entire solar system, and hold the keys of time and space as long and as far as the sun shines for us all--and then there will be the beginning of everything. And all through that little episode in the street of those White Ursulines! And the seed of Barty and Leah will overflow to the uttermost ends of the earth, and finally blossom and bear fruit for ever and ever beyond the stars.
"What a beginning for a new order of things! what a getting up-stairs! what an awakening! what an annunciation!
"Do you remember that knock at the door?
"'Il est dix heures, savez-vous? Voulez-vous votre cafe dans votre chambre?'
"She little knew, poor little Frau! humble little Finche Torfs, lowly Flemish virgin, who loved you as the moth loves the star; vilain mangeur de coeurs que vous etes!
"Barty, I wish your wife to hear nothing of this till the child who once was your Martia shall have seen the light of day with eyes of its own; tell her that I have left you at last, but don't tell her why or how; tell her some day, years hence, if you think she will love me the better for it; not otherwise.
"When you wake, Barty, I shall still be inside you; say to me in your mezza voce all the kind things you can think of--such things as you would have said to your mother had she lived till now, and you were speeding her on a long and uncertain journey.
"How you would have loved your mother! She was most beautiful, and of the type so dear to you. Her skin was almost as white as Leah's, her eyes almost as black, her hair even blacker; like Leah, she was tall and slim and lithe and graceful. She might have been Leah's mother, too, for the likeness between them. How often you remind me of her when you laugh or sing, and when you're funny in French; those droll, quick gestures and quaint intonations, that ease and freedom and deftness as you move! And then you become English in a moment, and your big, burly, fair-haired father has come back with his high voice, and his high spirits, and his frank blue eyes, like yours, so kind and brave and genial.
"And _you_, dear, what a baby you were--a very prince among babies; ah! if I can only be like that when I begin again!
"The people in the Tuileries garden used to turn round and stare and smile at you when Rosalie with the long blue streamers bore you along as proudly as if Louis Philippe were your grandfather and she the royal wet-nurse; and later, after that hideous quarrel about nothing, and the fatal fight by the 'mare aux biches,' how the good fisher people of Le Pollet adored you! 'Un vrai petit St. Jean! il nous portera bonheur, bien sur!'
"You have been thoroughly well loved all your life, my Barty, but most of all by me--never forget that!
"I have been your father and your mother when they sat and watched your baby-sleep; I have been Rosalie when she gave you the breast; I have been your French grandfather and grandmother quarrelling as to which of the two should nurse you as they sat and sunned themselves on their humble doorstep in the Rue des Guignes!
"I have been your doting wife when you sang to her, your children when you made them laugh till they cried. I've been Lady Archibald when you danced the Dieppoise after tea, in Dover, with your little bare legs; and Aunt Caroline, too, as she nursed you in Malines after that silly duel where you behaved so well; and I've been by turns Merovee Brossard, Bonzig, old Laferte, Mlle. Marceline, Finche Torfs, poor little Marianina, Julia Royce, Father Louis, the old Abbe, Bob Maurice--all the people you've ever charmed, or amused, or been kind to--a legion; good heavens! I have been them all! What a snowball made up of all these loves I've been rolling after you all these years! and now it has all got to melt away in a single night, and with it the remembrance of all I've ever been during ages untold.
"And I've no voice to bid you good-bye, my beloved; no arms to hug you with, no eyes to weep--I, a daughter of the most affectionate, and clinging, and caressing race of little people in existence! Such eyes as I once had, too; such warm, soft, furry arms, and such a voice--it would have wanted no words to express all that I feel now; that voice--nous savons notre orthographie en musique la bas!
"How it will please, perhaps, to remember even this farewell some day, when we're all together again, with nothing to come between!
"And now, my beloved, there is no such thing as good-bye; it is a word that has no real meaning; but it is so English and pretty and sweet and child-like and nonsensical that I could write it over and over again--just for fun!
"So good-bye! good-bye! good-bye! till I wake up once more after a long living sleep of many years, I hope; a sleep filled with happy dreams of you, dear, delightful people, whom I've got to live with and love, and learn to lose once more; and then--no more good-byes!
"Martia."
* * * * *
So much for Martia--whoever or whatever it was that went by that name in Barty's consciousness.
After such close companionship for so many years, the loss of her--or it--was like the loss of a sixth and most valuable sense, worse almost than the loss of his sight would have been; and with this he was constantly threatened, for he most unmercifully taxed his remaining eye, and the field of his vision had narrowed year by year.
But this impending calamity did not frighten him as in the old days. His wife was with him now, and as long as she was by his side he could have borne anything--blindness, poverty, dishonor--anything in the world. If he lost her, he would survive her loss just long enough to put his affairs in order, and no more.
But most distressfully he missed the physical feeling of the north--even in his sleep. This strange bereavement drew him and Leah even more closely together, if that were possible; and she was well content to reign alone in the heart of her fractious, unreasonable but most affectionate, humorous, and irresistible great man. Although her rival had been but a name and an idea, a mere abstraction in which she had never really believed, she did not find it altogether displeasing to herself that the lively Martia was no more; she has almost told me as much.
And thus began for them both the happiest and most beautiful period of their joint lives, in spite of sorrows yet to come. She took such care of him that he might have been as blind as Belisarius himself, and he seemed almost to depend upon her as much--so wrapt up was he in the work of his life, so indifferent to all mundane and practical affairs. What eyesight was not wanted for his pen and pencil he reserved to look at her with--at his beloved children, and the things of beauty in and outside Marsfield: pictures, old china, skies, hills, trees, and river; and what wits remained he kept to amuse his family and his friends--there was enough and to spare.
The older he grew the more he teemed and seethed and bubbled and shone--and set others shining round him--even myself. It is no wonder Marsfield became such a singularly agreeable abode for all who dwelt there, even for the men-servants and the maid-servants, and the birds and the beasts, and the stranger within its gates--and for me a kind of earthly paradise.
* * * * *
And now, gentle reader, I want very badly to talk about myself a little, if you don't mind--just for half a dozen pages or so, which you can skip if you like. Whether you do so or not, it will not hurt you--and it will do me a great deal of good.
I feel uncommonly sad, and very lonely indeed, now that Barty is gone; and with him my beloved comrade Leah.
The only people left to me that I'm really fond of--except my dear widowed sister, Ida Scatcherd--are all so young. They're Josselins, of course--one and all--and they're all that's kind and droll and charming, and I adore them. But they can't quite realize what this sort of bereavement means to a man of just my age, who has still got some years of life before him, probably--and is yet an old man.
The Right Honorable Sir Robert Maurice, Bart., M. P., etc., etc., etc. That's me. I take up a whole line of manuscript. I might be a noble lord if I chose, and take up two!
I'm a liberal conservative, an opportunist, a pessi-optimist, an in-medio-tutissimist, and attend divine service at the Temple Church.
I'm a Philistine, and not ashamed; so was Moliere--so was Cervantes. So, if you like, was the late Martin Farquhar Tupper--and those who read him; we're of all sorts in Philistia, the great and the small, the good and the bad.
I'm in the sixties--sound of wind and limb--only two false teeth--one at each side, bicuspids, merely for show. I'm rather bald, but it suits my style; a little fat, perhaps--a pound and a half over sixteen stone! but I'm an inch and a half over six feet, and very big-boned. Altogether, diablement bien conserve! I sleep well, the sleep of the just; I have a good appetite and a good digestion, and a good conceit of myself still, thank Heaven--though nothing like what it used to be! One can survive the loss of one's self-respect; but of one's vanity, never.
What a prosperous and happy life mine has been, to be sure, up to a few short months ago--hardly ever an ache or a pain!--my only real griefs, my dear mother's death ten years back, and my father's in 1870. Yes, I have warmed both hands at the fire of life, and even burnt my fingers now and then, but not severely.
One love disappointment. The sting of it lasted a couple of years, the compensation more than thirty! I loved her all the better, perhaps, that I did not marry her. I'm afraid it is not in me to love a very good wife of my own as much as I really ought!
And I love her children as well as if they'd been mine, and her grandchildren even better. They are irresistible, these grandchildren of Barty's and Leah's--mine wouldn't have been a patch on them; besides, I get all the fun and none of the bother and anxiety. Evidently it was my true vocation to remain single--and be a tame cat in a large, warm house, where there are lots of nice children.
O happy Bob Maurice! O happy sexagenarian!
"O me fortunatum, mea si bona norim!" (What would Pere Brossard say at this? he would give me a twisted pinch on the arm--and serve me right!)
I'm very glad I've been successful, though it's not a very high achievement to make a very large fortune by buying and selling that which put into a man's mouth is said to steal away his brains!
But it does better things than this. It reconciles and solves and resolves mental discords, like music. It makes music for people who have no ear--and there are so many of these in the world that I'm a millionaire, and Franz Schubert died a pauper. So I prefer to drink beer--as _he_ did; and I never miss a Monday Pop if I can help it.
_I_ have done better things, too. I have helped to govern my country and make its laws; but it all came out of wine to begin with--all from learning how to buy and sell. We're a nation of shopkeepers, although the French keep better shops than ours, and more of them.
I'm glad I'm successful because of Barty, although success, which brings the world to our feet, does not always endear us to the friend of our bosom. If I had been a failure Barty would have stuck to me like a brick, I feel sure, instead of my sticking to him like a leech! And the sight of his success might have soured me--that eternal chorus of praise, that perpetual feast of pudding in which I should have had no part but to take my share as a mere guest, and listen and look on and applaud, and wish I'd never been born!
As it is, I listened and looked on and clapped my hands with as much pride and pleasure as if Barty had been my son--and my share of the pudding never stuck in my throat!
I should have been always on the watch to take him down a peg when he was pleased with himself--to hold him cheap and overpraise some duffer in his hearing--so that I might save my own self-esteem; to pay him bad little left-handed compliments, him and his, whenever I was out of humor; and I should have been always out of humor, having failed in life.
And then I should have gone home wretched--for I have a conscience--and woke up in the middle of the night and thought of Barty; and what a kind, genial, jolly, large-minded, and generous-hearted old chap he was and always had been--and buried my face in my pillow, and muttered:
"Ach! what a poor, mean, jealous beast I am--un fruit sec! un malheureux rate!"
With all my success, this life-long exclusive cultivation of Barty's society, and that of his artistic friends, which has somehow unfitted me for the society of my brother-merchants of wine--and most merchants of everything else--has not, I regret to say, quite fitted me to hold my own among the "leaders of intellectual modern thought," whose company I would fain seek and keep in preference to any other.
My very wealth seems to depress and disgust them, as it does me--and I'm no genius, I admit, and a poor conversationalist.
To amass wealth is an engrossing pursuit--and now that I have amassed a good deal more than I quite know what to do with, it seems to me a very ignoble one. It chokes up everything that makes life worth living; it leaves so little time for the constant and regular practice of those ingenuous arts which faithfully to have learned is said to soften the manners, and make one an agreeable person all round.
It is even more _abrutissant_ than the mere pursuit of sport or pleasure.
How many a noble lord I know who's almost as beastly rich as myself, and twice as big a fool by nature, and perhaps not a better fellow at bottom--yet who can command the society of all there is of the best in science, literature, and art!
Not but what they will come and dine with me fast enough, these shining lights of culture and intellect--my food is very good, although I say it, and I get noble lords to meet them.
But they talk their real talk to each other--not to me--and to the noble lords who sit by them at my table, and who try to understand what they say. With me they fall back on politics and bimetallism, for all the pains I've taken to get up the subjects that interest them, and keep myself posted in all they've written and done. Precious little they know about bimetallism or politics!