The Pagans Part 11

Sleep! sleep! My song is laden With the soul of slumber; It was sung by a Samian maiden Whose lover was of the number Who now keep That calm sleep Whence none may wake; where none shall weep.

I touch thy temples pale!

I breathe my soul on thee!

And could my prayers avail, All my joy should be Dead, and I would live to weep, So thou might'st win one hour of quiet sleep!

It is difficult to convey the effect of this song upon its hearers. The strangeness, the unconventionality of the recitative, the wonderful, sad beauty of the poem, the dim light through which Helen's vibrating, pa.s.sionate voice thrilled, all helped to impress the hearers. There was a personal quality about the chant which made it seem like a direct appeal from the singer to the heart of each listener. It came to each as a spontaneous outflowing of the singer's innermost self; a confidence made in mystic wise, sacred and inviolable, and setting him honored by receiving it forever from the common mult.i.tude of men. It was an appeal to some unspoken and unspeakable bond of fealty, which made the pulses throb and great emotions stir in the breast. Before hearing one would be stubbornly incredulous of the possibility of his being so deeply affected; afterward he would remember how he had been moved with wonder and longing.

Especially was Grant Herman much moved. Thoughts came into his mind of the old minstrels chanting to their harps; he seemed to hear Sappho singing again in the gardens of Mytilene; this was the woman he loved, and he felt himself as never before surrounded palpably by her presence. The improvisation was a part of herself as no other music could have been; and in some subtle, sensuous way, the lover seemed for the moment to be one with his beloved. His eyes filled with tears in a sort of ecstasy, and he shrank back into the shadow lest some of his friends should detect the glad, salt drops which no eyes but hers had a right to see.

XIII.

THE GREAT a.s.sAY OF ART.

Macbeth; iv.--3.

A hush followed the conclusion of Mrs. Greyson's song.

No one wished to speak what all felt, and when the silence was broken, it was with talk of the poet rather than of the singer. To the singing they came only by slow degrees, and over it, when at length their admiration found speech, they pa.s.sed lightly.

One thing which seemed to be effected by the music was the awakening of Fenton from his gloomy reverie. He began to talk in his most extravagant and whimsical style, answering every question instantly, if with no especial care concerning the relevancy of his replies.

"What nonsense it is," he exclaimed, "to talk of any man's originating any thing. Why, when even Adam couldn't be made without material, what are we, his descendants, that we should hope to create? The authors of this old wisdom that we revamp to-day copied somebody further back, and those in turn put down what the ma.s.ses felt; collected the foam which gathered on the yeasty waves of their age. Every truth comes to the people first if they could only recognize it when it comes. It is evolved by the friction of the ma.s.ses, just as a fire is set by the rubbing together of tree-boughs in primeval forests, and the dusky redman incontinently roasted in his uncontaminated innocence. The longer I live the less faith I have that a man evolves any thing from his inner consciousness. Fancies are only the lies of the mendacious brain, which perceives one thing and declares to us another."

"Go slow, Fenton," interrupted Herman, "you know our poor wits are apt to be dazzled by too much brilliancy."

"The age," Fenton rattled on, "blooms once into a great man as an aloe into a crown of bloom."

"Right in there," broke in Rangely, who longed for a share in the conversation, "just consider how necessary it is that every art producer shall be in sympathy with the human life about him. That he should take the best wherever it is to be found. There's a miserable sentiment about shutting one's self up in some dark corner, and producing some tremendous thing. Don't you know how many New York and Boston artists have gone to Europe and hermetically sealed themselves up somewhere to ferment into greatness like a jug of cider turning into vinegar in a farmer's cellar?"

"That's what made Hunt such a big fellow," Herman interposed; "because he took the good wherever it offered."

"But that depends upon whether a man goes direct to Nature for inspiration," declared Fenton, "or sets himself to get a living by filching the good things his neighbors have won from her."

"Hunt did go to nature; that is just where he was great."

"I think," said Fred, laughingly, "that you will appreciate the mood in which I once wrote a preface. I planned a great metaphysical and philosophical work--I was a good deal younger than I am now--and the preface was to be, 'As to the originality of these ideas, I have nothing more to say than that I do not remember that they have ever been printed with my name on the t.i.tle-page.' Of course, after that declaration, I felt at liberty to take any thing I wanted from any where; but, unluckily, my book never got beyond the preface."

"I'm glad you had the sense to stop there," declared Arthur. "I forgive the preface, but I could never have forgiven the book."

Helen rose from her seat at the piano and turned up the gas a little.

The effect for which the light had been lowered was secured, and it was better, she recognized, to give to her singing a certain isolation, which must be done before the conversation became so general that the change from gloom to light would not be noticed.

She wore that evening a gray silk with black lace, a slight turning away showing the whiteness of her beautiful throat. Her jewels were cats'-eyes.

"Do you wear your cats'-eyes in honor of the cat-headed deity of the Pagans, Mrs. Greyson?" Rangely asked, as she paused near his chair, watching a burner which seemed disposed to flicker.

"No," returned she, smiling. "I am no follower of your Pasht; a G.o.ddess of 'winged-words' attracts me less than a deity whose province is the sacred sphere of silence. My dress is of Mr. Fenton's designing. He is deeply versed in the subject of clothes. I even suspect him of being the true author of _'Sartor Resartus.'_"

"That brings up my pet abomination," Fenton observed, with emphasis. "I do hate Carlyle. I've even lain awake nights to think how I'd like to pound his head. The self-conceited, self-centered, self-adoring old humbug! He was the sham _par excellence_ of the nineteenth century, this century of shams."

"It's something to be at the top of the heap in anything," interpolated Herman, "even in shams."

"The trouble with Carlyle," Fenton continued, "besides his enormous egotism, was that he never got beyond the whim that the truth is something absolute. He could not abide the idea that it is merely a relative thing and must be treated as such. If he'd got above the ma.s.s of cloudy vapor he called truth, he might have gained a glimpse of real sunlight; but his aggressive self-conceit clogged his wings. Don't you recognize that a lie is often truer than the truth?" he ran on, sitting up in his chair and speaking more rapidly; "that where the truth will often produce an erroneous impression, a lie will convey a correct one?

that to be true to the spirit it is often necessary to violate the letter?"

"Your patron saint should be the G.o.d of falsehood," Helen said lightly.

"I fear your allegiance to Pasht is not very sincere."

"Ah! but it is," retorted he, quickly. "My allegiance is to the G.o.ddess of 'winged words'; to the glorious mother of fict.i.tious speech; to Pasht, the G.o.ddess of splendid, golden lying. A lie is only the truth agreeably and effectively told. _Vive la faussete!_"

"Doubtless each interprets Pasht's attributes according to his own light," Herman observed, a little grimly.

He was only half-pleased with Fenton's badinage. But the latter, apparently, did not feel the thrust.

"Let him alone," Helen said, "he believes in nothing; he is a genuine Pagan."

"You are wrong in your idea," was Fenton's swift reply. "A true Pagan must have a belief in some G.o.d to take from his shoulders the burden of personal responsibility, or he cannot be joyous as a Pagan should.

However, to-night I make myself believe that I believe something, so it comes to much the same thing."

Helen turned and looked at him, attracted by some subtle quality in his voice.

He was sitting sidewise in his chair, holding an ivory paper-knife in his slender fingers. His cheeks burned, his eyes were bright, his lips red. He had shaken off the depression which oppressed him earlier in the evening. An air of joyous, quivering excitement pervaded him. He threw up his head with a characteristic gesture, and looked about him like one who has conquered in some desperate conflict.

"Come," the hostess said, wondering in what inward struggle he had come off victor; "you promised to a.s.sist me with the coffee. I make no boast of my house or my hospitality, gentlemen," she added, with a charming glance around, "but I warn you in advance that not to admire my coffee is to lose my friends.h.i.+p forever."

In answer to her ring, a servant brought in a small mortar and a pretty little bowl of whole coffee, delicately browned, and scarcely cold from its roasting. Arthur, who seemed acquainted with Mrs. Greyson's methods of procedure, began to pound the berries, roasted to perfect crispness, in the ebony mortar, reducing them to an almost impalpable powder, which diffused upon the air the entrancing odor dear to the nostrils of all artists.

The servant meantime had provided tiny cups, a little copper ibrik and an alcohol lamp over which simmered a vessel of boiling water.

"Coffee should be prepared only over coals of perfumed wood," Helen remarked as she measured into the ibrik the small spoonful of coffee dust designed for a single cup. "But alcohol is the next best thing, it burns with such a supernatural flame."

She put into the ibrik a measure of boiling water, rested it an instant over the flame to restore the heat lost in the cooler copper, and then poured the beverage into the egg-sh.e.l.l cup destined for it.

"To my master first," she said, presenting the steaming cup to Herman, who received it much as one might a gift from the skies. "I learned my coffee making," she continued, "from an old Arab at Cairo, who used to say that it was one of the only two things in life worth doing, the other being the duties of religion; and it therefore should be perfectly done."

"It is simply divine," the sculptor said. "I have never really tasted coffee before. Only if it is made like this your Arab might have said there was but one thing in life, for this becomes a religious duty."

One by one with equal care were prepared cups for the others, who were neither slow nor perfunctory in their endors.e.m.e.nt of the sculptor's praise.

XIV.

THIS IS NOT A BOON.

Oth.e.l.lo; iii.--3.