Memoirs of My Dead Life Part 17

"You play beautifully; why did you say you didn't like Beethoven?"

"I didn't say I didn't like Beethoven; you know very well mamma can't play the 'Impa.s.sionata.'"

"Why aren't you always like this?"

"I don't know. One can't always be the same. I feel differently when I play; the mood only comes over me sometimes. I used to play a great deal; I only play occasionally now, just when I feel like it."

We walked through the alleys by the statues, seeing them hardly at all, thinking of the music.

"I must be getting back," she said. "You see, I've got to pack up.

Mother can't do any packing; I've to do hers for her. I hope we shall meet again some day."

"What good would it be? I only like you when you're playing, and you're not often in the mood."

"I'm sorry for that; perhaps if you knew me better----"

"Now you're married, and I suppose Donald will come to Rome to fetch you?"

"Oh, I don't think he'll be able. He has got no money."

"And you'll fall in love with some one else?"

"Well, perhaps so; I don't feel that I ever could again after this week." Stopping suddenly in front of a hosier's shop, she said: "I like those collars; they have just come out--those turned-down ones.

Do you like them as well as the great high stand-up collars about three inches deep? When they were the fas.h.i.+on men could hardly move their heads." Then she made some remarks about neckties and the colour she liked best--violet. "Yes, there's a nice shade of violet. Poor Donald! He's so handsome."

After the hosier's shop she spoke no more about music. And long before we reached the hotel she who had played--I cannot say for certain what she played that day in the Luxembourg Gardens; my love of music was not then fully awakened; could it have been?--the names of Bach and Chopin come up in my mind--"I can't speak about music," she said, as we turned into the Rue du Bac, and she ran up the stairs of the hotel possessed completely by the other Mildred. She asked her mother to play the "Brooklyn Cake Walk," and she danced "the lovely two-step,"

as she had learned it at Nice, for my enjoyment. I noticed that she looked extraordinarily comic as she skipped up and down the room, the line of her chin deflected, and that always gives a slightly comic look to a face. She came downstairs with me, and, standing at the hotel door, she told me of something that had happened yesterday.

"Mother and I went to Cook's to get the tickets. When we went into the office I saw a Yank--oh, so nicely dressed! Lovely patent-leather boots. And I thought, 'Oh, dear, he'll never look at me.' But presently he did, and took out his card-case and folded up a card and put it on the ledge behind him, and gave me a look and moved away. So I walked over and took it up. Mamma never saw, but the clerks did."

I have reported Mildred's story truthfully at a particular moment of her life. Those who travel meet people now and again whose individuality is so strong that it survives. Mildred's has survived many years, and I have written this account of it because it seems to me to throw a gleam into the mystery of life without, however, doing anything to destroy the mystery.

CHAPTER X

A REMEMBRANCE

It was in the vastness of Westminster Hall that I saw her for the first time--saw her pointed face, her red hair, her brilliant teeth.

The next time was in her own home--a farm-house that had been rebuilt and was half a villa. At the back were wheat-stacks, a noisy thras.h.i.+ng-machine, a pigeon-cote, and stables whence, with jangle of harness and cries of yokels, the great farm-horses always seemed to be coming from or going to their work on the downs. In a garden planted with variegated firs she tended her flowers all day; and in the parlour, where we a.s.sembled in the evening, her husband smoked his pipe in silence; the young ladies, their blonde hair hanging down their backs, played waltzes; she alone talked. Her conversation was effusive, her laughter abundant and bright. I had only just turned eighteen, and was deeply interested in religious problems, and one day I told her the book I carried in my pocket, and sometimes pretended to study, was Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." My explanation of the value of the work did not seem to strike her, and her manifest want of interest in the discussion of religious problems surprised me, for she pa.s.sed for a religious woman, and I failed to understand how mere belief could satisfy any one. One day in the greenhouse, whither I had wandered, she interrupted some allusion to the chapter ent.i.tled "The Deduction of the Categories" with a burst of laughter, and declared that she would call me Kant. The nickname was not adopted by the rest of the family--another was invented which appealed more to their imagination--but she held to the name she had given me, and during the course of our long friends.h.i.+p never addressed me by any other.

There was no reason why I should have become the friend of these people. We were opposed in character and temperament, but somehow we seemed to suit. There was little reflection on either side; certainly there was none on mine; at that time I was incapable of any; my youth was a vague dream, and my friends were the shadows on the dream. I saw and understood them only as one sees and understands the summer clouds when, lying at length in the tall gra.s.s, one watches the clouds curl and uncurl. In such mood, visit succeeded visit, and before I was aware, the old Squire who walked about the downs in a tall hat died, and my friends moved into the family place, distant about a hundred yards--an Italian house, sheltered among the elms that grew along the seash.o.r.e. And in their new house they became to me more real than shadows; they were then like figures on a stage, and the building of the new wing and the planting of the new garden interested me as might an incident in a play; and I left them as I might leave a play, taking up another thread in life, thinking very little of them, if I thought at all. Years pa.s.sed, and after a long absence abroad I met them by chance in London.

Again visit succeeded visit. My friends were the same as when I had left them; their house was the same, the conduct of their lives was the same. I do not think I was conscious of any change until, one day, walking with one of the girls in the garden, a sensation of home came upon me. I seemed always to have known these people; they seemed part and parcel of my life. It was a sudden and enchanting awaking of love; life seemed to lengthen out like the fields at dawn, and to become distinct and real in many new and unimagined ways. Above all, I was surprised to find myself admiring her who, fifteen years ago, had appeared to me not a little dowdy. She was now fifty-five, but such an age seemed impossible for so girl-like a figure and such young and effusive laughter. I was, however, sure that she was fifteen years older than when I first saw her, but those fifteen years had brought each within range of the other's understanding and sympathy. We became companions. I noticed what dresses she wore, and told her which I liked her best in. She was only cross with me when I surprised her in the potting-shed wearing an old bonnet out of which hung a faded poppy. She used to cry: "Don't look at me, Kant. I know I'm like an old gipsy woman."

"You look charming," I said, "in that old bonnet."

She put down the watering-can and laughingly took it from her head.

"It is a regular show."

"Not at all. You look charming when working in the greenhouse.... I like you better like that than when you are dressed to go to Brighton."

"Do you?... I thought you liked me best in my new black silk."

"I think I like you equally well at all times."

We looked at each other. There was an accent of love in our friends.h.i.+p. "And strange, is it not," I said, "I did not admire you half as much when I knew you first?"

"How was that? I was quite a young woman then."

"Yes," I said, regretting my own words; "but, don't you see, at that time I was a mere boy--I lived in a dream, hardly seeing what pa.s.sed around me."

"Yes, of course," she said gaily, "you were so young then, all you saw in me was a woman with a grown-up son."

Her dress was pinned up, she held in her hand the bonnet which she said made her look like an old gipsy woman, and the sunlight fell on the red hair, now grown a little thinner, but each of the immaculate teeth was an elegant piece of statuary, and not a wrinkle was there on that pretty, vixen-like face. Her figure especially showed no signs of age, and if she and her daughters were in the room it was she I admired.

One day, while seeking through the store-room for a sheet of brown paper to pack up a book in, I came across a pile of old _Athenaeums_. Had I happened upon a set of drawings by Raphael I could not have been more astonished. Not one, but twenty copies of the _Athenaeum_ in a house where never a book was read. I looked at the dates--three-and-thirty years ago. At that moment she was gathering some withering apples from the floor.

"Whoever," I cried, "could have left these copies of the _Athenaeum_ here?"

"Oh, they are my _Athenaeums_," she said. "I always used to read the _Athenaeum_ when I was engaged to be married to Mr. Bartlett.

You must have heard of him--he wrote that famous book about the Euphrates. I was very fond of reading in those days, and he and I used to talk about books in the old garden at Wandsworth. It is all built over now."

This sudden discovery of dead tastes and sympathies seemed to draw us closer together, and in the quietness of the store-room, amid the odour of the apples, her face flushed with all the spirit of her girlhood, and I understood her as if I had lived it with her.

"You must have been a delightful girl. I believe if I had known you then I should have asked you to marry me."

"I believe you would, Kant.... So you thought because I never read books now that I had never read any? You have no idea how fond of books I was once, and if I had married Mr. Bartlett I believe I should have been quite a blue-stocking. But then d.i.c.k came, and my father thought it a more suitable match, and I had young children to look after. We were very poor in those days; the old Squire never attempted to help us."

At this time I seemed to be always with my friends; I came to see them when I pleased, and sometimes I stayed a week, sometimes I stayed six months: but however long my visit they said it was not long enough.

The five-o'clock from London brought me down in time for dinner, and I used to run up to my room just as if I were a member of the family. If I missed this train and came down by the six-o'clock, I found them at dinner, and then the lamplight seemed to accentuate our affectionate intimacy, and to pa.s.s round the table shaking hands with them all was in itself a peculiar delight. On one of these occasions, missing her from her place, I said: "Surely you have not allowed her to remain till this hour in the garden?"

I was told that she was ill, and had been for the last fortnight confined to her room. Several days pa.s.sed; allusion to her illness became more frequent; and then I heard that the local doctor would accept the responsibility no longer, and had demanded a consultation with a London physician. But she would not hear of so much expense for her sake, and declared herself to be quite sufficiently well to go to London.

The little pony-carriage took her to the station, and I saw her in the waiting-room wrapped up in shawls. She was ashamed to see me, but in truth the disease had not changed her as she thought it had. There are some who are so beautiful that disease cannot deform them, and she was endowed with such exquisite life that she would turn to smile back on you over the brink of the grave.

We thought the train was taking her from us for ever, but she came back hopeful. Operation had been p.r.o.nounced unnecessary, but she remained in her room many days before the medicine had reduced her sufficiently to allow her to come downstairs. Nearly a month pa.s.sed, and then she appeared looking strangely well, and every day she grew better until she regained her girlish figure and the quick dance of movement which was a grace and a joy in the silent peacefulness of the old house. Her grace and lightness were astonis.h.i.+ng, and one day, coming down dressed to go in the carriage, she raced across the library, opened her escritoire, hunting through its innumerable drawers for one of the sums of money which she kept there wrapped up in pieces of paper.

"How nice you look! You are quite well now, and your figure is like a girl of fifteen."

She turned and looked at me with that love in her face which an old woman feels for a young man who is something less and something more to her than her son. As a flush of summer lingers in autumn's face, so does a sensation of s.e.x float in such an affection. There is something strangely tender in the yearning of the young man for the decadent charms of her whom he regards as the mother of his election, and who, at the same time, suggests to him the girl he would have loved if time had not robbed him of her youth. There is a waywardness in such an affection that formal man knows not of.

I remember that day, for it was the last time I saw her beautiful.

Soon after we noticed that she did not quite recover, and we thought it was because she did not take her medicine regularly. She spent long hours alone in her greenhouse, the hot sun playing fiercely on her back, and we supplicated--I was the foremost among her supplicators--that she would not carry the heavy flower-pots to and fro, nor cans of water from the tank at the bottom of the garden, and to save her I undertook to water her flowers for her. But she was one of those who would do everything herself--who thought that if she did not shut the door it was not properly shut. She was always speaking of her work. "If I leave my work," she would say, "even for one week, everything gets so behind-hand that I despair of ever being able to make up the arrear. The worst of it is that no one can take up my work where I leave off." And as she grew worse this idea developed until it became a kind of craze. At last, speculating on the strength of our friends.h.i.+p, I told her her life belonged to her husband and children, and that she had no right to squander it in this fas.h.i.+on. I urged that with ordinary forbearance she might live for twenty years, but at the present rate of force-expenditure she could not hope to live long. I spoke brutally, but she smiled, knowing how much I loved her; and, looking back, it seems to me she must have known she could not be saved, and preferred to give the last summer of her life entirely to her flowers. It was pathetic to see her, poor moribund one, sitting through the long noons alone, the sun beating in upon her through the fiery gla.s.s, tending her flowers. I remember how she used to come in in the evenings exhausted, and lie down on the little sofa. Her husband, with an anxious, quiet, kindly look in his eyes, used to draw the skirt over her feet and sit down at her feet, tender, loving, soliciting the right to clasp her hand, as if they had not been married thirty years, but were only sweethearts. At that time we used all to implore her to allow us to send for the London doctor, and I remember how proud I was when she looked up and said, "Very well, Kant, it shall be as you wish it." I remember, too, waiting by the little wood at the corner of the lane, where I should be sure to meet the doctor as he came up from the station. The old elms were beautiful with green, the sky was beautiful with blue, and we lingered, looking out on the fair pasturage where the sheep moved so peacefully, and, with the exquisite warmth of summer in our flesh, we talked of her who was to die.