Peter Ibbetson Part 40

In a week I recovered much of my strength; but I was an old man. That was a great change.

Most people age gradually and imperceptibly. To me old age had come of a sudden--in a night, as it were; but with it, and suddenly also, the resigned and cheerful acquiescence, the mild serenity, that are its compensation and more.

My hope, my certainty to be one with Mary some day--that is my haven, my heaven--a consummation of completeness beyond which there is nothing to wish for or imagine. Come what else may, that is safe, and that is all I care for. She was able to care for me, and for many other things besides, and I love her all the more for it; but I can only care for _her_.

Sooner or later--a year--ten years; it does not matter much. I also am beginning to disbelieve in the existence of time.

That waking was the gladdest in my life--gladder even than the waking in my condemned cell the morning after my sentence of death, when another black shadow pa.s.sed away--that of the scaffold.

Oh, Mary! What has she not done for me--what clouds has she not dispelled!

When night came round again I made once more, step by step, the journey from the Porte de la Muette to the Mare d'Auteuil, with everything the same--the gay wedding-feast, the blue and silver courier, the merry guests singing

_"Il etait un pet.i.t navire."_

Nothing was altered, even to the dull gray weather. But, oh, the difference to me!

I longed to play at _bouchon_ with the hackney coachmen, or at _la balle au camp_ with my old schoolfellows. I could have even waltzed with "Monsieur Lartigue" and "le pet.i.t Cazal."

I looked in Mere Manette's little mirror and saw my worn, gray, haggard, old face again; and liked it, and thought it quite good-looking. I sat down and rested by the fortifications as I had done the night before, for I was still tired, but with a most delicious fatigue; my very shabbiness was agreeable to me--_pauvre, mais honnete_. A convict, a madman, but a prince among men--still the beloved of Mary!

And when at last I reached the spot I had always loved the best on earth ever since I first saw it as a child, I fell on my knees and wept for sheer excess of joy. It was mine indeed; it belonged to me as no land or water had ever belonged to any man before.

Mary was not there, of course; I did not expect her.

But, strange and incomprehensible as it seems, she had forgotten her gloves; she had left them behind her. One was on the bench, one was on the ground; poor old gloves that had been mended, with the well-known shape of her dear hand in them; every fold and crease preserved as in a mould--the very cast of her finger-nails; and the scent of sandal-wood she and her mother had so loved.

I laid them side by side, palms upward, on the bench where we had sat the night before. No dream-wind has blown them away; no dream-thief has stolen them; there they lie still, and will lie till the great change comes over me, and I am one with their owner.

I am there every night--in the lovely spring or autumn suns.h.i.+ne--meditating, remembering, taking notes--dream-notes to be learned by heard, and used next day for a real purpose.

I walk round and round, or sit on the benches, or lie in the gra.s.s by the brink, and smoke cigarettes without end, and watch the old amphibious life I found so charming half a century ago, and find it charming still.

Sometimes I dive into the forest (which has now been razed to the ground. Ever since 1870 there is an open s.p.a.ce all round the Mare d'Auteuil. I had seen it since then in a dream with Mary, who went to Paris after the war, and mad pilgrimages by day to all the places so dear to our hearts, and so changed; and again, when the night came, with me for a fellow-pilgrim. It was a sad disenchantment for us both).

_My_ Mare d'Auteuil, where I spend so many hours, is the Mare d'Auteuil of Louis Philippe, unchangeable except for such slight changes as _will_ occur, now and then, between the years 1839 and 1846: a broken bench mended, a new barrier put up by the high-road, a small wooden dike where the brink is giving way.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I AM THERE EVERY NIGHT."]

And the thicket beside and behind it is dark and dense for miles, with many tall trees and a rich, tangled undergrowth.

There is a giant oak which it is difficult to find in that labyrinth (it now stands, for the world, alone in the open; an ornament to the Auteuil race-course) I have often climbed it as a boy, with Mimsey and the rest; I cannot climb it now, but I love to lie on the gra.s.s in its shade, and dream in my dream there, shut in on all sides by fragrant, impenetrable verdure; with birds and bees and b.u.t.terflies and dragon-flies and strange beetles and little field-mice with bright eyes, and lithe spotted snakes and lively brown squirrels and beautiful green lizards for my company. Now and then a gentle roebuck comes and feeds close by me without fear, and the mole throws up his little mound of earth and takes an airing.

It is a very charming solitude.

It amuses me to think by day, when broad awake in my sad English prison, and among my crazy peers, how this nightly umbrageous French solitude of mine, so many miles and years away, is now but a common, bare, wide gra.s.sy plain, overlooked by a gaudy, beflagged grand-stand. It is Sunday, let us say--and for all I know a great race may be going on--all Paris is there, rich and poor. Little red-legged soldiers, big blue-legged gendarmes, keep the course clear; the sun s.h.i.+nes, the tricolour waves, the gay, familiar language makes the summer breeze musical. I dare say it is all very bright and animated, but the whole place rings with the vulgar din of the bookmakers, and the air is full of dust and foul with the scent of rank tobacco, the reek of struggling French humanity; and the gaunt Eiffel Tower looks down upon it all from the sky over Paris (so, at least, I am told) like a skeleton at a feast.

Then twilight comes, and the crowds have departed; on foot, on horseback, on bicycles and tricycles, in every kind of vehicle; many by the _chemin de fer de ceinture_, the Auteuil station of which is close by ... all is quiet and bare and dull.

Then down drops the silent night like a curtain, and beneath its friendly cover the strange transformation effects itself quickly, and all is made ready for _me_. The grand-stand evaporates, the railway station melts away into thin air; there is no more Eiffel Tower with its electric light! The sweet forest of fifty years ago rises suddenly out of the ground, and all the wild live things that once lived in it wake to their merry life again.

A quiet deep old pond in a past French forest, hallowed by such memories! What _can_ be more enchanting? Oh, soft and sweet nostalgia, so soon to be relieved!

Up springs the mellow sun, the light of other days, to its appointed place in the heavens--zenith, or east or west, according to order. A light wind blows from the south--everything is properly disinfected, and made warm and bright and comfortable--and lo! old Peter Ibbetson appears upon the scene, absolute monarch of all he surveys for the next eight hours--one whose right there are literally none to dispute.

I do not encourage noisy gatherings there as a rule, nor by the pond; I like to keep the sweet place pretty much to myself; there is no selfishness in this, for I am really depriving n.o.body. Whoever comes there now, comes there nearly fifty years ago and does not know it; they must have all died long since.

Sometimes it is a _garde champetre_ in Louis Philippe's blue and silver, with his black pipe, his gaiters, his old flint gun, and his embroidered game-bag. He does well in the landscape.

Sometimes it is a pair of lovers, if they are good-looking and well-behaved, or else the boys from Saindou's school to play fly the garter--_la raie_.

Sometimes it is Monsieur le Cure, peacefully conning his "Hours," as with slow and thoughtful step he paces round and round. I can now read his calm, benevolent face by the light of half a century's experience of life, and have learned to love that still, black, meditative aspect which I found so antipathetic as a small boy--_he_ is no burner alive of little heretics! This world is big enough for us both--and so is the world to come! And he knows it. Now, at all events!

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THIS WORLD IS BIG ENOUGH FOR US BOTH"]

Sometimes even a couple of Prendergasts are admitted, or even three; they are not so bad, after all; they have the qualities of their faults, although you might not think it.

But very often the old beloved shades arrive with their fis.h.i.+ng-nets, and their high spirits, and their ringing Anglo-French--Charlie, and Alfred, and Madge, and the rest, and the grinning, barking, gyrating Medor, who dives after stones.

Oh, how it does my heart good to see and hear them!

They make me feel like a grandfather. Even Monsieur le Major is younger than I--his mustache less white than mine. He only comes to my chin; but I look up to him still, and love and revere him as when I was a little child.

And Dr. Seraskier! I place myself between him and what he is looking at, so that he seems to be looking straight at me; but with a far-away look in his eyes, as is only natural. Presently something amuses him, and he smiles, and his eyes crinkle up as his daughter's used to do when she was a woman, and his majestic face becomes as that of an angel, like hers.

_L'ange du sourire!_

And my gay, young, light-hearted father, with his vivacity and rollicking laugh and eternal good-humor! He is just like a boy to me now, le beau Pasquier! He has got a new sling of his own invention; he pulls it out of his pocket, and slings stones high over the tree-tops and far away out of sight--to the joy of himself and everybody else--and does not trouble much as to where they will fall.

My mother is young enough now to be my daughter; it is as a daughter, a sweet, kind, lovely daughter, that I love her now--a happily-married daughter with a tall, handsome husband who yodles divinely and slings stones, and who has presented me with a grandson--_beau comme le jour_--for whatever Peter Ibbetson may have been in his time, there is no gainsaying the singular comeliness of little Gogo Pasquier.

And Mimsey is just a child angel! Monsieur le Major is infallible.

"Elle a toutes les intelligences de la tete et du coeur! Vous verrez un jour, quand ca ira mieux; vous verrez!"

That day has long come and gone; it is easy to see all that now--to have the eyes of Monsieur le Major.

Ah, poor little Mimsey, with her cropped head and her pale face, and long, thin arms and legs, and grave, kind, luminous eyes, that have not yet learned to smile. What she is to _me!!!!_

And Madame Seraskier, in all the youthful bloom and splendor of her sacred beauty! A chosen lily among women--the mother of Mary!

She sits on the old bench by the willow, close to her daughter's gloves.

Sometimes (a trivial and almost comic detail!) she actually seems to sit _upon_ them, to my momentary distress; but when she goes away, there they are still, not flattened a bit--the precious mould of those beautiful, generous hands to which I owe everything here and hereafter.

I have not been again to my old home. I dread the sight of the avenue. I cannot face "Parva sed Apta."