The Yellow Book Volume I Part 9

Night Piece

By Aubrey Beardsley

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Ill.u.s.tration: Night Piece]

Stella Maris

by Arthur Symons

Why is it I remember yet You, of all women one has met In random wayfare, as one meets The chance romances of the streets, The Juliet of a night? I know Your heart holds many a Romeo.

And I, who call to mind your face In so serene a pausing-place, Where the bright pure expanse of sea, The shadowy sh.o.r.e's austerity, Seems a reproach to you and me, I too have sought on many a breast The ecstasy of love's unrest, I too have had my dreams, and met (Ah me!) how many a Juliet.

Why is it, then, that I recall You, neither first nor last of all?

For, surely as I see to-night The glancing of the lighthouse light, Against the sky, across the bay, As turn by turn it falls my way, So surely do I see your eyes Out of the empty night arise, Child, you arise and smile to me Out of the night, out of the sea, The Nereid of a moment there, And is it seaweed in your hair?

O lost and wrecked, how long ago, Out of the drowned past, I know, You come to call me, come to claim My share of your delicious shame.

Child, I remember, and can tell One night we loved each other well; And one night's love, at least or most, Is not so small a thing to boast.

You were adorable, and I Adored you to infinity, That nuptial night too briefly borne To the oblivion of morn.

Oh, no oblivion! for I feel Your lips deliriously steal Along my neck, and fasten there; I feel the perfume of your hair, And your soft breast that heaves and dips, Desiring my desirous lips, And that ineffable delight When souls turn bodies, and unite In the intolerable, the whole Rapture of the embodied soul.

That joy was ours, we pa.s.sed it by; You have forgotten me, and I Remember you thus strangely, won An instant from oblivion.

And I, remembering, would declare That joy, not shame, is ours to share, Joy that we had the will and power, In spite of fate, to s.n.a.t.c.h one hour, Out of vague nights, and days at strife, So infinitely full of life.

And 'tis for this I see you rise, A wraith, with starlight in your eyes, Here, where the drowsy-minded mood Is one with Nature's solitude; For this, for this, you come to me Out of the night, out of the sea.

A Study

By Sir Frederic Leighton, P.R.A.

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Study]

Two Sketches

By Henry Harland

I--Mercedes

When I was a child some one gave me a family of white mice. I don't remember how old I was, I think about ten or eleven; but I remember very clearly the day I received them. It must have been a Thursday, a half-holiday, for I had come home from school rather early in the afternoon. Alexandre, dear old ruddy round-faced Alexandre, who opened the door for me, smiled in a way that seemed to announce, "There's a surprise in store for you, sir." Then my mother smiled too, a smile, I thought, of peculiar promise and interest. After I had kissed her she said, "Come into the dining-room. There's something you will like."

Perhaps I concluded it would be something to eat. Anyhow, all agog with curiosity, I followed her into the dining-room--and Alexandre followed _me_, anxious to take part in the rejoicing. In the window stood a big cage, enclosing the family of white mice.

I remember it as a very big cage indeed; no doubt I should find it shrunken to quite moderate dimensions if I could see it again. There were three generations of mice in it: a fat old couple, the founders of the race, dozing phlegmatically on their laurels in a corner; then a dozen medium-sized, slender mice, trim and youthful-looking, rus.h.i.+ng irrelevantly hither and thither, with funny inquisitive little faces; and then a squirming ma.s.s of pink things, like caterpillars, that were really infant mice, newborn. They didn't remain infants long, though. In a few days they had put on virile togas of white fur, and were scrambling about the cage and nibbling their food as independently as their elders. The rapidity with which my mice multiplied and grew to maturity was a constant source of astonishment to me. It seemed as if every morning I found a new litter of young mice in the cage--though how they had effected an entrance through the wire gauze that lined it was a hopeless puzzle--and these would have become responsible, self-supporting mice in no time.

My mother told me that somebody had sent me this soul-stirring present from the country, and I dare say I was made to sit down and write a letter of thanks. But I'm ashamed to own I can't remember who the giver was. I have a vague notion that it was a lady, an elderly maiden-lady--Mademoiselle ... something that began with P--who lived near Tours, and who used to come to Paris once or twice a year, and always brought me a box of prunes.

Alexandre carried the cage into my play-room, and set it up against the wall. I stationed myself in front of it, and remained there all the rest of the afternoon, gazing in, entranced. To watch their antics, their comings and goings, their labours and amus.e.m.e.nts, to study their shrewd, alert physiognomies, to wonder about their feelings, thoughts, intentions, to try to divine the meaning of their busy twittering language--it was such keen, deep delight. Of course I was an anthropomorphist, and read a great deal of human nature into them; otherwise it wouldn't have been such fun. I dragged myself reluctantly away when I was called to dinner. It was hard that evening to apply myself to my school-books. Before I went to bed I paid them a parting visit; they were huddled together in their nest of cotton-wool, sleeping soundly. And I was up at an unheard-of hour next morning, to have a bout with them before going to school. I found Alexandre, in his nightcap and long white ap.r.o.n, occupied with the _soins de proprete_, as he said. He cleaned out the cage, put in fresh food and water, and then, pointing to the fat old couple, the grandparents, who stopped lazily abed, sitting up and rubbing their noses together, whilst their juniors scampered merrily about their affairs, "Tiens! On dirait Monsieur et Madame Denis," he cried. I felt the appositeness of his allusion; and the old couple were forthwith officially denominated Monsieur and Madame Denis, for their resemblance to the hero and heroine of the song--though which was Monsieur, and which Madame, I'm not sure that I ever clearly knew.

It was a little after this that I was taken for the first time in my life to the play. I fancy the theatre must have been the Porte St.

Martin; at any rate, it was a theatre in the Boulevard, and towards the East, for I remember the long drive we had to reach it. And the piece was _The Count of Monte Cristo_. In my memory the adventure s.h.i.+nes, of course, as a vague blur of light and joy; a child's first visit to the play, and that play _The Count of Monte Cristo_! It was all the breath-taking pleasantness of romance made visible, audible, actual. A vague blur of light and joy, from which only two details separate themselves. First, the prison scene, and an aged man, with a long white beard, moving a great stone from the wall; then--the figure of Mercedes.

I went home terribly in love with Mercedes. Surely there are no such _grandes pa.s.sions_ in maturer life as those helpless, inarticulate ones we burn in secret with before our teens; surely we never love again so violently, desperately, consumedly. Anyhow, I went home terribly in love with Mercedes. And--do all children lack humour?--I picked out the prettiest young ladyish-looking mouse in my collection, cut off her moustaches, adopted her as my especial pet, and called her by the name of my _dea certe_.

All of my mice by this time had become quite tame. They had plenty to eat and drink, and a comfortable home, and not a care in the world; and familiarity with their master had bred a.s.surance; and so they had become quite tame and shamefully, abominably lazy. Luxury, we are taught, was ever the mother of sloth. I could put my hand in amongst them, and not one would bestir himself the littlest bit to escape me. Mercedes and I were inseparable. I used to take her to school with me every day; she could be more conveniently and privately transported than a lamb. Each _lyceen_ had a desk in front of his form, and she would spend the school-hours in mine, I leaving the lid raised a little, that she might have light and air. One day, the usher having left the room for a moment, I put her down on the floor, thereby creating a great excitement amongst my fellow-pupils, who got up from their places and formed an eager circle round her. Then suddenly the usher came back, and we all hurried to our seats, while he, catching sight of Mercedes, cried out, "A mouse! A white mouse! Who dares to bring a white mouse to the cla.s.s?"

And he made a dash for her. But she was too quick, too 'cute, for "the likes of" Monsieur le Pion. She gave a jump, and in the twinkling of an eye had disappeared up my leg, under my trousers. The usher searched high and low for her, but she prudently remained in her hiding-place; and thus her life was saved, for when he had abandoned his ineffectual chase, he announced, "I should have wrung her neck." I turned pale to imagine the doom she had escaped as by a hair's breadth. "It is useless to ask which of you brought her here," he continued. "But mark my words: if ever I find a mouse again in the cla.s.s _I will wring her neck_!" And yet, in private life, this bloodthirsty _pion_ was a quite gentle, kindly, underfed, underpaid, shabby, struggling fellow, with literary aspirations, who would not have hurt a fly.

The secrets of a schoolboy's pocket! I once saw a boy surrept.i.tiously angling in Kensington Gardens, with a string and a bent pin. Presently he landed a fish, a fish no bigger than your thumb, perhaps, but still a fish. Alive and wet and flopping as it was, he slipped it into his pocket. I used to carry Mercedes about in mine. One evening, when I put in my hand to take her out, I discovered to my bewilderment that she was not alone. There were four little pink mites of infant mice clinging to her.

I had enjoyed my visit to the theatre so much that at the _jour de l'an_ my father included a toy-theatre among my presents. It had a real curtain of green baize, that would roll up and down, and beautiful coloured scenery that you could s.h.i.+ft, and footlights, and a trap-door in the middle of the stage; and indeed it would have been altogether perfect, except for the Company. I have since learned that this is not infrequently the case with theatres. My company consisted of pasteboard men and women who, as artists, struck me as eminently unsatisfactory.

They couldn't move their arms or legs, and they had such stolid, uninteresting faces. I don't know how it first occurred to me to turn them all off, and fill their places with my mice. Mercedes, of course, was leading lady; Monsieur and Madame Denis were the heavy parents; and a gentlemanlike young mouse named Leander was _jeune premier_. Then, in my leisure, they used to act the most tremendous plays. I was stage-manager, prompter, playwright, chorus, and audience, placing the theatre before a looking-gla.s.s, so that, though my duties kept me behind, I could peer round the edge, and watch the spectacle as from the front. I would invent the lines and deliver them, but, that my illusion might be the more complete, I would change my voice for each personage. The lines tried hard to be verses; no doubt they were _vers libres_. At any rate, they were mouth-filling and sonorous. The first play we attempted, I need hardly say, was _Le Comte de Monte Cristo_, such version of it as I could reconstruct from memory. That had rather a long run. Then I dramatised _Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp_, _Paul et Virginie_, _Quentin Durward_, and _La Dame de Monsoreau_. Mercedes made a charming Diane, Leander a brilliant and das.h.i.+ng Bussy; Monsieur Denis was cast for the role of Frere Gorenflot; and a long, thin, cadaverous-looking mouse, Don Quichotte by name, somewhat inadequately represented Chicot. We began, as you see, with melodrama; presently we descended to light comedy, playing _Les Memoires d'un Ane_, _Jean qui rit_, and other works of the immortal Madame de Segur. And then at last we turned a new leaf, and became naturalistic. We had never heard of the naturalist school, though Monsieur Zola had already published some volumes of the _Rougon-Macquart_; but ideas are in the air; and we, for ourselves, discovered the possibilities of naturalism simultaneously, as it were, with the acknowledged apostle of that form of art. We would impersonate the characters of our own world--our schoolfellows and masters, our parents, servants, friends--and carry them through experiences and situations derived from our impressions of real life.

Perhaps we rather led them a dance; and I dare say those we didn't like came in for a good deal of retributive justice. It was a little universe, of which we were the arch-arbiters, our will the final law.

I don't know whether all children lack humour; but I'm sure no grown-up author-manager can take his business more seriously than I took mine.

Oh, I enjoyed it hugely; the hours I spent at it were enraptured hours; but it was grim, grim earnest. After a while I began to long for a less subjective public, a more various audience. I would summon the servants, range them in chairs at one end of the room, conceal myself behind the theatre, and spout the play with fervid solemnity. And they would giggle, and make flippant commentaries, and at my most impa.s.sioned climaxes burst into guffaws. My mice, as has been said, were overfed and lazy, and I used to have to poke them through their parts with sticks from the wings; but this was a detail which a superior imagination should have accepted as one of the conventions of the art. It made the servants laugh, however; and when I would step to the front in person, and, with tears in my eyes, beseech them to be sober, they would but laugh the louder. "Bless you, sir, they're only mice--_ce ne sont que des souris_," the cook called out on one such occasion. She meant it as an apology and a consolation, but it was the unkindest cut of all. Only mice, indeed! To me they had been a young gentleman and lady lost in the Desert of Sahara, near to die for the want of water, and about to be attacked, captured, and sold into slavery, by a band of Bedouin Arabs.

Ah, well, the artist must steel himself to meet with indifference or derision from the public, to be ignored, misunderstood, or jeered at; and to rely for his real, his legitimate, reward on the pleasure he finds in his work.

And now there befell a great change in my life. Our home in Paris was broken up, and we moved to St. Petersburg. It was impossible to take my mice with us; their cage would have hopelessly complicated our impedimenta. So we gave them to the children of our concierge. Mercedes, however, I was resolved I would not part with, and I carried her all the way to the Russian capital by hand. In my heart I was looking to her to found another family--she had so frequently become a mother in the past. But month succeeded month, and she forever disappointed me, and at last I abandoned hope. In solitude and exile Mercedes degenerated sadly; got monstrously fat; too indolent to gnaw, let her teeth grow to a preposterous length; and in the end died of a surfeit of _smetana_.

When I returned to Paris, at the age of twenty, to _faire mon droit_ in the Latin Quarter, I paid a visit to our old house, and discovered the same old concierge in the _loge_. I asked her about the mice, and she told me her children had found the care of them such a bother that at first they had neglected them, and at last allowed them to escape. "They took to the walls, and for a long time afterwards, Monsieur, the mice of this neighbourhood were pied. To this day they are of a paler hue than elsewhere."

II--A Broken Looking-Gla.s.s

He climbed the three flights of stone stairs, and put his key into the lock; but before he turned it, he stopped--to rest, to take breath. On the door his name was painted in big white letters, Mr. Richard Dane. It is always silent in the Temple at midnight; to-night the silence was dense, like a fog. It was Sunday night; and on Sunday night, even within the hushed precincts of the Temple, one is conscious of a deeper hush.

When he had lighted the lamp in his sitting-room, he let himself drop into an arm-chair before the empty fireplace. He was tired, he was exhausted. Yet nothing had happened to tire him. He had dined, as he always dined on Sundays, with the Rodericks, in Cheyne Walk; he had driven home in a hansom. There was no reason why he should be tired.

But he was tired. A deadly la.s.situde penetrated his body and his spirit, like a fluid. He was too tired to go to bed.

"I suppose I am getting old," he thought.

To a second person the matter would have appeared one not of supposition but of certainty, not of progression but of accomplishment. Getting old indeed? But he _was_ old. It was an old man, grey and wrinkled and wasted, who sat there, limp, sunken upon himself, in his easy-chair. In years, to be sure, he was under sixty; but he looked like a man of seventy-five.

"I am getting old, I suppose I am getting old."

And vaguely, dully, he contemplated his life, spread out behind him like a misty landscape, and thought what a failure it had been. What had it come to? What had it brought him? What had he done or won? Nothing, nothing. It had brought him nothing but old age, solitude, disappointment, and, to-night especially, a sense of fatigue and apathy that weighed upon him like a suffocating blanket. On a table, a yard or two away, stood a decanter of whisky, with some soda-water bottles and tumblers; he looked at it with heavy eyes, and he knew that there was what he needed. A little whisky would strengthen him, revive him, and make it possible for him to bestir himself and undress and go to bed.