Memoirs of My Dead Life Part 16

"But you like Donald much better than Toby?"

"Of course I do; he came here to marry me. Oh, yes, I've forgotten all about Toby. You see, I met Donald when I went back to London. But do look at that woman's back; see where her head is. I wonder what made Rodin put a woman in that position."

She looked at me, and there was a look of curious inquiry on her face.

Overcome with a sudden shyness, I hastened to a.s.sure her that the statue was "La Danaide."

"Rodin often introduces a trivial voluptuousness into art; and his sculpture may be sometimes called _l'article de Paris_. It is occasionally soiled by the sentiment, of which Gounod is the great exponent, a base soul who poured a sort of bath-water melody down the back of every woman he met, Margaret or Madeline, it was all the same."

"Clearly this is not a day to walk about a picture-gallery with you.

Come, let us sit down, and we'll talk about lighter things, about lovers. You won't mind telling me; you know you can trust me. One of these days you will meet a man who will absorb you utterly, and all these pa.s.sing pa.s.sions will wax to one pa.s.sion that will know no change."

"Do you think so? I wonder."

"Do you doubt it?"

"I don't think any one man could absorb me; no one man could fill my life."

"Not even Donald?"

"Donald is wonderful. Do you remember that morning, a few days after we arrived?"

"Your wedding night?"

"Yes, my wedding night."

We are interested in any one who is himself or herself, and this girl was certainly herself and nothing but herself. Travelling about as she did with her quiet, respectable mother, who never suspected anything, she seemed to indicate a type--type is hardly the word, for she was an exception. Never had I seen any one like her before, her frankness and her daring; here at least was one who had the courage of her instincts. She was man-crazy if you will, but now and then I caught sight of another Mildred when she sighed, when that little dissatisfied look appeared in her face, and the other Mildred only floated up for a moment like a water-flower or weed on the surface of a stream.

"... You know I do mean to be a good girl. I think one ought to be good. But really, if you read the Bible----Oh, must you go?--it has been such a relief talking things over with you. Shall I see you to-night? There is no one else in the hotel I can talk to, and mamma will play the piano, and when, she plays Beethoven it gets upon my nerves."

"You play the violin, don't you?"

"Yes, I play," and that peculiar sad look which I had begun to think was characteristic of her came into her face, and I asked myself if this sudden misting of expression should be ascribed to stupidity or to a sudden thought or emotion. "I am sorry you're not dining at the hotel."

"I am sorry, too; I'm dining with students in the Quarter; they would amuse you."

"I wish I were a grisette."

"If you were I would take you with me. Now I must say good-bye; I have to get on with my painting."

That night I returned to the hotel late and went away early in the morning. But the next day she came upon me again in the gardens, and as we walked on together she told me that Donald had gone away.

"He was obliged to return, you see; he left the office without leave, and he had only two pounds, the poor darling. I don't know if I told you that he had to borrow two pounds to come here."

"No, you omitted that little fact. You see, you are so absorbed in yourself that you think all these things are as interesting to everybody else as they are to you."

"Now you're unkind," and she looked at me reproachfully. "It is the first time you have been unsympathetic. If I talked to you it was because I thought my chatter interested you. Moreover, I believed that you were a little interested in me, and I have come all this way--"

My heart was touched, and I begged of her to believe that my remark was only uttered in sport, to tease her. But it was a long time before I could get her to finish the sentence. "You have come a long way, you said--"

"I came to tell you that we are going to Rome tomorrow. I didn't like to go away without seeing you, but it seems as if I were mistaken; it would not have mattered to you if I had."

She had her fiddle-case with her; and to offer to carry it for her seemed an easy way out of my difficulty; but she would not surrender it for a while. I asked her if she had been playing at a concert, or if she were coming from a lesson. No; well, then, why had she her fiddle-case with her?

"Don't ask me; leave me in peace. It doesn't matter. I cannot play now, and ten minutes ago my head was full of it."

These little ebullitions of temper were common in Mildred, and I knew that the present one would soon pa.s.s away. In order that its pa.s.sing might be accomplished as rapidly as possible, I suggested we should sit down, and I spoke to her of Donald.

"I don't want to talk about him. You have offended me."

"I'm sorry you are leaving Paris. This is the beautiful month. How pleasant it is here, a soft diffused warmth in the air, the sunlight flickering like a live thing in the leaves, and the sound of water dripping at the end of the alley. We are all alone here, Mildred.

Come, tell me why you brought your fiddle-case."

"Well," she said, "I brought it on the chance of meeting you. I thought you might like to hear me play. We are going away to-morrow morning. I can't play in that hotel, in that stuffy little room; mamma would want to accompany me."

"Play to me in the Luxembourg Gardens!"

"One can do anything one likes here; no one pays any attention to anybody else," and she pointed with her parasol to a long poet, with hair floating over his shoulders, who walked up and down the other end of the alley reciting his verses.

"Perhaps your playing will interrupt him."

"Oh, if he doesn't like it he'll move away. But I don't want to play; I can't play when I'm out of humour, and I was just in the very humour for playing until your remark about--"

"About what?"

"You know very well," she answered.

The desire to hear her play the fiddle in the gardens gained upon me.

The moment was an enchanting one, the light falling through the translucid leaves and the poet walking up and down carried my thoughts into another age. I began to see a picture--myself, the poet, and this girl playing the violin for us; other figures were wanting to make up the composition. Cabanel's picture of the Florentine poet intruded itself, interrupting my vision, the picture of Dante reading his verses at one end of a stone bench to a frightened girl whose lover is drawing her away from him who had been to h.e.l.l and witnessed the tortures of the d.a.m.ned, who had met the miserable lovers of Rimini whirling through s.p.a.ce and heard their story from them. Lizard-like, a man lies along a low wall, listening to the poet's story. But why describe a picture so well known? Why mention it at all? Only because its design intruded itself, spoiling my dream, an abortive idea that I dimly perceived in Nature without being able to grasp it; an illusive suggestion for a picture was pa.s.sing by me, and so eager was my pursuit of the vision that there was no strength in me to ask Mildred to play. True that the sound of her violin might help me, but it must happen accidentally, just as everything else was happening, without sequence, without logic. At that moment my ear caught the sound of violin-playing; some dance measure of old time was being played, and in the sunlit inters.p.a.ce three women appeared dancing a gavotte, advancing and retiring through the light and shade. The one who played the violin leaned sometimes against a tree, and sometimes she joined the others, playing as she danced.

"I know that gavotte. Come, let us go to them. I'll play for them if they'll let me."

Very soon the woman who played the violin seemed to recognise Mildred as a better player than herself. She handed her fiddle to a bystander and the gavotte proceeded, the three old ladies bowing and holding up their skirts and pointing their toes with the grace of bygone times.

Never, I think, did reality seem more like a dream. "But who are these three women?" I asked myself, and, sinking on a bench like one enchanted, I dreamed that these were three sisters, the remnant of a n.o.ble family who had lost its money during several generations till at last nothing remained, and the poor old women had to devise some mode of earning their living. I imagined the scene in some great house which they would have to leave on the morrow, and they talking together, thinking they must go forth to beg, till she who played the fiddle said that something would happen to save them from the shame of mendicancy. I imagined her saying that their last crust of bread would not be eaten before some one would come to tell them that a fortune awaited them. And it so happened that the day they divided this crust the one to whom faith had been given came upon an old letter. She stood reading till the others asked her what she was reading with so much interest. "I told you," she said, "that we should be saved, that G.o.d in His great mercy would not turn us out into the streets to beg.

This letter contains explicit directions how the gavotte used to be danced when our ancestors lived in the Place des Vosges."

"But what help to us to know the true step of the gavotte?" cried the youngest sister.

"A great deal," the eldest answered gravely; "I can play the fiddle, and we can all learn to dance; we'll go to dance the gavotte in the Luxembourg Gardens whenever it is fine--the true gavotte as it was danced when Madame de Sevigne drove up in a painted coach drawn by six horses, and entered the courtyard of her hotel decorated with bas-reliefs by Jean Goujon."

This is the story that I dreamed as I sat on the bench listening to the pretty, sprightly music flowing like a live thing. Under the fingers of the old woman the music scratched along like dead leaves along a pathway, without accent, without rhythm; now the old gavotte tripped like the springtime, pretty as the budding trees, as the sunlight along the swards. Mildred brought out the contrast between the detached and the slurred notes. How gaily it went! Full of the fas.h.i.+on of the time--the wigs, the swords, the bows, the gallantry!

How sedate! How charming! How well she understood it! How well the old women danced to it! How delighted every one was! She played on until the old women, unable to dance any more, sat down to listen to her.

After trying some few things which I did not know, I heard her playing a piece of music which I could not but think I had heard before--in church! Beginning it on the low string, she poured out the long, long phrase that never seems to end, so stern and so evocative of Protestantism that I could not but think of a soul going forth on its way to the Judgment Seat, telling perforce as it goes how it has desired and sought salvation, pleading almost defiantly. But Mildred could not appreciate such religious exaltation, yet it was her playing that had inspired the thought in me. Had she been taught to play it?

Was she echoing another's thought? Her playing did not sound like an echo; it seemed to come from the heart, or out of some unconscious self, an ante-natal self that in her present incarnation only emerged in music, borne up by some mysterious current to be sucked down by another.

She played other things, not certain what she was going to play; and then, as if suddenly moved to tell us about other things, she began to play a very simple, singing melody, interrupted now and again, so it seemed to me, by little fluttering confessions. I seemed to see a lady in white, at the close of day, in a dusky boudoir, one of Alfred Stevens's women, only much more refined, one whose lover has been unfaithful to her, or maybe a woman who is weary of lovers and knows not what to turn her mind to, hesitating between the convent and the ball-room. Ah, the beautiful lament--how well Mildred played it!--followed by the slight crescendo, and then the return of the soul upon itself, bewailing its weakness, confessing its follies in elegant, lovely language, seemingly speaking in a casual way, yet saying such profound things, profound even as Bach. The form is different, more light, more graceful, apparently more superficial, but just as deep; for when we go to the bottom of things all things are deep, one as deep as another, just as all things are shallow, one as shallow as another; for have not mystics of every age held that things exist not in themselves, but in the eye that sees and the ear that hears?

A crowd had collected to hear her, for she was playing out of the great silence that is in every soul, in that of the light-o'-love as well as of the saint, and she went on playing, apparently unaware of the number of people she had collected about her. She stopped playing and returned to me.