Young Lives - Richard Le Gallienne
All the arts within their reach they thus shared together,--pictures,
music, theatres,--in a fine comradeship. Together they had bravoed the
great tragedians, and together hopelessly worshipped the beautiful
faces, enskied and sainted, of famous actresses. In fact, they were the
Damon and Pythias of Tyre.
CHAPTER XIII
DAMON AND PYTHIAS AT THE THEATRE
Once, long before the beginning of this story, Damon and Pythias were
sitting in a theatre together, with the wonderful overture just
beginning to steal through their senses.
Ah, violins, whither would you take their souls? You call to them like
the voice of one waiting by the sea, bathed in sunset. What are these
wonderful things you are whispering to their souls? You promise--ah,
what things you promise, strange voices of the string!
Oh, sirens, have pity! Their hearts are pure, their bodies sweet as
apples. Oh, be faithful, betray them not, beautiful voices of the
wondrous world!
The overture had succeeded. Their souls had followed it over the
footlights, and, floating in the limelight, shone there awaiting the
fulfilment of the promise.
The play was "Pygmalion and Galatea," and at the appearance of Galatea
they knew that the overture had not lied. There, in dazzling white
flesh, was all it had promised; and when she called "Pyg-ma-lion!" how
their hearts thumped!--for they knew it was really them she was calling.
"Pyg-ma-lion! Pyg-ma-lion!"
It was as though Cleopatra called them from the tomb.
Their hands met. They could hear each other's blood singing. And was not
the play itself an allegory of their coming lives? Did not Galatea
symbolise all the sleeping beauty of the world that was to awaken, warm
and fragrant, at the kiss of their youth? And somewhere, too, shrouded
in enchanted quiet, such a white white woman waited for their kiss. In a
vision they saw life like the treasure cave of the Arabian thief; and
they said to their beating hearts that they had the secret of the magic
word, that the "open Sesame" was youth.
No fall of the curtain could hide the vision from their young eyes. It
transfigured the faces of their fellow-playgoers, crowding from the pit;
it made another stage of the embers of the sunset, a distant bridge of
silver far down the street. Then they took it with them to the tavern;
and to write of the solemn libations of that night would be to laugh or
cry. Only youth can be so radiantly ridiculous.
They had found their own corner. Turning down the gas, the fire played
at day and night with their faces. Imagine them in one of the flashes,
solemnly raising their glasses, hands clasped across the table, earnest
gleaming eyes holding each other above it.
"Old man, some day, somewhere, a woman like that!"
But there was still a sequel. At home at last and in bed, how could
Damon sleep! It seemed as if he had got into a rosy sunset cloud in
mistake for his bed. The candle was out, and yet the room was full of
rolling light.
It was no use; he must get up. So, striking a light, he was presently
deep in the composition of a fiery sonnet. It was evidently that which
had caused all the phosphorescence. But a sonnet is a mere pill-box; it
holds nothing. A mere cockle-shell,--and, oh, the raging sea it could
not hold! Besides being confessedly an art-form, duly licenced to lie,
it was apt to be misunderstood. It could not say in plain words, "Meet
me at the pier to-morrow at three in the afternoon;" it could make no
assignation nearer than the Isles of the Blest, "after life's fitful
fever." Therefore, it seemed well to add a postscript to that effect
in prose.
But then, how was she to receive it? There was nothing to be hoped from
the post, and Damon's home in Sidon was three miles from the ferry.
Likewise, it was now nearing three in the morning. Just time to catch
the half-past three boat, run up to the theatre, a mile away, and meet
the return boat. So down, down through the creaking house, carefully, as
though he were a Jason picking his way among the coils of the sleeping
dragon; and soon he was shooting through the phantom streets, like
Mercury on a message through Hades.
At last the river came in sight, growing slate-colour in the earliest
dawn. He could see the boat nuzzling up against the pier, and snoring in
its sleep. He said to himself that this was Styx and the fare an obolus.
As he jumped on board, with hot face and hotter heart, Charon clicked
his signal to the engines; the boat slowly snuffled itself half awake,
and shoved out into the sleepy water.
As they crossed, the light grew, and the gas-lamps of Tyre beaconed with
fading gleam. Overhead began a restlessness in the clouds, as of a giant
drowsily shuffling off some of his bedclothes; but as yet he slept, and
only the silver bosom of his spouse, the moon, was uncovered.
When they landed, the streets of Tyre were already light, but empty, as
though they had got up early to meet some one who had not arrived. Damon
sped through them like a sea-gull that has the harbour to itself, and
was not long in reaching the theatre. How desolate the play-bills looked
that had been so companionable but three or four hours before! And there
was her photograph! Surely it was an omen.
"Ah, my angel! See, I am bringing you my heart in a song. 'All my heart
in this my singing!'"
He dropped the letter into the box; but, as he turned away, momentarily
glancing up the long street, he caught sight of an approaching figure
that could hardly be mistaken. Good Heavens! it was Pythias, and he too
was carrying a letter.
CHAPTER XIV
CONTRIBUTIONS TOWARDS A GENEALOGY
The egregious Miss Bashkirtseff did not greatly fascinate Esther. Her
egotism was too hard, too self-bounded, even for egotism, and there was
generally about her a lack of sympathy. Her passion for fame had
something provincial in its eagerness, and her broadest ideals seemed to
become limited by her very anxiety to compass them. Even her love of art
seemed a form of snobbery. In all these young Mesuriers there was
implicit,--partly as a bye-product of the sense of humour, and partly as
an unconscious mysticism,--a surprising instinct for allowing the
successes of this world their proper value and no more. Even Esther, who
was perhaps the most worldly of them all, and whose ambitions were
largely social, as became a bonny girl whom nature had marked out to be
popular, and on whom, some day when Mike was a great actor,--and had a
theatre of his own!--would devolve the cares of populous "at home" days,
bright after-the-performance suppers, and all the various diplomacies of
the popular wife of fame,--even Esther, however brilliant her life might
become, would never for a moment imagine that such success was a thing
worth winning, at the expense of the smallest loss to such human
realities as the affection she felt for Mike and Henry. To love some one
well and faithfully, to be one of a little circle vowed to eternal
fidelity one to the other,--such was the initial success of these young
lives; and it was to make them all their days safe from the dangers of
more meretricious successes.
All the same, though the chief performer in Marie Bashkirtseff's
"Confessions" interested her but little, the stage on which for a little
while she had scolded and whimpered did interest her--for should it not
have been her stage too, and Henry's stage, and Dot's stage, father's
and mother's stage too? You had only to look at father to realise that
nature had really meant him for the great stage; here in Sidon, what was
he but a god in exile, bending great powers and a splendid character
upon ridiculously unimportant interests? Indeed, was not his destiny,
more or less, their destiny as a family? Henry would escape from it
through literature, and she through Mike. But what of Dot, what of Mat,
not yet to speak of "the children"?
All she envied Marie Bashkirtseff was her opportunity. Great Goddess
Opportunity! So much had come to Marie in the cradle, and came daily to
a hundred thousand insignificant aristocratic babes, to approach which
for the Mesuriers, even ten years too late, meant convulsions of the
home, and to attain which in any satisfactory degree was probably
impossible. French, for example, and music! Why, if so disposed, Marie
Bashkirtseff might have read old French romances at ten, and to play
Chopin at an earlier age was not surprising in the opportunitied,
so-called "aristocratic" infant. Oh, why had they not been born like the
other Sidonians, whose natures and ideals had been mercifully calculated
to the meridian of Sidon! Why didn't they think the Proudfoots and the
Wilkinsons and the Wagstaffs, and other local nobody-somebodies, people
of importance, and why did they think the mayor a ludicrous upstart,
and the adjacent J.P. a sententious old idiot? Far better to have rested
content in that state of life to which God had called them. To talk
French, or to play Chopin! What did it matter? In one sense nothing, but
in another it mattered like other convenient facilities of life. To the
immortal soul it mattered nothing, but to the mortal social unit it made
life the easier, made the passage of ideas, the intercourse of
individualities, the readier, and, in general, facilitated spiritual and
intellectual, as well as social, communication. To be first-rate
in your instincts, in all your fibres, and third-rate in your
opportunities,--that was a bitter indignity of circumstance.
This sub-conscious sense of aristocracy--it must be observed, lest it
should have been insufficiently implied--was almost humorously
dissociated in the minds of the young Mesuriers from any recorded family
distinctions. In so far as it was conscious, it was defiantly
independent of genealogy. Had the Mesuriers possessed a coat-of-arms,
James Mesurier would probably have kept it locked up as a frivolity to
be ashamed of, for it was a part of his Puritanism that such earthly
distinctions were foolishness with God; but, as a matter of fact,
between Adam and the immediate great-grandparents of the young
Mesuriers, there was a void which the Herald's office would have found a
difficulty in filling. This it never occurred to them to mind in
the least.
It was one of Henry's deep-sunken maxims that "a distinguished product
implied a distinguished process," and that, at all events, the
genealogical process was only illustratively important. It would have
been interesting to know how they, the Mesuriers, came to be what they
were. In the dark night of their history a family portrait or two, or an
occasional reference in history, would have been an entertaining
illumination--but, such not being forthcoming, they were, documentally,
so much the less indebted to their progenitors. Yet if they had only
been able to claim some ancestor with a wig and a degree for the
humanities, or some beautiful ancestress with a romantic reputation!
One's own present is so much more interesting for developing, or even
repeating, some one else's past. And yet how much better it was to be as
they were, than as most scions of aristocratic lineage, whose present
was so often nothing and their past everything. How humiliating to be so
pathetically inadequate an outcome of such long and elaborate
preparation,--the mouse of a genealogical mountain! Yes, it was
immeasurably more satisfactory to one's self-respect to be Something out
of Nothing, than Nothing out of Everything. Here so little had made so
much; here so much had made--hardly even a lord. It was better for your
circumstances to be inadequate for you, than you to be inadequate for
your circumstances.
Henry had amused himself one day in making a list of all their
"ancestors" to whom any sort of worldly or romantic distinction could
attach, and it ran somewhat as follows:--
(1) A great-grandmother on the father's side, fabled to live in some
sort of a farm-house chateau in Guernsey, who once a year, up till two
years ago, when she died, had sent them a hamper of apples from Channel
Island orchards. Said "chateau" believed by his children to descend to
James Mesurier, but the latter indifferent to the matter, and relatives
on the spot probably able to look after it.
(2) A great-grandfather on the mother's side given to travel, a
"rolling-stone," fond of books and talk, and rich in humanity. Surviving
still in a high-nosed old silhouette.
(3) A grand-uncle on the father's side who was one of Napoleon's guard
at St. Helena!
(4) A grandfather on the mother's side, who used to design and engrave
little wooden blocks for patterns on calico-stuffs, and whose little box
of delicate instruments, evidently made for the tracing of lines and
flowers, was one of the few family heirlooms.
(5) A grandmother on the father's side of whom nothing was known beyond
the beautiful fact that she was Irish.
(6) A grandfather on the father's side who was a sea-captain, sailing
his own ship (barque "the Lucretia") to the West Indies, and who died of
yellow fever, and was buried, in the odour of romance, on the Isthmus
of Panama.
(7) An uncle who had also been a sea-captain, and who, in rescuing a
wrecked crew from an Australian reef, was himself capsized, and after a
long swim finally eaten by a shark,--said shark being captured next day,
and found to contain his head entire, two gold rings still in his ears,
which he wore for near-sightedness, after the manner of common sailors,
and one of which, after its strange vicissitudes, had found a
resting-place in the secretaire of his brother, James Mesurier.
Such was the only accessible "ancestry" of the Mesuriers, and it is to
be feared that the last state of the family was socially worse than the
first. James Mesurier was unapproachably its present summit, its Alpine
peak; and he was made to suffer for it no little by humble and
impecunious relatives. Still, whatever else they lacked, Henry Mesurier
loved to insist that these various connections were rich in character,
one or two of them inexhaustible in humour; and their rare and somewhat
timorous visits to the castle of their exalted relative, James Mesurier,
were occasions of much mirthful embarrassment to the young people. Here
the reader is requested to excuse a brief parenthetical chapter by way
of illustration, which, if he pleases, he may skip without any loss of
continuity in the narrative, or the least offence in the world to the
writer. This present chapter will be found continued in chapter sixteen.
CHAPTER XV
MERELY A HUMBLE INTERRUPTION AND
ILLUSTRATION OF THE LAST
Some peaceable afternoon when Mrs. Mesurier was enjoying a little doze
on the parlour sofa, and her three elder daughters were snatching an
hour or two from housework--they had already left school--for a little
private reading, the drowsy house would suddenly be awakened by one loud
wooden knock at the door.
"Now, whoever can that be!" the three girls would impatiently exclaim;
and presently the maid would come to Miss Esther to say that there was
an old man at the door asking for Mrs. Mesurier.
"What's his name, Jane?"
"He wouldn't give it, miss. He said it would be all right. Mrs. Mesurier
would know him well enough."
"Whoever can it be? What's he like, Jane?"
"He looks like a workman, miss,--very old, and rather dotey."
"Who can it be? Go and ask him his name again."
Esther would then arouse her mother; and the maid would come in to say
that at last the old man had been persuaded to confide his name as
Clegg--Samuel Clegg.
"Tell the missus it's Samuel Clegg," the old man had said, with a
certain amusing conceit. "She'll be glad enough to see Samuel Clegg."
"Why!" said Mrs. Mesurier, "it's your father's poor old uncle, Mr.
Clegg. Now, girls, you mustn't run away, but try and be nice to him.
He's a simple, good, old man."
Mrs. Mesurier was no more interested in Mr. Clegg than her daughters;
but she had a great fund of humanity, and an inexhaustible capacity for
suffering bores brilliantly.
"Why, I never!" she would say, adapting her idiom to make the old man
feel at home, as he was presently ushered in, chuntering and triumphant;
"you don't mean to say it's Uncle Clegg. Well, we are glad to see you! I
was just having a little nap, and so you must excuse my keeping
you waiting."
"Ay, Mary. It's right nice of you to make me so welcome. I got a bit
misdoubtful at the door, for the young maid seemed somehow a little
frightened of me; but when I told the name it was all right. 'Samuel
Clegg,' I said. 'She'll be glad enough to see Samuel Clegg,' I said."
"Glad indeed," murmured Mrs. Mesurier, "I should think so. Find a chair
for your uncle, Esther."
"Ay, the name did it," chuckled the old man, who as a matter of fact was
anything but a humble old person, and to whom the bare fact of
existence, and the name of Clegg, seemed warrant enough for thinking
quite a lot of yourself.
"I'm afraid you don't remember your old uncle," said the old man to
Esther, looking dimly round, and rather bewildered by the fine young
ladies. Actually, he was only a remote courtesy uncle, having married
their father's mother's sister.
"Oh, of course, Uncle Clegg," said Esther, a true daughter of her
mother; "but, you see, it's a long time since we saw you."
"And this is Dorcas. Come and kiss your uncle, Dorcas. And this is
Matilda," said Mrs. Mesurier.
"Ay," said the old man, "and you're all growing up such fine young
ladies. Deary me, Mary, but they must make you feel old."
"We were just going to have some tea," said Esther; "wouldn't you like a
cup, uncle?"
"I daresay your uncle would rather have a glass of beer," said Mrs.
Mesurier.
"Ay, you're right there, Mary," answered the old man, "right there. A
glass of beer is good enough for Samuel Clegg. A glass of beer and some
bread and cheese, as the old saying is, is good enough for a king; but
bread and cheese and water isn't fit for a beggar."
All laughed obligingly; and the old man turned to a bulging pocket which
had evidently been on his mind from his entrance.
"I've got a little present here from Esther," he said,--"Esther" being
the aunt after whom Mike's Esther had been named,--bringing out a little
newspaper parcel. "But I must tell you from the beginning.
"Well, you know, Mary," he continued, "I was feeling rather low
yesterday, and Esther said to me, 'Why not take a day off to-morrow,
Samuel, and see Mary, it'll shake you up a bit, and I'll be bound she's
right glad to see you?' 'Why, lass!' I said, 'it's the very thing. See
if I don't go in the morning.'
"So this morning," he continued, "she tidies me up--you know her
way--and sends me off. But before I started, she said, 'Here, Samuel,
you must take this, with my love, to Mary.' I've kept it wrapped up in
this drawer for thirty years, and only the other day our Mary Elizabeth
said, 'Mother, you might give me that old jug. It would look nice in our
little parlour.'" "But no!" I says, "Mary Elizabeth, if any one's to have
that jug, it's your Aunt Mary."
"How kind of her!" murmured Mrs. Mesurier, sympathetically.
"Yes, those were her words, Mary," said the old man, unfolding the
newspaper parcel, and revealing an ugly little jug of metallically
glistening earthenware, such as were turned out with strange pride from
certain English potteries about seventy years ago. It seemed made in
imitation of metal,--a sort of earthenware pewter; and evidently it had
been a great aesthetic treasure in the eyes of Mrs. Clegg. Mrs. Mesurier
received it accordingly.
"How pretty," she said, "and how kind of Aunt Esther! They don't make
such things nowadays."
"No, it's a vallyble relic," said the old man; "but you're worthy of
it, Mary. I'd rather see you have it than any of them. My word, but I'm
glad I've got it here safely. Esther would never have forgiven me.' Now,
Samuel,' she said, as I left, 'mind you get home before dark, and don't
sit on the jug, whatever you do.'"
Meanwhile the "young ladies" were in imminent danger of convulsions;
and, at that moment, further to enhance the situation, an old lady of
the neighbourhood, who occasionally dropped in for a gossip, was
announced. She was a prim little lady, with "Cranford" curls, and a
certain old-world charm and old-world vanity about her, and very deaf.
She too was a "character" in her way, but so different from old Mr.
Clegg that the entertainment to be expected from their conjunction was
irresistible even to anticipate.
"This is Mr. Clegg, an uncle of Mr. Mesurier," said poor Mrs. Mesurier,
by way of introduction.
"Howd'ye do, marm?" said Mr. Clegg, without rising.
Mrs. Turtle bowed primly. "Are you sure, my dear, I don't interrupt?"
she said to Mrs. Mesurier; "shall I not call in some other day?"
"Oh, dear, no!" said Mrs. Mesurier. "Esther, get Mrs. Turtle a little
whisky and water."
"Oh, my dear!" exclaimed Mrs. Turtle, "only the least little drop in the
world, Esther dear. My heart, you know, my dear. Even so short a walk as
this tires me out."
Mrs. Mesurier responded sympathetically; and then, by way of making
himself pleasant, Mr. Clegg suddenly broke in with such an extraordinary
amenity of old-world gallantry that everybody's hair stood on end.
"How old do you be?" he said, bowing to the new-comer.
"I beg your pardon," said Mrs. Turtle, putting her hand to her ear; "but
I'm slightly deaf."
"How old do you be?" shouted the old man.
Though not unnaturally taken aback at such an unwonted conception of
conversational intercourse, Mrs. Turtle recovered herself with
considerable humour, and, bridling, with an old-world shake of her
head, said,--
"What would you take me for?"
"I should say you were seventy, if you're a day," promptly answered the
old man.
"Oh, dear, no!" replied Mrs. Turtle, with some pique; "I was only sixty
last January."
"Well, you carry your age badly," retorted the old man, not to be
beaten.
"What does he say, my dear?" said the poor old lady turning to Mrs.
Mesurier.
"You carry your age badly," shouted the determined old man; "she should
see our Esther, shouldn't she, Mary?"
The silence here of the young people was positively electric with
suppressed laughter. Two of them escaped to explode in another room, and
Esther and her mother were left to save the situation. But on such
occasions as these Mrs. Mesurier grew positively great; and the manner
in which she contrived to "turn the conversation," and smooth over the
terrible hiatus, was a feat that admits of no worthy description.
Presently the old man rose to go, as the clock neared five. He had
promised to be home before dark, and Esther would think him "benighted"
if he should be late. He evidently had been to America and back in that
short afternoon.
"Well, Mary, good-bye," he said; "one never knows whether we shall meet
again. I'm getting an old man."
"Eh, Uncle Clegg, you're worth twenty dead ones yet," said Mrs.
Mesurier, reassuringly.
"What a strange old gentleman!" said Mrs. Turtle, somewhat bewildered,
as this family apparition left the room.
"Good-bye, Uncle Clegg," Esther was heard singing in the hall.
"Good-bye, be careful of the steps. Good-bye. Give our love to
Aunt Esther."
Then the door would bang, and the whole house breathe a gigantic sigh of
humorous relief.
(This was the kind of thing girls at home had to put up with!)
"Well, mother, did you ever see such a funny old person?" said Esther,
on her return to the parlour.
"You mustn't laugh at him," Mrs. Mesurier would say, laughing herself;
"he's a good old man."
"No doubt he's good enough, mother dear; but he's unmistakably funny,"
Esther would reply, with a whimsical thought of the family tree. Yes,
they were a distinguished race!
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER FOURTEEN CONCLUDED
No, the Mesuriers had absolutely nothing to hope for from their
relations,--nothing to look back upon, less to look forward to. Most
families, however poor and even _bourgeois_, had some memories to
dignify them or some one possible contingency of pecuniary inheritance.
At the very least, they had a ghost-story in the family. You seldom read
the biographies of writers or artists without finding references,
however remote, to at least one person of some distinction or substance.
To have had even a curate for an ancestor, or a connection, would have
been something, some frail link with gentility.
Now if, instead of being a rough old sea-captain of a trading ship,
Grandfather Mesurier had only been a charming old white-headed admiral
living in London, and glad, now and again, to welcome his little country
granddaughters to stay with him! He would probably have been very dull,
but then he would have looked distinguished, and taken one for walks in
the Park, or bought one presents in the Burlington arcade. At least old
admirals always seemed to serve this indulgent purpose in stories. At
all events, he would have been something, some possible link with an
existence of more generous opportunities. Dot and Mat would then at
least have seen a nice boy or two occasionally, and in time got married
as they deserved to be, and thus escape from this little provincial
theatre of Sidon. Who could look at Dot and think that anything short of
a miracle--a miracle like Esther's own meeting with Mike--was going to
find her a worthy mate in Sidon; and, suppose the miracle happened once
more in her case, what of Mat and all the rest? To be the wife of a
Sidonian town-councillor, at the highest,--what a fate!