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The Last Time/Part 2

RS. ARMITAGE, sir,” said Ellen's thin voice.

Mrs. Armitage came into the room, looking grave, self-possessed, austere, but still young under her crown of white hair.

“Bring up tea, Ellen.”

“Yes, sir.”

Strickland held out his hand.

“I am glad to meet you again. You went away from Denbury so suddenly—”

“That there was no time to say good-by.”

“Do sit here by the fire and take off your coat.”

She slipped out of her long dark fur and sat down.

“Did Mrs. Laparais tell you I asked for your address before I went?” she said, without looking at him.

“Yes, she did.”

“You must have been surprised.”

“I was, rather. But it made me hope we might perhaps meet again some day.”

The door opened and Ellen came in with tea. When she had gone out Strickland said, “We shall not be disturbed again.”

After giving her tea and helping himself, he sat down by the tea table and said, “May I ask you something?”

“Why I have come here, why I wished to see you?”

“No, it isn't that. What I want to ask you is this. Did you know that you and I had met before we met at Denbury?”

“Yes.”

“I fancied you knew. But I wasn't quite sure.”

“I recognized you directly you came into the drawing-room at Denbury. That was really why I left on the Saturday morning. I—I tried to stand being with you, but I couldn't. It was too painful.”

There was a silence. He broke it by saying,

“But you are here!”

“Yes. I'm not so weak now. Besides, I have learnt a good deal since then. That is because I have suffered terrifically.”

“I know.”

“Yes, you know. You are the only one who does know, you, a stranger. You have seen the truth of me. I am generally too reserved. It's almost an illness with me. If you had spoken to me in the train I don't know what would have happened. But you were reserved that day—and now I shall speak to you. I have come here purposely to speak to you.”

She leaned forward in her chair. She had taken off her gloves, and her long narrow hands were clasped lightly together. She looked into the fire.

“How much do you know about me?” she asked.

“That you were married and lived in Paris, that your husband died suddenly—about two months, I suppose, before we met in the train.”

“Yes.”

“That—that” Strickland hesitated.

“Oh, don't hesitate, don't choose your words. I have come here to—tell you. So that you can tell me.”

“I was told that you and your husband hadn't got on at all well, that probably it was a great relief to you when he died.”

“Oh!”

It was almost a cry, and vibrated with irony. After a pause she said,

“Were you told that I was a difficult woman, that I had a bad temper?”

“Something of that kind.”

“They spoke the truth. I was a terribly difficult woman. I had a very bad temper. And I have been punished for it. I have been scourged for it.”

ER long hands twisted for a moment, gripped each other almost fiercely.

“I don't want anyone else ever to be punished as I have been.”

She was silent, still gazing into the fire. Then she said, looking up at him with steady, wide-opened eyes,

“Mr. Strickland, I know your wife.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Minnie Laparais told you?”

“Just that, nothing more. She did not say how well you knew her.”

“I did not tell her. But I will tell you. I know your wife very well. That is why I am here.”

“Yes?” said Strickland, feeling very uncomfortable, but trying to look quite unembarrassed and calm.

“Of course, at first I had no idea her husband and the man I met in the Paris-Calais rapide were one and the same. I only found that out when you walked into the drawing-room at Denbury.”

“Yes?”

“I knew you recognized me as the woman who had shown you herself though we had never spoken to one another.

“You—you behaved with true delicacy—like a gentleman if I may say so. You recognized instinctively that you couldn't help me, and you didn't try to. I shall always be grateful for that.”

“I—I felt like a brute.”

“I know—for being there. That wasn't your fault. But at Denbury, being full of egoism, I couldn't forgive you. And I went away as soon as I could. I didn't think I should ever see you again of my own accord. But I took your address. Even then I had some faint pushing instinct, I suppose. But now—here I am. Do please give me a cigaret, if you have one.”

“Please forgive me!”

E HELD out a box. She took a cigaret quickly, lit it and went on:

“Mr. Strickland, you heard that I was probably relieved when my husband suddenly died. This is the truth: it broke my heart.”

Strickland looked away from her. In a moment he heard her say again,

“It broke my heart. You have heard that we didn't get on well together. That's true. We often quarreled. It was my fault. I loved him so much that I didn't care really at all for any one else. My love for him was so great that perhaps it exhausted my power of loving. I don't know. Anyhow, every one else was really indifferent to me. And yet we didn't get on. But no man can ever have been loved by a woman more than my husband was by me.”

She paused, and as the pause was prolonged, Strickland said,

“We cannot help our natures.”

“Yes, we can!” she said almost sharply. “We ought to. If we don't we may quite easily bring hell here on earth. Were you thinking of your own nature?”

“Perhaps I was.”

“Has it ever occurred to you how all through our lives we are perpetually being taken unawares?”

“Sometimes I have thought of that.”

“We are seldom or never prepared for the big things which happen to us. They come upon us as suddenly as bullets fired by enemies in ambush. And, too often, we aren't ready.”

T SEEMED to Strickland that another woman was emerging in his companion, was coming out of the reserved, almost austere woman who, so few minutes ago, had entered his drawing-room. And she was strangely unreserved. There was something of the seer in her manner. She spoke evidently out of the depths of a heart-knowledge which rendered her passionately sure of herself. Beside this woman Strickland began to feel very ignorant

“Mr. Strickland, is there an afterwards for us, do you think?”

“I hope there is.”

“There must be!” she said, fiercely almost. “Otherwise we cannot ask for pardon, we cannot explain, we cannot— There must be! There is! I will believe it! If science could even disprove it by proving that all a man is and has dies with the body, ceases to function when the last breath is drawn, I would not cease to believe. I long so much for the hereafter that there must be the possibility of it. Such longings have their goal, or else God is the most absolutely merciless power in all creation.”

She laid down carefully the end of her cigaret, cast a swift glance at Strickland, and said in a quieter voice,

“Now I am going to tell you!”

And again he was conscious of almost rigid effort, of the almost hard exercise of will.

“I'm half American, half French; Southern American, Southern French. From Nice, my French ancestors were. I was brought up chiefly in France. I was born—at least I suppose so, as it manifested itself when I was a mere child—I was born with a terrific temper and a highly impulsive, nervous temperament. On some days I felt buoyant, joyous, full of hope, kindness, good nature; on others I was miserable, full of blackness, angry suspicious thoughts and imaginings, impulses to unkindness, intense irritability. On such days I was caged in darkness and nothing seemed right to me. I felt injured without reason, or even abandoned. I couldn't believe in the love of any one for me, and yet morbidly I desired love. But I felt unworthy of it, uncertain of myself, shrinkingly useless and incapable, and yet arbitrary and full of vehement yearnings.

“These violent and sometimes opposing feelings bred in me an impulse to be morally cruel—and always to those I loved. When I was in these moods I tried to hurt those I loved, and in hurting them I wounded myself. I thrust daggers into my own heart. For I thought I had made myself hated by them and that they could never tolerate me again. And yet somehow I was forgiven! I have often asked myself why. I think it must have been because, in spite of all, I knew how to love. I had a passionately warm heart, and was really loyal under all my almost infernal tempers and moods.

“Sometimes, Mr. Strickland, I am inclined to believe that there are possessions of the devil, even in these modern days, and that I was often possessed of the devil.

“Of course, I was punished sometimes for my tempers, but on the whole my parents spoiled me. I was often horrible to my father and mother, but I adored them both. They are dead now, but they died with me beside them, able to ask forgiveness of them for all the pain I must have caused them. They knew—before they died.”

LL THE self-consciousness of which Strickland had been aware when Mrs. Armitage came into his room had vanished from her now; all reserve seemed to have died out of her. They sat by the fire, in the delicate light shed by the wax candles, like two intimates, and Strickland no longer had any acute sense of strangeness in listening to this revelation of moral defects by a stranger. He knew that she had a very definite purpose driving her on, and that presently he would know what that purpose was. Meanwhile, he was content to listen absorbed, undesirous of making the least interruption. But now she paused and looked up at him, almost expectantly, almost as if she were waiting for some comment, or some question from him.

“You—you—” he began, and hesitated. She was still silent and still kept her eyes fixed on him, with a curious half expectant and—he thought—half-inward look.

“I understand those moods of yours,” he said at last. “I have known something of the same kind myself. One day everything seems right; another day everything seems black and infernal.”

“Yes. But do you understand my horrible propensity for being cruel only to those I loved?” she asked, in an earnest low voice. “For picking them out as my victims? It is that, just that, which has ruined my life. Can you understand it?”

He thought of certain episodes in his life with Jeanne.

“Yes,” he said, reddening slowly. “I believe there are many people who are only really unkind to those whom they love.”

“Isn't that from the devil?” she said.

“I don't know. I don't think I believe in a personal devil.”

“Why is it then?”

“In some way—somehow, it doesn't seem worth while to be cruel to those who are nothing to us. It is those who are very close to us, whom we have wrapped up in our lives, who give out music when we touch the keys. And so I suppose we are moved to touch them.”

“But why should we, why do we deliberately strike horrible discords? Why won't we be contented with the beautiful harmonies of life?”

GAIN Strickland thought of his life with Jeanne.

“I don't know,” he said. “It often seems as if we were driven.”

“That is our fault. We should not let ourselves be driven. Look at me, Mr. Strickland. Now I have absolutely complete control over my behavior to other people; not always over my own emotions, the emotions that are entirely mine, that I don't share with others, but over my actions in connection with others. People are safe with me now. I had a lesson which in one moment changed me—broke me. Do you understand—broke me?”

“What lesson?”

“It was this. I loved a man. I am thirty-two now, though of course I look much older. Then I was twenty-three. Although I believe my temper must have been notorious among my friends, although I was considered an alarming type of girl, several men had seemed to be attracted by me before this time. I had not cared for them—and with me it has generally been all or nothing. It isn't love or hate, but love or tremendous indifference, a dryness of the desert in my heart. Now, I met the man to whom afterwards I was married, and I loved him. Mr. Strickland, at first he didn't care for me. I was the first to love. It often is the woman, often she draws the man to her by that, by loving him desperately and wanting him desperately, and saying nothing about it, and acting, and pretending. But it oozes through all the acting and the pretending, and it drops on the man—drops—drops—and mysteriously, occultly almost, he feels wanted, desired, and it warms him, and it makes him know that he has been lonely in all his freedom, lonely, perhaps, in his intrigues and his vices, lonely with his bachelor friends—and he begins to want the woman who wants him so terribly. Often it's like that.”

“Is it?” said Strickland, wondering at this woman's amazing frankness, a frankness which seemed for the moment to free her from the bondage of sex.

“Yes. I think women want—much more than men. As a sex we are not, and never shall be, independent. Men often set out to conquer us when we are conquered already. I loved for nearly a year before I was loved. Often I thought I never should be loved. I believed the legend of my horrible temperament had gone before me to him, that it repelled him. And I was frightened, terrified. For the first time I looked my temperament in the face as it was, and saw it as a great danger, as a dragon in my path of life. For the first time I wanted to kill the dragon because I thought perhaps he knew of and hated it. My love grew for a year; side by side with it grew my first real moral effort. I don't know—I can't remember how far I succeeded in what I was trying to do, but one day he told me he loved me. He asked me if I could ever love him! That is how men know us! I was quite frank. I told him I had loved him for a whole year: and of my fears that he knew about my violent nature. I humiliated myself, perhaps. But I loved too much to mind. I made the very worst of myself. Something inside me warned me to do that. Something said to me—'Don't let him misunderstand you. Show your sores! If he can stand the sight of them and still wish to be with you, he loves you indeed.' And I was brave. But cowardice isn't my fault, I think. I am not often a coward.”

“I am sure you are not,” said Strickland. “And he—how did he take it? Had he known?”

“He had heard rumors, but he told me he had only half believed them. I assured him that they were true. I tried to let him in to the ugliest secrets of my temperament. You may say no woman would ever do that with a man she loved. But I did do it. I was so afraid of his finding out ugly things later and hating me because I had concealed them that I was frank as few women are ever frank. I told him that I couldn't govern myself, but that I would try to, that I would make the greatest possible effort to overcome my temper and banish my desperate moods. He said it would be all right, that he would help me. I must tell you that he was a man with enormous self-control, but a very, very sensitive man. I believe I told you at Denbury that his mother was French?”

“Yes, you did.”

“His father was English, but a great lover of France. My husband was in some ways more French than English. He had the Frenchman's sensitiveness to women, quick intelligence, swiftness of vision, and understanding of subtleties, but all the Englishman's sentiment, straightforwardness and loyalty. He had a splendid nature. I wasn't like many women. I loved something worth loving. He was incomparable, Mr. Strickland—indeed, indeed he was! People felt that he was. They loved him instinctively. But not as I did. I worshiped him. I think—and I am almost sure I am right—that it is only a few people who know how to love. Great love is, I am convinced, a very rare thing, unknown by most of us.

HE looked at Strickland questioningly, then added, with a sort of diffidence,

“Jeanne knows it, I think: she is one of the few.”

Strickland flushed deeply, but kept his eyes on her. Before her amazing unreserve he scarcely dared to be reserved. When, he wondered, was this extraordinary interview going to end.

“Mr. Strickland, we were married, Andrew and I. We gave ourselves up to happiness as I think few people ever can have given themselves. My love had waited a year, had had to wait a year in absolute uncertainty. So I had to pay it back. At any rate, if I am a dead woman now, I haven't died without living. It wasn't enough for me to be happy—apparently. My love grew, and in growing it became destructive. At first I held my natural temperament—the bad, dangerous part of it, I mean—in check without difficulty. Happiness seemed to lay my nerves to rest, to smooth out my prickly irritabilities. Changing moods didn't beset me at first. I had no days of unreasoning depression. I had no impulses towards unkindness, or even cruelty. I was tender to Andrew then. I submitted myself to him with that wonderful happiness in submission which only a loving woman ever feels. But that perfection of being didn't last on my side. Presently, it was as if I swung back to my original temperament and way of being. I thought then it was inevitable, that I couldn't help it, that I had to be as God had made me. (That's the excusing phrase, the miserable cliché of the sinner!) I know now I simply didn't continue an effort I had made, and that I could have continued it if I had chosen. Mr. Strickland most of us don't try enough. We are morally lazy. We compound with our worst part. I have paid. I shall go on paying all my life long. But I don't want others to pay, That's why I am here to-day.”

“Yes. Yes. I—I begin to understand.”

“Do you?”

“I think, at least, perhaps I do.”

HE sat very still for a moment. Apparently she was thinking deeply, profoundly. At last she said:

“In daily life with any one—I don't care who it is—there are many difficult moments when human forbearance only nothing else—can save the situation. And if one has a highly strung, naturally sensitive and irritable temperament, and is liable to lose control, those moments are terribly dangerous. And I was jealous—that is the curse of sensitive women—jealous without reason, and knowing really I had no reason. When he died I felt he had died absolutely true to me. I couldn't prove it. No woman can ever prove such a thing. But I just know it, Mr. Strickland—as I dare say you know a somewhat similar thing.”

“Yes,” said Strickland, in a low voice.

Without asking permission, mechanically almost as a man does an accustomed thing, he pulled his pipe out of his pocket, began to fill it with tobacco carefully. She sat watching him.

“We so often sat like this,” she said.

“What?”

He looked up from his pipe, startled almost by her intonation.

“So often I watched him doing what you are doing. I can see his hands now—just the movement of them and the shapes they took. When those we love are dead we often see their dear hands moving in the firelight, or in the candle-light. And then we remember their eternal stillness and—”

She broke off.

Strickland had paused. This woman moved him strangely by the depth of sincerity in her emotion, and by her extraordinary simplicity. Now, with an effort, he went on with what he had been doing Presently he lit his pipe. Then she spoke again.

“Those we love can irritate us as no other human beings can irritate us. Can't they?”

“Yes.”

“We want them to be perfect, I suppose, and so their imperfections strike us like little hammers. I criticized my husband, often and even bitterly. He bore with my hatefulness in that respect wonderfully, but not meekly. He wasn't a meek man, or I should never have loved him. He seldom, scarcely ever, criticized me. When I was intolerable, he would get up in silence and go out of the room, out of the house, stay away for a time, come back and meet me as if nothing had happened. Often I tried to provoke him into passion. I played, as it were, for scenes. Something in me at certain times seemed to demand a violent scene. He would not give me what I demanded. He thought it degrading for two people linked as we were to mingle love with its hideous opposite, anger, recrimination. There was a certain almost spiritual dignity about him—absolutely unostentatious—which sometimes provoked me almost to fever, I think, because I had none of it, and because his having it made me feel how inferior I was to him. And yet I loved him for it all the time—underneath. Really, I loved even his faults, his tricks, his little mannerisms. I know that now. I knew it directly I heard—”

HE got up suddenly. For an instant Strickland thought that she was going to leave him, that she had suddenly repented of her frankness, and would not stay. But she only went to stand by the fire. For a moment she stayed with her back to him. Then she turned round. Her face was very pale, and her eyes were burning with emotion, and an energy of feeling such as he had never seen before, he thought, in a woman's eyes, except perhaps at moments in Jeanne's.

“Directly death comes, knowledge comes,” she said. “Probably few, or none, of us ever know exactly what we feel about another until death takes that other away. Mystery and nakedness are there together in one and the same moment, and we cry out the truth only when there is no voice to answer us. But—oh, if only we didn't wait for death! If we would only speak when there was still time for the answer!

“I said to you that all through our lives we are perpetually being taken unawares. That happened to me in a most terrible way, the most terrible way possible. Our married life went on—mine with Andrew—in the way I have tried to indicate. My jealousy made him very miserable. I scared him. But he would have his decent freedom, the freedom every man, married or not, ought to have. One thing in him, which sometimes irritated me to the verge almost of madness, was his marvelous self-control. I don't believe anything irritates an uncontrolled person so much as complete self-control in another. It is such a stinging rebuke. That rebuke he gave me many times, but not deliberately. Once he frightened me.

“We were in a château on the Seine. There was a little wood in the grounds near the house. It was in autumn, on an autumn afternoon. That day I was in one of my worst moods. Autumn is a season that always depresses me, that inclines me, I suppose, to morbidity.”

“I know—I know!” said Strickland, quickly breaking in upon her speech. “It seems to take away hope. One hears all the doors shutting against one. I, living here alone by the river, I know that.”

“Ah!”

She gazed at him.

“Yes—you who live here alone!” she said. “And—” she paused; he waited—“and need not live here alone!” she added.

Strickland looked down, and pulled at his pipe.

“God sends loneliness to some of us,” she went on. “I think it is one of the greatest punishments of God, perhaps the greatest of all. But why anticipate God?”

HE was silent. Strickland said nothing.

“In Paris I know some one who is lonely,” she said, somberly, almost fatally. She bent her head a little. Then she lifted it and went on.

“That autumn day he and I were alone in the château. We had had some guests with us, but they had just left. They had been with us for shooting. One of them was a beautiful woman who was extraordinarily amiable, kind and gentle—the reverse of myself. She was almost universally beloved for her sweet disposition. While she had been with us, I had secretly compared her with myself. Then I had gone a step further. I had imagined her as the wife of my husband—women often give themselves to such imaginings. How different Andrew's life would have been with her! I had dwelt on that thought. At night I had lain awake with it. She would have surrounded Andrew with the warmth of endless kindness, delicate and unwearied tenderness. She was not a dull but a clever woman, clever in goodness—a rather rare combination. I had brooded over all this during the visit of our guests, until I had come to the horrible, morbid conviction that in very truth Andrew had been comparing me with our friend, and that he had been wishing that he had chosen differently when he married. I felt positive that the visit of this woman—she had never stayed with us before—had opened his eyes to facts, perhaps never clearly seen before by him, and that now, through her, he had realized the disaster of his life. I could not help almost hating this dear woman. And I bade her good-by conventionally, but feeling that I was bidding good-by to an enemy.

“That day blackness encompassed me. It was one of my terrible days. I felt hopeless, a slave of my hateful character, angry with the Creator who had made me as I was, totally impotent to change, or even to put up a fight against myself! Andrew, no doubt, noticed the condition I was in. He was but too accustomed to my black moods. But he said nothing and seemed as cheerful as usual. After lunch, however, he said he was going out shooting and would probably be back late. He would shoot till dark, he said.

“I scarcely know why, but this announcement of his suddenly brought my misery to a climax. I suppose I felt that, now we were left alone, he was longing to get away from me. I could not contain myself and I broke out into a torrent of reproaches with which I mingled the name of our departed guest I can't tell you what I said. I believe I launched contemptible and absurd accusations against him. In spite of his marvelous self-control, he was this time driven into real anger. He told me to be silent, and not to dare to malign the name of a woman who was above reproach. I persisted. He went quite pale. Finally he left me. He was away a long time. I did not know whether he had gone out shooting. At last, I went to ask. I found the keeper who usually accompanied him. The man told me that his master had left the house alone and without his gun, and had gone in the direction of the wood. I did not follow him. I did not dare to.

“Toward evening Andrew returned and came into the room where I was. He was still very pale, but his eyes were red and bloodshot. He looked terrible, I thought, as if—as if he had been crying. Then I broke down completely. I humiliated myself and begged him to pardon me. I asked him where he had been. He told me he had been sitting in the wood for hours, trying to make up his mind 'what to do.' This reply terrified me. I looked again at his eyes. I remember that I muttered, 'Why are your eyes so red?' He put his hand up to them quickly and turned his head away from me. Then I knew that he had been crying. Mr. Strickland, the knowledge that I had reduced such a man, a real man if ever there was one, to such a condition of despair, broke up all the hatefulness within me. And I—I showed him my utter contrition. But I had hurt him so much that he could only say, 'It must stop, Vivienne. From this moment it must stop. I find I can't bear it any more. I am losing control. And if I lose it, then the end will come quickly—I know that.

“Mr. Strickland, from that day I was a different woman. For I had been terrified I forced myself to govern my moods, to hold my temper in check. Things were better, much better between us. He knew the effort I was making and he helped me in every way he could. There were certain things in him which always irritated me, little habits, little ways. I needn't, I cant tell you. He tried to change them. He tried to change them. Oh, if only I could have them in my life now, every one of them! I should bless God for them! To me his faults, if they were faults, were really dearer than the greatest virtues of other men. I know that now. He did everything he could think of to make things easy for me. He was touchingly good to me. There is something so wonderful in the conscious effort of a man to be all that a woman wishes him to be. When I think—when I think—”

Sudden tears rushed to her eyes. She drew out a handkerchief quickly and wiped them away. Her face flushed, grew red to her temples. At that moment Strickland felt almost as if he were again in the Paris-Calais express.

“Oh, it hurts you too much!” he said “Don't let us—”

But she interrupted him quickly, impetuously.

“No. I came here to make you understand. I have nearly finished. It doesn't matter about me. Don't trouble about me and what I feel. I am on the other side of sorrow.”

HE rolled up her handkerchief and put it on the mantelpiece.

“This is how the end came, Mr. Strickland. It was again autumn. The shooting season had begun and we were in the château. We generally had a few shooting parties every autumn. Andrew and I consulted together as to the people we would ask. Remembering the horrors of the preceding autumn he did not suggest asking that sweet woman about whom we had had that terrible scene. Her husband was a great shot. Our shooting was exceptionally good. It would have been natural to ask him and his wife. But Andrew made up the lists without alluding to them.

I said nothing at the time. But on the evening of the day on which we had decided whom we were going to ask, I remember thinking that it was cowardly of me to allow Andrew to be so far more magnanimous than I was. And I resolved to prove my absolute trust in Andrew, and in myself, by begging that Madame de V.—I cannot tell you her name—and her husband might be invited to come to us. Next day I told Andrew of my wish. He looked surprised, doubtful for a moment. 'I know what you are thinking' I said. 'You are wrong. Andrew, I have conquered myself. I want them to come, partly that you may know it.' He looked pleased, almost—almost as if he were a little proud of me. I wrote the invitation. It was accepted. They came to us.”

She came away from the fire slowly and sat down again in her chair. The flush had died out of her face, which looked now almost hard. “This is what happened,” she said. “I had miscalculated my own powers for goodness, for reasonableness. I thought I had changed. Really I had not changed. The effort I had made for so long a successful effort. instead of strengthening me, as thought, must really have tried me to the point of exhaustion.

“Our friends arrived on a beautiful autumn day. I welcomed them, as I believed, with genuine pleasure. Perhaps, really, it was only with a conscious, strong effort to be pleased, which for a moment deceived myself. Madame de V., who, of course, could have had no idea what my former feelings toward her had been, for I feel sure I had concealed them effectively while she had been in our house, seemed happy to be with us again. She was a radiant woman, getting, I think, light and warmth from the beauty of her own disposition.

“Even on the first night after their arrival, I was conscious that, for me, all was not going to be well. The sight of Madame de V. recalled to me in a strange and dreadful way my past jealousy. Again her serenity and charming good nature, which produced happiness all about her as light produces beauty in a landscape, marked for me the contrast between her temperament and disposition and my own, underlined for me, and as I fancied for others, my own defects. Whenever I saw my husband with her, enjoying himself in the beams of her clever kindness, I trembled. I—I—only a vulgarism can express what I felt. It seemed to me that Madame de V. showed me up.

HE looked toward Strickland with a sort of shamed and almost wistful inquiry.

“I know exactly what you mean,” he said, in answer to her look.

“It was a cruel feeling. It ate its way into me. It made me almost hate her for being what she was, one of the most good and delightful women in the world. The love of others was her natural birthright. And, thinking that, I felt, as I had often felt before, that it was impossible that any one could really love me. Long ago, my husband's love for me must really have died, when he found out what I was. I imagined him acting what perhaps once had been reality. I remembered all the scenes I had made with him, all my attacks on him, all my sarcasm, all the bitter words I had spoken to him in bad temper, when my only desire had been to wound him. How he must hate me in his heart! Perpetual forgiving must wear out a man's love. Thinking back, I tried to fix the moment when my husband's affection for me must inevitably have died. And immediately I thought of the day when he had gone out alone into the wood and had come back to me with red eyes. I remembered his words, that he had been sitting in the wood for hours trying to make up his mind 'what to do.' I knew now exactly what they meant. He had been debating with himself how best to get rid of the burden that weighed him down—me. On that afternoon in the wood he had realized that his love for me was dead. My despair, my pleading, my promises of amendment had been effective on his sense of chivalry, and he had shouldered the burden again. That was what had happened. I knew it now. And Madame de V. had been the cause of this disaster to me. It was she who had wrecked my life.

“Something seemed to crash in me, as I said this to myself, bringing everything to ruin.

“This crash, as I can only call it, happened the second night of our house party, and not when I was alone. It occurred when I was sitting in the midst of our guests after dinner, listening to a pianist whom we had engaged to come out from Paris to play to us. I shall never forget that moment.

“My husband happened to be sitting on a sofa by Madame de V., who was herself a fine pianist and devoted to music. I was at some distance from them, but could see them both without turning my head. The pianist played first a sonata by Mozart, clear, gay, delicate, happy—full of spontaniety [sic] and sunshine, it seemed. Delight in it, and understanding of it, shone in Madame de V.'s beautiful face, and I saw her, from time to time, look at my husband, as if she were summoning him to share in her pleasure.

“'She is like that music,' I thought, as I sat in the midst of the ruin which nobody saw, which no one was aware of but myself.

“When the sonata was finished there was a short pause. My husband was talking animatedly with Madame de V. I saw him smiling, then laughing. It seemed to me that he looked almost boyish. Had I ever seen him look like that with me? Mr. Strickland, in my misery I told myself that I had never been able to bring such an expression into his eyes, such an emancipated expression. My whole body turned cold as I watched. Presently, the pianist began to improvise a short prelude and every one was silent. Then he played something of Liszt's. I can't tell you its name, but it was a stormy, passionate thing, with occasional bits of romance in it, fleeting moments of sweetness, but a great deal of violent ugliness. It showed off marvelously the great executive powers of the pianist, but it was tormented, lowering, full of thunder clouds, fierceness, unrest, the very antithesis of the piece which had preceded it.

“I thought to myself, 'And that is I!' Again I looked at Madame de V. and my husband. She was listening intently with a grave, almost puzzled expression on her face Her brows were drawn a little together. Her lips were pressed together. I felt that the music interested her, but that she disliked it. While I was feeling this I saw my husband steal a glance at me; a strange, furtive glance, I thought it. It was almost as if a stranger looked at me, but a stranger who knew, or had gathered by means of secret observation, much about me—to my detriment. Then he looked at Madame de V. I shut my eyes. In darkness I heard the remainder of that tempestuous music—music with no foothold anywhere for the soul that wants to rest. And in that darkness all power of moral control, of effort such as I had made during the last year, seemed to leave me.

“I don't know how I got through the rest of the evening. The end came at last. I was able to say good night to our guests. I pressed Madame de V.'s hand. I remember hearing her pleasant, clear voice say, concluding some discussion of the music, 'Mozart for me.' My husband added a comment that made me quiver. It was: 'One sees you reflected in Mozart as in a mirror. But in Liszt one sees only a stormy petrel.'

“'That is meant for me!' I thought.

“Then we separated, going up-stairs to our different rooms.

“My husband and I had a set of rooms in a tower. It was almost like a small flat, with a lobby, two bedrooms and a sitting-room, quite separate from the rest of the house. That night I went quickly up to my bedroom, sent away my maid, and then locked both the doors of my room. When my husband came up to change into a smoking-coat, he tried my door. Finding it locked he called out to me. I didn't move or answer. He called out again. Then, as no one replied, he went to his room. I didn't see him again that night. I didn't want to see him. I was afraid to see him. A savage was awake in me. I sat up nearly all night. I can't tell you all that passed in my mind. But I'll tell you this—I felt I hated my husband.”

ER eyes seemed to ask Strickland a searching question. At last she added,

“One can only feel as I felt then toward the man, or woman, one really loves best in the world. Mr. Strickland, do please forgive me—haven't you hated Jeanne like that?”

“I—I scarcely know,” he said.

He paused; then as if making a strong effort over himself, he added,

“Perhaps I have, now and then.”

“I remembered that look he had given me, and I hated him—or said to myself that I did. I summed up all my long love for him, all I had given him, all I had suffered because of him; not, I mean, because of any fault in him, but inevitably, because of my type of nature. And this was the end of it all—a look like that, the look of a stranger who knew bad things of me.

“Don't think that even then I believed that Andrew could ever be false to me with Madame de V. I was not so mad as to think that. What I believed was this: that he wished he had married such a woman as Madame de V., that she had made him long for such companionship as she could have given him; that she had unconsciously taught him to hate such a woman as I was. That was all, but that was enough.

“In the morning I came down just before the men went out shooting. I saw Andrew only when I saw him among our guests. thought he looked at me anxiously, as if he were almost in dread of something. But I smiled at him and managed, I believe, to hide what I was feeling.

“'Of course, you'll be with us at luncheon,' he said.

“I said I would. But when the brake was starting for the rendezvous agreed on for lunch, I didn't go. I made an excuse to the two or three women who were driving, said I wasn't feeling very well, and stayed behind by myself.

“That day I had a horrible feeling which I suppose is very rare in a woman brought up as I had been among refined people, always taught to hide their passions, to behave in a certain way whatever happens. I felt as if I were losing hold of the conventions, as if the shell, as it were, in which the so-called 'lady' lives had been smashed, as if the naked human being that was I must emerge. All these people whom I was entertaining—what were they to me? Why should I eternally act before them? I hated them. I dreaded their return to the château, because I didn't know whether I should be able any longer to be ordinary, civil, agreeable to them. I imagined myself breaking down under the strain I was enduring and doing something terrible before them all.

“The afternoon wore on. My guests and Andrew would soon be home. Presently I heard the grinding of wheels on the gravel, the sound of horses' hoofs, then, a moment later, the note of a motor horn, of laughter and gay voices—a barking of dogs.

“Mr. Strickland, at that moment I couldn't stand the routine of civilized life. I knew I could no longer rely on myself, and I went up-stairs and hid myself in my room. I got into a dressing-gown, quickly made all dark, and lay down on my bed.

“Presently I heard a knock at the door. It was my husband. Finding me in the dark he asked what was the matter. I told him I had a violent sick headache and felt feverish. I begged him to make my excuses to our guests, to send up my maid and then not to disturb me again. I said my nerves were all to pieces from the pain in my head. We spoke to each other in the dark. But I felt energy, cheerfulness, the open air had come into my room with him, and I bitterly compared my misery, my almost madness, with my husband's sanity and poise. I was a moral wreck.

“He stood there filling the dark room with an atmosphere of health and strength. Mr. Strickland, in less than a week from that moment he was dead.

“Our guests had been invited to stay for four days. During the rest of their time I did not face them. I never went down-stairs. But I saw one of them. Madame de V., in the most charming way, I believe, insisted gently on coming up. This was on the evening before she left the château. She sent up a message begging to be allowed to see me. And my husband also brought a word from her. I remember he said to me,

“'Do see her, Vivienne. She is so calm, such a sweet woman, she can only do you good. I often wish you knew more of her.'

“That's how men are with us, Mr. Strickland! But how often I long to be misunderstood by Andrew now! We love men partly because they haven't got our horrible subtleties.

“I consented to see Madame de V., and she came up to my room. It wasn't quite dark. There were two shaded candles lighted. She sat down by my bed, and stayed perhaps for half an hour. But it seemed a very long time to me.

“I couldn't ever tell a man what I lived through during that little visit, Mr. Strickland.

“At last she left me. I have never seen her again.

“That day the house party broke up. All our guests left the château. They went away in the morning. My husband had some business to attend to in Paris. He came to my room to bid me good-by. Somehow—he only stayed a few minutes—I managed to seem calm and casual while he was with me. As he was going out of my room, he said, 'I shall motor up with the de V.'s and come back by train.' With an effort—for I felt as if I had received a blow over the heart—I asked him when I should expect him. 'To-morrow morning in time for lunch,' he answered. 'What—not to-night?' I said. My throat felt all dried up as I spoke. 'No; I'm afraid I can't get through all I have to do in time to get back to-night,' he answered. I remember I opened my lips to beg him not to spend the night in Paris. But I shut them without speaking. He bent to kiss me, but I turned my head brusquely away. At that moment I felt I would rather be touched by a snake than by him.

“I can't tell you much about the following night. I didn't sleep. In the dark hours I reviewed my life and its utter failure, and in my madness I attributed its failure to my husband. I no longer blamed myself. I blamed him. My tortured nerves drove me into fierce condemnation of him. Everything was distorted by my imagination that night. Evil boiled up in me—evil.”

HE stopped abruptly. Strickland could see in her face that in imagination she was literally living through again that bit of her past life. She stared before her while he waited, not moving. His pipe had gone out, but he still kept it between his lips. At last she looked at him as one who again sees the reality of the moment.

“I told you that when my husband was going to kiss me I turned my head away brusquely. I told you that at that moment I would rather have been touched by a snake than by him—”

She paused.

“Yes,” Strickland said.

“That was the last time he ever bent down to kiss me.”

“Do you mean—didn't you ever see him again?”

“Oh, yes. We had a last interview, but there was nothing but hatred in it—what seemed hatred, I mean—on my side. No man could have wished to kiss, no man could ever have even thought of kissing, the woman I was in that last interview. Oh, Mr. Strickland, the last time—the last time—and not to know it, not even to suspect it! With one you love, always say to yourself, 'It may be the last time!' And put your true heart, your love, the best part of you into it.”

For a moment her face was tormented.

“Let your last time be sweet and tender. Otherwise you go into hell here on earth. I have done that.

“In the morning I got up. I was restless, like a driven fury. I waited for him to come back. I did not know what I was going to do. But I knew I was going to do something drastic, perhaps horrible. I knew I needed to do something horrible as one needs to eat when starving Because I was tortured, I longed to torture—not any friend, or casual acquaintance, not a servant, not some stranger, but the one I loved.

“I came down-stairs. I went out. I walked in the garden. I went into the wood where he had once stayed so long—thinking 'what to do.' I thought, 'I'll bring him here. I'll torture him here, for wishing to get away from me, to rid himself of me, who have loved him exclusively.' I can hear the leaves falling now, and the shrill cry of birds in the coverts. Presently I looked at my watch. It was nearly noon. I returned to the château.

“I found a telegram there. It told me that he was delayed in Paris for a few hours, but would be down by an afternoon train. I thought, 'I don't care. When he comes, I'll take him into the wood. Even if it's night, I'll take him into the wood.' The idea of the wood obsessed me.

“Twilight was beginning to fall when at last he came back. It was cold that evening, cold with the strange earthy chill characteristic of autumn, compounded, I always think, of the differing coldnesses of many things dead or fading rapidly into death. I was dressed for walking, when he came into my sitting-room. He seemed surprised at seeing me up, still more so at seeing me dressed for going out. He came toward me, perhaps intending to kiss me. But something in my look must have stopped him. For, when he was near me, he stood still. He asked me if I was better. I said I was quite well, and wanted him to come out with me. He said of course he would come if I wished it, but added a doubt as to the wisdom of my going out at such a late hour after my illness. I told him I wished to talk to him and preferred to do it in the open air. He asked me why. I said, imperiously, even violently I believe, that I wished it and that was enough. He said nothing more, and we went out together. I led the way toward the wood. Mists were beginning to rise from the Seine, which flowed not far from the château. We walked in silence side by side. When we drew near to the trees, he said that we had better remain in the garden, on one of the terraces where it would be dry underfoot. I said that I wished to go into the wood. 'It is madness in your condition,' he said. But I persisted and we followed a winding grass path among the trees till we came to a clearing. Woodcutters had been at work there, several trunks of poplar trees, stripped of their branches and leaves, lay on the damp ground. Here I stopped and stood still.

“'Do you remember coming into this wood last year?' I asked. 'After Madame de V.'s visit to us?'

“He answered 'Yes.'

“'Was it here you sat and for hours considered what to do?' I asked.

“'It may have been here,' he answered. 'I can't remember exactly. But what does it matter?'

“'I only wanted to tell you here in this wood,' I said, 'that this time I shall not humble myself. I shall not beg forgiveness. You can do what you like. I understand the whole situation now clearly. Last year you wanted to get rid of me. You were hoping to get rid of me. But I didn't let you. I didn't give you the chance. Because then I still loved you. But now it's different.'

“Mr. Strickland, I can't tell you any more of the words I said. But I poured forth all the bitterness in my heart. Instead of humbling myself and showing my love, I called pride to me in my jealousy. I pretended that it was I who was weary of him, that it was I who longed to get rid of him. Always I saw before me the face of Madame de V. like a smiling vision in the mists—”

HE stopped speaking and stared before her for a moment. Then she got up and again stood by the fire with her hands gripped tightly together.

“Mr. Strickland, do you know how in such moments of madness, of love, intense love, turned, twisted all awry, the tongue finds instinctively all the most horrible words, all the words that are like spears to lacerate and draw blood? Do you know?”

“Yes,” said Strickland.

“In such moments, we turn love inside out, we show the side that is hideous. I did. You know what the intimacy of marriage is, how it arms one with knowledge that others haven't got, knowledge of the little human failings, of the secret weaknesses, that everyone has, however dear, however noble. Tricks, mannerisms of body and soul, physical things—who knows them quite as the husband does, or the wife? Every wife has weapons which, perhaps, no other living woman has against the husband. I used all mine. I can't tell you more than that. And all the time I loved every hair on his dear head. That's how a woman can be!

“He didn't speak—not a word. He just stood there looking absolutely stricken—with a sort of terrific surprise in his eyes. But the terrible, the frightful thing is, that I know at that moment he believed that I hated him. Men can believe such a thing! At last, when I had emptied myself of hatred and bitterness—hatred of the moment, false hatred—I stopped speaking. He stood for a moment. Then he turned. I heard his feet trampling on the brushwood. The trees and the mists took him.

“When I went back to the château, night had fallen and his servant came to tell me his master had left in the motor for Paris.

“'Who went with him?' I asked.

“He told me no one. Andrew had gone alone, driving himself. Mr. Strickland, that same night he was killed on the road to Paris, near a village. Two villagers saw it. They said he was driving fiercely, at something like seventy miles an hour. A dog ran out. He tried to avoid it. The car struck a bank. It was the end.

“It was the end for him.

“I received his dead body, Mr. Strickland—that was all.”

Strickland, without knowing why, had instinctively got on to his feet. She held out her hand, put it on his arm.

“They laid him down before me, and I couldn't tell him the truth. Can you understand what that meant to me?”

"Perhaps—partly,” he almost whispered.

“That's all I can tell you. Mr. Strickland, don't be false to your heart. That is death. Jeanne loves you. She is ill—”

“Ill!” said Strickland.

“Yes—because she is starving, I think That's why I came. That's why I have told you. I don't know, of course, how much you love her, or if you love her. But I thought I would just give you the chance to profit by my tragedy, if you care at all. That day, in the Calais express, before you, I went down into the bottom of understanding of what I had done, and what it meant. I wonder now whether you had anything to do with that. I don't know. All I know is that till that moment, since Andrew's death, I hadn't shed a tear.”

She went to the sofa and picked up her fur coat. Strickland helped her to put it on.

HEN she said good-by she gave him a slip of paper.

“Jeanne's address in Paris,” she said.

Those were her last words to Strickland.

On the following morning Strickland started for Paris.

title: The Last Time/Part 2


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 have carried Krista far away with no one by—carried her away wherever he chose, free from the curious gaze of the inquisitive and where he might vent the anguish of his soul alone.

But in all that multitude sorrow was but a forced unnatural plant. It was but the mere semblance of sorrow and struck no deep root.

That was soon apparent. By the time the procession reached the barriers of the city all but a very few of the mourners had slunk away and ere the earth was wellnigh shovelled over the coffin all were gone but he and two or three grave-diggers. Then even the grave-diggers departed and Venik remained alone. And here beside the grave it seemed as if he talked once more with Krista, as if the bonds of sorrow were loosened and as if even in the midst of bitter anguish he was himself once more.

He stayed long beside the grave and paid his sad court there several days—its living monument. And at evening he went to Krista’s previous dwelling and looked long and wistfully at the yet open casement. But from that casement no one now looked forth either into the street or toward the sky or toward the star.

Then it seemed to Venik as though the book of fate was closed and all was accomplished, he quitted Prague, aimed straight for home, and came one evening to the hill-side, beneath which flowed the river and on which stood the hollow tree at the outskirts of the old oak-wood.

N the old oak-tree was yet strewed the couch of moss and leaves. He laid himself down to rest upon it and was utterly alone. And now even his thoughts had no basis in reality. He began to smile vacantly at everything just as Krista had.

And a strange numbness stole upon him, and though it was a warm summer’s evening, winter seemed to close in around him.

And the birds sang now no more their carol of the spring, the tuneful stream was stayed, the full-voiced choir was hushed, only from time to time they piped a dreary call-note as if to tell the world they still were there. And then when Venik took into his hand his violin it seemed as though, like the song of those birds, the melody had vanished from its strings. The tale he had to tell upon them was already told, his joy had throbbed itself out upon them, his grief had sobbed itself to rest upon them, and now he Rh

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text: Chapters on Jewish Literature/Chapter 25


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 scarcely knew what had come over them. Already they held but empty tones, already their melody had ceased to speak.

The river hummed its old perpetual song and above the neighbouring village, his home and birth-place, the sleep of dreams descended. And fitful slumber seemed to flap about the hollow tree and to mock and gibe at Venik.

But perhaps only that aged tree understood the deep delight of slumber. Venik crept out of it and then he began again to muse and speculate and question within himself, whether all must be that had been, and whether there was not some power in Nature to efface and roll back the past. And his own soul answered him that all must be as it was and that he and Krista had understood one another at last. Krista had always smiled and smiled, and still she smiled even in the earth.

Then it seemed strange to him that he and Krista, who had grown up together like folded leaves upon a single bough, should have diverged so far from one another, that one could neither see nor touch the other; or they were like two mountains set side by side—for half their height they were like one single growth, for the other half their summits grew wider and wider apart, and nevermore encountered, or only when the snow-wreath and the tempest swept over them, and one summit sent its message to the other on the wings of the lightning. Thus he had sent his message to Krista on the wings of the lightning, and it had stricken her to death.

And he began to feel oppressed within that hollow tree, or perhaps it oppressed him to be on that couch of leaves and moss, which now so vainly began to be a couch. He laid himself down before the tree just on the spot where in the old days he and Krista had buried his mother, that is to say, the sweetbrier and the willow-wands and the sweet marjoram, and out of it had made his mother. And here on that little tomb he felt more at peace.

And it was just as if he saw and heard around him everything that he saw and heard here in yonder distant past, when here he shepherded the sheep.

There stood the little Krista, whose piping treble sang the gloria to his violin, and who wept because he chased her from him, and because she was a poor orphaned girl! And he began anew to smile vacantly at everything, just, ah! just as he had seen the dead Krista coldly smile.

And then a cuckoo cuckooed and its note rang lonely through that lonely wood, where now but few birds sang, rang out as if


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 in witness of a desolate world, and as if it tolled a dirge of endless woe. “Ah! ha! thou hast scarce any one to whom to cuckoo now”, said Venik, and smiled to himself thereat.

Then a bat flew out and fluttered round the tree, just as if it sought something.

And Venik smiled tauntingly and said, “Brother mine, seek.” Then he perceived that there were two bats and that they had found one another, and in the tree a piping from a nest of young bats made itself heard. And after this Venik said, “Ha! ha! how fares it with the young vampires, how fares it with the young vampires?” And again he added, “I also am but a hollow tree.”

Then he began to look to the horizon and saw the river glittering dead white below him, and above him a wan firmament and wan stars. And again his eyes looked deep into those star-depths, and far away in that direction whither Krista’s eyes had strayed, and he began to murmur fitful snatches of melody.

The hill-side and his life upon it began to skip about in his memory, like the ignes fatui of the night. And thus, too, wildly rose and fell his snatches of wild melody.

Then he said to himself, “What is it all worth? When chill autumn comes, the birds must hie away, away home!”

And he felt the chill winter round him once again. And once again he peered into the tree, at the couch of moss and leaves and said, “What shall I do with thee?”

And he arose and gathered up about half the leaves and moss. “Thou shalt smile too”, he said, and made a fire of it. All was winter in his heart, and he warmed himself and smiled inanely and said to himself, “It was a merry bout to warm himself at Krista’s couch.” Then he patted down the leaves and moss and added more fuel until he made a roaring bonfire of it, and it burnt higher and higher and crackled and smiled as he said. And he smiled, too. And there was yet merrier sport to come: for the old hollow tree took fire from the bonfire and burnt like a gigantic fiery column, scattering sparks in all directions. The whole horizon was aflame, the smoke stretched ruddy to the firmament, and Venik thought the sport grew merrier and merrier, so that now everything smiled upon him, even the whole world.

Then he took his violin once again for the last time, and played just as if he had gathered all the dust of life into a single pinch and would scatter it to the winds by the vibrations of his instrument. Rh


text:
Mr. Rackett's Queen Elizabeth

"…. only Aunt Brooke—a perfect duck of a thing. Granny, she'll tell you ghost stories, but you must listen—and, of course, Dad, the Mater, and all the boys will be here. Later on, if possible, one of Teddy's 'Varsity chums may drop in. They tell me he is great fun. I'm longing to see him. And we all hope you will join us at dinner—half-past one sharp—and excuse short notice. The Mater asked me to write because she knows I hate writing, and, being Christmas Eve, she thought a little penance would be good for me. "Yours very sincerely, "." "P.S.—I insist on your coming."

"'Yours very sincerely'"—Rackett lingered on the words as though they were old wine—"isn't it ripping? Wish she'd underlined the 'very,' though. But 'I insist on your coming.' Much as to say 'Can't do without you.' By Jove! I must give something away to-night. I never felt so utterly, absolutely, almost confoundedly happy in my life. She—she—'pon my soul, she's better than I thought she was, the darling!"

Rackett bounced out of his armchair, holding the letter to his lips, and walked three times round his table. Hardly walked—danced, jigged, waltzed, gavotted, singly, in pairs, in a jumble. Then, pushing his fingers through his hair, he put the letter under the lamp, drew his chair up to the table, sat down, and started to read it all over again from the beginning. It took some time, as it was necessary to go back every now and then. In a lady's letter there is more between the lines than on them. When, however, he arrived at the last full stop, he stuck a thumb into each side of his waistcoat and stared into the depths of his lamp-shade.

"'I insist,' underlined. Which makes it 'I in .. sist.' … I can see her eyebrows come up like two new moons as she said it, with a little tightening of her lips, which immediately afterwards honoured the quill by holding it between them, while she—with now a little tender flicker in her eye—such a grey eye—stuck down the envelope before writing 'Chichele Rackett, Esq., 102, King's Bench Walk, Temple. Immediate.'" His voice sank into a whisper. "Elizabeth Rackett. Mrs. Chichele Rackett. Goodness! how well it sounds! If she says 'Yes 'to-morrow—if she only does—I believe I shall be obliged to go mad and break things."

He bent over the letter as though it were a long, sweet, slender hand whose delicious nails each contained a rising sun, and kissed it. And then he told it how he would be so grateful because he loved her so; how, if she married him, he would be a clean, loving, honest chap—tender when she was irritable, true to himself for her sake, never argumentative … and all those other things we have all said, or have yet to say, on similar occasions.

Propping the precious letter up against the lamp, so that the full light might fall upon it—the little queer moisture in his eyes didn't seem to affect his sight—he loaded his pipe. That best of pipes. The last before the first.

Then, for the tenth time, louder, something more irritably, the knocking he hadn't heard was repeated on the door.

This time, being saner, he heard it, ran his fingers through his hair, hastily secured his letter—the only letter in the world—and finally, as the handle of an umbrella smote its panels, opened the door.

"My dear Mrs. Biggles, I'm so sorry. Come in. Hope you have not been knocking long?"

Mrs. Biggles lifted her thin chin so high that two long, hard cords started out and ran down into the frill round the neck of her dress. "Oh, no, sir," she said, with Bunyan-like meekness; "I only 'eard Big Ben strike two quarters, and it ain't freezin' so 'ard now, thank you kindly, sir."

To make amends, Rackett became more cordial than a log fire. "My dear Mrs. Biggles, you must be worn out. Do sit down and"

"Thank you kindly, sir. I'd as lief stand, Mr. Rackett."

Thrown back upon himself by a frontispiece more coldly dignified—almost, indeed, more rudely polite—than the bluest of Blue Books, Rackett found himself wondering what "lief" was derived from, and why "rather" did not do as well.

"You will at least join me in a glass of whisky"—inspiration sat upon every feature—"to wish me, while I wish you, a merry Christmas? This is excellent whisky, though there is not much left, Mrs. Biggles."

He seized the bottle breezily.

Mrs. Biggles' chin resumed its place. "Thank you, sir; it may starve off the chill."

He handed her a tumbler, hiding with infinite thoughtfulness the fact that he was well aware how large her share had been in reducing the whisky to its present level. Was she not the good lady who "did for him"? Is not the flesh always weak when there is spirit in the cupboard?

Holding her glass high, she stared into it solemnly—her wedding-ring, very worn in places, reminded Rackett of the steps to his chambers—wrestled with a sniff, and said: "There ain't no doubt but as 'ow your Christmas will be merry spent—most like—in the succle of peace and plenty, with sossages likewise, and snap-dragon to follow. But as ter mine"

With a great gust of tears the poor soul put her untasted whisky on the table and covered her worn face with two thin, mottled hands.

Rackett blushed. What a blackguard he was, to be going to sit at a table groaning with Christmas cheer—Elizabeth's father was a solicitor with the largest clientèle in London—next to the dearest girl the world had ever held, with her hand, perhaps, in his under the table-cloth

"My dear Mrs. Biggles," he said hurriedly, "do let me help you for once. I was only saying just now that I wanted to give something to somebody, and nothing"

With a hysterical, shrill laugh the charwoman took her wet fingers from her smudged face, gathered up her apron, and threw it over her head. The Gloire de Dijon in her little black bonnet, feeling itself to be an imitation of the most three-farthing description, sighed with relief.

With presence of mind unique in so young a man, Rackett took the shaking lady by the elbows and ran her sympathetically into his armchair. She sat there in a heap, sniffing loudly, her week-old apron making a none too spotless tent over her attenuated figure.

"There, there, cheer up, Mrs. Biggles. No one must be unhappy on Christmas Eve. You were afraid you and your kiddies wouldn't manage a Christmas dinner, eh? That's the trouble, isn't it?"

Mrs. Biggles dropped her apron, smothered her sobs, and rose impressively. "I say to you, Mr. Rackett, that you are a round hole … You 'ave found your plice in life … Why, anyone 'ud think you'd been in the Divorce Court all your time. I do believe as 'ow you kin see through a brick wall."

Rackett blushed with pleasure. "Look here, Mrs. Biggles, how much does it require to buy all you want to fill—is it fourteen mouths now?"

"Thirteen and a 'arf, sir."

"Now, Mrs. Biggles, let's be business-like. Take this sheet of paper and this pencil"—Mrs. Biggles treated it as though it were a sugar-stick—"and jot the items down…. Now, there are thirteen children and a baby, yourself and one husband, and perhaps an aunt or an uncle. That's sixteen and a half mouths. The turkey must, therefore, weigh at least thirty-two pounds."

Mrs. Biggles' eyes danced. "Oh! but what price the oven, sir?" she said.

"Never mind about the oven. Cook it in front of the fire. How much will it cost?"

Perplexity laid a heavy hand on Mrs. Biggles. "Well, sir, the nearest thing I've ever bought to a turkey was a pigeon, what was one and six. But look 'ere, Mr. Rackett, I tell you what. I'll go out as the shops are shuttin' and get a bargain. They chuck 'em away—if you'll excuse the expression—lite at night. Anyway, Mrs. Midwinter, a widder-lidy as lives next door to me, as chars, says to me, last Christmas, she says"

"Put down a sovereign, Mrs. Biggles," said Rackett, unconsciously catching the manner of a great one for whom he longed to devil. "Then there'll be—let me see. Will two dozen sausages do?"

"Sossages? Oh, crums!"

"Right. Twopence a piece, twice twenty-four, forty-eight—four shillings."

"What!" cried Mrs. Biggles excitedly. "Knock off a couple of bob, sir, and that'll have a margin; because I does charing for a gent as makes 'em a specialarity, and he'll"

"Then," said Rackett, who felt that the woolsack itself would have to be re-lined for him to sit upon, "there are the etceteras."

"Oh! Mr. Rackett, keep off the grass. We don't want nothink French. It'd be all over our street."

Rackett began to feel a much greater respect for Mrs. Biggles. He had an enormous dislike to artificiality. She was beginning to be delightfully natural. "Er—potatoes, two shillings. Those cabbages that try to imitate roses and don't succeed"

"Spraughts?"

"Good. Another two shillings."

"Lor! What a beno!"

"And the pudding"

"'Ere! are we to 'ave a puddin'?"

If the lion underneath Nelson's statue would only condescend to melt into laughter, its expression would exactly resemble that worn by Mrs. Biggles. Involuntarily her feet commenced to move as they had done many years ago to a piano-organ. A wave of gratitude and astonishment crept over her. Something upon which she instantly placed a thumb and finger fell from her eyes to the paper over which she had scrawled in a shaky, schoolgirl hand.

"I believe ten shillings would get you a regular thumping pudding, Mrs. Biggles," said Rackett, pretending not to notice Mrs. Biggles' condition. "And, now, is that everything?"

"Everythink, and a bit more, sir," she said, between smiles and tears.

"No; we are wrong. There's port wine yet."

"Forty wine, sir? Oh! I couldn't; I couldn't indeed."

"My dear Mrs. Biggles, what would any Christmas dinner be without port wine and—by Jove! good again—walnuts. There, there, old lady, don't cry. I'll just go and get the money from my room while you sip your whisky."

Gathering his dressing-gown more tightly round him—there are those who will be shocked to hear that he had been sitting all the evening in pyjamas for economy's sake; writing in trousers bags them so at the knee—Rackett darted into his bedroom, leaving Mrs. Biggles trembling with anticipation, excitement, and suppression. She longed to plunge into the bosom of her family with loaded arms.

Suddenly there came from the bedroom an exclamation of disgust and horror. With pale face, Rackett came into his sitting-room. "Mrs. Biggles," he said, "I'm the biggest idiot in the Temple. I've just discovered that the cheques and postal orders I expected from the papers I do work for have not arrived. I haven't a penny in the place."

Mrs. Biggles rose to her feet. She looked like an electric light suddenly switched off.

"But this is the best thing we can do. Would you very much mind making a bundle of some of those clothes you'll find scattered about my bedroom, and taking them to pawn? I'm so sorry to ask you to do such a thing a thing, but I really haven't anything else upon which to raise money. My watch and rings went for the rent a few days ago."

"Mind, sir? Not me!" cried Mrs. Biggles, switched on again to sixteen-candle power. "Uncle and me don't stand on no ceremony."

Rackett gave a sigh of relief. He would rather himself go without dinner than disappoint this worn mother of thirteen and a half.

"Well, then, Mrs. Biggles, there they are, hanging up and lying about. Pack them up and hurry away to do your shopping. Bring me the ticket next time you come. Hurry; it's already quite late."

She returned in no time with a huge bundle. This she put on the floor by the door, wiped her hand on her apron, and stretched it out to Rackett.

"A merry Christmas to yer, sir, and—and God bless yer for feeding the 'ungry"

"So glad you came, Mrs. Biggles. Good night. Have a good time on Christmas day, and—and drink this toast to-morrow: 'Mr. Rackett's Queen Elizabeth.' Don't forget. Good night."

With a warm glow at his heart, Rackett, briefless barrister and struggling author, returned to his armchair, to his letter, to his hopes, doubts, and fears.

Under his pillow that night lay the letter, whose every word he knew by heart.

When Rackett woke about half-past eight on Christmas morning, the first thing he did was to scramble to the foot of the bed like a schoolboy to see what Santa Claus had left. Which conclusively proved what a ruling power habit is. He found nothing at the end of the bed. One sock was by the door, and the other in the fireplace with his collar. He stood in the middle of the room and chuckled. At any rate, it showed that if he had not yet made a name and reputation, he had plenty of time left in which to do so.

Before doing anything else he thought it better to make himself reacquainted with the contents of his letter. This he did, walking up and down the room, till his bare feet with one accord voted for shoes, and his body for a dressing-gown. It was Christmas Day, indeed. On his window were traced, with the delicate touch of a wood-engraver, exquisite fern leaves and banks of flowers upon which Titania might have lain. Putting a towel round his neck, he threw up the window. Everything was white. The walk below, the high railings, every single blade of grass in the gardens, every tree, every branch, every twig—a dainty, sparkling white. The barges on the river, the wharves, the high chimneys beyond, the air itself—whitest of white. Only the river, moving heavily and quietly down to the sea, was black.

Before he closed the window, Rackett fetched a handful of bread and, breaking it into tiny mouthfuls, scattered it in the walk and on the window-sill, whistling. With shrill thanks, down came a bevy of intimate sparrows, elbowing each other good-humouredly for the largest pieces, darting up with others too heavy to carry, dropping them for quick little rascals to seize upon.

Under the railings opposite, with a muzzle hanging under his chin, sat a casual dog, with expectation in its eyes. "Well, my friend," thought Rackett, "so you shall." He went to the cupboard in his sitting-room, took up a chop he had been unable to tackle the previous evening, by the end, returned, and with unerring aim sent it whizzing to the dog's astonished feet. Then he shut the window and, singing snatches of the Eton boat song, shaved with cold, too cold, water, lit the fire in his sitting-room with the ease born of constant practice, tidied yesterday's litter, blew the smuts from his papers, put on a saucepan to boil by the side of the phlegmatic kettle, laid his breakfast-cloth, and returned to tub and dress.

"Now," he said to himself, "the momentous question of what to wear presents itself. To make a good impression on the elders, tall hat, frock-coat, patent boots, and quiet tie would be the thing. But, personally, I rather fancy myself in tweeds and brown boots. How would Betty like it, though? No, I'll make a compromise. Black, short coat, microbe tie, nearly new, blue waistcoat with red dits, and black trousers. Orthodox, and yet leaving a little room for originality. The microbe tie, a delightful thing in sudden reds and unexpected yellows, will do that for me, and the waistcoat—by the way, did I sew those buttons on, or not? Hullo! there's the kettle. Coming, sir."

He darted into the sitting-room, filled the teapot, put a couple of eggs into the saucepan, and, seduced by the warmth of the fire, stood in front of it with hands outstretched.

Between the bars, seated side by side, were two small black coals surrounded by glowing yellows. The smaller one had hair of delicate gold turning to brown, a sweet oval face, a little nose as straight and proud as the two clear grey eyes above it, and eyebrows which moved with every varying thought. The larger one, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, was clean-shaven and dark, not so good looking as he wished, but better looking than he thought. They were hand in hand, and on the third finger of the hand of the smaller one, the left hand, was a plain gold ring, in which was engraved "Chiche" Crack!

"Oh! my hat! if that isn't an egg bust! Dreamer and romancist, attend to the cooking of thy inner requirements."

Deftly Rackett whipped out the eggs, on both of which sat a small white blob, and placed them in their cups. "So to breakfast. I will make a picture of myself afterwards and proceed to Elizabeth's church. A walk through the Park with her—Mr. and Mrs., and the youngsters ahead—will be divine. If I could only think how I'm to put it. 'Elizabeth, if you think you could ever care enough about me to' Shopun, and deuced nasty at that! Jove! and I'm frightfully sharp-set. If the other isn't all right, I must fall back on New Zealand mutton."

The other was all right. But the mutton was fallen on, nevertheless. Talking aloud, waving knife and fork as emphasisers one moment, singing snatches of an opera or a ballad the next, this briefless and whimsical person somewhat resembled, for sheer healthy optimism, that great creation of Defoe's, or better, that greater one of Cervantes', although, for that matter, neither was he bearded, stout, and dressed in skins with parrot on shoulder; nor tall, spare, and sunken-eyed, dressed in patched ironware with exaggerated lance and a tubby Sancho at his heels. But he was like them both, in that he was also capable of the deepest despair and the heaviest depression.

Leaving the breakfast table and whistling gaily, he strolled back into his bedroom to array himself in the clothes mentally decided upon. He flung the wardrobe open—nothing. He still whistled. He drew out the top drawer—nothing. The whistling became jerky. The other three followed all too easily. The whistling stopped. He crept, trembling, to the pegs behind the door, to the pegs at the far side of the wardrobe, to every peg in any corner of the room—nothing. Not a single coat, waistcoat, or a pair of trousers. The last night's bundle dangled before his eyes. "Good Heavens! what, in the name of all that's awful"

Rackett fell heavily into a chair. Mrs. Biggles had been too unimaginative. Not even his oldest suit was left. Flannels, dress clothes, tweeds, everything had gone. All he had was a dressing-gown and pyjamas.

For three long hours, cold and miserable hours, he sat in that small bedroom chair, a more pitifully depressed and despairing object than Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe at their most unfortunate moments. A succession of awful thoughts chased each other through his brain. They would wait, dinner would be spoilt, Mr. and Mrs. would drop him like a hot potato, the boys would chaff, Betty would never speak to him again. Oh! woe, woe! …. There would never be a Mrs. Chichele Rackett. Elizabeth would marry Freddy's beastly 'Varsity chum; he—Rackett—would grow grey, hipped, dyspeptic, a hater of humanity, an enemy to charity, egoistic, cantankerous, pessimistic

"Good Heavens! what's that?"

Someone was knocking loudly on his oak. Who, in the name of fortune …. He couldn't go—in pyjamas—if it were the Prime Minister, the Lord Chief Justice, even Her Majesty the Queen.

"Mr. Rackett, are you in?"

It was the Queen, his Queen, Queen Elizabeth. He rushed to the door.

"Mr. Rackett, Mr. Rackett! Oh! Molly! what is the matter with him? He must be in, or there would be a ticket on the door. Oh! what am I to do?"

Rackett, with ear to the keyhole, shivering with cold and joy, drank in every word.

"We shall be most awfully late for dinner. Father will rave. The whole thing will be spoilt …. and I shall die of fright. Oh! Chichele, Chichele!"

Betty was crying, he could hear her. He couldn't open the door and let her see him like that—a blue-nosed thing in a dressing-gown; she would think he had gone mad.

Steadying his voice, he said huskily: "Miss Elizabeth, is that you?"

"Yes.… Oh! are you all right? Oh! are you all right? We've been knocking for ever so l—l—long. Please open the door!"

"I can't. I—I'm not well…. It's catching.… I will write to you…. I'm awfully sorry."

Betty began to dry her eyes, ashamed at having been caught.

"But what is it? You must open the door. I believe you're chaffing."

Rackett groaned in a way that made Elizabeth tremble. Chaffing! "Miss Elizabeth, why have you come here?"

"Oh! Mr. Rackett, I'm so frightened! I missed you at church—at least, we all did—thought perhaps you'd been working late, and were not up in time—at least, Freddy did—decided to drive here to see if we could take you back in the carriage…."

Rackett became eager-eyed. "Miss Elizabeth, is Freddy in the carriage?"

"Yes."

"Send him up to me at once. And stay in the carriage, for Heaven's sake! At once, please."

Elizabeth drew herself up to her full height with the dignity of her royal namesake.

"Oh! very well, Mr. Rackett, certainly. For the present, good morning. If you are too ill, pray don't trouble to come to dinner."

Rackett, with a mixture of despair and delight, heard the steps die away and, presently, heavier ones come nearer and nearer.

"I say, Hack, old chap, what on earth's the row?"

The door opened. A roar of laughter made every cobweb within a mile swing agitatedly.

"She took them all, the old sneak, did she? Well, I'm Look here, go to bed and get warm, and I'll drive home and get back all I know. I've just time before dinner. I'll bring you the new suit I wore yesterday—a ripper. So long, dear old chap!"

Rackett and Freddy entered the dining-room at the instant all the company were seating themselves. General handshakings and introductions were followed by a whispering, a giggling, and a nudging of elbows. Rackett sank into the vacant chair by Elizabeth, looking at her pleadingly. For a moment her face retained its far-away look. Then, presently, came the first glimmer of a smile. The eyes—and they were grey eyes—turned to him and said: "I know. You are a darling old duck! My hand is waiting under the table-cloth."

At that, moment, in a little, crowded, but very happy room in Paradise Court, a thin, squeaky voice, with tears in it, called out: "Now then, boys and gels, stand up all of yer, and drink to Mr. Rackett's Queen Elizabeth!"

title: Mr. Rackett's Queen Elizabeth


text: Talk:Mr. Rackett's Queen Elizabeth

title: Talk:Mr. Rackett's Queen Elizabeth


text:
Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/88

 The hollow tree was a gorgeous theatre. It shone and crackled and Venik played by its fitful glare. He played and imitated all the birds which had already fled in terror. In sooth he played feelingly and finely, just as Krista had done, when she fell in a fainting fit, and Venik smiled madly at it all.

Then in the village a bell rang out from the very chapel in which he and Krista once played and sang together. The bell rang out an alarm, and when the people from the village streamed on to the hill-side, Venik was still playing underneath the tree so that it looked and all fell out just as in the old song where the linden-tree burns and its sparks fall upon the girl lying beneath it, only that there an oak-tree burnt and under it was Venik.

And just as the people began to throng the hill-side the hollow tree collapsed with a horrible crackling and in its embers the song of Venik was silenced. The people saw exactly how it buried him, and a shriek ran along the whole hill-side as if from a single throat.

The family of the bats fluttered round. Then all burnt out, all was extinguished, all was silenced, the music of two human lives was hushed and on the face of death the smile was turned to stone.

The hollow tree, Krista’s couch, Venik, the violin—all was one cinder.


text: Page:Virgil's Pastorals, Georgics and Aeneis - Dryden (1709) - volume 2.djvu/170


text:
Page:The Man Who Died Twice (1924).djvu/27

 That once in adolescent insolence

Would have believed himself another Titan.

Fernando sat with his large heavy face

Held forward in his hands and cursed his works

Till malediction was a weariness,

And all his makeshift insolence a lie

That only cravens who had trained themselves

To fight and had not fought were silly enough

To fancy for the truth. No insolence

That he remembered would have been sufficient

Without additions and foreseen betrayals

To make of him this penitential emblem

Of that which he was not. When he had called

Himself a worm, another worm turned at once

Within his heart and bit him; and just then

The candid face of one that heretofore

Had been for him as near to the divine


text:
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 As any might be, and through all had remained so,

Became as if alive there on the wall,

Transfigured into living recognition,

Wherein there was much wonder and some pity,

And more regret. The Titan, it would seem,

For the first time, and ruinously too late,

And only for a moment interested,

Saw what had happened and could do no more,

Having seen, than to recede ineffably

Aloft into the distance and the dark,

Until he was as high as a large star

That shines on death and life and death in life

Indifferently. Fernando Nash at length

Arose, leaving his bed for his one chair;

And under the sick gleam of one gas-flame,

That had for years to shadowy lodgers given

More noise than light, he sat before a glass


text:
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 That was more like a round malevolent eye

Filmed with too many derelict reflections,

Appraising there a bleared and heavy face

Where sodden evil should have been a stranger.

“What are you doing here? And who are you?”

He mumbled, with cloudy consciousness

Of having felt a ghostly blow in the face

From an unseemly mirrored visitor

That he had not invited. “And how long

Have you been on your way, do you suppose,

To come to this? If I remember you

As first you were anointed and ordained,

There was a daemon in you, not a devil,

Who told you then that when you heard those drums

Of death, it would be death to follow them.


text:
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 You were to trust your daemon and to wait,

And wait, and still to wait. You had it—once.

You had it then—though you had not yet heard it,

Coming as it would have to come some time,

Blown down by choral horns out of a star

To quench those drums of death with singing fire

Unfelt by man before. You knew it then.

You felt it singing down out of the sky

When you were only a small boy at school;

And you knew then that it was all for you,

For you and for the world, that it was coming.

Where is it now? It may be coming yet,

For someone else, but you do not know that;

And that was not what you were meant to know.

O, you poor toad, why could you not have waited?

Why did you have to kill yourself like this?

Why did you let the devil’s retinue


text:
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 That was to be a part be everything,

And so drive out your daemon till your star

Should sing unheard for you whose ears were left

Only for drums and songs of your destroyers?

And now even they are gone—all but the drums.

You knew that if you waited, they, not you,

Should cease—that they should all be hushed at last

In that great golden choral fire of sound.

‘Symphony Number Three. Fernando Nash.’

Five little words, like that, if you had waited,

Would be enough tonight, you flabby scallion,

To put you on the small roll of the mighty.

As for the other two, they’re in a box

Under the bed; and they will soon be nowhere.

You do not have to mourn now over them,

For they were only ladders carrying you


text:
Page:The Man Who Died Twice (1924).djvu/32

 Up to the half-way place from which you fell,

And should have fallen, since you were going to fall,

A little faster, and so broken at once

Your neck. Why could you not have fallen faster

And saved yourself all this? If you had given

The devil a sign to play those drums of death

Longer and louder at about that time,

You might be now a carrion more at ease

Than you are like to be till you make haste.

What wine in God’s name, are you waiting for?

And where’s the use? And while I’m asking that;

Where was the use of all your prentice-years

Wherein you toiled, while others only tinkled,

Till you were master of a new machine

That only your invention could have built

Or driven? You built it and you let it rust.


text:
Page:The Man Who Died Twice (1924).djvu/33

 A fog of doubt that a small constant fire

Would have defeated had invisibly

And imperceptibly crept into it,

And made the miracle in it that was yours

A nameless toy for the first imbecile

To flout who found it—wherefore he’ll not find it.

Presently Number One and Number Two

Will be beyond all finding. Number Three

Will not be farther from his eyes tomorrow;

And they’ll all be as safe together then

As we should be if we had not been born.

The circle fills itself; and there you are

Inside it, where you can’t crawl out of it.

It holds you like a rat in a round well,

Where he has only time and room to swim

In a ring until he disappears and drowns,

If it be true that rats abandon ships


text:
Page:The Man Who Died Twice (1924).djvu/34

 That sail away to sink, praise be to rats!

If you were one, you'd never find another

For shipmate. He would know you for a fool,

And therefore dangerous. You're not even a rat;

For a good rat will wait for what is coming,

Whether it comes or not. You could not wait,

Knowing that it must come. You had it—once.

You had enough of it to make you know,

And were among the sceptred of the few

In having it. But where’s your sceptre now?

You threw it away; and then went wallowing

After that other music, and those drums—

Assured by more than man’s authority

That all you had not then was only waiting

To make of that which once was you a torch

Of sound and fire that was to flood the world

With wonder, and overwhelm those drums of death


text:
Page:Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky - The Aims of the Bolsheviki (1919).djvu/4

You know that at the present time the avowed and unavowed enemies of the working class—the capitalists and their parasites, the clergy of all denominations, officials of high or middle rank, and other paid tools of the bureaucratic confraternity—are everywhere vilifying the Bolsheviki, those revolutionary Socialists who, in the stormy tide of events, have remained true to their aims and to their determination to fight against those who impede the progress of the people, whether the opponents be the capitalist class as a whole, Kerensky's notorious Provisional Government, individual Socialists who have deviated from the old revolutionary path, or even entire Socialist sections such as the Left and Right Social Revolutionaries and the S.D. Mensheviki.

What, then, is this Communist, Bolshevik Party? Why is there such gnashing of teeth at the mere mention of its name among the merchants, the manufacturers, and the financial interests? Why has this party become the pet aversion of all those who work little and eat much? Where has it sprung from, and whither is it leading the workers and poorest peasantry? By what means does it intend to bring about the liberation of the peoples?

This pamphlet will endeavour to make all these matters clear to the reader.


text:
Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/448

following little fairy tale is the only one of its kind which has been preserved, and which certainly belongs to the time of the Incas. It was told to Fray Martin de Morua, who was a Quichua scholar, in about 1585, by old Amautas well versed in Inca folklore, who gave it the following title:

In the snow-clad Cordillera above the valley of Yucay, called Pitu-siray, a shepherd watched the flock of white llamas intended for the Inca to sacrifice to the Sun. He was a native of Laris, named Acoya-napa, a very well disposed and gentle youth. He strolled behind

title: Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/448


text: The Incas of Peru/Appendix E

title: The Incas of Peru/Appendix E


text: Page:Virgil's Pastorals, Georgics and Aeneis - Dryden (1709) - volume 2.djvu/171


text:
Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/449

Rh his flock, and presently began to play upon his flute very softly and sweetly, neither feeling anything of the amorous desires of youth, nor knowing anything of them.

He was carelessly playing his flute one day when two daughters of the Sun came to him. They could wander in all directions over the green meadows, and never failed to find one of their houses at night, where the guards and porters looked out that nothing came that could do them harm. Well! the two girls came to the place where the shepherd rested quite at his ease, and they asked him after his llamas.

The shepherd, who had not seen them until they spoke, was surprised, and fell on his knees, thinking that they were the embodiments of two out of the four crystalline fountains which were very famous in those parts. So he did not dare to answer them. They repeated their question about the flock, and told him not to be afraid, for they were children of the Sun, who was lord of all the land, and to give him confidence they took him by the arm. Then the shepherd stood up and kissed their hands. After talking together for some time the shepherd said that it was time for him to collect his flock, and asked their permission. The elder princess, named Chuqui-llantu, had been struck by the grace and good disposition of the shepherd. She asked him his name and of what place he was a native. He replied that his home was at Laris and that his name was Acoya-napa. While he was speaking Chuqui-llantu cast her eyes upon a plate of silver which the shepherd wore over his forehead, and which shone and glittered very prettily. Looking closer she saw on it two figures, very subtilely contrived, who were eating a heart. Chuqui-llantu asked the shepherd the name of that silver ornament, and he said it was

title: Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/449


text:
Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/450

410 called utusi. The princess returned it to the shepherd, and took leave of him, carrying well in her memory the name of the ornament and the figures, thinking with what delicacy they were drawn, almost seeming to her to be alive. She talked about it with her sister until they came to their palace. On entering, the Puncu-camayoc looked to see if they brought with them anything that would do harm, because it was often found that women had brought with them, hidden hi their clothes, such things as fillets and necklaces. After having looked well, the porters let them pass, and they found the women of the Sun cooking and preparing food. Chuqui-llantu said that she was very tired with her walk, and that she did not want any supper. All the rest supped with her sister, who thought that Acoya-napa was not one who could cause inquietude. But Chuqui-llantu was unable to rest owing to the great love she felt for the shepherd Acoya-napa, and she regretted that she had not shown him what was in her breast. But at last she went to sleep.

In the palace there were many richly furnished apartments in which the women of the Sun dwelt. These virgins were brought from all the four provinces which were subject to the Inca, namely Chincha-suyu, Cunti-suyu, Anti-suyu and Colla-suyu. Within there were four fountains which flowed towards the four provinces, and in which the women bathed, each in the fountain of the province where she was born. They named the fountains in this way. That of Chincha-suyu was called Chuclla- -puquio, that of Cunti-suyu was known as Ocoruro -puquio, Sicllat -puquio was the fountain of Anti-suyu, and Llulucha -puquio of Colla-suyu. The most beautiful child

title: Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/450


text:
Page:Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky - The Aims of the Bolsheviki (1919).djvu/5

The Bolsheviki have not appeared suddenly in recent years in the midst of the Russian S.-D. Party. As far back as 1900, after the split in the "Union of Russian Social Democrats," a new political union was formed by the first Russian followers of revolutionary working-class Socialism. It became known as the Revolutionary Organisation and Social Democrat, and was joined by all the members of the first Russian S.D. organisation abroad—the Group of the Emancipation of Labour, people like Plekhanov, Zassulitch, Alexandrov and others.

These workers (or "stariki"=elders, as they were called), who had left the "Union of Russian Social Democrats," had the political emancipation of the people as their aim; they wished to free the people from the position of servitude under the landowners and the autocracy, and by so doing to prepare them for a far greater struggle—the struggle for Socialism. One of these "stariki" was Plekhanov, who in 1914 took up a distinctly hostile attitude to the aspirations of the revolutionary workers.

Those workers who remained in the "Union of Social Democrats" went by the name of "the young ones" (Molodyie). They deemed it necessary for the party organisations of these days to confine their work to an agitation on economic lines in order to wrest from the master class an immediate and certainly partial amelioration of their labour and social conditions. They assumed that the Russian working class was not yet ripe for a wide political struggle.

This was the chief point of disagreement between the two sections. It very soon definitely divided the Russian Social Democrat Workers' Party into two wings. This party had just come into being through the amalgamation of the S.D. group—"Iskra" (= the Spark) and "Zarya" (= the Dawn).


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 At first this division did not assume very clear forms, and it was only as a result of a two years' test of live social revolutionary activity that the rôle of the Right and Left S.D.'s became clear. This happened in 1903, at the second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party. There the two sections definitely separated, the majority of the Congress forming the Bolsheviki, headed by Lenin, and the minority, the Mensheviki, headed by Martov. Henceforth the struggle between these sections went on unceasingly in connection with a whole series of highly-important questions of theory and practice in the revolutionary movement of the working masses, and especially that of Russia.

The Bolsheviki and the Mensheviki disagreed on the following questions:—

Who are the motive power of the revolution? The Bolsheviki asserted that, apart from the revolutionary vanguard—the industrial proletariat—the motive power in the struggie for the political and economic freedom of the whole people is not the upper and middle bourgeoisie, but solely the democracy, i.e., the poorest peasantry and the strata of the lower bourgeoisie, akin to it. They held that only the working class and their "fellow travellers" of the lower bourgeoisie had an interest in establishing the people's power in Russia. This interest was not shared by the upper and middle strata of the bourgeoisie, which even under the Czarist régime had received their share of power in the shape of admittance to posts in the administration of the State, of voting rights for the Imperial Duma, and for the Councils of the Empire, and in local social work in the Zemstvos ("county councils") and municipalities. And this, too, at a time when the masses were fleeced


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Rh of the Sun, Chuqui-llantu, was wrapped in profound sleep. She had a dream. She thought she saw a bird flying from one tree to another, and singing very softly and sweetly. After having sung for some time, the bird came down and regarded the princess, saying that she should feel no sorrow, for all would be well. The princess said that she mourned for something for which there could be no remedy. The singing bird replied that it would find a remedy, and asked the princess to tell her the cause of her sorrow. At last Chuqui-llantu told the bird of the great love she felt for the shepherd boy named Acoya-napa, who guarded the white flock. Her death seemed inevitable. She could have no cure but to go to him whom she so dearly loved, and if she did her father the Sun would order her to be killed. The answer of the singing bird, by name Checollo, was that she should arise and sit between the four fountains. There she was to sing what she had most in her memory. If the fountains repeated her words, she might then safely do what she wanted. Saying this the bird flew away, and the princess awoke. She was terrified. But she dressed very quickly and put herself between the four fountains. She began to repeat what she remembered to have seen of the two figures on the silver plate, singing:

Presently all the fountains began to sing the same verse. [The Indians who told the story drew a picture of the princess between the fountains.]

Seeing that all the fountains were very favourable, the princess went to repose for a little while, for all night she had been conversing with the checollo in her dream.

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