Read Ebook: Grey Roses by Harland Henry

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 713 lines and 48930 words, and 15 pages

'Oh, yes,' she explained to me afterwards, 'my uncle is a good man. My aunt and cousins are very good women. But for me, to live with them--pas possible, mon cher. Their thoughts were not my thoughts, we could not speak the same language. They disapproved of me unutterably. They suffered agonies, poor things. Oh, they were very kind, very patient. But--! My gods were their devils. My father--my great, grand, splendid father--was "poor Alfred," "poor uncle Alfred." Que voulez-vous? And then--the life, the society! The parishioners--the people who came to tea--the houses where we sometimes dined! Are you interested in crops? In the preservation of game? In the diseases of cattle? Ol?l?! Ol?l?, l?l?! And then--have you ever been homesick? Oh, I longed, I pined, for Paris, as one suffocating would long, would die, for air. Enfin, I could not stand it any longer. They thought it wicked to smoke cigarettes. My poor aunt--when she smelt cigarette-smoke in my bed-room! Oh, her face! I had to sneak away, behind the shrubbery at the end of the garden, for stealthy whiffs. And it was impossible to get French tobacco. At last I took the bull by the horns, and fled. It will have been a terrible shock for them. But better one good blow than endless little ones; better a lump-sum than instalments with interest.'

But what was she going to do? How was she going to live? For, after all, much as she loved Paris, she couldn't subsist on its air and sunshine.

'Oh, never fear! I'll manage somehow. I'll not die of hunger,' she said confidently.

In a word, she managed very well, and by no means died of hunger. She could scarcely afford Madame Chanve's three-franc table d'h?te, it is true; but we could dine modestly at L?on's, over the way, and return to the Bleu for coffee,--though, it must be added, that establishment no longer enjoyed a monopoly of our custom. We patronised it and the Vachette, the Source, the Ecoles, the Souris, indifferently. Or we would sometimes spend our evenings in Nina's rooms. She lived in a tremendously swagger house in the Avenue de l'Observatoire,--on the sixth floor, to be sure, but 'there was a carpet all the way up.' She had a charming little salon, with her own furniture and piano , and no end of books, pictures, draperies, and pretty things, inherited from her father or presented by her friends.

'All the same, Lord help the man you marry,' Chalks continued gloomily.

'Oh, I shall never marry,' Nina cried. 'Because, first, I don't approve of matrimony as an institution. And then--as you say--Lord help my husband. I should be such an uncomfortable wife. So capricious, and flighty, and tantalising, and unsettling, and disobedient, and exacting, and everything. Oh, but a horrid wife! No, I shall never marry. Marriage is quite too out-of-date. I shan't marry; but, if I ever meet a man and love him--ah!' She placed two fingers upon her lips, and kissed them, and waved the kiss to the skies.

'He'll not understand her, he'll not respect her. Take her peculiar views. We know where she gets them. But he--he'll despise her for them, at the very time he's profiting by 'em,' some one said.

Her peculiar views of the institution of matrimony, the speaker meant. She had got them from her father. 'The relations of the sexes should be as free as friendship,' he had taught. 'If a man and a woman love each other, it is nobody's business but their own. Neither the Law nor Society can, with any show of justice, interfere. That they do interfere, is a survival of feudalism, a survival of the system under which the individual, the subject, had no liberty, no rights. If a man and a woman love each other, they should be as free to determine for themselves the character, extent, and duration of their intercourse, as two friends should be. If they wish to live together under the same roof, let them. If they wish to retain their separate domiciles, let them. If they wish to cleave to each other till death severs them--if they wish to part on the morrow of their union--let them, by heaven. But the couple who go before a priest or a magistrate, and bind themselves in ceremonial marriage, are serving to perpetuate tyranny, are insulting the dignity of human nature.' Such was the gospel which Nina had absorbed , and which she professed in entire good faith. We felt that the coming man would misapprehend both it and her--though he would not hesitate to make a convenience of it. Ugh, the cynic!

It was all very well to laugh; but some of us, our personal equation quite apart, could not help feeling that the joke was of a precarious quality, that the situation held tragic possibilities. A young and attractive girl, by no means constitutionally insusceptible, and imbued with heterodox ideas of marriage--alone in the Latin Quarter.

Anyhow, if we were mortified that she should have preferred such a one to us, we were relieved to think that she hadn't fallen into the clutches of a blackguard, as we had feared she would. That Coco was a blackguard we never guessed. We made the best of him, because we had to choose between doing that and seeing less of Nina: in time, I am afraid--such is the influence of habit--we rather got to like him, as one gets to like any innocuous, customary thing. And if we did not like the situation--for none of us, whatever might have been our practice, shared Nina's hereditary theories anent the sexual conventions--we recognised that we couldn't alter it, and we shrugged our shoulders resignedly, trusting it might be no worse.

And then, one day, she announced, 'Ernest and I are going to be married.' And when we cried out why, she explained that--despite her own conviction that marriage was a barbarous institution--she felt, in the present state of public opinion, people owed legitimacy to their children. So Ernest, who, according to both French and Brazilian law, could not, at his age, marry without his parents' consent, was going home to procure it. He would sail next week; he would be back before three months. Ernest sailed from Lisbon; and the post, a day or two after he was safe at sea, brought Nina a letter from him. It was a wild, hysterical, remorseful letter, in which he called himself every sort of name. He said his parents would never dream of letting him marry her. They were Catholics, they were very devout, they had prejudices, they had old-fashioned notions. Besides, he had been as good as affianced to a lady of their election ever since he was born. He was going home to marry his second cousin.

Shortly after the birth of Camille I had to go to London, and it was nearly a year before I came back to Paris. Nina was looking better than when I had left, but still in nowise like her old self--pale and worn and worried, with a smile that was the ghost of her former one. She had been waiting for my return, she said, to have a long talk with me. 'I have made a little plan. I want you to advise me. Of course you must advise me to stick to it.'

And when we had reached her lodgings, and were alone in the salon, 'It is about Camille, it is about her bringing-up,' she explained. 'The Latin Quarter? It is all very well for you, for me; but for a growing child? Oh, my case was different; I had my father. But Camille? Restaurants, caf?s, studios, the Boul' Miche, and this little garret--do they form a wholesome environment? Oh, no, no--I am not a renegade. I am a Bohemian; I shall always be; it is bred in the bone. But my daughter--ought she not to have the opportunity, at least, of being different, of being like other girls? You see, I had my father; she will have only me. And I distrust myself; I have no "system." Shall I not do better, then, to adopt the system of the world? To give her the conventional education, the conventional "advantages"? A home, what they call home influences. Then, when she has grown up, she can choose for herself. Besides, there is the question of francs and centimes. I have been able to earn a living for myself, it is true. But even that is more difficult now; I can give less time to work; I am in debt. And we are two; and our expenses must naturally increase from year to year. And I should like to be able to put something aside. Hand-to-mouth is a bad principle when you have a growing child.'

I had a much simpler and pleasanter plan of my own, but of that, as I knew, she would hear nothing. I did not smile at hers, however; though I confess it was not easy to imagine madcap Nina in the r?le of a landlady, regulating the accounts and presiding at the table of a boarding-house. I can't pretend that I believed there was the slightest likelihood of her filling it with success. But I said nothing to discourage her; and the fact that she is rich to-day proves how little I divined the resources of her character. For the boarding-house she kept was an exceedingly good boarding-house; she showed herself the most practical of mistresses; and she prospered amazingly. Jeanselme, whose father had recently died, leaving him a fortune, lent her what money she needed to begin with; she took and furnished a flat in the Avenue de l'Alma; and I--I feel quite like an historical personage when I remember that I was her first boarder. Others soon followed me, though, for she had friends amongst all the peoples of the earth--English and Americans, Russians, Italians, Austrians, even Roumanians and Servians, as well as French; and each did what he could to help. At the end of a year she overflowed into the flat above; then into that below; then she acquired the lease of the entire house. She worked tremendously, she was at it early and late, her eyes were everywhere; she set an excellent table; she employed admirable servants; and if her prices were a bit stiff, she gave you your money's worth, and there were no 'surprises.' It was comfortable and quiet; the street was bright; the neighbourhood convenient. You could dine in the common salle-?-manger if you liked, or in your private sitting-room. And you never saw your landlady except for purposes of business. She lived apart, in the entresol, alone with Camille and her body-servant Jeanne. There was the 'home' she had set out to make.

'That's all very well for you,' her listener complained sombrely. 'But for me? Where shall I stop when I come to Paris?'

'With me. You shall be my guest. I will kill you if you ever go elsewhere. You shall pass your old age in a big chair in the best room, and Camille and I will nurse your gout and make herb-tea for you.'

'And I shall sit and think of what might have been.'

'Yes, we'll indulge all your little foibles. You shall sit and "feel foolish"--from dawn to dewy eve.'

If you had chanced to be walking in the Bois-de-Boulogne this afternoon, you might have seen a smart little basket-phaeton flash past, drawn by two glossy frays, and driven by a woman--a woman with sparkling eyes, a lovely colour, great quantities of soft dark hair, and a figure--

'H?las, mon p?re, la taille d'une d?esse'--

MERCEDES

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

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

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

A BROKEN LOOKING-GLASS

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

When he had lighted the lamp in his sitting-room, he let himself drop into an armchair before the empty fireplace. He was tired, he was exhausted. Yet nothing had happened to tire him. He had dined, as he always dined on Sundays, with the Rodericks, in Cheyne Walk; he had driven home in a hansom. There was no reason why he should be tired. But he was tired. A deadly lassitude penetrated his body and his spirit, like a fluid. He was too tired to go to bed.

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

'I am getting old, I suppose I am getting old.'

And vaguely, dully, he contemplated his life, spread out behind him like a misty landscape, and thought what a failure it had been. What had it come to? What had it brought him? What had he done or won? Nothing, nothing. It had brought him nothing but old age, solitude, disappointment, and, to-night especially, a sense of fatigue and apathy that weighed upon him like a suffocating blanket. On a table, a yard or two away, stood a decanter of whisky, with some soda-water bottles and tumblers; he looked at it with heavy eyes, and he knew that there was what he needed. A little whisky would strengthen him, revive him, and make it possible for him to bestir himself and undress and go to bed. But when he thought of rising and moving to pour the whisky out, he shrank from that effort as from an Herculean labour; no--he was too tired. Then his mind went back to the friends he had left in Chelsea half an hour ago; it seemed an indefinably long time ago, years and years ago; they were like blurred phantoms, dimly remembered from a remote past.

Yes, his life had been a failure; total, miserable, abject. It had come to nothing; its harvest was a harvest of ashes. If it had been a useful life, he could have accepted its unhappiness; if it had been a happy life, he could have forgiven its uselessness; but it had been both useless and unhappy. He had done nothing for others, he had won nothing for himself. Oh, but he had tried, he had tried. When he had left Oxford people expected great things of him; he had expected great things of himself. He was admitted to be clever, to be gifted; he was ambitious, he was in earnest. He wished to make a name, he wished to justify his existence by fruitful work. And he had worked hard. He had put all his knowledge, all his talent, all his energy, into his work; he had not spared himself; he had passed laborious days and studious nights. And what remained to show for it? Three or four volumes upon Political Economy, that had been read in their day a little, discussed a little, and then quite forgotten--superseded by the books of newer men. 'Pulped, pulped,' he reflected bitterly. Except for a stray dozen of copies scattered here and there--in the British Museum, in his College library, on his own bookshelves--his published writings had by this time met with the common fate of unappreciated literature, and been 'pulped.'

'Pulped--pulped; pulped--pulped.' The hateful word beat rhythmically again and again in his tired brain; and for a little while that was all he was conscious of.

So much for the work of his life. And for the rest? The play? The living? Oh, he had nothing to recall but failure. It had sufficed that he should desire a thing, for him to miss it; that he should set his heart upon a thing, for it to be removed beyond the sphere of his possible acquisition. It had been so from the beginning; it had been so always. He sat motionless as a stone, and allowed his thoughts to drift listlessly hither and thither in the current of memory. Everywhere they encountered wreckage, derelicts; defeated aspirations, broken hopes. Languidly he envisaged these. He was too tired to resent, to rebel. He even found a certain sluggish satisfaction in recognising with what unvarying harshness destiny had treated him, in resigning himself to the unmerited.

He caught sight of his hand, lying flat and inert upon the brown leather arm of his chair. His eyes rested on it, and for the moment he forgot everything else in a sort of torpid study of it. How white it was, how thin, how withered; the nails were parched into minute corrugations; the veins stood out like dark wires; the skin hung loosely on it, and had a dry lustre: an old man's hand. He gazed at it fixedly, till his eyes closed and his head fell forward. But he was not sleepy, he was only tired and weak.

He raised his head with a start and changed his position. He felt cold; but to endure the cold was easier than to get up, and put something on, or go to bed.

How silent the world was; how empty his room. An immense feeling of solitude, of isolation, fell upon him. He was quite cut off from the rest of humanity here. If anything should happen to him, if he should need help of any sort, what could he do? Call out? But who would hear? At nine in the morning the porter's wife would come with his tea. But if anything should happen to him in the meantime? There would be nothing for it but to wait till nine o'clock.

Ah, if he had married, if he had had children, a wife, a home of his own, instead of these desolate bachelor chambers!

If he had married, indeed! It was his sorrow's crown of sorrow that he had not married, that he had not been able to marry, that the girl he had wished to marry wouldn't have him. Failure? Success? He could have accounted failure in other things a trifle, he could have laughed at what the world calls failure, if Elinor Lynd had been his wife. But that was the heart of his misfortune, she wouldn't have him.

He had met her for the first time when he was a lad of twenty, and she a girl of eighteen. He could see her palpable before him now: her slender girlish figure, her bright eyes, her laughing mouth, her warm brown hair curling round her forehead. Oh, how he had loved her. For twelve years he had waited upon her, wooed her, hoped to win her. But she had always said, 'No--I don't love you. I am very fond of you; I love you as a friend; we all love you that way--my mother, my father, my sisters. But I can't marry you.' However, she married no one else, she loved no one else: and for twelve years he was an ever-welcome guest in her father's house; and she would talk with him, play to him, pity him; and he could hope. Then she died. He called one day, and they said she was ill. After that there came a blank in his memory--a gulf, full of blackness and redness, anguish and confusion; and then a sort of dreadful sudden calm, when they told him she was dead.

He remembered standing in her room, after the funeral, with her father, her mother, her sister Elizabeth. He remembered the pale daylight that filled it, and how orderly and cold and forsaken it all looked. And there was her bed, the bed she had died in; and there her dressing-table, with her combs and brushes; and there her writing-desk, her book-case. He remembered a row of medicine bottles on the mantelpiece; he remembered the fierce anger, the hatred of them, as if they were animate, that had welled up in his heart as he looked at them, because they had failed to do their work.

'You will wish to have something that was hers, Richard,' her mother said. 'What would you like?'

On her dressing-table there was a small looking-glass, in an ivory frame. He asked if he might have that, and carried it away with him. She had looked into it a thousand times, no doubt; she had done her hair in it; it had reflected her, enclosed her, contained her. He could almost persuade himself that something of her must remain in it. To own it was like owning something of herself. He carried it home with him, hugging it to his side with a kind of passion.

He had prized it, he prized it still, as his dearest treasure; the looking-glass in which her face had been reflected a thousand times; the glass that had contained her, known her; in which something of herself, he felt, must linger. To handle it, look at it, into it, behind it, was like holding a mystic communion with her; it gave him an emotion that was infinitely sweet and bitter, a pain that was dissolved in joy.

The glass lay now, folded in its ivory case, on the chimney-shelf in front of him. That was its place; he always kept it on his chimney-shelf, so that he could see it whenever he glanced round his room. He leaned back in his chair, and looked at it; for a long time his eyes remained fixed upon it. 'If she had married me, she wouldn't have died. My love, my care, would have healed her. She could not have died.' Monotonously, automatically, the phrase repeated itself over and over again in his mind, while his eyes remained fixed on the ivory case into which her looking-glass was folded. It was an effect of his fatigue, no doubt, that his eyes, once directed upon an object, were slow to leave it for another; that a phrase once pronounced in his thought had this tendency to repeat itself over and over again.

But at last he roused himself a little, and leaning forward, put his hand out and up, to take the glass from the shelf. He wished to hold it, to touch it and look into it. As he lifted it towards him, it fell open, the mirror proper being fastened to a leather back, which was glued to the ivory, and formed a hinge. It fell open; and his grasp had been insecure; and the jerk as it opened was enough. It slipped from his fingers, and dropped with a crash upon the hearthstone.

The sound went through him like a physical pain. He sank back in his chair, and closed his eyes. His heart was beating as after a mighty physical exertion. He knew vaguely that a calamity had befallen him; he could vaguely imagine the splinters of shattered glass at his feet. But his physical prostration was so great as to obliterate, to neutralise, emotion. He felt very cold. He felt that he was being hurried along with terrible speed through darkness and cold air. There was the continuous roar of rapid motion in his ears, a faint, dizzy bewilderment in his head. He felt that he was trying to catch hold of things, to stop his progress, but his hands closed upon emptiness; that he was trying to call out for help, but he could make no sound. On--on--on, he was being whirled through some immeasurable abyss of space.

'Ah, yes, he's dead, quite dead,' the doctor said. 'He has been dead some hours. He must have passed away peacefully, sitting here in his chair.'

'Poor gentleman,' said the porter's wife. 'And a broken looking-glass beside him. Oh, it's a sure sign, a broken looking-glass.'

THE REWARD OF VIRTUE

He was one of the institutions of the Latin Quarter, one of the least admirable. He haunted the Boulevard St. Michel, hung round the caf?s, begged of the passing stranger, picked up cigarette-ends, and would, at a pinch, run errands, or do odd jobs.

With his sallow, wrinkled skin, his jungle of grey beard, his thick grey hair, matted and shiny, covering his ears and falling about his shoulders, he was scarcely an attractive-looking person. Besides, he had lost an eye; and its empty socket irresistibly drew your gaze--an abhorrent vacuum. His clothes would be the odds and ends of students' offcasts, in the last stages of disintegration. He had a chronic stoop; always aimed his surviving eye obliquely at you, from a bent head; and walked with a sort of hang-dog shuffle that seemed a general self-denunciation.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet