"No, no, no. But what was it?"
"She"s bought a house at Malmesbury."
"How lucky to find one!"
On the contrary, it seems to me pretty sure that she, whoever she may be, is d.a.m.ned, since it"s all a matter of flats and hats and sea gulls, or so it seems to be for a hundred people sitting here well dressed, walled in, furred, replete. Not that I can boast, since I too sit pa.s.sive on a gilt chair, only turning the earth above a buried memory, as we all do, for there are signs, if I"m not mistaken, that we"re all recalling something, furtively seeking something. Why fidget? Why so anxious about the sit of cloaks; and gloves--whether to b.u.t.ton or unb.u.t.ton? Then watch that elderly face against the dark canvas, a moment ago urbane and flushed; now taciturn and sad, as if in shadow. Was it the sound of the second violin tuning in the ante-room? Here they come; four black figures, carrying instruments, and seat themselves facing the white squares under the downpour of light; rest the tips of their bows on the music stand; with a simultaneous movement lift them; lightly poise them, and, looking across at the player opposite, the first violin counts one, two, three----
Flourish, spring, burgeon, burst! The pear tree on the top of the mountain. Fountains jet; drops descend. But the waters of the Rhone flow swift and deep, race under the arches, and sweep the trailing water leaves, washing shadows over the silver fish, the spotted fish rushed down by the swift waters, now swept into an eddy where--it"s difficult this--conglomeration of fish all in a pool; leaping, splashing, sc.r.a.ping sharp fins; and such a boil of current that the yellow pebbles are churned round and round, round and round--free now, rushing downwards, or even somehow ascending in exquisite spirals into the air; curled like thin shavings from under a plane; up and up.... How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world! Also in jolly old fishwives, squatted under arches, obscene old women, how deeply they laugh and shake and rollick, when they walk, from side to side, hum, hah!
"That"s an early Mozart, of course----"
"But the tune, like all his tunes, makes one despair--I mean hope. What do I mean? That"s the worst of music! I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes, yellow cakes, drink thin, sharp wine. Or an indecent story, now--I could relish that. The older one grows the more one likes indecency. Hah, hah! I"m laughing. What at? You said nothing, nor did the old gentleman opposite.... But suppose--suppose--Hush!"
The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pa.s.s the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight. Woven together, inextricably commingled, bound in pain and strewn in sorrow--crash!
The boat sinks. Rising, the figures ascend, but now leaf thin, tapering to a dusky wraith, which, fiery tipped, draws its twofold pa.s.sion from my heart. For me it sings, unseals my sorrow, thaws compa.s.sion, floods with love the sunless world, nor, ceasing, abates its tenderness but deftly, subtly, weaves in and out until in this pattern, this consummation, the cleft ones unify; soar, sob, sink to rest, sorrow and joy.
Why then grieve? Ask what? Remain unsatisfied? I say all"s been settled; yes; laid to rest under a coverlet of rose leaves, falling. Falling. Ah, but they cease. One rose leaf, falling from an enormous height, like a little parachute dropped from an invisible balloon, turns, flutters waveringly. It won"t reach us.
"No, no. I noticed nothing. That"s the worst of music--these silly dreams. The second violin was late, you say?"
"There"s old Mrs. Munro, feeling her way out--blinder each year, poor woman--on this slippery floor."
Eyeless old age, grey-headed Sphinx.... There she stands on the pavement, beckoning, so sternly, the red omnibus.
"How lovely! How well they play! How--how--how!"
The tongue is but a clapper. Simplicity itself. The feathers in the hat next me are bright and pleasing as a child"s rattle. The leaf on the plane-tree flashes green through the c.h.i.n.k in the curtain. Very strange, very exciting.
"How--how--how!" Hush!
These are the lovers on the gra.s.s.
"If, madam, you will take my hand----"
"Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls."
"Then these are the embraces of our souls." The lemons nod a.s.sent. The swan pushes from the bank and floats dreaming into mid stream.
"But to return. He followed me down the corridor, and, as we turned the corner, trod on the lace of my petticoat. What could I do but cry "Ah!"
and stop to finger it? At which he drew his sword, made pa.s.ses as if he were stabbing something to death, and cried, "Mad! Mad! Mad!" Whereupon I screamed, and the Prince, who was writing in the large vellum book in the oriel window, came out in his velvet skull-cap and furred slippers, s.n.a.t.c.hed a rapier from the wall--the King of Spain"s gift, you know--on which I escaped, flinging on this cloak to hide the ravages to my skirt--to hide.... But listen! the horns!"
The gentleman replies so fast to the lady, and she runs up the scale with such witty exchange of compliment now culminating in a sob of pa.s.sion, that the words are indistinguishable though the meaning is plain enough--love, laughter, flight, pursuit, celestial bliss--all floated out on the gayest ripple of tender endearment--until the sound of the silver horns, at first far distant, gradually sounds more and more distinctly, as if seneschals were saluting the dawn or proclaiming ominously the escape of the lovers.... The green garden, moonlit pool, lemons, lovers, and fish are all dissolved in the opal sky, across which, as the horns are joined by trumpets and supported by clarions there rise white arches firmly planted on marble pillars.... Tramp and trumpeting. Clang and clangour. Firm establishment. Fast foundations.
March of myriads. Confusion and chaos trod to earth. But this city to which we travel has neither stone nor marble; hangs enduring; stands unshakable; nor does a face, nor does a flag greet or welcome. Leave then to perish your hope; droop in the desert my joy; naked advance.
Bare are the pillars; auspicious to none; casting no shade; resplendent; severe. Back then I fall, eager no more, desiring only to go, find the street, mark the buildings, greet the applewoman, say to the maid who opens the door: A starry night.
"Good night, good night. You go this way?"
"Alas. I go that."
BLUE & GREEN
GREEN
The pointed fingers of gla.s.s hang downwards. The light slides down the gla.s.s, and drops a pool of green. All day long the ten fingers of the l.u.s.tre drop green upon the marble. The feathers of parakeets--their harsh cries--sharp blades of palm trees--green, too; green needles glittering in the sun. But the hard gla.s.s drips on to the marble; the pools hover above the dessert sand; the camels lurch through them; the pools settle on the marble; rushes edge them; weeds clog them; here and there a white blossom; the frog flops over; at night the stars are set there unbroken. Evening comes, and the shadow sweeps the green over the mantelpiece; the ruffled surface of ocean. No ships come; the aimless waves sway beneath the empty sky. It"s night; the needles drip blots of blue. The green"s out.
BLUE
The snub-nosed monster rises to the surface and spouts through his blunt nostrils two columns of water, which, fiery-white in the centre, spray off into a fringe of blue beads. Strokes of blue line the black tarpaulin of his hide. Slushing the water through mouth and nostrils he sings, heavy with water, and the blue closes over him dowsing the polished pebbles of his eyes. Thrown upon the beach he lies, blunt, obtuse, shedding dry blue scales. Their metallic blue stains the rusty iron on the beach. Blue are the ribs of the wrecked rowing boat. A wave rolls beneath the blue bells. But the cathedral"s different, cold, incense laden, faint blue with the veils of madonnas.
KEW GARDENS
From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights pa.s.sed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the sh.e.l.l of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green s.p.a.ces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves.
Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.
The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue b.u.t.terflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed. The man was about six inches in front of the woman, strolling carelessly, while she bore on with greater purpose, only turning her head now and then to see that the children were not too far behind. The man kept this distance in front of the woman purposely, though perhaps unconsciously, for he wished to go on with his thoughts.
"Fifteen years ago I came here with Lily," he thought. "We sat somewhere over there by a lake and I begged her to marry me all through the hot afternoon. How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some reason I thought that if it settled there, on that leaf, the broad one with the red flower in the middle of it, if the dragonfly settled on the leaf she would say "Yes" at once. But the dragonfly went round and round: it never settled anywhere--of course not, happily not, or I shouldn"t be walking here with Eleanor and the children--Tell me, Eleanor. D"you ever think of the past?"
"Why do you ask, Simon?"
"Because I"ve been thinking of the past. I"ve been thinking of Lily, the woman I might have married.... Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my thinking of the past?"
"Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn"t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren"t they one"s past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees, ... one"s happiness, one"s reality?"
"For me, a square silver shoe buckle and a dragonfly--"
"For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels twenty years ago, down by the side of a lake, painting the water-lilies, the first red water-lilies I"d ever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on the back of my neck. And my hand shook all the afternoon so that I couldn"t paint. I took out my watch and marked the hour when I would allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes only--it was so precious--the kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses all my life. Come, Caroline, come, Hubert."
They walked on the past the flower-bed, now walking four abreast, and soon diminished in size among the trees and looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches.
In the oval flower bed the snail, whose sh.e.l.l had been stained red, blue, and yellow for the s.p.a.ce of two minutes or so, now appeared to be moving very slightly in its sh.e.l.l, and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth which broke away and rolled down as it pa.s.sed over them. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antennae trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture--all these objects lay across the snail"s progress between one stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circ.u.mvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings.
This time they were both men. The younger of the two wore an expression of perhaps unnatural calm; he raised his eyes and fixed them very steadily in front of him while his companion spoke, and directly his companion had done speaking he looked on the ground again and sometimes opened his lips only after a long pause and sometimes did not open them at all. The elder man had a curiously uneven and shaky method of walking, jerking his hand forward and throwing up his head abruptly, rather in the manner of an impatient carriage horse tired of waiting outside a house; but in the man these gestures were irresolute and pointless. He talked almost incessantly; he smiled to himself and again began to talk, as if the smile had been an answer. He was talking about spirits--the spirits of the dead, who, according to him, were even now telling him all sorts of odd things about their experiences in Heaven.
"Heaven was known to the ancients as Thessaly, William, and now, with this war, the spirit matter is rolling between the hills like thunder."
He paused, seemed to listen, smiled, jerked his head and continued:--