Complete Works of George Moore, page 835
Next morning as I was shaving I heard a knock at my door.
“Entré!”
“Oh, I beg your pardon, but I didn’t want to miss you. I’ll wait for you in the salon.”
When I came downstairs she showed me a wedding ring. She had married Donald, or said she had.
“Oh, I am tired. I hate going to the shops, and now mamma wants me to go shopping with her. Can’t you stay and talk to me, and later on we might sneak out together and go somewhere?... Are you painting to-day?”
“Well, no, I’m going to a museum a long way from here. I have never seen Madame de Sévigné’s house.”
“Who is she?”
“The woman who wrote the famous letters.”
“I am afraid I shall only bore you, because I can’t talk about books.”
“You had better come; you can’t stay in this hotel by yourself all the morning.”
There was some reason which I have forgotten why she could not go out with Donald, and I suppose it was my curiosity in all things human that persuaded me to yield to her desire to accompany me, though, as I told her, I was going to visit Madame de Sévigné’s house. The reader doubtless remembers that we visited not only Madame de Sévigné’s house, but also Victor Hugo’s in the Place des Vosges, and perhaps her remark as we returned home in the evening along the quays, that “Paris wasn’t bad for an old city,” has not yet slipped out of the reader’s memory. For it was a strange remark, and one could hardly hear it without feeling an interest in the speaker; at least, that was how I felt. It was that remark that drew my attention to her again, and when we stopped before the door of our hotel, I remembered that I had spent the day talking to her about things that could have no meaning for her. Madame de Sévigné and Jean Goujon, old Paris and its associated ideas could have been studied on another occasion, but an opportunity of studying Mildred might never occur again. I was dining out that evening; the next day I did not see her, and the day after, as I sat in the Luxembourg Gardens, beguiled from my work by the pretty April sunlight and the birds in the alley (I have spoken already of these things), as I sat admiring them, a thought of Mildred sprang into my mind, a sudden fear that I might never see her again; and it was just when I had begun to feel that I would like to walk about the gardens with her that I heard her voice. These coincidences often occur, yet we always think them strange, almost providential. The reader knows how I rose to meet her, and how I asked her to come for a walk in the gardens. Very soon we turned in the direction of the museum, for, thinking to propitiate me, Mildred suggested I should take her there, and I did not like to refuse, though I feared some of the pictures and statues might distract me from the end I now had in view, which was to find out if Donald had been her first lover, and if her dear little mamma suspected anything.
“So your mother knows nothing about your marriage?”
“Nothing. He ought to go back, but he’s going to stay another night. I think I told you. Poor dear little mamma, she never suspected a bit.”
As we walked to the museum I caught glimpses of what Donald’s past life had been, learning incidentally that his father was rich, but since Donald was sixteen he had been considered a ne’er-do-well. He had gone away to sea when he was a boy, and had been third mate on a merchant ship; in a hotel in America he had been a boot-black, and just before he came to Paris he fought a drunken stoker and won a purse of five pounds.
She asked me which were the best pictures, but she could not keep her attention fixed, and her attempts to remember the names of the painters were pathetic. “Ingres, did you say? I must try to remember.... Puvis de Chavannes? What a curious name! but I do like his picture. He has given that man Donald’s shoulders,” she said, laying her hand on my arm and stopping me before a picture of a young naked man sitting amid some grey rocks, with grey trees and a grey sky. The young man in the picture had dark curly hair, and Mildred said she would like to sit by him and put her hands through his hair. “He has got big muscles, just like Donald. I like a man to be strong: I hate a little man.”
We wandered on talking of love and lovers, our conversation occasionally interrupted, for however interested I was in Mildred, and I was very much interested, the sight of a picture sometimes called away my attention. When we came to the sculpture-room it seemed to me that Mildred was more interested in sculpture than in painting, for she stopped suddenly before Rodin’s “L’age d’arain,” and I began to wonder if her mind were really accessible to the beauty of the sculptor’s art, or if her interest were entirely in the model that had posed before Rodin. Sculpture is a more primitive art than painting; sculpture and music are the two primitive arts, and they are therefore open to the appreciation of the vulgar; at least, that is how I tried to correlate Mildred with Rodin, and at the same moment the thought rose up in my mind that one so interested in sex as Mildred was could not be without interest in art. For though it be true that sex is antecedent to art, art was enlisted in the service of sex very early in the history of the race, and has, if a colloquialism may be allowed here, done yeoman service ever since. Even in modern days, notwithstanding the invention of the telephone and the motor car, we are still dependent upon art for the beginning of our courtships. To-day the courtship begins by the man and the woman sending each other books. Before books were invented music served the purpose of the lover. For when man ceased to capture woman, he went to the river’s edge and cut a reed and made it into a flute and played it for her pleasure; and when he had won her with his music he began to take an interest in the tune for its own sake. Amusing thoughts like these floated through my mind in the Luxembourg galleries — how could it be otherwise since I was there with Mildred? — and I began to argue that it was not likely that one so highly strung as Mildred could be blind to the sculptor’s dream of a slender boy, and that boy, too, swaying like a lily in some ecstasy of efflorescence.
“The only fault I find with him is that he is not long enough from the knee to the foot, and the thigh seems too long. I like the greater length to be from the knee to the foot rather than from the knee to the hip. Now, have I said anything foolish?”
“Not the least. I think you are right. I prefer your proportions. A short tibia is not pretty.”
A look of reverie came into her eyes. “I don’t know if I told you that we are going to Italy next week?”
“Yes, you told me.”
Her thoughts jerked off at right angles, and turning her back on the statue, she began to tell me how she had made Donald’s acquaintance. She and her mother were then living in a boarding-house in the same square in which Donald’s father lived, and they used to walk in the square, and one day as she was running home trying to escape a shower, he had come forward with his umbrella. That was in July, a few days before she went away to Tenby for a month. It was at Tenby she had become intimate with Toby Wells; he had succeeded for a time in putting Donald out of her mind. She had met Toby at Nice.
“But you like Donald much better than Toby?”
“Of course I do; he came here to marry me. Oh, yes, I’ve forgotten all about Toby. You see, I met Donald when I went back to London. But do look at that woman’s back; see where her head is. I wonder what made Rodin put a woman in that position.”
She looked at me, and there was a look of curious inquiry on her face. Overcome with a sudden shyness, I hastened to assure her that the statue was “La Danaide.”
“Rodin often introduces a trivial voluptuousness into art; and his sculpture may be sometimes called l’article de Paris. It is occasionally soiled by the sentiment, of which Gounod is the great exponent, a base soul who poured a sort of bath-water melody down the back of every woman he met, Margaret or Madeline, it was all the same.”
“Clearly this is not a day to walk about a picture-gallery with you. Come, let us sit down, and we’ll talk about lighter things, about lovers. You won’t mind telling me; you know you can trust me. One of these days you will meet a man who will absorb you utterly, and all these passing passions will wax to one passion that will know no change.”
“Do you think so? I wonder.”
“Do you doubt it?”
“I don’t think any one man could absorb me; no one man could fill my life.”
“Not even Donald?”
“Donald is wonderful. Do you remember that morning, a few days after we arrived?”
“Your wedding night?”
“Yes, my wedding night.”
We are interested in any one who is himself or herself, and this girl was certainly herself and nothing but herself. Travelling about as she did with her quiet, respectable mother, who never suspected anything, she seemed to indicate a type — type is hardly the word, for she was an exception. Never had I seen any one like her before, her frankness and her daring; here at least was one who had the courage of her instincts. She was man-crazy if you will, but now and then I caught sight of another Mildred when she sighed, when that little dissatisfied look appeared in her face, and the other Mildred only floated up for a moment like a water-flower or weed on the surface of a stream.
“... You know I do mean to be a good girl. I think one ought to be good. But really, if you read the Bible —— Oh, must you go? — it has been such a relief talking things over with you. Shall I see you to-night? There is no one else in the hotel I can talk to, and mamma will play the piano, and when, she plays Beethoven it gets upon my nerves.”
“You play the violin, don’t you?”
“Yes, I play,” and that peculiar sad look which I had begun to think was characteristic of her came into her face, and I asked myself if this sudden misting of expression should be ascribed to stupidity or to a sudden thought or emotion. “I am sorry you’re not dining at the hotel.”
“I am sorry, too; I’m dining with students in the Quarter; they would amuse you.”
“I wish I were a grisette.”
“If you were I would take you with me. Now I must say good-bye; I have to get on with my painting.”
That night I returned to the hotel late and went away early in the morning. But the next day she came upon me again in the gardens, and as we walked on together she told me that Donald had gone away.
“He was obliged to return, you see; he left the office without leave, and he had only two pounds, the poor darling. I don’t know if I told you that he had to borrow two pounds to come here.” “No, you omitted that little fact. You see, you are so absorbed in yourself that you think all these things are as interesting to everybody else as they are to you.”
“Now you’re unkind,” and she looked at me reproachfully. “It is the first time you have been unsympathetic. If I talked to you it was because I thought my chatter interested you. Moreover, I believed that you were a little interested in me, and I have come all this way—”
My heart was touched, and I begged of her to believe that my remark was only uttered in sport, to tease her. But it was a long time before I could get her to finish the sentence. “You have come a long way, you said—”
“I came to tell you that we are going to Rome tomorrow. I didn’t like to go away without seeing you, but it seems as if I were mistaken; it would not have mattered to you if I had.”
She had her fiddle-case with her; and to offer to carry it for her seemed an easy way out of my difficulty; but she would not surrender it for a while. I asked her if she had been playing at a concert, or if she were coming from a lesson. No; well, then, why had she her fiddle-case with her?
“Don’t ask me; leave me in peace. It doesn’t matter. I cannot play now, and ten minutes ago my head was full of it.”
These little ebullitions of temper were common in Mildred, and I knew that the present one would soon pass away. In order that its passing might be accomplished as rapidly as possible, I suggested we should sit down, and I spoke to her of Donald.
“I don’t want to talk about him. You have offended me.”
“I’m sorry you are leaving Paris. This is the beautiful month. How pleasant it is here, a soft diffused warmth in the air, the sunlight flickering like a live thing in the leaves, and the sound of water dripping at the end of the alley. We are all alone here, Mildred. Come, tell me why you brought your fiddle-case.”
“Well,” she said, “I brought it on the chance of meeting you. I thought you might like to hear me play. We are going away to-morrow morning. I can’t play in that hotel, in that stuffy little room; mamma would want to accompany me.”
“Play to me in the Luxembourg Gardens!”
“One can do anything one likes here; no one pays any attention to anybody else,” and she pointed with her parasol to a long poet, with hair floating over his shoulders, who walked up and down the other end of the alley reciting his verses.
“Perhaps your playing will interrupt him.”
“Oh, if he doesn’t like it he’ll move away. But I don’t want to play; I can’t play when I’m out of humour, and I was just in the very humour for playing until your remark about—”
“About what?”
“You know very well,” she answered.
The desire to hear her play the fiddle in the gardens gained upon me. The moment was an enchanting one, the light falling through the translucid leaves and the poet walking up and down carried my thoughts into another age. I began to see a picture — myself, the poet, and this girl playing the violin for us; other figures were wanting to make up the composition. Cabanel’s picture of the Florentine poet intruded itself, interrupting my vision, the picture of Dante reading his verses at one end of a stone bench to a frightened girl whose lover is drawing her away from him who had been to Hell and witnessed the tortures of the damned, who had met the miserable lovers of Rimini whirling through space and heard their story from them. Lizard-like, a man lies along a low wall, listening to the poet’s story. But why describe a picture so well known? Why mention it at all? Only because its design intruded itself, spoiling my dream, an abortive idea that I dimly perceived in Nature without being able to grasp it; an illusive suggestion for a picture was passing by me, and so eager was my pursuit of the vision that there was no strength in me to ask Mildred to play. True that the sound of her violin might help me, but it must happen accidentally, just as everything else was happening, without sequence, without logic. At that moment my ear caught the sound of violin-playing; some dance measure of old time was being played, and in the sunlit interspace three women appeared dancing a gavotte, advancing and retiring through the light and shade. The one who played the violin leaned sometimes against a tree, and sometimes she joined the others, playing as she danced.
“I know that gavotte. Come, let us go to them. I’ll play for them if they’ll let me.”
Very soon the woman who played the violin seemed to recognise Mildred as a better player than herself. She handed her fiddle to a bystander and the gavotte proceeded, the three old ladies bowing and holding up their skirts and pointing their toes with the grace of bygone times. Never, I think, did reality seem more like a dream. “But who are these three women?” I asked myself, and, sinking on a bench like one enchanted, I dreamed that these were three sisters, the remnant of a noble family who had lost its money during several generations till at last nothing remained, and the poor old women had to devise some mode of earning their living. I imagined the scene in some great house which they would have to leave on the morrow, and they talking together, thinking they must go forth to beg, till she who played the fiddle said that something would happen to save them from the shame of mendicancy. I imagined her saying that their last crust of bread would not be eaten before some one would come to tell them that a fortune awaited them. And it so happened that the day they divided this crust the one to whom faith had been given came upon an old letter. She stood reading till the others asked her what she was reading with so much interest. “I told you,” she said, “that we should be saved, that God in His great mercy would not turn us out into the streets to beg. This letter contains explicit directions how the gavotte used to be danced when our ancestors lived in the Place des Vosges.”
“But what help to us to know the true step of the gavotte?” cried the youngest sister.
“A great deal,” the eldest answered gravely; “I can play the fiddle, and we can all learn to dance; we’ll go to dance the gavotte in the Luxembourg Gardens whenever it is fine — the true gavotte as it was danced when Madame de Sévigné drove up in a painted coach drawn by six horses, and entered the courtyard of her hotel decorated with bas-reliefs by Jean Goujon.”
This is the story that I dreamed as I sat on the bench listening to the pretty, sprightly music flowing like a live thing. Under the fingers of the old woman the music scratched along like dead leaves along a pathway, without accent, without rhythm; now the old gavotte tripped like the springtime, pretty as the budding trees, as the sunlight along the swards. Mildred brought out the contrast between the detached and the slurred notes. How gaily it went! Full of the fashion of the time — the wigs, the swords, the bows, the gallantry! How sedate! How charming! How well she understood it! How well the old women danced to it! How delighted every one was! She played on until the old women, unable to dance any more, sat down to listen to her. After trying some few things which I did not know, I heard her playing a piece of music which I could not but think I had heard before — in church! Beginning it on the low string, she poured out the long, long phrase that never seems to end, so stern and so evocative of Protestantism that I could not but think of a soul going forth on its way to the Judgment Seat, telling perforce as it goes how it has desired and sought salvation, pleading almost defiantly. But Mildred could not appreciate such religious exaltation, yet it was her playing that had inspired the thought in me. Had she been taught to play it? Was she echoing another’s thought? Her playing did not sound like an echo; it seemed to come from the heart, or out of some unconscious self, an ante-natal self that in her present incarnation only emerged in music, borne up by some mysterious current to be sucked down by another.
