Gossamer Part 14

"Yes," she said.

"Has he been sitting for you?" I asked.

I stopped myself just in time. I was very nearly saying "sitting to you like that?" The figure on which she was at work was entirely undraped.

I do not suppose that Mrs. Ascher would have been the least embarra.s.sed even if I had said "like that." The artist's soul scorns conventions.

But I should have felt awkward if she had answered "Yes."

"Not exactly sitting to me," she said. "He just comes here and talks.

While he talks I catch glimpses of his great, buoyant, joyous soul and fashion the poor clay to express it."

"I did not know he was back in New York," I said.

"Oh, yes, he has been here a week, perhaps more. To me it seems as if he had been here for ever."

I could not even guess at what she meant by that so I did not try to answer her.

"I wonder he didn't look me up," I said.

"Ah," said Mrs. Ascher, "he has had no time. That abundant, restless energy of his is for ever pressing out into fresh activities."

I gathered, more from her tone than from her actual words that only an effete, devitalised creature would call on me. A man of abundant energy would naturally sit half the day in Mrs. Ascher's studio, while she made a fancy body for him in damp clay.

She clasped her hands and gazed with rapt intensity at the statue of Gorman's soul.

"His patriotism!" she said. "After living in that atmosphere of nebulous cosmopolitanism which is what we hypercivilised people have created in the world, it is everything to get back to the barbaric simplicity of the old love for country."

"Did he happen to mention," I asked, "whether he succeeded in wheedling five thousand dollars out of that Detroit man?"

Mrs. Ascher did not hear that; or if she did chose to ignore it.

"The splendid destiny of Ireland," she said, "has been to escape age after age the malarial fever of culture. The Romans never touched her sh.o.r.es. The renaissance pa.s.sed her by. She has not bowed the knee to our modern fetish of education. You and I have our blood diluted with----"

Gorman must have been at his very best while he talked to Mrs. Ascher.

He had evidently made a kind of whirlpool of her mind. Her version of his philosophy of history and politics seemed to me to be going round and round in narrowing circles with confusing speed. The conception of the Romans as apostles of the more malarial kinds of culture was new to me. I had been brought up to believe--not that any one does believe this as an actual fact--that Ireland was once and to some extent still is, an island of Saints and Scholars. I did not obtain any very clear idea of what Mrs. Ascher's blood was diluted with, but there must have been several ingredients, for she went on talking for quite a long time. When she stopped I made a protest on behalf of my country.

"We're not so backward as all that," I said. "We have a Board of National Education and quite a large number of technical schools. In the convents they teach girls to play the piano."

Mrs. Ascher shook her head slowly. I gathered that she knew much more about Irish education than I did and regarded it as unworthy even of serious contempt.

"Dear Ireland!" she said, "splendid Ireland!"

I suppose Gorman must have been talking to her about fairies, the dignified, Celtic kind, and the dear dark head of Kathaleen ni Houlihan.

Gorman is capable of anything. However as my country was being admired I thought I might as well get a little of the credit for myself.

"I am an Irishman," I said.

Mrs. Ascher looked at me with withering scorn.

"You," she said, "you--you--you are----"

She was evidently in difficulties. I helped her out as best I could.

"An Irish gentleman," I said.

"An alien," she replied, "a stranger in the land you call your own."

"That," I said, "is just what I say, put more forcibly and picturesquely."

Then Gorman came in, without knocking at the door. I was very glad to see him. In another minute Mrs. Ascher and I would, perhaps, have quarrelled. Gorman saved us from that catastrophe. I do not think I ever understood before that moment the secret of Gorman's charm. He came into that studio, a place charged with the smell of damp clay, like a breeze from a nice green field. He was in a thoroughly good temper. I suspect that he hurt Mrs. Ascher's hand when he shook it.

"I've just been looking at Mrs. Ascher's statue of your soul," I said.

"Splendid muscles in the calves of its legs. You must be enormously proud of them."

Gorman, under pretence of seeking a place in which to put his hat, turned his back on Mrs. Ascher for a minute. As he did so he deliberately winked at me.

Some day I mean to get Gorman in a private place, "away from everywhere," as Mrs. Ascher would say. When I get him there I shall ask him two questions and insist on having an answer. First I shall ask him why he devotes himself to Mrs. Ascher. He is not in love with her. We Irish have not many virtues, but we can boast that we seldom make love to other men's wives. Besides, Mrs. Ascher is not the kind of woman who allows strange men to make love to her. She is, in essentials, far less emanc.i.p.ated than she thinks. It is just possible that he finds her responsive to his fondness for the more flamboyant kinds of rhetoric.

Gorman really likes talking about Ireland as an oppressed and desolated land. It is easy enough to move large audiences to enthusiasm by that kind of oratory. It is not so easy, I imagine, to get single, sympathetic listeners in private life. Mrs. Ascher apparently laps up patriotic sentiment with loud purrs. That may be why Gorman likes her.

The next thing I mean to ask him is what he means by patriotism. I can understand quite easily what Irish patriotism meant ten years ago.

Gorman's friends wanted my land, a definite, tangible thing. I wanted it myself. But now they have got the land, and yet Gorman goes on talking patriotism. It is not as if he had no sense of humour. Gorman sees the absurdity of the things he says just as plainly as I do. The ridiculous side of his own enthusiasm is never long absent from his consciousness; yet he goes on just the same. I wish I understood how he manages it.

CHAPTER IX.

Now that my leg has been smashed up hopelessly, by that wretched German sh.e.l.l, I shall never ride or shoot again. I have to content myself with writing books to occupy my time, a very poor form of amus.e.m.e.nt compared to tramping the fields after partridge. I suppose it is inevitable that a man in my position should indulge in regretful memories. My mind goes back now and then to certain days in my boyhood and I find myself picturing scenes through which I shall not move again.

There are fields stretching back from the demesne which used to be mine.

In the autumn many of them were stubble fields and among them were gorse covered hills. I used to go through them with my gun and dogs in early October mornings. There were--no doubt there still are--though I shall not see them--very fine threads of gossamer stretching across astonishingly wide s.p.a.ces. The dew hung on them in tiny drops and glittered when the sun rose clear of the light mist and shone on them.

Sometimes the threads floated free in the air, attached to some object at one end, the rest borne about by faint breaths of wind, waved to and fro, seeking other attachment elsewhere. Some threads reached from tufts of gra.s.s to little hummocks or to the twigs which form the boles of elm trees. Others still, with less ambitious span, went only from one blade of gra.s.s to another or united the thorns of whin bushes. The lower air, near the earth, was full of these threads. They formed an indescribably delicate net cast right over the fields and hills. I used to see them glistening, rainbow coloured when the sun rays struck them. Oftener I was aware of their presence only when my hands had touched and broken them or when they clung to my clothes, dragged from their fastenings by my pa.s.sing through them.

I have no idea what place these gossamer threads occupy in the economy of nature. I find it difficult to believe that the life of the fields and gorsy hills and young plantations would be either better or worse if there were no such thing as gossamer. But I am no longer contented with my ignorance. I mean to find out all that is known about gossamer, and satisfy myself of the truth of the tradition that the threads are spun by tiny spiders, though surely with very little hope of snaring flies.

I spent six months making the tour which Ascher planned for me. I returned to London in the spring of 1914, full of interest in what I had seen and learned. I intend some day to write a book of travels, to give an account of my experiences. I shall describe the long strip of the world over which I wandered as a landscape on a quiet autumn morning, netted over with gossamer. That is the way it strikes me now, looking back on it all. Ascher and men like him have spun fine threads, covering every civilised land with a web of credit, infinitely complex, so delicate that a child's hand could tear it.

A storm, even a strong breeze comes, and the threads are dragged from their holdings and waved in wild confusion through the air. A man, brutal as war, goes striding through the land, and, without knowing what he does, bursts the filaments and destroys the shimmering beauty which was before he came. That, I suppose, is what happens. But the pa.s.sing of a man, however violent he is, is the pa.s.sing of a man and no more. Even if a troop of men marches across the land their marching is over and done with soon. They have their day, but afterwards there are other days. Nature is infinitely persistent and gossamer is spun again.

I remember meeting, quite by chance, on a coasting steamer on which I travelled, a bishop. He was not, judged by strict ecclesiastical standards, quite ent.i.tled to that rank. He belonged to some American religious organisation of which I had no knowledge, but he called himself, on the pa.s.senger list, Bishop Zacchary Brown. He was apostolic in his devotion to the Gospel as he understood it. His particular field of work lay in the northern part of South America. He ranged, so I understood, through Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. He was full of hope for the future of these lands, their spiritual future. I had long talks with him and discovered that he regarded education, the American form of it, and commerce, the fruit of American enterprise, as the enemies of superst.i.tion and consequently the handmaids of the Gospel.

He wanted to see schools and colleges scattered over the republic in which he was interested. He wanted to see these lands heavily fertilised with capital.

"If you have any spare money," he said, "put it into----"

I think he said fruit farming in Colombia. Whatever the business was--I forgot at the time to make a note of the particulars--he promised that it would develop enormously when the Panama Ca.n.a.l was opened. The advice may have been perfectly sound; but I do not think it was disinterested.

Bishop Zacchary Brown was not anxious about my future or my fortune. He did not care, cannot have cared, whether the Panama Ca.n.a.l made me rich or not. Nor did it seem to him an important thing that the fruit trade of South America should develop. What he cared for was his conception of religion. He saw in the inflow of capital the way of triumph for his Gospel, the means of breaking up old careless, lazy creeds, the infusion of energy and love of freedom. Ascher, so I conceived the situation, was to stretch his threads from Calvary to the grapefruit trees of Cartagena.

At Bahia I was introduced to a Brazilian statesman. I met him first at the house of one of Ascher's banker friends. We talked to each other in French, and, as we both spoke the language badly, understood each other without much difficulty. It is one of the peculiarities of the French language that the worse it is spoken the easier it is to understand. A real Parisian baffles me completely. My Brazilian statesman was almost always intelligible.