Peter Ibbetson Part 32

But to return. With all these temptations of travel and amus.e.m.e.nt and society and the great world, such was our insatiable fondness for "the pretty place of our childhood" and all its a.s.sociations, that our greatest pleasure of all was to live our old life over again and again, and make Gogo and Mimsey and our parents and cousins and M. le Major go through their old paces once more; and to recall _new_ old paces for them, which we were sometimes able to do, out of stray forgotten bits of the past; to hunt for which was the most exciting sport in the world.

Our tenderness for these beloved shades increased with familiarity. We could see all the charm and goodness and kindness of these dear fathers and mothers of ours with the eyes of matured experience, for we were pretty much of an age with them now; no other children could ever say as much since the world began, and how few young parents could bear such a scrutiny as ours.

Ah! what would we not have given to extort just a spark of recognition, but that was impossible; or to have been able to whisper just a word of warning, which would have averted the impending strokes of inexorable fate! They might have been alive now, perhaps--old indeed, but honored and loved as no parents ever were before. How different everything would have been! Alas! alas!

And of all things in the world, we never tired of that walk through the avenue and park and Bois de Boulogne to the Mare d'Auteuil; strolling there leisurely on an early spring afternoon, just in time to spend a midsummer hour or two on its bank, and watch the old water-rat and the dytiscus and the tadpoles and newts, and see the frogs jump; and then walking home at dusk in the school-room of my old home; and then back to war, well-lighted "Magna sed Apta" by moonlight through the avenue on New Year's Eve, ankle-deep in snow; all in a few short hours.

Dream winds and dream weathers--what an enchantment! And all real!

Soft caressing rains that do not wet us if we do not wish them to; sharp frosts that brace but never chill; blazing suns that neither scorch nor dazzle.

Bl.u.s.tering winds of early spring, that seem to sweep right through these solid frames of ours, and thrill us to the very marrow with the old heroic excitement and ecstasy we knew so well in happy childhood, but can no longer feel now when awake!

Bland summer breezes, heavy with the scent of long lost French woods and fields and gardens in full flower; swift, soft, moist equinoctial gales, blowing from the far-off orchards of Meudon, or the old market gardens of Suresnes in their autumnal decay, and laden, we do not know why, with strange, mysterious, troubling reminiscence too subtle and elusive to be expressed in any tongue--too sweet for any words! And then the dark December wind that comes down from the north, and brings the short, early twilights and the snow, and drives us home, pleasantly shivering, to the chimney-corner and the hissing logs--_chez nous!_

It is the last night of an old year--_la veille du jour de l'an_.

Ankle-deep in snow, we walk to warm, well-lighted "Magna sed Apta," up the moonlit avenue. It is dream snow, and yet we feel it crunch beneath our feet; but if we turn to look, the tracks of our footsteps have disappeared--and we cast no shadows, though the moon is full!

M. le Major goes by, and Yverdon the postman, and Pere Francois, with his big sabots, and others, and their footprints remain--and their shadows are strong and sharp!

They wish each other the compliments of the season as they meet and pa.s.s; they wish us nothing! We give them _la bonne annee_ at the tops of our voices; they do not heed us in the least, though our voices are as resonant as theirs. We are wishing them a "Happy New Year," that dawned for good or evil nearly twenty years ago.

Out comes Gogo from the Seraskiers', with Mimsey. He makes a s...o...b..ll and throws it. It flies straight through me, and splashes itself on Pere Francois's broad back. "Ah, ce polisson de Monsieur Gogo ... attendez un peu!" and Pere Francois returns the compliment--straight through me again, as it seems; and I do not even feel it! Mary and I are as solid to each other as flesh and blood can make us. We cannot even touch these dream people without their melting away into thin air; we can only hear and see them, but that in perfection!

There goes that little Andre Corbin, the poulterer's son, running along the slippery top of Madame Pele's garden wall, which is nearly ten feet high.

"Good heavens," cries Mary, "stop him! Don't you remember? When he gets to the corner he'll fall down and break both his legs!"

I rush and bellow out to him--

"Descends donc, malheureux; tu vas te ca.s.ser les deux jambes! Saute!

saute!" ... I cry, holding out my arms. He does not pay the slightest attention: he reaches the corner, followed low down by Gogo and Mimsey, who are beside themselves with generous envy and admiration. Stimulated by their applause, he becomes more foolhardy than ever, and even tries to be droll, and standing on one leg, sings a little song that begins--

_"Maman m'a donne quat' sous Pour m'en aller a la foire, Non pas pour manger ni boire, Alais pour m'regaler d'joujoux!"_

Then suddenly down he slips, poor boy, and breaks both his legs below the knee on an iron rail, whereby he becomes a cripple for life.

All this sad little tragedy of a New-year's Eve plays itself anew. The sympathetic crowd collects; Mimsey and Gogo weep; the heart-broken parents arrive, and the good little doctor Larcher; and Mary and I look on like criminals, so impossible it seems not to feel that we might have prevented it all!

We two alone are alive and substantial in all this strange world of shadows, who seem, as far as we can hear and see, no less substantial and alive than ourselves. They exist for us; we do not exist for them.

We exist for each other only, waking or sleeping; for even the people among whom our waking life is spent know hardly more of us, and what our real existence is, than poor little Andre Corbin, who has just broken his legs for us over again!

[Ill.u.s.tration]

And so, back to "Magna sed Apta," both saddened by this deplorable misadventure, to muse and talk and marvel over these wonders; penetrated to the very heart's core by a dim sense of some vast, mysterious power, latent in the sub-consciousness of man--unheard of, undreamed of as yet, but linking him with the Infinite and the Eternal.

And how many things we always had to talk about besides!

Heaven knows, I am not a brilliant conversationalist, but she was the most easily amusable person in the world--interested in everything that interested me, and I disdamaged myself (to use one of her Anglo-Gallicisms) of the sulky silence of years.

Of her as a companion it is not for me to speak. It would be impertinent, and even ludicrous, for a person in my position to dilate on the social gifts of the famous d.u.c.h.ess of Towers.

Incredible as it may appear, however, most of our conversation was about very common and earthly topics--her homes and refuges, the difficulties of their management, her eternal want of money, her many schemes and plans and experiments and failures and disenchantments--in all of which I naturally took a very warm interest. And then my jail, and all that occurred there--in all of which I became interested myself because it interested her so pa.s.sionately; she knew every corner of it that I knew, every detail of the life there--the name, appearance, and history of almost every inmate, and criticised its internal economy with a practical knowledge of affairs; a business-like sagacity at which I never ceased to marvel.

One of my drollest recollections is of a visit she paid there _in the flesh_, by some famous philanthropists of both s.e.xes.

I was interviewed by them all as the model prisoner, who, for his unorthodoxy, was a credit to the inst.i.tution. She listened demurely to my intelligent answers when I was questioned as to my bodily health, etc., and asked whether I had any complaints to make. Complaints! Never was jail-bird so thoroughly satisfied with his nest--so healthy, so happy, so well-behaved. She took notes all the time.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARY, d.u.c.h.eSS OF TOWERS. From a photograph by Strlkzchuski, Warsaw.]

Eight hours before we had been strolling hand in hand through the Uffizi Gallery in Florence; eight hours later we should be in each other's arms.

Strange to relate, this happiness of ours--so deep, so acute, so transcendent, so unmatched in all the history of human affection--was not always free of unreasonable longings and regrets. Man is never so blessed but what he would have his blessedness still greater.

The reality of our close companionship, of our true possession of each other (during our allotted time), was absolute, complete, and thorough.

No Darby that ever lived can ever have had sweeter, warmer, more tender memories of any Joan than I have now of Mary Seraskier! Although each was, in a way, but a seeming illusion of the other's brain, the illusion was no illusion for us. It was an illusion that showed the truth, as does the illusion of sight. Like twin kernels in one sh.e.l.l ("Philipschen," as Mary called it), we touched at more points and were closer than the rest of mankind (with each of them a separate sh.e.l.l of his own). We tried and tested this in every way we could devise, and never found ourselves at fault, and never ceased to marvel at so great a wonder. For instance, I received letters from her in jail (and answered them) in an intricate cipher we had invented and perfected together entirely during sleep, and referring to things that had happened to us both when together.[A]

[Footnote A: _Note_.--Several of these letters are in my possession.

MADGE PLUNKET.]

Our privileges were such as probably no human beings could have ever enjoyed before. Time and s.p.a.ce were annihilated for us at the mere wish of either--we lived in a palace of delight; all conceivable luxuries were ours--and, better than all, and perennially, such freshness and elation as belong only to the morning of life--and such a love for each other (the result of circ.u.mstances not to be paralleled) as time could never slake or quench till death should come and part us. All this, and more, was our portion for eight hours out of twenty-four.

So what must we do sometimes, but fret that the sixteen hours which remained did not belong to us well; that we must live two-thirds of our lives apart; that we could not share the toils and troubles of our work-a-day, waking existence, as we shared the blissful guerdon of our seeming sleep--the glories of our common dream.

And then we would lament the lost years we had spent in mutual ignorance and separation--a deplorable waste of life; when life, sleeping or waking, was so short.

How different things might have been with us had we but known!

We need never have lost sight and touch of each other; we might have grown up, and learned and worked and struggled together from the first--boy and girl, brother and sister, lovers, man and wife--and yet have found our blessed dream-land and dwelt in it just the same.

Children might have been born to us! Sweet children, _beaux comme le jour_, as in Madame Perrault's fairy tales; even beautiful and good as their mother.

And as we talked of these imaginary little beings and tried to picture them, we felt in ourselves such a stupendous capacity for loving the same that we would fall to weeping on each other's shoulders. Full well I knew, even as if they had formed a part of my own personal experience, all the pa.s.sion and tenderness, all the wasted anguish of her brief, ill-starred motherhood: the very ache of my jealousy that she should have borne a child to another man was forgotten in that keen and thorough comprehension! Ah, yes ... that hungry love, that woful pity, which not to know is hardly quite to have lived! Childless as I am (though old enough to be a grandfather) I have it all by heart!

Never could we hope for son or daughter of our own. For us the blessed flower of love in rich, profuse, unfading bloom; but its blessed fruit of life, never, never, never!

Our only children were Mimsey and Gogo, between whom and ourselves was an impa.s.sable gulf, and who were unconscious of our very existence, except for Mimsey's strange consciousness that a Fairy Tarapatapoum and a Prince Charming were watching over them.

All this would always end, as it could not but end, in our realizing the more fully our utter dependence on each other for all that made life not only worth living, ingrates that we were, but a heaven on earth for us both; and, indeed, we could not but recognize that merely thus to love and be loved was in itself a thing so immense (without all the other blessings we had) that we were fain to tremble at our audacity in daring to wish for more.

Thus sped three years, and would have sped all the rest, perhaps, but for an incident that made an epoch in our joint lives, and turned all our thoughts and energies in a new direction.