Peter Ibbetson Part 35

For whoever remembers having once been you, wakes you for the nonce out of--nirvana, shall we say? His strength, his beauty, and his wit are yours; and the felicity he derives from them in this earthly life is for you to share, whenever this subtle remembrance of you stirs in his consciousness; and you can never quite sink back again into--nirvana, till all your future wakers shall cease to be!

It is like a little old-fashioned French game we used to play at Pa.s.sy, and which is not bad for a dark, rainy afternoon: people sit all round in a circle, and each hands on to his neighbor a spill or a lucifer-match just blown out, but in which a little live spark still lingers; saying, as he does so--

_"Pet.i.t bonhomme vit encore!"_

And he, in whose hand the spark becomes extinct, has to pay forfeit and retire--"Helas! pet.i.t bonhomme n'est plus! ... Pauv' pet.i.t bonhomme!"

Ever thus may a little live spark of your own individual consciousness, when the full, quick flame of your actual life here below is extinguished, be handed down mildly incandescent to your remotest posterity. May it never quite go out--it need not! May you ever be able to say of yourself, from generation to generation, "Pet.i.t bonhomme vit encore!" and still keep one finger at least in the pleasant earthly pie!

And, reader, remember so to order your life on earth that the memory of you (like that of Gatienne, la belle Verriere de Verny le Moustier) may smell sweet and blossom in the dust--a memory pleasant to recall--to this end that its recallings and its recallers may be as numerous as filial love and ancestral pride can make them....

And oh! looking _backward_ (as _we_ did), be tender to the failings of your forbears, who little guessed when alive that the secrets of their long buried hearts should one day be revealed to _you_! Their faults are really your own, like the faults of your innocent, ignorant childhood, so to say, when you did not know better, as you do now; or will soon, thanks to

_"Le Chant du Triste Commensal!"_

Wherefore, also, beware and be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall club-footed retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at every turn! Most remorselessly, most vindictively, will you be aroused, in sleepless hours of unbearable misery (future-waking nightmares), from your false, uneasy dream of death; to partic.i.p.ate in an inheritance of woe still worse than yours--worse with all the acc.u.mulated interest of long years and centuries of iniquitous self-indulgence, and poisoned by the sting of a self-reproach that shall never cease till the last of your tainted progeny dies out, and finds his true nirvana, and yours, in the dim, forgetful depths of interstellar s.p.a.ce!

And here let me most conscientiously affirm that, partly from my keen sense of the solemnity of such an appeal, and the grave responsibility I take upon myself in making it; but more especially in order to impress you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and somewhat minatory utterance (that it may haunt your finer sense during your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my best, my very best, to couch it in the obscurest and most unintelligible phraseology I could invent. If I have failed to do this, if I have unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense--mere common-sense--it is the fault of my half-French and wholly imperfect education. I am but a poor scribe!

Thus roughly have I tried to give an account of this, the most important of our joint discoveries in the strange new world revealed to us by chance. More than twenty years of our united lives have been devoted to the following out of this slender clew--with what surprising results will, I trust, be seen in subsequent volumes.

We have not had time to attempt the unravelling of our English ancestry as well--the Crays, and the Desmonds, the Ibbetsons, and Biddulphs, etc.--which connects us with the past history of England. The farther we got back into France, the more fascinating it became, and the easier--and the more difficult to leave.

What an unexampled experience has been ours! To think that we have seen--actually seen--_de nos propres yeux vu_--Napoleon Bonaparte himself, the arch-arbiter of the world, on the very pinnacle of his pride and power; in his little c.o.c.ked hat and gray double-breasted overcoat, astride his white charger, with all his staff around him, just as he has been so often painted! Surely the most impressive, unforgettable, ineffaceable little figure in all modern history, and clothed in the most cunningly imagined make-up that ever theatrical costumier devised to catch the public eye and haunt the public memory for ages and ages yet to come!

It is a singularly new, piquant, and exciting sensation to stare in person, and as in the present, at bygone actualities, and be able to foretell the past and remember the future all in one!

To think that we have even beheld him before he was first consul--slim and pale, his lank hair dangling down his neck and cheeks, if possible more impressive still as innocent as a child of all that lay before him!

Europe at his feet--the throne--Waterloo-St. Helena--the Iron English Duke--the pinnacle turned into a pillory so soon!

_"O corse a cheveux plats, que la France etait belle Au soleil de Messidor!"_

And Mirabeau and Robespierre, and Danton and Marat and Charlotte Corday!

we have seen them too; and Marie Antoinette and the fish-wives, and "the beautiful head of Lamballe" (on its pike!) ... and watched the tumbrils go by to the Place du Carrousel, and gazed at the guillotine by moonlight--silent and terror-stricken, our very hearts in our mouths....

And in the midst of it all, ridiculous stray memories of Madame Tussaud would come stealing into our ghastly dream of blood and retribution, mixing up past and present and future in a manner not to be described, and making us smile through our tears!

Then we were present (several times!) at the taking of the Bastille, and indeed witnessed most of the stormy scenes of that stormy time, with our Carlyle in our hands; and often have we thought, and with many a hearty laugh, what fun it must be to write immortal histories, with never an eye-witness to contradict you!

And going further back we have haunted Versailles in the days of its splendor, and drunk our fill of all the glories of the court of Louis XIV!

What imposing ceremonials, what stupendous royal functions have we not attended--where all the beauty, wit, and chivalry of France, prostrate with reverence and awe (as in the very presence of a G.o.d), did loyal homage to the greatest monarch this world has ever seen--while we sat by, on the very steps of his throne, as he solemnly gave out his royal command! and laughed aloud under his very nose--the shallow, silly, pompous little sn.o.b--and longed to pull it! and tried to disinfect his greasy, civet-scented, full-bottomed wig with wholesome whiffs from a nineteenth-century regalia!

Nothing of that foolish but fascinating period escaped us. Town, hamlet, river, forest, and field; royal palace, princely castle, and starving peasants' hut; pulpit, stage, and salon; port, camp, and marketplace; tribunal and university; factory, shop, studio, smithy; tavern and gambling-h.e.l.l and den of thieves; convent and jail, torture-chamber and gibbet-close, and what not all!

And at every successive step our once desponding, over-anxious, over-burdened latter-day souls have swelled with joy and pride and hope at the triumphs of our own day all along the line! Yea, even though we have heard the ill.u.s.trious Bossuet preach, and applauded Moliere in one of his own plays, and gazed at and listened to (and almost forgiven) Racine and Corneille, and Boileau and Fenelon, and the good Lafontaine--those five ruthless persecutors of our own innocent French childhood!

And still ascending the stream of time, we have hobn.o.bbed with Montaigne and Rabelais, and been personally bored by Malherbe, and sat at Ronsard's feet, and ridden by Froissart's side, and slummed with Francois Villon--in what enchanted slums! ...

Francois Villon! Think of that, ye fond British bards and bardlets of to-day--ye would-be translators and imitators of that never-to-be-translated, never-to-be-imitated lament, the immortal _Ballade des Dames du Temps jadis_!

And while I speak of it, I may as well mention that we have seen them too, or some of them--those fair ladies _he_ had never seen, and who had already melted away before his coming, like the snows of yester year, _les neiges d'antan!_ Bertha, with the big feet; Joan of Arc, the good Lorrainer (what would she think of her native province now!); the very learned Helose, for love of whom one Peter Esbaillart, or Abelard (a more luckless Peter than even I!), suffered such cruel indignities at monkish hands; and that haughty, naughty queen, in her Tower of Nesle,

_"Qui commanda que Buridan Fut jecte en ung Sac en Seine...."_

Yes, we have seen them with the eye, and heard them speak and sing, and scold and jest, and laugh and weep, and even pray! And I have sketched them, as you shall see some day, good reader! And let me tell you that their beauty was by no means maddening: the standard of female loveliness has gone up, even in France! Even _la tres sage Helos_ was scarcely worth such a sacrifice as--but there! Possess your soul in patience; all that, and it is all but endless, will appear in due time, with such descriptions and ill.u.s.trations as I flatter myself the world has never bargained for, and will value as it has never valued any historical records yet!

Day after day, for more than twenty years, Mary has kept a voluminous diary (in a cipher known to us both); it is now my property, and in it every detail of our long journey into the past has been set down.

Contemporaneously, day by day (during the leisure accorded to me by the kindness of Governor----) I have drawn over again from memory the sketches of people and places I was able to make straight from nature during those wonderful nights at "Magna sed Apta." I can guarantee the correctness of them, and the fidelity of their likenesses; no doubt their execution leaves much to be desired.

Both her task and mine (to the future publication of which this autobiography is but an introduction) have been performed with the minutest care and conscientiousness; no time or trouble have been spared. For instance, the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew alone, which we were able to study from seventeen different points of view, cost us no less than two months' unremitting labor.

As we reached further and further back through the stream of time, the task became easier in a way; but we have had to generalize more, and often, for want of time and s.p.a.ce, to use types in lieu of individuals.

For with every successive generation the number of our progenitors increased in geometrical progression (as in the problem of the nails in the horseshoe) until a limit of numbers was reached--namely, the sum of the inhabitants of the terrestrial globe. In the seventh century there was not a person living in France (not to mention Europe) who was not in the line of our direct ancestry, excepting, of course, those who had died without issue and were mere collaterals.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE MAMMOTH."]

We have even just been able to see, as in a gla.s.s darkly, the faint shadows of the Mammoth and the cave bear, and of the man who hunted and killed and ate them, that he might live and prevail.

The Mammoth!

We have walked round him and under him as he browsed, and even _through_ him where he lay and rested, as one walks through the dun mist in a little hollow on a still, damp morning; and turning round to look (at the proper distance) there was the unmistakable shape again, just thick enough to blot out the lines of the dim primeval landscape beyond, and make a hole in the blank sky. A dread silhouette, thrilling our hearts with awe--blurred and indistinct like a composite photograph--merely the _type_, as it had been seen generally by all who had ever seen it at all, every one of whom _(exceptis excipiendis)_ was necessarily an ancestor of ours, and of every man now living.

There it stood or reclined, the monster, like the phantom of an overgrown hairy elephant; we could almost see, or fancy we saw, the expression of his dull, cold, antediluvian eye--almost perceive a suggestion of russet-brown in his fell.

Mary firmly believed that we should have got in time to our hairy ancestor with pointed ears and a tail, and have been able to ascertain whether he was arboreal in his habits or not. With what pa.s.sionate interest she would have followed and studied and described him! And I!

With what eager joy, and yet with what filial reverence, I would have sketched his likeness--with what conscientious fidelity as far as my poor powers would allow! (For all we know to the contrary he may have been the most attractive and engaging little beast that ever was, and far less humiliating to descend from than many a t.i.tled yahoo of the present day.)

Fate, alas, has willed that it should be otherwise, and on others, duly trained, must devolve the delightful task of following up the clew we have been so fortunate as to discover.

And now the time has come for me to tell as quickly as I may the story of my bereavement--a bereavement so immense that no man, living or dead, can ever have experienced the like; and to explain how it is that I have not only survived it and kept my wits (which some people seem to doubt), but am here calmly and cheerfully writing my reminiscences, just as if I were a famous Academician, actor, novelist, statesman, or general diner-out--blandly garrulous and well-satisfied with myself and the world.

During the latter years of our joint existence Mary and I engrossed by our fascinating journey through the centuries, had seen little or nothing of each other's outer lives, or rather I had seen nothing of hers (for she still came back sometimes with me to my jail); I only saw her as she chose to appear in our dream.

Perhaps at the bottom of this there may have been a feminine dislike on her part to be seen growing older, for at "Magna sed Apta" we were always twenty-eight or thereabouts--at our very best. We had truly discovered the fountain of perennial youth, and had drunk thereof! And in our dream we always felt even younger than we looked; we had the buoyancy of children and their freshness.

Often had we talked of death and separation and the mystery beyond, but only as people do for whom such contingencies are remote; yet in reality time flew as rapidly for us as for others, although we were less sensible of its flight.

There came a day when Mary's exuberant vitality, so constantly overtaxed, broke down, and she was ill for a while; although that did not prevent our meeting as usual, and there was no perceptible difference in her when we met. But I am certain that in reality she was never quite the same again as she had been, and the dread possibility of parting any day would come up oftener in our talk; in our minds, only too often, and our minds were as one.

She knew that if I died first, everything I had brought into "Magna sed Apta" (and little it was) would be there no more; even to my body, ever lying supine on the couch by the enchanted window, it she had woke by chance to our common life before I had, or remained after I had been summoned away to my jail.