The Daughters of Danaus Part 54

"Have you ever been to France before, ma'am?" Hannah asked, perhaps noticing the sparkle of her employer's eye and the ring in her voice.

"Yes, once; I spent a week in Paris with Mr. Temperley, and we went on afterwards to the Pyrenees. That was just before we took the Red House."

"It must have been beautiful," said Hannah. "And did you take the babies, ma'am?"

"They were neither of them in existence then," replied Mrs. Temperley. A strange fierce light pa.s.sed through her eyes for a second, but Hannah did not notice it. Martha's shawl was blowing straight into her eyes, and the nurse was engaged in arranging it more comfortably.

The coast of France had become clear, some time ago; they were making the pa.s.sage very quickly to-day. Soon the red roofs of Boulogne were to be distinguished, with the grey dome of the cathedral on the hill-top.

Presently, the boat had arrived in the bright old town, and every detail of outline and colour was standing forth brilliantly, as if the whole scene had been just washed over with clear water and all the tints were wet.

The first impression was keen. The innumerable differences from English forms and English tones sprang to the eye. A whiff of foreign smell and a sound of foreign speech reached the pa.s.sengers at about the same moment. The very houses looked unfamiliarly built, and even the letters of printed names of hotels and shops had a frivolous, spindly appearance--elegant but frail. The air was different from English air.

Some _bouillon_ and a slice of fowl were very acceptable at the restaurant at the station, after the business of examining the luggage was over. Hannah, evidently nourishing a sense of injury against the natives for their eccentric jargon, and against the universe for the rush and discomfort of the last quarter of an hour, was disposed to express her feelings by a marked lack of relish for her food. She regarded Hadria's hearty appet.i.te with a disdainful expression. Martha ate bread and b.u.t.ter and fruit. She was to have some milk that had been brought for her, when they were _en route_ again.

"_Tout le monde en voiture!_" Within five minutes, the train was puffing across the wastes of blowing sand that ran along the coast, beyond the town. The child, who had become accustomed to the noise and movement, behaved better than had been expected. She seemed to take pleasure in looking out of the window at the pa.s.sing trees. Hannah was much struck with this sign of awakening intelligence. It was more than the good nurse showed herself. She scarcely condescended to glance at the panorama of French fields, French hills and streams that were rushing by. How pale and ethereal they were, these Gallic coppices and woodlands! And with what a dainty lightness the foliage spread itself to the sun, French to its graceful finger-tips! That grey old house, with high lichen-stained roof and narrow windows--where but in sunny France could one see its like?--and the little farmsteads and villages, full of indescribable charm. One felt oneself in a land of artists. There was no inharmonious, no unfitting thing anywhere. Man had wedded himself to Nature, and his works seemed to receive her seal and benediction.

English landscape was beautiful, and it had a particular charm to be found nowhere else in the world; but in revenge, there was something here that England could not boast. Was it fanciful to see in the characteristics of vegetation and scenery, the origin or expression of the difference of the two races at their greatest?

"Ah, if I were only a painter!"

They were pa.s.sing some fields where, in the slanting rays of the sun, peasants in blue blouses and several women were bending over their toil.

It was a subject often chosen by French artists. Hadria understood why.

One of the labourers stood watching the train, and she let her eyes rest on the patient figure till she was carried beyond his little world. If she could have painted that scene just as she saw it, all the sadness and mystery of the human lot would have stood forth eloquently in form and colour; these a magic harmony, not without some inner kinship with the spirit of man at its n.o.blest.

What was he thinking, that toil-bent peasant, as the train flashed by?

What tragedy or comedy was he playing on his rural stage? Hadria sat down and shut her eyes, dazzled by the complex mystery and miracle of life, and almost horrified at the overwhelming thought of the millions of these obscure human lives burning themselves out, everywhere, at every instant, like so many altar-candles to the unknown G.o.d!

"And each one of them takes himself as seriously as I take myself: perhaps more seriously. Ah, if one could but pause to smile at one's tragic moments, or still better, at one's sublime ones. But it can't be done. A remembrancer would have to be engaged, to prevent lapses into the sublime,--and how furious one would be when he nudged one, with his eternal: 'Beware!'"

It was nearly eight o'clock when the train plunged among the myriad lights of the great city. The brilliant beacon of the Eiffel Tower sat high up in the sky, like an exile star.

Gaunt and grim was the vast station, with its freezing purplish electric light. Yet even here, to Hadria's stirred imagination, there was a certain quality in the t.i.tanic building, which removed it from the vulgarity of English utilitarian efforts of the same order.

In a fanciful mood, one might imagine a tenth circle of the Inferno, wherein those stern grey arches should loftily rise, in blind and endless sequence, limbing an abode of horror, a place of punishment for those, empty-hearted, who had lived without colour and sunshine, in voluntary abnegation, caring only for gain and success.

The long delay in the examination of the luggage, the fatigue of the journey, tended to increase the disposition to regard the echoing edifice, with its cold hollow reverberations, as a Circle of the Doomed.

It was as if they pa.s.sed from the realm of the Shades through the Gates of Life, when at length the cab rattled out of the courtyard of the station, and turned leftwards into the brilliant streets of Paris. It was hard to realize that all this stir and light and life had been going on night after night, for all these years, during which one had sat in the quiet drawing-room at Craddock Dene, trying wistfully, hopelessly, to grasp the solid fact of an unknown vast reality, through a record here and there. The journey was a long one to the Rue Boissy d'Anglas, but tired as she was, Hadria did not wish it shorter. Even Hannah was interested in the brilliantly lighted shops and _cafes_ and the splendour of the boulevards. Now and again, the dark deserted form of a church loomed out, lonely, amidst the gaiety of Parisian street-life.

Some electric lamp threw a distant gleam upon calm cla.s.sic pillars, which seemed to hold aloof, with a quality of reserve rarely to be noticed in things Parisian. Hadria greeted it with a feeling of grat.i.tude.

The great Boulevard was ablaze and swarming with life. The _cafes_ were full; the gilt and mirrors and the crowds of _consommateurs_ within, all visible as one pa.s.sed along the street, while, under the awning outside, crowds were sitting smoking, drinking, reading the papers.

Was it really possible that only this morning, those quiet English fields had been dozing round one, those sleepy villagers spreading their slow words out, in expressing an absence of idea, over the s.p.a.ce of time in which a Parisian conveyed a pocket philosophy?

The cabman directed his vehicle down the Rue Royale, pa.s.sing the stately Madeleine, with its guardian sycamores, and out into the windy s.p.a.ciousness of the Place de la Concorde.

A wondrous city! Hannah pointed out the electric light of the Eiffel Tower to her charge, and Martha put out her small hands, demanding the toy on the spot.

The festooned lights of the Champs Elysees swung themselves up, in narrowing line, till they reached the pompous arch at the summit, and among the rich trees of those Elysian fields gleamed the festive lamps of _cafes chantants_.

"_Si Madame desire encore quelque chose?_" The neat maid, in picturesque white cap and ap.r.o.n, stood with her hand on the door of the little bedroom, on one of the highest storeys of the _pension_. Half of one of the long windows had been set open, and the sounds of the rolling of vehicles over the smooth asphalte, mingled with those of voices, were coming up, straight and importunate, into the dainty bedroom. The very sounds seemed nearer and clearer in this keen-edged land. The bed stood in one corner, canopied with white and blue; a thick carpet gave a sense of luxury and deadened the tramp of footsteps; a marble mantel-piece was surmounted by a mirror, and supported a handsome bronze clock and two bronze ornaments. The furniture was of solid mahogany. A nameless French odour pervaded the atmosphere, delicate, subtle, but unmistakeable. And out of the open window, one could see a series of other lighted windows, all of exactly the same tall graceful design, opening in the middle by the same device and the same metal handle that had to be turned in order to open or close the window. Within, the rooms obviously modelled themselves on the one unvarying ideal. A few figures could be seen coming and going, busy at work or play. Above the steep roofs, a blue-black sky was alive with brilliant stars.

"_Merci;_" Madame required nothing more.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

"... Rushes life on a race As the clouds the clouds chase; And we go, And we drop like the fruits of the tree, Even we, Even so."

Just at first, it was a sheer impossibility to do anything but bask and bathe in the sunny present, to spend the days in wandering incredulously through vernal Paris, over whose bursting freshness and brilliancy the white clouds seemed to be driven, with the same joy of life. The city was crammed; the inhabitants poured forth in swarms to enjoy, in true French fashion, the genial warmth and the universal awakening after the long capricious winter. It was actually hot in the sun, and fresh light clothing became a luxury, like a bath after a journey. The year had raised its siege, and there was sudden amity between man and Nature.

Shrivelled man could relax the tension of resistance to cold and damp and change, and go forth into the sun with cordial _insouciance_. In many of the faces might be read this kindly amnesty, although there were some so set and fixed with past cares that not even the soft hand of a Parisian spring could smooth away the lines, or even touch the spirit.

These Hadria pa.s.sed with an aching pity. Circ.u.mstance had been to them a relentless taskmaster. Perhaps they had not rubbed the magic ring of will, and summoned the obedient genius. Perhaps circ.u.mstance had forbidden them even the rag wherewith to rub--or the impulse.

Sallying forth from the _pension_, Hadria would sometimes pause, for a moment, at the corner of the street, where it opened into the Place de la Concorde, irresolute, because of the endless variety of possible ways to turn, and places to visit. She seldom made definite plans the day before, unless it were for the pleasure of changing them. The letter of introduction to Madame Vauchelet had remained unpresented. The sense of solitude, combined for the first time with that of freedom, was too delightful to forego. One must have time to realize and appreciate the sudden calm and serenity; the sudden absence of claims and obstructions and hara.s.sing criticisms. Heavens, what a price people consented to pay for the privilege of human ties! what hard bargains were driven in the kingdom of the affections! Thieves, extortionists, usurers--and in the name of all the virtues!

"Yes, solitude has charms!" Hadria inwardly exclaimed, as she stood watching the coming and going of people, the spouting of fountains, the fluttering of big sycamore leaves in the Champs Elysees.

Unhappily, the solitude made difficulties. But meanwhile there was a large field to be explored, where these difficulties did not arise, or could be guarded against. Her s.e.x was a troublesome obstruction. "One does not come of centuries of chattel-women for nothing!" she wrote to Algitha. Society bristled with insults, conscious and unconscious. Nor had one lived the brightest, sweetest years of one's life tethered and impounded, without feeling the consequences when the tether was cut.

There were dreads, shrinkings, bewilderments, confusions to encounter; the difficulties of pilotage in unknown seas, of self-knowledge, and guidance suddenly needed in new ranges of the soul; fresh temptations, fresh possibilities to deal with; everything untested, the alphabet of worldly experience yet to learn.

But all this was felt with infinitely greater force a little later, when the period of solitude was over, and Hadria found herself in the midst of a little society whose real codes and ideas she had gropingly to learn. Unfamiliar (in any practical sense) with life, even in her own country, she had no landmarks or finger-posts, of any kind, in this new land. Her sentiment had never been narrowly British, but now she realized her nationality over-keenly; she felt herself almost grotesquely English, and had a sense of insular clumsiness amidst a uprightly, dexterous people. Conscious of a thousand illusive, but very real differences in point of view, and in nature, between the two nations, she had a baffled impression of walking among mysteries and novelties that she could not grasp. She began to be painfully conscious of the effects of the narrow life that she had led, and of the limitations that had crippled her in a thousand ways. .h.i.therto scarcely realized.

"One begins to learn everything too late," she wrote to Algitha. "This ought all to have been familiar long ago. I don't know anything about the world in which I live. I have never before caught so much as a distant glimpse of it. And even now there are strange thick wrappings from the past that cling tight round and hold me aloof, strive as I may to strip off that past-made personality, and to understand, by touch, what things are made of. I feel as if I would risk anything in order to really know that. Why should a woman treat herself as if she were Dresden china? She is more or less insulted and degraded whatever happens, especially if she obeys what our generation is pleased to call the moral law. The more I see of life, the more hideous seems the position that women hold in relation to the social structure, and the more sickening the current nonsense that is talked about us and our 'missions' and 'spheres.' It is so feeble, so futile, to try to ornament an essentially degrading fact. It is such insolence to talk to us--good heavens, to _us!_--about holiness and sacredness, when men (to whom surely a sense of humour has been denied) divide their women into two great cla.s.ses, both of whom they insult and enslave, insisting peremptorily on the existence of each division, but treating one cla.s.s as private and the other as public property. One might as well talk to driven cattle in the shambles about their 'sacred mission' as to women.

It is an added mockery, a gratuitous piece of insolence."

Having been, from childhood, more or less at issue with her surroundings, Hadria had never fully realized their power upon her personality. But now daily a fresh recognition of her continued imprisonment, baffled her attempt to look at things with clear eyes. She struggled to get round and beyond that past-fashioned self, not merely in order to see truly, but in order to see at all. And in doing so, she ran the risk of letting go what she might have done better to hold. She felt painfully different from these people among whom she found herself.

Her very trick of pondering over things sent her spinning to hopeless distances. They seemed to ponder so wholesomely little. Their intelligence was devoted to matters of the moment; they were keen and well-finished and accomplished. Hadria used to look at them in astonishment. How did these quick-witted people manage to escape the importunate inquisitive demon, the familiar spirit, who pursued her incessantly with his queries and suggestions? He would stare up from river and street and merry gardens; his haunting eyes looked mockingly out of green realms of stirring foliage, and his voice was like a sardonic echo to the happy voices of the children, laughing at their play under the flickering shadows, of mothers discussing their cares and interests, of men in blouses, at work by the water-side, or solemn, in frock-coats, with pre-occupations of business and bread-winning. The demon had his own reflections on all these seemingly ordinary matters, and so bizarre were they at times, so startling and often so terrible, that one found oneself shivering in full noontide, or smiling, or thrilled with pa.s.sionate pity at "the sad, strange ways of men."

It was sweet to stretch one's cramped wings to the sun, to ruffle and spread them, as a released bird will, but it was startling to find already little stiff habits arisen, little creaks and hindrances never suspected, that made flight in the high air not quite effortless and serene.

The Past is never past; immortal as the G.o.ds, it lives enthroned in the Present, and sets its limits and lays its commands.

Cases have been known of a man blind from birth being restored to sight, at mature age. For a time, the appearance of objects was strange and incomprehensible. Their full meaning was not conveyed to him; they remained riddles. He could not judge the difference between near and far, between solid and liquid; he had no experience, dating from childhood, of the apparent smallness of distant things, of the connexion between the impression given to the touch by solids and their effect on the eye. He had all these things to learn. A thousand trifling a.s.sociations, of which those with normal senses are scarcely conscious, had to be stumblingly acquired, as a child learns to connect sound and sight, in learning to read.

Such were the changes of consciousness that Hadria found herself going through; only realising each phase of the process after it was over, and the previous confusion of vision had been itself revealed, by the newly and often painfully acquired co-ordinating skill.

But, as generally happens, in the course of pa.s.sing from ignorance to knowledge, the intermediate stage was chaotic. Objects loomed up large and indistinct, as through a mist; vague forms drifted by, half revealed, to melt away again; here and there were clear outlines and solid impressions, to be deemed trustworthy and given a place of honour; thence a disproportion in the general conception; it being almost beyond human power to allow sufficiently for that which is unknown.

For some time, however, the dominant impression on Hadria's mind was of her own gigantic ignorance. This ignorance was far more confusing and even misleading than it had been when its proportions were less defined.

The faint twinkle of light revealed the dusky outline, bewildering and discouraging the imagination. Intuitive knowledge was disturbed by the incursion of sc.r.a.ps of disconnected experience. This condition of mind made her an almost insoluble psychological problem. Since she was evidently a woman of p.r.o.nounced character, her bewilderment and tentative att.i.tude were not allowed for. Her actions were regarded as deliberate and cool-headed, when often they would be the outcome of sheer confusion, or chance, or perhaps of a groping experimental effort.

The first three weeks in Paris had been given up to enjoying the new conditions of existence. But now practical matters claimed consideration.

The _pension_ in the Rue Boissy d'Anglas was not suitable as a permanent abode. Rooms must be looked for, combining cheapness with a good situation, within easy distance of the scene of Hadria's future musical studies, and also within reach of some park or gardens for Martha's benefit.

This ideal place of abode was at last found. It cost rather more than Hadria had wished to spend on mere lodging, but otherwise it seemed perfect. It was in a quiet street between the Champs Elysees and the river. Two great thoroughfares ran, at a respectful distance, on either side, with omnibuses always pa.s.sing. Hadria could be set down within a few minutes' walk of the School of Music, or, if she liked to give the time, could walk the whole way to her morning's work, through some of the most charming parts of Paris. As for Martha, she was richly provided with playgrounds. The Bois could be quickly reached, and there were always the Champs Elysees or the walk beneath the chestnuts by the river, along the Cours de la Reine and the length of the quays. Even Hannah thought the situation might do. Hadria had begun her studies at the School of Music, and found the steady work not only a profound, though somewhat stern enjoyment, but a solid backbone to her new existence, giving it cohesion and form. Recreation deserved its name, after work of this kind. Any lurking danger of too great speculative restlessness disappeared. There had been a moment when the luxurious joy of mere wandering observation and absorption, threatened to become overwhelming, and to loosen some of the rivets of the character.

But work was to the sum-total of impulse what the central weight was to one of Martha's toys: a leaden ballast that always brought the balance right again, however wildly the little tyrant might swing the creature off the perpendicular. When Hadria used to come in, pleasantly tired with her morning's occupation, and the wholesome heat of the sun, to take her simple _dejeuner_ in the little apartment with Martha, a frivolous five minutes would often be spent by the two in endeavouring to overcome the rigid principles of that well-balanced plaything. But always the dead weight at its heart frustrated their attempts. Martha played the most inconsiderate pranks with its centre of gravity, but quite in vain. When a little French boy from the _etage_ above was allowed to come and play with Martha, she proceeded to experiment upon _his_ centre of gravity in the same way, and seemed much surprised when Jean Paul Auguste not only howled indignantly, but didn't swing up again after he was overturned. He remained supine, and had to be reinstated by Hadria and Hannah, and comforted with sweetmeats. Martha's logic received one of its first checks. She evidently made up her mind that logic was a fallacious mode of inference, and determined to abandon it for the future. These rebuffs in infancy, Hadria conjectured, might account for much!