Young Lives Part 5

All the arts within their reach they thus shared together,--pictures, music, theatres,--in a fine comrades.h.i.+p. Together they had bravoed the great tragedians, and together hopelessly wors.h.i.+pped the beautiful faces, enskied and sainted, of famous actresses. In fact, they were the Damon and Pythias of Tyre.

CHAPTER XIII

DAMON AND PYTHIAS AT THE THEATRE

Once, long before the beginning of this story, Damon and Pythias were sitting in a theatre together, with the wonderful overture just beginning to steal through their senses.

Ah, violins, whither would you take their souls? You call to them like the voice of one waiting by the sea, bathed in sunset. What are these wonderful things you are whispering to their souls? You promise--ah, what things you promise, strange voices of the string!

Oh, sirens, have pity! Their hearts are pure, their bodies sweet as apples. Oh, be faithful, betray them not, beautiful voices of the wondrous world!

The overture had succeeded. Their souls had followed it over the footlights, and, floating in the limelight, shone there awaiting the fulfilment of the promise.

The play was "Pygmalion and Galatea," and at the appearance of Galatea they knew that the overture had not lied. There, in dazzling white flesh, was all it had promised; and when she called "Pyg-ma-lion!" how their hearts thumped!--for they knew it was really them she was calling.

"Pyg-ma-lion! Pyg-ma-lion!"

It was as though Cleopatra called them from the tomb.

Their hands met. They could hear each other's blood singing. And was not the play itself an allegory of their coming lives? Did not Galatea symbolise all the sleeping beauty of the world that was to awaken, warm and fragrant, at the kiss of their youth? And somewhere, too, shrouded in enchanted quiet, such a white white woman waited for their kiss. In a vision they saw life like the treasure cave of the Arabian thief; and they said to their beating hearts that they had the secret of the magic word, that the "open Sesame" was youth.

No fall of the curtain could hide the vision from their young eyes. It transfigured the faces of their fellow-playgoers, crowding from the pit; it made another stage of the embers of the sunset, a distant bridge of silver far down the street. Then they took it with them to the tavern; and to write of the solemn libations of that night would be to laugh or cry. Only youth can be so radiantly ridiculous.

They had found their own corner. Turning down the gas, the fire played at day and night with their faces. Imagine them in one of the flashes, solemnly raising their gla.s.ses, hands clasped across the table, earnest gleaming eyes holding each other above it.

"Old man, some day, somewhere, a woman like that!"

But there was still a sequel. At home at last and in bed, how could Damon sleep! It seemed as if he had got into a rosy sunset cloud in mistake for his bed. The candle was out, and yet the room was full of rolling light.

It was no use; he must get up. So, striking a light, he was presently deep in the composition of a fiery sonnet. It was evidently that which had caused all the phosph.o.r.escence. But a sonnet is a mere pill-box; it holds nothing. A mere c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l,--and, oh, the raging sea it could not hold! Besides being confessedly an art-form, duly licenced to lie, it was apt to be misunderstood. It could not say in plain words, "Meet me at the pier to-morrow at three in the afternoon;" it could make no a.s.signation nearer than the Isles of the Blest, "after life's fitful fever." Therefore, it seemed well to add a postscript to that effect in prose.

But then, how was she to receive it? There was nothing to be hoped from the post, and Damon's home in Sidon was three miles from the ferry.

Likewise, it was now nearing three in the morning. Just time to catch the half-past three boat, run up to the theatre, a mile away, and meet the return boat. So down, down through the creaking house, carefully, as though he were a Jason picking his way among the coils of the sleeping dragon; and soon he was shooting through the phantom streets, like Mercury on a message through Hades.

At last the river came in sight, growing slate-colour in the earliest dawn. He could see the boat nuzzling up against the pier, and snoring in its sleep. He said to himself that this was Styx and the fare an obolus.

As he jumped on board, with hot face and hotter heart, Charon clicked his signal to the engines; the boat slowly snuffled itself half awake, and shoved out into the sleepy water.

As they crossed, the light grew, and the gas-lamps of Tyre beaconed with fading gleam. Overhead began a restlessness in the clouds, as of a giant drowsily shuffling off some of his bedclothes; but as yet he slept, and only the silver bosom of his spouse, the moon, was uncovered.

When they landed, the streets of Tyre were already light, but empty, as though they had got up early to meet some one who had not arrived. Damon sped through them like a sea-gull that has the harbour to itself, and was not long in reaching the theatre. How desolate the play-bills looked that had been so companionable but three or four hours before! And there was her photograph! Surely it was an omen.

"Ah, my angel! See, I am bringing you my heart in a song. 'All my heart in this my singing!'"

He dropped the letter into the box; but, as he turned away, momentarily glancing up the long street, he caught sight of an approaching figure that could hardly be mistaken. Good Heavens! it was Pythias, and he too was carrying a letter.

CHAPTER XIV

CONTRIBUTIONS TOWARDS A GENEALOGY

The egregious Miss Bashkirtseff did not greatly fascinate Esther. Her egotism was too hard, too self-bounded, even for egotism, and there was generally about her a lack of sympathy. Her pa.s.sion for fame had something provincial in its eagerness, and her broadest ideals seemed to become limited by her very anxiety to compa.s.s them. Even her love of art seemed a form of sn.o.bbery. In all these young Mesuriers there was implicit,--partly as a bye-product of the sense of humour, and partly as an unconscious mysticism,--a surprising instinct for allowing the successes of this world their proper value and no more. Even Esther, who was perhaps the most worldly of them all, and whose ambitions were largely social, as became a bonny girl whom nature had marked out to be popular, and on whom, some day when Mike was a great actor,--and had a theatre of his own!--would devolve the cares of populous "at home" days, bright after-the-performance suppers, and all the various diplomacies of the popular wife of fame,--even Esther, however brilliant her life might become, would never for a moment imagine that such success was a thing worth winning, at the expense of the smallest loss to such human realities as the affection she felt for Mike and Henry. To love some one well and faithfully, to be one of a little circle vowed to eternal fidelity one to the other,--such was the initial success of these young lives; and it was to make them all their days safe from the dangers of more meretricious successes.

All the same, though the chief performer in Marie Bashkirtseff's "Confessions" interested her but little, the stage on which for a little while she had scolded and whimpered did interest her--for should it not have been her stage too, and Henry's stage, and Dot's stage, father's and mother's stage too? You had only to look at father to realise that nature had really meant him for the great stage; here in Sidon, what was he but a G.o.d in exile, bending great powers and a splendid character upon ridiculously unimportant interests? Indeed, was not his destiny, more or less, their destiny as a family? Henry would escape from it through literature, and she through Mike. But what of Dot, what of Mat, not yet to speak of "the children"?

All she envied Marie Bashkirtseff was her opportunity. Great G.o.ddess Opportunity! So much had come to Marie in the cradle, and came daily to a hundred thousand insignificant aristocratic babes, to approach which for the Mesuriers, even ten years too late, meant convulsions of the home, and to attain which in any satisfactory degree was probably impossible. French, for example, and music! Why, if so disposed, Marie Bashkirtseff might have read old French romances at ten, and to play Chopin at an earlier age was not surprising in the opportunitied, so-called "aristocratic" infant. Oh, why had they not been born like the other Sidonians, whose natures and ideals had been mercifully calculated to the meridian of Sidon! Why didn't they think the Proudfoots and the Wilkinsons and the Wagstaffs, and other local n.o.body-somebodies, people of importance, and why did they think the mayor a ludicrous upstart, and the adjacent J.P. a sententious old idiot? Far better to have rested content in that state of life to which G.o.d had called them. To talk French, or to play Chopin! What did it matter? In one sense nothing, but in another it mattered like other convenient facilities of life. To the immortal soul it mattered nothing, but to the mortal social unit it made life the easier, made the pa.s.sage of ideas, the intercourse of individualities, the readier, and, in general, facilitated spiritual and intellectual, as well as social, communication. To be first-rate in your instincts, in all your fibres, and third-rate in your opportunities,--that was a bitter indignity of circ.u.mstance.

This sub-conscious sense of aristocracy--it must be observed, lest it should have been insufficiently implied--was almost humorously dissociated in the minds of the young Mesuriers from any recorded family distinctions. In so far as it was conscious, it was defiantly independent of genealogy. Had the Mesuriers possessed a coat-of-arms, James Mesurier would probably have kept it locked up as a frivolity to be ashamed of, for it was a part of his Puritanism that such earthly distinctions were foolishness with G.o.d; but, as a matter of fact, between Adam and the immediate great-grandparents of the young Mesuriers, there was a void which the Herald's office would have found a difficulty in filling. This it never occurred to them to mind in the least.

It was one of Henry's deep-sunken maxims that "a distinguished product implied a distinguished process," and that, at all events, the genealogical process was only ill.u.s.tratively important. It would have been interesting to know how they, the Mesuriers, came to be what they were. In the dark night of their history a family portrait or two, or an occasional reference in history, would have been an entertaining illumination--but, such not being forthcoming, they were, doc.u.mentally, so much the less indebted to their progenitors. Yet if they had only been able to claim some ancestor with a wig and a degree for the humanities, or some beautiful ancestress with a romantic reputation!

One's own present is so much more interesting for developing, or even repeating, some one else's past. And yet how much better it was to be as they were, than as most scions of aristocratic lineage, whose present was so often nothing and their past everything. How humiliating to be so pathetically inadequate an outcome of such long and elaborate preparation,--the mouse of a genealogical mountain! Yes, it was immeasurably more satisfactory to one's self-respect to be Something out of Nothing, than Nothing out of Everything. Here so little had made so much; here so much had made--hardly even a lord. It was better for your circ.u.mstances to be inadequate for you, than you to be inadequate for your circ.u.mstances.

Henry had amused himself one day in making a list of all their "ancestors" to whom any sort of worldly or romantic distinction could attach, and it ran somewhat as follows:--

(1) A great-grandmother on the father's side, fabled to live in some sort of a farm-house chateau in Guernsey, who once a year, up till two years ago, when she died, had sent them a hamper of apples from Channel Island orchards. Said "chateau" believed by his children to descend to James Mesurier, but the latter indifferent to the matter, and relatives on the spot probably able to look after it.

(2) A great-grandfather on the mother's side given to travel, a "rolling-stone," fond of books and talk, and rich in humanity. Surviving still in a high-nosed old silhouette.

(3) A grand-uncle on the father's side who was one of Napoleon's guard at St. Helena!

(4) A grandfather on the mother's side, who used to design and engrave little wooden blocks for patterns on calico-stuffs, and whose little box of delicate instruments, evidently made for the tracing of lines and flowers, was one of the few family heirlooms.

(5) A grandmother on the father's side of whom nothing was known beyond the beautiful fact that she was Irish.

(6) A grandfather on the father's side who was a sea-captain, sailing his own s.h.i.+p (barque "the Lucretia") to the West Indies, and who died of yellow fever, and was buried, in the odour of romance, on the Isthmus of Panama.

(7) An uncle who had also been a sea-captain, and who, in rescuing a wrecked crew from an Australian reef, was himself capsized, and after a long swim finally eaten by a shark,--said shark being captured next day, and found to contain his head entire, two gold rings still in his ears, which he wore for near-sightedness, after the manner of common sailors, and one of which, after its strange vicissitudes, had found a resting-place in the secretaire of his brother, James Mesurier.

Such was the only accessible "ancestry" of the Mesuriers, and it is to be feared that the last state of the family was socially worse than the first. James Mesurier was unapproachably its present summit, its Alpine peak; and he was made to suffer for it no little by humble and impecunious relatives. Still, whatever else they lacked, Henry Mesurier loved to insist that these various connections were rich in character, one or two of them inexhaustible in humour; and their rare and somewhat timorous visits to the castle of their exalted relative, James Mesurier, were occasions of much mirthful embarra.s.sment to the young people. Here the reader is requested to excuse a brief parenthetical chapter by way of ill.u.s.tration, which, if he pleases, he may skip without any loss of continuity in the narrative, or the least offence in the world to the writer. This present chapter will be found continued in chapter sixteen.

CHAPTER XV

MERELY A HUMBLE INTERRUPTION AND ILl.u.s.tRATION OF THE LAST

Some peaceable afternoon when Mrs. Mesurier was enjoying a little doze on the parlour sofa, and her three elder daughters were s.n.a.t.c.hing an hour or two from housework--they had already left school--for a little private reading, the drowsy house would suddenly be awakened by one loud wooden knock at the door.

"Now, whoever can that be!" the three girls would impatiently exclaim; and presently the maid would come to Miss Esther to say that there was an old man at the door asking for Mrs. Mesurier.