Haldane MacFall

“ Choiseul was too astute a man not to recognise what lay beyond the shadow of her pretty skirts—nay, does he not turn in the courtyard as he leaves the palace to go into banishment, his lettre de cachet in his pocket, and, seeing a woman looking out from a window at the end of an alley, bow and kiss his hand to the window where gazes out of tear-filled eyes this strange doomed beauty who has won to the sceptre of France? ”

“ It’s but a ghost’s walk seen by daylight—a ridicule that in the night was a tragedy. Now there comes to me the fragrance of flowers. I am in the arms of the sweet brown earth. I rise through sap and root and stem and blossom of the dear plants to become life again, and a part of the sweet exhalation of eternity. My heart’s blood leaps within me—I am glad.... Your voice fills my ears, dear heart—if God’s be only as exquisite!... Yours and Betty’s and this tender Babette’s—the voices of them that I love are the refrain of an eternal hymn to me. ”

“ Noll brooded on.
What had been all the frantic ecstasy of art for art’s sake to the world at large? An absolute nothing. And what was this ascetic hatred of life?
The aim of life is not to live in poet’s rhyme—nor does our neighbour pass feverish nights fearful of losing immortality. The poet may be shaken with such fears for his verse; the ambitious may see in dreams their names writ in flashing jewels on the face of time, glittering like stars beyond their daily lusting; but the man of the street scratches his poll to no such questionings. He has to live. ”

“ Edinburgh is fortunate in possessing this, one of the world-famous examples of Boucher’s exquisite portraiture. He painted with rare charm more than once this wonderful woman, “the king’s morsel,” Jeanne Poisson, Madame Lenormant d’Etioles, who became the notorious Marquise de Pompadour. He gives us perhaps too dainty a butterfly; for, of a truth, this woman’s prettiness masked an iron nerve, an unflinching courage, and a capacity and talents which must have reached to fame in any human being whose frame they illumined. ”

“ For days Noll haunted the great aisles of the cathedral of Notre Dame—sat within the beautiful interiors of the old medieval churches of Paris—dreamed—brooded over the problem of the Refuge from Life—was thrilled with the thought that the lowly and the meek should inherit the earth....
Amidst the fragrant scent of the swinging incense, to the pathetic sob of the haunting chant, in the emotional atmosphere of prayer, the great pity for all created things welled in his heart and roused in him a passionate desire to be at grips with the cruelty of life. ”

“ Across the murk of the stress of life that is the dust-storm up-blown from the sordid details of living—across the dreary fog that is compact of the accumulations of vain strivings and failings and galling insolences—across the black clouds of the humiliations and the indignities that are flung along the path of womanhood under cover of the fulsome hypocrisies, there leaped, with rainbow brilliancy, the bright sign that gladness is the law, the night but the shadow of the light, that there is laughter in the firmament and gaiety and delight, and on the earth a splendid wayfaring. ”

“ Boucher was grown old and ailing; and just as Boucher had been the painter of the France of fashion under the Pompadour, so Fragonard was now to become the mirror of the court, of the theatre, of the drawing-room, of the boudoir, of the age of Du Barry.
Finding a ready market for subjects of gallantry, he gave rein to his natural bent, and straightway leaped into the vogue. Pictures were the hobby of the nobility and the rich; and France under the Pompadour, and particularly at this the end of her reign, was madly spendthrift upon its hobbies and fickle fancies. ”

“ Betty had early perceived, with wise foreseeing eyes, that life’s scheme is not work nor leisure nor sleep. The human day is compact of all that makes for happy sanity—work and rest and the decent pleasures that are called recreation—each as important as the other, each a part of the triple crown that tops the human day’s achievement. Every mortal has the birthright to this splendid heritage; and where there is lack in the three, there has been filching. There be foul rogues who ever shirk the toil, and such must of necessity steal another’s leisure to overfill his own measure. ”

“ The kiss of a woman’s mouth was become but a passing pleasure. All these shabby little adulteries were without desire for the child beyond—the child when it came was an unlooked-for inconsequence, a burden, a thing of shame. The sweetest thing in life an affair of accident—to be feared—flinched from!
Life might be a tragedy. These were making of it a melancholy and a ghastly farce.
Noll got up from his place and slipped from the smoke-befogged room amidst the clamorous din of applause that greeted the recital of an Ode in Envy of One who had died Young. ”

“ Arrived in Paris she sought out the greatest painter of the day, and burst with the shy youth into the studio of the dandified favourite artist of the king’s majesty, Pompadour’s Boucher—large-hearted, generous, much-sinning, world-famed Boucher, then at the very summit of his career—he was at that time living in the Rue Grenelle-Saint-Honoré, which he was about to leave, and in which Fragonard in his old age was destined to end his days. ”

“ There was one thorn only in all this summer delight—Moll Davenant, moody, a prey to odd whims, possessed now of strange reservations and sudden shrinkings, now frightened, now daring, now boisterous, now brooding, lived feverishly, crowding her life into its little span, her pathetic eyes on her doom, as one who knows how short a while she has to live. More than once, Betty had sold some trinket of her own to get the wherewithal to tempt the uncertain appetite; and Noll, too, was the poorer by more than one little possession which he cheerily said he did not want. ”

“ In the midst of the smudgy dusk that filled the room, his head in his hands, elbows on knees, sat the dim figure of Netherby Gomme, sobbing pitifully.
Noll shut the door softly, and went up to the bowed man:
“Good God, Netherby!” said he—“what’s this?”
He gripped his hand upon the other’s shoulder, affectionately.
Gomme signed him to a seat:
“Sit down, Noll—I’ll be all right in a minute.” He blew his nose. “No—better still, light the gas. I must stop. Tears will not bring back one’s dead, nor grief annul the things that are done. Light up! A man can only cry comfortably in the dark.” ”

“ The scowling genius of the German had nearly found the truth—that a mighty desire for life was at the core of all existence. And here had slipped the mighty intellect; and the crabbed hands, groping in the half-darkness, missing the little, had missed the all, since that which stirs at the heart of all things is not a will to live, but life—life with an overwhelming urging to fulfil its fullest self. Nay, urging so overwhelming that, to know the fullest life, it lightly takes the risks of death in the achieving. ”

“ In the gathering darkness of his dingy little room over the southern gate of New Inn sat Noll Baddlesmere in his shirt-sleeves, cudgelling his wandering wits for epigrams and the dramatic situation; yet though the dun walls did not distract his attention with the restlessness of over-abundant gaieties, nor the sedate quietude nor the narrow view from his grimy windows strain his nerves—indeed, he could scarce hear the turmoil of the traffic in the great Strand hard by—he was unable to settle down to hard work, nor could he rid himself of the fret of his thoughts. ”

“ Twilight is far more full of spirits than any other time—things that beckon and tell secrets. The dusk is always filled with whispers, as if sweet young things were being born, and poor dying things were glad to be going to sleep.... That’s the sower—he walks along and sows. And he is solemn, because he knows that all that he flings on the dark earth will spring in the dusk, and become alive.”
Netherby stroked her head:
“Betty,” said he, “do you think the artist who painted that picture meant you to feel all that?”
“Didn’t he?” she asked simply. She looked at it again with serious grey eyes. ”

“ The day was chilly grey without.
As she blotted the last lines, there came to her hearing, from the thoroughfares of the Latin Quarter below, rollicking snatches of song, and the stir of students in noisy holiday mood.
Betty brushed aside her tears, and read carefully the letter she had just signed:
“Noll,
A year ago I was writing you love-letters—delightful deliriousness more full of meaning than of sense. To-day I am writing farewell.
It is the most eager desire of my life, of my whole being, that you should be free—to be a man. ”

“ Rejecting the crude and garish guesses, the untenable dogma, the juggling conventions of theology, the young fellow had, with the confidence of youth, relied on the intellect for the solution of the problem of life. Indeed, it is abundantly clear that out of the base metal of untruth, at any rate, the key to the great mysteries of life shall not be forged. So, rightly looking to knowledge as an essential element in the search for the key to the secret of life, the youth had gone further and looked to the intellect to be that key—only to find himself in a blind alley with museums at end. ”

“ So the child sat, between Noll and Netherby, holding a hand of each. It struck her keen wits as strange that in the large drawing-rooms of her fashionable relations she had felt no warmth of affection towards the glittering women who turned their cold critical eyes upon this child of their ne’er-do-weel soldier kinsman—yet here were two lads, whom she had not known a couple of days ago, winning her confidence by their large chivalry, their whole-souled friendship now grown as old as her life—friendship such as makes of life a splendid adventure. ”