Bernard Capes

“ From les Baux we walked over the Alpines, six miles or so, to St. Remy, passing by the way those two famous fragments, tomb and triumphal arch, which are all that remains of a once prosperous Roman town. Standing solitary under the hills, they would seem to have been spared, in their chance juxtaposition, as a symbol and epitome to all future generations of the glory and vanity of the human story: Life’s victory, Death’s victory over Life, and Time, the last and mightiest, the conquerer of both. ”

“ Reeds are its prominent growth, with, everywhere, unending thickets of tamarisk and juniper; and water, in ponds, in pools, in the little irrigating canals which they call roubines, blots the surface eternally. Now and again a clump of silver poplars, or of that most beautiful of its family the umbrella-pine, will rise to trance the austerity with its lovelier mood; but they are rare benedictions. For the most part one seems to travel on the near-barren margin between Life and Death—and so to the symbol and expression of it all, the solitary fortress-church on the edge of the sea. ”

“ For the cup was nearly drained, and the scroll written—Fifine’s whole story, as a woman reads such things; and yet but a paragraph in mine, one brief glowing passage lost in a waste of platitude. Sometimes I wonder how men, having once known a perfect confidence in love, can bear to cloud its memory with later fancies. Gross and imperfect, our souls, I suppose, are not meet for the sublime; but, having gathered and eaten fruit from heaven, we must be for taking the taste of its intolerable sweetness out of our mouths with some coarser earthlier savour. ”

“ To carve divinity out of stone is ever a higher joy to me than to beget its fleshly image. Wherefore I can assert truly that personal coxcombry is as remote from my nature as the pride of the craftsman is near and holy. That may be believed or not: it may concern others to dispute what it does not concern me to defend.
I put this to myself, and to one other, if not as a justification, as a plea. I have sinned, if I have sinned, not from vanity at all. A thousand times I would rather have suffered that longest handicap than have basely used a favour due to no merit, but merely to inheritance. ”

“ Fifine was Fifine to me, and that was all sufficient. If I thought lazily beyond that bare fact, tasting even a piquancy in speculation, it was to present myself with the portrait of a young lady of very feminine but independent views, having a knowledge, or at least a cognizance of the Bohemian side of Paris, entertaining seedy violoncellists, and capable of coming to definite conclusions with herself on a variety of subjects, from art and dress to conduct. Comely too, and yet unspoilt, be it said; and, if a worldling, one with the highest capacity for self-sacrifice to an ideal devotion. ”

“ We caught it, however, easily, and again had a compartment to ourselves; a boon which, in our then frame of mind, we were not backward in appreciating. For we were full of happiness and gaiety, a jocund irresponsible couple, who had now finally shaken off the shackles of constraint, and were bound for the wilderness where no proprieties were to question nor dangers to apprehend. Even the absurd little shadow of Carabas was to me, in its dissipating, a matter for some small self-congratulation, and I felt our flight into the seaboard solitudes the breezier for its absence. ”

“ Once in a little garden we saw a pomegranate tree in rosy fruit—a lovely touch of colour; and once a group of merry girls went by, bareheaded and unadorned, fruit almost as fair. Elsewise, it seemed, we had these deserted ramparts to ourselves, and the view therefrom.
“But grant me still a friend in my retreat,” quoth and quoted I, “whom I may whisper—Solitude is sweet.”
And at that instant, turning an angle, we saw the whole perspective of battlements ahead fringed with human forms.
Fifine laughed delightfully, hearing my gasp of dismay. ”

“ All immense, all significant, all spectral despite its ponderous actuality; teeming with the infinite dust and debris of bygone story; ruins like rocks and rocks like ruins, one indistinguishable confusion and torrent of stone. Long ago from the floor of the little church they had unearthed the body of some beautiful unknown châtelaine. She had golden hair, like the maid of Pornic, that stretched down on either side to her feet. It was all that survived from the desecration, and it was deposited in Mistral’s museum at Arles. Fifine had seen it there; and, of course, Carabas. ”

“ The year was now drawing on and in, closing upon the last days of October; but still the season moved in golden accord with our mood, showering peace and quiet sunshine upon our heads. Fifine had of course as a child lifted her trivial skirts and pointed her pretty toes to the “L’on y danse tout en rond,” and nothing now in all the grey old city delighted her so much as the broken bridge, on whose imagined stones the feet of countless generations of infants have danced and pattered. ”

“ One must necessarily in leaving Paradise put on the common vesture of mortality; and, though the deathless glamour of past days remained to us for all eternity, a sense of the finite conditions of life, of its partings and uncertainties, returned to possess us, like a premonition, the moment we stepped beyond the bounds of our love-haunted Eden. Wherefore, having fully depicted that sovereign realm of delight, it would be a work of rather sad supererogation to dwell at length on our sojournings, as we made our way easily northward, in the subkingdoms of happiness. ”

“ It was actually so. Strewed all about the ground, with little alleys of commerce dividing the groups, was an infinite confusion of pottery—jugs, dishes, cooking utensils, and what not; and, pervading it, a number of picturesque figures, swarthy of face, hot-dyed of dress and neckerchief, the whole constituting a sort of gypsies’ fair. Fifine stood as if dumbstricken.
“Perhaps now,” I said, “the clue of memory taken up will lead you back to your birthplace?” ”

“ Like soiled armour which, being cleaned, looks richer than when new, so, under the rubs of Fate, was Bérard’s soul to reveal its intrinsic worth. And Briande took a little house next to the Presbytery, between whose garden and hers was a wall both high and frail, and yet to them a barrier of rock which no speciousness might scale or passion overthrow. And there, on either side, they grew their flowers; and that was the sole bond between them. And, like him, she gave her virgin life to God until she died. Very young she died, Felix, and on the same day died Bérard. ”

“ The man who could “pinch” his own soul of buds, like a prize chrysanthemum, in order to develop one monstrous head, was always a fool to me. I prefer, improving upon Ancient Pistol, to make the world not only mine oyster, but my pepper, my Chablis, my feast of a hundred dishes from hors-d’œuvre to savoury; and so, if you like, the last decanter being drained, to sleep under the table. Most properly, Death is the only drunkard who never wakes with a headache.
Well, Fifine interested me; but Fifine was not my universe. ”

“ Love, we know, is the only bond, by whatever name we call it. Throw this sop to the priests, if, by satisfying them, it secures us our idyll in peace. It makes no difference to the understanding between us. There is only one thing that can tie us, or that we should ever wish to tie. Were it to fray and snap—I think I know you, Fifine—that thread of convention would count for nothing in our severance. Even our knowledge of its existence would count for nothing—only the liberty to be ourselves unchallenged. ”

“ I don’t defend myself, but only my opinion of you, which, being what it was, was the reason perhaps of my venturing to take such spoilt advantage of it. I won’t believe now that you are different from what I thought; I have tried you beyond your patience, that is all. But I think, Felix, you might have spared me all that bitter sarcasm. To use sarcasm, I have heard you say yourself, is to try to play the wit with a fool’s weapon. It hurts but it does not convince. ”

“ Yet happiness is not content, though it may achieve it, as labour achieves sleep and life death. It is a thing of subtler texture, of more ardent constitution. One may feel content after a good meal eaten, thirst assuaged, a handsome deed accomplished, anxiety or physical pain relieved, or on rest following fatigue. But that is not happiness: happiness is to be experienced only through the creative and constructive processes of the mind. Following an idea, it may foresee its goal as a bright lodestar; but its essence lies in the pursuit rather than in the attainment of that end. ”

“ But my heart seems so full: it cannot hold more without brimming over. And I want to keep this memory, just as it is—so full, so complete; a little immaculate Paradise, and all our own.”
“It is Paradise, as you say, Fifine. If we leave it we shall have to put on aprons perhaps. It is not time yet to talk of clouds—especially since the serpent departed.”
“I don’t care what the world says. I am not ashamed. But I might be, if the cloud appeared. Won’t you, gossip dear—just to spoil me? And there is another reason. Somebody I know will be getting anxious about me. ”

“ You are shy and proud, mon ami; you affect to laugh at the heroic in yourself; you meet the rebuffs of the world with a pretence of their being justified towards incompetence. But all the time you know the world is wrong, though the great in you will not condescend to parly with it as to your merits. Better, you think, to give up the struggle, to cease your pursuit of the inaccessible, and, falling into line with your detractors, hunt for bouille-abaisse, as the sort of perfection we can all understand and attain. ”

“ I could not believe it humanly possible that any woman, young or old, patrician or plebeian, living in perpetual apprehension of death by secret violence, could conduct herself with such persistent sangfroid. She did not so live in fact; of that I was finally convinced. For some purpose unconfessed Marion had foisted that story upon me, with the sole intention, likely enough, to ensure my closest trust and vigilance. Necessary precautions, no doubt, if one knew the whole truth, but hardly dictated by terror of the worst. By what lesser fear, or policy, it was useless for me to conjecture ”

“ As she stood up, the picture she made—her face, half in glow half in shadow, the vivid life of her contrasting with the golden ruins of the walls—wrought with such ardour upon my imagination, that I felt that, if I failed in that moment to take advantage of the creative impulse its beauty awoke in me, I deserved to be writ down for ever more the emasculate cypher of her strictures. So very quietly I got out the block, pencils, and a handful of coloured crayons which I made it my constant practice to carry about with me.
“Fifine,” I said, “don’t move: stand just as you are. ”

“ Joyful in the novelty of all things, Fifine was prepared to find ambrosia in the thin broth with a sop of toast in it, and the divine savour of the chèvre d’or himself in tough and smoky cutlets. But even she could not idealise the “vin compris.” Throughout Provence that way lies disenchantment, and the traveller who would keep glowing in his breast the comfortable lamp of romance should by no means drink the wine, the red in particular, which is invariably provided free of charge. ”

“ Never suppose that I forgot my responsibility to my charge, or my tremendous respect for the rank that condescended to me, or that Fifine herself made any motion of unbending in the matter of that mutual understanding. She trusted in me without question, and I never gave her cause to question.
Not that I will pretend the situation found me entirely without qualms of a sort. Nature, it must be admitted, abhors a Platonism, and I was not superior to Nature. Moreover, I could never quite forget Marion’s curiously ambiguous language in delivering my trust to me. ”

“ Such is the difference between men and women; yet women are infinitely the pitifuller. The elemental riddle of them, of their inconsistencies with themselves, has never seemed to me so well epitomised as in the fable of the Amazonian Queen Thalestris, man-conqueror and man-scorner, travelling alone to give herself to Alexander, that she might become by him the mother of a boy-hero.
One day Fifine, putting a hand on my arm and looking up into my face, spoke to me wistfully of a thought that had come into her mind.
“Felix, we have been very, very happy here, have we not?” ”

“ We would make a compromise of our theories, our principles, with even perhaps a slight leaning of the balance towards the traditional; and in the result—well, those were but plans, elevations, as it were. The whole, into which the infinite parts were compacted, exists for any one to see who likes.1 It is the only work of mine in which heart and soul and brain made a common cause of it to achieve perfection. It has not achieved it, of course, for Fifine was not perfection. But what approach to it it makes was her doing and hers alone. There is sunshine in it, which they call sunshine. ”

“ I have heard it, then—I will never believe but that I have heard it. Could she bear to withhold from me, even in death, one charm that had not been mine?
And so ends Fifine’s story. No man in all his life has known a sweeter love; no man a bitterer desolation. ”