Haldane MacFall

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Why flutter against the encaging bars? why struggle ever to be in the winds and the free airs? Tush! wherein was freedom but to flee from death? The little fragile thing had the gift of song; let it be glad that it had the gift of song.
She uttered the pity of it in the most caressing tongue that the nations have wrought; and when she had spoken the last word, she bowed to the thunder of applause, came back to the table, and seated herself by Noll with a freedom from conceit that touched him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You go home, Horace, to life—I go on here, growing old, year by year. I have been sitting here in the dark, peering at the years. One day the gaiety will go out of my heart, the freshness out of my looks, the colour out of my face, the light out of my eyes. Men turn and look at me now—their eyes smile at me. The time will come when men’s eyes will pass me by. Students in the Boule Miche will say, ‘She was some clever fellow’s mistress—once.’ And there will be laughter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He laughed quietly, kissing her gloved fingers:
“Are not your very hands exquisitely fashioned but to steal away a man’s heart, my Betty? Why does your white self hold me enthralled unless it be that I may love you—not the vague image of you?”
Betty laughed happily:
“Well, Noll,” said she—“if you forget me as wholly as you have done these two years, I can almost bear it!”
“You were becoming obliterated, sweetheart,” said he hoarsely—“yet you were not leaving me free. Other women’s skirts were rustling in my ears, but your fragrance came between. Now these others are all silent—I hear only you. ”

“ Here they met together at a time when drowsy citizens were getting into their unthinking beds—here they were happy in the companionship of their fellows throughout the long night, exchanging their ideas of the beautiful, their polished gentle wit, their praises—here, shrugging contemptuous shoulders at the conventions of the world, men and women lived and loved as they listed.
If the world should one day awaken to the works of their genius, so much the better for the world—if it should clamour for their poesy, their song, their works of art, well and good. ”

“ Aubrey at the mantelpiece, gazing at himself in the mirror, said simply:
“Bosh!”
“Rather a dramatic situation when you come to think of it, eh?” said Fluffy Reubens, lolling his full length in the easy-chair.
Rippley, his hands in his trousers pockets, considered the situation with reflective eye fixed on the carpet:
“And a rippin’ dramatic emotion, eh! To feel one’s self being wrangled about from one end of the country to the other——”
Aubrey turned languidly from the mirror:
“Ah!” said he, “and then to listen to it all, robed in the delightful invisible cloak of pseudonymity!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Quogge Myre adored the “intelligent” peerage.
In her rooms in Paris sat Marguerite Olmé, reading a book.
She had been reading it all day—and the red blood burned her face with shame. She missed no word of the brutal details of her most intimate life with this man—there was little reservation, even by innuendo.
The elbow-nudgings and the leer at her love-ecstasies—nay, at the very manner in which she had hidden the only small defect of her figure; the display of all her bodily habits; the jibes at the little reliances on the arts of her dressing-table ”

“ 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. ”

“ Radiant in thy sunshine, fantastic in thy murk, it is when thou puttest on the habit of thy lilac twilight that thou showest all thy majesty—thy tiring maids, the handsomest women of the world, helping thee to thy wondrous mantle of many hues—pale whitenesses and opal greys, beribboned with purple and ultramarine and the sooty tinge of dusky shadows, adorned with diamonds of a hundred flames and wrought through and through with gold and silvery strands, and thus and so, with smoky art, spinning thyself a mystic robe that it is full fit only the Queen of all cities shall wear. ”

“ In a large and richly furnished studio that was the splendid workshop of a fashionable portrait-painter there stood before an easel a handsome fair-bearded man—handsome, though the head was small—a fellow who held himself with self-reliance, straight and satisfied. And with the calculated stroke of one who has mastered the technique of his craft, he set down the loaded brush on the embrowned canvas, yielding a touch of colour that told like living flesh on the portrait of the pretty woman whose likeness he was building up into life. ”

“ Here, in fantastic riot, had Rousseau been carried shoulder high after a dramatic triumph; here had Condorcet, in intervals of writing upon the Integral Calculus, been not above horseplay; here had sat Diderot, scheming his encyclopædic schemes, talking tomfool solemn travesties of dangerous talk with winking eye upon his fellow-wags, to lead on the over-zealous police agents to the fussy discovery of large mares’ nests of conspiracy.
Nor had jests and badinage been the only fare. In these ghostly dingy mirrors had passed the faces of the great actors in the world tragedy of France. ”

“ Noll could not shake off a strange sense of humiliation. Shrug his shoulders as he might at the pathetic silence that had taken the place of Betty’s mellow voice, humiliation nudged elbows with him, peered into his frowning eyes, was not to be rebuffed by his sullen face. He was a prey to self-contempt. The devil of regret takes hard snubbing. And no man lies intelligently to his own conscience. ”