Richard Le Gallienne

“ Tell me this,—do you love me?"
"I love you," I said simply; "and it is just because I love you so much that I have talked as I have done. No man situated as I am who loved you could have talked otherwise."
"Well, I have heard it all, weighed it all," said Nicolete, presently; "and to me it is but as thistledown against the love within my heart. Will you cast away a woman who loves you for theories? You know you love me, know I love you. We should have our trials, our ups and downs, I know; but surely it is by those that true love learns how to grow more true and strong. ”

“ I wonder if the reader would care to hear about my First Love, of whom I am naturally thinking a good deal this morning, under the demoralising influences of the fresh air, blue sky, and various birds and flowers. More potent intoxicants these than any that need licenses for their purveyance, responsible—see the poets—for no end of human foolishness.
I was about to tell the story of my First Love, but on second thoughts I decide not. It will keep, and I feel hungry, and yonder seems a dingle where I can lie and open my knapsack, eat, drink, and doze among the sun-flecked shadows. ”

“ I entered the town over the bridge, and the stream under it, washing the walls of the high-piled, many-gabled old inn where I proposed to pass the night. I should hear it still rippling on with its gentle harpsichord tinkle, as I stretched myself down among the cool lavendered sheets, and little by little let slip the multifarious world.
The inn windows beamed cheerily, a home of ruddy rest. Having ordered my dinner and found my room, I threw down my knapsack and then came out again to smoke an ante-prandial pipe, listen to the evensong of the stream, and think great thoughts. ”

“ Sometimes we are merry together as in the old time, and our laughter makes nightfaring folk to cross themselves; my work, my dreams, my loves, are all hers, and my very sins are sinned for her sake.
Two years did Elizabeth and I know the love that passeth all understanding, and day by day the chestnut upon her head was more and the gold less, till the day came that she had prophesied, and with the day a little child, whose hair had stolen all her mother's gold, as her heart had drained away her mother's life. ”

“ I suggested.
"I love Sylvia very tenderly," he said.
"Yes, I know; I don't think you could do anything else. No man worth his salt could be anything but tender to a dainty little woman like that. But tenderness, gentleness, affection, even self-sacrifice,—these may be parts of love; but they are merely the crude untransformed ingredients of a love such as you feel for your wife, and such as I know she feels for you."
"She still loves me, then," he said pitifully; "she hasn't fallen in love with you." ”

“ Even Death himself, the great and terrible King of kings, though he may break the heart of love with agonies and anguish and slow tortures of separation, may break not his faith. No one that has loved will dream even death too terrible a price to pay for the revelation of love. For that revelation once made can never be recalled. As a little sprig of lavender will perfume a queen's wardrobe, so will a short year of love keep sweet a long life. And love's best gifts death can never take away. ”

“ It has been said by them of old time, and our fathers have told us, that the kiss of first love, the first kiss of the first woman we love, is beyond all kisses sweet; and true it is. But true is it also that no less sweet is the first kiss of the last woman we love.
Putting my faith in old saws, as a young man will, I had never dreamed to know again a bliss so divinely passionate and pure as came to me with every glance of Nicolete's sweet eyes, with every simple pressure of her hand ”

“ There is indeed only one law of beauty on which we may rely,—that it invariably breaks all the laws laid down for it by the professors of aesthetics. All the beauty that has ever been in the world has broken the laws of all previous beauty, and unwillingly dictated laws to the beauty that succeeded it,—laws which that beauty has no less spiritedly broken, to prove in turn dictator to its successor.
The immortal sculptors, painters, and poets have always done exactly what their critics forbade them to do. The obedient in art are always the forgotten. ”

“ Each year he has strained and stimulated his art to surpass himself, seeking ever a finer and a brighter gold, a more celestial azure. Never had his gold been so golden, his azure so dazzlingly clear and deep as on this particular May morning; while his fancy simply ran riot in the marginal decorations of woodland and spinney, quaint embroidered flowers and copses full of exquisitely painted and wonderfully trained birds of song. It was indeed a day for nature to be proud of. So seductive was the sunshine that even the shy trout leapt at noonday, eager apparently to change his silver for gold. ”

“ Think what the word "Paris" means to the emancipated intellect, to the political government, to the humanised morals, of the world; not to speak of the romance of its literature, the tradition of its manners, and the immortal fame of its women. France is the brain of the world, as England is its heart, and Russia its fist. Strange is the power, strange are the freaks and revenges, of association, particularly perhaps of literary association. ”

“ The girl we go to meet is the girl we have met before. I evolved this sage reflection, as, lost deep down in the green alleys of the dingle, having fortified the romantic side of my nature with sandwiches and sherry, I lazily put the question to myself as to what manner of girl I expected the Golden Girl to be. A man who goes seeking should have some notion of what he goes out to seek. Had I any ideal by which to test and measure the damsels of the world who were to pass before my critical choosing eye? ”

“ The fairy prince is on the fairy road.
Incipit vita nuova!
So in the lovely rapture of a new-born resolution—and is there any rapture like it?—nature has no more intoxicating illusion than that of turning over a new leaf, or beginning a new life from to-day—I sprang along the road with a carolling heart; quite forgetting that Apuleius and Fielding and Boccaccio were still in my knapsack—not to speak of the petticoat. ”

“ With all its sweet and mystical significance, surely the prevailing feeling in the hearts of bride and bridegroom is, or should be, that of happiness,—happiness bubbling and dancing, all sunny ripples from heart to heart.
Surely they can spare a little of it, just one day's sight of it, to a less happy world,—a world long since married and done for, and with little happiness in it save the spectacle of other people's happiness. It is good for us to see happy people, good for the symbols of happiness to be carried high amidst us on occasion ”

“ I answered. And as I spoke, there was a crash of white marble in my soul, and lo! Love had fallen from his pedestal and been broken into a thousand pieces,—a heavy, dead thing he lay upon the threshold of my heart.
We had appointed a secret meeting in the salon of the pension that afternoon. I was not there! (Nor, as I afterwards learnt, was Semiramis.) When we did meet, I was brutally cold. I evaded all her moves; but when at last I decided to give her a hearing, I confess it needed all my cynicism to resist her air of innocence, of pathetic devotion. ”

“ I think I was more troubled than Nicolete. When, after interviewing the landlady, I came and told her of the dilemma, where she sat in the little parlour wearied out with the day's walk, she blushed, it is true, but seemed little put about. Indeed, she laughed, and said it was rather fun, "like something out of Sterne,"—of such comfort is a literary reference in all seasons and circumstances,—and then she added, with a sweet look that sent the blood rioting about my heart, "It won't matter so much, will it, love, NOW?" ”

“ Meanwhile, I had moved to sociable chambers within sound of the city clocks, and had lived the life of a lonely man about town, sinking more and more into the comfortable sloth of bachelorhood. I had long come to look back upon my pilgrimage as a sort of Indian-summer youth, being, as the reader can reckon for himself, just on thirty-seven. As one will, with one's most serious experiences, hastening to laugh lest one should weep, as the old philosopher said, I had made some fun out of my quest, in the form of a paper for a bookish society to which I belonged, on "Woman as a Learned Pursuit." ”

“ In the middle ages a journey to the moon with a woman you loved was a very perilous matter indeed. Even in the last century the roads were much beset with danger; but in our own day, like most journeys, it is accomplished with ease and safety in a few hours.
However, to the latter-day hero, whose appetite for dragons is not keen, this absence of adventure is perhaps rather pleasurable than otherwise; and I confess that I enjoyed the days I spent on foot with Nicolete none the less because they passed in tranquil uneventfulness,—that is, without events of the violent kind. ”

“ Indeed, now I could see that the petticoat was nothing short of a portrait of her, and that any one learned in the physiognomy of clothes would have been able to pick Sylvia out of a thousand by that spirited, spoilt, and petted garment.
"What is that sly smile about?" she repeated presently.
"I only chanced to think of an absurd little fairy story I read the other day," I said, "which is quite irrelevant at the moment. You know the idle way things come and go through one's head."
"I don't believe you," she replied, "but tell me the story. I love fairy tales." ”

“ Paint a woman! as our young friend Alastor said.
Faces that fall into types you can describe, or at all events label in such a way that the reader can identify them; but those faces that consist mainly of spiritual effect and physical bloom, that change with everything they look upon, the light in which ebbs and flows with every changing tide of the soul,—these you have to love to know, and to worship to portray.
Now the face of Nicolete, as I learnt in time to call her, was just soul and bloom, perhaps mainly bloom. ”

“ I left the twelfth Golden-Haired Bar-maid not too late to stalk her husband and her under-study to their hotel, where they evidently proposed to dine. There was, therefore, nothing left for me but to dine also. So I dined; and when the courses of my dining were ended, I found myself in a mellow twilight at the Cafe du Ciel. And it was about the hour of the sirens' singing. Presently the little golden butterflies flitted once more through the twilight, and again the woman's voice rose like a silver bird on the air. ”

“ A library is a better world, built by the brains and hearts of poets and dreamers, as a refuge from the real world outside; and in it alone is to be found the land of milk and honey which it promises.
"Milk and honey" would have been an appropriate inscription for the delicious little library which parents who, I surmised, doted on Nicolete in vain, had allowed her to build in a wild woodland corner of her ancestral park, half a mile away from the great house, where, for all its corridors and galleries, she could never feel, at all events, spiritually alone. ”

“ A woman's happiness was at stake. No other consideration could have persuaded me to means so mean save an end so noble. I didn't even tell Rosalind all I heard. Mercifully for her, the candour of fools is not among my superstitions. Suffice it for all third persons to know—what Rosalind indeed has never known, and what I hope no reader will be fool enough to tell her—that Orlando was for the moment hopelessly and besottedly faithless to his wife, and that my services had been bespoken in the very narrowest nick of time. ”

“ Sin is for the innocent,—a truth which sinners will be the first to regret. It was so, I said to myself, Alfred de Musset used to sit and sip his absinthe before a fascinated world. It is a privilege for the world to look on greatness at any moment, even when it is drinking. So I sat, and privileged the world.
It will readily be surmised from this exordium that—incredible as it may seem in a man of thirty—this was my first visit to Paris. You may remember that I had bought Orlando's tickets, and it had occurred to Sylvia and me to use them. ”

“ And while we ate and drank and laughed and chatted, the books around us were weaving their spells. Even before the invention of printing books were "love's purveyors." Was it not a book that sent Paolo and Francesca for ever wandering on that stormy wind of passion and of death? And nowadays the part played by books in human drama is greater than we perhaps realise. ”

“ How good it was to be young! No wonder men had so desperately sought the secret of Eternal Youth! Who would not be young for ever, for such dreams and such an appetite?
Here of course was the very heaven-sent confidant for such an enterprise as mine. I told him all about my whim, just for the pleasure of watching his face light up with youth's generous worship of all such fantastic nonsense. ”

“ Now I had smiled to think that underneath that stately silk, around that tight little waist, was a dainty waistband bearing the legend "Sylvia Joy," No. 4, perhaps, or 5, but NOT No. 6; and a whole wonderful underworld of lace and linen and silk stockings, the counterpart of which wonders, my clairvoyant fancy laughed to think, were at the moment—so entirely unsuspected of their original owner—my delicious possessions.
Everything a woman wears or touches immediately incarnates something of herself. A handkerchief, a glove, a flower,—with a breath she endues them with immortal souls. ”

“ Strange, in truth, are the ministrations to which Beauty is called. Out of the high heaven is she summoned, from mystic communion with her own perfection, from majestic labours in the Sistine Chapel of the Stars,—yea, she must put aside her gold-leaf and purples and leave unfinished the very panels of the throne of God,—that Circe shall have her palace, and her worshippers their gilded sty. ”