Richard Le Gallienne

“ I am the woman of that poem, not Isabel. It is I who must say good-bye. I can do it. I am a woman now, love--not a little child any more. 'Look in my face and see.'"
The tangle of Theophil's emotions and thoughts, as he listened to Jenny in silence, was a revelation to him of the strange heart of love, and of the insufficiency of those formulas by which we image ourselves to ourselves. How little we know of ourselves till we are tested by the powerful reagents of love and danger, and in how many ways must those tests be applied before we learn anything of the elements of which we are composed! ”

“ Theophil conceived this grief that had come to him as one more activity added to his life till life should end. He knew that it would not outcast joy, but that it would live side by side with it, that it must alternate with joy for it to go on living. Jenny's death was not going to be less sad, less a factor of the eternal tragedy, at the end of a year,--that he might go to a theatre once more, as some widows joyously don colours, when the clock strikes the end of a year of lost dances. ”

“ No! but sometimes when a bird sings in the stillness, when the moon rises above the trees, when a breath of secret violets crosses one's path one knows not whence; sometimes when the rain is sobbing at the window, or the wind plaining about the doors; sometimes when an unknown happiness fills the heart, when a great deed has been done, when a lovely word has been spoken, in seasons of music and in all high moments, then can one say, "There, listen! that was Jenny."
Jenny was already a legend. She was with the great lovers. Theophil remained behind only to write her name across the high stars. ”

“ But, O Jenny, may it be your gain indeed, for the loss to us is greater than we can bear--greater than we can bear. Not Theophil only--not young love, that, for all his smitten heart, has somewhere hidden away the potencies of his unspent life, and will still have his dream, though sorrow itself should become that dream--but this poor old mother, all the force of her days spent, the sap of her spirit dried up. Hers is the terrible sorrow of age, with not a hope left betwixt her and death. ”

“ And till London knew him as well as Coalchester, there was no real monument to Jenny. London--no longer the city of Isabel--must learn to say "Theophilus Londonderry" so naturally, that it would some day serve as an unforgettable remembrance of Jenny. He must become a great man, because a great name is the one shrine in which love's memory may escape oblivion. In the arms of his name Jenny would then be carried down the years, one woman-star saved from the night of death. Again, the world, for which in one way he had so little care, was to help him indirectly to keep his troth to Jenny. ”

“ Was Jenny losing her power in this intoxicating fragrance of Isabel's words--as though for once the cross should lose its virtue in some subtle air of hellish sweetness?
O lilies from Jenny's white coffin, O little chrysanthemum that lay in her bosom, O violets from Jenny's tomb, pierce with your faithful breath this cloud of incense that is enwrapping Jenny's lover.
Alas! the power of the dead is but the power of the ideal, at once the strongest and the weakest force in the world,--a power, indeed, that prevails, but which may in some moments be shattered by the frailest whisper of the real. ”

“ Hers, had she known it, was the cup of anguish here; for Theophil and Isabel had been decreed the cup of joy. But will they drink it? No, they will change the cups; perhaps the bitter cup will grow sweet near the dregs, being drunk together.
Yet this love of theirs, this perilous chance for Jenny, was none of their making. Their joy had been given to them by unseen hands. It is fairly theirs. Next time, perhaps, it will be their turn to suffer. It is Jenny's now...
But no! the good heart of humanity will defeat the cruel ruling of the gods. Let the lightning come upon them--not little Jenny. ”

“ Christianity, no doubt, has robbed us of much--but then it has given us sorrow; it has taken away the sun, but it has brought us the stars. It is only in the starlight of sorrow that we become conscious of other worlds. The sun flatters our own little world with the illusion of a transitory importance; the stars show it its place in the universe, and teach it a nobler meaning for itself.
No consciousness of his gifts had ever given Theophil any such sense of his belonging to the chosen and dedicated minority of mankind as this initiation into the Secret Society of Sorrow. ”

“ Here it seemed to Theophil was the whole duty of faithfulness. The dead know that if we remember them in our hours of joy, they are indeed remembered; and if they know anything at all, they will understand the waywardness of sad hearts better than sad hearts understand themselves.
Yet, indeed, save in the exercise of his faculties, Theophil had no joy to reproach himself with. Surely returning spring, with its terrible exuberance of warm life, was no joy. Perhaps he had looked on Jenny lying dead with less anguish than he one day beheld an apple-tree thick with blossom in the hot sun. ”

“ Isabel was indeed a muse that waited for her poet. The mere idea of such a woman, cherished across dividing seas and separating years, will help a man be great. To grow great near or far is the one way to be hers, and to pile up great work for her sake is perhaps the best way to love her. She could never be his wife, but she might still be his muse, resolved Theophil, feigning in that reflection for the moment a more human comfort than, alas! ”

“ Theophil could permit himself no outward insignia of sorrow which he could not wear for ever. Already his profession had clothed him in black, and it was only for him that his black seemed now to gain a deeper distinction; but such ugly symbols of beautiful memory as that note-paper whose diminishing edge of blackness is rather a cynical witness of a graduated forgetfulness, were not for a real grief like his. As if sorrow, while it may and will change, can ever end! Why, in the world of faithful hearts, men and women have not yet dried their tears for Romeo and Juliet! ”

“ Sorrow is a mysticism, and to talk of it to those who have never known the initiation of tears is like talking alchemy to a child. Sorrow, too, is an aristocracy, and when Theophil came to realise that, as Jenny had been found worthy to die, he had been found worthy to suffer, it seemed to him almost vulgar only to have been happy. Happiness is such a materialist, a creature of coarse tastes and literal pleasures, a bourgeois who has not yet attained the rank of a soul. The influence of sorrow on the individual is much what the influence of Christianity has been upon the world. ”

“ Think, Jenny, of the hours and hours and hours you and Theophil have spent in careless happiness, and they--one almost laughs to think of it--have just so far been granted four minutes. For four minutes out of infinite time life has privileged them to be alone together.
It will be far safer too. Otherwise you know not with what fearful flame love will fill the chasms under ground, circling and seething in the fiery darkness. Theophil loves you, but some day your home will suddenly be rent from cope to base, unless his poor heart may speak, yea, babble itself, just once in Isabel's ears. ”

“ In just that look of the rooms was the best portrait he possessed of Jenny.
Though he had always been fond of Mr. Moggridge, it had not before occurred to Theophil to make of him a companion; but about this time, as Mr. Moggridge would drop in of an evening to discuss church matters, the young minister would be surprised to note how lonely he felt when he had gone. Indeed Mr. Moggridge possessed that great undefinable gift of companionability.
What is needed in a companion is not brilliance of conversation, but the power to make you feel that you are not quite alone in the universe. ”

“ She had developed wonderfully in these months, had Jenny. She was a real little great man's wife now; and as Theophil looked at her, with her lit eager face, her whole soul so alive to help him in however humble a way, her whole life his, his, his,--such love seemed almost tragic in its very beauty and joy. It was so irremediably--love. At times he almost trembled before it. He would almost chide her with its divine completeness.
What if he were to be taken from her? Oughtn't she to keep just a little of herself for foothold? We ought all to belong to ourselves as well as to another. ”

“ For woman's adaptability is not the domination of a weaker nature by a stronger, it is in itself a noble and world-necessary form of strength.
Strength is needed as well for the taking as the making of an impression,--something more than mere ductility. Weakness may never bear the stamp of power,--it breaks in the moulding; and it is rather because woman is so strong that she is able to take the Caesarean stamp of any form of power. Nor cares she by whose hands she is moulded, whose image she wears, be it warrior, poet, or priest, so long as she feels the veritable grasp and impress of power. ”

“ Sometimes, perhaps nearly always, it tortures us with the unreality, the unrealisability of precious moments that are flying, flying, and can never come again; and at other times it equally eludes us with a sense of their indestructibility. To-night the present had chosen to seem real. Theophil felt, as he looked at Isabel, that this wonderful nearness could never pass away. Her dress, her coiled cendré hair, her soft smile, her very attitudes, seemed to wear a curious expression of everlastingness. Yes, she would sit just like that, and he and Jenny would sit near her for ever and ever. ”

“ Never voice nor look nor touch of woman had affected Theophil before as the least tone or glance or movement of Isabel stirred him to the centre of his being. To meet her eyes was to release a music that went shuddering through the whole world; her lightest word was filled with echoes of infinite things. Not a lover only, but anyone with instincts for such perceptions, looking at Isabel, would have said: There is a woman who is needed to make some man a great poet, a great artist, some kind of great man! She belongs to the history-making women. ”

“ Doesn't it seem strange to be so wonderful?" said Jenny afterwards, as the two girls took off their outdoor things in Jenny's room.
"Dear child!" said Isabel, kissing Jenny on her brow, "it is you that are wonderful."
There is no joy in the world better worth seeing, better worth living, than the joy of young people with the same dreams, the same thoughts, and--so important--the same words for them, blown together by some unexpected conjunction of the four winds, met by some blissful dispensation of the planets of youth. ”

“ Somehow Isabel's visit has made me feel that life is a bigger, fuller thing than I had dreamed, and that men like you, at all events, have duties towards it even greater than your love for a little thing like me."
"Jenny dear, don't talk like that. Why should you? You don't surely doubt my love!"
"Of course not, Theophil. It was only my silly little brain thinking for once in a while,--and I don't mean to be unkind, but really I rather mean it. Are you still quite sure there is nothing in the world more important than love?"
"Quite sure," he answered; "surer than ever--if that were possible. ”

“ I have asked mercy for Jenny, though it was perhaps hardly necessary, for the world always pities Jenny. Now I would ask it for Isabel and Theophil, who are thus quietly to sacrifice the greatest thing in their lives, the one reality for which they have come into existence, for Jenny's sake. Great is their love for each other, but even greater and stranger must be their involuntary love for an invisible goodness, an ideal of ineffable pity. They are going to die that Jenny may live. ”

“ Their souls are swung high above time and space in one never-ending kiss,--the kiss of that predestined irrefragable union, of which meetings and partings and kisses and caresses and words, and every other fragmentary mode of expression, are but trivial accidents, to which distance is still nearness, and nearness is still distance.
Their love is a property of eternal elements. It is fated as the union of magnetic powers, it obeys chemic laws of irresistible combination. They are Isabel and Theophil,--that is their love; they are in the world together,--that is their marriage. ”

“ Indeed it was hardly recognisable to himself as a fancy that whenever he spoke Jenny was somewhere in the audience. Sometimes a remote face might bear a chance resemblance to her, and he would humour himself with the thought that that was Jenny. For, with that self-consciousness which no modern mind can escape, he found a certain sad pleasure sometimes in noting the tricks grief played with him, loving and encouraging all its fancies--if fancies indeed they were. ”

“ Isabel was the one woman in the whole world whom Theophil's faithfulness could not transform into Jenny. That it had been his fatal love for her that had brought Jenny to her death, his reason, except in moments of self-injustice, was robust enough to put aside.
There are excuses that we owe to ourselves, and we have a right to expect justice even from our own consciences. A sentimental conscience is the most tiresome of all altruists, and wilfully to indulge in remorse that we have not justly incurred is to blunt our consciences for real offences. ”

“ The dying have forgotten; the living are numb and foolish and in a dream. All they love on earth is passing away beneath their very eyes, and they cannot understand,--cannot realise that this, this is death.
Except in moments of piercing agony, days and weeks afterwards, moments that were similarly soothed away again by that mysterious narcotic property which pain at its highest brings with it (pain at its highest being its own anaesthetic) , Theophil never realised that Jenny had died, and least of all at the moment when she was dying. ”

“ If they had only told her, might she not have loved their love? (Ah! if we would only trust the deeps in those we love!)
Had Isabel only seen that white face in the dark doorway, she would have spared Jenny one of her recitations that night. It was a poem of Mrs. Browning's, perhaps the most poignant poem of renunciation ever written, and Isabel had chosen it, as love will choose a song, for the fearful joy of singing it where all may hear but one only may understand. ”

“ Surely the lover would trip in the shroud that was plainly to be seen from his feet to his lips!
Like sudden snow on a summer meadow, a white silence fell from his imagination across that fiddling, jigging, gleaming atmosphere, and everywhere the dead sat around him, watching in a trance strange antics of the grimacing dead. Curiously, in these moods, he never thought of himself as dead. Alas! life was too cruel to release him so soon to death and Jenny. ”

“ It seemed impossible that one form could so mockingly resemble another, and yet be so hopelessly someone else. Theophil could hardly bring himself to believe that the woman yonder with Jenny's eyes and mouth and hair had never even heard of Jenny's name. Surely, if he were to come and look into her face, she would recognise him at once, and the old common interests would rise to her lips as of old. ”