Part Eight. In Which The River Rushes Into Perilous Rapids - Chapter 28. Arabian Nights In England

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_ PART EIGHT. IN WHICH THE RIVER RUSHES INTO PERILOUS RAPIDS
CHAPTER XXVIII. ARABIAN NIGHTS IN ENGLAND

I had much to reconstruct that season in regard to Margarita. I had found her once before, in Paris, no longer a child, but a woman; I found her now no woman merely, but a woman of the world. It seems incredible, indeed, and I have puzzled over it many an hour when the demon of sciatica has clawed at my hip and Hodgson's faithful hands have dropped fatigued from his ministrations. How she did it, how an untrained, emotional little savage, with hands as quick to strike as the paws of a cub lioness, with tongue as unbridled as the tongue of a four-year-old, with no more religion than a Parisian boulevardier, with not one-tenth the instruction of a London board-school child--how such a creature became in two years an (apparently) finished product of civilisation, I am at a loss to comprehend. That she did it is certain. My own eyes have seen Boston Brahmins drinking her tea gratefully; my own ears have heard New York fashionables babbling in her drawing-room. As for London, she dominated one whole season, and not to be able to bow to her, when she rode on her grey gelding of a morning, was to argue oneself unbowed to! Paris can never forget her, for did she not invent an entirely new Marguerite? And the Republic of Art is not ungrateful. She would have been a social success in Honolulu or Lapland, the witch!

Whether her ancestor the prince or her ancestress the actress made her development possible, whether her Connecticut grandfather or her Virginia grandmother taught her, how much she owed her bandit father who defied the world and her mother, the nun, who won it--both for love--who shall say?

When I look back on those wonderful months I find that the fanciful sprite whose province it is to tint imperishably the choice pictures that shall brighten the last grey days, has selected for my gallery not those hours when the footlights stretched between us, though one would suppose them beyond all doubt the most brilliant, but quaint, unexpected bits, sudden, unrehearsed scenes that stand out like tiny, jewelled landscapes viewed through a reversed telescope, or white sudden statues at the end of a dark corridor.

There is that delicious afternoon when we went, she and I and Sue Paynter and an infatuated undergrad, to Oxford together, and ate strawberries and hot buttered tea-cake and extraordinary little buns choked with plums, and honey breathing of clover and English meadows, and drank countless cups of strong English tea with blobs of yellow, frothing cream atop. Heavens, how we ate, and how we talked, and how tolerantly the warm, grey walls, ivy-hung and statue-niched, smiled through the long, opal English sunset at our frivolous and ephemeral chatter! They have listened to so much, those walls, and we shall perish and wax old as a garment, and still the tea and strawberries shall brew and bloom along the emerald turf, and infatuated youths shall cross their slim, white-flannelled legs and hang upon the voice of their charmer. Not the pyramids themselves give me that sense of the continuity of the generations, the ebb and flow of youth and youth's hot loves and hot regrets and the inexorable twilight that makes placid middle age, as do those grey walls and blooming closes of what I sometimes think is the very heart's core of England. My mother's countrymen may fill London with their national caravanseries and castles with their nation's lovely (if somewhat nasal) daughters, but Oxford shall defy them forever.

The infatuated undergrad was the owner of a banjo, an instrument hitherto unknown to Margarita and in regard to which she was vastly curious, and at her request he and three of his mates blushingly sang for her some of the American negro melodies then so popular among them. She was delighted with them and soon began to hum and croon unconsciously, the velvet of her voice mingling most piquantly with their sweet throaty English singing. By little and little her tones swelled louder and more bell-like: theirs softened gradually, till the harmony, so simple, yet so inevitable, dwindled to the nearest echo and barely breathed the quaint, primitive words:

"Nellie was a lady--
Last night she died ..."

Those deep tones of hers, stolen from envious contraltos, turned in our ears to a mourning purple; a sombre, tender gloom haunted us, and the sorrow of life, that alone binds us together who live, hung like a lifting cloud over all who came within the magic radius of her voice. The people gathered like bees to a honeycomb from all sides; black caps and pale clear draperies drifted into a wondering circle; the clink of cups, the murmur of gentle English voices died softly away and the silence that was always her royal right spread around her.

"Toll the bell for lovely Nell,
My dark ... Virginia ... bride!"

Who they were, those listening hundreds, I could not say for my life. I suppose they must have been some garden party--I distinctly recall the gaiters of a bishop and the coloured linings of more than one doctor's hood among them. They are as sudden, as unexplained in my memory, as those crowds in dreams, so definite, so individualised, where haunting, special faces stand out and hands clasp and shoulders touch--and all fades away. Around the vivid emerald lawn they group themselves, and Margarita, a pearl in pearly trailing laces, sits on a stone bench, defaced and mossy, in the centre, at the back; the lads adore at her feet, the banjo drops tinkling handfuls of chords at intervals, the birds flutter through the ivy overhead, the watered turf smells strong and sweet in the fanlike rays of the slow sun; bright pencils of yellow light fall like stained glass among the immemorial ivy; the day goes, softly, pensively....

"Toll the bell for lovely Nell ..."

"Ah-h-h!" they sigh and melt, and I see nothing more. But the picture is safe.

Then there was the famous house-party down in Surrey, whither the elect of England, for some reason or other, seem to gravitate; whether because the long midsummer Surrey days appear to them the last stage on the way to a peaceful, well-ordered heaven, in case they expect to spend eternity there, or a temporary solace, in case they don't! Sue, to whom all musical Europe opened its doors on poor Frederick's account, had taken Margarita, to whom the said doors were gladly opening on her own, to one of the famous country houses of a county famous for such jewels, and when Roger and I turned up there, who should our host be but one of my old schoolmates at Vevay--younger son of a younger son, then, and unimportant to a degree, but advanced since by one of those series of family holocausts that so change English county history, to be the head of a great house and lord of more acres than seems quite discreet--until one is in a position to slap the lord on the shoulder!

To Sue and me the soft-shod luxury, the studious, ripe comfort of the great, hedged establishment, were frankly marvellous, accustomed as we were to the many grades and stages of domestic prosperity between this rose-lined ease and little-a-year; but Margarita, to whom the old red jersey of the Island was no more real than the barbaric trappings of Aida, who accepted shells from Caliban or diamonds from Mephistopheles with equal sang-froid, displayed an indifference to her surroundings as regal as it was sincere. Indeed, the two simplest people at that party (famous for years in country-house annals as the most brilliant gathering of well-mixed rank and talent that ever fought with that arch-enemy of the leisured classes, Ennui, and throttled him successfully for seventy-two hours) were the wife of an American attorney-at-law and the eldest son of England's greatest duke--the most eligible parti in the United Kingdom, a youth of head-splitting lineage and fabulous possessions.

They sat together on the floor of a chintz-hung breakfast room, spinning peg-tops all over the polished wax, for two rainy hours before dinner (which function was delayed half an hour to please them, to the awed wonder of the lesser guests and the apoplectic amusements of the young peer's father) and were the only occupants of the great house, except three collie pups who sat with them, to see nothing odd in the performance, though Saint-Saens was come over from Paris to accompany Margarita on the piano and the princess of a royal family was dressed in her palpitating best for the best reason in the world not unconnected with the son of an historic house!

Du Maurier drew a picture of it for Punch in his very best manner (it went the length and breadth of England) and then, at Roger's grave request, withdrew it from the all-but-printed page and gracefully presented him with it. It was wonderfully characteristic of both of them and prettily done on both sides, to my old-fashioned way of thinking.

Well, it was after that top-spinning that Margarita and the Fortunate Youth jumped up carelessly, kicked away the tops, and raced each other to the noble music room, a magnificent gallery, all oak and Romneys and Lelys, and there the Fortunate Youth sat down at the piano (Saint-Saens standing amused in the curve of it) and began to play the accompaniment of one of Tosti's great popular waltz-songs. It is no longer in favour, your waltz-song, though I have lived through a sufficient number of musical fashions to be reasonably certain of its return to power, some day, but then it was at its height, and subalterns hummed them to military bands, from Simla to Quebec, and soft eyes dropped under those subalterns' right shoulders and soft hearts melted as the chorus was repeated by request, and the dawn found them still dancing--bless the happy days!

Now Providence had seen fit (displaying thus an astonishing lack of socialistic wisdom and an altogether regrettable tendency to give to those to whom much had already been given) to bestow upon this Fortunate Youth enough musical ability to have made the fortune of a pair of Blind Toms, so that he could play any and all instruments, instinctively, apparently, and almost equally well. He played also by ear, with the greatest ease, the most complicated harmonies, and could accompany anybody's singing or playing of anything whatever--if he happened to be in the mood for it.

"It is a thousand pities that one could not have found him in the gutter, that boy," as M. Saint-Saens confided to me, "it would have been of service to him!"

Which remark, being overheard, scandalised many good British souls horribly and caused the youth to blush with perfectly ingenuous and modest pleasure.

He sat down at the great Steinway and ran his long white fingers loosely over the keys, and said to Margarita, while the butler gazed in agony at his mistress, and the other guests, all arrayed for one of the climaxes of one of England's most temperamental importations from the kitchens of France, stood divided between interest and foreboding,

"I say, Mrs. Bradley, can you sing 'Bid me Good-bye and Go'? I'm awfully fond of that."

"I can sing it if it is here," said Margarita placidly, "why not?"

"Oh, it's safe to be here," he answered easily, and sure enough, it was there, in a cabinet close by.

Well, it was banal enough, heaven knows--how else could it have been popular? Lincoln was not a musician, so far as I know, but he knew that one can't fool all the people all the time! And the good Tosti, however light he may ring nowadays, had one little bit of information not always at the disposal of modern song-writers--he understood how to write for the human voice. Which has always seemed to me a very valuable acquisition, if one happens to be in the song-writing trade.

So when Margarita, with a quick glance at the obvious little melody, put her hands behind her back like a school-girl--she was dressed in a tight, plain little jacket and skirt of English tweeds, with stiff white collar and cuffs and thick-soled boots, and what used to be called an "Alpine hat"--and began to sing, to a slow waltz rhythm, one might not have expected much: indeed, the youth hummed audaciously with her, at first, and the other men, not one of whom was within many degrees of nonentity, beat time carelessly.

"Is there a single joy or pain
That I may never know?"

Stop a bit! What caught at your heart and worried you, Colonel, and stabbed a little under your D. S. O.? Were you quite fair to that lovely, high-spirited creature you married, all those years ago?

"Take back your love, it is in vain ..."

Ah, Lady Mary, you are a good twelve stone nowadays, but when that poor younger cousin gave you that look in the garden and the roses crawled over the old dial in the moonlight, you were slighter, and crueler!

"Bid me good-bye and go!"

It was a waltz, oh, yes, but it was a very Dance of Death to those of us who had any parting to look back to, that changed our life--and we could never go back again and make it better; never any more. That was what cut so, and Margarita, dark and slim like a plain brown nightingale, who leaves plumage to the raucous peacock because it matters so little what she, the real queen of us all, wears--Margarita spelled it out remorselessly, to the tune of a mess-room waltz, and told us that youth is only once and so sweet and for so little time! And the boy beside her smiled with pleasure and embroidered her rich, clear-cut phrasing and annotated it and threw jewels and flowers of unexpected chords through it and mocked the sad, charming fatalism of it as only spendthrift youth can.

"You do not love me, no!
Bid me good-bye and go ..."

Cruel Margarita, how could you make the tears splash down the cheeks of the poor little princess, who knew what was expected of her and had no greater sin on her conscience than a tiny lock of her yellow hair always warm, now, in the breast of a ridiculous second cousin on a sheep-ranch in far Dakota, U. S. A.?

"Good-bye, good-bye, 'tis better so ..."

They stand so still in this picture, those big, non-committal British, each gnawing his lip a little under the drooping mustache; the women's shoulders are ivory against the panelled oak and bowls of Guelder roses in Chinese bowls; that beautiful line from the base of the throat to the top of the corsage which America has not to give her daughters, as yet, heaves and droops; the Romneys smile behind their wax candles in sconces. It is only a waltz of the street, but she has bewitched us with it, has our Margarita.

But strongest and clearest of all, keen in light and dense in shadow like a Rembrandt, I see that extraordinary night in Trafalgar Square, that night that surely lives unique in the memory of Nelson and the Lions, though most that shared it may be, and doubtless are--for they were not for various reasons long-lived classes of people--dead and dust by now. How and why we found ourselves at Trafalgar Square I could not tell, though I went to the stake for it this minute. But I think it must have been that Margarita wanted to walk through the streets, a form of exercise for which she took fitful fancies at odd times, and that I, as was mostly the case, went with her.

We were all alone, for Roger, who shared our walks usually, when he was not too busy, had just left for Berlin an hour earlier, on one of his patient unravellings of Carter's diplomatic tangles.

It had been a dull, damp day--the kind of day that tried Margarita terribly in England, for she was much under the influence of the weather, and le beau temps brought out her plumage like her Mexican parrot in Whistler's portrait. Looking back at it all, too, I seem to feel, though with no definite reason for it, that she was perturbed and excited about something known only to herself, for she was strangely irritable on our walk, contradicted me fiercely, inquired testily who Nelson might be, then chid me for a dry old schoolmaster, when I told her, and such like flighty vagaries, inseparable, I believed, from her sex in general and her temperament in particular. If I have never taken the trouble to defend myself from the accusation of thinking The Pearl perfect in her somewhat spoiled relations with her best friends at this period of her life, it is because I have always considered that such people as are too inelastic in their views of human nature to realise that Margarita merely exhibited les defauts de ses qualites (as who of us does not, at one time or another?) are unworthy even my argumentative powers, which are not great, as I perfectly understand.

So she unsheathed her sharp little female claws and patted me mercilessly with them, and contrived to make me seem to myself a tactless, blundering fool to her heart's content that night, striding easily beside me, meanwhile, like a boy, though she had refused to change her high-heeled bronze slippers for more sensible footgear and carried the unreasonably long train of her black lace dinner gown over her arm. Roger did not care for her in black, and she seldom wore it, but had ordered this a few days ago from the great Worth, who then ruled those fortunate ladies who could afford to number themselves among his subjects with a sway he has since, I am assured, been forced to divide among other monarchs--the only monarchs left now to a Republic that has never denied that one divine succession through all her revolutions. For that monarchy Paris never will sing ca ira; for that principle she knows no cynicism; that wonderful juggernaut, the Fashion, shall never rumble across channel, it seems!

I had derided myself for a sentimentalist and spinner of fine theories when I had thought I detected a little defiance in her first assumption of this midnight black robe, with its startling corals on her arm and neck, and the foreign-looking comb behind her high-dressed hair, the whole bringing out markedly that continental strain that amused Whistler (naughty Jimmie!) and displeased Roger. But when she appeared in it that night determined on a dinner where most of the guests were highly distasteful to Roger, who had congratulated himself on a quiet evening at home; when she had dragged him to it at the risk of losing his only train and teased him shamefully all through it by the most ridiculous flirtation with one of the worst roues of Europe (Margarita was so fundamentally honest and so thoroughly attached to her husband that such performances could only be doubly painful to him, since they were obviously intended maliciously) when she sent him off before the long dinner's close without any but the most casual adieux and without the remotest intention of accompanying him, I was uncomfortably forced to the conclusion that this long-trained, inky dress was a veritable devil's livery, that she had put it on deliberately and that there would be no stopping her till the mood was off.

And now I find myself about to write a most unjustifiable thing, in view of the possibility of these idle memories falling somehow, sometime, somewhere, into the hands of that ubiquitous Young Person to whom all print is free as air in these enlightened days. In America it has been the rule, to suppress such print as could not brave this freedom; in France, to suppress such Young Persons as could! There is something to be said for both methods, and each has, perhaps, its defects; the one producing more stimulating Young Persons, the other enjoying more virile prose.

Be that as it may, I am quite aware that my duty to the youth of Anglo Saxondom should lead me to state, sadly but firmly, that such conduct as Margarita displayed on the night in question could have had but one result--that of filling me, her friend and admirer, with a grieved displeasure and disgust; that her unwomanly carelessness as to the feelings of others and her wanton disregard of the wishes and comfort of those who should have been dearest to her lowered her in my estimation and greatly detracted from her charm in my eyes. But I am not writing particularly for the Young Person and candour compels me to state that she was quite as interesting to me as ever! I didn't think she had treated Roger very handsomely--true; but Roger had known that he was marrying a delicious vixen when he married Margarita, you see, and if I had begun to lecture her, there were too many others who would have been only too delighted to relieve her of my society. She abused her power sometimes, I admit it--but then, she had the power! And oh, the balm she kept for the wounds she gave!

As I have said, I have not the remotest idea of how or why we confronted Nelson and the Lions, I cannot by any effort of memory see us arriving or leaving; but I see myself pausing in my lecture on English history, as a lighted transparency, a straggling crowd and a band bear down upon us suddenly out of nowhere. It is a poor, vicious sort of crowd, the gutter-sweepings of London; pale, stunted lads, haggard, idle slatterns, a handful of women of the street, a trio of tawdry flower girls. Around the band, which turns out to be only a big drum and a clattering tambourine, a group of men and women in a vaguely familiar uniform, the women in ugly coal-scuttle bonnets.

"What is that, Jerry?" says Margarita.

"That is the Salvation Army--let's get along," I answer.

But she will not, for she is curious, and I resign myself to the inevitable and wait. Their crude appeals are symbols born of a deep knowledge of the human heart they fight to win--gleaming light and rhythmic drum: the first groping of savagery, the last pinnacle of the most highly organised religious spectacle the world has yet elaborated. They gather near the fountain, they group about their lighted banner, and a drawling cockney voice afflicts the air. I can see the circle now--they form in the classic amphitheatre that knows no century nor country; a humpback pushing a barrow of something before him stops near us; a woman, coughing frightfully, leans on it, muttering to herself, staring at Margarita's scarf-wrapped head.

The cockney's address begins, "O my brothers ..." but I do not attend: I want to get Margarita out of the growing crowd, listless, but lifted for a moment from their sordid treadmill of existence by the light and the muffled, rhythmic crush and the high-pitched sing-song. They must have followed for a long way, for they are churnings from the very dregs of London and alien to Trafalgar Square, and the officer on his beat looks at them suspiciously enough.

"Won't you give us a song, lieutenant?" says the speaker suddenly, "pipe h'up there, friends--many a sinner's saved his soul with a song--w'y not some o' you? Are you ready, lieutenant?"

I can see her so plainly, the pretty, worn little creature; pale as death and in no condition for street singing, evidently, but plucky and borne along by the very zeal of the Crusaders. The other woman, who cannot sing, shakes the tambourine, a great, burly fellow, some rescued navvy, thuds at the drum, and her sweet, thin little voice rises, shrill, but wonderfully appealing, through the night.

"I need Thee every hour,
Most gracious Lord!"

It is not difficult now to see why the crowd followed; her voice is like a child's lost in the wood, but brave, and sure of ultimate protection; it has a curious effect of the country and the hedgerows. They listen eagerly, they like it.

"Come, Margarita, I think we ought to get away--the crowd is getting thicker. People are staring at us."

"No, no, Jerry, let me alone! Oh, see the poor woman, she is too ill to sing! She has lost her voice--do you know it?"

And so she has. With a clutch at her throat and a pathetic turn of her eyes to the speaker, the little lieutenant shakes her head at him and is dumb. He seats her deftly on a camp stool by the drummer, pats her shoulder, sends a friendly gutter-rat with the face of a sneak-thief for water, and turns to the crowd.

"Come now, friends, the lieutenant 'ere 'as lost 'er voice along o' you, an' tryin' to save yer! Can't you pipe up, some o' you? If some of you'd sing a bit with us, now, maybe we'd be able to take back one soul to Christ with us to-night. Can't one o' yer sing?"

"I will sing!" says some one near me--and it is Margarita!

I clutch her cape fiercely, but it slips off in my hand and she is at the drum, and the lane that opened for her closes for me, and I fight in vain to reach her--Oh, it must be a dream!

"I need Thee every hour...."

Ah-h-h! The crowd sighs with the old familiar joy, the magic of the golden voice slips like a veil over the cruel angles of their broken lives and mists and softens everything.

She has a slip of printed paper in her hand and reads seriously from it; some one holds the transparency near her shoulder for light--her white shoulders, bare in Trafalgar Square!

"I need Thee every hour,
Most gracious Lord,
No tender voice like thine
Can peace afford...."

They are still as death, tranced in those liquid bell-tones. The great drum shivers, as it shivered, of old, a tom-tom, across the African desert; the old, primal thrill creeps through my blood--good heavens, is this fear? Is it superstition? Is it religion?

"I need Thee--oh, I need Thee!"

The woman sobs like a damned soul beside me; a man coughs huskily. Will no one stop her? They have wedged me so that I cannot breathe, I feel them gathering from the nearby streets. And there she stands, coral like blood on her bare neck, the scarf fallen from her black hair, the plea of all humanity pouring in a great anguished stream of melody out of her white throat.

"I need Thee oh, I need Thee,
Ev'ry hour I need Thee!"

The tambourine shudders barbarically across the smooth flood of her voice: it is the tingling crash of the Greek Mysteries--and I had thought it vulgar!

I hear hansoms jingling up--what will Roger say? He would kill them all, if he could, I know, and yet no one there would hurt a hair of her head--and does she not belong to the public?

God knows the poor devils need something--is it that, then? Is it a real thing? Do people fight for it like that? For this imperious Voice is agonising for something and the drum is the beat of its heart.

"Gawd's frightful hard on women," the poor creature beside me moans, and lo, the little dumb lieutenant is by her side miraculously, and like a shifting kaleidoscope the crowd lets them through and she kneels, shaking, by the drum.

Their white faces heap in layers before me; drawn, wolfish, brutal in the flaring lights they peer and gasp and sob, like uncouth inhabitants of another world--wait a bit, Jerry, it is your world, just the same, and perhaps you are responsible for it? Ugh!

"I need Thee ..."

"Gad, it's little Josefa!"

The clear English voice cuts across the hush, and,

"What a lark!" answers a deeper bass.

He is a very important and highly conventional personage, nowadays, that slender pink dandy, with five grown daughters and a Constituency; but if by any odd chance he should read this, I will wager he forgets what he is actually looking at for a moment and sees against the black shadows and rising night fog of Trafalgar Square a beautiful, black-robed woman in red corals lifted to an empty barrow by two eager club-dandies and held there by a gigantic Guardsman--the best fencer in Europe, once!

Oh, Bertie, the Right Honourable now, the always honourable then, do you know that there were tears on your pink cheeks? And your noble friend, who broke up his establishment in St. John's Wood the next day and founded the Little Order of the Sons of St. Francis, does he know that the lightning stroke that blinded him like Saul of Tarsus and sent him reeling from Piccadilly to the slums, lighted for a moment, as it fell, the way of a dazed, rheumatic bachelor from America, who saw the terror in his eyes and the sweat on his forehead as he held his corner of the barrow and Margarita drove him to his God?

"Ev'ry hour I need Thee ..."

The fog rolls over us, the lights flare through a sea of mist; the Honourable Bertie produces a hansom, from his pocket apparently, and the wild, dark etching is wiped out like a child's picture on a slate.

Margarita falls asleep on my shoulder, I gain my usual philosophical control, gradually, and realise, now the echoes of that agonised pleading have ceased to disturb my soul, that the woman beside me is not even a Christian, technically speaking, and knew not, literally, what she did!

The magic of the Golden Voice--ah, what magic can cope with it? Of all the pictures hers has painted for me on those miraculous, grey-tissued walls where memory lives, this strange coarse-tinted sketch--a very Hogarth in its unsparing contrasts--stands out the clearest. At night, when I close my eyes and think "London," then does that poor sister of the streets moan to me that "Gawd's frightful hard on women," and fight her way to Margarita--who has been favoured beyond most women, and knows not God--at least, not that implacable deity of the London slum! Whenever I hear or read the phrase "Salvation Army" then do I see a young exquisite with a white camellia in his buttonhole, gazing like a hypnotised Indian Seer at a crude transparency blotted with unconvincing texts, then rushing off to found a celibate order--from Margarita, who was no more celibate that Ceres the bountiful!

Ah, well, the Way is a Mystery, as Alif said, and who am I that I should expect to solve it, when kings and philosophers have failed? At any rate, I have my pictures safe. _

Read next: Part Eight. In Which The River Rushes Into Perilous Rapids: Chapter 29. Fate Grips Her Landing Net

Read previous: Part Eight. In Which The River Rushes Into Perilous Rapids: Chapter 27. We Bring Our Pearl To Market

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