by George Moore
“But I object to your immortality being put on the rates.”
“You write books, Mr. Harding; I can’t.”
As soon as he left them, Harding, who knew the dealer kind, the original stock and the hybrid, told an amusing story of Mr. Rowe’s beginnings; and Owen forgot his sentimental trouble; but the story was interrupted by Lady Ascott coming down the room followed by her attendants, her literary and musical critics.
“Every one of them most interesting, I assure you, Sir Owen. Mr. Homer has just returned from Italy—”
“But I know Mr. Homer; we met long ago at Innes’ concerts. If I am not mistaken you were writing a book then about Bellini.”
“Yes, ‘His Life and Works.’ I’ve just returned from Italy after two years’ reading in the public libraries.”
Lady Ascott’s musical critic was known to Owen by a small book he had written entitled “A Guide to the Ring.” Before he was a Wagnerian he was the curator of a museum, and Owen remembered how desirous he was to learn the difference between Dresden and Chelsea china. He had dabbled in politics and in journalism; he had collected hymns, ancient and modern, and Owen was not in the least surprised to hear that he had become the director of a shop for the sale of religious prints and statues, or that he had joined the Roman Church, and the group watched him slinking round on the arm of a young man, one who sang forty-nine songs by all the composers in Europe in exactly the same manner.
“He is teaching Botticelli in his three manners,” said Lady Ascott, “and Cyril is thinking of going over to Rome.”
“Asher, let us get away from this culture,” Harding whispered.
“Yes, let’s get away from it; I want to show you a table, the one on which Evelyn used to write her letters. We bought it together at the Salle Druot.”
“Yes, Asher, yes; but would you mind coming this way, for I see Ringwood. He goes by in his drooping mantle, looking more like an umbrella than usual. Lady Ascott has engaged him for the season, and he goes out with her to talk literature — plush stockings, cockade. Literature in livery! Ringwood introducing Art!”
Owen laughed, and begged Harding to send his joke to the comic papers.
“An excellent subject for a cartoon.”
“He has stopped again. Now I’m sure he’s talking of Sophocles. He walks on…. I’m mistaken; he is talking about Molière.”
“An excellent idea of yours— ‘Literature in livery!’”
“His prose is always so finely spoken, so pompous, that I cannot help smiling. You know what I mean.”
“I’ve told you it ought to be sent to the papers. I wish he would leave that writing-table; and Lady Ascott might at least ask him to brush his coat.”
“It seems to me so strange that she should find pleasure in such company.”
“Men who will not cut their hair. How is it?”
“I suppose attention to externals checks or limits the current of feeling… or they think so.”
“I am feeling enough, God knows, but my suffering does not prevent me from selecting my waistcoat and tying my tie.”
Harding’s eyes implied acquiescence in the folding of the scarf (it certainly was admirably done) and glanced along the sleeves of the coat — a rough material chosen in a moment of sudden inspiration; and they did not miss the embroidered waistcoat, nor the daring brown trousers (in admirable keeping withal), turned up at the ends, of course, otherwise Owen would not have felt dressed; and, still a little conscious of the assistance his valet had been to him, he walked with a long, swinging stride which he thought suited him, stopping now and again to criticise a friend or a picture.
“There’s Merrington. How absurdly he dresses! One would think he was an actor; yet no man rides better to hounds. Lady Southwick! I must have a word with her.”
Before leaving Harding he mentioned that she attributed her lapses from virtue, not to passionate temperament, but to charitable impulses. “She wouldn’t kiss—” and Owen whispered the man’s name, “until he promised to give two thousand pounds to a Home for Girl Mothers.”
“Now, my dear Lady Southwick, I’m so delighted to see you here. But how very sad! The greatest singer of our time.”
“She was exceedingly good in two or three parts.”
A dispute arose, in which Owen lost his temper; but, recovering it suddenly, he went down the room with Lady Southwick to show her a Wedgewood dessert service which he had bought some years ago for Evelyn, pressing it upon her, urging that he would like her to have it.
“Every time you see it you will think of us,” and he turned on his heel suddenly, fearing to lose Harding, whom he found shaking hands with one of the dealers, a man of huge girth— “like a waggoner,” Owen said, checking a reproof, but he could not help wishing that Harding would not shake hands with such people, at all events when he was with him.
“These are the Chadwells, whom—” (Harding whispered a celebrated name) “used to call the most gentlemanly picture-dealers in Bond-street.” Harding spoke to them, Owen standing apart absorbed in His grief, until the word “Asher” caught his ear.
“Of whom are you speaking?”
“Of you, of Sir Owen Asher.” And Harding followed Owen, intensely annoyed.
“Not even to a gentlemanly picture-dealer should you—”
“You are entirely wrong; I said ‘Sir Owen Asher.’”
“Very strange you should say ‘Sir Owen Asher’; why didn’t you say Sir Owen?”
Harding did not answer, being uncertain if it would not be better to drop Asher’s acquaintance. But they had known each other always. It would be difficult.
“The sale is about to begin,” Asher said, and Harding sat down angry with Asher and interested in the auctioneer’s face, created, Harding thought, for the job… “looking exactly like a Roman bust. Lofty brow, tight lips, vigilant eyes, voice like a bell…. That damned fellow Asher! What the hell did he mean—”
The auctioneer sat at a high desk, high as any pulpit, and in the benches the congregation crowded — every shade of nondescript, the waste ground one meets in a city: poor Jews and dealers from the outlying streets, with here and there a possible artist or journalist. As the pictures were sold the prices they fetched were marked in the catalogues, and Harding wondered why.
Around the room were men and women of all classes; a good many of Sir Owen’s “set” had come— “Society being well represented that day,” as the newspapers would put it. All the same, the pictures were not selling well, not nearly so well as Owen and Harding anticipated. Harding was glad of this, for his heart was set on a certain drawing by Boucher.
“I would sooner you had it, Harding, than anybody else. It would be unendurable if one of those picture-dealers should get it; they’d come round to my house trying to sell it to me again, whereas in your rooms—”
“Yes,” said Harding, “it will be an excuse to come to see me. Well, if I can possibly afford it—”
“Of course you can afford it; I paid eighty-seven pounds for it years ago; it won’t go to more than a hundred. I’d really like you to have it.”
“Well, for goodness’ sake don’t talk so loud, somebody will hear you.”
The pictures went by — portraits of fair ladies and ancient admirals, landscapes, underwoods and deserts, flower and battle pieces, pathetic scenes and gallantries. There was a time when every one of these pictures was the hope and delight of a human being, now they went by interesting nobody….
At last the first of Evelyn’s pictures was hoisted on the easel.
“Good God!” isn’t it a miserable sight seeing her pictures going to whomsoever cares to bid a few pounds. But if I were to buy the whole collection—”
“I quite understand, and every one is a piece of your life.”
The pictures continued to go by.
“I can’t stand this much longer.”
“Hush!”
The Boucher drawing went up. It was turned to the right and to the left: a beautiful g
irl lying on her belly, her legs parted slightly. Therefore the bidding began briskly, but for some unaccountable reason it died away. “Somebody must have declared it to be a forgery,” Owen whispered to Harding, and a moment after it became Harding’s property for eighty-seven pounds— “The exact sum I paid for it years ago. How very extraordinary!”
“A portrait by Manet — a hundred pounds offered, one hundred,” and two grey eyes in a face of stone searched the room for bidders. “One hundred pounds offered, five, thirty, thirty-five, forty, fifty,” and so on to two hundred.
“Her portrait will cost me a thousand,” Owen whispered to Harding, and, catching the auctioneer’s eyes, he nodded again. Seven hundred. “Will they never stop bidding? That fellow yonder is determined to run up the picture.” Eight hundred and fifty! The auctioneer raised his hammer, and the watchful eyes went round the room in search of some one who would pay another ten pounds for Evelyn’s portrait by Manet. Eight hundred and fifty — eight hundred and fifty. Down came the hammer. The auctioneer whispered “Sir Owen Asher” to his clerk.
“It’s a mercy I got it for that; I was afraid it would go over the thousand. Now, come, we have got our two pictures. I’m sick of the place.”
Harding had thought of staying on, just to see the end of the sale, but it was easier to yield to Owen than to argue with him; besides, he was anxious to see how the drawing would look on his wall. Of course it was a Boucher. Stupid remarks were always floating about Christie’s. But he would know for certain as soon as he saw the drawing in a new light.
He was muttering “It is genuine enough,” when his servant opened the door— “Sir Owen Asher.”
“I see you have hung up the drawing. It looks very well, doesn’t it. You’ll never regret having taken my advice.”
“Taken your advice!” Harding was about to answer. “But what is the use in irritating the poor man? He is so much in love he hardly knows what he is saying. Owen Asher advising me as to what I should buy!”
Owen went over and looked into Harding’s Ingres.
“Every time one sees it one likes it better.” And they talked about Ingres for some time, until Owen’s thoughts went back to Evelyn, and looking from the portrait by Ingres to the drawing by Boucher he seemed suddenly to lose control; tears rose to his eyes, and Harding watched him, wondering whither Owen’s imagination carried him. “Is he far away in Paris, hearing her sing for the first time to Madame Savelli? Or is he standing with her looking over the bulwarks of the Medusa, seeing the shape of some Greek island dying in the twilight?” And Harding did not speak, feeling the lover’s meditation to be sacred. Owen flung himself into an arm-chair, and without withdrawing his eyes from the picture, said, relying on Harding’s friendship:
“It is very like her, it is really very like her. I am much obliged to you, Harding, for having bought it. I shall come here to see it occasionally.”
“And I’ll present you with a key, so that when I am away you can spend your leisure in front of the picture…. Do you know whom I shall feel like? Like the friend of King Condules.”
“But she’ll not ask you to conspire to assassinate me. My murder would profit you nothing. All the same, Harding, now I come to think of it, there’s a good deal of that queen in Evelyn, or did she merely desire to take advantage of the excuse to get rid of her husband?”
“Ancient myths are never very explicit; one reads whatever psychology one likes into them. Perhaps that is why they never grow old.”
The door opened… Harding’s servant brought in a parcel of proofs.
“My dear Asher, the proof of an article has just come, and the editor tells me he’ll be much obliged if I look through it at once.”
“Shall I wait?”
“Well, I’d sooner you didn’t. Correcting a proof with me means a rewriting, and—”
“You can’t concentrate your thoughts while I am roving about the room. I understand. Are you dining anywhere?”
“I’m not engaged.”
The thought crossed Harding’s mind when Owen left the room that it would be better perhaps to write saying that the proofs detained him, for to spend the evening with Owen would prove wearisome. “No matter what the subject of conversation may be his mind will go back to her very soon…. But to leave him alone all the evening would be selfish, and if I don’t dine with him I shall have to dine alone….” Harding turned to his writing-table, worked on his proof for a couple of hours, and then went to meet Owen, whom he found waiting for him at his club.
“My dear friend, I quite agree with you,” he said, sitting down to the table; “what you want is change.”
“Do you think, Harding, I shall find any interest again in anything?”
“Of course you will, my dear friend, of course you will.” And he spoke to his friend of ruined palaces and bas-reliefs; Owen listened vaguely, begging of him at last to come with him.
“It will give you ideas, Harding; you will write better.”
Harding shook his head, for it did not seem to him to be his destiny to relieve the tedium of a yachting excursion in the Mediterranean.
V
“ONE CANNOT YACHT in the Baltic or in the Gulf of Mexico,” Owen said, and he went to the Mediterranean again to sail about the Ægean Islands, wondering if he should land, changing his mind, deciding suddenly that the celebrated site he was going to see would not interest him. He would stand watching the rocky height dying down, his eyes fixed on the blue horizon, thinking of some Emperor’s palace amid the Illyrian hills, till, acting on a sudden impulse, he would call an order to the skipper, an order which he would countermand next day. A few days after the yacht would sail towards the Acropolis as though Owen had intended to drop anchor in the Piræeus. But he was too immersed in his grief, he thought, to be able to give his attention to ruins, whether Roman or Greek. All the same, he would have to decide if he would return to the islands. He did not know them all; he had never been to Samos, famous for its wine and its women…. The wine cloyed the palate and no woman charmed him in the dance; and he sailed away wondering how he might relieve the tedium of life, until one day, after long voyaging, sufficiently recovered from his grief and himself, he leaned over the taffrail, this time lost in admiration of the rocks and summits above Syracuse, the Sicilian coasts carrying his thoughts out of the present into the past, to those valleys where Theocritus watched his “visionary flocks.”
“‘His visionary flocks,’” he repeated, wondering if the beautiful phrase had floated accidentally into his mind, hoping that it was his own, and then abandoning hope, for he had nearly succeeded in tracing the author of the phrase; but there was a vision in it more intense than Tennyson’s. “Visionary flocks!” For while the shepherds watched Theocritus dreamed the immortal sheep and goats which tempt us for an instant to become shepherds; but Owen knew that the real flocks would seem unreal to him who knew the visionary ones, so he turned away from the coasts without a desire in his heart to trouble the shepherds in the valley with an offer of his services, and walked up and down the deck thinking how he might obtain a translation of the idyls.
“Sicily, Sicily!”
It was unendurable that his skipper should come at such a moment to ask him if he would like to land at Palermo; for why should he land in Sicily unless to meet the goatherd who in order to beguile Thyrsis to sing the song of Daphnis told him that “his song was sweeter than the music of yonder water that is poured from the high face of the rock”? It was in Sicily that rugged Polyphemus, peering over some cliffs, sought to discern Galatea in the foam; but before Owen had time to recall the myth an indenture in the coast line, revealing a field, reminded him how Proserpine, while gathering flowers on the plains of Enna with her maidens, had been raped into the shadows by the dark god. And looking on these waves, he remembered that it was over them that Jupiter in the form of a bull, a garlanded bull with crested horns, had sped, bearing Europa away for his pleasure. Venus had been washed up by these waves! Poseidon! Sirens
and Tritons had disported themselves in this sea, the bluest and the beautifullest, the one sea that mattered, more important than all the oceans; the oceans might dry up to-morrow for all he cared so long as this sea remained; and with the story of Theseus and “lonely Ariadne on the wharf at Naxos” ringing in his ears he looked to the north-east, whither lay the Cyclades and Propontis. Medea, too, had been deserted— “Medea deadlier than the sea.” Helen! All the stories of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” had been lived about these seas, from the coasts of Sicily to those of Asia Minor, whence Æneas had made his way to Carthage. Dido, she, too, had been deserted. All the great love stories of the world had been lived about these shores and islands; his own story! And he mused for a long time on the accident — if it were an accident — which had led him back to this sea. Or had he returned to these shores and islands merely because there was no other sea in which one could yacht? Hardly, and he remembered with pleasure that his story differed from the ancient stories only in this, that Evelyn had fled from him, not be from her. And for such a woeful reason! That she might repent her sins in a convent on the edge of Wimbledon Common, whereas Dido was deserted for —
Again his infernal skipper hanging about. This time he had come with news that the Medusa was running short of provisions. Would Sir Owen prefer that they should put in at Palermo or Tunis?
“Tunis, Tunis.”
The steerman put down the helm, and the fore and aft sails went over. Three days later the Medusa dropped her anchor in the Bay of Tunis, and his skipper was again asking Owen for orders.
“Just take her round to Alexandria and wait for me there,” he answered, feeling he would not be free from England till she was gone. It was his wish to get away from civilisation for a while, to hear Arabic, to learn it if he could, to wear a bournous, to ride Arab horses, live in a tent, to disappear in the desert, yes, and to be remembered as the last lover of the Mediterranean — that would be une belle fin de vie, après tout.
Then he laughed at his dreams, but they amused him; he liked to look upon his story as one of the love stories of the world. Rome had robbed Dido of her lover and him of his mistress. So far as he could see, the better story was the last, and his thoughts turned willingly to the Virgil who would arise centuries hence to tell it. One thing, however, puzzled him. Would the subject-matter he was creating for the future poet be spoilt if he were to fall in love with an Arab maiden, some little statuette carved in yellow ivory? Or would it be enhanced? Would the future Virgil regard her as an assuagement, a balm? Owen laughed at himself and his dream. But his mood drifted into sadness; and he asked if Evelyn should be punished. If so, what punishment would the poet devise for her? In Theocritus somebody had been punished: a cruel one, who had refused to relieve the burden of desire even with a kiss, had been killed by a seemingly miraculous interposition of Love, who, angered at the sight of the unhappy lover hanging from the neck by the lintel of the doorpost, fell from his pedestal upon the beloved, while he stood heart-set watching the bathers in the beautiful bathing-places.
