Yes, I had once again forgotten Jupiter. How many hundred times was he bigger than the earth? Never mind, there he was, bright as crystal, for me to measure my importance against! The street-lamps did their best, I observed, to brave it out, and the electric lights in Holborn seemed certainly to have the best of it—as cheap jewellery is gaudiest in its glitter. One could much more easily believe that all these hansoms with their jewelled eyes, these pretty, saucily frocked women with theirs, this busy glittering milky way of human life was the enduring, and those dimmed uncertain points up yonder but the reflections of human gas-lights.

A city clerk, with shining evening hat, went by, his sweetheart on his arm. They were wending gaily to the theatre, without a thought of all the happy people who had done the same long ago—hasting down the self-same street, to the self-same theatre, with the very same sweet talk—all long since mouldering in their graves. I felt I ought to rush up and shake them, take them into a bystreet, turn their eyes upon Jupiter, and tell them they must die; but I thought it might spoil the play for them.

Besides, there were so many hundreds in the streets I should have to address in the same way: formidable people, too, clad in respectability as in a coat of mail. The pompous policeman yonder: I longed to go and say to him that there had been policemen before; that he was only the ephemeral example of a world-old type, and needn't take himself so seriously. It was an irresistible temptation to ask him: 'Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?' But I forbore, and just then, glancing into an oyster shop, I was fascinated by the oysterman. He was rapidly opening a dozen for a new customer, and wore the while the solemnest face I ever saw. Oysters were so evidently, so pathetically, all the world to him. All his surroundings suggested oysters, legends of their prices and qualities made the art on his walls, printed price-lists on his counter made his literature, the prospects and rivalries of trade made his politics: oysters were, in fact, his raison d'etre. His associations from boyhood had been oysters, I felt certain that his relatives, even his ancestors, must be oysters, too; and that if he had any idea of a supreme being, it must take the form of an oyster. Indeed, a sort of nightmare seemed suddenly to take possession of the world, in which alternately policemen swallowed oysters and oysters policemen. How sad it all was—that masterly flourish of the knife with which the oysterman ruthlessly hurried dozen after dozen into eternity; that deferential 'Sir' in his voice to every demand of his customer; that brisk alacrity with which he bid his assistant bring 'the gentleman's half-stout.'

There seemed a world of tears in these simple operations, and the plain oysterman had grown suddenly mystical as an astrological symbol. And, indeed, there was planetary influence in the thing, for there was Jupiter high above us, sneering at our little world of policemen and oystermen.

His grin disagreeably reminded me—had I not myself that very night ignorantly flourished on a brass knocker?

It is so hard to remember the respect we owe to death. Yet for me there is always a feeling that if we direct our lives cautiously, with proportionate seriousness and no more, not presuming on life as our natural birthright, but taking it with simple thankfulness as a boon which we have done nothing to deserve, and which may be snatched from us before our next breath: that, if we so order our days, Death may respect our humility.

'The lusty lord, rejoicing in his pride, He draweth down; before the armed knight With jingling bridle-rein he still doth ride; He crosseth the strong captain in the fight';

but such are proud people, arrogant in beauty and strength. With a humble person, who is careful not to flourish beneath his signature, who knocks just as much as he means on the knocker, bows just as much as he respects, smiles cautiously, and never fails to touch his hat to the King of Terrors—may he not deal more gently with such a one?

And yet Death is not a pleasant companion at Life's feast, however kindly disposed. One cannot quite trust him, and he doesn't go well with flowers. Perhaps, after all, they are wisest who forget him, and happy indeed are they who have not yet caught sight of him grinning to himself among the green branches of their Paradise.

Yes, it is good that youth should go with a feather in his cap, that spring should garland herself with blossom, and love's vows make light of death. He is a bad companion for young people. But for older folk the wisdom of that knocker in Gray's Inn applies.



A TAVERN NIGHT

Looking back, in weak moments, we are sometimes heard to say: 'After all, youth was a great fool. Look at the tinsel he was sure was solid gold. Can you imagine it? This tawdry tinkling bit of womanhood, a silly doll that says "Don't" when you squeeze it,—he actually mistook her for a goddess.' Ah! reader, don't you wish you could make such a splendid mistake? I do. I'd give anything to be once more sitting before the footlights for the first time, with the wonderful overture just beginning to steal through my senses.

Ah! violins, whither would you take my soul? You call to it like the voice of one waiting by the sea, bathed in sunset. Why do you call me? What are these wonderful things you are whispering to my soul? You promise—ah! what things you promise, strange voices of the string!

O sirens, have pity! It is the soul of a boy comes out to meet you. His heart is pure, his body sweet as apples. Oh, be faithful, betray him not, beautiful voices of the wondrous world!

David and I sat together in a theatre. The overture had succeeded. Our souls had followed it over the footlights, and, floating in the limelight, shone there awaiting the fulfilment of the promise. The play was 'Pygmalion and Galatea.' I almost forget now how the scenes go, I only know that at the appearance of Galatea we knew that the overture had not lied. There, in dazzling white flesh, was all it had promised; and when she called 'Pyg-ma-lion!' how our hearts thumped! for we knew it was really us she was calling.

'Pyg-ma-lion!' 'Pyg-ma-lion!'

It was as though Cleopatra called us from the tomb.

Our hands met. We could hear each other's blood singing. And was not the play itself an allegory of our coming lives? Did not Galatea symbolise all the sleeping beauty of the world that was to awaken warm and fragrant at the kiss of our youth? And somewhere, too, shrouded in enchanted quiet, such a white white woman waited for our kiss.

In a vision we saw life like the treasure cave of the Arabian thief, and we said to our beating hearts that we had the secret of the magic word: that the 'Open Sesame' was youth.

No fall of the curtain could hide the vision from our young eyes. It transfigured the faces of our fellow-pittites, it made another stage of the embers of the sunset, a distant bridge of silver far down the street. Then we took it with us to the tavern: and, as I think of the solemn libations of that night, I know not whether to laugh or cry. Doubtless, you will do the laughing and I the crying.

We had got our own corner. Turning down the gas, the fire played at day and night with our faces. Imagine us in one of the flashes, solemnly raising our glasses, hands clasped across the table, earnest gleaming eyes holding each other above it. 'Old man! some day, somewhere, a woman like that!'

There was still a sequel. At home at last and in bed, how could I sleep? It seemed as if I had got into a rosy sunset cloud in mistake for my bed. The candle was out, and yet the room was full of rolling light.

I'll swear I could have seen to read by it, whatever it was.

It was no use. I must get up. I struck a light, and in a moment was deep in the composition of a fiery sonnet. It was evidently that which had caused all the phosphorescence. But a sonnet is a mere pill-box. It holds nothing. A mere cockleshell. And, oh! the raging sea it could not hold! Besides, being confessedly an art-form, duly licensed to lie, it is apt to be misunderstood. It could not say in plain English, 'Meet me at the pier to-morrow at three in the afternoon'; it could make no assignation nearer than the Isles of the Blest, 'after life's fitful fever.' Therefore, it seemed well to add a postscript to that effect in prose.

And then, how was she to receive it? Needless to say, there was nothing to be hoped from the post; and I should have said before that Tyre and Sidon face each other on opposite sides of the river, and that my home was in Sidon, three miles from the ferry.

Likewise, it was now nearing three in the morning. Just time to catch the half-past three boat, run up to the theatre, a mile away, and meet the return boat. So down down through the creaking house, gingerly, as though I were a Jason picking my way among the coils of the sleeping dragon. Soon I was shooting along the phantom streets, like Mercury on a message through Hades.

At last the river came in sight, growing slate-colour in the earliest dawn. I could see the boat nuzzling up against the pier, and snoring in its sleep. I said to myself that this was Styx and the fare an obolus. As I jumped on board, with hot face and hotter heart, Charon clicked his signal to the engines, the boat slowly snuffled itself half awake, and we shoved out into the sleepy water.

As we crossed, the light grew, and the gas-lamps of Tyre beaconed with fading gleam. Overhead began a restlessness in the clouds, as of a giant drowsily shuffling off some of his bedclothes; but as yet he slept, and only the silver bosom of his spouse the moon was uncovered.

When we landed, the streets of Tyre were already light, but empty: as though they had got up early to meet some one who had not arrived. I sped through them like a seagull that has the harbour to itself, and was not long in reaching the theatre. How desolate the playbills looked that had been so companionable but two or three hours before. And there was her photograph! Surely it was an omen. Ah, my angel! See, I am bringing you my heart in a song 'All my heart in this my singing!'

I dropped the letter into the box: but, as I turned away, momentarily glancing up the long street, I caught sight of an approaching figure that could hardly be mistaken. Good Heavens! it was David, and he too was carrying a letter.



SANDRA BELLONI'S PINEWOOD

(TO THE SWEET MEMORY OF FRANCES WYNNE)

I felt jaded and dusty, I needed flowers and sunshine; and remembering that some one had told me—erroneously, I have since discovered!—that the pinewood wherein Sandra Belloni used to sing to her harp, like a nixie, in the moonlit nights, lay near Oxshott in Surrey, I vowed myself there and then to the Meredithian pilgrimage.

The very resolution uplifted me with lyric gladness, and I went swinging out of the old Inn where I live with the heart of a boy. Across Lincoln's Inn Fields, down by the Law Courts, and so to Waterloo. I felt I must have a confidante, so I told the slate-coloured pigeons in the square where I was off—out among the thrushes, the broom, and the may. But they wouldn't come. They evidently deemed that a legal purlieu was a better place for 'pickings.'

Half-a-crown return to Oxshott and a train at 12.35. You know the ride better than I, probably, and what Surrey is at the beginning of June. The first gush of green on our getting clear of Clapham was like the big drink after an afternoon's haymaking. There was but one cloud on the little journey. She got into the next carriage.

I dreamed all the way. On arriving at Oxshott I immediately became systematic. Having a very practical belief in the material basis of all exquisite experience, I simply nodded to the great pinewoods half a mile off, on the brow of long heathy downs to the left of the railway bridge—as who should say, 'I shall enjoy you all the better presently for some sandwiches and a pint of ale'—and promptly, not to say scientifically, turned down the Oxshott road in search of an inn.

Oxshott is a quaint little hamlet, one of the hundred villages where we are going to live when we have written great novels; but I didn't care for the village inn, so walked a quarter of a mile nearer Leatherhead, till the Old Bear came in sight.

There I sat in the drowsy parlour, the humming afternoon coming in at the door, 'the blue fly' singing on the hot pane, dreaming all kinds of gauzy-winged dreams, while my body absorbed ham sandwiches and some excellent ale. Of course I did not leave the place without the inevitable reflection on Lamb and the inns he had immortalised. Outside again my thoughts were oddly turned to the nature of my expedition by two figures in the road—an unhappy-looking couple, evidently 'belonging to each other,' the young woman with babe at breast, trudging together side by side—

'One was a girl with a babe that throve, Her ruin and her bliss; One was a youth with a lawless love, Who claspt it the more for this.'

The quotation was surely inevitable for any one who knows Mr. Meredith's tragic little picture of 'The Meeting.'

Thus I was brought to think of Sandra again, and of the night when the Brookfield ladies had heard her singing like a spirit in the heart of the moon-dappled pinewood, and impresario Pericles had first prophesied the future prima donna.

Do you remember his inimitable outburst?—'I am made my mind! I send her abroad to ze Academie for one, two, tree year. She shall be instructed as was not before. Zen a noise at La Scala. No—Paris! No—London! She shall astonish London fairst. Yez! if I take a theatre! Yez! if I buy a newspaper! Yez! if I pay feefty-sossand pound!'

Of course, as one does, I had gone expecting to distinguish the actual sandy mound among the firs where she sat with her harp, the young countryman waiting close by for escort, and the final 'Giles Scroggins, native British, beer-begotten air' with which she rewarded him for his patience in suffering so much classical music. Mr. Meredith certainly gives a description of the spot close enough for identification, with time and perseverance. But, reader, I had gone out this afternoon in the interest rather of fresh air than of sentimental topography; and it was quite enough for me to feel that somewhere in that great belt of pinewood it had all been true, and that it was through those fir-branches and none other in the world that that 'sleepy fire of early moonlight' had so wonderfully hung.

After crossing the railway bridge the road rises sharply for a few yards, and then a whole stretch of undulating woodland is before one: to the right bosky green, but on the left a rough dark heath with a shaggy wilderness of pine for background, heightened here and there with a sudden surprise of gentle silver birch. How freshly the wind met one at the top of the road: a southwest wind soft and blithe enough to have blown through 'Diana of the Crossways.'

'You saucy south wind, setting all the budded beech boughs swinging Above the wood anemones that flutter, flushed and white, When far across the wide salt waves your quick way you were winging, Oh! tell me, tell me, did you pass my sweetheart's ship last night?

Ah! let the daisies be, South wind! and answer me; Did you my sailor see? Wind, whisper very low, For none but you must know I love my lover so.'

I had been keeping that question to ask it for two or three days, since a good friend had told me of some lyrics by Miss Frances Wynne; and the little volume, charmingly entitled Whisper, was close under my arm as I turned from the road across the heath—a wild scramble of scrubby chance-children, wind-sown from the pines behind. And then presently, like a much greater person, 'I found me in a gloomy wood astray.'

But I soon realised that it wasn't the day for pinewoods, however rich in associations. Dark days are their Opportunity. Then one is in sympathy. But on days when the sunshine is poured forth like yellow wine, when the broom is ablaze, and the sky blue as particular eyes, the contrast of those dark aisles without one green blade is uncanny. Its listening loneliness almost frightens one. Brurrhh! One must find a greenwood where things are companionable: birds within call, butterflies in waiting, and a bee now and again to bump one, and be off again with a grumbled 'Beg your pardon. Confound you!' So presently imagine me 'prone at the foot of yonder' sappy chestnut, nice little cushions of moss around me, one for Whisper, one for a pillow; above, a world of luminous green leaves, filtered sunlight lying about in sovereigns and half-sovereigns, and at a distance in the open shine a patch of hyacinths, 'like a little heaven below.'

Whisper! Tis the sweetest little book of lyrics since Mrs. Dollie Radford's Light Load. Whitman, you will remember, always used to take his songs out into the presence of the fields and skies to try them. A severe test, but a little book may bear it as well as a great one. The Leaves of Grass claims measurement with oaks; but Whisper I tried by speedwell and cinquefoil, and many other tiny sweet things for which I know no name, by all airs and sounds coming to me through the wood, quaint little notes of hidden birds,—and the songs were just as much at home there as the rest, because they also had grown out of Nature's heart, and were as much hers as any leaf or bird. So I dotted speedwell all amongst them, because I felt they ought to know each other.

I wonder if you love to fill your books with flowers. It is a real bookish delight, and they make such a pretty diary. My poets are full of them, and they all mean a memory—old spring mornings, lost sunsets, walks forgotten and unforgotten. Here a buttercup pressed like finely beaten brass, there a great yellow rose—in my Keats; my Chaucer is like his old meadows, 'ypoudred with daisie,' and my Herrick is full of violets. The only thing is that they haunt me sometimes. But then, again, they bloom afresh every spring. As Mr. Monkhouse sings:—

'Sweet as the rose that died last year is the rose that is born to-day.'

But I grow melancholy with an Englishman's afterthought, for I coined no such reflections dreaming there in the wood. It is only on paper that one moralises—just where one shouldn't.

My one or two regrets were quite practical—that I had not learnt botany at school, and that the return train went so early.



WHITE SOUL

What is so white in the world, my love, As thy maiden soul— The dove that flies Softly all day within thine eyes, And nests within thine heart at night? Nothing so white.

One has heard poets speak of a quill dropped from an angel's wing. That is the kind of nib of which I feel in need to-night. If I could but have it just for to-night only,—I would willingly bequeath it to the British Museum to-morrow. As a rule I am very well satisfied with the particular brand of gilt 'J' with which I write to the dictation of the Muse of Daily Bread; but to-night it is different. Though it come not, I must make ready to receive a loftier inspiration. Whitest paper, newest pen, ear sensitive, tremulous; heart pure and mind open, broad and clear as the blue air for the most delicate gossamer thoughts to wing through; and snow-white words, lily-white words, words of ivory and pearl, words of silver and alabaster, words white as hawthorn and daisy, words white as morning milk, words 'whiter than Venus' doves, and softer than the down beneath their wings'—virginal, saintlike, nunnery words.

It may be because I love White Soul that I think her the fairest blossom on the Tree of Life, yet a child said of her to its mother, the other day: 'Look at White Soul's face—it is as though it were lit up from inside!' Children, if they don't always tell the truth, seldom tell lies; and I always think that the praise of children is better worth having than the Cross of the Legion of Honour. They are the only critics from whom praise is not to be bought. As animals are said to see spirits, children have, I think, an eye for souls. It is so easy to have an eye for beautiful surfaces. Such eyes are common enough. An eye for beautiful souls is rarer; and, unless you possess that eye for souls, you waste your time on White Soul. She has, of course, her external attractions, dainty features, refined contours; but these it would not be difficult to match in any morning's walk. It is when she smiles that her face, it seems to me, is one of the most wonderful in the world. Till she smiles, it is like the score of some great composer's song before the musician releases it warbling for joy along the trembling keys; it is like the statue of Memnon before the dawn steals to kiss it across the desert. White Soul's face when she smiles is made, you would say, of larks and dew, of nightingales and stars.

She is an eldritch little creature, a little frightening to live with—with her gold flaxen hair that seems to grow blonder as it nears her head: burnt blonde, it would seem, with the white light of the spirit that pours all day long from her brows. There is something, as we say, almost supernatural about her—'a fairy's child.' The gypsies have a share in her blood, she boasts in her naive way, and with her love for all that is free and lawless and under-the-sky—but I always say the fairies have more. She is constantly saying 'Hush!' and 'Whisht!' when no one else can hear a sound, and she dreams the quaintest of dreams.

Once she woke sobbing in the night and told her husband, who knew her ways and loved her tenfold for them, that she had dreamed herself in the old churchyard, and that as the moon rose behind the tower the three old men who live in the three yew-trees had come out and played cards upon a tomb in the moonlight, and one of them had beckoned to her and offered to tell her fortune. It fell out that she was to die in the spring, and as he held up the fatal card, the old man had leered at her—and then a cock crew, all three vanished, and she awoke.

Her dreams are nearly all about dying, and, though she is obviously robust, there is that transparent ethereal look in her face which makes old women say 'she is not long for this world,' that fateful beauty which creates an atmosphere of doom about it. You cannot look at her without a queer involuntary feeling that she was born to die in some tragic way. She reminds one of those perilously fragile vases we feel must get broken, those rarely delicate flowers we feel cannot have strong healthy roots.

She is one of those who seem born to see terrible things, monstrous accidents, supernatural appearances. She has seen death and birth in strange uncanny forms; and she has met with unearthly creatures in the lonely corners of rooms. She is a 'seventh-month child,' and 'seventh-month children always see things,' she says, with a funny little sententious shake of her head.

Yet, with all this, she is the sunniest, healthiest, most domestic little soul that breathes; and no doubt the materialist would be right in saying that all this 'spirituelle' nonsense is but a trick of her transparent blonde complexion, a chance quality in the colour of her great luminous eyes.

Like all women, she was most wonderful just before the birth of her first child, a little changeling creature, wild-eyed as her fairy mother. How she made believe with the little fairy vestments, the elfin-shirts, the pixy-frocks—long before it was time for the tiny body to step inside them! how she talked to the unborn soul that none but she as yet could see! And all the time she 'knew' she was going to die, that she would never see the little immortal that was about to put on our mortality: 'people' had told her so in her dreams at night,—doubtless 'the good people,' the fairies. Those who loved her grew almost to believe her—she looks so like a little Sibyl when she says such things,—yet her little one came almost without a cry, and in a few days the fairy mother was once more glinting about the house like a sunbeam.

Well! well! I cannot make you see her as I know her: that I fear is certain. You might meet her, yet never know her from my description. If you wait for the coarse articulation of words you might well 'miss' her; for her qualities are not histrionic, they have no notion of making the best of themselves. They remain, so to speak, in nuggets; they are minted into no current coin of fleeting fashion and shallow accomplishment. But if a face can mean more to you than the whole of Johnson's Dictionary, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica to boot, if a strain of music can convey to you the thrill of human life, with its heights and depths and romantic issues and possibilities, as Gibbon and Grote can never do—come and worship White Soul's face with me. Some women's faces are like diamonds—they look their best in artificial lights; White Soul's face is bright with the soft brightness of a flower—a flower tumbled with dew, and best seen in the innocent lights of dawn. Dear face without words!

And if there are those who can look on that face without being touched by its strange spiritual loveliness, without seeing in it one of those clear springs that bubble up from the eternal beauty, there must indeed be many who would miss the soul for which her face is but the ivory gate, who would never know how white is all within, never see or hear that holy dove.

But I have seen and heard, and I know that if God should covet White Soul and steal her from me, her memory would ever remain with me as one of those eternal realities of the spirit to which 'realities' of flesh and blood, of wood and stone, are but presumptuous shadows.

I am not worthy of White Soul. Indeed, just to grow more worthy of her was I put into the world.

* * * * *

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press

THE END