Part 10 (2/2)

But if we descend from our aesthetic heights to the lowly level of the biped Smith, we may see Mrs. S. in a totally different atmosphere, and certain lights and shadows will play about her with a radiance not altogether without beauty. She is a single-minded woman, anxious to make her husband and children comfortable and happy in their home,--and dreaming of nothing beyond this. She is full of homely wisdom; a hundred little economies she practises with forethought and unwearying a.s.siduity tend to make her husband and children love her and regard her as a paragon of domestic policy. Her husband's affection and her children's affection are all the world to her; music and painting and poetry, Mr. Ruskin, Phidias, Praxiteles, Holman Hunt, and Mr. Whistler pale away into shadows of shadows in presence of the indications of love she receives from that baby. And this intense single-minded love elevates her within its own compa.s.s. She sees in that baby's eyes the light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the mother's dream. She broods over it till she effects for it in her own maternal fancy an apotheosis; and round its image in her heart there glows a bright halo of poetry. She sees through the fat. The grossness disappears before her rapt gaze. There remains the spirit from heaven:--

Sweet spirit newly come from Heaven With all the G.o.d upon thee, still Beams of no earthly light are given Thy heart e'en yet to bless and fill.

Thy soul a sky whose sun has set, Wears glory hovering round it yet; And childhood's eve glows sadly bright Ere life hath deepened into night.

So with the husband; so with the home; a glory gathers round them, which she alone, the intense wors.h.i.+pper, sees; and this unaesthetic Mrs. Smith, altogether unsatisfactory to the artistic eye, most practical, most commonplace, carries within her some of the Promethean flame, and is worthy of that halo of homely joy and affection with which she is crowned.

No. x.x.xV

SAHIB

[February 19, 1880.]

I first met him driving home from cutcherry in his buggy. He was a fat man in the early afternoon of life. In his blue eyes lay the mystery of many a secret salad and unwritten milk-punch; but though he smoked the longest cheroots of Trichinopoly and Dindigul, his hand was still steady and still grasped a cue or a long tumbler, with the unerring certainty of early youth and unshaken health.

Of an evening he would come over to my bungalow in a friendly way; he would ”just drop in,” as he used to say, in his pleasant offhand fas.h.i.+on, and he would irrigate himself with my brandy and soda, amid genial smiles and a brandis.h.i.+ng of his long cheroot, playfully indicating his recognition of a stimulant with which he had been long acquainted.

As he began to glow with conversation and brandy, he would call for cards and play ecarte with me, until the room gradually resolved itself into one of the circles of some Californian Inferno, with a knave of spades digging the diamonds out of my heart and clubbing my trumps.

He would leave me throbbing with the eructation of oaths and the hollow aching of an empty purse, and uncertain whether to give up cards and liquor for hymns and Government paper or whether to call him back and take fortune by storm. But he had gone off with a resolute ”good night” that tended to dispel illusions; he had gone to his own No. 1 Exshaw and his French novels, which he read as he lay on his solitary bachelor couch.

Yes,--his bachelor couch, for he was not married. He had loved much and often. He had loved a great many people in different stations of life, but they did not marry him. He was, upon the whole, glad that they did not marry him; for they were often married to other people, and he would have been lonely with one, dissatisfied with two, and embarra.s.sed with more; so he continued his austere bachelor life; and always tried to love unostentatiously somebody else's wife.

He loved somebody else's wife, because he had no wife of his own, and the heart requires love. It was very wrong of him to love somebody else's wife, and to sponge thus on affections which belonged to another; but then he had nothing puritanical or pharisaical in his nature; he was too highly cultivated to be moral, and arguing the point in the mood of sweet _Barbara_, he had often succeeded in persuading pretty women that he did right in loving them, though their household duties belonged to another.

I have said that he was too highly cultivated to be religious. He was exceedingly emotional and intellectual; and the procrustean bed of a creed would have been intolerable torture to him. Life throbbed around him in an aurora of skittles. The world of morality only raised a languid smile, or tickled an appet.i.te pleased with novelty. An archdeacon, or a book of sermons delighted him. He would play with them and ponder over them, as if they were old china, or curious etchings. But he was never profane, especially before bishops, or children, and he always went to church on Sunday morning.

He went to church on Sunday morning, because it was quaint and old-fas.h.i.+oned to do so, and because he loved to see the women of his acquaintance in their devotional moods and att.i.tudes. There was hardly any mood or att.i.tude in which he did not love to see a woman, partly because he was full of human sympathy and tenderness, and partly for other reasons. I suppose he was a student of human nature, though he always repudiated the notion of being a student of anything. He said that life was too short for serious study, and that every kind of pursuit should be tempered with fooling; while to prevent fooling becoming wearisome it should always be dashed with something earnest, as the sodawater is dashed with brandy, or the Government of India with Mr. Whitley Stokes.

Nigrorum memor, dum licet, ignium, Misce stult.i.tiam consiliis brevem: Dulce est desipere in loco.

But besides being a man of pleasure and a capital billiard player, he was a Collector in the North-Western Provinces--a man who sat at the receipt of custom under a punkah, and read his _Pioneer_. The Lord High c.o.c.kalorum at Nynee Tal, Sir Somebody Thingmajig,--I am speaking of years ago--did not like him, I believe; but n.o.body thought any the worse of him for this; and although he continued to be a Collector until the shades of evening, when all his contemporaries had retired into the Dreamland of Commissioners.h.i.+ps, he still loved and was loved; and to the very last he read his French novels and quoted Horace, sitting peacefully on the bank while the stream of promotion rolled on, knowing well that it would roll on _in omne aevum_, and not caring a jot whether it did, or did not. What was a seat at the Sadr Board[BB] to him, a seat among the solemn mummies of the service? He would not object to lie in the same graveyard with them; but to sit at the same board while this sensible warm motion of life still continued was too much; this could never be. He belonged to a higher order of spirits. As a boy he had not bartered the music of his soul for Eastern languages and the Rent Law; and as an old man he would not sit in state with corpses faintly animated by rupees.

To the last he mocked promotion; he mocked, till the dread mocker laid mocking fingers on his liver, and till gibe and laughter were silenced for evermore. So the Collector died, the merry Collector; and ”where shall we bury the merry Collector?” became the last problem for his friends to deal with. I was in far away lands at the time with another friend of his--we mourned for the Collector.

We would have buried him in soft summer weather under sweet arbute trees, near the sh.o.r.e of some murmuring Italian sea. The west wind should whisper its grief over his grave for ever:--

”Thou who didst waken from his summer-dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers.”

Blue-eyed girls have bound his dear head with garlands of the amorous rosemary. The echoes of sea-caves would have chanted requiems until time should be no more. Embalmed in darkness the nightingale would nightly for ever pour forth her soul in profuse strains of inconsolable ecstasy; by day the dove should moan in the flickering shade until the sun should cease to roll on his fiery path:--

”Where through groves deep and high, Sounds the far billow, Where early violets die under the willow.

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