Selected Poems and Prose

Selected Poems and Prose

Ernest Dowson

© 2002 by The New Formalist


Published by The New Formalist Press


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Introductory Note

THESE verses and brief pieces of prose, which one might call prose poems, are selected from the two books of his poems Ernest Dowson saw published in his short lifetime (1867-1900). First published was Verses (1896); second was Decorations in Verse and Prose (1899). The two longer prose selections included here are from his book Dilemmas: Stories and Studies in Sentiment (1895).

In presenting any considerable selection of Dowson’s work to readers familiar only with his few widely anthologized poems, or but slightly acquainted with his tragic life, one can hardly do better than to quote from the introduction to the biography researched and written by Mark Longaker:

“Although by no means a poet of the front rank,” Longaker wrote, “Ernest Dowson’s place in literature is secure. No anthologist who presumes to select the best poems in the language can possibly ignore him, and no literary historian who is concerned with true poetic values can identify him with a movement and pass on. That his verse profits by selection cannot be gainsaid, but there is more lyric beauty in his slender volumes than is generally believed. He is far more than a one-poem poet: exquisite as the ‘Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae’ is, it is by no means all of Dowson, or all we need to know.

“Nor is the view of the vexed and torn spirit, the refugee in cabmen’s shelters, East End dives, and dimly lighted cafes around les Halles a complete and balanced portrait of Dowson. It is true that his life was lived amongst shadows rather than light, but on occasion sunbeams filtered through the wall of cloud with which his heredity and environment surrounded him. His life and character cannot be called exemplary, but it can readily be shown that he was far from the wastrel that he is often pictured. Without laboring the point, one who has familiarized himself with the facts can readily conclude that Dowson was more a victim of circumstance than one who deliberately cultivated nostalgie de la boue and chose the path which led to evil and destruction. Of admiration for his character and life there can be little; but it is easy to like Ernest Dowson, and to wish that something might have been done to give him sanctuary from the world and from himself.”

And for a comprehensive, balanced account of the life of Dowson, one could hardly do better than to buy or borrow a copy of Professor Longaker’s Ernest Dowson, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, Third Edition, April 1967.

—Wiley Clements

From Verses (1896)

Ad Domnulam Suam

LITTLE lady of my heart!
    Just a little longer,
Love me:  we will pass and part,
    Ere this love grow stronger.

I have loved thee,  Child!  too well,
    To do aught but leave thee:
Nay! my lips should never tell
    Any tale, to grieve thee.

Little lady of my heart!
    Just a little longer,
I may love thee: we will part
    Ere my love grow stronger.

Soon thou leavest fairy-land;
    Darker grow thy tresses:
Soon no more of hand-in-hand;
    Soon no more caresses!

Little lady of my heart!
    Just a little longer,
Be a child: then we will part,
    Ere this love grow stronger.

Ad Manus Puellae

I was always a lover of ladies’ hands!
    Ere ever my heart came here to tryst,
For the sake of your carved white hands’ commands;
    The tapering fingers, the dainty wrist;
    The hands of a girl were what I kissed.

I remember an hand like a fleur-de-lys
    When it slid from its silken sheath, her glove;
With its odours passing ambergris:
    And that was the empty husk of love,
    Oh, how shall I kiss your hands enough?

They are pale with the pallor of ivories;
    But they blush to the tips like a curled sea-shell:
What treasure, in kingly treasuries,
    Of gold, and spice for the thurible,
    Is sweet as her hands to hold and tell?

I know not the way from your finger-tips,
    Nor how I shall gain the higher lands,
The citadel of your sacred lips:
    I am captive still of my pleasant bands,
    The hands of a girl, and most your hands.

Amantium Irae

WHEN this, our rose, is faded,
    And these, our days, are done,
In lands profoundly shaded
    From tempest and from sun:
Ah, once more come together,
    Shall we forgive the past,
And safe from worldly weather
    Possess our souls at last?

Or in our place of shadows
    Shall still we stretch an hand
To green, remembered meadows,
    Of that old pleasant land?
And vainly there foregathered,
    Shall we regret the sun?
The rose of love ungathered?
    The bay, we have not won?

Ah, child! the world’s dark marges
    May lead to Nevermore,
The stately funeral barges
    Sail for an unknown shore,
And love we vow tomorrow,
    And pride we serve today:
What if they both should borrow
    Sad hues of yesterday?

Our pride! Ah, should we miss it,
    Or will it serve at last?
Our anger, if we kiss it,
    Is like a sorrow past.
While roses deck the garden,
    While yet the sun is high,
Doff sorry pride for pardon,
    Or ever love go by.

Amor Umbratilis

A gift of silence, sweet!
    Who may not ever hear:
To lay down at your unobservant feet,
    Is all the gift I bear.

I have no songs to sing,
    That you should heed or know:
I have no lilies, in full hands, to fling
    Across the path you go.

I cast my flowers away,
    Blossoms unmeet for you!
The garland I have gathered in my day:
    My rosemary and rue.

I watch you pass and pass,
    Serene and cold: I lay
My lips upon your trodden daisied grass,
    And turn my life away.

Yea, for I cast you, sweet!
    This one gift, you shall take:
Like ointment, on your unobservant feet,
    My silence for your sake.

Amor Profanus

BEYOND the pale of memory,
In some mysterious dusky grove;
A place of shadows utterly,
Where never coos the turtle-dove,
A world forgotten of the sun:
I dreamed we met when day was done,
And marvelled at our ancient love.

Met there by chance, long kept apart,
We wandered through the darkling glades;
And that old language of the heart
We sought to speak: alas! poor shades!
Over our pallid lips had run
The waters of oblivion,
Which crown all loves of men or maids.

In vain we stammered: from afar
Our old desire shone cold and dead:
That time was distant as a star,
When eyes were bright and lips were red.
And still we went with downcast eye
And no delight in being nigh,
Poor shadows most uncomforted.

Ah, Lalage! while life is ours,
Hoard not thy beauty rose and white,
But pluck the pretty, fleeting flowers
That deck our little path of light:
For all too soon we twain shall tread
The bitter pastures of the dead:
Estranged, sad spectres of the night.

April Love

WE have walked in Love’s land a little way,
    We have learnt his lesson a little while,
And shall we not part at the end of day,
    With a sigh, a smile?

A little while in the shine of the sun,
    We were twined together, joined lips, forgot
How the shadows fall when day is done,
    And when Love is not.

We have made no vows—there will none be broke,
    Our love was free as the wind on the hill,
There was no word said we need wish unspoke,
    We have wrought no ill.

So shall we not part at the end of day,
    Who have loved and lingered a little while,
Join lips for the last time, go our way,
    With a sigh, a smile?

Autumnal

PALE amber sunlight falls across
    The reddening October trees,
    That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer’s loss
    Seems little, dear! on days like these.

Let misty autumn be our part!
    The twilight of the year is sweet:
    Where shadow and the darkness meet:
Our love, a twilight of the heart
    Eludes a little time’s deceit.

Are we not better and at home
    In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
    No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
    A little while, then, let us dream.

Beyond the pearled horizons lie
    Winter and night: awaiting these
    We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
    Beneath the drear November trees.

Beata Solitudo

WHAT land of Silence,
    Where pale stars shine
On apple-blossoms
    And dew-drenched vine,
    Is yours and mine?

The silent valley
    That we will find,
Where all the voices
    Of humankind
    Are left behind.

There all forgetting,
    Forgotten quite,
We will repose us,
    With our delight
    Hid out of sight.

The world forsaken,
    And out of mind
Honour and labour,
    We shall not find
    The stars unkind.

And men shall travail,
    And laugh and weep;
But we have vistas
    Of Gods asleep,
    With dreams as deep.

A land of Silence,
    Where pale stars shine
On apple-blossoms
    And dew-drenched vine,
   Be yours and mine!

Benedictio Domini

WITHOUT, the sullen noises of the street!
    The voice of London, inarticulate,
Hoarse and blaspheming, surges in to meet
    The silent blessing of the immaculate.

Dark is the church, and dim the worshippers,
    Hushed with bowed heads as though by some old spell,
While through the incense-laden air there stirs
    The admonition of a silver bell.

Dark is the church, save where the altar stands,
    Dressed like a bride, illustrious with light,
Where one old priest exalts with tremulous hands
    The one true solace of man’s fallen plight.

Strange silence here: without, the sounding street
    Heralds the world’s swift passage to the fire:
O Benediction, perfect and complete!
    When shall men cease to suffer and desire?

Cease Smiling.......

Dum nos fata sinunt, oculos sanemus Amore.
                                                          Propertius

CEASE smiling, Dear! a little while be sad,
    Here in the silence, under the wan moon;
Sweet are thine eyes, but how can I be glad,
       Knowing they change so soon?

For Love’s sake, Dear, be silent! Cover me
    In the deep darkness of thy falling hair:
Fear is upon me and the memory
       Of what is all men’s share.

O could this moment be perpetuate!
    Must we grow old, and leaden-eyed and gray,
And taste no more the wild and passionate
       Love sorrows of today?

Grown old, and faded, Sweet! and past desire,
    Let memory die, lest there be too much ruth,
Remembering the old, extinguished fire
       Of our divine, lost youth.

O red pomegranate of thy perfect mouth!
    My lips’ life-fruitage, might I taste and die
Here in thy garden, where the scented south
       Wind chastens agony;

Reap death from thy live lips in one long kiss,
    And look my last into thine eyes and rest:
What sweets had life to me sweeter than this
       Swift dying on thy breast?

Or if that may not be, for Love’s sake, Dear!
    Keep silence still, and dream that we shall lie,
Red mouth to mouth, entwined, and always hear
       The south wind’s melody,

Here in thy garden, through the sighing boughs,
    Beyond the reach of time and chance and change,
And bitter life and death, and broken vows,
       That sadden and estrange.

Chanson Sans Paroles

IN the deep violet air,
    Not a leaf is stirred;
    There is no sound heard,
But afar, the rare
    Trilled voice of a bird.

In the wood’s dim heart,
    And the fragrant pine,
    Incense, and a shrine
Of her coming? Apart,
    I wait for a sign.

What the sudden hush said,
    She will hear, and forsake,
    Swift, for my sake,
Her green, grassy bed:
    She will hear and awake!

She will harken and glide,
    From her place of deep rest,
    Dove-eyed, with the breast
Of a dove, to my side:
    The pines bow their crest.

I wait for a sign:
    The leaves to be waved,
    The tall tree-tops laved
In a flood of sunshine,
    This world to be saved!

In the deep violet air,
    Not a leaf is stirred;
    There is no sound heard,
But afar, the rare
    Trilled voice of a bird.

A Coronal

With His Songs and Her Days To His Lady and to Love

VIOLETS and leaves of vine,
    Into a frail, fair wreath
We gather and entwine:
    A wreath for Love to wear,
    Fragrant as his own breath,
To crown his brow divine,
    All day till night is near.
Violets and leaves of vine
We gather and entwine.

Violets and leaves of vine
   For Love that lives a day,
We gather and entwine.
    All day till Love is dead,
    Till eve falls, cold and gray,
These blossoms, yours and mine,
    Love wears upon his head,
Violets and leaves of vine
We gather and entwine.

Viloets and leaves of vine,
    For Love when poor Love dies
We gather and entwine.
    This wreath that lives a day
    Over his pale, cold eyes,
Kissed shut by Proserpine,
    At set of sun we lay:
Violets and leaves of vine
We gather and entwine.

Epigram

BECAUSE I am idolatrous and have besought,
With grievous supplication and consuming prayer,
The admirable image that my dreams have wrought
Out of her swan’s neck and her dark, abundant hair:
The jealous gods, who brook no worship save their own,
Turned my live idol marble and her heart to stone.

Exile

BY the sad waters of separation
    Where we have wandered by divers ways,
I have but the shadow and imitation
    Of the old memorial days.

In music I have no consolation,
    No roses are pale enough for me;
The sound of the waters of separation
    Surpasseth roses and melody.

By the sad waters of separation
    Dimly I hear from an hidden place
The sigh of mine ancient adoration:
    Hardly can I remember your face.

If you be dead, no proclamation
    Sprang to me over the waste, gray sea:
Living, the waters of separation
    Sever for ever your soul from me.

No man knoweth our desolation;
    Memory pales of the old delight;
While the sad waters of separation
    Bear us on to the ultimate night.

Extreme Unction

UPON the eyes, the lips, the feet,
  On all the passages of sense,
The atoning oil is spread with sweet
  Renewal of lost innocence.

The feet, that lately ran so fast
  To meet desire, are soothly sealed;
The eyes, that were so often cast
  On vanity, are touched and healed.

From troublous sights and sounds set free;
  In such a twilight hour of breath,
Shall one retrace his life, or see
  Through shadows, the true face of death?

Vials of mercy! Sacring oils!
  I know not where nor when I come,
Nor through what wanderings and toils,
  To crave of you Viaticum.

Yet, when the walls of flesh grow weak,
   In such an hour, it well may be,
Through mist and darkness, light will break,
     And each anointed sense will see.  

Flos Lunae

I would not alter thy cold eyes,
Nor trouble the calm fount of speech
With aught of passion or surprise.
The heart of thee I cannot reach:
I would not alter thy cold eyes!

I would not alter thy cold eyes;
Nor have thee smile, nor make thee weep:
Though all my life droops down and dies,
Desiring thee, desiring sleep,
I would not alter thy cold eyes.

I would not alter thy cold eyes;
I would not change thee if I might,
To whom my prayers for incense rise,
Daughter of dreams! my moon of night!
I would not alter thy cold eyes.

I would not alter thy cold eyes,
With trouble of the human heart:
Within their glance my spirit lies,
A frozen thing, alone, apart;
I would not alter thy cold eyes.

The Garden of Shadow

LOVE heeds no more the sighing of the wind
Against the perfect flowers: thy garden’s close
Is grown a wilderness, where none shall find
One strayed, last petal of one last year’s rose.

O bright, bright hair!  O mouth like a ripe fruit!
Can famine be so nigh to harvesting?
Love, that was songful with a broken lute
In grass of graveyards goeth murmuring.

Let the wind blow against the perfect flowers,
And all thy garden change and glow with spring:
Love is grown blind with no more count of hours
Nor part in seed-time nor in harvesting.

Gray Nights

A WHILE we wandered  (thus it is I dream!)
Through a long, sandy track of No Man’s Land,
Where only poppies grew among the sand,
The which we, plucking, cast with scant esteem,
And even sadlier, into the stream,
Which followed us, as we went, hand in hand,
Under the estranged stars, a road unplanned,
Seing all things in the shadow of a dream.

And even sadlier, as the stars expired,
We found the poppies rarer, till thine eyes
Grown all my light, to light me were too tired,
And at their darkening, that no surmise
Might haunt me of the lost days we desired,
After them I flung those memories!

Growth

I WATCHED the glory of her childhood change,
Half-sorrowful to find the child I knew,
    (Loved long ago in lily-time)
Become a maid, mysterious and strange,
With fair, pure eyes—dear eyes, but not the eyes I knew
    Of old, in the olden time!

Till on my doubting soul the ancient good
Of her dear childhood in the new disguise
    Dawned, and I hastened to adore
The glory of her waking maidenhood,
And found the old tenderness within her deepening eyes,
    But kinder than before.

Impenitentia Ultima

BEFORE my light goes out forever if God should give me a choice of graces,
I would not reck of length of days, nor crave for things to be;
But cry: "One day of the great lost days, one face of all the faces,
Grant me to see and touch once more and nothing more to see.

"For, Lord, I was free of all Thy flowers, but I chose the world’s sad roses,
And that is why my feet are torn and mine eyes are blind with sweat,
But at Thy terrible judgement-seat, when this my tired life closes,
I am ready to reap whereof I sowed, and pay my righteous debt.

"But once the sand is run and the silver thread is broken,
Give me a grace and cast aside the veil of dolorous years,
Grant me one hour of all mine hours, and let me see for a token
Her pure and pitiful eyes shine out, and bathe her feet with tears."

Her pitiful hands should calm, and her hair stream down and blind me,
Out of the sight of night, and out of the reach of fear,
And her eyes should be my light whilst the sun went out behind me,
And the viols in her voice be the last sound in mine ear.

Before the ruining waters fall and my life be carried under,
And Thine anger cleave me through as a child cuts down a flower,
I will praise Thee, Lord, in Hell while my limbs are racked asunder,
For the last sad sight of her face and the little grace of an hour.

In Tempore Senectutis

WHEN I am old,
    And sadly steal apart,
Into the dark and cold,
    Friend of my heart!
Remember, if you can,
Not him who lingers, but that other man,
Who loved and sang, and had a beating heart—
       When I am old!

When I am old,
    And all Love’s ancient fire
Be tremulous and cold:
    My soul’s desire!
Remember, if you may
Nothing of you and me but yesterday,
When heart on heart we bid the years conspire
       To make us old.

When I am old,
    And every star above
Be pitiless and cold:
    My life’s one love!
Forbid me not to go:
Remember nought of us but long ago,
And not at last, how love and pity strove
       When I grew old!

My Lady April

DEW on her robe and on her tangled hair;
    Twin dewdrops for her eyes; behold her pass,
    With dainty step brushing the young, green grass,
The while she trills some high, fantastic air,
Full of all feathered sweetness: she is fair,
    And all her flower-like beauty, as a glass,
    Mirrors out hope and love: and still, alas!
Traces of tears her languid lashes wear.

Say, doth she weep for very wantonness?
    Or is it that she dimly doth foresee
Across her youth the joys grow less and less
    The burden of the days that are to be:
    Autumn and withered leaves and vanity,
And winter bringing end in barrenness.

Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae

LAST night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
    Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
    When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
    Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire.
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! and the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
    Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration

CALM, sad, secure; behind high convent walls,
    These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray:
And it is one with them when evening falls,
    And one with them the cold return of day.

These heed not time; their nights and days they make
    Into a long, returning rosary,
Whereon their lives are threaded for Christ’s sake;
    Meekness and vigilance and chastity.

A vowed patrol, in silent companies,
    Life-long they keep before the living Christ.
In the dim church, their prayers and penances
    Are fragrant incense to the Sacrificed.

Outside, the world is wild and passionate;
    Man’s weary laughter and his sick despair
Entreat at their impenetrable gate:
    They heed no voices in their dreams of prayer.

They saw the glory of the world displayed;
    They saw the bitter of it, and the sweet;
They knew the roses of the world should fade,
    And be trod under by the hurrying feet.

Therefore they put away desire,
    And crossed their hands and came to sanctuary
And veiled their heads and put on coarse attire:
    Because their comeliness was vanity.

And there they rest;  they have serene insight
    Of the illuminating dawn to be:
Mary’s sweet Star dispels for them the night,
    The proper darkness of humanity.

Calm, sad, secure; with faces worn and mild:
    Surely their choice of vigil is the best?
Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild;
    But there, beside the altar, there is rest.

O Mors!  Quam Amara Est Memoria Tua
Homini Pacem Habenti in Substantiis Suis

EXCEEDING sorrow
    Consumeth my sad heart!
Because to-morrow
    We must depart,
Now is exceeding sorrow
    All my part!

Give over playing,
    Cast thy viol away:
Merely laying
    Thine head my way;
Prithee, give over playing
    Grave or gay.

Be no word spoken;
    Weep nothing: let a pale
Silence, unbroken
    Silence prevail!
Prithee, be no word spoken,
    Lest I fail!

Forget to-morrow!
Weep nothing: only lay
In silent sorrow
    Thine head my way:
Let us forget tomorrow,
    This one day!

On the Birth of a Friend’s Child

MARK the day white, on which the Fates have smiled:
Eugenio and Egeria have a child,
On whom abundant grace kind Jove imparts
If she but copy either parent’s parts.
Then, Muses! long devoted to her race,
Grant her Egeria’s virtues and her face;
Nor stop your bounty there, but add to it
Eugenio’s learning and Eugenio’s wit.

Quid Non Speremus, Amantes?

WHY is there in the least touch of her hands
    More grace than other women’s lips bestow,
If love is but a slave in fleshly bands
    Of flesh to flesh, wherever love may go?

Why choose vain grief and heavy-hearted hours
    For her lost voice, and dear remembered hair,
If love may cull his honey from all flowers,
    And girls grow thick as violets everywhere?

Nay! She is gone, and all things fall apart;
    Or she is cold, and vainly have we prayed;
And broken is the summer’s splendid heart,
    And hope within a deep dark grave is laid.

As man aspires and falls, yet a soul springs
    Out of his agony of flesh at last,
So love that flesh enthralls, shall rise on wings
    Soul-centered, when the rule of flesh is past.

Then, most High Love, or wreathed with myrtle sprays,
    Or crownless and forlorn, nor less a star,
Thee may I serve and follow, all my days,
    Whose thorns are sweet as never roses are!

 Requiem

NEOBULE, being tired,
Far too tired to laugh or weep,
From the hours, rosy and gray,
Hid her golden face away.
Neobule, fain of sleep,
Slept at last as she desired!

Neobule! is it well,
That you haunt the hollow lands,
Where the poor, dead people stray,
Ghostly, pitiful and gray,
Plucking, with their spectral hands,
Scentless blooms of asphodel?

Neobule, tired to death
Of the flowers that I threw
On her flower-like, fair feet,
Sighed for blossoms not so sweet,
Lunar roses pale and blue,
Lilies of the world beneath.

Neobule! ah, too tired
Of the dreams and days above!
Where the poor, dead people stray,
Ghostly, pitiful and gray,
Out of life and out of love,
Sleeps the sleep which she desired.

Sapientia Lunae

THE wisdom of the world said unto me:
    "Go forth and run, the race is to the brave;
Perchance some honour tarrieth for thee!"
     "As tarrieth," I said, "for sure the grave."
    For I had pondered on a rune of roses,
    Which to her votaries the moon discloses.

The wisdom of the world said: "There are bays:
    Go forth and run, for victory is good,
 After the stress of the laborious days."
    "Yet," said I, "shall I be the worm’s sweet food,"
    As I went musing on a rune of roses,
    Which in her hour, the pale, soft moon discloses.

Then said my voices: "Wherefore strive or run,
    On dusty highways ever, a vain race?
The long night cometh, starless, void of sun,
    What light shall serve thee like her golden face?"
    For I had pondered on a rune of roses,
    And knew some secrets which the moon discloses.

"Yes," said I, "for her eyes are pure and sweet
    As lilies, and the fragrance of her hair
Is many laurels; and it is not meet
    To run for shadows when the prize is here";
    And I went reading in that rune of roses
    Which to her votaries the moon discloses.

Soli Cantare Periti Arcades

OH, I would live in a dairy,
    And its Colin I would be,
And many a rustic fairy
    Should churn the milk for me.

Or the fields should be my pleasure,
    And my flocks should follow me,
Piping a frolic measure
     For Joan or Marjorie.

For the town is black and weary,
   And I hate the London street;
But country ways are cheery,
    And country lanes are sweet.

Good luck to you, Paris ladies!
    Ye are over fine and nice.
I know where the country maid is,
    Who needs not asking twice.

Ye are brave in your silks and satins,
    As ye mince about the Town;
But her feet go free in pattens,
    If she wear a russet gown.

If she be not queen nor goddess
    She shall milk my brown-eyed herds,
And the breasts beneath her bodice
    Are whiter than her curds.

So I will live in a dairy,
    And its Colin I will be,
And it’s Joan that I will marry,
    Or, haply, Marjorie.

Spleen

I WAS not sorrowful, I could not weep,
And all my memories were put to sleep.

I watched the river grow more white and strange,
All day till evening I watched it change.

All day till evening I watched the rain
Beat wearily upon the window pane.

I was not sorrowful, but only tired
Of everything that ever I desired.

Her lips, her eyes, all day became to me
The shadow of a shadow utterly.

All day mine hunger for her heart became
Oblivion, until the evening came.

And left me sorrowful, inclined to weep,
With all my memories that could not sleep.

Terre Promise

EVEN now the fragrant promise of her hair
Has brushed my cheek; and once, in passing by,
Her hand upon my hand lay tranquilly:
What things unspoken trembled in the air!

Always I know how little severs me
From mine heart’s country, that is yet so far;
And must I lean and long across a bar
That half a word would shatter utterly?

Ah, might it be, that just by touch of hand,
Or speaking silence, shall the barrier fall;
And she shall pass, with no vain words at all,
But droop into mine arms, and understand!

To One in Bedlam

WITH delicate, mad hands, behind his sordid bars,
Surely he hath his posies, which they tear and twine;
Those scentless wisps of straw, that miserably line
His strait, caged universe, whereat the dull world stares,

Pedant and pitiful. O, how his rapt gaze wars
With their stupidity!  Know they what dreams divine
Lift his long, laughing reveries like enchaunted wine,
And make his melancholy germane to the stars’?

O lamentable brother!  If those pity thee,
Am I not fain of all thy lone eyes promise me;
Half a fool’s kingdom, far from men who sow and reap,
All their days, vanity?  Better than mortal flowers,
Thy moon-kissed roses seem: better than love or sleep,
The star-crowned solitude of thine oblivious hours!

Vain Hope

SOMETIMES, to solace my sad heart, I say,
    Though late it be, though lily-time be past,
    Though all the summer skies be overcast,
Haply I will go down to her, some day,
    And cast my rests of life before her feet,
That she may have her will of me, being so sweet
  And none gainsay!

So might she look on me with pitying eyes,
    And lay calm hands of healing on my head:
    "Because of thy long pains be comforted;
For I, even I, am Love: sad soul arise!"
    So, for her graciousness, I might at last
Gaze on the very face of Love, and hold Him fast
  In no disguise.

Haply, I said, she will take pity on me,
    Though late I come, long after lily-time,
    With burden of waste days and drifted rhyme:
Her kind, calm eyes, down drooping maidenly,
    Shall change, grow soft: there yet is time, meseems,
I said, for solace; though I know these things are dreams
            And may not be!

Vain Resolves

I SAID:  "There is an end of my desire:
    Now have I sown, and I have harvested,
And these are ashes of an ancient fire,
    Which, verily, shall not be quickened.
Now will I take me to a place of peace,
        Forget mine heart’s desire;
In solitude and prayer, work out my soul’s release.

"I shall forget her eyes, how cold they were;
    Forget her voice,  how soft it was and low,
With all my singing that she did not hear,
    And all my service that she did not know.
I shall not hold the merest memory
        Of any days that were,
Within those solitudes where I will fasten me."

And once she passed, and once she raised her eyes,
    And smiled for courtesy, and nothing said:
And suddenly the old flame did uprise,
    And all my dead desire was quickened.
Yea! as it hath been, it shall ever be,
        Most passionless of eyes!
Which never shall grow soft, nor change, nor pity me.

A Valediction

IF we must part
    Then let it be like this;
Not heart on heart,
Nor with the useless anguish of a kiss;
But touch mine hand and say:
"Until to-morrow or some other day,
    If we must part."

Words are so weak
    When love hath been so strong:
Let silence speak:
    "Life is a little while, and love is long;
A time to sow and reap,
And after harvest a long time to sleep,
    But words are weak."

Vanitas

BEYOND the need of weeping,
    Beyond the reach of hands,
May she be quietly sleeping,
    In what dim nebulous lands?
Ah, she who understands!

The long, long winter weather,
    These many years and days,
Since she, and Death, together,
Left me the wearier ways:
And now, these tardy bays!

The crown and victor’s token:
    How are they worth to-day?
The one word left unspoken,
    It were late now to say:
But cast the palm away!

For once, ah once, to meet her,
    Drop laurel from tired hands:
Her cypress were the sweeter,
    In her oblivious lands:
Haply she understands.

Yet, crossed that weary river,
    In some ulterior land,
Or anywhere or ever,
    Will she stretch out a hand?
And will she understand?

Vesperal

STRANGE grows the river on the sunless evenings!
The river comforts me, grown spectral, vague and dumb:
Long was the day; at last the cooling shadows come:
Sufficient for the day are the day’s evil things!

Labour and longing and despair the long day brings:
Patient till evening men watch the sun go west;
Deferred, expected night at last brings sleep and rest:
Sufficient for the day are the day’s evil things!

At last the tranquil Angelus of evening rings
Night’s curtain down for comfort and oblivion
Of all the vanities observed by the sun:
Sufficient for the day are the day’s evil things!

So, some time, when the last of all our evenings
Crowneth memorially the last of all our days,
Not loth to take his poppies man goes down and says,
"Sufficient for the day were the day’s evil things!"

Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures

I TOOK her dainty eyes, as well
    As silken tendrils of her hair:
And so I made a Villanelle!

I took her voice, a silver bell,
    As clear as song, as soft as prayer;
I took her dainty eyes as well.

It may be, said I, who can tell,
    These things shall be my less despair?
And so I made a Villanelle!

I took her whiteness virginal
    And from her cheeks two roses rare:
I took her dainty eyes as well.

I said: "It may be possible
    Her image from my heart to tear!"
And so I made a Villanelle.

I stole her laugh, most musical:
I wrought it in with artful care;
I took her dainty eyes as well;
And so I made a Villanelle.

Villanelle of Marguerites

    "A LITTLE,  passionately, not at all?"
    She casts the snowy petals on the air:
And what care we how many petals fall!

    Nay, wherefore seek the seasons to forestall?
    It is but playing, and she will not care,
A little passionately, not at all!

    She would not answer us if we should call
    Across the years: her visions are too fair;
And what care we how many petals fall!

    She knows us not, nor recks if she enthrall
    With voice and eyes and fashion of her hair,
A little, passionately, not at all!

    Knee-deep she goes in meadow grasses tall,
    Kissed by daisies that her fingers tear:
And what care we how many petals fall!

    We pass and go: but she shall not recall
    What men we were, nor all she made us bear:
"A little, passionately, not at all!"
And what care we how many petals fall!

Villanelle of Sunset

    Come hither, Child! and rest:
    This is the end of day,
Behold the weary West!

    Sleep rounds with equal zest
    Man’s toil and children’s play:
Come hither, Child! and rest.

    My white bird, seek thy nest,
    Thy drooping head down lay:
Behold the weary West!

    Now are the flowers confest
    Of slumber: sleep, as they!
Come hither, Child! and rest.

    Now eve is manifest,
    And homeward lies our way:
Behold the weary West!

    Tired flower! upon my breast,
    I would wear thee alway:
Come hither, Child! and rest;
Behold,  the weary West!

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam

THEY are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
        Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
        We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
        Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
        Within a dream.

You Would Have Understood Me.....

                Ah, dans ces mornes séjours
                Les jamais sont les toujours
                                                     PAUL VERLAINE

You would have understood me, had you waited;
    I could have loved you, dear! as well as he:
Had we not been impatient, dear! and fated
          Always to disagree.

What is the use of speech?  Silence were fitter:
    Lest we should be wishing things unsaid.
Though all the words we ever spake were bitter,
          Shall I reproach you dead?

Nay,  let this earth, your portion, likewise cover
    All the old anger, setting us apart:
Always, in all, in truth I was your lover;
          Always, I held your heart.

I have met other women who were tender,
    As you were cold, dear! ah, had you waited,
    I had fought death for you, better than he:
But from the very first, dear! we were fated
          Always to disagree.

Late, late, I come to you, now death discloses
    Love that in life was not to be our part:
On your low lying mound between the roses,
          Sadly I cast my heart.

I would not waken you: nay! this is fitter;
    Death and darkness give you unto me;
Here we who loved so, were so cold and bitter,
          Hardly can disagree.

Yvonne of Brittany

IN your mother’s apple-orchard,
    Just a year ago, last spring;
Do you renmember, Yvonne!
    The dear trees lavishing
Rain of their starry blossoms
    To make you a coronet?
Do you remember, Yvonne?
    As I remember yet.

In your mother’s apple-orchard,
    When the world was left behind:
You were shy, so shy, Yvonne!
    But your eyes were calm and kind.
We spoke of the apple harvest,
    When the cider press is set,
And such-like trifles, Yvonne!
    That doubtless you forget.

In the still, soft Breton twilight,
   We were silent; words were few,
Till your mother came out chiding,
    For the grass was bright with dew:
But I knew your heart was beating,
    Like a fluttered, frightened dove.
Do you ever remember, Yvonne?
    That first faint flush of love?

In the fullness of midsummer,
    When the apple-bloom was shed,
Oh, brave was your surrender,
    Though shy the words you said.
I was glad, so glad, Yvonne!
    To have led you home at last;
Do you ever remember, Yvonne!
    How swiftly the days passed?

In your mother’s apple-orchard
    It is grown too dark to stray,
There is none to chide you, Yvonne!
    You are over far away.
There is dew on your grave grass, Yvonne!
    But your feet it shall not wet:
No, you never remember, Yvonne!
    And I shall soon forget.     

From Decorations: in Verse and Prose; (1899)

Beyond

LOVE’S aftermath!  I think the time is now
That we must gather in, alone, apart
The saddest crop of all the crops that grow,
        Love’s aftermath.
Ah, sweet—sweet yesterday, the tears that start
Can not put back the dial; this is, I trow,
Our harvesting!  Thy kisses chill my heart,
Our lips are cold; averted eyes avow
The twilight of poor love: we can but part,
Dumbly and sadly, reaping as we sow,
Love’s aftermath.

Breton Afternoon

HERE, where the breath of the scented-gorse floats through the sun-stained air,
On a steep hill-side, on a grassy ledge, I have lain hours long and heard
Only the faint breeze pass in a whisper like a prayer,
And the river ripple by and the distant call of a bird.

On the lone hill-side, in the gold sunshine, I will hush me and repose,
And the world fades into a dream and a spell is cast on me;
And what was all the strife about  for the myrtle or the rose,
And why have I wept for a white girl’s paleness passing ivory!

Out of the tumult of angry tongues, in a land alone, apart,
In a perfumed dream-land set betwixt the bounds of life and death,
Here will I lie while the clouds fly by and delve a hole where my heart
May sleep deep down with the gorse above and red, red earth beneath.

Sleep, and be quiet for an afternoon, till the rose-white angelus
Softly steals my way from the village under the hill:
Mother of God, O Misericord, look down in pity on us,
The weak and blind who stand in our light and wreak ourselves such ill.

Carthusians

THROUGH what long heaviness, assayed in what strange fire,
    Have these white monks been brought into the way of peace,
Despising the world’s wisdom and the world’s desire,
    Which from the body of this death bring no release?

Within their austere walls no voices penetrate;
    A sacred silence only, as of death, obtains;
Nothing finds entry here of loud or passionate;
This quiet is the exceeding profit of their pains.

From many lands they came, in divers fiery ways;
    Each knew at last the vanity of earthly joys;
And one was crowned with thorns, and one was crowned with bays,
    And each was tired at last of the world’s foolish noise.

It was not theirs with Dominic to preach God’s holy wrath,
    They were too stern to beat sweet Francis’ gentle sway;
Theirs was a higher calling and a steeper path,
    To dwell alone with Christ, to meditate and pray.

A cloistered company, they are companionless,
    None knoweth here the secret of his brother’s heart:
They are but come together for more loneliness,
    Whose bond is solitude and silence all their part.

O beatific life! Who is there shall gainsay,
    Your great refusal’s victory, your little loss,
Deserting vanity for the more perfect way,
The sweeter service of the most dolorous Cross.

Ye shall prevail at last!  Surely ye shall prevail!
    Your silence and austerity shall win at last:
Desire and mirth, the world’s ephemeral light shall fall,
The sweet star of your queen is never overcast.

We fling up flowers and laugh, we laugh across the wine;
    With wine we dull our souls and careful strains of art;
Our cups are polished skulls round which roses twine:
    None dares to look at Death who leers and lurks apart.

Move on, white company, whom that has not sufficed!
    Our viols cease, our wine is death, our roses fail:
Pray for our heedlessness,  O dwellers with the Christ!
    Though the world fall apart, surely ye shall prevail.

The Dead Child

SLEEP on, dear, now
    The last sleep and the best;
And on thy brow,
    And on thy quiet breast
Violets I throw.

Thy scanty years
    Were mine a little while;
Life had no fears
    To trouble thy brief smile
With toil or tears.

Lie still, and be
    For evermore a child!
Not grudgingly,
    Whom life has not defiled,
I render thee.

Slumber so deep,
    No man would rashly wake;
I hardly weep,
    Fain only, for thy sake,
To share thy sleep.

Yes, to be dead,
    Dead, here with thee to-day—
When all is said
    T’were good by thee to lay
My weary head.

The very best!
    Ah, child so tired of play,
I stand confessed:
    I want to come thy way,
And share thy rest.

Dregs

THE fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof
(This is the end of every song man sings!)
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,
Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;
And health and hope have gone the way of love
Into the drear oblivion of lost things.
Ghosts go along with us until the end;
This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.
With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait
For the dropt curtain and the closing gate:
This is the end of all the songs man sings.

Exchanges

ALL that I had I brought,
    Little enough I know;
A poor rhyme roughly wrought,
    A rose to match thy snow:
All that I had I brought.

Little enough I sought:
    But a word compassionate,
A passing glance, or thought,
    For me outside the gate:
Little enough I sought.

Little enough I found:
    All that you had,  perchance!
With the dead leaves on the ground,
    I dance the devil’s dance.
All that you had I found.

In a Breton Cemetery

THEY sleep well here,
    These fisher-folk who passed their anxious days
    In fierce Atlantic ways;
And found not there,
    Beneath the long curled wave,
    So quiet a grave.

And they sleep well
    These peasant-folk, who told their lives away,
    From day to market-day,
As one should tell,
    With patient industry,
    Some sad old rosary.

And now night falls,
    Me, tempest-tost, and driven from pillar to post,
    A poor worn ghost,
This quiet pasture calls;
    And dear dead people with pale hands
    Beckon me to their lands.

In Spring

SEE how the trees and the osiers lithe
    Are green bedecked and the woods are blithe,
The meadows have donned their cape of flowers,
The air is soft with the sweet may showers,
    And the birds make melody:
But the spring of the soul, the spring of the soul,
    Cometh no more for you or for me.

The lazy hum of the busy bees
    Murmureth through the almond trees;
The jonquil flaunteth a gay, blonde head,
The primrose peeps from a mossy bed,
    And the violets scent the lane
But the flowers of the soul, the flowers of the soul,
    For you and for me bloom never again.

Jadis

EREWHILE, before the world was old,
When violets grew and celedine,
In Cupid’s train we were enrolled:
Erewhile!
Your little hands were clasped in mine,
Your head all ruddy and sun-gold
Lay on my breast which was its shrine,
And all the tale of love was told:
Ah, God, that sweet things should decline,
And fires fade out which were not cold
Erewhile.

To His Mistress

THERE comes an end to summer,
    To spring showers and hoar rime;
His mumming to each mummer
    Has somewhere end in time,
And since life ends and laughter,
    And leaves fall and tears dry,
Who shall call love immortal,
    When all that is must die?

Nay, sweet, let’s leave unspoken
    The vows the fates gainsay,
For all vows made are broken,
    We love but while we may.
Let’s kiss when kissing pleases,
    And part when kisses pall;
Perchance, this time to-morrow,
    We shall not love at all.

You ask my love completest,
    As strong next year as now;
The devil take you, sweetest,
    Ere I make aught such vow.
Life is a masque that changes,
    A fig for constancy!
No love at all were better,
    Than love which is not free.

To a Lady Asking Foolish Questions

WHY am I sorry, Chloe?  Because the moon is far;
And who am I to be straitened in a little earthly star?

Because thy face is fair?  And what if it had not been?
The fairest face of all is the face I have not seen.

Because the land is cold, and however I scheme and plot,
I cannot find a ferry to the land where I am not.

Because thy lips are red and thy breasts upbraid the snow?
(There is neither white nor red in the pleasance where I go.)

Because thy lips grow pale and thy breasts grow dun and fall?
I go where the wind blows, Chloe, and am not sorry at all.

To William Theodore Peters
On His Renaissance Cloak

THE cherry-coloured velvet of your cloak
    Time hath not soiled: its fair embroideries
Gleam as when centuries ago they spoke
    To what bright gallant of Her Daintiness,
    Whose slender fingers, long since dust and dead
    For love or courtesy embroidered
The cherry-coloured velvet of this cloak.

Ah! cunning flowers of silk and silver thread,
    That mock mortality, the broidering dame,
The page they decked, the kings and courts are dead:
    Gone the age beautiful; Lorenzo’s name,
    The Borgia’s pride are but an empty sound;
    But lustrous still upon their velvet ground,
Time spares these flowers of silk and silver thread.

Gone is that age of pageant and of pride:
    Yet don your cloak, and haply it shall seem,
The curtain of old time is set aside;
    As through the sadder coloured throng you gleam;
    We see once more fair dame and gallant gay,
    The glamour and the grace of yesterday:
The elder, brighter age of pomp and pride.

Villanelle of Acheron

BY the pale marge of Acheron,
    Methinks we shall pass restfully,
Beyond the scope of any sun.

There all men hie them one by one,
    Far from the stress of earth and sea,
By the pale marge of Acheron.

‘Tis well when life and love are done,
    ‘Tis very well at last to be
Beyond the scope of any sun.

No busy voice there shall stun
    Our ears: the stream flows silently
By the pale marge of Acheron.

There is the crown of labour won,
    The sleep of immortality,
Beyond the scope of any sun.

Life, of thy gifts I will have none,
    My queen is that persephone,
By the pale marge of Acheron,
Beyond the scope of any sun.

Villanelle of the Poet’s Road

WINE and woman and song,
    Three things garnish our way:
Yet the day is over long.

Lest we do our youth wrong,
    Gather them while we may:
Wine and woman and song.

Three things render us strong,
    Vine leaves, kisses and bay;
Yet the day is over long.

Unto us they belong,
    Us the bitter and gay,
Wine and woman and song.

We, as we pass along,
    Are sad that they will not stay;
Yet the day is over long.

Fruits and flowers among,
    What is better than they:
Wine and woman and song?
    Yet the day is over long.

Absinthia Taetra

    GREEN changed to white, emerald to an opal: nothing was changed.  The man let the water trickle gently into his glass, and as the green clouded, a mist fell away from his mind.
    Then he drank opaline.
    Memories and terrors beset him.  The past tore after him like a panther and through the blackness of the present he saw the luminous tiger eyes of the things to be.
    But he drank opaline.
    And that obscure night of the soul, and the valley of humiliation, through which he stumbled were forgotten. He saw blue vistas of undiscovered countries, high prospects and a quiet, caressing sea.  The past shed its perfume over him, to-day held his hand as it were a little child, and to-morrow shone like a white star: nothing was changed.
    He drank opaline.
    The man had known the obscure night of the soul, and lay even now in the valley of humiliation; and the tiger menace of things to be was red in the skies.  But for a little while he had forgotten.
    Green changed to white, emerald to an opal: nothing was changed.

Markets

                 (After an Old Nursery Rhyme)

    "WHERE are you going, beautiful maiden?"
    "I am going to the market, sir."
    "And what do you take with you, beautiful maiden?  Lilies out of your garden?  White milk, warm from the cow, little pats of yellow butter, new-laid eggs, this morning’s mushrooms?  Where is your basket?  Why have you nothing in your hands?
    "I am going to market, sir."
    "Beautiful maiden, may I come with you?"
    "Oh, sir."

The Visit

        AS though I were still struggling through the meshes of some riotous dream, I heard his knock upon the door.  As in a dream, I bade him enter, but with his entry, I awoke.  Yet when he entered it seemed to me that I was dreaming, for there was nothing strange in that supreme and sorrowful smile which shone through the mask which I knew.  And just as though I had not always been afraid of him I said:  "Welcome."
    And he said very simply, "I am here."
    Dreaming I had thought myself, but the reproachful sorrow of his smile showed me that I was awake.  Then dared I open my eyes and I saw my old body on the bed, and the room in which I had grown so tired, and in the middle of the room the pan of charcoal which still smouldered. And dimly I remembered my great weariness and the lost whiteness of Lalage and last year’s snows; and these things had been agonies.
    Darkly, as in a dream, I wondered why they gave me no more hurt, as I looked at my old body on the bed;  why, they were like old maids’ fancies (as I looked at my gray body on the bed of my agonies)—like silly toys of children that fond mothers lay up in lavender (as I looked at the twisted limbs of my old body),  for these things had been agonies.
    But all my wonder was gone when I looked again into the eyes of my guest, and I said:
    "I have waited for you all my life."
    Then said Death (and what reproachful tenderness was shadowed in his obscure smile):
    "You had only to call."

Two Tales from Dilemmas: Stories and Studies in Sentiment (1895)

Souvenirs of an Egoist

EHEU FUGACES!   How that air carries me back, that air ground away so unmercifully, sans tune, sans time on a hopelessly discordant barrel-organ  right underneath my window.  It is being bitterly execrated, I know, by the literary gentleman who lives in the chambers above me  and by the convivial gentleman who has a dinner party underneath.  It has certainly made it impossible for me to continue the passage in my new Fugue in A minor, which was being transferred so flowingly from my own brain on to the score when it interrupted me.  But for all that, I have a shrewd suspicion that I shall bear its unmusical torture as long as it lasts and eventually send away the frowsy foreigner, who no doubt is playing it,  happy with a  fairly large coin.
    Yes, for the sake of old times, for the old emotion’s sake—for Ninette’s sake, I put up with it, not altogether sorry for the recollections it has aroused.
    How vividly it brings it all back!  Though I am a rich man now, and so comfortably domiciled,  though the fashionable world are so eager to lionise me, and the musical world look upon me almost as a god, and to-morrow hundreds of people will be turned away for want of space from the Hall where I am to play, just I alone, my last Fantaisie, it was not so very many years ago that I trudged along, fiddling for half-pence in the streets.  Ninette and I—Ninette with her barrel-organ, and I fiddling.  Poor little Ninette—that air was one of the four her organ played.  I wonder what has become of her?  Dead, I should hope,  poor child.  Now that I am successful and famous, a Baron of the French Empire, it is not altogether unpleasant to think of the old, penniless, vagrant days, by a blazing fire in a thick carpeted room, with the November night shut outside.  I am rather an epicure of my emotions, and my work is none the worse for it.

    ‘Little egoist,’ I remember Lady Greville once said of me, ‘he has the true artistic susceptibility.  All his sensations are so much grist for his art.’
    But it is of Ninette, not Lady Greville, that I think tonight,  Ninette’s childish face that the dreary grinding organ brings up before me, not Lady Greville’ s aquiline nose and delicate artificial complexion.
    Although I am such a great man now, I should find it very awkward to be obliged to answer questions as to my parentage and infancy.
    Even my nationality I could not state precisely, though I know I am as much Italian as English, perhaps rather more.  From Italy I have inherited my genius and enthusiasm for art, from England I think I must have got my common-sense,  and the capacity of keeping the money which I make; also a certain natural coldness of disposition, which those who only know me as a public character do not dream of. All my earliest memories are very vague and indistinct. I remember tramping over France and Italy with a man and woman—they were Italian, I believe—who beat me, and a fiddle which I loved passionately and which I cannot remember having ever been without.  They are very shadowy presences now, and the name of the man I have forgotten.  The woman, I think,  was called Maddalena.  I am ignorant whether they were related to me in any way: I know I hated them bitterly, and eventually, after a worse beating than usual, ran away from them.  I never cared for any one except my fiddle until I knew Ninette.

    I was very hungry and miserable indeed when that recontre came about.  I wonder sometimes what would have happened if Ninette had not come to the rescue just at that particular juncture.  Would some other salvation have appeared, or would—well, well, if one once begins wondering what would have happened if certain accidents in one’s life had not befallen one when they did,  where will one come to a stop? Anyhow, when I had escaped from my taskmasters, a wretched, puny child of ten, undersized and shivering, clasping a cheap fiddle in my arms, lost in the huge labyrinth of Paris, without a sou in my rags to save me from starvation, I did meet Ninette, and that, after all, is the main point.
    It was at the close of my first day of independence, a wretched November evening very much like this one.  I had wandered about all day, but my efforts had not been rewarded by a single coin.  My fiddle was old and warped, and injured by the rain;  its whining was even more repugnant to my own sensitive ear than to that of the casual passer-by.  I was in despair.  How I hated all the few well-dressed, well-to-do people who were out on the Boulevards on that inclement night.  I wandered up and down hoping against hope until I was too tired to stand, and then I crawled under the shelter of a covered passage and flung myself down on the ground to die,  as I hoped,  crying bitterly.
    The alley was dark and narrow, and I did not see at first it had another occupant.  Presently a hand was put out and touched me on the shoulder.
    I started up in terror, though the touch was soft and need not have alarmed me.  I found it came from a little girl, for she was really about my own age though then she seemed to me very big and protecting.  But she was tall and strong for her age, and I,  as I have said, was weak and undersized.

    ‘Chut! little boy,’ said Ninette;  ‘what are you crying for?’
    And I told her my story, as clearly as I could, through my sobs; and soon a pair of small arms were thrown round my neck and a smooth little face laid against my wet one caressingly.  I felt as if half my troubles were over.
    ‘Don’t cry, little boy,’  said Ninette grandly; ‘I will take care of you.  If you like, you shall live with me.  We will make a ménage together.  What is your profession?
    I showed her my fiddle, and the sight of its condition caused fresh tears to flow.
    ‘Ah!’  she said, and with a smile of approval,  ‘a violinist—good!  I too am an artiste.  You ask my instrument?  There it is.’
    And she pointed to an object on the ground beside her which I had,  at first,  taken to be a big box and dimly hoped might contain eatables.  My respect for my new friend suffered a little diminution.  Already I felt instinctively that to play the fiddle,  even though it is an old,  a poor one,  is to be something above a mere organ-grinder.
    But I did not express this feeling—was not this little girl going to take me home with her?  would not she, doubtless,  give me something to eat?
    My first impulse was an artistic one;  that was of Italy.  The concealment of it was due to the English side of me—the practical side.

    I crept close to the little girl; and she drew me to her protectingly.
    ‘What is thy name, p’tit?’  she said.
    ‘Anton,’  I answered, for that was what the woman Maddalena had called me.  Her husband, if he was her husband, never gave me any title except when he was abusing me, and then my names were many and unmentionable.  Nowadays I am Baron Antonio Antonelli of the Legion of Honour, but that is merely an extension of the old concise Anton, so far as I know,  the only name I ever had.
    ‘Anton?’  repeated the little girl, ‘that is a nice name to say.  Mine is Ninette.’
    We sat in silence in our sheltered nook, waiting until the rain should stop, and very soon I began to whimper again.
    ‘I am so hungry, Ninette,’  I said;  ‘I have eaten nothing to-day.’
    In the literal sense this was a lie; I had eaten some stale crusts in the early morning  before I gave my taskmasters the slip,  but the hunger was true enough.
    Ninette began to reproach herself for not thinking of this before.  After much fumbling in her pocket she produced a bit of brioche, an apple, and some cold chestnuts.
    ‘V’la, Anton,’ she said,  ‘pop those in your mouth.  When we get home we will have supper together.  I have bread and milk at home.  And we will buy two hot potatoes from the man on the quai.’

    I ate the unsatisfying morsels ravenously, Ninette watching me with an approving nod the while.  When they were finished, the weather was a little better, and Ninette said we might move.  She slung the organ over her shoulder—it was a small organ, though heavy for a child; but she was used to it  and trudged along under its weight like a woman.  With her free hand she caught hold of me and led me along the wet streets, proudly home. Ninette’s home!  Poor little Ninette!  It was colder and barer than these rooms of mine now; it had no grand piano, and no thick carpets; and in the place of pictures and bibelots, its walls were only wreathed in cobwebs.  Still it was drier than the streets of Paris, and if it had been a palace it could not have been more welcome to me than it was that night.
    The ménage of Ninette was a strange one!  There was a tumbledown deserted house in the Montparnasse district.  It stood apart, in an overgrown, weedy garden and has long ago been pulled down.  It was uninhabited; no one but a parisian gamine could have lived in it, and Ninette had long occupied it  unmolested  save by the rats.  Through the broken palings in the garden she had no difficulty in passing, and as its back door had fallen to pieces,  there was nothing to bar her further entry.  In one of the few rooms which had its windows intact, right at the top of the house, a mere attic, Ninette had installed herself and her scanty goods, and henceforth this became my home also.

    It has struck me since as strange that the child’s presence should not have been resented by the owner.  But I fancy the house had some story connected with it.  It was, I believe, the property of an old and infirm miser who in his reluctance to part with any of his money in repairs had overreached himself  and let his property become valueless.  He could not let it, and he would not pull it down.  It remained therefore an eyesore to the neighborhood  until his death put it into the possession of a less avaricious successor.  The proprietor never came near the place, and with its neighbours it had a bad repute,  and they avoided it as much as possible.  It stood, as I have said,  alone and in its own garden, and Ninette’s occupation of it may have passed unnoticed,  while even if any one of the poor people living around had known of her,it was, after all, nobody’s business to interfere.
    When I was last in Paris I went to look for the house, but all traces of it had vanished, and over the site, so far as I could fix it, a narrow street of poor houses flourished.
    Ninette introduced me to her domain with an air of ownership.  She had a little store of charcoal  with which she proceeded to light a fire in the grate and by its fitful light prepared our common supper—bread and radishes washed down by a pennyworth of milk,  of which,  I have no doubt,  I received the lion’s share.  As a dessert we munched, with much relish, the steaming potatoes that Ninette had bought from a stall in the street and had kept warm in the pocket of her apron.

    And so,  as Ninette had said,  we made a ménage together.  How that old organ brings it all back.  My fiddle was useless after the hard usage it received that day.  Ninette and I went out on our rounds together, but for the present I was a sleeping partner in the firm, and all I could do was to grind occasionally when Ninette’s arm ached  or pick up the sous that were thrown us.  Ninette was,  as a rule,  fairly successful.  Since her mother had died a year before, leaving the organ as her sole legacy, she had lived mainly by that instrument; although she often increased her income in the evenings, when organ-grinding was more than ever at a discount, by selling bunches of violets and other flowers as button-holes.
    With her organ she had a regular beat, and a distinct clientéle.  Children playing with their bonnes in the gardens of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg were her most productive patrons.  Of course we had bad days as well as good,  and in winter it was especially bad; but as a rule we managed fairly to make both ends meet.  Sometimes we carried home as much as five francs as the result of the day’s campaign, but this, of course, was unusual.
    Ninette was not precisely a pretty child, but she had a very bright face and wonderful gray eyes.  When she smiled, which was often, her face was very attractive, and a good many people were induced to throw a sou for the smile which they would have assuredly grudged to the music.
    Though we were about the same age, the position which it might have been expected we should occupy was reversed.  It was Ninette who petted and protected me—I who clung to her.

    I was very fond of Ninette, certainly.  I should have died in those days if it had not been for her, and sometimes I am surprised at the tenacity of my tenderness for her.  As much as I ever cared for anything except my art, I cared for Ninette.  But still she was never the first with me,  as I must have been with her.  I was often fretful and discontented, sometimes, I fear,  ready to reproach her for not taking more pains to alleviate our misery, but all the time of our partnership Ninette never gave me a cross word.  There was something maternal about her affection which withstood all ungratefulness.  She was always ready to console me when I was miserable and to throw her arms round me when I was cold; and many a time, I am sure, when the day’s earnings had been scanty, the little girl must have gone to sleep hungry, that I might not be stinted in my supper.
    One of my grievances, and that the sorest of all, was the loss of my beloved fiddle.  This, for all her goodwill, Ninette was powerless to allay.
    ‘Dear Anton,’ she said, ‘do not mind about it.  I earn enough for both with my organ, and some day we shall save enough to buy thee a new fiddle.  When we are together and have got food and charcoal, what does it matter about an old fiddle?  Come, eat thy supper, Anton, and I will light the fire.  Never mind, dear Anton.’  And she laid her soft little cheek against mine with a pleading look.
    ‘Don’t,’  I cried, pushing her away, ‘you can’t understand, Ninette; you can only grind an organ—just four tunes, always the same.   But I loved my fiddle,  loved it, loved it!’  I cried passionately.   ‘It could talk to me, Ninette, and tell me beautiful, new things, always beautiful, always new.  Oh, Ninette, I shall die if I cannot play!’

    It was always the same cry, and Ninette, if she could not understand and was secretly a little jealous, was as distressed as I was;  but what could she do?
    Eventually,  I got my violin, and it was Ninette who gave it me.  The manner of its acquirement was in this wise.
    Ninette would sometimes invest some of her savings in violets, which she divided with me and made into nose-gays for us to sell in the streets at night.
    Theater doors and frequented places on the Boulevards were our favorite spots.
    One night we had taken up our station outside the Opéra, when a gentleman stopped on his way in.  He was in evening dress and in a great hurry.
    ‘How much?’ he asked shortly.
    ‘Ten  sous, M’seu,’ said the exorbitant little Ninette, expecting to get two at the most.
    The gentleman drew out some coins hastily and selected a bunch from the basket.
    ‘Here is a franc,’ he said, ‘I cannot wait for change,’ and putting a coin into Ninette’s hand he turned into the theater.
    Ninette ran towards me with her eyes gleaming; she held up the piece of money exultantly.
    ‘Tiens, Anton!’ she cried, and I saw that it was not a franc, as we had thought at first, but a gold Napoleon.

    I believe the good little boy and girl in the story-books would have immediately sought out the unfortunate gentleman and bid him rectify his mistake,  generally receiving, so the legend runs, a far larger bonus as a reward of their integrity.  I have never been a particularly good little boy, however, and I don’t think it ever struck either Ninette or myself—perhaps we were not sufficiently speculative—that any other course was open to us than to profit by the mistake.  Ninette began to consider how we should spend it.
    ‘Think of it, Anton, a whole golden louis. A louis,’ said Ninette, counting laboriously, ‘is twenty francs, a franc is twenty sous, Anton;  how many sous are there in a louis?  More than an hundred?’
    But this piece of arithmetic was beyond me;  I shook my head dubiously.
    ‘What shall we buy first, Anton?’ said Ninette, with sparkling eyes.  You shall have new things, Anton, a pair of new shoes and an hat;  and I—’
    But I had other things than clothes in my mind’s eye;  I interrupted her.
    ‘Ninette, dear little Ninette,’  I said coaxingly,  ‘remember the fiddle.’
    Ninette’s face fell, but she was a tender little thing, and she showed no hesitation.
    ‘Certainly, Anton,’ she said, but with less enthusiasm, ‘we will get it to-morrow—one of the fiddles you showed me in M. Boudinot’s shop on the Quai.  Do you think the ten-franc one will do, or the light one for fifteen francs?’

    ‘Oh, the light one, dear Ninette,’ I said; ‘it is worth more than the extra money.  Besides, we shall soon earn it back now.  Why if you could earn such a lot as you have with your old organ, when you have only to turn an handle, think what a lot I shall make, fiddling.  For you have to be something to play the fiddle,  Ninette.’
    ‘Yes,’ said the little girl, wincing; ‘you are right, dear Anton.  Perhaps you will get rich and go away and leave me?’
    ‘No, Ninette,’ I declared grandly, ‘I will always take care of you.  I have no doubt I shall get rich, because I am going to be a great musician, but I shall not leave you.  I will have a big house on the Champs Elysées, and then you shall come and live with me and be my housekeeper.  And in the evenings I will play to you and make you open your eyes,  Ninette.  You will like me to play, you know;  we are often dull in the evenings.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Ninette meekly, ‘we will buy your fiddle to-morrow, dear Anton.  Let us go home now.’
    Poor vanished Ninette!  I must often have made the little heart sore with some of the careless things I said.  Yet looking back at it now, I know that I never cared for any living person so much as I did for Ninette.
    I have very few illusions left now; a childhood  such as mine  does not tend to preserve them, and time and success have not made me less cynical.  Still I have never let my scepticism touch that childish presence.  Lady Greville once said to me, in the presence of her nephew Felix Leominster, a musician too,  like myself,  that we three were curiously suited, for that we were, without exception, the three most cynical persons in the universe.  Perhaps in a way she was right.  Yet for all her cynicism Lady Greville I know has a bundle of old and faded letters,  tied up in black ribbon in some hidden drawer, that perhaps she never reads now,  but that she cannot forget or destroy.  They are in a bold handwriting, that is not,  I think,  that of the miserable  old debauchee,  her husband,  from whom ahe has been separated since the first year of her marriage, and their envelopes bear Indian postmarks.

    And Felix, who told me the story of the letters with a smile of pity on his thin,  ironical lips—Felix, whose principles are adapted to his conscience and whose conscience is bounded by law, and in whom I believe as little as he does in me,  I found out by accident not so very long ago.  It was the day of All Souls, the melancholy festival of souvenirs, celebrated once a year under the November fogs, that I strayed into the Montparnasse Cemetery to seek inspiration for my art.  And though he did not see me,  I saw Felix, the prince of railers, who believes in nothing and cares for nothing except himself,  for music is not with him a passion but an agrément.  Felix, bareheaded and without his usual smile,  putting fresh flowers on the grave of a little Parisian grisette who had been his mistress and died five years ago.  I thought of Balzac’s ‘Messe de l’Althée’ and ranked Felix’s inconsistency with it, feeling at the same time how natural such a paradox is.  And myself, the last of the trio, at the mercy of a street organ,  I cannot forget Ninette.
    Though it was not until many years had passed that I heard that little criticism,  the purchase of my fiddle was destined,  very shortly, to bring my life in contact with its author.  Those were the days when a certain restraint grew up between Ninette and myself.  Ninette,  it must be confessed,  was jealous of the fiddle.  Perhaps she knew instinctively that music was with me a single and absorbing passion from which she was excluded.  She was no genius, and her organ was nothing more to her than the means of making a livelihood;  she felt not the smallest tendresse for it and could not understand why a dead and inanimate fiddle, made of mere wood and catgut, should be any more to me than that.  How could she know that to me it was never a dead thing, that even when it hung hopelessly out of my reach in the window of M. Boudinot,  before ever it had given out wild,  impassioned music beneath my hands, it was always a live thing to me, alive and with a human, throbbing heart, vibrating with hope and passion.

So Ninette was jealous of the fiddle, and being proud in her way, she became more and more quiet and reticent, and drew herself aloof from me,  although, wrapped as I was in the double egoism of art and boyhood, I failed to notice this.  I have been sorry since that any shadow of misunderstanding should have clouded the closing days of our partnership.  It is too late to regret now,  however.  When my fiddle was added to our belongings we took to going out separately.  It was more profitable and,  besides,  Ninette, I think, saw that I was growing a little ashamed of her organ.  On one of those occasions, as I played before a house in the Fauborg St. Germain, the turning point of my life befell me.  The house outside which I had taken my station was a large, white one, with a balcony on the first floor.  This balcony was unoccupied, but the window looking to it was open, and through the lace curtains I could distinguish the sound of voices.  I began to play; at first one of the airs that Maddalena had taught me; but before it was finished I had glided off, as usual, into an improvisation.
    When I was playing like that I threw all my soul into my fingers, and I had neither ears nor eyes for anything round me.  I did not therefore notice until I had finished playing that a lady and a young man had come out onto the balcony,  and were beckoning to me.
    ‘Bravo!’ cried the lady enthusiastically, but she did not throw me the reward I had expected.  She turned and said something to her companion, who smiled and disappeared.  I waited expectantly, thinking perhaps she had sent him for her purse.  Presently the door opened, and the young man issued from it.  He came to me and touched me on the shoulder.

    ‘You are to come with me,’ he said authoritatively, speaking in French but with an English accent.  I followed him, my heart beating with excitement,  through the big door into a large handsome hall and up a broad staircase,  thinking that in all my life I had never seen such a beautiful house.
    He led me into a large and luxurious salon, which seemed to my astonished eyes like a wonderful museum.  The walls were crowded with pictures, a charming composition by Gustave Moreau was lying on the grand piano,  waiting untril a nook could be found for it to hang. Renaissance bronzes and the work of eighteenth century silversmiths jostled one another on brackets, and on a table lay a handsome violin-case.  The pale blinds were drawn down, and there was a delicious smell of flowers diffused everywhere.  A lady was lying on a sofa near the window, a handsome woman of about thirty whose dress was a miracle of lace and flimsiness.
    The young man led me towards her, and she placed two delicate, jewelled hands on my shoulders, looking me steadily in the face.
    ‘Where did you learn to play like that, my boy?’  she asked.
    ‘I cannot remember when I could not fiddle, Madame,’  I answered, and that was true.
    ‘The boy is a born musician, Felix,’ said Lady Greville.  ‘Look at his hands.’
    And she held up mine to the young man’s notice.  He glanced at them carelessly.
    "Yes,  Miladi,’ said the young man, ‘they are real violin hands.  What were you playing just now, my lad?’

    ‘I don’t know, sir,’  I said.  ‘I play just what comes into my head.’
    Lady Greville looked at her nephew with a glance of triumph.
    ‘What did I tell you?’ she cried.  ‘The boy is a genius, Felix.  I shall have him educated.’
    ‘All your geese are swans, Auntie,’ said the young man in English.
    Lady Greville, however, ignored this thrust.
    ‘Will you play for me now, my dear,’ she said, ‘as you did before—just what comes into your head?’
    I nodded and was getting my fiddle to my chin when she stopped me.
    ‘Not that thing,’ bestowing a glance of contempt at my instrument.  ‘Felix, the Stradivarius.’
    The young man went to the other side of the room and returned with the case I had noticed.  He put it in my hand with the injunction to handle it gently.  I had never heard of Cremona violins nor of my namesake Stradivarius; but at the sight of the dark seasoned wood  reposing on its blue velvet  I could not restrain a cry of admiration.
    I have that same instrument in my room now, and I would not trust it in the hands of another for a million.
    I lifted the violin tenderly from its case  and ran my bow up the gamut.

    I felt almost intoxicated at the mellow sounds it uttered.  I could have kissed the dark wood  that looked to me stained through and through with melody.
    I began to play.  My improvisation was a song of triumph and delight;  the music, at first rapid and joyous, became slower and more solemn as the inspiration seized on me,  until at last, in spite of myself, it grew into a wild and indescribable dirge, fading away in a long wail of unutterable sadness and regret.  When it was over I felt exhausted and unstrung, as though virtue had gone out from me.  I had played as I had never played before.  The young man had turned away and was looking out of the window.  The lady on the sofa was transfigured.  The languor had altogether left her, and the tears were streaming down her face,  to the great detriment of the powder and enamel which composed her complexion.
    ‘It is beautiful, terrible!’  she said;  ‘I have never heard such strange music in my life.  You must stay with me now and have masters.  If you can play like that now, without culture and education, in time, when you have been taught, you will be the greatest violinist that ever lived!’
    I will say of Lady Greville that, in spite of her frivolity and affectations, she does love music at the bottom of her soul, with the absorbing passion that in my eyes would absolve a person for committing all the sins in the Decalogue.  If her heart could be taken out and examined I can fancy it as a shield,  divided into equal fields.  Perhaps, as her friends declare, one of these might bear the device ‘Modes et Confections’; but I am sure that you would see on the other, even more deeply graven, the divine word ‘Music.’

She is one of the few persons whose praise of any of my compositions gives me real satisfaction; and almost alone, when everybody is running in true goose fashion, to hear my piano recitals, she knows and tells me to stick to my true vocation—the violin.
    ‘My dear Baron,’ she said, ‘why waste your time playing on an instrument which is not suited to you when you have the Stradivarius waiting at home for the magic touch?’
    She was right, though it is the fashion to speak of me as a second Rubenstein.  There are two or three finer pianints than I, even here in England.  But I am quite sure, yes, and you are sure too, oh my Stradivarius, that in the whole world there is nobody who can make such music out of you as I can, no one to whom you tell such stories as you tell me.  Any one who knows could see by merely looking at my hands that they are violin and not piano hands.
    ‘Will you come and live with me, Anton?’  said Lady Greville more calmly.  ‘I am rich and childless; you shall live just as if you were my child.  The best masters in Europe shall teach you.  Tell me where to find your parents, Anton,  and I will see them tonight.’
    ‘I have no parents,’ I said, ‘only Ninette.  I cannot leave Ninette.’
    ‘Shade of Musset, who is Ninette?’  asked Felix, turning round from the window.
    I told him.

    ‘What is to be done?’  cried Lady Greville in perplexity.  ‘I cannot have the girl here as well, and I will not let my Phonix go.’
    ‘Send her to the Sours de la Miséricorde,’  said the young man carelessly;  ‘you have a nomination.’
    ‘Have I?’  said Lady Greville with a laugh.  ‘I am sure I did not know it.  It is an excellent idea; but do you think he will come without the other?  I suppose they were like brother and sister?’
    ‘Look at him now,’  said Felix,  pointing to where I stood caressing the precious wood;  ‘he would sell his soul for that fiddle.’
    Lady Greville took the hint.  ‘Here, Anton,’  said she, ‘I cannot have Ninette here—you understand, once and for all.  But I will see that she is sent to a kind home, where she will want for nothing and be trained up as a servant.  You need not bother about her.  You will live with me and be taught, and some day, if you are good and behave, you shall go and see Ninette.’
    I was irresolute, but I only said doggedly, feeling what would be the end,  ‘I do not want to come if Ninette may not.’
    Then Lady Greville played her trump card.
    ‘Look, Anton,’ she said, ‘you see that violin.  I have no need, I see, to tell you its value.  If you will come with me and make no scene, you shall have it for your very own.  Ninette will be perfectly happy.  Do you agree?

    I looked at my old fiddle lying on the floor.  How yellow and trashy it looked beside the grand old Cremona  bedded in its blue velvet.
    ‘I will do what you like, Madame,’ I said.
    ‘Human nature is pretty much the same in geniuses and dullards,’  said Felix.  ‘I congratulate you, Auntie.’
    And so the bargain was struck, and the new life entered upon that very day.  Lady Greville sought out Ninette at once, though I was not allowed to accompany her.
    I never saw Ninette again.  She made no opposition to Lady Greville’s scheme.  She let herself be taken to the Orphanage, and she never asked, so they said, to see me again.
‘She’s a stupid little thing,’ said Lady Greville to her nephew, on her return,  ‘and as plain as possible; but I suppose she was kind to the boy.  They will forget each other now I hope.  It is not as if they were related.’
    ‘In that case they would already be hating each other.  However, I am quite sure your protégé will forget soon enough; and after all, you have nothing to do with the girl.’
    I suppose I did not think very much of Ninette then; but what would you have?  It was such a change from the old vagrant days that there is a good deal to excuse me.  I was absorbed too in the new and wonderful symmetry which music began to assume, as taught me by the master Lady Greville procured for me.  When the news was broken to me, with great gentleness, that my little companion had run away from the sisters with whom she had been placed—run away and left nop traces behind her, I hardly realised how completely she would have passed away from me.  I thought of her for a little while with some regret;  then I remembered the Stradivarius, and I could not be sorry long.  So by degrees I ceased to think of her.
    I lived on in Lady Greville’s house, going with her wherever she stayed—London, Paris, and Nice—until I was thirteen.  Then she sent me away to study music at a small German capital, in the house of one of the few surviving pupils of Weber.  We parted as we had lived together, without affection.

    Personally Lady Greville did not like me; if anything, she felt an actual repugnance towards me.  All the care she lavished on me was for the sake of my talent, not for myself.  She took a great deal of trouble in superintending, not only my musical education, but my general culture.  She designed little mediæval costumes for me, and was indefatigable in her endeavours to impart to my manners that finish which a gutter education had denied me.
    There is a charming portrait of me by a well-known English artist that hangs now in her ladyship’s drawing room.  A pale boy of twelve, clad in an old-fashioned suit of ruby velvet;  a boy with huge black eyes  and long curls of the same colour is standing by an oak music-stand holding before him a Cremona violin whose rich colouring is relieved admirably by the beautiful old point lace with which the boy’s doublet is slashed.  It is a charming picture.  The famous artist who painted it considers it his best portrait, and Lady Greville is proud of it.
    But her pride is of the same quality as that which made her value my presence.  I was in her eyes merely the complement of her famous fiddle.
    I heard her one day express a certain feeling of relief and my approaching departure.
    ‘You regret having taken him up?’  asked her nephew curiously.
    ‘No,’  she said,  ‘that would be folly.  He repays all one’s trouble as soon as he touches his fiddle—but I don’t like him.’

    ‘He can playlike the great Pan,’ says Felix.
    ‘Yes, and like Pan he is half a beast.’
    ‘You may make a musician out of him,’  answered the young man, examining his pink nails with a certain admiration, ‘but you will never make him a gentleman.’
    ‘Perhaps not,’  said Lady Greville carelessly.  ‘Still, Felix, he is very refined.’
    Dame!  I think he would own himself mistaken now.  Mr Felix Leominster himself is not a greater social success than Baron Antonio Antonelli of the Legion of Honour.   I am as sensitive as anyone to the smallest spot on my linen,  and Duchesses rave about my charming manners.
    For the rest, my souvenirs are not very numerous.  I lived in Germany until I made my début,  and I never heard anything more of Ninette.
    The history of my life is very much the history of my art: and that you know.  I have always been an art-concentrated man—self-concentrated, my friend Felix Leominster tells me frankly—and since I was a boy nothing has ever troubled the serene repose of my egoism.
    It is strange considering the way people rant about the ‘compassionate sympathy’  of my playing, the ‘enormous potentiality of suffering’ revealed in my music, how singularly free from passion and disturbance my life has been.

    I have never let myself be troubled by what is commonly called ‘love.’  To be frank with you, I do not much believe in it.  Of the two principal elements of which it is composed, vanity and egoism,  I have too little of the former, too much of the latter to suffer from it.  My life has been notoriously irreproachable.  I figure in polemical literature as an instance of a man who has lived in contact with the demoralising influence of the stage and will yet go to Heaven.  A la bonne heure!
    I am coming to the end of my souvenirs and of my cigar at the same time.  I must convey a coin somehow to that dreary person outside who is grinding now half-way down the street.
    On consideration, I decide emphatically against opening the window and presenting it in that way.  If the fog once gets in it will utterly spoil me for any work this evening.  I feel myself in travail also of two charming little Lieder that all this thinking about Ninette has suggested.  How would ‘Chansons de Gamine’  do for a title?  I think it best, on second thoughts, to ring for Giacomo, my man,  and send him out with the half-crown I propose to sacrifice on the altar of sentiment.  Doubtless the musician is a country-woman of his, and if he pockets the coin that is his look out.
    Now if I were writing a romance  what a chance I have got.  I should tell you how my organ-grinder turned out to be no other than Ninette.  Of course she would not be spoilt or changed by the years—just the same Ninette.  Then what scope for a pathetic scene of reconciliation and forgiveness—the whole to conclude with a peal of marriage bells,  two people living together ‘happy ever after.’  But I am not writing a romance,  and I am a musician, not a poet.
    Sometimes, however, it strikes me that I should like to see Ninette again,  and I find myself seeking traces of her in childish faces in the street.

    The absurdity of such an expectation strikes me very forcibly afterwards,  when I look at my reflection in the mirror and tell myself that I must be careful in the disposition of my parting.
    Ninette, too, was my contemporary.  Still I cannot conceive of her as a woman.  To me she is always a child.  Ninette grown up, with a draggled dress and squalling babies, is an incongruous thing that shocks my sense of artistic fitness.  My fiddle is my only mistress, and while I can summon its consolation at command I may not be troubled by the pettiness of a merely human love.  But once, when I was down with Roman fever and tossed on a hotel bed all the long,  hot night while Giacomo drowsed in a corner over ‘Il Diavolo Rosa,’  I seemed to miss Ninette.
    Remembering that time, I sometimes fancy that when the inevitable hour strikes, and this hand is too weak to raise the soul of melody out of Stradivarius—when, my brief dream of life and music over, I go down into the dark land, where there is no more music, and no Ninette, into the sleep from which there is no awaking, I should like to see her again, not the woman but the child.  I should like to look into the wonderful eyes of the old Ninette, to feel the soft cheek laid against mine, to hold the little brown hands as in the old gamin days.
    It is a foolish thought, because I am not forty yet, and with the moderate life I lead I may live to play the Stradivarius for another thirty years.
    There is always the hope, too, that it,  when it comes, may seize me suddenly.  To see it coming, that is the horrible part.  I should like to be struck by lightening with you in my arms, Stradivarius, oh, my beloved—to die playing.

    The literary gentleman over my head is stamping viciously about his room.  What would his language be if he knew how I have rewarded his tormentress—he whose principles are so strict that he would bear the agony for hours, sooner than give a barrel-organ sixpence to go to another street.  He would be capable of giving Giacomo a sovereign to pocket my coin if only he knew.  Yet I owe that unmusical old organ a charming evening, tinged with the faint soupçon of melancholy which is necessary to and enhances the highest pleasure.  Over these memories it has excited I have smoked a pleasant cigar—peace to its ashes!

The Statute of Limitations

DURING five years of an almost daily association with Michael Garth in a solitude of Chile which threw us,  men of common speech though scarcely of common interests,  largely on each other’s tolerance,  I had grown,  if not into an intimacy with him,  at least into a certain familiarity through which the salient features of his history and his character reached me.  It was a singular character and a history rich in instruction.  So much I gathered from hints he let drop long before I had heard the end of it.  Unsympathetic as the man was to me, it was impossible not to be interested by it.  As our acquaintance advanced it took  ( his character I mean) more and more the aspect of a difficult problem in psychology  that I was passionately interested in solving: to study it was my recreation,  after watching the fluctuating course of the nitrates.  So that when I had achieved fortune and might have started home immediately my interest induced me to wait more than three months and return in the same ship with him.  It was through this delay that I am able to transcribe the issue of my impressions:  I found them edifying,  if only for their singular irony.
    From his own mouth indeed I gleaned but little, although during our voyage home, in those long nights when we paced the deck together under the Southern Cross, his reticence occasionally gave way, and I obtained glimpses of a more intimate knowledge of him than the whole of our juxtaposition on the station ever afforded me.  I guessed more,  however,  than he told me; and what was lacking I pieced together later from the talk of the girl to whom I broke the news of his death.  He named her to me for the first time a day or two before that happened;  a piece of confidence so unprecedented that I must have been blind indeed  not to have foreseen what it prefaced.  I had seen her face the first time I entered his house where her photograph hung on a conspicuous wallthe charming oval face of a young girl, little more than a child, with great eyes that one guessed, one knew not why, to be the colour of violets, looking out with singular wistfulness from a waving cloud of dark hair.  Afterwards, he told me that it was a picture of his fiancée: but, before that, signs had not been wanting by which I had read a woman in his life.

    Iquique is not Paris; it is not even Valparaiso; but it is a city of civilization and but two days’ ride from the pestilential stew where we nursed our lives doggedly on quinine and hope, the ultimate hope of evasion.  The lives of most Englishmen yonder, who superintend the works in the interior, are held on the same tenure: you know them by a certain savage, hungry look in their eyes.  In the meantime, while they wait for their luck, most of them are glad enough when business calls them down for a day or two in Iquique.  There are ships and streets, lit streets through which blackeyed senoritas pass in their lace mantillas;  there are cafes too, and faro for those who reck of it, and bullfights and newspapers younger than six weeks; and in the harbour, taking in their fill of nitrates, many ships not to be considered without envy, because they are coming,  within a limit of days, to England.  But Iquique had no charm for Michael Garth, and when one of us must go it was usually I, his subordinate who, being delegated, congratulated myself on his indifference.  Hard-earned dollars melted at Iquique, and to Garth life in Chile had long been solely a matter of amassing them.  So he stayed on in the prickly heat of Agnas Blancas and grimly counted the days and the money (although his nature, I believe,was fundamentally generous, in his set concentration of purpose he had grown morbidly avaricious) which should restore him to his mistress.  Morose, reticent, unsociable as he had become, he had still, I discovered by degrees, a leaning towards the humanities,  a nice taste, such as could only be the result of much knowledge, in the finer things of literature.  His infinitesimal library, a few  French novels, an Horace and some well thumbed volumes of the modern English poets in the familiar edition of Tauchnuitz, he put at my disposal in return for a collection,  somewhat similar although a little larger, of my own.  In his rare moments of amiability he could talk on such matters with verve and originality: more

usually he preferred to pursue with the bitterest animosity an abstract fetish which he called his "luck."  He was by temperament an enraged pessimist; and I could believe that he seriously attributed to Providence some quality, inconceivably malignant, directed in all things personally against himself. His immense bitterness and careful averice alike I could explain and in a measure justify when I came to understand that he had felt the sharpest stings of poverty and,  moreover,  was passionately in love,  in love comme on ne l’est plus.  As to what his previous resources had been I knew nothing,  nor why they had failed him;  but I gathered that the crisis had come just when his life was complicated by the sudden blossoming of an old friendship into love, in his case at least, to be complete and final.  The girl too was poor; they were poorer than most poor persons: how could he refuse the post which, through the good offices of a friend, was just then unexpectedly offered him? Certainly, it was abroad;  it implied five years solitude in Equitorial America.  Separation and change were to be accounted; perhaps diseases and death, and certainly his ‘luck,’ which seemed to include all these.  But it also promised, when the term of his exile was up, and there were means of shortening it, a certain competence, very likely wealth, and escaping those other contingencies, marriage.  There seemed no other way.  The girl was very young: there was no question of an early marriage;  there was not even a definite engagement.  Garth would take no promise from her: only for himself; he was her bound lover while he breathed, would keep himself free to claim her when he came back in five years, or ten, or twenty, if she had not chosen better.  He would not bind her; but I can imagine how impressive his dark, bitter face must have made this renunciation to the little girl with the violet eyes; how tenderly she repudiated her freedom.  She went out as a governess and sat down to wait.  And absence only rivited faster the chain of her affection: it set Garth more securely on the pedestal of her idea; for in love it is most usually the reverse of that social maxim, les absents ont tojours tort, which is true.

    Garth, on his side, writing to her month by month while her picture smiled at him from the wall, if he was careful always to insist on her perfect freedom,  added, in effect, so much more than this that the renunciation lost its benefit.  He lived in a dream of her; and the memory of her eyes and her hair was a perpetual presence with him, less ghostly than the real company among whom he mechanically transacted his daily business.  Burnt away and consumed by desire of her living arms, he was counting the hours which still prevented him from them.  Yet, when his five years were done he delayed his return, although his economies justified it, and settled down for another term of five years, which was to be prolonged to seven.  Actually, the memory of his old poverty, with its attendant dishonours, was grown a fury, pursuing him ceaselessly with whips.  The lust of gain, always for the girl’s sake and so, as it were, sanctified, had become a second nature to him; an intimate madness which left him no peace.  His worst nightmare was to wake with a sudden shock, imagining that he had lost everything, that he was reduced to his former poverty: a cold sweat would break out all over him befoer he had mastered the horror.  The recurrance of it,  time after time, made him vow grimly that he would go home a rich man, rich enough to laugh at the fantasies of his luck.  Latterly, indeed, this seemed to have changed;  so that his vow was fortunately kept.  He made money lavishly at last: all his operations were successful, even those which seemed the wildest gambling, and the  most forlorn speculations turned round and shewed a pretty harvest when Garth meddled with their stock.

    And all the time he was waiting there at Agnas Blancas and scheming in a feverish concentration of himself upon his ultimate reunion with the girl at home,  the man was growing old: gradually at first, but towards the end by leaps and starts with an increasing consciousness of how he aged and altered, which did but feed his black melancholy.  It was borne upon him,  perhaps, a little brutally and not by direct self-examination, when there came another photograph from England.  A beautiful face still, but certainly the face of a woman who had passed from the grace of girlhood (seven years now separated her from it) to a dignity touched with sadness: a face upon which life had already written some of its cruelties.  For many days after this arrival Garth was silent and moody,  even beyond his wont: then he studiously concealed it.  He threw himself again furiously into the economic battle; he had gone back to the inspiration of that other, older portrait:  the charming oval face of a young girl, almost a child with great eyes that one guessed, one knew not why, to be the colour of violets.
    As the time of our departure approached, a week or two before we had gone down to Valparaiso where Garth had business to wind up, I was enabled to study more intimately the morbid demon which possessed him.  It was the most singular thing in the world: no man had hated the country more, had been more passionately determined for a period of years to escape from it; and now that his chance was come the emotion with which he viewed it was nearer akin to terror than to the joy of a reasonable man who is about to compass the desire of his life.  He had kept the covenant which he had made with himself; he was a rich man,  richer than he had ever meant to be. Even now he was in full vigor and not much past the threshold of middle age, and he was going home to the woman whom for the best part of fifteen years he had adored with an unexampled constancy,  whose fidelity had been to him all through that exile as the shadow of a rock in a desert land:

he was going home to an honourable marriage.  But withal he was a man with an incurable sadness, miserable and afraid.  It seemed to me at times that he would have been glad if she had kept her troth less well, had only availed herself of that freedom he had given her to disregard her promise.  And this was the more strange in that I never doubted the strength of his attachment; it remained engrossing and unchanged the largest part of his life.  No alien shadow had ever come between him and the memory of the little girl with the violet eyes to whom he, at least, was bound.  But a shadow was there; fantastic it seemed to me at first, too grotesque to be met with argument, but in whose very lack of substance, as I came to see, lay its ultimate strength.  The notion of the woman which she now was came between him and the girl whom he had loved, whom he still loved with passion and separated them.  It was only on our voyage home,  when we walked the deck together interminably during the hot, sleepless nights that he first revealed to me without subterfuge the slow agony by which this phantom slew him.  And his old bitter conviction of the malignity of his luck,  which had lain dormant in the first flush of his material prosperity, returned to him.  The apparent change in it seemed to him just then the last irony of those hostile powers which had pursued him.
    ‘It came to me suddenly,’ he said, ‘just before I left Agnas, when I had been adding up my pile and saw there was nothing to keep me, that it was all wrong.  I had been a blamed fool!  I might have gone home years ago.  Where is the best of my life?  Burnt out, wasted, buried in that accursed oven!  Dollars?  If I had all the metal in Chile I couldn’t buy one day of youth.  Her youth too; that has gone with the rest; that’s the worst part!’
    Despite all my protests his despondency increased, as the steamer ploughed her way towards England, with the ceaseless throb of her screw which was like the panting of a great beast.  Once, when we had been talking of other matters,  of certain living poets whom he favored, he broke off with a quotation from the ‘Prince’s Progress’  of Miss Rossetti:

    ‘Ten years ago,  five years ago,
          One year ago,
    Even then you had arrived in time,
        Though somewhat slow;
    Then you had known her living face
          Which now you cannot know.’

He stopped sharply with a tone in his voice which seemed to intend, in the lines,  a personal instance.
    ‘I beg your pardon!’  I protested.  ‘I don’t see the analogy.  You haven’t loitered; you don’t come too late.  A brave woman has waited for you; you have a fine felicity before you: it should be all the better because you have won it laboriously.  For heaven’s sake, be reasonable!’  He shook his head sadly then added, with a gesture of sudden passion, looking out over the taffrail at the heaving gray waters:  ‘It’s finished.  I haven’t any longer the courage.’   ‘Ah!’  I exclaimed impatiently, ‘say once and for all, outright, that you are tired of her,  that you want to back out of it.’   ‘No,’ he said drearily, ‘it isn’t that.  I can’t reproach myself with the least wavering.  I have had a single passion; I have given my life to it; it is there still, consuming me.  Only the girl I loved: it’s as if she had died.  Yes, she is dead, as dead as Helen; and I have not the consolation of knowing where they have laid her.  Our marriage will be a ghastly mockery:  a marriage of corpses.  Her heart, how can she give it to me?  She gave it years ago to the man I was, the man who is dead.  We who are left  are nothing to one another,  mere strangers.’
    One could not argue with a perversity so infatuate: it was useless to point out that in life a distinction so arbitrary as the one which haunted him does not exist.  It was only left to me to wait, hoping that in the actual event of their meeting his malady would be healed. 

But this meeting, would it ever be compassed?  There were moments when his dread of it seemed to have grown so extreme that he would be capable of any cowardice, any compromise to postpone it, to render it impossible.  He was afraid that she would read his revulsion in his eyes, would suspect how time and his very constancy had given her the one rival with whom she could never compete; the memory of her old self, of her gracious girlhood which was dead.  Might not she too, actually, welcome a reprieve, however readily she would have submitted out of honour or lassitude to a marriage which could only be a parody of what might have been?
    At Lisbon, I hoped that he had settled these questions, had grown reasonable and sane, for he wrote a long letter to her which was subsequently a matter of much curiosity to me; and he wore for a day or two afterwards an air almost of assurance, which deceived me.  I wondered what he had put in that epistle, how far he had explained himself, justified his curious atitude.  Or was it simply a résumé, a conclusion to those many letters which he had written at Agnas Blancas, the last one which he would ever address to the little girl of the earlier photograph?  Later, I would have given much to decide this, but she herself, the woman who read it, maintained unbroken silence.  In return, I kept a secret from her my private interpretation of the accident of his death.  It seemed to me a knowledge tragical enough for her that he should have died as he did, so nearly in English waters; within a few days of the home coming which they had passionately expected for years.
    It would have been mere brutality to afflict her further by lifting the veil of obscurity which hangs over that calm, moonless night by pointing to the note of intention in it.  For it is my experience that accidents so opportune do not in real life occur, and I could not forget that, from Garth’s point of view, death was certainly a solution.  Was it not, moreover, precisely a solution which so little time before he had

the appearance of having found?  Indeed, when the first shock of his death was past I could feel that it was after all a solution: with his ‘luck’ to handicap him, he had perhaps avoided worse things than the death he met.  For the luck of such a man, is it not his temperament, his character?  Can anyone escape from that?  May it not have been an escape for the poor devil himself, an escape too for the woman who loved him, that he chose to drop down, fathoms down, into the calm, irrecoverable depths of the Atlantic when he did, bearing with him at least an unspoilt ideal, and leaving her a memory that experience could never tarnish, nor custom stale?