Margarita's Soul: The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty. Josephine Daskam Bacon

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СКАЧАТЬ so inhumanly possible an ideal as democracy is a great feat and a wonderful exhibition of the powers of our minds on this planet, I suppose. And I am not sure that it is a greater proof of sincerity to practice it while denying it in theory, as they do in the old countries, than to reverse the process in the new ones. Americans are such incurable idealists! And if Plato is right and the idea is the really important part of the matter, then the idea of seventy—or is it eighty, now?—millions of equal lords of creation is really more to the point than the fact that they don't exist. But why, oh why, must equality produce such bad manners? They must have been very bad to make such an impression upon a little lad of ten. And who can explain its extraordinary effect upon the voice? Why does it kill all modulation, all tone-color, all delicate shades of thought and passion equally, and resolve that great gift, which I sometimes think the greatest difference between me and my dog, into a toneless, mumble-chopped grunting?

      That was the glory of Margarita's voice: if she but informed you that she would like more bread, your ear relished that series of unimportant syllables precisely as the tongue relishes a satisfying dish; with her, pleading, commanding, refusing, admiring, were four perfectly different tonal processes; a blind man, an Eskimo or a South Sea Islander would have understood that voice perfectly. And even now, merely a shadow of what it once was, it is a lesson to all about her.

      When Roger was seventeen and I but twelve he lost two years out of his school-life, and this brought us closer together ultimately, as will be seen. In some more than usually violent game of his favourite baseball at this time he managed to fall so heavily on his chest as slightly to bruise the lung, and a teasing cough that resulted from this terrified his mother, over whom, like so many of her pure-blooded countrywomen, the White Scourge hung threateningly, never very far away. Good luck sent them just then an invitation from a distant cousin, skipper of a large schooner that plied in Southern waters, and she thankfully sent Roger off for a long cruise with him. It was a fine experience, and oh, how bitterly I longed to share it, as the skipper cousin urged me to do! But I was the only son of my mother and she a widow, and so I swallowed my grief and contented myself with writing. It had long been a great grief to me that I must follow him so far behind at college—he had of course decided me on his own university—and one of my contentments at this period was the hope of winning ahead a year and leaving only two between us. This would enable me to enter Yale when he was but half way in his course, which as a matter of fact, I accomplished, to my mother's great pride. She liked Roger, but always found him a little heavy and slow, and secretly cherished my greater facility and more rapid mental development with a fond and wholly female short-sightedness.

      Our correspondence was very characteristic at this time: I have specimens of both sides of it. My letters are long and detailed, almost school-diaries. Roger's are few, short and immensely impressive. He had a straightforward, utterly unimaginative style that strikes the heart like Defoe's. He gave the strongest sense of great events always happening, of high seas, bright, strange coasts, racy, vital talk—and all in few, short words.

      "We have been rolling hard for three days now," he says in one letter, "and the ship's dog died of colic, which is about the worst sign there is, they say. It may be we shall be wrecked. I wish you were here, Jerry, you would enjoy it. They have stopped trying to coddle me now and I live rough, like the rest. The food is not so very good, but we all eat hard. I hardly ever cough at all now. The captain says I am as handy as the next man."

      The oldest of four, he had been looked up to and respected from the nursery. A powerful influence at school, a prince regent at home, wealthy in his own right, he stood in some danger of being spoiled, I suppose. But the bluff skipper cousin, representative of that strange New England Wanderlust, so little exploited in the anemic fiction that so ridiculously caricatures New England life, stamped Roger at this most impressionable age with the clean, downright simplicity, the manly humility so signally characteristic of men who must always be ready to perish in the elements; the ability to hold his tongue and wait. Few families really rooted in that Old England that made the New but can count in some generation their skipper cousin; in these the whitecaps, the tall masts, the spices and hot nights, the scarlet tropics and the dusky, startled natives tip with flame the quiet chronicles of the sisters left at home; and gorgeous peacock fans, rosy, enamelled shells, strings of sandalwood beads, riotous, bloomy embroideries and supple folds of exotic muslin weave their scents and suggestions through the sober-coloured stuff of everyday. Indeed, New England as I have known her, both as a child in her chief and representative city, and as a man in her farthest, least-spoiled hamlets has always seemed to me far more complicated and mysterious, far more vital and suggestive than her too-exclusively-spinsterly chroniclers can comprehend.

      I look to see the country turn back to New England, not only with historic pride, but with a rich appreciation of its artistic mother-land—not mistaking her for its bleak and apprehensive maiden aunt!

      I am far from her now, that old breeding ground of great, incisive sons, that nest of passions so strong that only a grip of granite—like her sea line—could master them (do you fancy, O languorous, faded South, do you bellow, O strident, bustling West, that because she neither sighed them nor trumpeted them, she had no passions? Allez, allez!) but I can close my eyes at any moment and smell the challenge of her Atlantic winds here on the Mediterranean or feel the heady languor of her miraculous "Indian Summer" there in a London drizzle. It is strange that I, who have said many unhandsome things of her country as a whole, should thus rush into apologia for my mother's birthplace. And yet to think of never having known Margarita!

      But of course I should have met her. She would have come to me walking lightly out of the dim Algerian evening or bumped into me some morning in Piccadilly or peered curiously through my leaded pane at Oxford, whither I should undoubtedly have returned, one day, to muse away my middle age. I idled for a happy year there, twenty-odd years ago, while Roger was grinding away at the fantastic matter he called the Law, and liked it well. But fate had not decreed me for a conventional Englishman, which I should doubtless have been, for as a boy I was malleable to a degree, but had reserved me instead for the ends of the earth—and Margarita.

CHAPTER IV

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      There is nothing more certain than that the bare facts of life are misleading in the extreme. This is doubtless nature's reason for concealing the human skeleton; it is undeniably necessary, but not many of us take it into daily consideration, and nobody but a few negligible anthropologists would dream of bringing it forward as proof of anything in particular. And yet people who are fond of describing themselves as practical persistently fold their hands over their abdomens, shrug their shoulders and reiterate monotonously: "But, my dear fellow, there are the facts! It is only necessary to consider the facts of the case!" or, "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid the bare facts are against you!" I suppose that is why they are so often called bare, because so little of the important, informing or attractive is draped around them.

      Consider for instance, the bare facts of Roger's adventure. Here is a man who, meeting a perfectly unknown and singularly beautiful young woman in a questionable locality at dusk, enters into conversation with her, takes her to a French restaurant for dinner, then finds himself embroiled in a disgraceful altercation in which wine-glasses are thrown and chairs waved, and finally escapes with her in a closed carriage, which soon becomes the scene of a violent struggle culminating in a ferocious kiss! The case is really too clear; it is almost too conventional for an art student of any initiative and originality. Anyone possessed of the slightest acquaintance СКАЧАТЬ