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The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson

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'No,' I answered, 'Madame la Comtesse. She was left a widow very shortly
after her marriage. I never knew M. le Comte.'

My host shrugged his shoulders.

'From all accounts,' he said, 'you did not lose very much.'

'It was an unhappy marriage,' I remarked, vaguely, 'most unhappy. Her
second marriage promised greater felicity.'

Mr. Venables looked at me curiously.

'I understood,' he began, but he broke off abruptly. 'I did not know Madame
de Savaresse married again.'

His tone had suddenly changed, it had grown less cordial, and we parted
shortly afterwards with a certain constraint. And as I walked home
pensively curious, his interrupted sentence puzzled me. Does he look upon
me as an impostor, a vulgar gossip-monger? What has he heard, what does he
know of her? Does he know anything? I cannot help believing so. I almost
wish I had asked him definitely, but he would have misunderstood my
motives. Yet, even so, I wish I had asked him.


_6th October._

I am still living constantly in the past, and the fantastic feeling,
whenever I enter a church or turn a corner that I shall meet Lorimer
again, has grown into a settled conviction. Yes, I shall meet him, and in
Bruges.... It is strange how an episode which one has thrust away out of
sight and forgotten for years will be started back into renewed life by
the merest trifle. And for the last week it has all been as vivid as if it
happened yesterday. To-night I have been putting questions to myself--so
far with no very satisfactory answer. _Was_ it a boyish infatuation after
all? Has it passed away as utterly as I believed? I can see her face
now as I sit by the fire with the finest precision of detail. I can
hear her voice, that soft, low voice, which was none the less sweet
for its modulation of sadness. I think there are no women like her
now-a-days--none, none! _Did_ she marry Lorimer? and if not--? It seems
strange now that we should have both been so attracted, and yet not strange
when one considers it. At least we were never jealous of one another. How
the details rush back upon one! I think we must have fallen in love with
her at the same moment--for we were together when we saw her for the
first time, we were together when we went first to call on her in the Rue
d'Alva--I doubt if we ever saw her except together. It was soon after we
began to get intimate that she wore white again. She told us that we had
given her back her youth. She joined our sketching expeditions with the
most supreme contempt for _les convenances_; when she was not fluttering
round, passing from Lorimer's canvas to mine with her sweetly inconsequent
criticism, she sat in the long grass and read to us--André Chénier and
Lamartine. In the evening we went to see her; she denied herself to the
rest of the world, and we sat for hours in that ancient room in the
delicious twilight, while she sang to us--she sang divinely--little French
_chansons_, gay and sad, and snatches of _operette_. How we adored her! I
think she knew from the first how it would be and postponed it as long as
she could. But at last she saw that it was inevitable.... I remember the
last evening that we were there--remember--shall I ever forget it? We had
stayed beyond our usual hour and when we rose to go we all of us knew that
those pleasant irresponsible evenings had come to an end. And both Lorimer
and I stood for a moment on the threshold before we said good-night,
feeling I suppose that one of us was there for the last time.

And how graceful, how gracious she was as she held out one little white
hand to Lorimer and one to me. 'Good-night, dear friends,' she said, 'I
like you both so much--so much. Believe me, I am grateful to you both--for
having given me back my faith in life, in friendship, believe that, will
you not, _mes amis_?' Then for just one delirious moment her eyes met mine
and it seemed to me--ah, well, after all it was Lorimer she loved.


_7th October._

It seems a Quixotic piece of folly now, our proposal we would neither take
advantage of the other, but we both of us _must_ speak. We wrote to her at
the same time and likely enough, in the same words, we posted our letters
by the same post. To-day I had the curiosity to take out her answer to me
from my desk, and I read it quite calmly and dispassionately, the poor
yellow letter with the faded ink, which wrote 'Finis' to my youth and made
a man of me.

'_Pauvre cher Ami_,' she wrote to me, and when I had read that, for the
first time in my life and the only time Lorimer's superiority was bitter to
me. The rest I deciphered through scalding tears.

'_Pauvre cher Ami_, I am very sorry for you, and yet I think you should
have guessed and have spared yourself this pain, and me too a little. No,
my friend, that which you ask of me is impossible. You are my dear friend,
but it is your brother whom I love--your brother, for are you not as
brothers, and I cannot break your beautiful friendship. No, that must not
be. See, I ask one favour of you--I have written also to him, only one
little word "Viens,"--but will you not go to him and tell him for me? Ah,
my brother, my heart bleeds for you. I too have suffered in my time. You
will go away now, yes, that is best, but you will return when this fancy of
yours has passed. Ah forgive me--that I am happy--forgive us, forgive me.
Let us still be friends. Adieu! Au revoir.

'Thy Sister,
DELPHINE.'

I suppose it was about an hour later that I took out my letter to Lorimer.
I told him as I told myself, that it was the fortune of war, that she
had chosen the better man, but I could not bear to stay and see their
happiness. I was in London before the evening. I wanted work, hard,
grinding work, I was tired of being a briefless barrister, and as it
happened, an Indian opening offered itself at the very moment when I had
decided that Europe had become impossible to me. I accepted it, and so
those two happy ones passed out of my life.

Twenty years ago! and in spite of his promise he has never written from
that day till this, not so much as a line to tell me of his marriage. I
made a vow then that I would get over my folly, and it seemed to me that my
vow was kept. And yet here to-day, in Bruges, I am asking myself whether
after all it has been such a great success, whether sooner or later
one does not have to pay for having been hard and strong, for refusing
to suffer.... I must leave this place, it is too full of Madame de
Savaresse.... Is it curiosity which is torturing me? I _must_ find Lorimer.
If he married her, why has he been so persistently silent? If he did not
marry her, what in Heaven's name does it mean? These are vexing questions.


_10th October._

In the Church of the Dames Rouges, I met to-day my old friend Sebastian
Lorimer. Strange! Strange! He was greatly altered, I wonder almost that I
recognised him. I had strolled into the church for benediction, for the
first time since I have been back here, and when the service was over and I
swung back the heavy door, with the exquisite music of the 'O Salutaris,'
sung by those buried women behind the screen still echoing in my ear, I
paused a moment to let a man pass by me. It was Lorimer, he looked wild and
worn; it was no more than the ghost of my old friend. I was shocked and
startled by his manner. We shook hands quite impassively as if we had
parted yesterday. He talked in a rambling way as we walked towards my
hotel, of the singing of the nuns, of the numerous religious processions,
of the blessed doctrine of the intercession of saints. The old melodious
voice was unchanged, but it was pitched in the singularly low key which
I have noticed some foreign priests acquire who live much in churches.
I gather that he has become a Catholic. I do not know what intangible
instinct, or it may be fear, prevented me from putting to him the vital
question which has so perplexed me. It is astonishing how his face has
changed, what an extraordinary restlessness his speech and eye have
acquired. It never was so of old. My first impression was that he was
suffering from some acute form of nervous disorder, but before I left him
a more unpleasant suspicion was gradually forced upon me. I cannot help
thinking that there is more than a touch of insanity in my old friend. I
tried from time to time to bring him down to personal topics, but he eluded
them dexterously, and it was only for a moment or so that I could keep him
away from the all absorbing subject of the Catholic Church, which seems in
some of its more sombre aspects to exercise an extraordinary fascination
over him. I asked him if he often visited Bruges.

He looked up at me with a curious expression of surprise.

'I live here,' he said, 'almost always.' I have done so for years....'
Presently he added hurriedly, 'You have come back. I thought you would come
back, but you have been gone a long time--oh, a long time! It seems years
since we met. Do you remember--?' He checked himself; then he added in a
low whisper, 'We all come back, we all come back.'

He uttered a quaint, short laugh.

'One can be near--very near, even if one can never be quite close.'

He tells me that he still paints, and that the Academy, to which he sends
a picture yearly, has recently elected him an Associate. But his art does
not seem to absorb him as it did of old, and he speaks of his success drily
and as a matter of very secondary importance. He refused to dine with me,
alleging an engagement, but that so hesitatingly and with such vagueness
that I could perceive it was the merest pretext. His manner was so strange
and remote that I did not venture to press him. I think he is unhappily
conscious of his own frequent incoherencies and at moments there are quite
painful pauses when he is obviously struggling with dumb piteousness to be
lucid, to collect himself and pick up certain lost threads in his memory.
He is coming to see me this evening, at his own suggestion, and I am
waiting for him now with a strange terror oppressing me. I cannot help
thinking that he possesses the key to all that has so puzzled me, and that
to-night he will endeavour to speak.


_11th October._

Poor Lorimer! I have hardly yet got over the shock which his visit last
night caused me, and the amazement with which I heard and read between
the lines of his strange confession. His once clear reason is, I fear,
hopelessly obscured, and how much of his story is hallucination, I cannot
say. His notions of time and place are quite confused, and out of his
rambling statement I can only be sure of one fact. It seems that he has
done me a great wrong, an irreparable wrong, which he has since bitterly
repented.

And in the light of this poor wretch's story, a great misunderstanding is
rolled away, and I am left with the conviction that the last twenty years
have been after all a huge blunder, an irrevocable and miserable mistake.
Through my own rash precipitancy and Lorimer's weak treachery, a trivial
mischance that a single word would have rectified, has been prolonged
beyond hope of redress. It seems that after all it was not Lorimer whom
she chose. Madame de Savaresse writing to us both twenty years ago, made a
vital and yet not inexplicable mistake. She confused her envelopes, and the
letter which I received was never meant for me, although it was couched in
such ambiguous terms that until to-day the possibility of this error never
dawned on me. And my letter, the one little word of which she spoke, was
sent to Lorimer. Poor wretch! he did me a vital injury--yes, I can say that
now--a vital injury, but on the whole I pity him. To have been suddenly
dashed down from the pinnacles of happiness, it must have been a cruel
blow. He tells me that when he saw her that afternoon and found out his
mistake, he had no thought except to recall me. He actually came to London
for that purpose, vowed to her solemnly that he would bring me back; it was
only in England, that, to use his own distraught phrase, the Devil entered
into possession of him. His half-insane ramblings gave me a very vivid
idea of that fortnight during which he lay hid in London, trembling like a
guilty thing, fearful at every moment that he might run across me and yet
half longing for the meeting with the irresoluteness of the weak nature,
which can conceive and to a certain extent execute a _lâcheté_, yet which
would always gladly yield to circumstance and let chance or fate decide the
issue. And to the very last Lorimer was wavering--had almost sought me out,
and thrown himself on my mercy, when the news came that I had sailed.

Destiny who has no weak scruples, had stepped in and sealed Delphine's
mistake for all time, after her grim fashion. When he went back to Bruges,
and saw Madame de Savaresse, I think she must have partly guessed his
baseness. Lorimer was not strong enough to be a successful hypocrite, and
that meeting, I gather, was also their final parting. She must have said
things to him in her beautiful quiet voice which he has never forgotten.
He went away and each day he was going to write to me, and each day he
deferred it, and then he took up the _Times_ one morning and read the
announcement of my marriage. After that it seemed to him that he could only
be silent....

Did _she_ know of it too? Did she suffer or did she understand? Poor woman!
poor woman! I wonder if she consoled herself, as I did, and if so how she
looks back on her success? I wonder whether she is happy, whether she is
dead? I suppose these are questions which will remain unanswered. And yet
when Lorimer left me at a late hour last night, it seemed to me that the
air was full of unspoken words. Does he know anything of her now! I have a
right to ask him these things. And to-morrow I am to meet him, he made the
request most strangely--at the same place where we fell in with each other
to-day--until to-morrow then!


_12th October._

I have just left Sebastian Lorimer at the Church of the Dames Rouges. I
hope I was not cruel, but there are some things which one can neither
forget nor forgive, and it seemed to me that when I knew the full measure
of the ruin he had wrought, my pity for him withered away. 'I hope,
Lorimer,' I said, 'that we may never meet again.' And, honestly, I cannot
forgive him. If she had been happy, if she had let time deal gently with
her--ah yes, even if she were dead--it might be easier. But that this
living entombment, this hopeless death in life should befall her, she so
magnificently fitted for life's finer offices, ah, the pity of it, the pity
of it!... But let me set down the whole sad story as it dawned upon me this
afternoon in that unearthly church. I was later than the hour appointed;
vespers were over and a server, taper in hand, was gradually transforming
the gloom of the high altar into a blaze of light. With a strange sense of
completion I took my place next to the chair by which Lorimer, with bowed
head, was kneeling, his eyes fixed with a strange intentness on the screen
which separated the outer worshippers from the chapel or gallery which was
set apart for the nuns. His lips moved from time to time spasmodically,
in prayer or ejaculation: then as the jubilant organ burst out, and the
officiating priest in his dalmatic of cloth of gold passed from the
sacristy and genuflected at the altar, he seemed to be listening in a very
passion of attention. But as the incense began to fill the air, and the
Litany of Loreto smote on my ear to some sorrowful, undulating Gregorian, I
lost thought of the wretched man beside me; I forgot the miserable mistake
that he had perpetuated, and I was once more back in the past--with
Delphine--kneeling by her side. Strophe by strophe that perfect litany rose
and was lost in a cloud of incense, in the mazy arches of the roof.

'Janua coeli,
Stella matutina,
Salus infirmorum, Ora pro nobis!'

In strophe and antistrophe: the melancholy, nasal intonation of the priest
died away, and the exquisite women's voices in the gallery took it up with
exultation, and yet with something like a sob--a sob of limitation.

'Refugium peccatorum,
Consolatrix afflictorum,
Auxilium Christianorum, Ora pro nobis!'

And so on through all the exquisite changes of the hymn, until the time of
the music changed, and the priest intoned the closing line.

'Ora pro nobis, Sancta Dei Genetrix!'

and the voices in the gallery answered:

'Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi.'

There was one voice which rose above all the others, a voice of marvellous
sweetness and power, which from the first moment had caused me a curious
thrill. And presently Lorimer bent down and whispered to me: 'So near,' he
murmured, 'and yet so far away--so near, and yet never quite close!'

But before he had spoken I had read in his rigid face, in his eyes fixed
with such a passion of regret on the screen, why we were there--whose voice
it was we had listened to.

I rose and went out of the church quietly and hastily; I felt that to stay
there one moment longer would be suffocation.... Poor woman! so this is how
she sought consolation, in religion! Well, there are different ways for
different persons--and for me--what is there left for me? Oh, many things,
no doubt, many things. Still, for once and for the last time, let me set
myself down as a dreary fraud. I never forgot her, not for one hour or day,
not even when it seemed to me that I had forgotten her most, not even when
I married. No woman ever represented to me the same idea as Madame de
Savaresse. No woman's voice was ever sweet to me after hers, the touch of
no woman's hand ever made my heart beat one moment quicker for pleasure or
for pain, since I pressed hers for the last time on that fateful evening
twenty years ago. Even so--!...

When the service was over and the people had streamed out and dispersed, I
went back for the last time into the quiet church. A white robed server
was extinguishing the last candle on the altar; only the one red light
perpetually vigilant before the sanctuary, made more visible the deep
shadows everywhere.

Lorimer was still kneeling with bowed head in his place. Presently he rose
and came towards me. 'She was there--Delphine--you heard her. Ah, Dion, she
loves you, she always loves you, you are avenged.'

I gather that for years he has spent hours daily in this church, to be near
her, and hear her voice, the magnificent voice rising above all the other
voices in the chants of her religion. But he will never see her, for is she
not of the Dames Rouges! And I remember now all the stories of the Order,
of its strictness, its austerity, its perfect isolation. And chiefly, I
remember how they say that only twice after one of these nuns has taken her
vows is she seen of any one except those of her community; once, when she
enters the Order, the door of the convent is thrown back and she is seen
for a single moment in the scarlet habit of the Order, by the world, by all
who care to gaze; and once more, at the last, when clad in the same coarse
red garb, they bear her out quietly, in her coffin, into the church.

And of this last meeting, Lorimer, I gather, is always restlessly
expectant, his whole life concentrated, as it were, in a very passion of
waiting for a moment which will surely come. His theory, I confess, escapes
me, nor can I guess how far a certain feverish remorse, an intention of
expiation may be set as a guiding spring in his unhinged mind, and account,
at least in part, for the fantastic attitude which he must have adopted for
many years. If I cannot forgive him, at least I bear him no malice, and
for the rest, our paths will hardly cross again. One takes up one's life
and expiates its errors, each after one's several fashion--and my way is
not Lorimer's. And now that it is all so clear, there is nothing to keep
me here any longer, nothing to bring me back again. For it seemed to me
to-day, strangely enough, as though a certain candle of hope, of promise,
of pleasant possibilities, which had flickered with more or less light for
so many years, had suddenly gone out and left me alone in utter darkness,
as the knowledge was borne in upon me that henceforth Madame de Savaresse
had passed altogether and finally out of my life.

And so to-morrow--Brussels!




A CASE OF CONSCIENCE


I

It was in Brittany, and the apples were already acquiring a ruddier,
autumnal tint, amid their greens and yellows, though Autumn was not yet;
and the country lay very still and fair in the sunset which had befallen,
softly and suddenly as is the fashion there. A man and a girl stood looking
down in silence at the village, Ploumariel, from their post of vantage,
half way up the hill: at its lichened church spire, dotted with little
gables, like dove-cotes; at the slated roof of its market; at its quiet
white houses. The man's eyes rested on it complacently, with the enjoyment
of the painter, finding it charming: the girl's, a little absently, as
one who had seen it very often before. She was pretty and very young, but
her gray serious eyes, the poise of her head, with its rebellious brown
hair braided plainly, gave her a little air of dignity, of reserve which
sat piquantly upon her youth. In one ungloved hand, that was brown from
the sun, but very beautiful, she held an old parasol, the other played
occasionally with a bit of purple heather. Presently she began to speak,
using English just coloured by a foreign accent, that made her speech
prettier.

'You make me afraid,' she said, turning her large, troubled eyes on her
companion, 'you make me afraid, of myself chiefly, but a little of you. You
suggest so much to me that is new, strange, terrible. When you speak, I am
troubled; all my old landmarks appear to vanish; I even hardly know right
from wrong. I love you, my God, how I love you! but I want to go away from
you and pray in the little quiet church, where I made my first Communion.
I will come to the world's end with you; but oh, Sebastian, do not ask me,
let me go. You will forget me, I am a little girl to you, Sebastian. You
cannot care very much for me.'

The man looked down at her, smiling masterfully, but very kindly. He took
the mutinous hand, with its little sprig of heather, and held it between
his own. He seemed to find her insistence adorable; mentally, he was
contrasting her with all other women whom he had known, frowning at the
memory of so many years in which she had no part. He was a man of more
than forty, built large to an uniform English pattern; there was a touch
of military erectness in his carriage which often deceived people as to
his vocation. Actually, he had never been anything but artist, though he
came of a family of soldiers, and had once been war correspondent of an
illustrated paper. A certain distinction had always adhered to him, never
more than now when he was no longer young, was growing bald, had streaks
of gray in his moustache. His face, without being handsome, possessed a
certain charm; it was worn and rather pale, the lines about the firm mouth
were full of lassitude, the eyes rather tired. He had the air of having
tasted widely, curiously, of life in his day, prosperous as he seemed
now, that had left its mark upon him. His voice, which usually took an
intonation that his friends found supercilious, grew very tender in
addressing this little French girl, with her quaint air of childish
dignity.

'Marie-Yvonne, foolish child, I will not hear one word more. You are a
little heretic; and I am sorely tempted to seal your lips from uttering
heresy. You tell me that you love me, and you ask me to let you go, in
one breath. The impossible conjuncture! Marie-Yvonne,' he added, more
seriously, 'trust yourself to me, my child! You know, I will never give you
up. You know that these months that I have been at Ploumariel, are worth
all the rest of my life to me. It has been a difficult life, hitherto,
little one: change it for me; make it worth while. You would let morbid
fancies come between us. You have lived overmuch in that little church,
with its worm-eaten benches, and its mildewed odour of dead people, and
dead ideas. Take care, Marie-Yvonne: it had made you serious-eyed, before
you have learnt to laugh; by and by, it will steal away your youth, before
you have ever been young. I come to claim you, Marie-Yvonne, in the name of
Life.' His words were half-jesting; his eyes were profoundly in earnest. He
drew her to him gently; and when he bent down and kissed her forehead,
and then her shy lips, she made no resistance: only, a little tremor ran
through her. Presently, with equal gentleness, he put her away from him.
'You have already given me your answer, Marie-Yvonne. Believe me, you will
never regret it. Let us go down.'

They took their way in silence towards the village; presently a bend of the
road hid them from it, and he drew closer to her, helping her with his arm
over the rough stones. Emerging, they had gone thirty yards so, before the
scent of English tobacco drew their attention to a figure seated by the
road-side, under a hedge; they recognised it, and started apart, a little
consciously.

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