VI.
CALLIOPE’S STORY: THE LAST STRAW.
IF Euterpe had happened to have been born a pronoun, she would not have been demonstrative or personal. She would have been self-possessive. With all her shyness, she had herself perfectly in hand. She always was a little in love with somebody, but that was a secret she never told herself. Some gentle reason guided all that she did. And now for some little time she had been watching Erato, who was stretched in her favourite attitude on the floor of the cloud-chamber.
Now Erato had not even pretended to pay the slightest attention to Polymnia’s story. She was thinking—and thinking. She thought easiest when she was lying on her back. Her hands were clasped behind her head, and she looked upwards with wide-opened eyes. You never saw such eyes. They told one half the story, how—with all her waywardness and petulance and laughter—love was the life of her. And now, as she lay dreaming, it seemed that it was noon in Sicily, and the flocks were sleeping; and he rested in the shade—he, the shepherd—singing. And now, again, the noon had passed and the night had fallen; in the dim cavern the air was fragrant and cool; one heard no footsteps on the thin white sand; she said nothing to him, nor he to her, for all was said and sleep was near; only for a little while they listened, and heard the great sea singing its song eternal. And it all was over and gone. For the gods are dead, and the steam-roller goes about the streets; and we are all either brutes or prigs, and most of us are both, and there is no more love-making. I, of course—a spiritual nature, very highly civilised—can see that we live in an age of progress and omnibuses, and can be thankful for it. But Erato, poor child, did not take many things seriously—only love and the service of it. And it happened, every now and then, that some such fit of despondency or fierce sorrow would capture her as had captured her now. Of late this had been happening too often. To-night it was the song which Euterpe had sung that had set her pondering—now thrilling her with some exquisite recollection, now saddening her as she thought of the present time, the epoch of the brute and the prude. It was half-pitiful to watch, as Euterpe was watching, and to see the laughter all die away from those red lips, and the eyes grow liquid and suddenly close, and the tightening of the little hands, and the hurried breathing.
Euterpe was not demonstrative. So it was the more to her credit that she left her place, and sat down on the cushions by Erato’s side. She did not say anything to her. She only did one or two of those gentle things that a girl will do—a touch of the hand—a caress. And suddenly Erato buried her head in Euterpe’s lap, and clung to her and sobbed quietly. I suppose Euterpe had the sympathetic way. Some dogs have it: you are sitting before your fire, alone, smoking, thinking of your bills or your badness, or anything unpleasant, and you murmur a few bad words; the big dog gets up, shakes himself, and thrusts his cold nose into your hand and whines dejectedly. Then you have to slap his back genially, to make him see that it is not his fault.
I do not think Clio can have noticed what had happened, for she said briskly:
“And now, Erato, we will have your story. The young men in Cambridge must be all in bed and asleep, so it won’t hurt them. You must not spoil it by leaving anything out. Let it be the story of you and the shepherd, you know—and don’t——”
“Clio, Clio,” said Euterpe quickly, “can’t you see that Erato is ill? Please go on quickly, and let Calliope tell her story. When that is finished, Erato will be all right again. She has been worrying herself.”
It was not often that Euterpe said so much, and so authoritatively. Her eyes were bright: almost there were tears in them.
“I should be glad to recite to you,” said Calliope, “a poem in thirty-five cantos, with two thousand stanzas to the canto, heroic metre, classical subject——”
“Swivel-action and no escapement,” Thalia went on, under her breath.
“I am afraid,” said Clio, “that we shall not have time for all that, much as we should like to.”
“Oh, quite so,” added Terpsichore, a little maliciously.
“If you would read us the synopsis now,” suggested Clio.
“Or the index,” said Thalia.
“Or even the advertisements at the end,” Terpsichore proposed.
“I will read you no poem whatever,” said Calliope severely. “You are not—not yet ripe for it.”
“Yes, we are very crude,” sighed Thalia to Terpsichore.
“I will tell you instead a perfectly true story, quite unadorned and not at all epic. When you get a little riper, I will read you one of my own poems, but not to-night. To-night you have to put up with the following drivel.”
This is the drivel which they had to put up with:—
There was once a man, an Athenian, who was the opposite of all that he wanted to be. The gods had made him for a joke, and a very good joke he was; but as a man he was a failure.
To start with, he desired to have a perfect body and then to despise it. He wanted to be beautiful, and strong, and think nothing of it. Yet he thought a good deal of the bent piece of ugliness which was the nearest he could do to a perfect body. For he had nothing he wanted, and could do nothing he wanted. Sometimes he made good resolutions and tried to lead a fine life; then the gods dug one another in the ribs, and rolled about Olympus gasping with laughter. They knew very well that they had taken unusual pains about that man’s physical composition; they had afflicted him with several hereditary taints; they knew that he might make enough good resolutions to pave the whole of—well, Westminster Abbey, and that it was a physical impossibility that he should keep any of them. “Let this man,” one of the gods had said to Zeus, shortly before the failure was born, “be cowardly, sensual, and brutal.” Then Zeus said that he was tired of making that sort. “Oh,” the other god urged, “but we’ll give him at the same time the emotions and aspirations of a noble mind. Then we shall see soul and body fighting, and the soul will get thrashed every time.” “Now, that is something like sport,” Zeus had remarked, as he gave the necessary order.
So this man went on providing amusement for gods and men until he was twenty-five years of age. Sometimes he, unfortunately, was quite unable to laugh at himself. Then he wrote verses. At other times he laughed at himself very well—often in self-defence, because it made other men let him off easier—and then he would tear his verses up.
On that last day he lay in bed in the morning and shivered. He had slept for a little while—he had seen to that before he went to bed—but he was wide awake now, and his head was burning, and his thoughts were of the kind that tighten the muscles of the body and are likely nowadays to lead on to padded rooms. For the day before he had been found out; one act of fatal cowardice on his part—such cowardice as no one could forgive—had cost a girl her life, and this girl was the sister of his own familiar friend. There was plenty of variety about his thoughts. Sometimes he felt like a murderer. Sometimes he heard the dead girl’s brother speaking awful things to him, contemptuous, heart-broken words. There was no hope of concealment, no pretty story that he could tell. It had all been seen and known. In his dreams that night he had been through the whole scene again, but his own part had been altered. In his dream he had been equal to the occasion—taken the plunge, rescued the girl, and been welcomed with praise and honour, and he had walked back through the streets of Athens feeling more happy than a god. Suddenly he awoke and recalled the facts. The girl whom he had loved was dead—dead through his own cowardice. It was such loathly cowardice that he shuddered to think of it. All men would hate him, and yet their hatred would be nothing to his own hatred for himself. Every thought was a torture, a knife that went into his heart and brain, fiercely and with regular beat, stabbing and stabbing.
He sprang from his bed, and dressed himself hurriedly. The house seemed to him to be strangely quiet. He called—in a parched, husky voice—and no one answered. All had left him: the very slaves had run away from such a master, and he was alone. No one, he thought, would come near him now. He had served as a laughing-stock for his friends: he was now too despicable to be laughed at. If you wish the villain of your drama to be hissed as villain was never hissed before, make him during the first two acts the low comedian of the piece.
The man was trembling and shuddering. He made a small fire, and crouched down by it. Ah, if he only had it to do again! A million deaths were better than such torture as this. An impulse—irresistible almost—came over him to shriek aloud and to tear with his hands at something. Could he be going mad? The thought horrified him. He fetched wine, and drank it, and tried to calm himself, crouching down by the fire again. Suddenly he heard footsteps, and presently one of his old companions—and the worst man in Athens—stood before him.
“You cur!” said his old companion.
“Leave me alone!” gasped the crouching figure. “Leave me alone, or I will kill you.”
“You know that you dare not touch me.”
The coward knew it. It was true. The long knife which he had grasped fell from his fingers. “Leave me,” he cried again piteously; “you can say nothing of me which I have not said of myself. You cannot hate me as I hate myself. Leave me! leave me!”
Then, with a gesture of disgust and contempt, the worst man in Athens left him. And now the strength of the wine mastered the coward, and he slept. This time dream followed dream, and every dream was cruel. It was late in the evening when he awoke. The only light in the room was that which came from the dying embers of the fire. By that light he saw to his horror the figure of a child standing there—a white-faced child, with awe in her eyes—the younger sister of the girl whose death his cowardice had caused.
“I have a message for you,” she said. “As I slept this afternoon she came to me, and bade me tell you that she knows all about it, and that you could not help it; the gods made you so; for the gods are strong, and it is fitting that we should be very patient.”
The crouching coward said nothing.
Then the child came quickly to him and kissed his ugly face. “I am very sorry, very sorry for you,” she whispered gently; and then she crept gently away.
The coward burst into tears, and, grasping the long knife once more, staggered into an inner chamber, and drew the curtain behind him. The child’s kiss was the thing that had just turned the balance. From the inner chamber there was the sound of one who fell heavily, and then all was still—very still indeed.
“The worst of making that sort,” Zeus remarked, with a jerk of his thumb in the direction of that inner chamber, “is that they so seldom last. But they are certainly funny. Personally, I sha’n’t sleep for laughing to-night.”
“Would you mind,” said Euterpe quietly, “drawing back that curtain from the front of the room? A few minutes ago Erato fainted, and I can’t bring her round again. I think the cool night air might revive her.”
Terpsichore drew back the curtain, grumbling to herself. “Just like her—we shall have the whole place turned into a regular hospital again, I expect.”