VII.
THALIA’S STORY: THE CAMEL WHO NEVER GOT STARTED.
ERATO soon recovered consciousness, although she did not regain the spirit which she had shown at the commencement of the evening. She leaned, white and listless, on a pile of cushions. Cupid had brought her water to drink; and now he waited, seated on the floor, his knees drawn up to his chin and his hands clasped over them, gazing lovingly and sadly at his dear Erato, or downward in sheer dejection at the mosaic. Euterpe, at Erato’s request, had gone to the piano. For some time she sat playing nothing in particular with great feeling and much expression; but she went songwards in the end, as she always did. As far as I can remember the words, they were something like this—it is called “Malcontent”:
“These verses,” said Euterpe in apology, “were written by a young man in London, who was forced to live in town, but would have preferred to have driven the cows to pasture, and to have made wreaths of buttercups to twine in his beautiful hair.”
“Had he beautiful hair?” asked Erato softly.
“N-no; that was the difficulty,” answered Euterpe.
Then she came and sat by Erato again, blushing at having spoken so much. And Erato made a good deal of her, as she always did.
“I am quite well again now, Euterpe,” she said.
“Ah!” sighed Euterpe, “but this happens every night.”
“Every night you swoon away,” added Cupid.
“But I am quite well now, and I will never be ill any more.”
“Then,” said Clio, “perhaps you would tell us your story now. Love stories suit the small hours.”
I am afraid Clio had wanted to hear that story all the time. But she was the incarnation of outward propriety, and had struggled against her wishes. And now it was Erato who was unwilling.
“I can’t,” she said in a low voice. “I could have done it before—earlier in the night—but now it reminds me of too many things.”
“Then,” said Clio rather snappishly, “I will ask Thalia.”
Thalia had a good-humoured smile, and a very pleasant voice, but her story was nothing more than the following:—
There was once a camel who had got sick of the menagerie business. And this was pardonable, because the menagerie had now been on tour for six weeks, and the trombone in the band had been out of tune all the time. There were other things that made the camel weary. The untamed tigress had a bad cough, and kept him awake at night. The showman had called him the ship of the desert at each performance, and he wanted to be called something else for a change. On one occasion he had been lying in motionless dignity, and a little boy in a tight suit had asked if he was stuffed. He had been kicked by his keeper, ridden by children, starved by the manager, and jested upon by young men with penny cigars, who sucked intermittent oranges and called one another Chollie. He was sick of the menagerie business, and he wanted to get out of it. So he made himself disagreeable. As he was passing the band-stand one night, he reached out his great neck and ate the trombone part to “Nancy Lee.” This made him want to be a sailor and sing “heave-ho” during the rest of the term of his natural life. But where was the sea? He’d got no sea. He hadn’t an notion, as people say. So he gave up his mind to being disagreeable again. He knocked down a beautiful child with golden hair, and trod on her, so that she died; and the management had to send her parents a gratis admission before they’d stop grumbling. Then the camel took up his position in front of the lion’s den, and said sarcastic things to the lioness. This enraged her; and not being able to reach the camel, she ate a portion of the lion-tamer, to show her spirit. Finally he walked up to one of the elephants who had a dummy tusk, and did a little comic dentist business, insomuch that the audience jeered at the showman, and the showman said several things which were not set down in the printed guide to the show. That night the camel kicked his keeper, out of reciprocity, and then talked very high talk indeed in the still midnight hours to a hyena who had seen the world.
“I am going away,” the camel said, with a pathetic gasp which was the nearest he could do to a sigh. “My soul is being stifled—quite stifled—in this place.”
“That’s the bread,” said the hyena decidedly. “We get nothing but bread.”
“It’s not the bread,” snapped the camel. “It’s the smell, and the low social status of the audience. I am going to seek peace and culture in another clime. I am not happy here; there can be no true happiness in a tent which smells of thirty-four distinct species, and penny cigars on the top of them.”
“Well, I hope you’ll find them—the peace and culture. I’m not much on pilgrimages myself, but I believe the first thing to do is to get started. Start away.”
“I will,” said the camel. So he wandered slowly out of the tent, and was fetched quickly back again, and tied up, and treated with ignominy. He tried it again on the following night, and was kicked till he was more grieved than he could express. He tried it a third time, and then the menagerie management sold him to a circus.
Now, at the circus, the camel was at first exceedingly proud, because he walked in the procession, and cab-horses shied at him; but afterwards he grew very lonely, for want of other wild beasts with whom he might converse. But at last the circus people bought an ostrich that was very cheap because it had consumption, and the camel’s heart was lightened. Now the ostrich was a great romancer, and told stories of passion and bulbuls, of rivers and deserts. And the camel listened to all these stories with glowing eyes.
“I once,” he said confidingly, “was going to start on a pilgrimage to find culture, but I was prevented. And after all it would surely be better to return to my old home in the desert and taste the sweets of domesticity.” Now the camel had been born in the menagerie, and knew nought of the desert, but he was nothing if he was not a talker.
“I shall lie under the palm-trees, and crop the cocoanuts; plunge into the hot white sands for air and exercise; and I shall take a wife, and she shall build herself a nest, and sit in it, and lay eggs in it.”
“My dear sir!” said the ostrich with a blush.
“And then my family will gather round me in the winter evenings, and we shall play round games, and go to bed early, and regularly enjoy ourselves.”
“When do you start on your pilgrimage in search of domesticity?”
“I shall start, wind and weather permitting, to-morrow at one pm.”
But he did not start then, because he ate of circus bread, which was so exceedingly diseased that he fell on a bed of sickness. And the circus company saw that he would die, and advertised him for sale very cheap. And he was bought by an ardent young curate who had an enthusiastic but indistinct idea that the poor beast might be utilised to illustrate a lecture on the Holy Land.
Now the curate was a very humane man, and lodged the camel meanwhile at a livery stable. And while he was writing a sermon against all manner of pride, that night a message came to him from the livery stable to say that the camel had very bad spasms, and had kicked a large hole in the ostler. The curate, from force of habit, sent the poor quadruped a pound of tea, a bottle of port, and a tract called, “Mother’s Mangle; or, Have you a Penny for the Ticket?” The ostler drank the port, and the camel ate the tea. So much tea made him very nervous, and out of compassion they put a cat in the stable to keep him company.
“Pleased to meet you,” said the cat. “Will you sing something?” The cat knew perfectly well, of course, that camels cannot sing; it wanted to make the animal return the polite inquiry, and so get a chance of letting off an erotic song which it had learned in the stables. But the camel was not such a fool as that.
“I dislike music,” he said. “I went in search of culture, and never got started. I also went in search of domesticity, and never got started. I am now going on a third pilgrimage,—but it will not be in search of music.”
“Do you like milk?” said the cat rather inconsequently.
“No,” said the camel.
“Do you like being scratched under the left ear?”
“No,” said the camel.
“Can you catch mice and kill them slowly?”
“Look here,” said the camel, now justly irritated, “you’re not the Catechism, and you’re not the Census; what’s the point of all these questions?”
“I was going,” replied the cat, rather aggrieved, “to suggest some object for your pilgrimage, and I wished to see what you liked.”
“Well, if that’s all,” said the camel, “I’ve quite made up my mind. I am going to search for death. I shall start, if the tide serves, at six a.m. to-morrow morning.”
But he didn’t, because he died that night. And as he arrived without ever starting, it has been argued by some that he must have been a genius. If he had stuck half-way without ever arriving, he would have been only a camel of considerable talent.
But these things may be otherwise. Things generally are.
“Has that story got an inner meaning?” asked Terpsichore.
“Yes,” said Thalia.
“What is it?”
“Don’t know,” said Thalia.
“If you do know, you ought to say,” remarked Clio.
“I do not think the story is quite—quite—well, you know.”
“No, I don’t,” said Thalia.
“Nor do I,” said Terpsichore.
They were just going to quarrel a little more, when Euterpe exclaimed: “Look, Erato, the dawn is breaking; it is already a little lighter in the East.” She added gently, after a pause, “Don’t you think you had better go to bed now, Cupid?”
“No, no,” said Cupid, “I want to stay with my darling Erato. I love you, too, Euterpe, but I love Erato more than anything else in the whole world.”
“Then come and kiss me—again, and again,” said Erato.