Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

conceal all this? Had I ever asked him not to marry because it would break my heart? One should never trust men. I had trusted only one man in all my life, and he proved that fact to my satisfaction.

'When the doctor returned after visiting his patients, and was about to leave, I said to him with a laugh,

"So, doctor, you are to be married this evening?"

'My merriment completely upset him.

"How does it happen," I continued, "that we are to have no illuminations and no music?"

age

'He replied with a sigh: "Is a marrithen a reason for celebration?" 'I laughed again. "No, no," I said, "that won't do. Whoever heard of a marriage without lights and music?" And I teased my brother until he ordered everything becoming for a brilliant marriage.

"Then I chatted away merrily of the bride; of the coming festival, and what I would do when the bride arrived. I asked: "And, doctor, will you still go out to feel peoples' pulses?"

'Although one cannot see what occurs inside a person's bosom, especially if that person is a man, I ventured to wager that my words were so many dagger-thrusts in the doctor's heart.

'The marriage festival was to occur late that afternoon. Before the doctor left, he was to drink a glass of wine on the terrace with my brother, as they were wont to do every evening. It was just at moonrise.

'I came in laughing, and said to them: "Have you forgotten your marriage, doctor? Is n't it time to go?"

'I ought to mention one little thing here. During the interval I had gone to the pharmacy and bought a small powder, which I shook unobserved into the doctor's glass.

"The doctor emptied his glass at a single draft, and said, with a voice stifled by emotion and a glance that cut me to the heart: "Then I must go."

"The music began to play. I went to my chamber and clothed myself in my bridal robes of silk and gold. I took my jewels out of my cabinet and put them all on. I painted the red sign of my matronhood upon the crown of my head. Then I betook myself to my seat under the trees in the garden.

'It was a glorious night. A gentle south wind kissed away the weariness of the world. The scent of jasmine and quince-blossoms filled the garden with a drowsy odor.

"The sound of the music grew softer and softer; the light of the moon grew paler and paler. The world with all its familiar scenes of home and relatives gradually died out of my consciousness like a dream. I closed my eyes and smiled.

'I fancied that, when the people came and found me, that smile would still be on my lips like a trace of red wine; that I would take that smile with me; that it would brighten my countenance as I slept in my bridal robes. Where are my bridal garments of silk and gold? When I awoke, it was to hear the rattle of bones, and to discover three little children learning osteology from my skeleton. Where once my heart beat with joy and sorrow, and the budding blossoms of youth opened in quick succession, a teacher was busy indicating my bones with his pointer. And that last smile, which I had practised so carefully did you see anything of that?

'Now, tell me; how do you like my story?'

'It's a marvelous one,' I said. Just then the cock crowed. 'Are you still there?' I asked. No one answered. Dawn peered through the window.

measured my pulse, I counted his heart-beats. Do you believe me?'

I replied: 'Certainly, I believe you. A man's heart-beats may easily betray him.'

'After I recovered from my ups and downs of fever, I discovered that the hosts of suitors of whom I was wont to dream in the garden, evenings, had been magically reduced to a single person. My little world consisted now of only a doctor and his patient.

'On such evenings I would clothe myself privately in a golden-yellow sari, place a wreath of white jasmine blossoms on my hair, and betake myself with a little hand-mirror to my usual seat under the trees.

'Now, you might think that a person would soon tire of viewing her own beauty; but that is not so. I did not regard myself with my own eyes. I was, so to speak, two persons. I looked at myself as if I were the physician. I reveled in my reflection, like the most ardent lover. But in spite of this, there was a constant sighing in my heart, as of an ever-blowing night-wind.

thoughtfully. "To be sure, it would not be complete. But I could easily spend the rest of the night imagining different endings for it.'

'But then the story would be too serious. Where would the merry part be? What would become of the skeleton with its grinning teeth? You had better let me go on. As soon as the doctor acquired a small practice, he rented a room on the ground floor of our building as a consulting-room. I used to ask him jokingly questions about medicines and poisons, and how little of this or that drug it would take to kill a person. It was a subject which aroused his interest, and he would talk fluently upon it. These conversations made me familiar with the thought of death; and so love and death became the two things which rounded out my little world. My story is now truly drawing to an end. There is not much more.'

I murmured: 'Nor is there much of the night left, either.'

'After a time I observed that the doctor was very absent-minded, and seemed to be concealing something from me of which he was ashamed. One day he came in. He was more carefully dressed than usual, and he borrowed my brother's carriage for the evening.

'I could not restrain my curiosity, and went at once to my brother to learn what the doctor was about to do. Af talking for a time ther matt said, "Dada, whe to-night in yo

'However, from this time on I was never alone. As I walked through the garden, I would watch with drooping eyes the movements of my own tiny feet, and ask what the doctor would think of them. At noon, when the air was filled with the heat of the midday sun, and no sound could be heard but the distant cry of a kite; or when peddlers passed our garden-walls, calling in their singing monotone: "Buy spangles, crystal spangles!" I would spread a snow-white cloth on the ground and lie down with my head supported by my goin arm. Then I would imagine someone watching me in this negligent pose, and seizing my hands respectfully, pressing. a kiss upon my rosy fingers, and slowly withdrawing. How would it be if ended my story here? Do you like it

'It would n't be a bad end,' I repli

[ocr errors]
[graphic]

LIFE, LETTERS, AND THE ARTS

ANGLO-AMERICAN HISTORY PROFESSORS

AND MR. WELLS

A CONFERENCE of professors of history in British and American universities, held during July at the new Institute of Historical Research in London, has laid plans for increased coöperation between scholars of the two nations, especially those who are engaged in research. The conference included noted historians from America, Canada, and Great Britain, and taking place as it did at a time when popular interest in historical problems is especially keen, it received comment in the English press to a degree unusual for a purely academic gathering. Two other events of importance to students of history occurred at nearly the same time. A few days before the historians met, the League of Nations Union sent a deputation on methods of history teaching to the President of the Board of Education, and at about the same time the Institute of Historical Research was opened. The conference devoted a great deal of its time to developing plans for the publication of manuscripts and other materials, as well as bibliographies designed to facilitate research in littleknown fields.

The deputation from the League of Nations Union, which included Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. Frederic Harrison, protested against the methods of teaching history now in vogue in Great Britain, of which Mr. Wells, since the publication of his Outline of History, entertains a particularly low opinion. Mr. Wells said:

First of all we want our public as a whole to know more of general social history, of the history of mankind as a history of the development of communities. Our general

public has no ideas, or the very vaguest ideas, of the development of human society through the early Stone Age, through the Bronze Age, to the beginning of communities. It sees everything in a flattened perspective, with no real sense of the enormous past of the human community. As a consequence it accepts all sorts of current institutions, which are transitory, as permanent institutions.

the

At present our European public men, statesmen, the politicians of our time, have necessarily to work upon the cheapest intellectual material. They cannot pause to educate during the activities and negotiations in the solving of urgent questions, and they have to work in every country upon a narrow and bitter ignorance of the wider facts

of history. Unless we have a wider teaching of history, going beyond national range, we are bound to have impatience and all sorts of unhappy struggles and moods of apathy alternating with moods of hysterical combativeness, and the whole of international affairs has to go to the tune of that.

MR. DRINKWATER'S 'LINCOLN'

ATTACKED

ALTHOUGH Mr. John Drinkwater's play, Abraham Lincoln, met with a chorus of praise during its tour in this country as well as during the earlier English productions, at least one vigorously dissenting voice has been raised at its midsummer revival in England. Mr. Sidney W. Carroll, writing in the London Times, criticizes it bitterly, attributing its success mainly to the gullibility of the public. Mr. Carroll says of the play: —

It is a most pretentious 'spoof,' an impertinent travesty of the life of a really great man. It assumes a loftiness of treatment it is far from possessing. Its simplicity of construction and characterization has an eccentric naïveté to be found only in public wax

work shows. Dramatically it has practically no value. Its historical accuracy is questionable. It is episodic, lacking continuity, and such action as there is, is constantly interrupted by bombastic and swollen-headed imitations of the Greek chorus.

The author attempts to show the whole purpose of Lincoln's life concentrated into six scenes. Only a real English poet would have the hardihood to attempt such a feat. Gladstone's career, no doubt, will shortly appear boiled down into three scenes, while the life of Aaron Burr can no doubt be concentrated into a curtain-raiser.

The actor who plays Lincoln represents him as an opinionative, aggressive, drawling old Irishman, duly lantern-jawed and whiskered, alternately whining or ascending pedestals with the manner of a man who knows that reporters and camera-men by the score are in attendance upon every shuffle of his attenuated shanks and every totter of his hydrocephalic noddle. He is played as a transfigured, inspired scarecrow, surrounded by a retinue of American senators, whose movements remind one of a little army of supers attached to a grand-opera chorus. These mighty representatives of the American people, whenever they are faced with Lincoln, bend low, and, with bated breath and whispering humbleness, lapse into morose silences and throw into exalted supremacy this intellectual mammoth who meanders over their flattened carcases.

This is no President of the United States, but the King of Roscommon Castle intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity. This Lincoln has no sympathies at all. He is a fletiferous hypocrite. All his ideas are fixed. He is perpetually offering words of advice to all and sundry, with pontifical oracularity. He delights in the snub. His principal pleasure is lecturing his friends as well as his enemies. He can carney and blarney almost as well as he can snap and sneer. He can never pass a map of the United States without gazing at it ecstatically, as if it were some painting by Raphael or Leonardo. If I were an American as I am an Australian, while such a caricature of one of my noblest countrymen remained in my country, I never would lay down my pen.

This may be Mr. Drinkwater's idea or

Mr. Rea's idea of Abraham Lincoln. It is not mine. And yet here's the rub. The public both here and in America not only like it they go again and again.

CHAIKOVSKY'S MARRIAGE

A NEW book of memoirs published in Petrograd by the composer's friend, Kashkin, sheds new light on the mystery of Chaikovsky's unhappy marriage, and English extracts have recently been published in London by Mrs. Albert Coates, wife of the conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. In 1877 Chaikovsky married Antonina Milioukova, leaving her after a few weeks, and this is all that has hitherto been known. Chaikovsky never spoke of her to anyone, except once to Kashkin. They were sitting in the garden at twilight, when Chaikovsky referred to his wife and told the story of his marriage in a conversation which Kashkin reports in his memoirs:

'You remember, my friend,' said Chaikovsky, 'that in the spring of 1877 I began to write my opera, Eugene Onegin. One day I received a letter from a girl, a pupil of the Moscow Conservatoire. It was a love letter in which the girl, Antonina Milioukova, told me that she had fallen so desperately in love with me that she even forgot the modesty of girlhood so far as to write me of her love; she begged me to take pity on her and write to her. I was so deeply engrossed in my composition that I not only did not answer but I forgot all about her. After a couple of weeks Antonina wrote again, complained bitterly of my harsh treatment of her, and said that if to this second letter she again received no answer, nothing remained to her but to end her life. I was working at the time on the second scene of Onegin. I was so engrossed, so absolutely obsessed by my subject, that the characters of this finest work of Pushkin were no longer the characters of a drama to me, but real and living people.

'Into this mental state of mine fell Antonina's second letter, and somehow the simi

larity of the two cases worked on me to such an extent that Antonina and Tatiana gradually became one in my thoughts. For the same reason I seemed to take the place of Onegin. Horror filled me at the idea that I had acted toward the girl Antonina in the same heartless and cruel way that Onegin had treated Tatiana, and, full of remorse, I went to see her.

'We met several times after this; and when Antonina one day suggested that we should get married, I agreed. I did not see what else I could do. The whole thing worried me so that I was unable to work; but what else could I have done? To have left her now would have seemed worse than anything that even Onegin was capable of therefore impossible! I told my future wife that I felt no love for her, only sympathy for her unhappiness; but this did not seem to move her, for she only smiled. I think what principally influenced me was my wish to have done with the whole question once and for all, so as to be able to give myself up completely to my opera. All this time I had not been able to work. The question of An

tonina and what would be the end of it had worried me; her tears, too (she cried often), troubled me so that I found it impossible to concentrate my thoughts. I know that I in no way realized the seriousness of the step that I was taking. I simply wanted to decide the matter once and for all and finish with it. I asked my bride to take upon herself all the arrangements for our marriage, and then took the train and left for my country house, to compose. My work again completely obsessed me, so that everything

else, Antonina, marriage, and all the rest of life, seemed utterly remote and unreal. I was like a man in a fever, I worked like one in a delirium.

'In this dream-state I got married, and it was only after the step was irrevocably taken, that I realized what it meant to be tied day by day to a human being who was in every respect a stranger to me. After the first few days, already I realized that we had absolutely nothing in common. Antonina had only the most shallow and superficial understanding of art and music. As a matter of fact, the only things that really interested her were the ordinary small material details of everyday life. There seemed an

extraordinary limitation in her mind. She had heard a lot; but it awakened no echo in her soul; she had also read a great deal, but nothing left any trace on her mind. Unable to bear this state of things any longer, I left her. I did not in any way blame her for anything. I blamed myself, and I suffered acute torments of conscience. After a time I even decided that, having married her, it was my duty to bear patiently the life I had brought on myself; and I went back to her with every intention of trying my best to do so. It was, however, no use.

A REVOLUTION IN STAGE-LIGHTING

AFTER prolonged experiment, Mme. Boutkovsky, a Russian painter now living in Paris, has perfected a system of stage-lighting which makes possible instantaneous alterations of scene. It has long been known that certain colors will disappear nearly or quite completely in certain lights. Mme. Boutkovsky's task has been to determine exactly

the relative values of colors, and their behavior in different lights. At present, she can paint three entirely different pictures on the same canvas, only one of which is visible at a time, according to the lights which she throws on it.

The advantages of such stage-mechanism for the dramatist of poetic fantasy M. Maurice Maeterlinck, or Sir James Barrie, for example - are evident enough. Clumsy scene-shifting is no longer required. The change can be made by merely pressing a button.

It is not merely a matter of changing a night scene into a day scene a feat which is almost too easy with the new technique; but a garden can, in the twinkling of an eye, become a drawingroom, a forest a seashore, an attic a palace. Negotiations with a French theatrical manager are said to be in progress, but it is understood that the first use of the new method of painting scenery will be in Sir James Barrie's Marie Rose at its coming production in

« VorigeDoorgaan »