Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty

Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon

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• Publié par: osla
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 8
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Margarita's Soul, by Ingraham Lovell

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Margarita's Soul  The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty

Author: Ingraham Lovell

Illustrator: J. Scott Williams

Release Date: August 12, 2008 [EBook #26277]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARGARITA'S SOUL ***

Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Mark C. Orton, Linda McKeown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

MARGARITA'S SOUL

THEY CROONED TOGETHER THERE, THE WOMAN, THE CHILD AND THE BIRDS

MARGARITA'S SOUL

THE ROMANTIC RECOLLECTIONS OF A MAN OF FIFTY

BY

INGRAHAM LOVELL

W ITH I LLUSTRATIONSBY J. S COTT W ILLIAMS A ND W HISTLER B UTTERFLY D ECORATIONS

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD

NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY

MCMIX

Copyright, 1909 By T HE P HILLIPS P UBLISHING C O MPANY

Copyright, 1909 By J O HN L ANE C O MPANY

CONTENTS

PART I

I N W HICH Y O U S EEA S ECRET S PRING CHAPTER PAGE I.11Fate Walks Broadway II.Fate Goes A-fishing 17 III.28As the Twigs Were Bent IV.Fate Reels In 37 PART II I N W HICHTHE S PRING F LO WSINA L ITTLE S TREAM V.Roger Finds the Island 47 VI.59Fate Casts Her Die VII.66I Ride Knight Errant VIII.The Mists of Eden 74 PART III I N W HICHTHE S TREAM J O INSWITH O THERSAND P LUNG ES D O WNA C LIFF IX.Margarita Meets the Enemy and He is Hers 81 X.Fate Spreads an Island Feast 87 XI.94Our Parson Proves Capable XII.I Leave Eden 105 PART IV I N W HICHTHE S TREAM W INDS T HRO UG HA S ULLEN M ARSHAND B ECO MESA B RO O K XIII.111Straws that Showed the Wind XIV.The Island Cottage 118 XV.Fate Plays Me in the Shallows 130 XVI.141Margarita Comes to Town PART V I N W HICHTHE B RO O K B ECO MESA R IVERAND F LO WSBY G REAT C ITIES XVII.149Our Pearl Bathes in Seine Water XVIII.My Pearl of Too Great Price. 157 XIX.Fate Lands Me on the Rocks 164 PART VI I N W HICH Y O U A RE S HO WNTHE R IVER ' S V ERY S O URCES , F AR U NDERG RO UND XX.A Garden Glimpse of Eden 181 XXI.186Hester Prynne's Secret XXII.196Fate Laughs and Baits Her Hook PART VII I N W HICHTHE R IVER L EAPSA S UDDEN C LIFFAND B ECO MESA C ATARACT

XXIII.Fate Spreads Her Net XXIV.Our Second Summer in Eden XXV.The Island Tomb XXVI.A Handful of Memories PART VIII I N W HICHTHE R IVER R USHESINTO P ERILO US R APIDS XXVII.We Bring Our Pearl to Market XXVIII.Arabian Nights in England XXIX.Fate Grips Her Landing Net PART IX I N W HICHTHE R IVER F INDSTHE S EA XXX.A Terror in the Snow XXXI.Fate Empties Her Creel XXXII.The Sunset End

ILLUSTRATIONS

213 221 231 235

247 257 273

279 289 294

They Crooned Together There, the Woman, the Child and the Birds Frontispiece PAGE Scooped Hundreds—Perhaps Thousands—Out of a Chest to Flee at Dawn 43 The Tall, Gaunt, Silent Woman ... Striding Through the Pastures 49 I Seem to See ... a Beautiful Woman in a Blue Dress Sitting Under a Fruit Tree 105 Persons Born in That Month of That Year Will Never Be Otherwise Than Far Out of the Ordinary 132 Margarita Stopped and Stared at It Several Minutes 1 44 For Hours and Hours I Walked, Muttering and Cursing 163 Her Weekly Check, Plus a Draft for a Hundred Pounds 174 She Spins Her Hemp and Weaves Osiers into Baskets and Changes Them for Goats' Hams 204 The Gloomy, Faded Glories of the Musty Palace 208

Ah, Faithful Caliban, What Hours of Terrible Tuition Made Thy Task Clear to Thee! He Sketched Her in Charcoal, Dressed (He Would Have It) in Black It Was After the Garden Love-Scene That She Won Her Recalls They Are Still as Death, Tranced in Those Liquid Bell-Tones I Leaned Over the Bank and Cried That I Was There, But She Never Stopped—It Was Terrible It Is a Favourite Claim of Ours Who Are Bidden to That Home That It Is an Enchanted Isle

PART ONE

IN WHICH YOU SEE A SECRET SPRING

O I have seen a fair mermaid, That sang beside a lonely sea, And now her long black hair she'll braid, And be my own good wife to me.

233 240 250 270

281

296

O woe's the day you saw the maid, And woe's the song she sang the sea, In hell her long black hair she'll braid, For ne'er a soul at all has she!

Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden.

MARGARITA'S SOUL

CHAPTER I

FATE WALKS BROADWAY

Roger Bradley was walking up Broadway. This fact calls sharply for comment, for he had not done it in years; the thoroughfare was intolerable to him. But one of its impingements upon a less blatant avenue had caught him napping and he found himself entangled in a mesh of theatre dribbl ings, pool-room loungers, wine-touts and homeward bent women of the middle, shopping class. Being there, he scorned to avail himself of the regularly recurring cross streets, but strode along, his straight, trim bulk, his keen, ju dicial profile—a profile that spoke strong of the best traditions of American blood—marking him for what he was among a crowd not to be matched, in its way, upon the Western Continent.

At the second slanting of the great, tawdry lane he bent with it and encountered suddenly a little knot of flustered women just descended from the elevated way that doubled the din and blare of the shrieking city. They were bundle-filled, voluble, dressed by any standards save those of their native city, far beyond their probable means and undoubted station. As they stopped unexpectedly and hesitated, damming the flood of hurrying citizens, Roger halted of necessity and stepped backward, but in avoiding them he bumped heavily against the person behind him. A startled gasp, something soft against his shoulder, the sharp edge of a projecting hat, told him that this person was a woman, and

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stepping sidewise into the shelter of a neighbouring news-stall, he raised his hat with a courtesy alien to the place and hour.

"I beg your pardon, madam," he said, "I trust I have not hurt you?"

"No," said the woman, who wore a heavy grey veil, and as that is literally all she said and as her method of saying it was as convincing as it was simple, one would suppose the incident closed and look to see Roger complete his journey to his club without further adventure.

Do I wish he had? God knows. It was undoubtedly the turning-point in his life and he was forty. Had he gone on to the club where I was waiting for him; had we dined, played out our rubber, dropped in at the occasional chamber concert that was our usual and almost our only dissipation in those days, I should not now be ransacking old letters and diaries from which to make this book, nor would Margarita's picture—her loveliest, asJuliet—lean toward me from the wall. She is smiling; not as one smiles in photographs, but as a flesh-and-blood woman droops over the man she loves and smiles her heart into his lips, reaching over his shoulder. Everything slips behind but you two, herself and you, when you look at it. Sarony, who took it, told me he had never posed such a subject, and I believe him.

Well, well, it's done now. It was twenty years ago that Roger bumped into his fate in that eddy of Broadway and I was as powerles s as you are now to disentangle him and keep him for myself, which, selfishly enough, of course, I wanted terribly to do. You see, he was all I had, R oger, and I was hoping we would play the game out together. But—not to have known Margarita? Never to have watched that bending droop of her neck, that extraordinary colouring of her skin—a real Henner skin! I remember Maurice Grau's telling me that he had always thought Henner colour blind till he saw Margarita's neck in her name- part inFaust.

The things that girl used to tell me, before she had any soul, of course, and in the days when I was the third man to whom she had ever spoken more than ten words in her life, were almost enough to pay for al l the pain she taught me. Such talks! I can close my eyes and actually smell the sea-weed and the damp sand and hear the inrush of the big combers. She used to sit in the lee of the rocks, all huddled in that heavy, supple army-blue officer's cloak of hers with its tarnished silver clasps, and talk as Miranda must have talked to Ferdinand's old bachelor friend, who probably appreciated the chance—too well, the poor old dog!

I had reached, I think, when I left off my plain un varnished tale and took to maundering, that precise point in it which exhibits Roger in the act of replacing his hat upon his even then slightly greyish head and striding on. It seems to me that he would not have checked in his stride if the woman had replied after the usual tautological fashion of her sex (we blame them for it, not thinking how wholly in nature it is that they should be so, like the repeated notes of birds, the persistence of the raindrops, the continual flicker of the sun through the always fluttering leaves,) with some such phrase as, "No, indeed, not in the least, I assure you!" or "Not at all, really—don't mention it!" or even, "No, indeed," with a shy bow or a composed one, as the case might be. But this woman uttered merely the syllable, "No," with no modification nor variation, no inclination of

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the head, no movement forward or back. Her utterance was grave, moreover, and precise; her tone noticeably full and deep. Roger, pausing a moment in the shelter of the news-stall, spoke again at the spur of some unexplainable impulse.

"I was afraid I had stepped directly on your foot—it felt so," he said.

Again she answered simply, "No," and that was his second chance. Now in the face of these facts it is folly to contend that the woman "accosted" him, as his cousin, who was one of the Boston Thayers, put it to me. She did nothing of the kind; she replied twice, to his distinct questions, in the coldest of monosyllables and he could not even have told if she looked at him, her veil was so thick. Let that be definitely understood, once and for all. The chances were even in favour of her being violently pitted from the small-pox, since even twenty years ago, when the city was less cosmopolitan (and from my po int of view more interesting) the women of New York of the class that travels unaccompanied and on foot at dusk were not accustomed to go heavily veiled if they had any fair excuse for the contrary course.

Nevertheless to that veiled woman did Roger address himself—unnecessarily, mark you—for the third time. Why did he? He had his chance; two chances in fact. But this is folly, for of course he had no chance at all. Fate stood by that news-stall, with the blear-eyed, frousy woman that tended it looking vacantly on; Fate, veiled, too, and not even monosyllabic in his behalf. I should have known this, I think, even if I had not lived those curious, long eight months in Algeria and slept those dreamless nights under the Algerian stars that got into my blood and call me back now and then; imperiously and never in vain, though I feel older than the stars, and Alif and the rest are dead or exhibiting themselves at the great American memorial fairs that began to flourish about the time this tale begins. No, there was no help: it was written.

"I am glad I did not hurt you," he said, really moving forward now and again raising his hat, "these crowds are dangerous for women at this hour."

He took two steps and stopped suddenly, for a hand slipped under his arm. (You should have seen his cousin's face, the Boston one, when in that relentless way known only to women and eminent artists in cross-examination she got this fact out of me.)

"Will you tell me the quickest way to Broadway?" said the woman to whom he had just spoken.

"To Broadway?" he echoed stupidly, standing stock still, conscious of the grasp upon his arm, a curious sense of the importance of this apparently cheap experience surging over him, even while he resented its banality. "This is Broadway. What do you want of it?"

"I want to show myself on it," said the woman, a young woman, from the voice.

Roger stepped back against the news-stall, dragging her with him, since her hand did not leave his arm.

"To show yourself on it?" he repeated sternly, "and why do you want to do that? "

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