Peter Ibbetson

Chapter 4

For my early childhood was often haunted by a dream, which at first I took for a reality—a transcendant dream of some interest and importance to mankind, as the patient reader will admit in time. But many years of my life passed away before I was able to explain and account for it.

I had but to turn my face to the wall, and soon I found myself in company with a lady who had white hair and a young face—a very beautiful young face.

Sometimes I walked with her, hand in hand—I being quite a small child—and together we fed innumerable pigeons who lived in a tower by a winding stream that ended in a water-mill. It was too lovely, and I would wake.

Sometimes we went into a dark place, where there was a fiery furnace with many holes, and many people working and moving about—among them a man with white hair and a young face, like the lady, and beautiful red heels to his shoes. And under his guidance I would contrive to make in the furnace a charming little c****d hat of colored glass—a treasure! And the sheer joy thereof would wake me.

Sometimes the white-haired lady and I would sit together at a square box from which she made lovely music, and she would sing my favorite song—a song that I adored. But I always woke before this song came to an end, on account of the too insupportably intense bliss I felt on hearing it; and all I could remember when awake were the words “triste—comment—sale.” The air, which I knew so well in my dream, I could not recall.

It seemed as though some innermost core of my being, some childish holy of holies, secreted a source of supersubtle reminiscence, which, under some stimulus that now and again became active during sleep, exhaled itself in this singular dream—shadowy and slight, but invariably accompanied by a sense of felicity so measureless and so penetrating that I would always wake in a mystic flutter of ecstasy, the bare remembrance of which was enough to bless and make happy many a succeeding hour.

* * * * *

Besides this happy family of three, close by (in the Street of the Tower) lived my grandmother Mrs. Biddulph, and my Aunt Plunket, a widow, with her two sons, Alfred and Charlie, and her daughter Madge. They also were fair to look at—extremely so—of the gold-haired, white-skinned, well-grown Anglo-Saxon type, with frank, open, jolly manners, and no beastly British pride.

So that physically, at least, we reflected much credit on the English name, which was not in good odor just then at Passy-lès-Paris, where Waterloo was unforgotten. In time, however, our nationality was condoned on account of our good looks—”non Angli sed angeli!” as M. Saindou was gallantly pleased to exclaim when he called (with a prospectus of his school) and found us all gathered together under the big apple-tree on our lawn.

But English beauty in Passy was soon to receive a memorable addition to its ranks in the person of a certain Madame Seraskier, who came with an invalid little daughter to live in the house so modestly described in gold as “Parva sed Apta.”

She was the English, or rather the Irish, wife of a Hungarian patriot and man of science, Dr. Seraskier (son of the famous violinist); an extremely tall, thin man, almost gigantic, with a grave, benevolent face, and a head like a prophet’s; who was, like my father, very much away from his family—conspiring perhaps—or perhaps only inventing (like my father), and looking out “for his ship to come home!”

[Illustration: “SHE TOPPED MY TALL MOTHER.”]

This fair lady’s advent was a sensation—to me a sensation that never palled or wore itself away; it was no longer now “la belle Madame Pasquier,” but “la divine Madame Seraskier”—beauty-blind as the French are apt to be.

She topped my tall mother by more than half a head; as was remarked by Madame Pelé, whose similes were all of the kitchen and dining-room, “elle lui mangerait des petits pâtés sur la tête!” And height, that lends dignity to ugliness, magnifies beauty on a scale of geometrical progression—2, 4, 8, 16, 32—for every consecutive inch, between five feet five, let us say, and five feet ten or eleven (or thereabouts), which I take to have been Madame Seraskier’s measurement.

She had black hair and blue eyes—of the kind that turns violet in a novel—and a beautiful white skin, lovely hands and feet, a perfect figure, and features chiselled and finished and polished and turned out with such singular felicitousness that one gazed and gazed till the heart was full of a strange jealous resentment at any one else having the right to gaze on something so rare, so divinely, so sacredly fair—any one in the world but one’s self!

But a woman can be all this without being Madame Seraskier—she was much more.

For the warmth and genial kindness of her nature shone through her eyes and rang in her voice. All was of a piece with her—her simplicity, her grace, her naturalness and absence of vanity; her courtesy, her sympathy, her mirthfulness.

I do not know which was the most irresistible: she had a slight Irish accent when she spoke English, a less slight English accent when she spoke French!

I made it my business to acquire both.

Indeed, she was in heart and mind and body what we should all be but for the lack of a little public spirit and self-denial (under proper guidance) during the last few hundred years on the part of a few thousand millions of our improvident fellow-creatures.

There should be no available ugly frames for beautiful souls to be hurried into by carelessness or mistake, and no ugly souls should be suffered to creep, like hermit-crabs, into beautiful shells never intended for them. The outward and visible form should mark the inward and spiritual grace; that it seldom does so is a fact there is no gainsaying. Alas! such beauty is such an exception that its possessor, like a prince of the blood royal, is pampered and spoiled from the very cradle, and every good and generous and unselfish impulse is corroded by adulation—that spontaneous tribute so lightly won, so quickly paid, and accepted so royally as a due.

So that only when by Heaven’s grace the very beautiful are also very good, is it time for us to go down on our knees, and say our prayers in thankfulness and adoration; for the divine has been permitted to make itself manifest for a while in the perishable likeness of our poor humanity.

A beautiful face! a beautiful tune! Earth holds nothing to beat these, and of such, for want of better materials, we have built for ourselves the kingdom of Heaven.

“Plus oblige, et peut davantage

Un beau visage

Qu’un homme armé—

Et rien n’est meilleur que d’entendre

Air doux et tendre

Jadis aimé!”

My mother soon became the passionately devoted friend of the divine Madame Seraskier; and I, what would I not have done—what danger would I not have faced—what death would I not have died for her!

I did not die; I lived her protestant to be, for nearly fifty years. For nearly fifty years to recollect the rapture and the pain it was to look at her; that inexplicable longing ache, that dumb, delicious, complex, innocent distress, for which none but the greatest poets have ever found expression; and which, perhaps, they have not felt half so acutely, these glib and gifted ones, as I did, at the susceptible age of seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve.

She had other slaves of my s*x. The five Napoleonic heroes did homage each after his fashion: the good Major with a kind of sweet fatherly tenderness touching to behold; the others with perhaps less unselfish adoration; notably the brave Capitaine Audenis, of the fair waxed mustache and beautiful brown tail coat, so tightly buttoned with gilt buttons across his enormous chest, and imperceptible little feet so tightly imprisoned in shiny tipped female cloth boots, with buttons of mother-of-pearl; whose hobby was, I believe, to try and compensate himself for the misfortunes of war by more successful attempts in another direction. Anyhow he betrayed a warmth that made my small bosom a Gehenna, until she laughed and snubbed him into due propriety and shamefaced self-effacement.

It soon became evident that she favored two, at least, out of all this little masculine world—the Major myself; and a strange trio we made.

Her poor little daughter, the object of her passionate solicitude, a very clever and precocious child, was the reverse of beautiful, although she would have had fine eyes but for her red lashless lids. She wore her thick hair cropped short, like a boy, and was pasty and sallow in complexion, hollow-cheeked, thick-featured, and overgrown, with long thin hands and feet, and arms and legs of quite pathetic length and tenuity; a silent and melancholy little girl, who sucked her thumb perpetually, and kept her own counsel. She would have to lie in bed for days together, and when she got well enough to sit up, I (to please her mother) would read to her Le Robinson Suisse, Sandford and Merton, Evenings at Home, Les Contes de Madame Perrault, the shipwreck from “Don Juan,” of which we never tired, and the “Giaour,” the “Corsair,” and “Mazeppa”; and last, but not least, Peter Parleys Natural History, which we got to know by heart.

And out of this latter volume I would often declaim for her benefit what has always been to me the most beautiful poem in the world, possibly because it was the first I read for myself, or else because it is so intimately associated with those happy days. Under an engraving of a wild duck (after Bewick, I believe) were quoted W.C. Bryant’s lines “To a Water-fowl.” They charmed me then and charm me now as nothing else has quite charmed me; I become a child again as I think of them, with a child’s virgin subtlety of perception and magical susceptibility to vague suggestions of the Infinite.

Poor little Mimsey Seraskier would listen with distended eyes and quick comprehension. She had a strange fancy that a pair of invisible beings, “La fée Tarapatapoum,” and “Le Prince Charmant” (two favorite characters of M. le Major’s) were always in attendance upon us—upon her and me—and were equally fond of us both; that is, “La fée Tarapatapoum” of me, and “Le Prince Charmant” of her—and watched over us and would protect us through life.

“O! ils sont joliment bien ensemble, tous les deux—ils sont inséparables!” she would often exclaim, apropos of these visionary beings; and apropos of the water-fowl she would say—

“Il aime beaucoup cet oiseau-là, le Prince Charmant! dis encore, quand il vole si haut, et qu’il fait froid, et qu’il est fatigué, et que la nuit vient, mais qu’il ne veut pas descendre!”

And I would re-spout—

“’All day thy wings have fanned,

At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere,

Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,

Though the dark night be near!’”

And poor, morbid, precocious, overwrought Mimsey’s eyes would fill, and she would meditatively suck her thumb and think unutterable things.

And then I would copy Bewick’s wood-cuts for her, as she sat on the arm of my chair and patiently watched; and she would say: “La fée Tarapatapoum trouve que tu dessines dans la perfection!” and treasure up these little masterpieces—”pour l’album de la fée Tarapatapoum!”

[Illustration]

There was one drawing she prized above all others—a steel engraving in a volume of Byron, which represented two beautiful beings of either s*x, walking hand in hand through a dark cavern. The man was in sailor’s garb; the lady, who went barefoot and lightly clad, held a torch; and underneath was written—