Читать книгу For the Blood Is the Life - Francis Marion Crawford - Страница 23

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They all came forward by a simultaneous movement of curiosity and approached the solitary stranger. As they came year he slowly turned his head, looked at them and rose to his feet. He was below the middle height, slightly made and graceful, dressed scrupulously in the fashion of five and thirty years ago, save that the linen collar was less close about the throat than men wore it then, and loosely bound with a black silk cravat; he wore yellow nankeen trousers, the waistcoat was buttoned across and fitted tightly to his slender waist, and the long grey coat, narrow chested and tight in the sleeves, was unfastened and thrown back, while one small and delicate hand grasped a dark mantle which would have fallen to the ground as he stood up. It was a wonderful face upon which the moonlight fell; a face pale and thin and spiritual, from the smooth broad forehead about which the short fair hair grew in abundant thickness, to the sensitive, half satcastic downward curve of the lips, visible distinctly between the drooping moustache and the pointed beard. The fine and slightly aquiline nose, delicately modelled and long in proportion to the face, enhanced the mournful expression of the features. The eyes, veiled by the drooping of their lids, seemed to speak of such sadness as is distilled from the secret and melancholy visions of a poet's soul, rather than of that hopeless misery which prolonged and acute suffering stamps upon the face of an unfortunate man.

The stranger looked coldly at the party as though he were ill pleased at being disturbed in his reverie.

"Do you see me, that you look at me thus ?" he asked, as they'came quite near to him. The question was a strange one indeed, and there was a pause before any one answered it.

"We mean no discourtesy to you, sir," said Augustus at last. " Seeing a stranger so near our house, in this desolate region, we naturally desire to offer you such hospitality as we may."

"And I, sir, am most ready to thank you," said the other, a strange smile passing over his face as he frankly held out his hand. Augustus took it, willingly enough, but he started as he touched the long white fingers.

"You are very cold," he said. "Pray come with us to the house."

"No," answered the stranger, "I am not cold — at least I do not feel cold," he added, smiling again. "I am past feeling those things."

The ladies stood together in a little group. Augustus and the unknown gentleman were not two paces from them.

"I think it is a little rash of Augustus — asking him to the house," said Lady Brenda in an undertone. " He is so very oddly dressed! "

"Oh, Augustus is always right about those things, mamma," answered Gwendoline.

The stranger apparently overheard the remarks exchanged by the mother and daughter, for he moved forward a little and spoke to Augustus so that they could hear what he said.

"I feel," he said, "that upon accepting the kind offer you have made me, I must tell you my name."

"Mine is Augustus Chard," said the host, not wishing to be outdone in courtesy.

"And mine needs a word of explanation before it is told," rejoined the stranger, "a word of explanation which may save many misunderstandings in the future. Do not be startled at what I say. There is nothing supernatural in it. Nor must you imagine that I am a madman. You have been doing dangerous things with Nature, Mr. Chard, you have caused some of her laws to act for a time in a way not familiar to you. I supposed so from what I felt before you approached me. When I realised that you saw me, I understood that I had become visible, and I was greatly surprised, as no one has seen me for a long time — not since I died, in fact—"

"Not since you died?" exclaimed the three ladies at once.

"No, not since I died," continued the speaker, calmly. " By your experiments you have made dead men visible for a time. I have been dead thirty and odd years, and if there is anything left of my bones I am not curious to see it. This, that you see, is what is left of myself. I am Heinrich Heine. You see I did well to give you a word of explanation. I am quite harmless; indeed, I always was."

"My dear sir," said Augustus, "I have too long been accustomed to expect the unusual in nature to be startled at it when it appears, especially when it procures me the pleasure of meeting one whom I hate so sincerely admired as yourself. My wife, my mother-in-law. Lady Brenda, my sister, Miss Diana Chard. We have so often spoken of you that I will answer for the satisfaction these ladies must feel at this meeting."

"Yes indeed!" said Gwendoline and Diana together.

"This is all very queer and — astral — that sort of thing," said Lady Brenda. "But I suppose it is all right."

"Madam," answered Heine, "whatever brings me into such company must necessarily be right. Clearly, Mr. Chard's experiments were not for his own benefit but for mine."

"If you are not really cold," suggested Diana, " we might stay here for a while. It is so hot in the house this evening."

"No," objected Gwendoline, "I must go and see the baby — poor little thing, I don't believe it could possibly have slept through that frightful storm. Then we can sit upon the terrace in the moonlight."

As they all moved slowly towards the house, Lady Brenda glanced curiously at the graceful form of the dead poet as he walked beside her. She was very far from being persuaded that he was really a dead man, but she was by no means far from believing him to be a dangerous escaped lunatic. Under the circumstances the doubt was very reasonable. But Gwendoline and Diana felt that delicious thrill of excitement which every one experiences on being suddenly brought into the company of a person long admired and studied. On reaching the castle it was found that the model baby had slept soundly through the disturbances, and that the servants, having been at dinner during the whole time, had noticed nothing but the thunder. Augustus breathed freely, for he had feared that his electric storm might produce a serious convulsion in the prosaic mind of Bimbam. That catastrophe was averted, and the immediate prospect presented no difficulties.

A quarter of an hour later the whole party were seated upon the terrace in the full light of the May moon, looking over the placid southern sea. Heine sat in the midst of the group. Saving his antiquated dress, there was nothing in his appearance to distinguish him from his living hosts. Augustus alone had felt the icy chill of his hand.

"This is almost as good as life," said Heine in his dreamy voice. " You have the advantage of me still, however."

"Are you really dead?" asked Lady Brenda, incredulously.

"As dead, dear madam, as the little Veronica — as dead as Doctor Saul Ascher, who died an abstract death from reason-poisoning before his wizened little legs finally refused to carry about the over-loaded, over-packed, over-hardened thing he called his head."

"I never heard of Doctor Saul Ascher," said Gwendoline.

"Nor I," echoed Augustus and the rest, all together.

" He was much talked of in his day, especially by himself," said Heine. "His reputation suffered a mortal blow when he died. I only mentioned him as an illustration. If you like it better, I will say that I am as dead as a door-nail. I have passed from the condition of life to the condition of existence. By a happy accident I am now alive for purposes of conversation, a pastime in which I always found an unreasoning delight, provided I was not required to play an important part in it."

"I don't think it is at all unreasonable to like conversation," said Lady Brenda. "When people have ideas they ought to exchange them."

"Yes — when they have any. I once wrote a book about ideas, and I took the definition of the idea, not from Plato, but from a Berlin cab-driver — he said ideas were a lot of stupid stuff" that people got into their heads. The cab-driver evidently knew what he was talking about. I am more convinced of that now than I ever was before."

"Why?" asked Diana.

"I used to have ideas about death, before I died. I used to think one must sleep too soundly when one was dead. Death is the end of sleep. There is no more sleep for us, for ever, it seems — and alas, there are no more dreams either! I regret the sadness of life, for the sake of the contrasted sweetness of its dreams. I regret my bitter-sweet emotions, my joy in being sad and my delicious imaginary sadness in being joyful. I was made up of contradictions when I was alive. Now I know too much even to contradict myself. Our conversations now are tame. All conversations are, unless we speak of our hopes; and though we have plentiful material for reflection here, we have but little ground for anticipation. Our discussions, such as they are, cannot be better defined than as a perpetual comparison of our past experience. You will readily conceive that with our unlimited command of time such subjects may be exhausted."

"But of whom does your society consist?" asked Lady Brenda. " I can imagine that you might form a most delightful circle out of such elements."

"The elements are a little mixed," answered the poet in his soft, slow tones. "We have formed a little society almost as exclusive as a faculty of professors in a university — also a little more witty, for there are no professors among us, either ancient or modern."

"You never liked professors. I have noticed it in your books," said Diana.

"No — and professors never liked me; a fact which was of vastly greater importance to me than my liking or disliking them. We have only one of each of a certain number of classes. For instance we have only one conqueror."

"Who is he? " asked Augustus.

"A certain Julius Caesar. His soul does not inhabit the body of a schoolmaster as I once supposed. I was greatly relieved when I met him here. Perhaps he is the most unique in his way. I have not heard that any one has died recently who greatly resembles him. He has taken the place of Bonaparte in my estimation, since I made his acquaintance."

"Perhaps you will change your mind again," suggested Lady Brenda, hoping to make the dead man say more.

"No," he answered, sadly. "We are terribly consistent after death. We shall never change our minds again, now. We are the bronze of which our ' lives were but the clay moulds. We are new things indeed, but the impression is fatally true, for we are no longer subject to illusions — alas! there are no delicious self-deceptions for us now. We modelled ourselves in our lives and, as we modelled, so we are cast in this imperishable essence of the soul. But we are still fated to receive impressions, all true, and therefore commonplace and detestable, because when one sees nothing but fact one ceases to fabricate fiction. Moreover, the knowledge that we cannot write down what we think and sell it to newspapers and poetry-mongers for money is saddening to industriously-minded little poets like myself. The poet is accustomed in his lifetime to earn his living by forcing words to fit the bed of Procrustes, squeezing the poor sensitive feet into the iron boots of verse, ramming down the whole into couplets — very like strings of sausages in which mauled and chopped meat is forced into skins and tied up into appropriate lengths for quotation — I mean for the breakfast of an average strong man, and then hung up in long strings in the bookseller's window to attract the hungry. Words are words, even in verse — and pig is pig, even in sausages, but I doubt whether the pig would recognise himself after the transmigration. It is the proud privilege of the pig to be made into sausages after his death, and if he is a lucky pig his sausage form may even serve as an ornament and be decorated with laurels in the porkbutcher's shop at Christmas-tide, which is better luck than happens to most poets. For the poet eats himself up in his lifetime, and misses his daily search for rhymes, as well as the daily price of them, when he is dead; just as an Italian donkey on Sunday misses being kicked up hill with a load on his back before dinner; just as a business man who takes a holiday misses the delight of doubling himself up all day upon his desk and letting the delightful, crabbed, money-getting figures tickle his nose and his heart from morning till night. The poet after death is like the business man on a holiday, the Italian ass on Sunday and the pig before he has been made into sausages — he has no raison d'etre, no reason for existing, he is out of his sphere, lost in the labyrinths of everyday fact, uncomfortable as an antelope strolling on the Boulevard des Italiens, as a tragedian in the solitudes of the steppes, as a cat in a country where the houses have no roofs, so nice and romantic to howl upon at night. No one pays me for howling now, nor if any one would, could I find a roof. Perhaps I could not even find a subject for my lamentations, except the absence of such a subject, which indeed is a very serious matter for a poet."

" How can you speak of poetry in such a way — you who wrote such exquisite things ? " asked Diana.

"You may be sure," answered Heine, with that wonderful smile which drew strange angles about his sensitive mouth, "that if it were still in my power to make verses I would not laugh at my old trade. But the grapes which hang too high are eternally green — as perpetually sour as unrealised hope."

"Which is very sour indeed," remarked Augustus. " Nevertheless, you must have realised most of your hopes during your lifetime. You were brilliantly successful."

"In exile," answered the poet, sadly.

"In a perfectly voluntary exile, I believe?" returned Augustus.

"No — a fatal exile," said Heine, almost passionately. " In Germany I was a Frenchman, in France I was a German — among Jews a Christian, among Christians a Jew, with Catholics a Protestant, with Protestants a Catholic. I was always in contradiction with my surroundings, I was in a perpetual exile. Had I been made like some people, full of raw' fighting instincts, I would have fought. As it was, I was unhappy, sick in soul and ill in body, and so I became a poet and wrote verses. You say they were good? Yes, I believe they were, for I took pleasure in writing them; but had I possessed Mr. Chard's sanguine constitution I would have been a leader of men instead of a writer of lyrics. I used to think I might play a political part — indeed, I often fancied that I did. Since I died I have learned what stuff is needed to play a part in the world of nations."

"Broad shoulders and a rough fist," said Augustus. "Soldiering is girl's play compared with it."

"You may well say that. Broad shoulders, a rough fist and a hard heart. I think my heart was never very hard. Even when I abused people it did not hurt them much. My shoulders are not broad and my fist — you see," said the poet, glancing with a pathetic pride at his delicate fingers, "I have the hand of a woman, I was not made for a politician."

"It is strange," said Gwendoline, "that great poets so often believe themselves to be statesmen, or have opportunities of becoming statesmen thrust upon them."

"Yes," replied Heine, "there was Goethe, to begin with. Dante was another. Milton had the strongest political tastes. Victor Hugo was a type of the politician-poet. Horace refused to he political private secretary to Augustus. Catullus began as a writer of political squibs against Caesar. Mickievicz was a furious patriot. Even Byron aspired to political fame and sacrificed his life heroically for an idea. Perhaps I should say for a principle, I do not like the word idea."

"If you will pardon me, I think that is one of your amiable eccentricities," remarked Augustus. "The great fights — or the great struggles of history, have either been fought for material advantage or for ideas. It seems to me nobler to fight for an idea than to fight for money — or for what practically results in money."

"By all means," answered Heine. "In my mind the word idea is associated with certain philosophical theories which I consider absurd, but if you use the word in the sense of a principle, and enthusiasm for that principle, I agree with you. That is what the sickness of modern times means. It is too long since the world has fought for a pure principle. Individual nations have had their struggles, chiefly internal, about what they considered right or wrong, but it is long since the joint enthusiasm of all humanity has been roused to shed blood and spend it in attacking and defending a purely moral cause. At present the thinking world is divided into two very distinct classes — those who say that principles are worth fighting for, and those who say that there should be no fighting and that the principles will take care of themselves. Neither party has the full sympathy of the masses."

"I always think," said Lady Brenda, "that the world depends entirely on the thinking people. The masses are not of so much importance. They always follow, you know."

"You and I, madam," replied the poet, "may design a very good pyramid, as big and symmetrical as the pyramid of Cheops. But however perfect the design may be, we cannot build it unless the masses help us. Without the concurrence of the masses the noblest political schemes must fail."

"Their failure does not make them any the less noble," objected Lady Brenda.

"No. But it makes them less useful and therefore less important. The successful people are those who induce many to follow them, and that can only be done by presenting the many with ideas which they can understand. The thoughts of great poets are generally noble, but not easily understood by the masses. The poet, however, aims at elevating the people to his own level, and being carried away by the grandeur of his plans he thinks it a simple matter to make a poetic commonwealth of the whole world. He is of course disappointed; he dies fancying his life a failure, and after he is dead he is surprised to find that nobody ever thought anything of his political capabilities, whereas he has earned immortality by his verses. The great man of the future will be he who shall discover the idea — as you call it — for which mankind shall be willing to take up arms. If his idea succeeds he will be a very great man and will probably be murdered, like a gentleman; if he fails he will be the last of humanity and will most likely be hanged, like a thief. After all, it is better to be a poet. If people only knew and understood how much better it is to live out one's life naturally! There is so little of it, and the remembrance of that little must serve one so long! "

"It is certainly best to be a poet," said Diana, leaning back in her chair and looking from the moon to the dark water, and dreamily again from the water to the silver shield above. " But it is not everybody who can. They say there is but one good poet in a thousand million human beings."

"The proportion is truly discouraging," answered Heine. "It is even worse when you reflect that there is not more than one good poet in a thousand million poets of all kinds, any more than you will find two wise men in a milliard of puckery, peppery, self-satisfied scientists. It must therefore be difficult to be very wise or to be a very good poet — but be careful never to tell people so, for as yet nobody has found it out."

"It cannot hurt people if they try to be either," said Lady Brenda.

"The ultimate disappointment of being convinced of failure in the nine hundred ninety-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine cases is hardly ever felt in practice by. poets, never by scientists. It follows that, at a comparatively small cost, thousands of millions are made perfectly happy in the belief that they are great. Even when idiots do not obtain appreciation, which rarely occurs, they find pleasant consolation in attributing their lack of success to the stupidity of others. There are more ways of believing oneself great than by obtaining praise from one's contemporaries, or money for one's works. I received forty copies, free of charge, as sole and entire payment for my first book of verses, after another publisher had refused to print it altogether; but when I was correcting the proofs I felt that I was a much greater man than before, and I have never since felt so great as on that day. I had a considerable reputation when my excellent uncle remarked of me to a friend that 'if the silly boy had ever learned anything he would not have needed to write books.' I had reputation, I say, and yet I was so much struck by the truth of the remark, that I would have accepted the post of theological adviser and attorney-general to the king of the cannibals, had it been offered to me—anything for a respectable profession, as I said to myself. But the last theological adviser had chanced to disagree with the king about an hour after the Sunday meal, and on taking medical advice and consulting the family butcher I lost confidence in myself and did not apply. ' Uncle Solomon Heine also thought there was truth in his saying and repeated it frequently. I was then a man of one book, but he was a man of one joke. I afterwards wrote other books, but my uncle's jest did not multiply. Still, that one joke elevates him; he stood upon it as on a pedestal; and the pedestal bore to him about the same relation as the Vendome column bears to the statue of Napoleon."

There was something so good-natured in his story of the facetious uncle Solomon, that all the party laughed a little, except Diana, who was dreaming of something very far away. Heine noticed her silence.

"What were you thinking of?" he asked, turning towards her.

"I will not tell you — you would be angry," she answered.

"I? angry?" exclaimed the poet in some surprise. " Dead men are never angry. Anger is an emotion, and there are no emotions of that kind for us. We have lost the power of influencing our surroundings, and we perform no actions which can be influenced by them. We shed tears sometimes, and sometimes we laugh a little — but we are never angry. What were you thinking of?"

"I was thinking — wondering about the dead Maria," said Diana in a low voice.

"Yes," resumed Heine, softly, "I wonder too —I wonder why I suffered as I did. But no one knows the story. I regret the suffering now that it is gone, and I wish it were with me again. When I was alive I used to think that she came back from the dead in the silent evenings — evenings like this — and that she sat with me and spoke with me as she used to speak. Now that I am dead I cannot find her — I have long given up the search. I sometimes fancy I hear her voice singing — it is a strange, sweet voice, like a nightingale's last notes, full of silky tones that make me tremble with a sort of creeping fear, tones that seem to come from a bleeding heart, that wind and spin themselves among my thoughts like soft, beseeching memories. And her dear face that seemed modelled by a Greek master out of the perfumed mist of white roses, delicate as though breathed into shape, noble beyond all thought — and the passionate eyes illuminating the classic splendour of her beauty — I remember all. Her hand, too! There were little blue veins under the polished, high-born skin. It was not like a little girl's vegetable-animal hand — half lamb, half rose — thoughtless and fair; there was something spiritual in the white fingers, something that suggested a story of sympathy, like the hands of beautiful persons who are excessively refined or have suffered terribly — and yet it had a look of pathetic innocence, and if I touched it, it shrank delicately under the gentlest pressure. She was dead when I saw her last — she was so beautiful when she was dead, so terribly, so fascinatingly beautiful, as she lay among the roses on her bed. She died before I could reach her, but I saw her dead. She loved me once — I thought she loved me in the end, though she took another. They respected me—they left me alone with her. Old Ursula looked at me once, strangely I thought, and she went out. The shaded lamp stood on a table. A purple flower drooped in a glass beside it, and gave out a faint unnatural perfume. I stood by the bedside. I thought of the dark-robed knight who would have kissed his dead love to life again. I gazed long, and at last I bent down and I pressed my lips on her cold mouth. Suddenly the lamp was extinguished — it must have been the breeze from the open window, for I know I was alone — I felt cold, icy cold, arms go round my neck— I heard a name spoken. It was her voice, it was not my name. —The rest? I do not know the rest, for I fled from the house, from the town, from the country. They told me she was not dead. She was dead to me — dead as I am now. To me she is always dead, always, always! These are not tears, the moon casts queer lights on dead men's faces."

His voice trembled and ceased, and silence fell upon the little company that sat in the May moonlight over the sea. The story of human suffering is ever old, yet ever new — the dead man who had been telling his long-dead tale had himself said so, and it is true. Each of those who heard him, heard him differently; yet each felt in the story the whole depth of the pain for him which they could have felt had they stood beside him nearly seventy years ago when it all happened, when the woman he loved was suddenly restored to life with another's name upon her lips, when he himself was wounded in the first spring of his youth with a wound that never healed.

But it was not his manner when alive to excite sympathy for his own sufferings, nor was he now willing to let his tale end thus.

"You are silent," he said, "and you are sorry for me. I thank you. Sympathy exists in the human heart, unexplained by learned treatises about the pursuit of happiness. We shudder at the sight of a ghastly wound, and the tears rise to our eyes as we listen to the story of a broken heart. It is not for me that you are sad — it is for what I have told you. There are many sad stories — not all mine."

"Tell us a sad story," said Diana. "I love sad stories."

"I saw a beggar die upon the high road. His story was sad enough. He had seen many misfortunes, many troubles; many pains had had their will of his racked body, many days and years of suffering had piled their load upon his aching shoulders; grief knew him and tracked him down, and sorrow, the pitiless driver of men, had stung each galled wound of his soul with cunning cruelty, goading and sparing not as he came near to the end. The silver hairs were few which hung straggling from beneath the torn brim of his battered hat, and the furrows were many and deep upon his colourless face. His dim eyes peered from their worn and sunken sockets as though still faintly striving, striving to the very last, to understand those things which it was not given him to understand. Feebly his two hands clasped his crooked staff, road-worn and splintered by the flints; upon one foot still clung the fragments of a shoe, the other had no shoe at all, and as he stood he lifted the foot that was bare and tried to rest it upon the scanty bit of dusty leather which only half covered the other, as though to ease it from the cruel road, while he steadied himself feebly with his stick. Had there been the least fragment of a wall near him, a bit of fence, even a tree, he would have tried to lean upon it; but there was nothing — nothing but the broad flinty road, with the ditch dug deep upon each side, nothing but the cold grey sky, the black north wind that began to whirl up the dust, scattering here and there big flakes of wet snow, and, far away behind, the barking of the dogs that had driven him from the gate while the churls who lingered there after their day's work laughed and made rough jokes upon him. A little boy, the son of one of those fellows, had taken a stone and had thrown it after the old man — the missile had struck him in the back and he had bowed himself lower and limped away; he was used to it — people often threw stones at him, and sometimes they hit him. What was one blow more to him, one wound more ? The end could not be far.

"So he rested his naked foot upon the other, now that he was out of reach of harm. He could hear the dogs barking still, but dogs never chased him long; they would not come after him now. The boy could not throw stones to such a distance either, and would not take the trouble to pursue him, though one of the men had laughed when the old man was hit, and another had said it was a good shot. He might rest for a while, if it were rest to lean upon his staff and feel the bitter wind driving the snowflakes through the rents in his clothing, and whirling up the half frozen flint dust to his sore and weary eyes. The night was coming on. He would have to sleep in the ditch. It would not be the first time — if only he could get a mile or two farther he might find some bit of arched bridge across the ditch which would shelter him, or a stone wall; or even perhaps, a farmhouse where he should not be stoned from the door and might be suffered to sleep upon the straw in an outhouse. Such luck as that was rare indeed, and the mere thought of the straw, the pitiful dream that if he could struggle a little farther he might get shelter from the wind and snow, was enough to bring something like a shadowy look of hope into his wretched face. With a great effort he began to walk again, bending low to face the blast, starving, lame, and aching in every bone, but struggling still and peering through the gathering gloom in the vain hope of finding a night's resting-place."

"I would have killed the boy who threw the stone, if I had been you!" exclaimed Lady Brenda in ready sympathy.

"Alas, dear madam, I was dead myself," said Heine. "It was only the other day. Well, as I said, he struggled on; but the end was at hand. The road grew worse, for it had been mended and the small broken stones lay thick together, rough and bristling. He could hardly drag his steps over them. In the darkness he struck his naked foot against one sharp flint that was larger than the rest; he stumbled and with a low cry fell headlong upon the jagged surface. His hands were wounded and the blood trickled from them in the dark, wetting the stones more quickly than did the falling snow; his face, too, had been cut. For some moments he struggled to rise, but he was too weak, too utterly spent; then he rolled upon one side and rested his bruised face upon his torn hands and lay quite still, while the wind howled louder and the snow-flakes fell more thickly upon his rags and his wounds, upon the sorrows of his soul and the pains of his body. One long breath he drew — it was more than an hour since he had fallen.

"God be merciful to me! ' he murmured, and again, ' God be merciful to me, for I think it is the end. And the Angel of the Lord came in the storm and the darkness and touched his forehead; and it was the end. The snow buried him that night and the north wind sang his funeral dirge."

"How terribly sad!" exclaimed Diana in deep sympathy.

"To think that such things happen! " said Lady Brenda and Gwendoline in one breath.

" Do you think it is the fact, or the way the fact is told, which brings the tears to your eyes ? " asked the poet. "If I had stated the fact thus: an old beggar died in a snow-storm; shortly before he died a little boy hit him with a stone — I say, if I put the thing in its simplest expression, would you feel as deep a sympathy ? I believe not. I told you a long story — a true one, if you please — to show you that your sympathy could be commanded, could be excited, by my words. You asked me of a thing concerning myself — I was not willing to state it as a fact, I was obliged to state it with such accessories as should make you feel uncomfortable in my favour, so to say. All of which proves that man, living or dead, is a detestably selfish creature, and not very strong at that. When he has command of his audience he uses it unmercifully to rouse sympathy in others. When his audience has command of him, he generally makes a fool of himself. I once visited Goethe. In half an hour I could find nothing better to say to him than that there were good plums on the road from Jena to Weimar and that I was writing a Faust. I got no applause for my plums and no sympathy for my Faust; I never wrote the Faust, but I never ate plums from that day. So much for knowing how to manage one's hearers."

"I wish you would not talk in that light way, after what you have been telling us so earnestly," said Gwendoline.

"I cannot help it, dear madam," answered Heine.

"I have a particular talent for being easily moved; and when I am moved I shed tears, and when I shed tears it seems very foolish and I at once try to laugh at myself — or at the first convenient object which falls in my way. For tears hurt — bitterly sometimes, and it is best to get rid of them in any way one can, provided that one does not put them beyond one's reach altogether."

"People talk a great deal of sweet pain," remarked Augustus. " I do not understand how anything which hurts can be sweet at the same time."

"Can you understand how a thing sweet at the time may hurt afterwards ? "

"Perfectly," answered Chard.

"Then can you not understand how when the thing hurts it is pleasant to remember that it was once sweet? It is very simple. By no means all pains are sweet, but on the whole there are enough of the sort to supply poets for many years to come. There are men among us here, whose sufferings are bitter still — very bitter."

"Shall we ever know any of your companions ? " asked Lady Brenda.

"They would be delighted, I am sure. We rarely have an opportunity of exchanging words with living people — it has never happened to me before. Mr. Chard has discovered a rather dangerous way of making it possible, and I am delighted to see that you are not in the least nervous. That shows how greatly ideas have changed in thirty years. When I was alive there was something that made one's flesh creep in the idea of talking with a dead man. You have overcome all that. If Mr. Chard will only continue his experiments there is no reason why we dead men should not play a real part in society."

"I see no objection whatever," said Lady Brenda. "I am sure, if they are all like you, it would be most charming. But, after all, you may only be some one who knows all about Heine and talks delightfully about him."

"Will you let me look at your hand?" asked the poet, bending forward and taking Lady Brenda's fingers in his. "What a beautiful ring, I always loved sapphires — "

But Lady Brenda turned pale, and after a moment's struggle with her. convictions she nervously snatched her hand away.

"Oh you are — you are really dead — I can feel it in your fingers," she cried. After that, Lady Brenda ceased to be sceptical.

"There is only one point upon which I must warn you in regard to my friends," resumed Heine, smiling at Lady Brenda's discomfiture. " They wear the dress of their age — as I do. You must trust to them to avoid your servants, who might be surprised — or else you must warn your servants that some friends are coming to stay with you who wear the costumes of their country."

"I will manage that," said Augustus, confidently.