Du Maurier George
The Martian: A Novel
"Oh yes; damn him, I remember!" said Barty, who was three or four inches over six feet, and quite openly vain of his good looks.
Leah. "Well, then, pray be cautious with this Monsieur Paroly you think so much of because he's French. Let him talk – interview him– ask him all about his family, if he's got one – his children, and all that; play a game of billiards with him – talk French politics – dance 'La Paladine' – make him laugh – make him smoke one of those strong Trichinopoli cigars Bob gave you for the tops of omnibuses – make him feel your biceps – teach him how to play cup and ball – give him a sketch – then bring him in to tea. Madame Cornelys will be there, and Julia Ironsides, and Ida, who'll talk French by the yard. Then we'll show him the St. Bernards and Minerva, and I'll give him an armful of Gloire de Dijon roses, and shake him warmly by the hand, so that he won't feel ill‐natured towards us; and we'll get him out of the house as quick as possible."
Thus prepared, Barty awaited M. Paroly, and this is a free rendering of what M. Paroly afterwards wrote about him:
"With a mixture of feelings difficult to analyze and define, I bade adieu to the sage and philosopher of Cheyne Row, and had myself transported in my hansom to the abode of the other great sommité littéraire in London, the light one – M. Josselin, to whom we in France also are so deeply in debt.
"After a longish drive through sordid streets we reached a bright historic vicinity and a charming hill, and my invisible Jehu guided me at the great trot by verdant country lanes. We turned through lodge gates into a narrow drive in a well‐kept garden where there was a lawn of English greenness, on which were children and nurses and many dogs, and young people who played at the lawn‐tennis.
"The door of the house was opened by a charming young woman in black with a white apron and cap, like a waitress at the Bouillon Duval, who guided me through a bright corridor full of pictures and panoplies, and then through a handsome studio to a billiard‐room, where M. Josselin was playing at the billiard to himself all alone.
"M. Josselin receives me with jovial cordiality; he is enormously tall, enormously handsome, like a drum‐major of the Imperial Guard, except that his lip and chin are shaved and he has slight whiskers; very well dressed, with thick curly hair, and regular features, and a singularly sympathetic voice: he is about thirty‐five.
"I have to decline a game of billiards, and refuse a cigar, a very formidable cigar, very black and very thick and very long. I don't smoke, and am no hand at a cue. Besides, I want to talk about Étoiles Mortes, about Les Trépassées de François Villon, about Déjanire et Dalila!
"M. Josselin speaks French as he writes it, in absolute perfection; his mother, he tells me, was from
Normandy – the daughter of fisherfolk in Dieppe; he was at school in Paris, and has lived there as an art student.
"He does not care to talk about Les Trépassées or Les Étoiles, or any of his immortal works.
"He asks me if I'm a good swimmer, and can do la coupe properly; and leaning over his billiard‐table he shows me how it ought to be done, and dilates on the merits of that mode of getting through the water. He confides to me that he suffers from a terrible nostalgia – a consuming desire to do la coupe in the swimming‐baths of Passy against the current; to take a header à la hussarde with his eyes open and explore the bed of the Seine between Grenelle and the Île des Cygnes – as he used to do when he was a school‐boy – and pick up mussels with his teeth.
"Then he explains to me the peculiar virtues of his stove, which is almost entirely an invention of his own, and shows me how he can regulate the heat of the room to the fraction of a degree centigrade, which he prefers to Fahrenheit – just as he prefers metres and centimetres to inches and feet – and ten to twelve!
"After this he performs some very clever tricks with billiard‐balls; juggles three of them in each hand simultaneously, and explains to me that this is an exceptional achievement, as he only sees out of one eye, and that no acrobat living could do the same with one eye shut.
"I quite believe him, and wonder and admire, and his face beams with honest satisfaction – and this is the man who wrote La quatrième Dimension!
"Then he tells me some very funny French school-boy stories; he delights in my hearty laughter; they are capital stories, but I had heard them all before – when I was at school.
"'And now, M. Josselin,' I say, 'à propos of that last story you've just told me; in the Trépassées de François Villon you have omitted "la très‐sage Héloïse" altogether.'
"'Oh, have I? How stupid of me! – Abélard and all that! Ah well – there's plenty of time – nous allons arranger tout ça! All that sort of thing comes to me in the night, you know, when I'm half asleep in bed – a – a – I mean after lunch in the afternoon, when I take my siesta.'
"Then he leads me into his studio and shows me pencil studies from the life, things of ineffable beauty of form and expression – things that haunt the memory.
"'Show me a study for Déjanire,' I say.
"'Oh! I'll draw Déjanire for you,' and he takes a soft pencil and a piece of smooth card‐board, and in five minutes draws me an outline of a naked woman on a centaur's back, a creature of touching beauty no other hand in the world could produce – so aristocratically delicately English and of to‐day – so severely, so nobly and classically Greek. C'est la chasteté même – mais ce n'est pas Déjanire!
"He gives me this sketch, which I rechristen Godiva, and value as I value few things I possess.
"Then he shows me pencil studies of children's heads, from nature, and I exclaim:
"'O Heaven, what a dream of childhood! Childhood is never so beautiful as that.'
"'Oh yes it is, in England, I assure you,' says he. 'I'll show you my children presently; and you, have you any children?'
"'Alas! no,' I reply; 'I am a bachelor.'
"I remark that from time to time, just as the moon veils itself behind a passing cloud, the radiance of his brilliant and jovial physiognomy is eclipsed by the expression of a sadness immense, mysterious, infinite; this is followed by a look of angelic candor and sweetness and gentle heroism, that moves you strangely, even to the heart, and makes appeal to all your warmest and deepest sympathies – the look of a very masculine Joan of Arc! You don't know why, but you feel you would make any sacrifice for a man who looks at you like that, follow him to the death – lead a forlorn hope at his bidding.
"He does not exact from me anything so arduous as this, but passing round my neck his powerful arm, he says:
"'Come and drink some tea; I should like to present you to my wife.'
"And he leads me through another corridor to a charming drawing‐room that gives on to the green lawn of the garden.
"There are several people there taking the tea.
"He presents me first to Madame Josselin. If the husband is enormously handsome, the wife is a beauty absolutely divine; she, also, is very tall – très élégante; she has soft wavy black hair, and eyes and eyebrows d'un noir de jais, and a complexion d'une blancheur de lis, with just a point of carmine in the cheeks. She does not say much – she speaks French with difficulty; but she expresses with her smiling eyes so cordial and sincere a welcome that one feels glad to be in the same room with her, one feels it is a happy privilege, it does one good – one ceases to feel one may possibly be an intruder – one almost feels one is wanted there.
"I am then presented to three or four other ladies; and it would seem that the greatest beauties of London have given each other rendezvous in Madame Josselin's salon – this London, where are to be found the most beautiful women in the world and the ugliest.
"First, I salute the Countess of Ironsides – ah, mon Dieu, la Diane chasseresse – la Sapho de Pradier! Then Madame Cornelys, the wife of the great sculptor, who lives next door – a daughter of the ancient gods of Greece! Then a magnificent blonde, an old friend of theirs, who speaks French absolutely like a Frenchwoman, and says thee and thou to M. Josselin, and introduces me to her brother, un vrai type de colosse bon enfant, d'une tenue irréprochable [thank you, M. Paroly], who also speaks the French of France, for he was at school there – a school‐fellow of our host.
"There are two or three children, girls, more beautiful than anything or anybody else in the house – in the world, I think! They give me tea and cakes, and bread and butter; most delicious tartines, as thin as wafers, and speak French well, and relate to me the biographies of their animals, une vraie ménagerie which I afterwards have to visit – immense dogs, rabbits, hedgehogs, squirrels, white mice, and a gigantic owl, who answers to the name of Minerva.
"I find myself, ma foi, very happy among these wonderful people, and preserve an impression of beauty, of bonhomie, of naturalness and domestic felicity quite unlike anything I have ever been privileged to see – an impression never to be forgotten.
"But as for Étoiles Mortes and Les Trépassées de François Villon, I really have to give them up; the beautiful big dogs are more important than all the books in the world, even the master's – even the master himself!
"However, I want no explanation to see and understand how M. Josselin has written most of his chefs‐d'œuvre from the depths of a happy consciousness habituated to all that is most graceful and charming and seductive in real life – and a deeply sympathetic, poignant, and compassionate sense of the contrast to all this.
"Happy mortal, happy family, happy country where grow (poussent) such people, and where such children flourish! The souvenir of that so brief hour spent at Gretna Lodge is one of the most beautiful souvenirs of my life – and, above all, the souvenir of the belle châtelaine who filled my hansom with beautiful roses culled by her own fair hand, which gave me at parting that cordial English pressure so much more suggestive of Au revoir than Adieu!
"It is with sincere regret one leaves people who part with one so regretfully.
"Alphonse Paroly."
Except that good and happy women have no history, I should almost like to write the history of Barty's wife, and call it the history of the busiest and most hard‐working woman in Great Britain.
Barty left everything to her – to the very signing of cheques. He would have nothing to do with any business of any kind.
He wouldn't even carve at lunch or dinner. Leah did, unless I was there.
It is but fair to say he worked as hard as any man I know. When he was not writing or drawing, he was thinking about drawing or writing; when they got to Marsfield, he hardly ever stirred outside the grounds.
There he would garden with gardeners or cut down trees, or do carpenter's work at his short intervals of rest, or groom a horse.
How often have I seen him suddenly drop a spade or axe or saw or curry‐comb, and go straight off to a thatched gazebo he had built himself, where writing materials were left, and write down the happy thought that had occurred; and then, pipe in mouth, back to his gardening or the rest!
I also had a gazebo close to his, where I read blue‐books and wrote my endless correspondence with the help of a secretary – only too glad, both of us, to be disturbed by festive and frolicsome young Bartys of either sex – by their dogs – by their mother!
Leah's province it was to attend to all the machinery by which life was carried on in this big house, and social intercourse, and the education of the young, and endless hospitalities.
She would even try to coach her boys in Latin and Euclid during their preparation times for the school where they spent the day, two miles off. Such Latin! such geometry! She could never master the ablative absolute, nor what used to be called at Brossard's le que retranché, nor see the necessity of demonstrating by A + B what was sufficiently obvious to her without.
"Who helps you in your Latin, my boy?" says the master, with a grin.
"My father," says Geoffrey, too loyal to admit it was his mother who had coached him wrong.
"Ah, I suppose he helps you with your Euclid also?" says the master, with a broader grin still.
"Yes, sir," says Geoffrey.
"Your father's French, I suppose?"
"I dare say, sir," says Geoffrey.
"Ah, I thought so!"
All of which was very unfair to Barty, whose Latin, like that of most boys who have been brought up at a French school, was probably quite as good as the English school‐master's own, except for its innocence of quantities; and Blanchet and Legendre are easier to learn than Euclid, and stick longer in the memory; and Barty remembered well.
Then, besides the many friends who came to the pleasant house to stay, or else for lunch or tea or dinner, there were pious pilgrims from all parts of the world, as to a shrine – from Paris, from Germany, Italy, Norway, and Sweden; from America especially. Leah had to play the hostess almost every day of her life, and show off her lion and make him roar and wag his tail and stand on his hind legs – a lion that was not always in the mood to tumble and be shown off, unless the pilgrims were pretty and of the female sex.
Barty was a man's man par excellence, and loved to forgather with men. The only men he couldn't stand were those we have agreed to call in modern English the Philistines and the prigs – or both combined, as they can sometimes be; and this objection of his would have considerably narrowed his circle of male acquaintances but that the Philistines and the prigs, who so detest each other, were so dotingly fond of Barty, and ran him to earth in Marsfield.
The Philistines loved him for his world‐wide popularity; the prigs in spite of it! They loved him for himself alone – because they couldn't help it, I suppose – and lamented over him as over a fallen angel.
He was happiest of all with the good denizens of Bohemia, who have known want and temptation and come unscathed out of the fire, but with their affectations and insincerities and conventionalities all burnt away.
Good old Bohemia – alma mater dolorosa; stern old gray she‐wolf with the dry teats – marâtre au cœur de pierre! It is not a bad school in which to graduate, if you can do so without loss of principle or sacrifice of the delicate bloom of honor and self‐respect.
Next to these I think he loved the barbarians he belonged to on his father's side, who, whatever their faults, are seldom prigs or Philistines; and then he loved the proletarians, who had good, straightforward manners and no pretension – the laborer, the skilled artisan, especially the toilers of the sea.
In spite of his love of his own sex, he was of the kind that can go to the devil for a pretty woman.
He did not do this; he married one instead, fortunately for himself and for his children and for her, and stuck to her and preferred her society to any society in the world. Her mere presence seemed to have an extraordinarily soothing influence on him; it was as though life were short, and he could never see enough of her in the allotted time and space; the chronic necessity of her nearness to him became a habit and a second nature – like his pipe, as he would say.
Still, he was such a slave to his own æsthetic eye and ever‐youthful heart that the sight of lovely woman pleased him more than the sight of anything else on earth; he delighted in her proximity, in the rustle of her garments, in the sound of her voice; and lovely woman's instinct told her this, so that she was very fond of Barty in return.
He was especially popular with sweet, pretty young girls, to whom his genial, happy, paternal manner always endeared him. They felt as safe with Barty as with any father or uncle, for all his facetious love‐making; he made them laugh, and they loved him for it, and they forgot his Apolloship, and his Lionhood, and his general Immensity, which he never remembered himself.
It is to be feared that women who lacked the heavenly gift of good looks did not interest him quite so much, whatever other gifts they might possess, unless it were the gift of making lovely music. The little brown nightingale outshone the brilliant bird of paradise if she were a true nightingale; if she were very brown indeed, he would shut his eyes and listen with all his ears, rapt, as in a heavenly dream. And the closed lids would moisten, especially the lid that hid the eye that couldn't see – the emotional one! – although he was the least lachrymose of men, since it was with such a dry eye he wrote what I could scarcely read for my tears.
But his natural kindliness and geniality made him always try and please those who tried to please him, beautiful or the reverse, whether they succeeded or not; and he was just as popular with the ducks and geese as with the swans and peacocks and nightingales and birds of paradise. The dull, commonplace dames who prosed and buzzed and bored, the elderly intellectual virgins who knew nothing of life but what they had read – or written – in "Tendenz" novels, yet sadly rebuked him, more in sorrow than in anger, for this passage or that in his books, about things out of their ken altogether, etc.
His playful amenity disarmed the most aggressive bluestocking, orthodox or Unitarian, Catholic or Hebrew – radicals, agnostics, vegetarians, teetotalers, anti‐vaccinationists, anti‐vivisectionists – even anti‐things that don't concern decent women at all, whether married or single.
It was only when his privacy was invaded by some patronizing, loud‐voiced nouvelle‐riche with a low‐bred physiognomy that no millions on earth could gild or refine, and manners to match; some foolish, fashionable, would‐be worldling, who combined the arch little coquetries and impertinent affectations of a spoilt beauty with the ugliness of an Aztec or an Esquimau; some silly, titled old frump who frankly ignored his tea‐making wife and daughters and talked to him only – and only about her grotesque and ugly self – and told him of all the famous painters who had wanted to paint her for the last hundred years – it was only then he grew glum and reserved and depressed and made an unfavorable impression on the other sex.
What it must have cost him not to express his disgust more frankly! for reticence on any matter was almost a torture to him.
Most of us have a mental sanctum to which we retire at times, locking the door behind us; and there we think of high and beautiful things, and hold commune with our Maker; or count our money, or improvise that repartee the gods withheld last night, and shake hands with ourselves for our wit; or caress the thought of some darling, secret wickedness or vice; or revel in dreams of some hidden hate, or some love we mustn't own; and curse those we have to be civil to whether we like them or not, and nurse our little envies till we almost get to like them.
There we remember all the stupid and unkind things we've ever said or thought or done, and all the slights that have ever been put on us, and secretly plan the revenge that never comes off – because time has softened our hearts, let us hope, when opportunity serves at last!
That Barty had no such holy of holies to creep into I feel pretty sure – unless it was the wifely heart of Leah; whatever came into his head came straight out of his mouth; he had nothing to conceal, and thought aloud, for all the world to hear; and it does credit, I think, to the singular goodness and guilelessness of his nature that he could afford to be so outspoken through life and yet give so little offence to others as he did. His indiscretion did very little harm, and his naïve self‐revelation only made him the more lovable to those who knew him well.
They were poor creatures, the daws who pecked at that manly heart, so stanch and warm and constant.
As for Leah, it was easy to see that she looked upon her husband as a fixed star, and was well pleased to tend and minister and revolve, and shine with no other light than his; it was in reality an absolute adoration on her part. But she very cleverly managed to hide it from him; she was not the kind of woman that makes a doormat of herself for the man she loves. She kept him in very good order indeed.
It was her theory that female adoration is not good for masculine vanity, and that he got quite enough of it outside his own home; and she would make such fun of him and his female adorers all over the world that he grew to laugh at them himself, and to value a pat on the back and a hearty "Well done, Barty!" from his wife more than
"The blandishments of all the womankind
In Europe and America combined."
Gentle and kind and polite as she was, however, she could do battle in defence of her great man, who was so backward at defending himself; and very effective battle too.
As an instance among many, illustrating her method of warfare: Once at an important house a very immense personage (who had an eye for a pretty woman) had asked to be introduced to her and had taken her down to supper; a very immense personage indeed, whose fame had penetrated to the uttermost ends of the earth and deservedly made his name a beloved household word wherever our tongue is spoken, so that it was in every Englishman's mouth all over the world – as Barty's is now.
Leah was immensely impressed, and treated his elderly Immensity to a very full measure of the deference that was his due; and such open homage is not always good for even the Immensest Immensities – it sometimes makes them give themselves immense airs. So that this particular Immensity began mildly but firmly to patronize Leah. This she didn't mind on her own account, but when he said, quite casually:
"By‐the‐way, I forget if I know your good husband; do I?"
– she was not pleased, and immediately answered:
"I really can't say; I don't think I ever heard him mention your name!"
This was not absolutely veracious on Leah's part; for to Barty in those days this particular great man was a god, and he was always full of him. But it brought the immense one back to his bearings at once, and he left off patronizing and was almost humble.
Anyhow, it was a lie so white that the recording angel will probably delete what there is of it with a genial smile, and leave a little blank in its place.
In an old diary of Leah's I find the following entry:
"March 6th, 1874. – Mamma and Ida Scatcherd came to stay. In the evening our sixth daughter and eighth child was born."
Julia (Mrs. Mainwaring) was this favored person – and is still. Julia and her predecessors have all lived and flourished up to now.
The Josselins had been exceptionally fortunate in their children; each new specimen seemed an even finer specimen than the last. The health of this remarkable family had been exemplary – measles, and mumps, and whooping‐cough their only ailments.
During the month of Leah's confinement Barty's nocturnal literary activity was unusually great. Night after night he wrote in his sleep, and accumulated enough raw material to last him a lifetime; for the older he grew and the more practised his hand the longer it took him to give his work the shape he wished; he became more fastidious year by year as he became less of an amateur.
One morning, a day or two before his wife's complete recovery, he found a long personal letter from Martia by his bedside – a letter that moved him very deeply, and gave him food for thought during many weeks and months and years:
"My Beloved Barty, – The time has come at last when I must bid you farewell.
"I have outstayed my proper welcome on earth as a disembodied conscience by just a hundred years, and my desire for reincarnation has become an imperious passion not to be resisted.
"It is more than a desire – it is a duty as well, a duty far too long deferred.
"Barty, I am going to be your next child. I can conceive no greater earthly felicity than to be a child of yours and Leah's. I should have been one long before, but that you and I have had so much to do together for this beautiful earth – a great debt to pay: you, for being as you are; I, for having known you.
"Barty, you have no conception what you are to me and always have been.
"I am to you but a name, a vague idea, a mysterious inspiration; sometimes a questionable guide, I fear.
You don't even believe all I have told you about myself – you think it all a somnambulistic invention of your own; and so does your wife, and so does your friend.
"O that I could connect myself in your mind with the shape I wore when I was last a living thing! No shape on earth, not either yours or Leah's or that of any child yet born to you both, is more beautiful to the eye that has learned how to see than the fashion of that lost face and body of mine.
"You wore the shape once, and so did your father and mother, for you were Martians. Leah was a Martian, and wore it too; there are many of them here – they are the best on earth, the very salt thereof. I mean to be the best of them all, and one of the happiest. Oh, help me to that!
"Barty, when I am a splendid son of yours or a sweet and lovely daughter, all remembrance of what I was before will have been wiped out of me until I die. But you will remember, and so will Leah, and both will love me with such a love as no earthly parents have ever felt for any child of theirs yet.
"Think of the poor loving soul, lone, wandering, but not lost, that will so trustfully look up at you out of those gleeful innocent eyes!
"How that soul has suffered both here and elsewhere you don't know, and never will, till the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed; and I am going to forget it myself for a few decades – sixty, seventy, eighty years perhaps; such happy years, I hope – with you for my father and Leah for my mother during some of them at least – and sweet grandchildren of yours, I hope, for my sons and daughters! Why, life to me now will be almost a holiday.
"Oh, train me up the way I should go! Bring me up to be healthy and chaste and strong and brave – never to know a mean ambition or think an ungenerous thought – never to yield to a base or unworthy temptation.
"If I'm a boy – and I want to be a boy very much (although, perhaps, a girl would be dearer to your heart) – don't let me be either a soldier or a sailor, however much I may wish it as a Josselin or a Rohan; don't bring me up to buy or sell like a Gibson, or deal in law like a Bletchley.
"Bring me up to invent, or make something useful, if it's only pickles or soap, but not to buy and sell them; bring me up to build or heal or paint or write or make music – to help or teach or please.
"If I'm a girl, bring me up to be as much like Leah as you can, and marry me to just such another as yourself, if you can find him. Whether I'm a girl or a boy, call me Marty, that my name may rhyme with yours.
"When my conscience re‐embodies itself, I want it never to know another pang of self‐reproach. And when I'm grown up, if you think it right to do so, tell me who and what I once was, that I may love you both the more; tell me how fondly I loved you when I was a bland and fleeting little animalcule, without a body, but making my home in yours – so that when you die I may know how irrevocably bound up together we must forever be, we three; and rejoice the more in your death and Leah's and my own. Teach me over again all I've ever taught you, Barty – over and over again!
"Alas! perhaps you don't believe all this! How can I give you a sign?
"There are many ways; but a law, of necessity inexorable, forbids it. Such little entity as I possess would cease to be; it was all but lost when I saved your life – and again when I told you that you were the beloved of Julia Royce. It would not do for us Martians to meddle with earthly things; the fat would soon be in the fire, I can tell you!
"Try and trust me, Barty, and give me the benefit of any doubt.
"You have work planned out for many years to come, and are now yourself so trained that you can do without me. You know what you have still to say to mankind; never write a line about which you are not sure.
"For another night or two you will be my host, and this splendid frame of yours my hostelry; on y est très bien. Be hospitable still for a little while – make the most of me; hug me tight, squeeze me warm!
"As soon as Leah is up and about and herself again you will know me no more, and no more feel the north.
"Ah! you will never realize what it is for me to bid you good‐bye, my Barty, my Barty! All that is in your big heart and powerful brain to feel of grief belongs to me, now that you are fast asleep. And your genius for sorrow, which you have never really tested yet, is as great as any gift you possess.
"Happy Barty, who have got to forty years without sounding the great depths, and all through me! what will you do without your poor devoted unknown Martia to keep watch over you and ward – to fight for you like a wild‐cat, if necessary?
"Leah must be your wild‐cat now. She has it in her to be a tigress when you are concerned, or any of her children! Next to you, Leah is the darling of my heart; for it's your heart I make use of to love her with.
"I want you to tell the world all about your Martia some day. They may disbelieve, as you do; but good fruit will come of it in the future. Martians will have a freer hand with you all, and that will be a good thing for the earth; they were trained in a good hard school – they are the Spartans of our universe.
"Such things will come to pass, before many years are over, as are little dreamt of now, and all through your wanting to swallow that dose of cyanide at No. 36 Rue des Ursulines Blanches, and my having the gumption to prevent you!
"It's a good seed that we have sown, you and I. It was not right that this beautiful planet should go much longer drifting through space without a single hope that is not an illusion, without a single hint of what life should really be, without a goal.
