Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

yet no one ever heard

to,. her grumble.

Once, when a cold confined her upstairs, I found her and her old maid, Aline, who had been with her at the Tuileries, busy pasting ancient cuttings from newspapers into huge sorap-books. The maid, far more shaky than the mistress, but at least in possession of her eyesight, was on all-fours on the floor; the Empress, seated in her chair, was pointing with a stick to the cuttings she wished pasted into a partioular place occasionally, under the influence of an attack of mistrust, insisting on having the whole monstrous book lifted on to the table, and seizing the paste-brush herself. But gently, firmly, with Tuileries courtesy, Aline would intervene: "Non, Majesté,... pas comme cela, . c'est tout à fait de travers"; and with the same gentle firmness the book would be removed, the brush extriosted from the Empress's obstinately clutching fingers, and the former operator would resume operations. Whereupon the Empress would shrug her shoulders. "Aline croit toujours qu'il n'y a qu'elle pour bien faire les choses!" she would say, and resign herself to the inevitable. The relation between those two always touched and amused me deeply.

Only once do I remember the Empress seeming to pity herself. She had always detested needlework, but now took to knitting comforters and cholera - belts for her wounded officers. I cannot say these efforts progressed very

quickly, and the aid of Aline and her other maid was invoked at the finishing-off parts and other orises. One day when I went into her sittingroom she was busily rolling into a ball a skein of wool that was stretched across two chair-baoks: "Vous voyez à quoi je suis réduite," she said. It stabbed one's heart to hear her. She knew that, . . . and that is why she never complained.

Of her amazing physical vigour at ninety-three the following adventure will give an idea. She had been going upstairs to dress for dinner, and, arrived at the top, thought there was still a step. Finding none, in order to avoid falling on her face, she hurled herself backwards with such violence that she fell down the whole flight, her head bumping on each of its twelve steps. Her rheumatic wrists were slightly sprained and she could not get up, but luokily Antonia and Aline heard her cries for help and picked her up. She hated a fuss being made over her, and was not feeling in the least inclined to faint. When, therefore, Aline reappeared with a glass of cognao, she was so provoked, and rejected the stimulant with such emphasis, that it flew over the banisters, glass and all,

Up to a few years ago time had left but little mark on her, and there was no diminution of her beauty-the touching majestic beauty of a once supremely beautiful woman who, if I may again quote Lord Rosebery's dedication, had

"lived on the summits of the loveliness of the hat was spendour, sorrow, and catas- well received. That vision was trophe with supreme dignity so striking that I recorded the and courage." The face was impression in my diary, little of the pallor of ivory, the thinking it was to be the last. figure full and gracious, and in And when in June news came spite of her rheumatism she of the success of the operawas erect and active. But with- tion, I had been counting, as in the last five or six years she never before, on seeing her became smaller and thinner, again in a week or two. also rather deaf, and with the younger and more radiant onooming of blindness she than ever in the triumph of began to stoop; but one al- her recovered sight! ways felt it was because she chose to, rather than because it was inevitable. And, strange to relate, in spite of her blindness, if some small catastrophe happened, a tiny crack in a huge plate-glass window, for instance, which it was hoped would escape her notice, the event proved the vainness of that hope. To the last, in moments of fireand at least one such occurred whenever one saw her-forty years would fall from her like a garment. Forty? That is to understate the case. . . . Let us rather say sixty! Personally, I never got accustomed to this transfiguration, and was always amazed afresh when it happened.

Going for the last time through what I have written, and considering the lines in the portrait here attempted, I see that I have spoken more than once of the brilliancy of the Empress's intellect, yet seem to have dwelt chiefly on its lapses! . . .

This is inevitable. She wrote no books, and during the years I knew her took no public action. I am aware that M. Marconi was thunderstruck at her grasp of the problems of wireless telegraphy; that M. Santos Dumont, and later on the officers of the Royal Aeroplane Factory, were amazed at her knowledge of their particular subject. But to say so here does not carry us much farther.

All you can go by is the class of books she read habitually, and how she discussed them afterwards; above all, by her conversation, in which it was impossible not to feel the easy power of her brain, and the complete independence and originality of her points of view.

The very last time I saw her, in November 1919, it was a bright sunny day and she had just come in from the garden. She had on a new hat, and looked so magnificent that I stood astonished on the threshold. Whereupon she cried out, "Qu' avez-vous done? Entrez-entrez !" It would have been impossible to give the real reason of that pause, for, to her, the association of As for lapses. . . the spots old age and beauty W88 on the sun are far more inludiorous, but an allusion to teresting symptoms of that

monstrous fever-patient's temperature, than statistios as to what amount of heat he emits per millionth part of a second.

I have no doubt that readers will be struck, too, by the contradiotions in the Empress's personality as described by the present writer.

I cannot help it. They were there. And this, I think is the reason why she has been so imperfectly appreciated,-— for the world resents being puzzled. On the other hand, the latter part of her life is one strong, clear line, that more than redeems the uncertainty of other lines-and this, I believe, is the impress she will be found to have left on the pages of history. Can anyCan anything transcend the dignity of that long, iron silence? Can the world ever forget that supreme spectacle of one who knew how to fall?

To those who have known her in all the matchless nobility of her spirit, in all the miracle of her undimmed mental power, this death is not like the passing of a human being. It is as if the Temple at Pæstum had been suddenly overthrown by an earthquake.

Probably she never realised the depths of reverence and affection, the passionate admiration she inspired. She had long since lost the habit of expecting or asking anything for herself, and, as I have said, hers was not an imaginative tender nature-not one of those in the house of whose spirit

every hearth that blazed in youth holds a flame, even in extreme old age. extreme old age. She stood, and was capable of standing alone, and it was difficult to do anything for her, except, now and again, bring interest and stimulus into her intelleotual life. I think she took delight in the devotion of those few she may be said to have been fond of, and among these Madame d'Attainville and Count Joseph Primoli, both of them relations, were prominent. I am certain, too, that she was glad in the knowledge that those whom she had befriended -whether old members of her group, like the present writer, or the very last batch of young officers who passed through her hospital-were not ungrateful, and, above all, counted on her as the one friend who would never fail.

Otherwise she had won for herself an independence of sympathy that, if in a certain sense rather inhuman, was counterbalanced by her most human, phenomenal, and tireless pre-occupation with the sorrows and the joys of others. In a word, she bad outlived the power of reoeiving consolation, but had become herself the great Consoler.

Possibly that which was, and is, in the hearts of those that loved her may reach her yet, and be of some use to her in the place she has gone to. If one did not venture to believe this, the sorrow of her death would be almost unbearable.

VIGNETTES.

BY ELLA MACMAHON.

XII. THE CRUSADERS.

THE MALE CRUSADER was the first to make his appearance in our midst. He was English, of course, and had come from England in order to awaken us (the Irish) to our great heritage. The manner in which he opened his orusade was scarcely propitious. To begin with, he bought Timothy Feehan's deserted and tumbledown cabin at a fancy price. Timothy had some time before been put in possession by the Government of a brand-new cottage, built of mountain granite after a hideous architectural design, but trim, compaot, and weather-proof to a degree never before dreamed of by its ocoupants. Hence it came about that Timothy should have in his possession a derelict mound of stone and rotten thatch within a hundred yards or so of his new dwelling, which, till the Crusader appeared, it had never entered into his wildest imagination to suppose that any person would even take a present of, far less buy from him. It followed, therefore, that when the Crusader offered to purchase it, Timothy began to be suspicious of him, or for we are at all times suspicious of the stranger within our gates in Ireland-that his suspicion should be increased by the faot of any presumably sane

person offering unasked ridiculously high price for an obviously bad bargain. The Crusader did this-as later on he confided to me-in order to treat the vendor generously; and added that in his belief all that the Irish people needed was generous treatment on the part of England, and he was trying to lead the way. When I tried to explain this to Timothy, he exclaimed

"Generous how are ye? 'Faith ye'd be a queer omadhaun if ye believed the like o' that. An' I'll tell ye this, 'tis up to no good he is, if it isn't that he's not all in it! Anny way, ye'd be moidered in yer ears listening to the talk he has out of him."

It was unfortunate for the Crusader that he happened to be the possessor of what is sometimes described in Ireland as a "tall English accent," a possession of which he was naturally unconscious. It was also, perhaps, a drawback that he should have come straight to Ireland after four years spent in the mental atmosphere of Balliol College, Oxford. Any person fortunate enough to be acquainted with Ireland and Balliol will easily apprehend the disadvantage under which he laboured in this respect. Still, he might possibly have escaped arousing

the worst suspicions had he not further chosen to array himself in a kilt. This garment (which no one in the village had ever seen before) he believed to be the traditional attire of the male inhabitant of Ireland in the days when our Ireland was peopled with those mixed tribes which certain ardent patriots persist in regarding as having formed a nation. The kilt was of thick frieze and the colour of saffron. It was not unbecoming when worn, as the Crusader wore it, with a certain grace, and with the addition on high days and full state of a saffron shawl draped over one shoulder in Highland fashion. In itself this peculiar garb, worn by an English gentleman who could not boast of an infinitesimal drop of Irish blood in his veins, might have been accepted as the academic robes of an English college, or even the national dress of some Anglo-Saxon tribe, even though feminine feminine sensibility among us was scandalised by its brevity (the fashion of the short skirt not having yet penetrated to our village), and the sight of manly legs unolothed about the knee-but that the Crusader chose to attend the funeral of a local Patriot of many imprisonments, and therefore high esteem, thus garbed. The village to a man leaped to the conclusion that another insult to Ireland was thereby intended, no less than an unpardonable indignity to the dead.

A few pleas in extenuation were indeed put forth. I my

self tried to explain the supposedly Hibernian origin of the saffron kilt by the fact that certain Irish gentlemen of high position and "popular" proclivities have been known to go so far as to wear it even in Piccadilly; but I met with little success. Piccadilly and its standards carry no weight among us, whereas local feeling carries a great deal. True, Timothy Feehan, whose palm was still tingling from the unaccustomed impact of a considerable sum of money, asserted not for the first time-that "Sure the creature, God help him! wasn't all in it," and even hazarded the surmise that in a country "so quare an' English as England, may be 'twas the fashion to go to funerals in all the colours of the rainbow." But these well-meaning efforts were decisively discounted for what they were worth by his neighbours.

On the other hand, the Crusader remained blandly unconscious of all this; indeedso much for our Irish powers of dissimulation or perfection of manners, which you will— he assured me not long after that he was "winning them". "them" being the inhabitants of the village and various stray farmhouses within a radius of ten miles. To this end, moreover, and with that intimate knowledge of Irish character which strangers in Ireland so often believe themselves to possess in large measure, he was in the habit of attending Mass on Sundays at the Roman Catholic chapel,

« ZurückWeiter »