A Deserter from Philistia

Front matter

A~ T>ESERTER FROM THILISTIA Jt from Philistia By 8. VHIPPS TRAIN London JAMES BOWDEN io, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 1 PUBLISHER'S NOTE. Some months ago a gentleman chanced to discover in the secret drawer of a desk which he had bought at auction a qua?iiity of loose manuscript. This, out of mere idle curiosity, he sorted and arranged, becoming so interested in its perusal while placing it in order that he concluded to edit it for publication. It was claimed by the auctioneer who sold it that the desk had been the property of a celebrated actress, but he was unable to furnish the lady's name, nor was it possible for the purchaser to identify her by means of her MS., as throughout her history she had made use of initials only in referring both to persons and places. Himself a man of wide acquaintance with the stage, as well as with the social world, Mr. J considered that where he was baffled in an attempt at identification others were not likely to be more successful.

Therefore, having taken the additional precaution to change the initials of the names, which he filled in according to his fancy as they occurred in the MS., he has thought it no harm to offer these memoirs to tlie public. I

Chapter I

To-day Lisa was married. A simple sentence that, and how easily written ! My pen slipped as smoothly over the paper as if I were writing " How do you do ? It is a pleasant day." My God ! my God ! How have I been crucified this day ! How great agony can a woman's heart endure and not break ! Yet I bore it well, even kissing my girl's husband and bidding him love and cherish her. Ah ! my training stood me in good stead. I smiled, I chattered, I played my part — how, did they say ? " Like a gracious sovereign bestowing the hand of a princess royal upon a noble suitor." Play actress ! cheat ! impostor ! Was it so — was it so I felt ? No, no — like a woman rather, a miserable, hapless, hopeless woman, who has no choice left her but to rend her soul with her own fingers ; to tear with deliberate, determined hands her heart from her breast, and ruthlessly, in the very face and eyes of the public, trample it beneath her own feet ; to ache, and suffer, and sob internally, while she smiles at the crowd and dances merrily to the music ofthe pipes.

Oh, the comfort of my own presence and none other ! My whole being is en deshabille ; I can loosen all the bonds that have constrained me throughout the long day, and let my face assume what look it will. If I might but talk to some one — give vent to all this agony that consumes me ! I want to throw myself and all my troubles upon some sympathising breast and moan, so relieving my heart and securing that pity which no one ever dreams of bestowing upon a woman of my profession. Why should I not, for want of a better, make blank paper my confidant ? I have always kept a brief record of events ; this which to-day for the first time has assumed the character of a transcript of emotions. What if I create a fresh interest for myself by writing out the story of my life ? And when I shall have brought it up to this day I will place it in the hands of a stern reviewer — my own conscience — and let it pronounce a critical estimate upon the ethical value of the work.

What has made such utter shipwreck of my life ? No woman has ever had greater success in the special career she has chosen than I. No woman in my position has ever received more respect and appreciation than has fallen to me. I have never been assailed by that temptation to sin which, it is said, so generally destroys the morality of women of the stage. It is no credit to me that my reputation is without stain or blemish. It would simply be impossible for me, constituted as I am, to have permitted immorality to attaint me. I cannot imagine a woman allowing her conduct to fall below the standard of her own self-respect. I am rich ; I am virtuous, talented, beautiful — there is no vanity in the remark. My beauty has long been a matter of public comment ; besides which, exquisitely lovely as my Lisa was to-day in her wedding robes, it was I, her mother, that provoked the admiration of the crowd.

She, my blessed little altar of sacrifice, chided me laughingly for outshining the bride, and even the proud and radiant husband scolded me roundly for eclipsing his little wife upon her marriage-day. What is this ? — a tear, right in the middle of the sheet ! Do not let me come to tears, O Heaven, I beseech thee ! I have a pretty hatred of damp women. Besides, what cause for tears has a woman endowed with all the advantages enumerated above ? That is my secret. Later, if I do not abandon my present purpose, I will pour it into one faithful breast, which, if I am then so minded, I can forthwith do to death without fear of criminal proceedings. I think it was that one unlicensed action of mine so long ago that has cast its shadow so darkly over my life. Do I regret it ? I cannot say. Given the same conditions, would I repeat it ?

Perhaps. Should I be a happier woman to-day if I had not committed it ? Who can tell ? To-day I am thirty-seven years old. Lisa chose that her wedding should take place upon the anniversary of my birth — my feast-day, as they say abroad. Humph ! a barmecidal feast, in very truth ! Nearly every dish upon my table is empty. But one holds satisfying and savoury viands — that containing the love which exists between my child and me. Let me look back across thirty-seven years, then, to a day when Time first had significance for me. An ungenerous moment that of my birth, bestowing and depriving in the same instant. For that brief space which gave me breath robbed my mother of the feeble spark of life which had burnt but dimly within her since she had been left, a poor, unfortunate little wife, an expectant mother scarcely out of her bridehood, to do battle with a world which held her fittingly punished for a supreme act of folly and weakness.

In the speech of that little hamlet which com posed her universe she had " made a fool of herself" by marrying a foreigner, a gay, un principled, attractive young Frenchman, a lightopera tenor, who had been sent into temporary residence in Sheraton, in order that the dry, pure air of the place might benefit and restore an over taxed voice. Rumour has it she was a village beauty. Gossip (and alas ! I fear this time the crone's voice is that of truth as well) insists he was a rogue and rascal. At all events, not many months succeeded her honeymoon before the poor " fool " awoke to the discovery that, to all intents and purposes, though death had no part in her bereave ment, she was a widow. Paul Carette, after a year's wearisome expatriation from that land of Bohemia which was so congenial to his temperament, after a twelvemonth's dreary stagnation in one of the world's kitchen-gardens, in one of those dull villages where the fairest blooms are but those of vegetables ; where the atmosphere, mental, moral, and physical, is adapted solely to the cultivation of useful crops ; where brightness and sunshine are rather feared than courted, lest they injure, by their too great potency, springing plants and tender growths — after an unsuccessful attempt to enliven this depressing monotony by a legiti mately sentimental episode, my father, divesting himself of marital obligations as easily as he had assumed them, took an essentially Gallic leave of Sheraton, and of the pretty kornblume which he had so carelessly torn from its safely-established roots.

If I speak flippantly of my father's conduct, it is not that I do not reprobate it heartily. I hold him a coward, a scoundrel, a worse than thief and brigand, to have deliberately and of set purpose acquired a treasure of inestimable value, a thing of immortal worth, only to drop it lightly from his indifferent hold into the mire of un availing regret and woe when he had made an exhaustive examination of its exquisite and lovely intricacies. I have no words harsh enough to condemn properly the man who cheats and betrays a woman, be she wife or mistress. And yet — and yet, in treating of my father's baseness, I, Pauline Carette, must needs take heed of that Divine command, so vitally qualified : " Let him that is without sin among you, cast the first stone." And so my hand falls powerless, impotent, for in sooth I, who would make the assault, am far from sinless, am guilty indeed, even in fashion like unto that I would condemn.

It is a fearful, a most sad and miserable thing, for a child to discover in itself those parental traits which it most abhors ; to seek in its own character the reproduction of the admirable features of the one parent, only to behold the detestable lineaments ofthe other. I would have moulded myself after my mother's image — Nature fashioned me more largely after that of my father. By temperament I am so akin to him that even while I pity and deprecate my mother's wrong and anguish, I can in a measure sympathise with and understand the motives that directed the dastardly conduct which occasioned it. For have I not likewise been constrained, coerced, hampered, fretted beyond the limits of my endurance by the narrow, dull, and dreary life of Sheraton village ? Have I not sought con scientiously, and with real ardour, to content myself with the companionship of turnips, carrots, and cabbages ?

Have I not tried earnestly to cultivate the belief that vegetable blooms are real flowers, and that their ofttimes delicate beauty indicates refinement and sensibility within the plant, only to be disappointed as I have watched the fair promise of higher things fade away, and the fruit develop into a mere article of utility, fit alone for the consumption of boors and clod hoppers ? Her husband's desertion left my mother stranded. She had no money, no family, no resources, and but one available friend — but he was a host in himself. James Mavis was the recently settled minister of the Sheraton Orthodox Church. He was likewise my mother's cousin, and had hoped to marry her. He lived in the parsonage with his mother, a dear, tender old soul, to whom I owe the few indulgences of my childhood. The news of her niece's misfortune no sooner became public property than Aunt Caroline hastened to her, asserting that she came as her son's ambassadress, to offer the protection and shelter of his home to her for so long a time as she should feel dis posed to accept them.

The proposition afforded Hobson's choice to the desolate woman. Fain was she in her desperate strait to comply with so happy a suggestion ; and so it was that I, danseuse, comedienne, queen of opera-bouffe, came to be born beneath the roof of that direst of all respectabilities, an Orthodox parsonage. There I existed, I grew up, I dwelt. I did not live ; I never lived until I got away from those stunting, crippling, paralysing principles and traditions. No one in that house, indeed no one in the whole village, understood me. There was too much of the alien about me for the com prehension of those excellent but circumscribed souls. My moods, impulses, instincts, astonished, disgusted, and shocked them. They would have had me follow the village pattern ; become a stolid maiden of cut-and-dried ideas and inclinations ; bound my aspirations by the most rustic limita tions ; and tread with listless, dragging feet the same pathway of deadly monotony their mothers had trod.

They reckoned without the foreign quicksilver in my veins. My mother's cousin was a man possessed of abnormal virtue and no imagination. However safe and excellent a condition this for the person enjoying it, Heaven help those of more vivid temperament whom fate brings within its shadow ! God help those of sanguine spirit who fall victims to its influence ! The atmosphere of the parsonage was as chaste as snow — and as cold. But for the occasional out-croppings of Aunt Caroline's more genial nature, even my warm Southern vivacity must have become chilled and frozen in its very infancy. But these manifestations of a livelier humour in the mother were never greatly encouraged by the son, and therefore they were kept quite generally duly repressed, much to my sorrow and regret, who would have welcomed a constant exhibition of gaiety.

James Mavis set no chamber of his mind free to the intrusion of humour. He regarded life not only seriously, but austerely ; wholly as an oppor tunity, mercifully vouchsafed us, for the saving of our souls. Any moment not devoted to that purpose was a precious interval gone to waste. The act of salvation was constantly before his eyes, draped, not in the beautiful mantle of charity and Divine clemency, but in the forbid ding habit of punishment and rigour. Laughter was the handmaiden of levity, levity that of sin, and sin was corruption ; so he argued, and, so arguing, discouraged all cause for merriment. But humour is a spring, and will not wholly be repressed, and those moments when it bubbled to the surface of Aunt Caroline's spirit and found vent were the festas of my early childhood. The dear old soul never made the most trifling jest without keeping an anxious eye to windward ; not that squall or tempest ever disturbed the cold severity of her son's face, which had but a single expression for all the varied events of life, a look of steadfast and impeccable virtue, not self-com placent nor self-righteous, but self-assured and absolutely impregnable, the look of one who has founded his house upon a rock and rests secure and satisfied as to the stability of his mansion — but because, on such occasions, there was apt to bs a deepening of the chaste lines of the counten ance which was plainly significant to one who knew him well.

How often have I mentally dashed my spirit against that flint-like exterior ! How have I longed to make that immobile face show feeling of some sort, even if it were but rage and anger ! How have I, wickedly and of malice determined, wrought against that marble self-possession, only to have my efforts recoil unsuccessfully upon my own head ! He was, by all odds, the best man, from a purely moral standpoint, I have ever known. According to such lights as were his he was just, upright, conscientious — yes, even kind and charitable ; wholly unselfish, unsparing, and in considerate of himself to the verge of martyrdom. But, if the choice were offered me of placing in the hands of a man of like excellence, for the purpose of rearing, a child of disposition and proclivities similar to mine, or of seeing that child in infancy fall victim to a mortal disease, I think, having had personal and corroding experience of such narrow and intolerant virtue, I should turn down my thumbs.

If Aunt Caroline had but lived, things might have gone better with me. She died, however, before I reached the age of eight. Hers was so sad a loss to me that I well-nigh exhausted Mr. Mavis's patience by my inquiries concerning it, and he did his best to explain the great Mystery in terms intelligible to my childish mind. But I remember that my first feeling of active rebellion against the Ruler of the Universe arose out of his well-intentioned but abortive attempts to reconcile me to my loss, by urging the fact of Divine Interposition. In answer to my passionate demand as to why Aunt Caroline died when I needed her so much, he replied that God wanted her. This undue covetousness on the part of One who had so wide and unrestricted a choice of the best things on earth, while I had so little, aroused my ire and indignation.

Fear of Mr. Mavis did not allow me to show forth the resentment that consumed me. But it continued to burn away in my little breast, until, one day, as I was walking decorously along the street with my reverend guardian, it found expression. A cart was passing heavily laden with calves on their way to market. I pointed them out to my companion. " What are those ? " I asked. " Calves," he replied. " How funny they look ! " I exclaimed. " What is the matter with them ? " " They are dead," he answered. " Why did they die ? " I inquired anxiously ; " did God want them, too ? " Mr. Mavis paused a moment. Perhaps he felt weary and unequal to another long-winded debate upon the subject ; at all events, he contented himself with a simple assent to my suggestion. "Yes," he said, "certainly; God wanted them."

I remember well the thrill of satisfaction that went through me at the discomfiture of my enemy. " Well," I said, with a toss of the head and a little laugh of malevolent triumph, " He didn't get them, did He ? " My childish irreverence gained me ill-pro portioned punishment. Horror-stricken by the flippancy of my rejoinder, Mr. Mavis turned me face-about and marched me home, sending me to bed with dry bread and cold water for my only sustenance till morning. So were all my little unthinking and generally unintentional acts of folly dealt with. A prejudice against God and Heaven took hold of me. I was not overtly rebellious, but I secretly hated religion for all the privations it entailed. It seemed to me at times that I was the only creature alive in the whole village. I was bursting with animal spirits and vivacity.

I was consumed with lively instincts and impulses, quite natural and harmless in themselves, but which, had I disclosed them to my guardian, would have awakened in him the fear that I was the victim of an Evil Possession. The spirit of my actor-father was strong in me. I loved all kinds of movement and excitement, but above and beyond every other exercise I loved that of dancing ; my fondness for it was a genuine passion. As I grew to womanhood my limbs became long, lithe, shapely, and supple, willing and capable servants of the rhythmic impulses that rioted in my brain. My body ever moved swayingly and with charm. I think, even at the transition period when girls are usually awkward and gawky, I never fell from grace. Some surreptitious amusements I had ; indeed, my only real amusements were of that character.

The dearest, most beloved, that of which I never tired, was that which I was most careful to conceal. For dancing, if it were not regarded quite as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, was yet held in strong disfavour and reprobation at the parsonage, where my guardian was, I think, ever on the alert for signs in me of my father's mercurial and vicious temperament. There was an old man in Sheraton to whom I became warmly attached. He was the village shoemaker, and about his hoary head the nimbus of homely romance hung — a fact which alone would have endeared him to me as one who had at least trodden the boundaries of Arcady. Up to the age of fifty his life had been sufficiently prosaic, yet somewhat distinguished from mere horticultural development by the companionship of a lady of high degree — no less a person, indeed, than a heavenly maid that had descended from her lofty estate to enthrone herself in the breast of a humble but fervent worshipper.

But music had been his only female companion throughout his five decades. Then, alas ! one day Grove Pensy was taken in hand and married by a buxom widow of thirty-five. Not long did he remain a Benedict, however. The enterprising bride made it her immediate business to induce her victim to settle upon her what fortune he had. A month after the property passed into her hands Grove was left again to the sole comradeship of his muse. He had loved the A Deserter from Philistia woman deeply ; he had trusted implicitly to her disinterestedness ; he bore his desertion as he did all things — quietly, bravely, and in silence. But one act of open resentment he manifested. This was to take down the sign which hung outside his lonely dwelling and append to its advertisement one word, declaring, as he believed, his purpose to remain thenceforward a single man.

Whereas the legend had formerly read : " Grove Pensy," and beneath " Boots and Shoes made and repaired," now it ran : " Grove Pensy Forever, Boots and Shoes," etc. The old man had known my father, who had chanced upon him just after his wife absconded. The love of the divine science, imperfectly developed though it was in both men, drew them together. The only being in Sheraton who ever mentioned Paul Carette with toleration or liking was Pensy ; and he loved him. The mantle of the old man's affection for my father fell later upon my shoulders. Grove and I became comrades, close friends and secret allies. I was kept under pretty strict watch as a usual thing. My physical welfare was placed in the hands of my guardian's housekeeper and general factotum, Maria Wetherbee, also a member of the Church in good and regular standing ; a stiff* and rigid disciplinarian of spinster condition, who was eternally admonishing me " for my own good."

She harassed and goaded me in a thousand ways, and I hated her. The village schoolmistress was made responsible for my mental growth, and, as I was facile in circumvention from regular practice upon difficult subjects, I found little trouble in imposing upon her simple credulity. There is small doubt but that as a child I was a liar. Whether so con genially, or so perverted through the exigencies of circumstance, I cannot declare ; but the fact remains. Hour after hour I stole from school and devoted to more congenial occupation, offering as excuse for absence my guardian's need of my services. And these stolen hours, after I found him, I spent with Grove Pensy and his fiddle. Doing what ? Why, dancing, dancing, dancing, until the blood rushed madly through my veins, my head swam, my brain reeled with ecstasy, and I was no longer a soulless chattel of dull earth, but a winged spirit of the spheres, glorying in the very freedom of my own limbs, revelling in a new element ; mad, yes, actually mad with the mere joyousness of motion.

I became wondrously proficient under the tutelage of my own instinct and fancy. It has been said of me in praise of my dancing that I am original, that my methods are founded upon no model, that I am as a dancer sui generis. It is true. I follow no precedent ; I have never practised a regular step in my life. But I have danced as I have breathed, as a matter of course and necessity. For one year only have I been cut off from that natural outlet of the emotions which arise within me ; and in that year I was like to die. Also, in those days I had music that inspired me as music has seldom done since. It, too, was a thing of celestial realms, unlearnt of earth. Inspiration lodged in Grove Pensy's soul, and it caught fire from my ardour. Never was there question of what time the old fiddle was to keep, or of what movement I wished it to mark.

But one condition constrained us each — that he should play and I should dance. All else was a mere matter of fortuity. Oh, those hours ! Oh, those happy, those beatific hours ! Well might I place above your dear old head, Grove Pensy, a tablet to the memory of one who was the sole encourager of the talents God had given me ! From the age of fourteen to that of seventeen I was a regular and secret visitor and companion of the old shoemaker. I was deft in deceit, and, as his little shop was in a somewhat isolated and unfrequented part of the village, it was a matter easy of management for me to journey thither unobserved. When occasion demanded a falsehood to account for my being seen in the street during school hours, my tongue glibly furnished it forth — so glibly, indeed, that my untruthfulness was never detected.

But one day, after I had turned seventeen, Fate had ill-proportioned and dreadful revenge upon me. It was a wonderful day in early spring — the first real promise the season had given that summer was advancing. I was a pupil in the village academy, one of the class soon to graduate. As I sat in the ugly schoolroom that morning, surrounded by bumpkins poring over their books, breathing in the close and fætid air, the exhalations of many labouring lungs, a quick and impetuous impatience got the better of my circumspection. From my seat I could look out of a window upon the fresh landscape, tender and tempting in its bourgeoning bloom. A thirst for the outside world, for freedom, movement, action, came upon me, was working like a fermenting liquor within my brain, and, if I died for it, I felt I must make the effort to escape outside and give vent to the energy that effervesced inside me.

Boldly I rose and approached the august tribunal where Authority sat enthroned. " I feel very ill," I said ; " I must go home. Please allow me to do so." Mistress even then of the art of dissimulation, my feigned distress imposed upon the worthy master. My leave was granted. I constrained my steps to march decorously from the room ; but, once outside, I flew, I rushed, I tore, out of the building and whither my inclinations ever pointed. I burst in on the old shoemaker like a tornado. " Grove, Grove ! " I cried ; " quick — your fiddle ! I am mad ! — yes, I have really gone mad with the spring ! Let me dance ! Here, I must be all free to-day. Wait ! " And while the old man, accustomed to my frenzies, went slowly about, putting his work away and getting ready his instrument, I tore down my chestnut hair, and running my fingers through it tossed it freely about me in wanton confusion, until, being curly of nature, it floated forth from my person like a cloud.

How long ago that seems — how long ! I look back, and the years that have passed, the developing process that has intervened, the wide interposition of immeasurably altered conditions of life, seem to throw upon the reflecting glass of retrospection not the well-remembered features of a familiar face, but the half-forgotten characteristics of a stranger. Am I — disappointed, dissatisfied, dis illusioned woman that I am — indeed but the blighted fruition of that springing seed of incarnate expectancy which sought so ardently that day to thrust aside the dull envelope of earth that cumbered its vigorous young desires ? Oh, the immeasurable distance between the germ and the tree ; between promise and fulfilment ; between the limitless future of youth and the painfully circumscribed present of maturity !

Chapter II

On that spring morning, when Nature's impe rious call echoed so loudly through my being, I wentTengths that I had never gone before. The letting down of my hair was but a preliminary step in the course of transformation I meditated. My woollen gown, a coarse affair designed for utility alone, offended my eye as it restricted my motions. In a corner of the little attic loft which, as a theatre secure from intrusion, we habitually used for our dual performance, I remembered to have seen a heap of disused — once white — mos quito netting. I bade the old man remain below until I should call him, sped lightly up the stairs, dropped, with a sigh of relief, my ugly and ill fitting gown upon the floor, and with the aid of many pins draped the discoloured netting about my slender figure in such fashion that it left my limbs to perfect freedom of movement, while it also exposed to view my full white neck and palpitating bosom.

Quickly then I thrust aside my heavy boots and placed on my small arched feet the white silk sandals it had been Grove's pleasure to make for my wearing, and, thus habited, I called impatiently to the old man to come up. My vanity was much gratified by his loud expressions of admiration. My unique attire was undoubtedly becoming, for I know that even my own critical eyes were well satisfied, as I considered myself in the scrap of mirror which Grove had set up in the attic. I was at that time much interested in my looks, and I fear I was rather given to speculating upon their effect on others. Our stage-setting was quite simple and uncon ventional. The attic was really the unfinished upper storey of the little dwelling which Grove had built for his own use, for which the first floor amply sufficed.