The Other Passenger

by John Keir Cross

  The people of the moon are starry-eyed,

  They sing sweet songs all day and dance the night:

  Their little heads are empty all of brains, their hearts

  Are small soft balls of plasticine delight.

  And they remember nothing of the earth,

  No echo reaches those enchanted lands:

  They cruelly cruelly sup on others’ blood—and then

  Pluck out their lovers’ eyes with soft white hands.

  But O! I love the people of the moon!

  I love their secret smiles and haunted songs

  And suddenly Chloe stopped. She looked up. She put her head on one side and listened. We all listened. And in the strange silence that crept all round us with the stopping of the reading voice, we heard a terrible long-drawn scream.

  It died away. I looked up—at Jo Haycock. And my thoughts went rushing—as I knew hers also did—to that occasion when we were sitting in my room, high overlooking the King’s Road in the World’s End part of Chelsea. I had a vision—a hideous one—of the dark falling body of Alice Emmanuel . . .

  And now in the silence that replaced the scream we became aware of a harsh low sobbing. It came from immediately outside the door of the studio. And even as we stared at that door and speculated wildly, it swung open and there came—or staggered—into the room a figure we hardly recognized. The lace fichu was askew, the hair was wild, the violet eyes were rimmed with red and streaming with tears.

  “Miss Thing,” gasped Vera wildly. “Oh God oh God—Miss Thing! . . .”

  Our hearts leapt up. We had beheld! The voices had whispered aright. Miss Thing had won! The monument of respectability had toppled.

  But literally, my friend. With another wild cry the Wimbledon Achilles fell to the floor in a faint.

  My friend, there are layers and layers. Life, said Howard once, is like an onion. You peel the layers and there is no core. It only makes you weep.

  All that is so long ago you see. So incredibly far away. A sort of dream. We were glorious in our way I suppose—to ourselves of course as we look back now. It is all over and we have grown beyond it. I grope like Proust among the images.

  There are in life no climaxes. In a play the curtain falls at the end of a scene between lovers—and we applaud and cry “Bravo!” In life we have our scene—we embrace. But the curtain never falls. The chair arm sticks into our ribs or our partner has halitosis. And at the height of the scene we need to go to the w.c.

  They came and took Kolensky away and hanged him. A fitting end for the King of us all perhaps—that sparse body dangling through the trap door. Perhaps he was even asleep when they set the noose . . .

  But there was nothing dramatic about it all. No real climax. It was all accidental somehow. It wasn’t that that Vera went to the police about—not that at all.

  It was all something else. It wasn’t that, that the years of ingrained respectability revolted against. She was horrified when she found out what her visit to the police had done.

  Yes, it is all a sort of dream—a far-off dream. I see us grouped round Vera as she lay on Chloe’s divan—I see us as shadowy figures, unreal. The little book called Opus 7 lay where Chloe had dropped it on that high dramatic announcement. I remember glancing down at it and even reading a line or two while they held up brandy for Vera to sip.

  Our banner waves diaphanous

  is, as it were, an ancient tattered map,

  long scrawled upon but splendid,

  of countries from an old lunatic dream

  and stories never ended . . .

  “You mean,” cried Tania, “Miss Thing is real?”

  And Vera sobbing and nodding blindly.

  “Yes, real,” in a dry hopeless moan. “Not wax at all—embalmed—embalmed! . . . I found out, you see, when I was going through those old papers this morning. I’d no idea—I didn’t know. I found the marriage certificate, you see—I found that. And when I looked more closely at the Parts—when I cut into the Legs at the side of the mantelshelf . . .”

  She sobbed here wildly. Tania clutched at her throat—to stop being sick.

  “And you went to the police?” asked Jo in a low strained voice.

  “Yes . . . Yes . . . And they came—oh God!—they came to arrest him! This evening—an hour ago!”

  The tears were terrible. She couldn’t speak. I thought of the shrieking figure of Alice Emmanuel.

  Yes layers, my friend—layers, layers.

  “He’s gone—he’s gone. And I’ll never see him again—oh never, never, never!”

  My heart twisted round in my breast I remember. She wildly smoothed her flying hair and gazed at each of us in turn. A curious bleak agony was in her eyes.

  “You see, you see,” she gasped breathlessly—“it wasn’t that—oh Lord it wasn’t that! I didn’t mean——”

  She stopped and gulped an enormous breath.

  “It was only—you see—he hadn’t told me. It was false pretences. It was a sort of—bigamy. He married me under false pretences. I didn’t know, I didn’t know. Oh, it was cruel of him, cruel of him! But I didn’t mean them to—oh my God! It was only he didn’t tell me he had been married before! It was false pretences—false pretences! That’s what I went to the police about! . . .”

  . . . Strange how we’ve all dispersed and separated. Only Howard and myself left now. Tania on the stage—Jo married. Tony del Monte an academician. And Chloe, poor lass, gone mad.

  We went to see her the other day, Howard and I. She was quiet and gentle. She asked for news of all her old friends. We talked in low voices for an hour or so and then came away.

  Impossible not to be nostalgic about one’s youth. Now that one has settled down it seems—well, never mind. It is only a layer long since discarded.

  I was looking at Chloe’s Opus 7 the other day. The last book she ever printed. The last few verses of it come into my mind. I chanted them over and over again to myself as we came back from seeing her the other day.

  They say below that I am mad.

  Well—mad I am, mad, mad.

  And there are other things they say

  That I have thrown my life away:

  That I was drowned long since and do not know

  O there are many whispers from below!

  O little white worms have eaten my heart

  And devils have picked my brains apart.

  Lady, they say I have sisters three

  Who have blanched my veins by the olive tree

  Lady, O lady, have pity o’ me . . .

  And Vera? The last I heard of her she was working in a Camberwell mission among what they call Fallen Girls.

  She gives her name as Mrs. Kolensky.

  And if anyone—some serious boy from the University Settlement—asks sympathetically: “And—Mr. Kolensky?”

  She answers, her little prim mouth slightly tightening: “Mr. Kolensky—died, you know . . .”

  Valdemosa

  “. . . and then, in 1839, ignoring all the proprieties, Chopin and George Sand went to Majorca together . . .”

  THE CHARTREUSE

  The Chartreuse was an immense sprawling building of endless corridors and walls. It was picturesque and a little frightening. Some of it was in ruins. Each small section or cell—the parts reserved for residents—had a garden, walled round to a prodigious height. It was a building hugely futile—deserted, bleak—set majestically between the hills and the sea, with the beautiful rich trees of Majorca clustering all round it as if to crowd it out and hide it from view.

  And all the time that they were there, it seemed, it rained. The long dark corridors trickled, the walls sweated, the air was filled with a chilly moistness, the woodwork of the doors and windows was swollen. All things seemed damp and cold to the touch—the furniture, the counterpanes, their clothes—everything. The very bricks were saturated through and through—as Madame Sand once said, even the marrow in their bones was waterlogged.

  It was better after the p
iano arrived (it had cost them weeks of anxious letter-writing, that piano—and 300 francs duty at the douane). After that Chopin had something to take his mind away from the God-knows-what strange nightmares that haunted him in that place. It was better, too, purely practically: for the inhabitants, when they heard the pale visitor’s exquisite music, were more prone to overcome their prejudices. They even gave them food sometimes—food of a sort, that is: mostly pork that was hopelessly indigestible, and rancid oil to cook it in.

  “I have been as sick as a dog,” wrote Chopin to his friend Fontana. “I caught cold in spite of 18 degrees of heat, roses, oranges, palms, figs, and the three most famous doctors in the island. One of them sniffed at what I spat up, the second tapped where I spat it from, the third poked about and listened how I spat it. One said I had died, the second that I am dying, the third that I shall die. I could scarcely keep them from bleeding me . . .”

  They hardly knew how they went on living. But they did. Chopin composed, extemporised, moped: Madame Sand wrote and went exploring: the children ran wild among the ruins.

  MASTER AND MISTRESS

  One morning during a brief interval of watery sunshine in the rain, Madame Sand made her way to Chopin’s cell. She had been walking with Solange, her daughter, and was dressed carelessly in trousers and tunic, with great workmen’s boots on her feet. She strode mannishly over the flags, taking pleasure in the big free rhythm of her stride.

  The door of the cell was open and she paused for a moment on the threshold. A shaft of the thin sunlight fell through the archway before her, resting in a narrow band on the esparto matting and just touching the piano in the far corner. At the piano sat Chopin, leaning forward on his elbows, with his dark hair falling down over his arms. He did not move—hardly seemed even to breathe.

  Madame Sand made a slight tapping noise on the lintel, but there was no response. Then she moved slowly into the room.

  “Frederic,” she called softly.

  He did not look up. She moved a little closer and her shadow fell on the piano.

  “Frederic . . .”

  Then, when he still made no reply, she went up to him and laid her hand on his shoulder.

  He started round with an exclamation and the sudden movement jerked her back. She put her hand to her breast—a feminine gesture strangely out of keeping with her grotesque man’s costume.

  Chopin sighed and relaxed.

  “It’s you, then,” he said. “I was startled. I thought——”

  He finished the sentence with a shrug and sighed again. Madame Sand, used as she was to the extreme pallor of his face, noticed with emotion that he was even whiter than usual. The skin was drawn tightly over the high bones—it was as if you could have put a finger through his cheek.

  “Have you been composing?” she asked mechanically. He nodded and sighed once more.

  “Yes, a little.”

  He played a soft arpeggio. Outside, after the brief sunshine, the rain began again—falling straight down in a heavy persistent stream, as it had done the day before and the day before that.

  “Sol and I have been exploring,” Madame Sand went on. “We found an old well right at the far end of the east wing, with a sort of fallen-down fireplace in it. Sol wants to go picnicking there—when the rain stops, I mean.”

  “The rain will never stop,” said Frederic solemnly.

  “Nonsense.” She made an effort at laughing. Then she moved close to him again and put her hand on his shoulder. One knee she raised to rest on the edge of the piano stool, and in this position she gazed down at him—at the deep unhappy eyes of this strange man whose life seemed to have become so inextricably mixed with hers.

  “What’s wrong, Frederic?” she asked, in a tender voice. “Why do you mope so? Aren’t you happy with me? Oh I know it isn’t what we’d hoped it would be like here—we hadn’t bargained for this wretched rain and all the trouble with that old fool of an innkeeper at Palma. But we have made things as comfortable as we could for you. And I do love you, darling—you know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I know that,” said the composer after a pause—awkwardly, and with averted head. He fingered a few notes on the piano.

  “This wretched instrument,” he muttered. “Pleyel’s an insensitive dolt to send me a pile of junk like this.”

  “Frederic!” she chided. “Pleyel did what he could. You expect him and Fontana to perform miracles. You’re lucky to have a piano here at all.”

  “Then I’m lucky to be here at all. I couldn’t live without a piano—no, not another minute in this vile haunted house, with nothing to eat but garlic, garlic, garlic—garlic to frighten the devils away, that’s what it is—yes, that’s why they use so much garlic in this hell’s kitchen: it’s to frighten the devils away!”

  His voice had risen querulously, and now suddenly he began to cough. His head jerked forwards and he put both his thin hands to his mouth. She handed him a handkerchief that she took from the waist of her trousers, and he spat into it till the paroxysm was over: then sat looking with a blank and childish expression at the little spots of blood on the fine white cambric.

  “Ach!” he said at last. “More spittle for the doctors to sniff at! Well, good luck to them—let them stick me with leeches to their hearts’ content. I don’t care.”

  Madame Sand took back her handkerchief and crossed over to sit on the low bed at the other side of the cell. Through the open door there came now the pungent scent of the cooking that was going on in the little outside kitchen—garlic, as always. She could hear the children’s voices far-off from somewhere outside—Solange ecstatic (perhaps over a newly discovered ruin), Maurice disgruntled and truculent. And her heart was full of trouble. It seemed to her that there was no sort of good in this strange situation, with Frederic so ill and unhappy, the children running wild without companionship or education. Yet what could she do? She had fought with all her energies to provide the ménage with the small degree of comfort it did have—she had overcome the prejudice on the island, the awful stone wall of fear and superstition about Chopin’s disease. It was her money, her strength that had made life possible for them at all. And she knew that Chopin depended on her—that she had his absolute and slavish devotion. That gave her pleasure—it gave her pleasure and a sense of power to feel that she was the strong and responsible member. And it gave her pleasure, too, to feel that the strange genius of her “little one” was flourishing and maturing under her care—that the exquisite music he made was born, some of it, out of the turmoil of spirit that she was causing him. But yet——

  Now, as she sat looking across the room at him, gazing intently at the high pale forehead, the hooked nose with its sensitive nostrils, the sensuous lips that stood out femininely against the excessive pallor of the skin, she felt, as it were, something missing, some aspect of their relationship that, in a way impossible to describe, was out of key—even, fundamentally, a conflict. It was impossible for her not to compare in her mind this Majorcan escapade with her Italian journey with de Musset. The Frenchman, too, had been an artist—highly strung and impossible: but his flame had been hot and understandable beside Chopin’s untouchable fires.

  Meanwhile, Frederic had begun to play. He began with a simple tune in the Polish style—a mazurka: but before even the first phrase had gone, the little dance was imbued with his own spirit—the inevitable arabesque, the theme turning ornately to its cadence, the melancholy intervals that were all Chopin. It was impossible not to be touched by his delicacy, gentle and feminine as it was, yet free from all sentimentalism. The woman lay back and let her thoughts wander.

  She was, she felt, taking part in some tender scene—some vague situation in romance in which she was victim, yet mistress. A parting from a lover—the end of a love affair. She stood on a balcony, leaning against the stone balustrade: her lover was before her—he was embarrassed, guilty, in the wrong. It was something he had done, something reprehensible, which made it inevitable for their friendshi
p to end. He had just told her how it was—she, torn in spirit, was saying good bye to him . . . And now he went into the house, leaving her alone on the balcony, her head bowed. She wore lilacs on her bosom. A tear dropped on to the lock of his hair that she held in her hand. There was nothing to hope for or look forward to.

  Again, she was at some sort of celebration. People were dancing, there was life, colour, movement. And she was there, in the carnival crowd: but not taking part—cut away, it seemed—some sort of forlorn and remote figure. People moved past her—groups would approach her, and their laughter and gaiety would die quickly when they saw her sad face. She heard them murmuring and saw them glancing towards her, whispering her name. It was large, significant . . .

  Then suddenly a noise cut into her dream. There was a scuffle of feet on the flagstones outside, and Solange ran in. Her face was wet, her hair was all streaked and plastered against her temples.

  “Look, mama, look!” she cried. “I got them from the sacristan—he said I was to count them—I was to count them every day, he said, and I was to say a prayer to the Holy Virgin for Fritz—I mean, Uncle Frederic . . .”

  She held up a little string of cheap wooden rosary beads, her face all flushed with excitement and exercise, her voice shrill and plangent against the music.

  “Give them here, Sol,” said Madame Sand irritably.

  “No—I don’t want to, mama. I want to say a prayer for Fritz—Maria Antonia said he was damned.”

  Her mother snatched at the beads and with a little scream of annoyance Solange tried to tug them back. The cheap string broke and the little wooden balls fell to the floor and went rolling into the corners of the room. Solange gave a cry of vexation and stamped her foot.

  “He’s damned,” she cried. “Fritz is damned—he’s damned, he’s damned, he’s damned!”

  Chopin had stopped playing. His face was strained. He looked helplessly at the child and then at Madame Sand, who was frowning her anger.

  EN FAMILLE

  Later, they sat down to eat, Chopin and Madame Sand opposite each other at the head and foot of the table, Maurice and Solange at the sides. Solange had got over her fit of temper, she was vivacious and chatty, asked questions, giggled, till Frederic’s nerves were at breaking point and he would willing have garrotted her. Maurice was sullen. He talked about setting off next day to find some eagles’ nests. Madame Sand served the food abstractedly.