by Ouida
‘No; all that I could do was to simplify his immense erudition and arrange it. I never loved the work; do not accredit me with so much industry: but it was a debt that I paid, and paid easily too, for the materials lay all to my hand, if in disorder.’
‘The Marquis Xavier must at least have infused his own love of archæology and science into you?’
‘I can scarcely say even so much. I have a facility at acquiring knowledge, which is not a very high quality. Things come easily to me. I fear if Herr Joachim examined me he would find my science shallow.’
‘You have so many talents that perhaps you are like one of your own Mexican forests; one luxuriance kills another.’
‘Had I had fewer I might have been more useful in my generation,’ he said, with a certain sincerity of regret.
‘You would have been much less interesting,’ she thought to herself, as she said aloud, ‘There are the horses coming up to the steps: will you ride with me? And do not be ungrateful for your good gifts. Talent is a Schlüsselblume that opens to all hidden treasures.’
‘Why are you not in the Chamber?’ she had said a little before to him. ‘You are eloquent; you have an ancestry that binds you to do your best for France.’
‘I have no convictions,’ he had said, with a flush on his face. ‘It is a sad thing to confess.’
‘It is; but if you have nothing better to substitute for them you might be content to abide by those of your fathers.’
He had been silent.
‘Besides,’ she had added, ‘patriotism is not an opinion, it is an instinct.’
‘With good men. I am not one of them.’
‘Go into public life,’ she had repeated. ‘Convictions will come to you in an active career, as the muscles develop in the gymnasium.’
‘I am indolent,’ he had demurred, ‘and I have desultory habits.’
‘You may break yourself of these. There must be much in which you could interest yourself. Begin with the fishing interests of the coast that belongs to you.’
‘Honestly, I care for nothing except for myself. You will say it is base.’
‘I am afraid it is natural.’
He but seldom spoke of his early life. When he did so it was with reluctance, as if it gave him pain. His father he had never known; of his grandfather, the Marquis Xavier, as he usually called him, he spoke with extreme and reverent tenderness, but with little reticence. The grave old man, in the stateliness and simplicity of his solitary life, had been to his youthful imagination a solemn and sacred figure.
‘His was the noblest life I have ever known,’ he said once, with an emotion in the accent of the words which she had never heard in his voice before, and which gave her a passing impression of a regret in him that was almost remorse.
It might be, she reflected, the remorse of a man who, in his careless youth, had been less heedful of the value of an affection and the greatness of a character which, as he grew older and wiser, he learned to appreciate when it was too late. He related willingly how the old man had trusted him to carry out into the light of the world the fruits of his life of research, and with what pleasure he had seen the instant and universal recognition of the labours of the brain and the hand that were dust. But of his own life in the West he said little; he referred his skill in riding to the wild horses of the pampas, and his botanical and scientific knowledge to the studies which the solitudes of the sierras had made him turn to as relaxation and occupation; but of himself he said little, nothing, unless the conversation so turned upon his life there that it was impossible for him to avoid those reminiscences which were evidently little agreeable to him. Perhaps she thought some youthful passion, some unwise love, had made those flowering swamps and sombre plains painful in memory to him. There might be other graves than that of the Marquis Xavier beneath the plumes of pampas grass. Perhaps, also, to a man of the world, a man of mere pleasure as he had become, that studious and lonesome youth of his already had drifted so far away that, seen in distance, it seemed dim and unreal as any dream.
‘How happy you are to have so many admirable gifts!’ said Wanda to him one day, when he had offered her a fan that he had painted on ivory. He had a facile skill at most of the arts, and had acquired accuracy and technique lounging through the painting-rooms of Paris. The fan was an exquisite trifle, and bore on one side her monogram and the arms of her house, and on the other mountain flowers and birds, rendered with the delicacy of a miniaturist.
‘What is the use of a mere amateur?’ he said, with indifference. ‘When one has lived amongst artists one learns heartily to despise oneself for daring to flirt with those sacred sisters the Muses.’
‘Why? And, after all, when one has such perfect talent as yours, the definition of amateur and artist seems a very arbitrary and meaningless one. If you needed to make your fame and fortune by painting faces you could do so. You do not need. Does that make the fan the less precious? The more, I think, since gold cannot buy it.’
‘You are too kind to me. The world would not be as much so if I really wanted its suffrages.’
‘You cannot tell that. I think you have that facility which is the first note of genius. It is true all your wonderful talents seem the more wonderful to me because I have none myself. I feel art, but I have no power over it; and as for what are called accomplishments I have none. I could, perhaps, beat you in the shooting gallery, and I will try some day if you like, and I can ride — well, like my Kaiserin — but accomplishments I have none.’
‘Surely you were yesterday reading Plato in his own text?’
‘I learnt Greek and Latin with my brother. You cannot call that an accomplishment. The ladies of the old time often knew the learned tongues, though they were greater at tapestry or distilling and at the ordering of their household. In a solitary place like this it is needful to know so many useful things. I can shoe my horse and harness a sleigh; I can tell every useful herb and flower in the woods; I know well what to do in frostbite or accidents; if I were lost in the hills I could make my way by the stars; I can milk a cow, and can row any boat, and I can climb with crampons; I am a mountaineer. Do not be so surprised. I do all that I have the children taught in my schools. But in a salon I am useless and stupid; the last new lady whose lord has been decorated because he sold something wholesale or cheated successfully at the Bourse would, I assure you, eclipse me easily in the talents of the drawing-room.’
Sabran looked at her and laughed outright. A compliment would have seemed ridiculous before this beautiful patrician, with her serene dignity, her instinctive grace, her unconscious hauteur, her entire possession of all those attributes which are the best heirlooms of a great nobility. To protest against her words would have been like an insult to this daughter of knights and princes, to whom half the sovereigns of modern Europe would have seemed but parvenus, the accidental mushroom growth of the decay in the contest of nations.
His laughter amused her, though it was, perhaps, the most discreet and delicate of compliments. She was not offended by it as she would have been with any spoken flattery.
‘After all, do not think me modest in what I have said,’ she pursued. ‘Talents de société are but slight things at the best, and in our day need not even have either wit or culture: a good travesty at a costume-ball, a startling gown on a racecourse, a series of adventures more or less true, a trick of laughing often and laughing long — any one of these is enough for renown in your Paris. In Vienna we do more homage to tradition still; our Court life has still something of the grace of the minuet.’
‘Yet even in Vienna you refuse — —’
‘To spend my time? Why not? The ceremonies of a Court are wearisome to me; my duties lie here; and for the mirth and pomp of society I have had no heart since the grief that you know of fell upon me.’
It was the first time that she had ever spoken of her brother’s loss to him: he bowed very low in silent sympathy.
‘Who would not envy his death, since it has brought s
uch remembrance!’ he said in a low tone, after some moments.
‘Ah, if only we could be sure that unceasing regret consoles the dead!’ she said, with an emotion, that softened and dimmed all her beauty. Then, as if ashamed or repentant of having shown her feeling for Bela to a stranger, she turned to him and said more distantly:
‘Would it entertain you to see my little scholars? I will take you to the schoolhouses if you like.’
He could only eagerly accept the offer: he felt his heart beat and his eyes lighten as she spoke. He knew that such a condescension in her was a mark of friendship, a sign of familiar intimacy.
‘It is but a mile or so through the woods. We will walk there,’ she said, as she took her tall cane from its rack and called to Neva and Donau, where they lay on the terrace without.
He fancied that the vague mistrust of him, the vague prejudice against him of which he had been sensible in her, were passing away from her mind; but still he doubted — doubted bitterly — whether she would ever give him any other thought than that due to a passing and indifferent acquaintance. That she admired his intelligence and that she pitied his loneliness he saw; but there seemed to him that never, never, never, would he break down in his own favour that impalpable but impassable barrier due, half to her pride, half to her reserve, and absolutely to her indifference, which separated Wanda von Szalras from the rest of mankind.
If she had any weakness or foible it was the children’s schools on the estates in the High Tauern and elsewhere. They had been founded on a scheme of Bela’s and her own, when they had been very young, and the world to them a lovely day without end. Their too elaborate theories had been of necessity curtailed, but the schools had been established on the basis of their early dreams, and were unlike any others that existed. She had read much and deeply, and had thought out all she had read, and as she enjoyed that happy power of realising and embodying her own theories which most theorists are denied, she had founded the schools of the High Tauern in absolute opposition to all that the school-boards of her generation have decreed as desirable. And in every one of her villages she had her schools on this principle, and they throve, and the children with them. Many of these could not read a printed page, but all of them could read the shepherd’s weather-glass in sky and flower; all of them knew the worm that was harmful to the crops, the beetle that was harmless in the grass; all knew a tree by a leaf, a bird by a feather, an insect by a grub.
Modern teaching makes a multitude of gabblers. She did not think it necessary for the little goatherds, and dairymaids, and foresters, and charcoal-burners, and sennerinn, and carpenters, and cobblers, to study the exact sciences or draw casts from the antique. She was of opinion, with Pope, that ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing,’ and that a smattering of it will easily make a man morose and discontented, whilst it takes a very deep and even lifelong devotion to it to teach a man content with his lot. Genius, she thought, is too rare a thing to make it necessary to construct village schools for it, and whenever or wherever it comes upon earth it will surely be its own master.
She did not believe in culture for little peasants who have to work for their daily bread at the plough-tail or with the reaping-hook. She knew that a mere glimpse of a Canaan of art and learning is cruelty to those who never can enter into and never even can have leisure to merely gaze on it. She thought that a vast amount of useful knowledge is consigned to oblivion whilst children are taught to waste their time in picking up the crumbs of a great indigestible loaf of artificial learning. She had her scholars taught their ‘ABC,’ and that was all. Those who wished to write were taught, but writing was not enforced. What they were made to learn was the name and use of every plant in their own country; the habits and ways of all animals; how to cook plain food well, and make good bread; how to brew simples from the herbs of their fields and woods, and how to discern the coming weather from the aspect of the skies, the shutting-up of certain blossoms, and the time of day from those ‘poor men’s watches,’ the opening flowers. In all countries there is a great deal of useful household and out-of-door lore that is fast being choked out of existence under books and globes, and which, unless it passes by word of mouth from generation to generation, is quickly and irrevocably lost. All this lore she had cherished by her schoolchildren. Her boys were taught in addition any useful trade they liked — boot-making, crampon-making, horse-shoeing, wheel-making, or carpentry. This trade was made a pastime to each. The little maidens learned to sew, to cook, to spin, to card, to keep fowls and sheep and cattle in good health, and to know all poisonous plants and berries by sight.
‘I think it is what is wanted,’ she said. ‘A little peasant child does not need to be able to talk of the corolla and the spathe, but he does want to recognise at a glance the flower that will give him healing and the berries that will give him death. His sister does not in the least require to know why a kettle boils, but she does need to know when a warm bath will be good for a sick baby or when hurtful. We want a new generation to be helpful, to have eyes, and to know the beauty of silence. I do not mind much whether my children read or not. The labourer that reads turns Socialist, because his brain cannot digest the hard mass of wonderful facts he encounters. But I believe every one of my little peasants, being wrecked like Crusoe, would prove as handy as he.’
She was fond of her scholars and proud of them, and they were never afraid of her. They knew well it was the great lady who filled all their sacks the night of Santa Claus — even those of the naughty children, because, as she said, childhood was so short that she thought it cruel to give it any disappointments.
The walk to the schoolhouse lay through the woods to the south of the castle; woods of larch and beech and walnut and the graceful Siberian pine, with deep mosses and thick fern-brakes beneath them, and ever and again a watercourse tumbling through their greenery to fall into the Szalrassee below.
‘I always fancy I can hear here the echo of the great Krimler torrents,’ she said to him as they passed through the trees. ‘No doubt it is fancy, and the sound is only from our own falls. But the peasants’ tradition is, you may know, that our lake is the water of the Krimler come to us underground from the Pinzgau. Do you know our Sahara of the North? It is monotonous and barren enough, and yet with its vast solitudes of marsh and stones, its flocks of wild fowl, its reedy wastes, its countless streams, it is grand in its own way. And then in the heart of it there are the thunder and the boiling fury of Krimml! You will smile because I am an enthusiast for my country, you who have seen Orinoco and Chimborazo; but even you will own that the old Duchy of Austria, the old Archbishopric of Salzburg, the old Countship of Tirol, have some beauty and glory in them. Here is the schoolhouse. Now you shall see what I think needful for the peasant of the future. Perhaps you will condemn me as a true Austrian: that is, as a Reactionist.’
The schoolhouse was a châlet, or rather a collection of châlets, set one against another on a green pasture belted by pine woods, above which the snows of the distant Venediger were gleaming amidst the clouds. There was a loud hum of childish voices rising through the open lattice, and these did not cease as they entered the foremost house.
‘Do not be surprised that they take no notice of our entrance,’ she said to him. ‘I have taught them not to do so unless I bid them. If they left off their tasks I could never tell how they did them; and is not the truest respect shown in obedience?’
‘They are as well disciplined as soldiers,’ he said with a smile, as twenty curly heads bent over desks were lifted for a moment to instantly go down again.
‘Surely discipline is next to health,’ added Wanda. ‘If the child do not learn it early he must suffer fearfully when he reaches manhood, since all men, even princes, have to obey some time or other, and the majority of men are not princes, but are soldiers, clerks, porters, guides, labourers, tradesmen, what not; certainly something subject to law if not to a master. How many lives have been lost because a man failed to understand the meaning o
f immediate and unquestioning obedience! Soldiers are shot for want of it, yet children are not to be taught it!’
Whilst she spoke not a child looked up or left off his lesson: the teacher, a white-haired old man, went on with his recitation.
‘Your teachers are not priests?’ he said in some surprise.
‘No,’ she answered; ‘I am a faithful daughter of the Church, as you know; but every priest is perforce a specialist, if I may be forgiven the profanity, and the teacher of children should be of perfectly open, simple and unbiassed mind; the priest’s can never be that. Besides, his teaching is apart. The love and fear of God are themes too vast and too intimate to be mingled with the pains of the alphabet and the multiplication tables. There alone I agree with your French Radicals, though from a very different reason to theirs. Now in this part of the schools you see the children are learning from books. These children have wished to read, and are taught to do so; but I do not enforce though I recommend it. You think that very barbarous? Oh! reflect for a moment how much more glorious was the world, was literature itself, before printing was invented. Sometimes I think it was a book, not a fruit, that Satan gave. You smile incredulously. Well, no doubt to a Parisian it seems absurd. How should you understand what is wanted in the heart of these hills? Come and see the other houses.’
In the next which they entered there was a group of small sturdy boys, very sunburnt and rough and bright, who were seated in a row listening with rapt attention to a teacher who was talking to them of birds and their uses and ways; there were prints, of birds and birds’ nests, and the teacher was making them understand why and how a bird flew.
‘That is the natural history school,’ she said; ‘one day it is birds, another animals, another insects, that they are told about. Those are all little foresters born. They will go about their woods with eyes that see, and with tenderness for all creation.’