"Oh," She Cried, And It Was A Cry Of Pain,
"Was I Once As Beautiful As That?" And Burst Into Tears.
She
had found the picture she had been looking for, which she had
come to see; it had been there twenty to twenty-five years,
and the story of it was as follows.
When she was a young girl her mother took her to the great
artist to have her portrait painted, and when the work was at
length finished she and her mother went to see it. The artist
put it before them and the mother looked at it, her face
expressing displeasure, and said not one word. Nor did the
artist open his lips. And at last the girl, to break the
uncomfortable silence, said, "Where shall we hang it, mother?"
and the lady replied, "Just where you like, my dear, so long
as you hang it with the face to the wall." It was an
insolent, a cruel thing to say, but the artist did not answer
her bitterly; he said gently that she need not take the
portrait as it failed to please her, and that in any case he
would decline to take the money she had agreed to pay him for
the work. She thanked him coldly and went her way, and he
never saw her again. And now Time, the humbler of proud
beautiful women, had given him his revenge: the portrait,
scorned and rejected when the colour and sparkle of life was
in the face, had been looked on once more by its subject and
had caused her to weep at the change in herself.
To return. One wishes in these moments of meeting, of
surprise and sudden revealings, that it were permissible to
speak from the heart, since then the very truth might have
more balm than bitterness in it. "Grieve not, dear friend of
old days, that I have not escaped the illusion common to all
- the idea that those we have not looked on this long time
- full five years, let us say - have remained as they were
while we ourselves have been moving onwards and downwards in
that path in which our feet are set. No one, however hardened
he may be, can escape a shock of surprise and pain; but now
the illusion I cherished has gone - now I have seen with my
physical eyes, and a new image, with Time's writing on it, has
taken the place of the old and brighter one, I would not have
it otherwise. No, not if I could would I call back the
vanished lustre, since all these changes, above all that
wistful look in the eyes, do but serve to make you dearer, my
sister and friend and fellow-traveller in a land where we
cannot find a permanent resting-place."
Alas! it cannot be spoken, and we cannot comfort a sister if
she cannot divine the thought; but to brood over these
inevitable changes is as idle as it is to lament that we were
born into this mutable world. After all, it is because of the
losses, the sadnesses, that the world is so infinitely sweet
to us. The thought is in Cory's Mimnernus in Church:
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them is because they die.
From this sadness in Bath I went to a greater in Wells, where
I had not been for ten years, and timing my visit so as to
have a Sunday service at the cathedral of beautiful memories,
I went on a Saturday to Shepton Mallet. A small, squalid
town, a "manufacturing town" the guide-book calls it. Well,
yes; it manufactures Anglo-Bavarian beer in a gigantic
brewery which looks bigger than all the other buildings
together, the church and a dozen or twenty public-houses
included. To get some food I went to the only eating-house
in the place, and saw a pleasant-looking woman, plump and
high-coloured, with black hair, with an expression of good
humour and goodness of every description in her comely
countenance. She promised to have a chop ready by the time I
had finished looking at the church, and I said I would have it
with a small Guinness. She could not provide that, the house,
she said, was strictly temperance. "My doctor has ordered me
to take it," said I, "and if you are religious, remember that
St. Paul tells us to take a little stout when we find it
beneficial."
"Yes, I know that's what St. Paul says," she returned, with a
heightened colour and a vicious emphasis on the saint's name,
"but we go on a different principle."
So I had to go for my lunch to one of the big public-houses,
called hotels; but whether it called itself a cow, or horse,
or stag, or angel, or a blue or green something, I cannot
remember. They gave me what they called a beefsteak pie - a
tough crust and under it some blackish cubes carved out of the
muscle of an antediluvian ox-and for this delicious fare and a
glass of stout I paid three shillings and odd pence.
As I came away Shepton Mallet was shaken to its foundations by
a tremendous and most diabolical sound, a prolonged lupine
yell or yowl, as if a stupendous wolf, as big, say, as the
Anglo-Bavarian brewery, had howled his loudest and longest.
This infernal row, which makes Shepton seem like a town or
village gone raving mad, was merely to inform the men, and,
incidentally, the universe, that it was time for them to knock
off work.
Turning my back on the place, I said to myself, "What a fool I
am to be sure! Why could I not have been satisfied for once
with a cup of coffee with my lunch? I should have saved a
shilling, perhaps eighteen-pence, to rejoice the soul of some
poor tramp; and, better still, I could have discussed some
interesting questions with that charming rosy-faced woman.
What, for instance, was the reason of her quarrel with the
apostle; by the by, she never rebuked me for misquoting his
words; and what is the moral effect (as seen through her clear
brown eyes) of the Anglo-Bavarian brewery on the population of
the small town and the neighbouring villages?"
The road I followed from Shepton to Wells winds by the
water-side, a tributary of the Brue, in a narrow valley with
hills on either side.
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