Boris Pilniak - "Tales of the Wilderness"

British Museum - "The Babylonian Legends of the Creation"

Pio Baroja - "The Quest"

Hans Bethge - "Japanischer Fruehling"

A  /  B  /  C  /  D  /  E  /   F  /  G  /  H  /  I  /  J  /   K  /  L  /  M  /  N  /  O   P  /  R  /  S  /  T  /  U  /  V  /  W  /  X  /  Y  /  Z

Wilfrid Cumbermede by George MacDonald

G >> George MacDonald >> Wilfrid Cumbermede




Here I and sorrows sit;
Here is my throne: bid kings come bow to it.

But the moment I took the pen in my hand to write, an almost agonizing
desire to speak to her laid hold of me. I dared not yet write to her,
but, after reflection, resolved to send her some verses which should
make her think of both Charley and myself, through the pages of a
magazine which I knew she read.

Oh, look not on the heart I bring--
It is too low and poor;
I would not have thee love a thing
Which I can ill endure.

Nor love me for the sake of what
I would be if I could;
O'er peaks as o'er the marshy flat,
Still soars the sky of good.

See, love, afar, the heavenly man
The will of God would make;
The thing I must be when I can,
Love now, for faith's dear sake.

But when I had finished the lines, I found the expression had fallen so
far short of what I had in my feeling, that I could not rest satisfied
with such an attempt at communication. I walked up and down the room,
thinking of the awful theories regarding the state of mind at death in
which Mary had been trained. As to the mere suicide, love ever finds
refuge in presumed madness; but all of her school believed that at the
moment of dissolution the fate is eternally fixed either for bliss or
woe, determined by the one or the other of two vaguely defined
attitudes of the mental being towards certain propositions; concerning
which attitudes they were at least right in asserting that no man could
of himself assume the safe one. The thought became unendurable that
Mary should believe that Charley was damned--and that for ever and
ever. I must and would write to her, come of it what might. That my
Charley, whose suicide came of misery that the painful flutterings of
his half-born wings would not bear him aloft into the empyrean, should
appear to my Athanasia lost in an abyss of irrecoverable woe; that she
should think of God as sending forth his spirit to sustain endless
wickedness for endless torture;--it was too frightful. As I wrote, the
fire burned and burned, and I ended only from despair of utterance. Not
a word can I now recall of what I wrote:--the strength of my feelings
must have paralyzed the grasp of my memory. All I can recollect is that
I closed with the expression of a passionate hope that the God who had
made me and my Charley to love each other, would somewhere, some day,
somehow, when each was grown stronger and purer, give us once more to
each other. In that hope alone, I said, was it possible for me to live.
By return of post I received the following:--

SIR,

After having everlastingly ruined one of my children, body and soul,
for _your_ sophisms will hardly alter the decrees of divine justice,
once more you lay your snares--now to drag my sole remaining child into
the same abyss of perdition. Such wickedness--wickedness even to the
pitch of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost--I have never in the course
of a large experience of impenitence found paralleled. It almost drives
me to the belief that the enemy of souls is still occasionally
permitted to take up his personal abode in the heart of him who
wilfully turns aside from revealed truth. I forgive you for the ruin
you have brought upon our fondest hopes, and the agony with which you
have torn the hearts of those who more than life loved him of whom you
falsely called yourself the friend. But I fear you have already gone
too far ever to feel your need of that forgiveness which alone can
avail you. Yet I say--Repent, for the mercy of the Lord is infinite.
Though my boy is lost to me for ever, I should yet rejoice to see the
instrument of his ruin plucked as a brand from the burning.

Your obedient well-wisher,


CHARLES OSBORNE.


'P.S.--I retain your letter for the sake of my less experienced
brethren, that I may be able to afford an instance of how far the
unregenerate mind can go in its antagonism to the God of Revelation.'

I breathed a deep breath, and laid the letter down, mainly concerned as
to whether Mary had had the chance of reading mine. I could believe any
amount of tyranny in her father--even to perusing and withholding her
letters; but in this I may do him injustice, for there is no common
ground known to me from which to start in speculating upon his probable
actions. I wrote in answer something nearly as follows:--

SIR,

That you should do me injustice can by this time be no matter of
surprise to me. Had I the slightest hope of convincing you of the fact,
I should strain every mental nerve to that end. But no one can labour
without hope, and as in respect of _your_ justice I have none, I will
be silent. May the God in whom I trust convince you of the cruelty of
which you have been guilty: the God in whom you profess to believe,
must be too like yourself to give any ground of such hope from him.

Your obedient servant,


'WILFRID CUMBERMEDE.'


If Mary had read my letter, I felt assured her reading had been very
different from her father's. Anyhow she could not judge me as he did,
for she knew me better. She knew that for Charley's sake I had tried
the harder to believe myself.

But the reproaches of one who had been so unjust to his own son could
not weigh very heavily on me, and I now resumed my work with a
tolerable degree of calmness. But I wrote badly. I should have done
better to go down to the Moat, and be silent. If my reader has ever
seen what I wrote at that time, I should like her to know that I now
wish it all unwritten--not for any utterance contained in it, but
simply for its general inferiority.

Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing
as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully
neglected. Abraham, seated in his tent door in the heat of the day,
would be to the philosophers of the nineteenth century an object for
uplifted hands and pointed fingers. They would see in him only the
indolent Arab, whom nothing but the foolish fancy that he saw his Maker
in the distance, could rouse to run.

It was clearly better to attempt no further communication with Mary at
present; and I could think but of one person from whom, without giving
pain, I might hope for some information concerning her.

* * * * *

Here I had written a detailed account of how I contrived to meet Miss
Pease, but it is not of consequence enough to my story to be allowed to
remain. Suffice it to mention that one morning at length I caught sight
of her in a street in Mayfair, where the family was then staying for
the season, and overtaking addressed her.

She started, stared at me for a moment, and held out her hand.

'I didn't know you, Mr Cumbermede. How much older you look! I beg your
pardon. Have you been ill?'

She spoke hurriedly, and kept looking over her shoulder now and then,
as if afraid of being seen talking to me.

'I have had a good deal to make me older since we met last, Miss
Pease,' I said. 'I have hardly a friend left in the world but you--that
is, if you will allow me to call you one.'

'Certainly, certainly,' she answered, but hurriedly, and with one of
those uneasy glances. 'Only you must allow, Mr Cumbermede,
that--that--that--'

The poor lady was evidently unprepared to meet me on the old footing,
and, at the same time, equally unwilling to hurt my feelings.

'I should be sorry to make you run a risk for my sake,' I said. 'Please
just answer me one question. Do you know what it is to be
misunderstood--to be despised without deserving it?'

She smiled sadly, and nodded her head gently two or three times.

'Then have pity on me, and let me have a little talk with you.'

Again she glanced apprehensively over her shoulder.

'You are afraid of being seen with me, and I don't wonder,' I said.

'Mr Geoffrey came up with us,' she answered. 'I left him at breakfast.
He will be going across the park to his club directly.'

'Then come with me the other way--into Hyde Park,' I said.

With evident reluctance, she yielded and accompanied me.

As soon as we got within Stanhope Gate, I spoke.

'A certain sad event, of which you have no doubt heard, Miss Pease, has
shut me out from all communication with the family of my friend Charley
Osborne. I am very anxious for some news of his sister. She is all that
is left of him to me now. Can you tell me anything about her?'

'She has been very ill,' she replied.

'I hope that means that she is better,' I said.

'She is better, and, I hear, going on the Continent, as soon as the
season will permit. But, Mr Cumbermede, you must be aware that I am
under considerable restraint in talking to you. The position I hold in
Sir Giles's family, although neither a comfortable nor a dignified
one--'

'I understand you perfectly, Miss Pease,' I returned, 'and fully
appreciate the sense of propriety which causes your embarrassment. But
the request I am about to make has nothing to do with them or their
affairs whatever. I only want your promise to let me know if you hear
anything of Miss Osborne.'

'I cannot tell--what--'

'What use I may be going to make of the information you give me. In a
word, you do not trust me.'

'I neither trust nor distrust you, Mr Cumbermede. But I am afraid of
being drawn into a correspondence with you.'

'Then I will ask no promise. I will hope in your generosity. Here is my
address. I pray you, as you would have helped him who fell among
thieves, to let me know anything you hear about Mary Osborne.'

She took my card, and turned at once, saying,

'Mind, I make no promise.'

'I imagine none,' I answered. 'I will trust in your kindness.'

And so we parted.

Unsatisfactory as the interview was, it yet gave me a little hope. I
was glad to hear that Mary was going abroad, for it must do her good.
For me, I would endure and labour and hope. I gave her to God, as
Shakspere says somewhere, and set myself to my work. When her mind was
quieter about Charley, somehow or other I might come near her again.--I
could not see how.

I took my way across the Green Park.

I do not believe we notice the half of the coincidences that float past
us on the stream of events. Things which would fill us with
astonishment, and probably with foreboding, look us in the face and
pass us by, and we know nothing of them.

As I walked along in the direction of the Mall, I became aware of a
tall man coming towards me, stooping, as if with age, while the length
of his stride indicated a more vigorous period. He passed without
lifting his head, but, in the partial view of the wan and furrowed
countenance, I could not fail to recognize Charley's father. Such a
worn unhappiness was there depicted that the indignation which still
lingered in my bosom went out in compassion. If his sufferings might
but teach him that to brand the truth of the kingdom with the private
mark of opinion must result in persecution and cruelty! He mounted the
slope with strides at once eager and aimless, and I wondered whether
any of the sure-coming compunctions had yet begun to overshadow the
complacency of his faith; whether he had yet begun to doubt if it
pleased the Son of Man that a youth should be driven from the gates of
truth because he failed to recognize her image in the faces of the
janitors.

Aimless also, I turned into the Mall, and again I started at the sight
of a known figure. Was it possible?--could it be my Lilith betwixt the
shafts of a public cabriolet? Fortunately it was empty. I hailed it,
and jumped up, telling the driver to take me to my chambers.

My poor Lilith! She was working like one who had never been loved! So
far as I knew she had never been in harness before. She was badly
groomed and thin, but much of her old spirit remained. I soon entered
into negotiations with the driver, whose property she was, and made her
my own once more, with a delight I could ill express in plain
prose--for my friends were indeed few. I wish I could draw a picture of
the lovely creature, when at length, having concluded my bargain, I
approached her, and called her by her name! She turned her head
sideways towards me with a low whinny of pleasure, and when I walked a
little away, walked wearily after me. I took her myself to livery
stables near me, and wrote for Styles. His astonishment when he saw her
was amusing.

'Good Lord! Miss Lilith!' was all he could say--for some moments.

In a few days she had begun to look like herself, and I sent her home
with Styles. I should hardly like to say how much the recovery of her
did to restore my spirits; I could not help regarding it as a good
omen.

And now, the first bitterness of my misery having died a natural death,
I sought again some of the friends I had made through Charley, and
experienced from them great kindness. I began also to go into society a
little, for I had found that invention is ever ready to lose the forms
of life, if it be not kept under the ordinary pressure of its
atmosphere. As it is, I doubt much if any of my books are more than
partially true to those forms, for I have ever heeded them too little;
but I believe I have been true to the heart of man. At the same time, I
have ever regarded that heart more as the fountain of aspiration than
the grave of fruition. The discomfiture of enemies and a happy marriage
never seemed to me ends of sufficient value to close a history
withal--I mean a fictitious history, wherein one may set forth joys and
sorrows which in a real history must walk shadowed under the veil of
modesty; for the soul, still less than the body, will consent to be
revealed to all eyes. Hence, although most of my books have seemed true
to some, they have all seemed visionary to most.

A year passed away, during which I never left London. I heard from Miss
Pease--that Miss Osborne, although much better, was not going to return
until after another Winter. I wrote and thanked her, and heard no more.
It may seem I accepted such ignorance with strange indifference; but,
even to the reader for whom alone I am writing, I cannot, as things
are, attempt to lay open all my heart. I have not written and cannot
write how I thought, projected, brooded, and dreamed--all about _her_;
how I hoped when I wrote that she might read; how I questioned what I
had written, to find whether it would look to her what I had intended
it to appear.




CHAPTER LVI.


THE LAST VISION.

I had engaged to accompany one of Charley's barrister-friends, in whose
society I had found considerable satisfaction, to his father's
house--to spend the evening with some friends of the family. The
gathering was chiefly for talk, and was a kind of thing I disliked,
finding its aimlessness and flicker depressing. Indeed, partly from the
peculiar circumstances of my childhood, partly from what I had
suffered, I always found my spirits highest when alone. Still, the
study of humanity apart, I felt that I ought not to shut myself out
from my kind, but endure some little irksomeness, if only for the sake
of keeping alive that surface friendliness which has its value in the
nourishment of the deeper affections. On this particular occasion,
however, I yielded the more willingly that, in the revival of various
memories of Charley, it had occurred to me that I once heard him say
that his sister had a regard for one of the ladies of the family.

There were not many people in the drawing-room when we arrived, and my
friend's mother alone was there to entertain them. With her I was
chatting when one of her daughters entered, accompanied by a lady in
mourning. For one moment I felt as if on the borders of insanity. My
brain seemed to surge like the waves of a wind-tormented tide, so that
I dared not make a single step forward lest my limbs should disobey me.
It was indeed Mary Osborne; but oh, how changed! The rather full face
had grown delicate and thin, and the fine pure complexion if possible
finer and purer, but certainly more ethereal and evanescent. It was as
if suffering had removed some substance unapt, [Footnote: Spenser's
'Hymne in Honour of Beautie.'] and rendered her body a better-fitting
garment for her soul. Her face, which had before required the softening
influences of sleep and dreams to give it the plasticity necessary for
complete expression, was now full of a repressed expression, if I may
be allowed the phrase--a latent something ever on the tremble, ever on
the point of breaking forth. It was as if the nerves had grown finer,
more tremulous, or, rather, more vibrative. Touched to finer issues
they could never have been, but suffering had given them a more
responsive thrill. In a word, she was the Athanasia of my dream, not
the Mary Osborne of the Moldwarp library.

Conquering myself at last, and seeing a favourable opportunity, I
approached her. I think the fear lest her father should enter gave me
the final impulse; otherwise I could have been contented to gaze on her
for hours in motionless silence.

'May I speak to you, Mary?' I said.

She lifted her eyes and her whole face towards mine, without a smile,
without a word. Her features remained perfectly still, but, like the
outbreak of a fountain, the tears rushed into her eyes and overflowed
in silent weeping. Not a sob, not a convulsive movement, accompanied
their flow.

'Is your father here?' I asked.

She shook her head.

'I thought you were abroad somewhere--I did not know where.'

Again she shook her head. She dared not speak, knowing that if she made
the attempt she must break down.

'I will go away till you can bear the sight of me,' I said. She
half-stretched out a thin white hand, but whether to detain me or bid
me farewell I do not know, for it dropped again on her knee.

[Illustration: "I will come to you by and by," I said.]

'I will come to you by-and-by,' I said, and moved away. The rooms
rapidly filled, and in a few minutes I could not see the corner where I
had left her. I endured everything for awhile, and then made my way
back to it; but she was gone, and I could find her nowhere. A lady
began to sing. When the applause which followed her performance was
over, my friend, who happened to be near me, turned abruptly and said,

'Now, Cumbermede, _you_ sing.'

The truth was that, since I had loved Mary Osborne, I had attempted to
cultivate a certain small gift of song which I thought I possessed. I
dared not touch any existent music, for I was certain I should break
down; but having a faculty--somewhat thin, I fear--for writing songs,
and finding that a shadowy air always accompanied the birth of the
words, I had presumed to study music a little, in the hope of becoming
able to fix the melody--the twin sister of the song. I had made some
progress, and had grown able to write down a simple thought. There was
little presumption, then, in venturing my voice, limited as was its
scope, upon a trifle of my own. Tempted by the opportunity of realizing
hopes consciously wild, I obeyed my friend, and, sitting down to the
instrument in some trepidation, sang the following verses--

I dreamed that I woke from a dream,
And the house was full of light;
At the window two angel Sorrows
Held back the curtains of night.

The door was wide, and the house
Was full of the morning wind;
At the door two armed warders
Stood silent, with faces blind.

I ran to the open door,
For the wind of the world was sweet;
The warders with crossing weapons
Turned back my issuing feet.

I ran to the shining windows--
There the winged Sorrows stood;
Silent they held the curtains,
And the light fell through in a flood.

I clomb to the highest window--
Ah! there, with shadowed brow,
Stood one lonely radiant Sorrow,
And that, my love, was thou.

I could not have sung this in public, but that no one would suspect it
was my own, or was in the least likely to understand a word of
it--except her for whose ears and heart it was intended.

As soon as I had finished, I rose, and once more went searching for
Mary. But as I looked, sadly fearing she was gone, I heard her voice
close behind me.

'Are those verses your own, Mr Cumbermede?' she asked, almost in a
whisper.

I turned trembling. Her lovely face was looking up at me.

'Yes,' I answered--'as much my own as that I believe they are not to be
found anywhere. But they were given to me rather than made by me.'

'Would you let me have them? I am not sure that I understand them.'

'I am not sure that I understand them myself. They are for the heart
rather than the mind. Of course you shall have them. They were written
for you. All I have, all I am, is yours.'

Her face flushed, and grew pale again instantly.

'You must not talk so,' she said. 'Remember.'

'I can never forget. I do not know why you say _remember_.'

'On second thoughts, I must not have the verses. I beg your pardon.'

'Mary, you bewilder me. I have no right to ask you to explain, except
that you speak as if I must understand. What have they been telling you
about me?'

'Nothing--at least nothing that--'

She paused.

'I try to live innocently, and were it only for your sake, shall never
stop searching for the thread of life in its ravelled skein.'

'Do not say for _my_ sake, Mr Cumbermede. That means nothing. Say for
your own sake, if not for God's.'

'If _you_ are going to turn away from me, I don't mind how soon I
follow Charley.'

All this was said in a half-whisper, I bending towards her where she
sat, a little sheltered by one of a pair of folding doors. My heart was
like to break--or rather it seemed to have vanished out of me
altogether, lost in a gulf of emptiness. Was this all? Was this the end
of my dreaming? To be thus pushed aside by the angel of my
resurrection?

'Hush! hush!' she said kindly. 'You must have many friends. But--'

'But you will be my friend no more? Is that it, Mary? Oh, if you knew
all! And you are never, never to know it!'

Her still face was once more streaming with tears. I choked mine back,
terrified at the thought of being observed; and without even offering
my hand, left her and made my way through the crowd to the stair. On
the landing I met Geoffrey Brotherton. We stared each other in the face
and passed.

I did not sleep much that night, and when I did sleep, woke from one
wretched dream after another, now crying aloud, and now weeping. What
could I have done? or rather, what could any one have told her I had
done to make her behave thus to me? She did not look angry--or even
displeased--only sorrowful, very sorrowful; and she seemed to take it
for granted I knew what it meant. When at length I finally woke after
an hour of less troubled sleep, I found some difficulty in convincing
myself that the real occurrences of the night before had not been one
of the many troubled dreams that had scared my repose. Even after the
dreams had all vanished, and the facts remained, they still appeared
more like a dim dream of the dead--the vision of Mary was so wan and
hopeless, memory alone looking out from her worn countenance. There had
been no warmth in her greeting, no resentment in her aspect; we met as
if we had parted but an hour before, only that an open grave was
between us, across which we talked in the voice of dreamers. She had
sought to raise no barrier between us, just because we _could_ not
meet, save as one of the dead and one of the living. What could it
mean? But with the growing day awoke a little courage. I would at least
try to find out what it meant. Surely _all_ my dreams were not to
vanish like the mist of the morning! To lose my dreams would be far
worse than to lose the so-called realities of life. What were these to
me? What value lay in such reality? Even God was as yet so dim and far
off as to seem rather in the region of dreams--of those true dreams, I
hoped, that shadowed forth the real--than in the actual visible
present. 'Still,' I said to myself, 'she had not cast me off; she did
not refuse to know me; she did ask for my song, and I will send it.'

I wrote it out, adding a stanza to the verses:--

I bowed my head before her,
And stood trembling in the light;
She dropped the heavy curtain,
And the house was full of night.

I then sought my friend's chambers.

'I was not aware you knew the Osbornes,' I said. 'I wonder you never
told me, seeing Charley and you were such friends.'

'I never saw one of them till last night. My sister and she knew each
other some time ago, and have met again of late. What a lovely creature
she is! But what became of you last night? You must have left before
any one else.'

'I didn't feel well.'

'You don't look the thing.'

'I confess meeting Miss Osborne rather upset me.'

'It had the same effect on her. She was quite ill, my sister said, this
morning. No wonder! Poor Charley! I always had a painful feeling that
he would come to grief somehow.'

'Let's hope he's come to something else by this time, Marston,' I said.

'Amen,' he returned.

Scottish book of the year goes to Kieron Smith, Boy by James Kelman

The barrister Constance Briscoe has won the libel case brought against her by her mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, over her bestselling misery memoir Ugly, in which she accused Briscoe-Mitchell of childhood cruelty and neglect.

Briscoe-Mitchell claimed the allegations were "a piece of fiction", and sued Briscoe and her publishers Hodder & Stoughton for libel.

A 10-day hearing at the high court in London concluded earlier today with a unanimous verdict from the jury after more than a day's deliberation. Speaking outside the court, Briscoe, a part-time judge, said she was "very happy" with the verdict.

"It is sad that my mother still feels the need to pursue me. Now I just want to get on with my career," she said. "I can quite understand why my family went into collective denial, but whilst child abuse may be committed behind closed doors, it should never be swept under the carpet."

The hearing saw Briscoe tell Mr Justice Tugendhat and a jury how her mother beat her with a stick for wetting the bed, called her a "dirty little whore" and drove her to attempt suicide by drinking bleach.

Briscoe's account of her upbringing was published in 2006 and has sold more than 400,000 copies in the UK.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Would you have your ashes scattered in Jane Austen's garden?
American film producer to publish version of the Bible in which God says it is better to be gay than straight

The royal family doesn't need a poet

The power of Jane Austen never ceases to amaze: the myriad film and TV adaptations, the biopics, the spin-off self-help books, the novels about Austen book clubs and Austen obsessives and even, next spring, the publication of a book about "how Jane Austen conquered the world" (Jane's Fame, by Clare Harman). And now comes the just-too-weird story that deceased fans of Jane Austen have been banned from having their ashes scattered in her garden. In a letter to the Jane Austen Society, Louise West, the collections manager of Jane Austen's House Museum, wrote: "While we understand many admirers of Jane Austen would love to have ashes laid here, it is something we do not allow. It is distressing for visitors to see mounds of human ash, particularly so for our gardener. Also, it is of no benefit to the garden!" (Or is it? Surely a small quantity of fresh ashes judiciously placed beneath a hydrangea bush is just the ticket?)

Anyway, leaving aside the Gardeners' Question Time minutiae, what on earth is going on here? I like an Austen novel as much as the next person – I probably reread my way through the complete works every couple of years – but I am baffled as to why one would want to be laid to rest among the flowerbeds of Chawton. The only explanation is the currently unstoppable power of the Austen cult, fuelled by Colin Firth in a wet blouse, by Andrew Davies's adaptations, and by Hollywood. I'm all for enjoying books, but the cult of Austen has reached ridiculous proportions. In a post-feminist world that should know better, she seems to be adored as the comforting provider of romantic, happy-endings nonsense instead of the sharp and acerbic social satirist she deserves to be seen as.

(Does anyone actually believe her, by the way, when she foretells a happy marriage for Darcey and Elizabeth? I fear a woman as interesting as Elizabeth would be sorely disappointed with this standard-issue British Repressed Public-school Man - hopeless emotionally, and probably hopeless in bed.)

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds