Chapter XI: Part 11

So then Barty dried his tears, if he really shed them--and he swears he did--and went and sat by his wife's bedside, and felt unutterably, as I believe all good men do under similar circumstances; and lo!--proh!--to his wonderment and delight, in the middle of it all, the sense of the north came back like a tide, like an overwhelming avalanche. He declared he all but fainted in the double ineffability of his bliss.

That night he arranged by his bedside writing materials chosen with extra care, and before he went to bed he looked out of window at the stars, and filled his lungs with the clean, frozen, virtuous air of Bloomsbury, and whispered a most passionate invocation to Martia, and implored her forgiveness, and went to sleep hugging the thought of her to his manly breast, now widowed for quite a month to come.

Next morning there was a long letter in bold, vigorous Blaze:

"My more than ever beloved Barty,--It is for me to implore pardon,
not for _you_! Your first-born is proof enough to me how right you
were in letting your own instinct guide you in the choice of a wife.

"Ah! and well now I know her worth and your good-fortune. I have
inhabited her for many months, little as she knows it, dear thing!

"Although she was not the woman I first wanted for you, and had
watched so many years, she is all that I could wish, in body and
mind, in beauty and sense and goodness of heart and intelligence, in
health and strength, and especially in the love with which she has
so easily, and I trust so lastingly, filled your heart--for that is
the most precious thing of all to me, as you shall know some day,
and why; and you will then understand and forgive me for seeming
such a shameless egotist and caring so desperately for my own ends.

"Barty, I will never doubt you again, and we will do great things
together. They will not be quite what I used to hope, but they will
be worth doing, and all the doing will be yours. All I can do is to
set your brains in motion--those innocent brains that don't know
their own strength any more than a herd of bullocks which any little
butcher boy can drive to the slaughter-house.

"As soon as Leah is well enough you must tell her all about me--all
you know, that is. She won't believe you at first, and she'll think
you've gone mad; but she'll have to believe you in time, and she's
to be trusted with any secret, and so will you be when once you've
shared it with her.

"(By-the-way, I wish you weren't so slipshod and colloquial in your
English, Barty--Guardsman's English, I suppose--which I have to use,
as it's yours; your French is much more educated and correct. You
remember dear M. Durosier at the Pension Brossard? he taught you
well. You must read, and cultivate a decent English style, for the
bulk of our joint work must be in English, I think; and I can only
use your own words to make you immortal, and your own way of using
them.)

"We will be simple, Barty--as simple as Lemuel Gulliver and the good
Robinson Crusoe--and cultivate a fondness for words of one syllable,
and if that doesn't do we'll try French.

"Now listen, or, rather, read:

"First of all, I will write out for you a list of books, which you
must study whenever you feel I'm inside you--and this more for me
than for yourself. Those marked with a cross you must read
constantly and carefully at home, the others you must read at the
British Museum.

"Get a reading ticket at once, and read the books in the order I put
down. Never forget to leave paper and pencil by your bedside. Leah
will soon get accustomed to your quiet somnambulism; I will never
trouble your rest for more than an hour or so each night, but you
can make up for it by staying in bed an hour or two longer. You will
have to work during the day from the pencil notes in Blaze you will
have written during the night, and in the evening, or at any time
you are conscious of my presence, read what you have written during
the day, and leave it by your bedside when you go to bed, that I may
make you correct and alter and suggest--during your sleep.

"Only write on one side of a page, leaving a margin and plenty of
space between the lines, and let it be in copybooks, so that the
page on the left-hand side be left for additions and corrections
from my Blaze notes, and so forth; you'll soon get into the way of
it.

"Then when each copybook is complete--I will let you know--get Leah
to copy it out; she writes a very good, legible business hand. All
will arrange itself....

"And now, get the books and begin reading them. I shall not be ready
to write, nor will you, for more than a month.

"Keep this from everybody but Leah; don't even mention it to Maurice
until I give you leave--not but what's he's to be thoroughly
trusted. You are fortunate in your wife and your friend--I hope the
day will come when you will find you have been fortunate in your

"Martia."

Here follows a list of books, but it has been more or less carefully erased; and though some of the names are still to be made out, I conclude that Barty did not wish them to be made public.

* * * * *

Before Roberta was born, Leah had reserved herself an hour every morning and every afternoon for what she called the cultivation of her mind--the careful reading of good standard books, French and English, that she might qualify herself in time, as she said, for the intellectual society in which she hoped to mix some day; she built castles in the air, being somewhat of a hero-worshipper in secret, and dreamt of meeting her heroes in the flesh, now that she was Barty's wife.

But when she became a mother there was not only Roberta who required much attention, but Barty himself made great calls upon her time besides.

To his friends' astonishment he had taken it into his head to write a book. Good heavens! Barty writing a book! What on earth could the dear boy have to write about?

He wrote much of the book at night in bed, and corrected and put it into shape during the daytime; and finally Leah had to copy it all out neatly in her best handwriting, and this copying out of Barty's books became to her an all but daily task for many years--a happy labor of love, and one she would depute to no one else; no hired hand should interfere with these precious productions of her husband's genius. So that most of the standard works, English and French, that she grew to thoroughly master were of her husband's writing--not a bad education, I venture to think!

Besides, it was more in her nature and in the circumstances of her life that she should become a woman of business and a woman of the world rather than a reader of books--one who grew to thoroughly understand life as it presented itself to her; and men and women, and especially children; and the management of a large and much frequented house; for they soon moved away from Southampton Row.

She quickly arrived at a complete mastery of all such science as this--and it is a science; such a mastery as I have never seen surpassed by any other woman, of whatever world. She would have made a splendid Marchioness of Whitby, this daughter of a low-comedy John Gilpin; she would have beaten the Whitby record!

She developed into a woman of the world in the best sense--full of sympathy, full of observation and quick understanding of others' needs and thoughts and feelings; absolutely sincere, of a constant and even temper, and a cheerfulness that never failed--the result of her splendid health; without caprice, without a spark of vanity, without selfishness of any kind--generous, open-handed, charitable to a fault; always taking the large and generous view of everything and everybody; a little impulsive perhaps, but not often having to regret her impulses; of unwearied devotion to her husband, and capable of any heroism or self-sacrifice for his sake; of that I feel sure.

No one is perfect, of course. Unfortunately, she was apt to be somewhat jealous at first of his singularly catholic and very frankly expressed admiration of every opposite type of female beauty; but she soon grew to see that there was safety in numbers, and she was made to feel in time that her own type was the arch-type of all in his eyes, and herself the arch-representative of that type in his heart.

She was also jealous in her friendships, and was not happy unless constantly assured of her friends' warm love--Ida's, mine, even that of her own father and mother. Good heavens! had ever a woman less cause for doubt or complaint on that score!

Then, like all extremely conscientious people who always know their own mind and do their very best, she did not like to be found fault with; she secretly found such fault with herself that she thought that was fault-finding enough. Also, she was somewhat rigid in sticking to the ways she thought were right, and in the selection of these ways she was not always quite infallible. _On a les defauts de ses qualites_; and a little obstinacy is often the fault of a very noble quality indeed!

Though somewhat shy and standoffish during the first year or two of her married life, she soon became "_joliment degourdie_," as Barty called it; and I can scarcely conceive any position in which she would have been awkward or embarrassed for a moment, so ready was she always with just the right thing to say--or to withhold, if silence were better than speech; and her fit and proper place in the world as a great man's wife--and a good and beautiful woman--was always conceded to her with due honor, even by the most impertinent among the highly placed of her own sex, without any necessity for self-assertion on her part whatever--without assumption of any kind.

It was a strange and peculiar personal ascendency she managed to exert with so little effort, an ascendency partly physical, no doubt; and the practice of it had begun in the West End emporium of the "Universal Fur Company, Limited."

How admirably she filled the high and arduous position of wife to such a man as Barty Josselin is well known to the world at large. It was no sinecure! but she gloried in it; and to her thorough apprehension and management of their joint lives and all that came of them, as well as to her beauty and sense and genial warmth, was due her great popularity for many years in an immense and ever-widening circle, where the memory of her is still preserved and cherished as one of the most remarkable women of her time.

With all this power of passionate self-surrender to her husband in all things, little and big, she was not of the type that cannot see the faults of the beloved one, and Barty was very often frankly pulled up for his shortcomings, and by no means had it all his own way when his own way wasn't good for him. She was a person to reckon with, and incapable of the slightest flattery, even to Barty, who was so fond of it from her, and in spite of her unbounded admiration for him.

Such was your mother, my dear Roberta, in the bloom of her early twenties and ever after; till her death, in fact--on the day following his!

* * * * *

Somewhere about the spring of 1863 she said to me:

"Bob, Barty has written a book. Either I'm an idiot, or blinded by conjugal conceit, or else Barty's book--which I've copied out myself in my very best handwriting--is one of the most beautiful and important books ever written. Come and dine with me to-night; Barty's dining in the City with the Fishmongers--you shall have what you like best: pickled pork and pease-pudding, a dressed crab and a Welsh rabbit to follow, and draught stout--and after dinner I will read you the beginning of _Sardonyx_--that's what he's called it--and I should like to have your opinion."

I dined with her as she wished. We were alone, and she told me how he wrote every night in bed, in a kind of ecstasy--between two and four, in Blaze--and then elaborated his work during the day, and made sketches for it.

And after dinner she read me the first part of _Sardonyx_; it took three hours.

Then Barty came home, having dined well, and in very high spirits.

"Well, old fellow! how do you like _Sardonyx_?"

I was so moved and excited I could say nothing--I couldn't even smoke. I was allowed to take the precious manuscript away with me, and finished it during the night.

Next morning I wrote to him out of the fulness of my heart.

I read it aloud to my father and mother, and then lent it to Scatcherd, who read it to Ida. In twenty-four hours our gay and genial Barty--our Robin Goodfellow and Merry Andrew, our funny man--had become for us a demi-god; for all but my father, who looked upon him as a splendid but irretrievably lost soul, and mourned over him as over a son of his own.

And in two months _Sardonyx_ was before the reading world, and the middle-aged reader will remember the wild enthusiasm and the storm it raised.

All that is ancient history, and I will do no more than allude to the unparalleled bitterness of the attacks made by the Church on a book which is now quoted again and again from every pulpit in England--in the world--and has been translated into almost every language under the sun.

Thus he leaped into fame and fortune at a bound, and at first they delighted him. He would take little Roberta on to the top of his head and dance "La Paladine" on his hearth-rug, singing:

"Rataplan, Rataplan,
I'm a celebrated man--"

in imitation of Sergeant Bouncer in _Cox and Box_.

But in less than a year celebrity had quite palled, and all his money bored him--as mine does me. He had a very small appetite for either the praise or the pudding which were served out to him in such excess all through his life. It was only his fondness for the work itself that kept his nose so constantly to the grindstone.

Within six months of the _Sardonyx_ Barty wrote _La quatrieme Dimension_ in French, which was published by Dollfus-Mois freres, in Paris, with if possible a greater success; for the clerical opposition was even more virulent. The English translation, which is admirable, is by Scatcherd.

Then came _Motes in a Moonbeam, Interstellar Harmonics_, and _Berthe aux grands Pieds_ within eighteen months, so that before he was quite thirty, in the space of two years, Barty had produced five works--three in English and two in French--which, though merely novels and novelettes, have had as wide and far-reaching an influence on modern thought as the _Origin of Species_, that appeared about the same time, and which are such, for simplicity of expression, exposition, and idea, that an intelligent ploughboy can get all the good and all the pleasure from them almost as easily as any philosopher or sage.

Such was Barty's debut as a man of letters. This is not the place to criticise his literary work, nor am I the proper person to do so; enough has been written already about Barty Josselin during his lifetime to fill a large library--in nearly every language there is. I tremble to think of what has yet to follow!

_Sardonyx_ came of age nearly twelve years ago--what a coming of age that was the reader will remember well. I shall not forget its celebration at Marsfield; it happened to coincide with the birth of Barty's first grandchild, at that very house.

I will now go back to Barty's private life, which is the sole object of this humble attempt at book-making on my part.

During the next ten years Barty's literary activity was immense. Beautiful books followed each other in rapid succession--and so did beautiful little Bartys, and Leah's hands were full.

And as each book, English or French, was more beautiful than the last; so was each little Barty, male or female. All over Kensington and Campden Hill--for they took Gretna Lodge, next door to Cornelys, the sculptor's--the splendor of these little Bartys, their size, their beauty, their health and high spirits, became almost a joke, and their mother became almost a comic character in consequence--like the old lady who lived in a shoe.

Money poured in with a profusion few writers of good books have ever known before, and every penny not wanted for immediate household expenses was pounced upon by Scatcherd or by me to be invested in the manner we thought best: nous avons eu la main heureuse!

The Josselins kept open house, and money was not to be despised, little as Barty ever thought of money.

Then every autumn the entire smalah migrated to the coast of Normandy, or Picardy, or Brittany, or to the Highlands of Inverness, and with them the Scatcherds and the chronicler of these happy times--not to mention cats, dogs, and squirrels, and guinea-pigs, and white mice, and birds of all kinds, from which the children would not be parted, and the real care of which, both at home and abroad, ultimately devolved on poor Mrs. Josselin--who was not so fond of animals as all that--so that her life was full to overflowing of household cares.

Another duty had devolved upon her also: that of answering the passionate letters that her husband received by every post from all parts of the world--especially America--and which he could never be induced to answer himself. Every morning regularly he would begin his day's work by writing "Yours truly--B. Josselin" on quite a score of square bits of paper, to be sent through the post to fair English and American autograph collectors who forwarded stamped envelopes, and sometimes photographs of themselves, that he might study the features of those who loved him at a respectful distance, and who so frankly told their love; all of which bored Barty to extinction, and was a source of endless amusement to his wife.

But even _she_ was annoyed when a large unstamped or insufficiently stamped parcel arrived by post from America, enclosing a photograph of her husband to which his signature was desired, and containing no stamps to frank it on its return journey!

And the photographers he had to sit to! and the interviewers, male and female, to whom he had to deny himself! Life was too short!

How often has a sturdy laborer or artisan come up to him, as he and I walked together, with:

"I should very much like to shake you by the hand, Mr. Josselin, if I might make so bold, sir!"

And such an appeal as this would please him far more than the most fervently written outpourings of the female hearts he had touched.

They, of course, received endless invitations to stay at country-houses all over the United Kingdom, where they might have been lionized to their hearts' content, if such had been their wish; but these they never accepted. They never spent a single night away from their own house till most of their children were grown up--or ever wanted to; and every year they got less and less into the way of dining out, or spending the evening from home--and I don't wonder; no gayer or jollier home ever was than that they made for themselves, and each other, and their intimate friends; not even at Cornelys's, next door, was better music to be heard; for Barty was friends with all the music-makers, English and foreign, who cater for us in and out of the season; even _they_ read his books, and understood them; and they sang and played better for Barty--and for Cornelys, next door--than even for the music-loving multitude who filled their pockets with British gold.

And the difference between Barty's house and that of Cornelys was that at the former the gatherings were smaller and more intimate--as became the smaller house--and one was happier there in consequence.

Barty gave himself up entirely to his writing, and left everything else to his wife, or to me, or to Scatcherd. She was really a mother to him, as well as a passionately loving and devoted helpmeet.

To make up for this, whenever she was ill, which didn't often happen--except, of course, when she had a baby--he forgot all his writing in his anxiety about her; and in his care of her, and his solicitude for her ease and comfort, he became quite a motherly old woman, a better nurse than Mrs. Jones or Mrs. Gibson--as practical and sensible and full of authority as Dr. Knight himself.

And when it was all over, all his amiable carelessness came back, and with it his genius, his school-boy high spirits, his tomfooling, his romps with his children, and his utter irresponsibility, and absolute disdain for all the ordinary business of life; and the happy, genial temper that never seemed to know a moment's depression or nourish an unkind thought.

Poor Barty! what would he have done without us all, and what should we have done without Barty? As Scatcherd said of him, "He's having his portion in this life."

But it was not really so.

Then, in 1870, he bought that charming house, Mansfield, by the Thames, which he rechristened Marsfield; and which he--with the help of the Scatcherds and myself, for it became our hobby--made into one of the most delightful abodes in England. It was the real home for all of us; I really think it is one of the loveliest spots on earth. It was a bargain, but it cost a lot of money; altogether, never was money better spent--even as a mere investment. When I think of what it is worth now! Je suis homme d'affaires!

What a house-warming that was on the very day that France and Germany went to war; we little guessed what was to come for the country we all loved so dearly, or we should not have been so glad.

I am conscious that all this is rather dull reading. Alas! Merry England is a devilish dull place compared to foreign parts--and success, respectability, and domestic bliss are the dullest things to write--or read--about that I know--and with middle age to follow too!

It was during that first summer at Marsfield that Barty told me the extraordinary story of Martia, and I really thought he had gone mad. For I knew him to be the most truthful person alive.

Even now I hardly know what to think, nor did Leah--nor did Barty himself up to the day of his death.

He showed me all her letters, _which I may deem it advisable to publish some day_: not only the Blaze suggestions for his books, and all her corrections; things to occupy him for life--all, of course, in his own handwriting; but many letters about herself, also written in sleep and by his own hand; and the style is Barty's--not the style in which he wrote his books, and which is not to be matched; but that in which he wrote his Blaze letters to me.

If her story is true--and I never read a piece of documentary evidence more convincing--these letters constitute the most astonishing revelation ever yet vouchsafed to this earth.

But her story cannot be true!

That Barty's version of his relations with "The Martian" is absolutely sincere it is impossible to doubt. He was quite unconscious of the genesis of every book he ever wrote. His first hint of every one of them was the elaborately worked out suggestion he found by his bedside in the morning--written by himself in his sleep during the preceding night, with his eyes wide open, while more often than not his wife anxiously watched him at his unconscious work, careful not to wake or disturb him in any way.

Roughly epitomized, Martia's story was this:

For an immense time she had gone through countless incarnations, from the lowest form to the highest, in the cold and dreary planet we call Mars, the outermost of the four inhabited worlds of our system, where the sun seems no bigger than an orange, and which but for its moist, thin, rich atmosphere and peculiar magnetic conditions that differ from ours would be too cold above ground for human or animal or vegetable life. As it is, it is only inhabited now in the neighborhood of its equator, and even there during its long winter it is colder and more desolate than Cape Horn or Spitzbergen--except that the shallow, fresh-water sea does not freeze except for a few months at either pole.

All these incarnations were forgotten by her but the last; nothing remained of them all but a vague consciousness that they had once been, until their culmination in what would be in Mars the equivalent of a woman on our earth.

Man in Mars is, it appears, a very different being from what he is here. He is amphibious, and descends from no monkey, but from a small animal that seems to be something between our seal and our sea-lion.

According to Martia, his beauty is to that of the seal as that of the Theseus or Antinous to that of an orangoutang. His five senses are extraordinarily acute, even the sense of touch in his webbed fingers and toes; and in addition to these he possesses a sixth, that comes from his keen and unintermittent sense of the magnetic current, which is far stronger in Mars than on the earth, and far more complicated, and more thoroughly understood.

When any object is too delicate and minute to be examined by the sense of touch and sight, the Martian shuts his eyes and puts it against the pit of his stomach, and knows all about it, even its inside.

In the absolute dark, or with his eyes shut, and when he stops his ears, he is more intensely conscious of what immediately surrounds him than at any other time, except that all color-perception ceases; conscious not only of material objects, but of what is passing in his fellow-Martian's mind--and this for an area of many hundreds of cubic yards.

In the course of its evolutions this extraordinary faculty--which exists on earth in a rudimentary state, but only among some birds and fish and insects and in the lower forms of animal life--has developed the Martian mind in a direction very different from ours, since no inner life apart from the rest, no privacy, no concealment is possible except at a distance involving absolute isolation; not even thought is free; yet in some incomprehensible way there is, as a matter of fact, a really greater freedom of thought than is conceivable among ourselves: absolute liberty in absolute obedience to law, a paradox beyond our comprehension.

Their habits are as simple as those we attribute to the cave-dwellers during the prehistoric periods of the earth's existence. But their moral sense is so far in advance of ours that we haven't even a terminology by which to express it.

In comparison, the highest and best of us are monsters of iniquity and egoism, cruelty and corruption; and our planet (a very heaven for warmth and brilliancy and beauty, in spite of earthquakes and cyclones and tornadoes) is a very hell through the creatures that people it--a shambles, a place of torture, a grotesque and impure pandemonium.

These exemplary Martians wear no clothes but the exquisite fur with which nature has endowed them, and which constitutes a part of their immense beauty, according to Martia.

They feed exclusively on edible moss and roots and submarine seaweed, which they know how to grow and prepare and preserve. Except for heavy-winged bat-like birds, and big fish, which they have domesticated and use for their own purposes in an incredible manner (incarnating a portion of themselves and their consciousness at will in their bodies), they have cleared Mars of all useless and harmful and mutually destructive forms of animal life. A sorry fauna, the Martian--even at its best--and a flora beneath contempt, compared to ours.

They are great engineers and excavators, great irrigators, great workers in delicate metal, stone, marble, and precious gems (there is no wood to speak of); great sculptors and decorators of the beautiful caves, so fancifully and so intricately connected, in which they live, and which have taken thousands of years to design and excavate and ventilate and adorn, and which they warm and light up at will in a beautiful manner by means of the tremendous magnetic current.

This richly parti-colored light is part of their mental and moral life in a way it is not in us to apprehend, and has its exact equivalent in sound--and vice versa.

They have no language of words, and do not need it, since they can only be isolated in thought from each other by a distance greater than that which any vocal sound can traverse; but their organs of voice and hearing are far more complex and perfect than ours, and their atmosphere infinitely more conductive of phonal vibrations.

It seems that everything which can be apprehended by the eye or hand is capable of absolute sonorous translation: light, color, texture, shape in its three dimensions, weight, and density. The phonal expression and comprehension of all these are acquired by the Martian baby almost as soon as it knows how to swim or dive, or move upright and erect on dry land or beneath it; and the mechanical translation of such expression by means of wind and wire and sounding texture and curved surface of extraordinary elaboration is the principal business of the Martian life--an art by which all the combined past experience and future aspirations of the race receive the fullest utterance. Here again personal magnetism plays an enormous part.

And it is by means of this long and patiently evolved and highly trained faculty that the race is still developing towards perfection with constant strain and effort--although the planet is far advanced in its decadence and within measurable distance of its unfitness for life of any kind.

All is so evenly and harmoniously balanced, whether above ground or beneath, that existence is full of joy in spite of the tremendous strain of life, in spite also of a dreariness of outlook, on barren nature, which is not to be matched by the most inhospitable regions of the earth; and death is looked upon as the crowning joy of all, although life is prolonged by all the means in their power.

For when the life of the body ceases and the body itself is burned and its ashes scattered to the winds and waves, the infinitesimal, imponderable, and indestructible something _we_ call the _soul_ is known to lose itself in a sunbeam and make for the sun, with all its memories about it, that it may then receive further development, fitting it for other systems altogether beyond conception; and the longer it has lived in Mars the better for its eternal life in the future.

But it often, on its journey sunwards, gets entangled in other beams, and finds its way to some intermediate planet--Mercury, Venus, or the Earth; and putting on flesh and blood and bone once more, and losing for a space all its knowledge of its own past, it has to undergo another mortal incarnation--a new personal experience, beginning with its new birth; a dream and a forgetting, till it awakens again after the pangs of dissolution, and finds itself a step further on the way to freedom.

Martia, it seems, came to our earth in a shower of shooting-stars a hundred years ago. She had not lived her full measure of years in Mars; she had elected to be suppressed, through some unfitness, physical or mental or moral, which rendered it inexpedient that she should become a mother of Martians, for they are very particular about that sort of thing in Mars: we shall have to be so here some day, or else we shall degenerate and become extinct; or even worse!

Many Martian souls come to our planet in this way, it seems, and hasten to incarnate themselves in as promising unborn though just begotten men and women as they find, that they may the sooner be free to hie them sunwards with all their collected memories.

According to Martia, most of the best and finest of our race have souls that have lived forgotten lives in Mars. But Martia was in no hurry; she was full of intelligent curiosity, and for ten years she went up and down the earth, revelling in the open air, lodging herself in the brains and bodies of birds, beasts, and fishes, insects, and animals of all kinds--like a hermit crab in a shell that belongs to another--but without the slightest inconvenience to the legitimate owners, who were always quite unconscious of her presence, although she made what use she could of what wits they had.

Thus she had a heavenly time on this sunlit earth of ours--now a worm, now a porpoise, now a sea-gull or a dragon-fly, now some fleet-footed, keen-eyed quadruped that did not live by slaying, for she had a horror of bloodshed.

She could only go where these creatures chose to take her, since she had no power to control their actions in the slightest degree; but she saw, heard, smelled and touched and tasted with their organs of sense, and was as conscious of their animal life as they were themselves. Her description of this phase of her earthly career is full of extraordinary interest, and sometimes extremely funny--though quite unconsciously so, no doubt. For instance, she tells how happy she once was when she inhabited a small brown Pomeranian dog called "Schnapfel," in Cologne, and belonging to a Jewish family who dealt in old clothes near the Cathedral; and how she loved them and looked up to them--how she revelled in fried fish and the smell of it--and in all the stinks in every street of the famous city--all except one, that arose from Herr Johann Maria Farina's renowned emporium in the Julichs Platz, which so offended the canine nostrils that she had to give up inhabiting that small Pomeranian dog forever, etc.

Then she took to man, and inhabited man and woman, and especially child, in all parts of the globe for many years; and, finally, for the last fifty or sixty years or so, she settled herself exclusively among the best and healthiest English she could find.

She took a great fancy to the Rohans, who are singularly well endowed in health of mind and body, and physical beauty, and happiness of temper. She became especially fond of the ill-fated but amiable Lord Runswick--Barty's father. Then through him she knew Antoinette, and loved her so well that she determined to incarnate herself at last as their child; but she had become very cautious and worldly during her wandering life on earth, and felt that she would not be quite happy either as a man or a woman in Western Europe unless she were reborn in holy wedlock--a concession she made to our British prejudices in favor of respectability; she describes herself as the only Martian Philistine and snob.

Evil communications corrupt good manners, and poor Martia, to her infinite sorrow and self-reproach, was conscious of a sad lowering of her moral tone after this long frequentation of the best earthly human beings--even the best English.

She grew to admire worldly success, rank, social distinction, the perishable beauty of outward form, the lust of the flesh and the pride of the eye--the pomps and vanities of this wicked world--and to basely long for these in her own person!

Then when Barty was born she loved to inhabit his singularly well constituted little body better than any other, and to identify herself with his happy child-life, and enjoy his singularly perfect senses, and sleep his beautiful sleep, and revel in the dreams he so completely forgot when he woke--reminiscent dreams, that she was actually able to weave out of the unconscious brain that was his: absolutely using his dormant organs of memory for purposes of her own, to remember and relive her own past pleasures and pains, so sensitively and highly organized was he; and to her immense surprise she found she could make him feel her presence even when awake by means of the magnetic sense that pervaded her strongly as it pervades all Martian souls, till they reincarnate themselves among us and forget.

And thus he was conscious of the north whenever she enjoyed the hospitality of his young body.

She stuck to him for many years, till he offended her taste by his looseness of life as a Guardsman (for she was extremely straitlaced); and she inhabited him no more for some time, though she often watched him through the eyes of others, and always loved him and lamented sorely over his faults and follies.

Then one memorable night, in the energy of her despair at his resolve to slip that splendid body of his, she was able to influence him in his sleep, and saved his life; and all her love came back tenfold.

She had never been able to impose a fraction of her will on any being, animal or human, that she had ever inhabited on earth until that memorable night in Malines, where she made him write at her dictation.

Then she conceived an immense desire that he should marry the splendid Julia, whom she had often inhabited also, that she might one day be a child of his by such a mother, and go through her earthly incarnation in the happiest conceivable circumstances; but herein she was balked by Barty's instinctive preference for Leah, and again gave him up in a huff.

But she soon took to inhabiting Leah a great deal, and found her just as much to her taste for her own future earthly mother as the divine Julia herself, and made up her mind she would make Barty great and famous by a clever management of his very extraordinary brains, of which she had discovered the hidden capacity, and influence the earth for its good--for she had grown to love the beautiful earth, in spite of its iniquities--and finally be a child of Barty and Leah, every new child of whom seemed an improvement on the last, as though practice made perfect.

Such is, roughly, the story of Martia.

There is no doubt--both Barty and Leah agreed with me in this--that it is an easy story to invent, though it is curiously convincing to read in the original shape, with all its minute details and their verisimilitude; but even then there is nothing in it that the author of _Sardonyx_ could not have easily imagined and made more convincing still.

He declared that all through life on awaking from his night's sleep he always felt conscious of having had extraordinary dreams--even as a child--but that he forgot them in the very act of waking, in spite of strenuous efforts to recall them. But now and again on sinking into sleep the vague memory of those forgotten dreams would come back, and they were all of a strange life under new conditions--just such a life as Martia had described--where arabesques of artificial light and interwoven curves of subtle sound had a significance undreamt of by mortal eyes or ears, and served as conductors to a heavenly bliss unknown to earth--revelations denied to us here, or we should be very different beings from what we most unhappily are.

He thought it quite possible that his brain in sleep had at last become so active through the exhausting and depleting medical regime that he went through in Malines that it actually was able to dictate its will to his body, and that everything might have happened to him as it did then and afterwards without any supernatural or ultranatural agency whatever--without a Martia!

He might, in short, have led a kind of dual life, and Martia might be a simple fancy or invention of his brain in an abnormal state of activity during slumber; and both Leah and I inclined to this belief (but for a strange thing which happened later, and which I will tell in due time). Indeed, it all seems so silly and far-fetched, so "out of the question," that one feels almost ashamed at bringing this Martia into a serious biography of a great man--un conte a dormir debout! But you must wait for the end.

Anyhow, the singular fact remains that in some way inexplicable to himself Barty has influenced the world in a direction which it never entered his thoughts even to conceive, so far as he remembered.

Think of all he has done.

He has robbed Death of nearly all its terrors; even for the young it is no longer the grisly phantom it once was for ourselves, but rather of an aspect mellow and benign; for to the most sceptical he (and only he) has restored that absolute conviction of an indestructible germ of Immortality within us, born of remembrance made perfect and complete after dissolution: he alone has built the golden bridge in the middle of which science and faith can shake hands over at least one common possibility--nay, one common certainty for those who have read him aright.

There is no longer despair in bereavement--all bereavement is but a half parting; there is no real parting except for those who survive, and the longest earthly life is but a span. Whatever the future may be, the past will be ours forever, and that means our punishment and our reward and reunion with those we loved. It is a happy phrase, that which closes the career of _Sardonyx_. It has become as universal as the Lord's Prayer!

To think that so simple and obvious a solution should have lain hidden all these aeons, to turn up at last as though by chance in a little illustrated story-book! What a nugget!

Ou avions-nous donc la tete et les yeux?

Physical pain and the origin of evil seem the only questions with which he has not been able to grapple. And yet if those difficulties are ever dealt with and mastered and overcome for us it can only be by some follower of Barty's methods.

It is true, no doubt, that through him suicide has become the normal way out of our troubles when these are beyond remedy. I will not express any opinion as to the ethical significance of this admitted result of his teaching, which many of us still find it so hard to reconcile with their conscience.

Then, by a dexterous manipulation of our sympathies that amounts to absolute conjuring, he has given the death-blow to all cruelty that serves for our amusement, and killed the pride and pomp and circumstance of glorious sport, and made them ridiculous with his lusty laugh; even the bull-fights in Spain are coming to an end, and all through a Spanish translation of _Life-blood_. All the cruelties of the world are bound to follow in time, and this not so much because they are cruel as because they are ridiculous and mean and ugly, and would make us laugh if they didn't make us cry.

And to whom but Barty Josselin do we owe it that our race is on an average already from four to six inches taller than it was thirty years ago, men and women alike; that strength and beauty are rapidly becoming the rule among us, and weakness and ugliness the exception?

He has been hard on these; he has been cruel to be kind, and they have received notice to quit, and been generously compensated in advance, I think! Who in these days would dare to enter the holy state of wedlock unless they were pronounced physically, morally, and mentally fit--to procreate their kind--not only by their own conscience, but by the common consent of all who know them? And that beauty, health, and strength are a part of that fitness, and old age a bar to it, who would dare deny?

I'm no Adonis myself. I've got a long upper lip and an Irish kink in my nose, inherited perhaps from some maternally ancestral Blake of Derrydown, who may have been a proper blackguard! And that kink should be now, no doubt, the lawful property of some ruffianly cattle-houghing moonlighter, whose nose--which should have been mine--is probably as straight as Barty's. For in Ireland are to be found the handsomest and ugliest people in all Great Britain, and in Great Britain the handsomest and ugliest people in the whole world.

Anyhow, I have known my place. I have not perpetuated that kink, and with it, possibly, the base and cowardly instincts of which it was meant to be the outward and visible sign--though it isn't in my case--that my fellow-men might give me a wide berth.

Leah's girlish instinct was a right one when she said me nay that afternoon by the Chelsea pier--for how could she see inside me, poor child? How could Beauty guess the Beast was a Prince in disguise? It was no fairy-tale!

Things have got mixed up; but they're all coming right, and all through Barty Josselin.

And what vulgar pride and narrownesses and meannesses and vanities and uglinesses of life, in mass and class and individual, are now impossible!--and all through Barty Josselin and his quaint ironies of pen and pencil, forever trembling between tears and laughter, with never a cynical spark or a hint of bitterness.

How he has held his own against the world! how he has scourged its wickedness and folly, this gigantic optimist, who never wrote a single line in his own defence!

How quickly their laugh recoiled on those early laughers! and how Barty alone laughed well because he laughed the last, and taught the laughers to laugh on his side! People thought he was always laughing. It was not so.

Part Ninth

"Cara deum soboles, magnum Jovis incrementum."

--Virgil.

The immense fame and success that Barty Josselin achieved were to him a source of constant disquiet. He could take neither pride nor pleasure in what seemed to him not his; he thought himself a fraud.

Yet only the mere skeleton of his work was built up for him by his demon; all the beauty of form and color, all the grace of movement and outer garb, are absolutely his own.

It has been noticed how few eminent men of letters were intimate with the Josselins, though the best among them--except, of course, Thomas Carlyle--have been so enthusiastic and outspoken in their love and admiration of his work.

He was never at his ease in their society, and felt himself a kind of charlatan.

The fact is, the general talk of such men was often apt to be over his head, as it would have been over mine, and often made him painfully diffident and shy. He needn't have been; he little knew the kind of feeling he inspired among the highest and best.

Why, one day at the Marathonaeum, the first and foremost of them all, the champion smiter of the Philistines, the apostle of culture and sweetness and light, told me that, putting Barty's books out of the question, he always got more profit and pleasure out of Barty's society than that of any man he knew.

"It does me good to be in the same room with him; the freshness of the man, his voice, his aspect, his splendid vitality and mother-wit, his boyish spirit, and the towering genius behind it all. I only wish to goodness I was an intimate friend of his as you are; it would be a liberal education to me!"

But Barty's reverence and admiration for true scholarship and great literary culture in others amounted to absolute awe, and filled him with self-distrust.

There is no doubt that until he was universally accepted, the crudeness of his literary method was duly criticised with great severity by those professional literary critics who sometimes carp with such a big mouth at their betters, and occasionally kill the Keatses of this world!

In writing, as in everything else, he was an amateur, and more or less remained one for life; but the greatest of his time accepted him at once, and laughed and wept, and loved him for his obvious faults as well as for his qualities. Tous les genres sont bons, hormis le genre ennuyeux! And Barty was so delightfully the reverse of a bore!

Dear me! what matters it how faultlessly we paint or write or sing if no one will care to look or read or listen? He is all fault that hath no fault at all, and we poor outsiders all but yawn in his face for his pains.

They should only paint and write and sing for each other, these impeccables, who so despise success and revile the successful. How do they live, I wonder? Do they take in each other's washing, or review each other's books?

It edifies one to see what a lot of trouble these deriders of other people's popularity will often take to advertise themselves, and how they yearn for that popular acclaim they so scornfully denounce.

Barty was not a well-read man by any means; his scholarship was that of an idle French boy who leaves school at seventeen, after having been plucked for a cheap French degree, and goes straightway into her Majesty's Household Brigade.

At the beginning of his literary career it would cut him to the quick to find himself alluded to as that inspired Anglo-Gallic buffoon, the ex-Guardsman, whose real vocation, when he wasn't twaddling about the music of the spheres, or writing moral French books, was to be Mr. Toole's understudy.

He was even impressed by the smartness of those second-rate decadents, French and English, who so gloried in their own degeneracy--as though one were to glory in scrofula or rickets; those unpleasant little anthropoids with the sexless little muse and the dirty little Eros, who would ride their angry, jealous little tilt at him in the vain hope of provoking some retort which would have lifted them up to glory! Where are they now? He has improved them all away! Who ever hears of decadents nowadays?

Then there were the grubs of Grub Street, who sometimes manage to squirt a drop from their slime-bags on to the swiftly passing boot that scorns to squash them. He had no notion of what manner of creatures they really were, these gentles! He did not meet them at any club he belonged to--it was not likely. Clubs have a way of blackballing grubs--especially grubs that are out of the common grubby; nor did he sit down to dinner with them at any dinner-table, or come across them at any house he was by way of frequenting; but he imagined they were quite important persons because they did not sign their articles! and he quite mistook their place in the economy of creation. C'etait un naif, le beau Josselin!

Big fleas have little fleas, and they've got to put up with them! There is no "poudre insecticide" for literary vermin--and more's the pity! (Good heavens! what would the generous and delicate-minded Barty say, if he were alive, at my delivering myself in this unworthy fashion about these long-forgotten assailants of his, and at my age too--he who never penned a line in retaliation! He would say I was the most unseemly grub of them all, and he would be quite right; so I am just now, and ought to know better--but it amuses me.)

Then there were the melodious bardlets who imitate those who imitate those who imitate the forgotten minor poets of the olden time and log-roll each other in quaint old English. They did not log-roll Barty, whom they thought coarse and vulgar, and wrote to that effect in very plain English that was not old, but quite up to date.

"How splendidly they write verse!" he would say, and actually once or twice he would pick up one or two of their cheap little archaic mannerisms and proudly use them as his own, and be quite angry to find that Leah had carefully expunged them in her copy.

"A _fair_ and _gracious_ garden indeed!" says Leah. "I _won't_ have you use such ridiculous words, Barty--you mean a _pretty_ garden, and you shall say so; or even a _beautiful_ garden if you like!--and no more '_manifolds_,' and '_there-anents_,' and '_in veriest sooths_,' and '_waters wan_,' and '_wan waters_,' and all that. I won't stand it; they don't suit your style at all!"