AN AUTUMN CITY.

To Daniel Roserra life was a matter of careful cultivation. He respected nature, for what might be cunningly extracted from nature; provided only that one's aim was a quite personal thing, willingly subject to surroundings on its way to the working out of itself. He tended his soul as one might tend some rare plant; careful above most things of the earth it was to take root in. And so he thought much of the influence of places, of the image a place makes for itself in the consciousness, of all that it might do in the formation of a beautiful or uncomely disposition. Places had virtues of their own for him; he supposed that he had the quality of divining their secrets; at all events, if they were places to which he could possibly be sensitive. Much of his time was spent in travelling, in a leisurely way, about Europe; not for the sake of seeing anything in particular, for he had no interest in historical associations or in the remains of ugly things that happened to be old, or in visiting the bric-a-brac museums of the fine arts which make some of the more tolerable countries tedious. He chose a city, a village, or a seashore for its charm, its appeal to him personally; nothing else mattered.

When Roserra was forty he fell in love, quite suddenly, though he had armed himself, as he imagined, against such disturbances of the æsthetic life, and was invulnerable. He had always said that a woman was like a liqueur: a delightful luxury, to be taken with discretion. He feared the influence of a companion in his delicate satisfactions: he realised that a woman might not even be a sympathetic companion. He had, it is true, often wished to try the experiment, a risky one, of introducing a woman to one of his friends among cities; it was a temptation, but he remembered how rarely such introductions work well among people. Would the cities be any more fortunate?

When, however, he fell in love, all hesitation was taken out of his hands by the mere force of things. Livia Dawlish was remarkably handsome, some people thought her beautiful; she was tall and dark, and had a sulky, enigmatical look that teased and attracted him. Some who knew her very well said that it meant nothing, and was merely an accident of colour and form, like the green eye of the cat or the golden eye of the buffalo. Roserra tried to study her, but he could get no point of view. He felt something that he had never felt before, and this something was like a magnetic current flowing subtly from her to him; perhaps, like the magnetic rocks in the 'Arabian Nights,' ready to draw out all the nails and bolts of his ship, and drown him among the wrecked splinters of his life.

He was rich, not too old, of a good Cornish family; he could be the most charming companion in the world; he knew so many things and so many places and was never tedious about them: Livia thought him on the whole the most suitable husband whom she was likely to meet. She was happy when he asked her to marry him, and she married him without a misgiving. She was not reflective.

After the marriage they went straight to Paris, and Roserra was surprised and delighted to find how childishly happy Livia could be among new surroundings. She had always wanted to see Paris, because of its gaiety, its bright wickedness, its names of pleasure and fashion. Everything delighted her; she seemed even to admire a little indiscriminatingly. She thought the Sainte-Chapelle the most beautiful thing in Paris.

They went back to London with more luggage than they had brought with them, and for six months Livia was quite happy. She wore her Paris hats and gowns, she was admired, she went to the theatre; she seemed to get on with Roserra even better than she had expected.

During all this time Roserra seemed to have found out very little about his wife. It gave him more pleasure to do what she wanted than it had ever given him to carry out his own wishes. So far, they had never had a dispute; he seemed to have put his own individuality aside as if it no longer meant anything to him. But he had not yet discovered her individuality from among her crowds of little likes and dislikes, which meant nothing. Nothing had come out yet from behind those enigmatical eyes; but he was waiting; they would open, and there would be treasure there.

Gradually, while he was waiting, his old self began to come back to him. He must do as he had always wanted to do: introduce the most intimate of his cities to a woman. Autumn was beginning; he thought of Arles, which was an autumn city, and the city which meant more to him than almost any other. He must share Arles with Livia.

Livia had heard of the Arlesiennes, she remembered Paris, and, though she was a little reluctant to leave the new London into which she had come since her marriage, she consented without apparent unwillingness.

They went by sea to Marseilles, and Livia wished they were not going any further. Roserra smiled a little satisfied smile; she was so pleased with even slight, superficial things, she could get pleasure out of the empty sunlight and obvious sea of Marseilles. When the deeper appeal of Arles came to her, that new world in which one went clean through the exteriorities of modern life, how she would respond to it!

They reached Arles in the afternoon, and drove to the little old-fashioned house which Roserra had taken in the square which goes uphill from the Amphitheatre, with the church of Notre Dame la Major in the corner. Livia looked about her vividly as the cab rattled round twenty sharp angles, in the midst of narrow streets, on that perilous journey. Here were the Arlesiennes, standing at doorways, walking along the pavements, looking out of windows. She scarcely liked to admit to herself that she had seen prettier faces elsewhere. The costume, certainly, was as fine as its reputation; she would get one, she thought, to wear, for amusement, in London. And the women were a noble race; they walked nobly, they had beautiful black hair, sometimes stately and impressive features. But she had expected so much more than that; she had expected a race of goddesses, and she found no more than a townful of fine-looking peasants.

'Do not judge too quickly,' said Roserra to her; 'you must judge neither the place nor the people until you have lived yourself into their midst. The first time I came here I was disappointed. Gradually I began to see why it was that even the guide-books tell you to come to this quiet, out-of-the-way place, made up of hovels that were once palaces.'

'I will wait,' said Livia contentedly. The queer little house, with its homely furniture, the gentle, picturesque woman who met her at the door, amused her. It was certainly an adventure.

Next day, and the days following, they walked about the town, and Roserra felt that his own luxuriating sensations could hardly fail to be shared by Livia, though she said little and seemed at times absent-minded. They strolled among the ruins of the theatre begun under Augustus, and among the coulisses of the great amphitheatre; they sat on the granite steps; they went up the hundred steps of the western tower. From the cloisters of St. Trophime they went across to the museum opposite, where a kindly little dwarf showed them the altar to Leda, the statue of Mithras, and the sarcophagi with the Good Shepherd. He sold them some photographs of Arlesian women: one was very beautiful. 'That is my sister,' he said shyly.

When the soul of Autumn made for itself a body, it made Arles. An autumn city, hinting of every gentle, resigned, reflective way of fading out of life, of effacing oneself in a world to which one no longer attaches any value; always remembering itself, always looking into a mournfully veiled mirror which reflects something at least of what it was, Arles sits in the midst of its rocky plains, by the side of its river, among the tombs. Everything there seems to grow out of death, and to be returning thither. The town rises above its ruins, does not seem to be even yet detached from them. The remains of the theatre look down on the public garden; one comes suddenly on a Roman obelisk and the fragments of Roman walls; a Roman column has been built into the wall of one of the two hotels which stand in the Forum, now the Place du Forum; and the modern, the comparatively modern houses, have an air which is neither new nor old, but entirely sympathetic with what is old. They are faded, just a little dilapidated, not caring to distinguish themselves from the faint colours, the aged slumber, of the very ancient things about them.

Livia tried to realise what it was that charmed Roserra in all this. To her there was no comfort in it; it depressed her; in the air itself there was something of decay. There was a smell of dead leaves everywhere, the moisture of stone, the sodden dampness of earth, water forming into little pools on the ground, creeping out of the earth and into the earth again. There was dust on everything; the trees that close in almost the whole city as with a leafy wall were dust-grey even in sunlight. The Aliscamps seemed to her drearier than even a modern cemetery, and she wondered what it was that drew Roserra to them, with a kind of fascination. On the way there, along the Avenue Victor Hugo, there were some few signs of life; the cafés, the Zouaves going in and out of their big barrack, the carts coming in from the country; and in the evening the people walked there. But she hated the little melancholy public garden at the side, with its paths curving upwards to the ruined walls and arches of the Roman theatre, its low balustrades of crumbling stone, its faint fountains, greenish grey. It was a place, she thought, in which no one could ever be young or happy; and the road which went past it did but lead to the tombs. Roserra told her that Dante, when he was in hell, and saw the 'modo più amaro' in which the people there are made into alleys of living tombs, remembered Arles:

'Si com' ad Arli ove 'l Rodano stagna.'

She laughed uneasily, with a half shudder. The tombs are moved aside now from the Aliscamps, into the little secluded Allée des Tombeaux, where they line both sides of the way, empty stone trough after empty stone trough, with here and there a more pompous sarcophagus. There is a quiet path between them, which she did not even like to walk in, leading to the canal and the bowling-green; and in the evening the old men creep out and sit among the tombs.

At first there was bright sunshine every day, but the sun scorched; and then it set in to rain. One night a storm wakened her, and it seemed to her that she had never heard such thunder, or seen such lightning, as that which shook the old roof under which she lay, and blazed and flickered at the window until it seemed to be licking up the earth with liquid fire. The storm faded out in a morning of faint sunshine; only the rain clung furtively about the streets all day.

Day after day it rained, and Livia sat in the house, listlessly reading the novels which she had brought with her, or staring with fierce impatience out of the window. The rain came down steadily, ceaselessly, drawing a wet grey curtain over the city. Roserra liked that softened aspect which came over things in this uncomfortable weather; he walked every day through the streets in which the water gathered in puddles between the paving-stones, and ran in little streams down the gutters; he found a kind of autumnal charm in the dripping trees and soaked paths of the Aliscamps; a peaceful, and to him pathetic and pleasant, odour of decay. Livia went out with him once, muffled in a long cloak, and keeping her whole face carefully under the umbrella. She wanted to know where he was taking her, and why; she shivered, sneezed, and gave one or two little coughs. When she saw the ground of the Aliscamps, and the first trees began to drip upon her umbrella with a faint tap-tapping on the strained silk, she turned resolutely, and hurried Roserra straight back to the house.

After that she stayed indoors day after day, getting more irritable every day. She took up one book after another, read a little, and then laid it down. She walked to and fro in the narrow room, with nothing, as she said, to think about, and nothing to see if she looked out of the window. There was the square, every stone polished by the rain; the other houses in the square, most of them shuttered; the little church in the corner, with its monotonous bell, its few worshippers. She knew them all; they were mostly women, plain, elderly women; not one of them had any interest, or indeed existence, for her. She wondered vaguely why they went backwards and forwards, between their houses and the church, in such a regular way. Could it really amuse them? Could they really believe certain things so firmly that it was worth while taking all that trouble in order to be on the right side at last? She supposed so, and ended her speculations.

When Roserra was with her, he annoyed her by not seeming to mind the weather. He would come in from a walk, and, if she seemed to be busy reading, would sit down cheerfully by the stove, and really read the book which he had in his hand. She looked at him over the pages of hers, hating to see him occupied when she could not fix her mind on anything. She felt imprisoned; not that she really wanted to go out: it was the not being able to that fretted her.

About the time when, if she had been in London, she would have had tea, the uneasiness came over her most actively. She would go upstairs to her room, and sit watching herself pityingly in the glass; or she would try on hat after hat, hats which had come from Paris, and were meant for Paris or London, hats which she could not possibly wear here, where her smallest and simplest ones seemed out of place. Sometimes she brought herself back into a good temper by the mere pleasurable feel of the things; and she would run downstairs forgetting that she was in Arles.

One afternoon, when she was in one of her easiest moods, Roserra persuaded her to attend Benediction with him at the church of Notre Dame la Major, in the corner of the square. The church was quite dark, and she could only dimly see the high-altar, draped in white, and with something white rising up from its midst, like a figure mysteriously poised among the unlighted candles. Hooded figures passed, and knelt with bowed heads; presently a light passed across the church, and a lamp was let down by a chain, lighted, and drawn up again to its place. Then a few candles were lighted, and only then did she see the priest kneeling motionless before the altar. The chanting was very homely, like that in a village church; there was even the village church's harmonium; but the monotony of one air repeated over and over again brought even to Livia some sense of a harmony between this half-drowsy service and the slumbering city outside. They waited until the service was over, the priests went out, the lamps and the candles were extinguished, and the hooded figures, after a little silence, began to move again in the dimness of the church.

Sometimes she would go with Roserra to the cloisters of St. Trophime, where Arles, as he said, seemed to withdraw into its most intimate self. The oddness of the whole place amused her. Every side was built in a different century: the north in the ninth, the east in the thirteenth, the west in the fourteenth, and the south in the sixteenth; and the builders, century by century, have gathered into this sadly battered court a little of the curious piety of age after age, working here to perpetuate, not only the legends of the Church, but the legends that have their home about Arles. Again and again, among these naïve sculptures, one sees the local dragon, the man-eating Tarasque who has given its name to Tarascon. The place is full of monsters, and of figures tortured into strange dislocations. Adam swings ape-like among the branches of the apple-tree, biting at the leaves before he reaches the apple. Flames break out among companies of the damned, and the devil sits enthroned above his subjects. A gentle Doctor of the Church holding a book, and bending his head meditatively sideways, was shown to Livia as King Solomon; with, of course, in the slim saint on the other side of the pillar, the Queen of Sheba. Broken escutcheons, carved in stone, commemorate bishops on the walls. There is no order, or division of time; one seems shut off equally from the present and from any appreciable moment of the past; shut in with the same vague and timeless Autumn that has moulded Arles into its own image.

But it was just this, for which Roserra loved Arles above all other places, that made Livia more and more acutely miserable. Wandering about the streets which bring one back always to one's starting-point, or along the boulevards which suggest the beginning of the country, but set one no further into it, nothing seems to matter very much, for nothing seems very much to exist. In Livia, as Roserra was gradually finding out, there was none of that sympathetic submissiveness to things which meant for him so much of the charm of life. She wanted something definite to do, somewhere definite to go; her mind took no subtle colour from things, nor was there any active world within her which could transmute everything into its own image. She was dependent on an exterior world, cut to a narrow pattern, and, outside that, nothing had any meaning for her. He began to wonder if he had made the irremediable mistake, and, in his preoccupation with that uneasy idea, everything seemed changed; he, too, began to grow restless.

Meanwhile Livia was deciding that she certainly had made a mistake, unless she could, after all, succeed in getting her own way; and to do that she would have to take things into her own hands, much more positively than she had yet done. She would walk with him when it was fine, because there was nothing else to do. Once they walked out to the surprising remains of the abbey of Mont-Major, and it began to rain, and they lingered uncomfortably about the ruins and in the subterranean chapel. She walked back with him, nursing a fine hatred in silence. She turned it over in her heart, and it grew and gathered, like a snowball rolled over and over in the snow. It was comprehensive and unreasoning, and it forgot the small grievance out of which it rose, in a sense of the vast grievance into which it had swollen. To Roserra such moods, which were now becoming frequent, were unintelligible, and he suffered from them like one who has to find his way through a camp of his enemies in the dark.

When they got back to the house, Livia would silently take up a book and sit motionless for hours, turning over the pages without raising her eyes, or showing a consciousness of his presence. He pretended to do the same, but his eyes wandered continually, and he had to read every page twice over. He wanted to speak, but never knew what to say, when she was in this prickly state of irritation. To her, his critical way of waiting, and doing nothing, became an oppression. And his silence, and what she supposed to be his indifference, grew upon her like a heavy weight, until the silent woman, who sat there reading sullenly, felt the impulse to rise and fling away the book, and shriek aloud.

Livia did not say that she wished to go away from Arles, anywhere from Arles, but the desire spoke in all her silences. She made no complaint, but Roserra saw an unfriendliness growing up in her eyes which terrified him. She held him, as she had held him since their first meeting, by a kind of magnetism which he had come to realise was neither love nor sympathy. He felt that he could hate her, and yet not free himself from that influence. What was to be done? He would have to choose; his life of the future could no longer be his life of the past. His introduction of a woman to his best friend had been unfortunate, as such introductions always are, in one way or another. He had tended his soul for more than half a lifetime, waited upon it delicately, served it with its favourite food; and now something stronger had come forward and said: No more. What was it? He had no wish to speculate; it mattered little whether it was what people called his higher nature, or what they called his lower nature, which had brought him to this result. At least he had some recompense.

When he told Livia that he had decided to go back to Marseilles ('Arles does not suit you,' he said; 'you have not been well since we came here') Livia flung herself into his arms with an uncontrollable delight. On the night before they left, he sat for a long time, alone, under the Allée des Tombeaux. When he came back, Livia was watching for him from the window. She ran to the door and opened it.

It was midday when they reached Marseilles. The sun burned on the blue water, which lay hot, motionless, and glittering. There was not a breath of wind, and the dust shone on the roads like a thick white layer of powder. The light beat downwards from the blue sky, and upwards from the white dust of the roads. The heat was enveloping; it wrapped one from head to foot like the caress of a hot furnace. Roserra pressed his hands to his forehead, as he leaned with Livia over the terrace above the sea; his head throbbed, it was an effort even to breathe. He remembered the grey coolness of the Allée des Tombeaux, where the old men sat among the tombs. A nausea, a suffocating nausea, rose up within him as he felt the heat and glare of this vulgar, exuberant paradise of snobs and tourists. He sickened with revolt before this over-fed nature, sweating the fat of life. He looked at Livia; she stood there, perfectly cool under her sunshade, turning to watch a carriage that came towards them in a cloud of dust. She was once more in her element, she was quite happy; she had plunged back into the warmth of life out of that penetential chillness of Arles; and it was with real friendliness that she turned to Roserra, as she saw his eyes fixed upon her.