The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre
9781465673893
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Ascension lilies were everywhere in our shabby drawing-room. They crowded two tables and filled a corner and rose, slim and white, atop a Sheraton cabinet. Every one had sent Pelleas and me a sheaf of the flowers—the Chartres, the Cleatams, Miss Willie Lillieblade, Enid, Lisa and dear Hobart Eddy had all remembered us on Easter eve, and we entered our drawing-room after breakfast on Easter morning to be all but greeted with a winding of the white trumpets. The sun smote them and they were a kind of candle, their light secretly diffused, premonitory of Spring, of some resurrection of light as a new element. It was a wonderful Easter day, and in spite of our sad gray hair Pelleas and I were never in fairer health; yet for the first time in our fifty years together Easter found us close prisoners. Easter morning, and we were forbidden to leave the house! “Etarre,” Pelleas said, with some show of firmness, “there is no reason in the world why we should not go.” “Ah, well now,” I said with a sigh, “I wish you could prove that to Nichola. Do I not know it perfectly already?” It is one sign of our advancing years, we must suppose, that we are prone to predicate of each other the trifles which heaven sends. The sterner things we long ago learned to accept with our hands clasped in each other’s; but when the postman is late or the hot water is cold or we miss our paper we have a way of looking solemnly sidewise. We had gone upstairs the night before in the best of humours, Pelleas carrying an Ascension lily to stand in the moonlight of our window, for it always seems to us the saddest injustice to set the sullen extinguisher of lowered lights on the brief life of a flower. And we had been looking forward happily to Easter morning when the service is always inseparable from a festival of Spring. Then, lo! when we were awakened there was the treacherous world one glitter of ice. Branches sparkled against the blue, the wall of the park was a rampart of silver and the faithless sidewalks were mockeries of thoroughfare. But the grave significance of this did not come to us until Nichola entered the dining-room with the griddle-cakes and found me dressed in my gray silk and Pelleas in broadcloth. “Is it,” asked our old serving-woman, who rules us as if she had brought us from Italy and we had not, more than forty years before, tempted her from her native Capri, “is it that you are mad, with this ice everywhere, everywhere?” “It is Easter morning, Nichola,” I said, with the mildness of one who supports a perfect cause. “Our Lady knows it is so,” Nichola said, setting down her smoking burden, “but the streets are so thick with ice that one breaks one’s head a thousand times. You must not think of so much as stepping in the ar-y.” She left the room, and the honey-brown cakes cooled while Pelleas and I looked at each other aghast. To miss our Easter service for the first time in our life together! The thought was hardly to be borne. We reasoned with Nichola when she came back and I think that Pelleas even stamped his foot under the table; but she only brought more cakes and shook her head, the impertinent old woman who has conceived that she must take care of us. “One breaks one’s head a thousand times,” she obstinately repeated. “Our Lady would not wish it. Danger is not holy.” To tell the truth, as Pelleas and I looked sorrowfully from the window above the Ascension lilies we knew that there was reason in the situation, for the streets were perilous even to see. None the less we were frankly resentful, for it is bad enough to have a disagreeable matter occur without having reason on its side. As for our carriage, that went long ago together with the days when Pelleas could model and I could write so that a few were deceived; and as for a cab to our far downtown church and back, that was not to be considered.
