By RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
“HOW sad your eyes are to-night!” I said to the Sphinx a few evenings ago.
“Are they?” she smiled. “But then you know we are never so sad as our eyes.”
“Are you quite sure there is nothing wrong?” I asked.
“Perfectly…. I expect I have been looking too long at my opals.”
After a moment she added:
“I so often think of what you said about sorrows being the opals of the soul.”
“Fancy your remembering that!” said I, with mock modesty.
“It is strange,” the Sphinx went on, “how sorrow continues to be associated with the opal.”
“I have often marvelled at your courage in wearing so many. They gleam on your fingers like a whole armory of sorrow.”
“Is there any danger a woman wouldn’t dare for beauty’s sake? And in spite of the superstition, they are more fashionable than ever. Yet I don’t think there is a woman who wears them who does not feel in her heart that she is living under the rainbow of some beautiful doom, some romantic menace. Some day the genius of the stone will touch her heart, with its wand of sorrow, and her face will suddenly become like one of her rings, mysteriously lit with pathos.”
“I believe,” said I, “that it is on that very account that women wear them. It is the legend of the stone that attracts them almost more than its beauty. It has for them something of the attraction of sorcery, and suggests a commerce with those occult influences which in spite of ourselves we involuntarily think of as ruling the romantic side of our lives. There is just a spice of magic about all precious stones, and, as in the old fairy tales, a certain ring was supposed to give control over unseen powers, so even yet we unconsciously, or consciously, continue to attach superstitious significance to the wearing of a ring.”
“That is true,” said the Sphinx, “and any woman who wears rings with art, and not merely for indiscriminate display, sets a new ring on her finger with a certain thoughtfulness, if not hesitation. If it does not already mean something to her, it is going to mean something—and what will that meaning be! A ring that means nothing to one, however beautiful, hardly seems to belong to us. A ring is a personal possession or nothing … except diamonds,” the Sphinx added, laughing, some particularly fine diamonds glittering at her throat; “diamonds are like one’s carriage—a part of one’s entourage.”
“They are the Three-per-Cents of Romance,” said I.
“Yes; one wears diamonds as one wears shoes. They mean nothing to one individually. They are social stones, even democratic. They are impervious to association. They are like the sun—every one loves sunlight, but no one has ever thought of sentimentally annexing the sun. The sun is not romantic. It is a wholesome, prosperous presence in our lives, but it is impossible to think of it as personally related to ourselves—whereas the moon, on the other hand, means just ‘us’ and no one else in the world to every romantic eye that looks up to it. The diamond is the sun of precious stones, the opal is the moon.”
“But what of the pearl?”
“The pearl is the Evening Star.”
“Tell me,” I said, “if I may ask, do your opals stand for sorrows gone by or for sorrows to come?”
“You mustn’t be so literal,” she answered, “one can hardly label one’s sorrows like that. Sorrow is temperamental, not accidental; it is attitude rather than history; it comes even more from within than from without. Some natures attract it—as the moon draws the sea. When I speak of my sorrows I do not mean my personal history—did you think my opals stood for so many disappointments?”
She laughed disdainfully.
“No,” she continued, “few of us, alas! are real enough to achieve the distinction of a great sorrow. A great sorrow is as rare as a great work of art. To know a really beautiful sorrow of our own, one needs to have a tragic simplicity of nature which belongs only to a few chosen temperaments; and if, indeed, a beautiful sorrow should come into our lives, who knows but that we should miss its beauty in its pain! Just as we have musicians to make our music for us, we have to rely on others for our sorrows.”
“It is strange how much more distinguished sorrow is than joy,” said I.
“Yes; and yet I suppose it is a part of what, resist it as we may, seems to be the natural law of renunciation. The weak nature may be crushed and lowered by renunciation, but the strong nature seems to be mysteriously refined. Perhaps, indeed, it is scarcely correct to speak of a weak nature renouncing. Things are taken from it rather than renounced. Renunciation implies will, and the exercise of strength. And thus to be able to do without implies an individual greatness and sufficiency from the beginning. We probably never renounce anything that we really need. Whatever the reason, however, there is no doubt that, as you say, the world is conscious of a certain distinction, and even romantic beauty attaching to sorrow which it does not associate with joy. Sorrow seems to imply a certain initiation into the arcana of human experience, a certain direct relation with the regent powers of our destiny, august and hidden, and only revealing their supernatural faces to this and that mortal here and there, henceforth stricken, and, so to say, ‘enchanted’, as one touched by the sacred lightning and yet alive among men.”
“I suspect,” said I, “that that is what, in a dim and trivial way, people mean when they speak of So-and-So looking ‘interesting’—because they look sad or even only ill.”
“No doubt. And, curious as it may sound, I don’t think we are ever quite satisfied with happiness—not, at all events, till we have known sorrow. Till then, in our happiest hours, we seem to be unconsciously waiting for sorrow. Perhaps that is because we instinctively feel that the rarest forms of joy can only be ours on the conditions of sorrow. Intense, complete joy is only possible to the sorrowful temperament … to the nature sensitive to the sorrow that lives in all beautiful things….”
“To the opal temperament,” said I. The Sphinx smiled and continued:
“There again is another mystery. Why does sadness seem to lie at the heart of all beauty? Truth and Beauty seem indeed to be one in sadness. All the rarest types of beauty have something sad about them, some tragic look, or enigmatic wistfulness of expression, at the least a touch of loneliness. The gayest music can never be quite happy. Indeed, one might almost say that two qualities only are necessary to the highest beauty—strangeness and sadness: perhaps we might say only one and call it world-strangeness; a look of another world than ours, a look of spiritual exile. Perhaps there is the secret of beauty—sadness. Beauty is an exile in this world, a fallen spirit, and, whatever her embodiment, be it a face, a flower, or a gem, it carries with it always its look of exile.”
“Thus, again,” said I, smiling, “we see why opals are more beautiful than diamonds. The diamond is the stone of this world. It has the prosperous, contented look of that brilliant, unmysterious happiness which comes of good health and a bank account. There is no sadness at the cold heart of the diamond—just as there is no sadness in this glass of champagne, and therefore no appeal to the imagination, as with the sad distinguished wines. I doubt if people who wear opals should drink champagne.”
“Ah! but you see I wear diamonds, too,” laughed the Sphinx.
“Yes, there you are. Always the best of both worlds….”
“True,” said the Sphinx sadly, “but the best is only in one of them….”
“Truth fully now,” I asked, “are you quite sure in which?”
The Sphinx refused to commit herself, but “My opals know,” she answered, musingly turning them to the light.