A Puritan Bohemia/Chapter 2

by Margaret Sherwood

 

CHAPTER II

"A pleasant land, not fenced with drab stucco, like Tyburnia or Belgravia; not guarded by a huge standing army of footmen; not echoing with noble chariots; a land of chambers, billiard-rooms, supper rooms; a land where soda-water flows freely in the morning; a land of lotus-eating (with lots of cayenne pepper); of pulls on the river; of delicious readings of novels, magazines, of saunterings in many studios; a land where men call each other by their Christian names; where most are poor, where almost all are young."

Thackeray's Philip.

It was not this old Bohemia that centred in the Square, but a new Bohemia, woman's Bohemia in a Puritan city.

In certain aspects the old land and the new are alike. This too is a country without geography, a kingdom of the air. It has no continuous history. All is shifting, changing, kaleidoscopic. Here the very furniture has an air of alertness, as if about to depart. The inhabitants, driven like sand across the desert, stop only for

"A moment's halt, a momentary taste
Of Being——"

For this is a land of quest. One does not come to rest or stay, only to search for that which one has not yet found.

"As we proceed, it shifts its place,"

and the days go by in swift pursuit.

But here is none of the reckless, happy-go-lucky temper of the London Prague or the Paris Latin Quarter. Life is earnest, sad, ascetic. Its only lotus-eating is hard work. The shadow of grief rests over it, for women whom life has robbed come here to forget their sorrow, if may be, in philanthropy or in art. Here eager girls toil with pen or canvas, keys or strings.

Each has a purpose. The little black bag that the Bohemian carries is a symbol of an aim in life. It may hold books, or manuscript poems, or comments on Aristotle. It may hold boxes of crackers or jars of marmalade. Whatever its contents, it is always full.

These earnest women suffer loneliness, and, it may be, failure. But they have freedom and pleasant companionship, long walks by river-bank or bridge, long discussions by tea-table or by fireplace. For the hardship there is compensation. Here the ideal has become real. One may hear the Bohemians condemning, over a luncheon of coffee and rolls, the ascetic idea, and expressing belief in controlled Epicureanism. Bread and cheese for the body's diet; Transcendentalism for the mind: muddy crossings for the feet; for the soul, the paths among the stars.

The charm of evanescence belongs to this life. Work and friends are doubly dear when every morning brings the thought that they may vanish. For the mortality is great in Bohemia. It lies hard by the borderland of life, life with its ordered sequences of birth and death, of marrying and giving in marriage, of family happenings. A constant fear walks with one that one's friend may at any moment be drawn to that bourne whence none return to Bohemia.

The charm of the unexpected belongs to it. Who knows what choice spirit may come to abide in the next studio or in the vacant suite? Any day may bring within the borders a victim to be sacrificed to one's art, or a friend to be grappled to one's soul.

The gathering of the inhabitants is ruled by seeming chance. Women drift hither through lack of strong ties to hold them back. Others come to whom this is but a halting place in a road to a chosen goal. A whim, a momentary wish, an old ambition revived, guide many feet to Bohemia.

This is hence a peculiar race, bound together, not by ties of birth and family, only by community of interest, of hope, of suffering. As in the world of mediæval story here are neither old people nor young children, only the vigorous, ready for battle.

Yet bits of everyday life float into Bohemia. Children come to play in the Square. Humble lovers stroll past, arm in arm, and little girls with braided hair walk through to school. Frail old ladies with nodding curls and men with hair like white spun silk go tremulously by, wondering at the queer life of this secluded spot.

The place is as quiet as a motionless pool at the side of a moving stream. Hence the tales of Bohemia are not full of strange incident. The hero of romance does not dwell here, and the villain is unknown. There are few men in this new country. Man here is a memory, a shadow, rarely a reality.

And the stories are incoherent. Only moments of life are represented. Here are but the beginnings and the endings of stories, often the ending that comes after the climax, sometimes the climax itself. Residence in Bohemia is perhaps only as long as the working out of a mood. Therefore its romances are not orderly developments of plot and counterplot, but merely bits of vivid experience in busy people's lives.