MUSA THE DESPOT.

New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, 1 September 1904, Page 445

MUS A THE DESPOT.

(Confessions of A Lttekary Man.)

By JESSIE MA.CKAY.

JjP HAVE been the slave of Musa fi so long that it surprises me IIJI when the normal Philistine UL persists in condemning me for what he deems the sins of my volition. Furthermore, when the said Philistine confidently assumes that I am master of my own inkpot, 1 tingle with the irritation of a henpecked husband receiving airy bits of outsiders' advice on home management while the sour arbiter of his domestic destinies sits back and sniffs. No sour arbiter is my wilful April lady, Musa ; and yet she is as absolute a despot as ever weilded the sceptre ; and there isn't a happier or more helpless serf in the universe than I — happier, that is to say, when my April lady condescends to occupy her rightful throne on my writing-table and smile on me through the Delphic fumes of Barries own divine Arcadia mixture. For often, alas ! the throne is spread, and for long days and nights the ringed Arcadian incense mutely implores her favour, and yet she will not come. Why she withdraws herself, where she loiters, I cannot tell. Her causeless wanderings, her airy returns, often remind me of a story of Sam Slick's,* wherein a dour and unemotional youth, being chidden for bringing in a back-log somewhat slighter than himself, walked out of the house and ran away to sea for seven years. Returning unannounced about the eighth year, the young man espied the segment of a mighty tree-trunk lying at the wood-heap, and upending it on his

shoulder, walked in with the calm, remark, " Here's the back-log, father." lam unable, however, to carry out the analogy and great Musa with the cool parental answer, " Well, you've been a precious long time getting- it." Instead of such a phlegmatic welcome, 1 fawn upon her ; 1 hold a Sun Feast in her honour, and survey my own beatified boots on the mantelshelf through a celestial haze you could slice with a knife. I repeat proudly to myself : " Yesterday 1 walked down the street alone, and saw nothing 'but mud, mortgages, and mutton. Today, Musa shall walk at my right hand, and my clarified vision shall detect molecules ofi infinity in the mud, divine retribution in the mortgages, and Parnassian rays glinting on the mutton. Walk, did I say ? No, i'faith ; I do not walk in Musa's company ; we travel the way of the frigate-bird, she and I." My first raptures over, I fall into a sort of cheapjack monologue regarding the dry bones I want her to vivify. I show her, one by one, the barren skeletons that during her absence have hung on my study walls in the weird style of house decoration affected by her Venus when he " floated his powerful mind in tea " with Silas Wegg, and wept over the hyper-sensitiveness of Pleasant Eiderhood on osseous subjects'. My cheapjack patter runs something like this : " Here's a critique on Soapleigh's last novel. The spine is bristling with stinging rays ; here

are two tentacles warranted to grip to the bone ; here is the subtle rudiment of a tail with a telling Latin tag for a finish. Sharp, starchy, superior ; smelling of the ' Saturday Review ' — 1 can thoroughly recommend it for a morning exercise— as good as dumb-bells, and, ahem ! more lucrative. " Here's a lovely thing in fancywork — an impressionist sketch — two men, a woman, and a girl. Men in love with the girl ; woman in love with the ugliest man ; girl in love with the man in the moon. Doublejointed, moves backward quicker than it moves forward ; an absolute triumph of modern mechanism and neurosis. " Here's a Christmas story, to be done the same way you draw a pig with your eyes shut at a birthday party ;— two ears, an eye, four legs, and a curly tail— must have a curly tail. Mild and moral ; full of milk and mistletoe ; a charming evening pastime. " Here is matter worthier of your power — a Greek poem about Andromeda, all outlined, wanting little but breath and colour. Ah ! just a touch here, I beg ; can't you see the magnificent curve that should swathe that forearm, the dainty mobile turn of the lip that should give piquancy to the face ? Can't you see the mermaid harmonies of richest colour that should envelope the stately form ? — blue of the heavens, snow of Olympus, blood of the Dawn? — no less for my Andromeda ! " Here's a noble piece of work — a novel, articulated to the very last chapter, proportioned like a Colossus, and yet as gray and dead as Queen Anne for want of you. Now, madam, this is a unique line in skeletons ; don't break the lot ; take them all." Then Musa coquets with me and my osseous gallery. She daintily fingers tlie poem and whispers that only the everlasting roll of the surf can bring back the creeping horror of the crag into the sea-blue eyes of

Andromeda. I take the hint and transport myself and note-book to the loneliest bit .of beach within travelling range. I spread out my overcoat, regretting the unaccountable oversight of Nature, who, in designing poets and rocks, and foreknowing their eternal affinity and frequent propinquity, might surely have cushioned the latter. And now to watch the sea-blue eyes of Andromeda quicken and reflect the phosphor moons dashing into shining fragments at her chained feet !, But no ! they stay as dead, as china. Musa has all at once taken a theological fit. She throws away the sea-anemone in her hand, like a fair Florentine casting- her jewels at the feet of Savonarola, and begins to pour out a fierce counterblast to Dr. Drykirk's ultimatum on the Exodus. I read that ultimatum this morning, and had no more thought of answering it than of turning steeplejack. But now Musa is throwing about fearsome German substantives like an angry Titan hurling rocks. She contrives to drag in Delitzch, Haeckel, Fichte, and dozens more, with Sayce and the Telel Amarua tablets bringing up the rear. Like a war-horse, I scent battle far off, and catch Musa's humour as tinder takes a spark. One sigh for the sea-ane-mones and the mystic gleam of the phosphor moons, and I turn to do her will. By the morrow's morn, Dr. Drykirk is hammered finer than gold-beater's skin.

Again I plead poor Andromeda's cause. Musa promises readily, but whether in good faith at the time, I know not, for just then I fall ia defenceless prey to a bore of the first water, and every idea is scattered to the winds. Now this affliction usually so commends me to the pity of my wayward Lady of Sight that on my release, weak and wrathful, she comforts me with a whole Aurora Borealis to myself. This tenderness of Musa's reconciles me to fate when I see a bore bearing down on me with slow murder in his ,eye ; : it has even taught me to

understand what a mighty brother of the pen once said to me :

"My boy, if you don't want to have your brains fretted into fiddlestrings at forty, keep this in mind. Begin the day with a plate of stodgy porridge and an hour's conversation with an ass — the biggest ass in town for preference." The bore leaves me at last, but Musa has no further thought for Andromeda. She comes running to me with a new toy. " See ; see what "I have found !" she cries. " A gem of a Polynesian legend on the Shining Mountain of the Beyond ! Quick, fix it before the opal fire goes out of it, and leaves it a pebble again !" I try being stern with Musa. " Do you take me for a curator of a museum, madam ?" I ask with portentous politeness. "Do you think I haven't enough stones and bones jingling about my study already ?" Musa stamps her foot. " Fix it, fix it as I see it now, or I leave you !" she cries. I obey ; am I not Musa's serf ? And, moreover, I am much enamoured of this thing she has found on the Shining Mountain of the Beyond. She is as good as gold, now she has her will. Far into the night she works with me, and in the grey dawn the legend is finished, the dross of ages refined away, the primeval truth at the heart of it laid bare. Hot from the loved toil of that long vigil, I take it in my hand critically, fondly, hopefully. " It will do," says Musa carelessly. "It has a vein of the fire opal in it, a creamy curve where the jagged point was ; but oh, if you saw it as I saw it on the Shining Mountain where the gem-stories lie !" Next day I am a trifle headachy, and Musa, neurotic and naughty, is grizzling over the impressionist sketch. I say tentatively : " Isn't it time to do something for Andromeda ?" " What is time ?" asks my April lady with a calm disdain. Too well I know that in Musa's country there

is neither time nor place, and that gold and silver there are as trivial as flying thistledown here. Has she not left me stranded high and dry for six months on the last couplet of a sonnet ? And is it not in holy places, under the stern regard of canons and bishops, that she forces her wildest quips and cranks upon me, while at a bachelor's supper she will hang- on my vision with her head on one side, singing " Willow, willow !" like poor Barbara ? But it is in novel-writing that Musa's full feminine genius for contradiction finds scope. How can I convince the normal Philistine that I can no more hinder the lives and marriages of my dream-folk from going wrong than he can stop an earthquake ? I set out on the enterprise with a definite scheme as to plot and character. The main moral is the purification of parish politics— you can't sell a novel without a moral now-a-days, any more than you can let a house without a bathroom. As to the leading characters, A. is an Apollo whose fiery soul frets the matchless mould of clay in which it is cased ; B. is a glorified Orson of the bacbblocks, all muscle and fidelity ; C . is a figuring machine in a 'bank, whose gray neutrality throws up the heroic colouring of A. and B. ; D. is a lovely vision in cream chiffon and Banksia roses. D.'s affections are to wayer between Apollo and Orson, finally declining on the latter. Musa is chilly and dissatisfied for a week or two. Then she warms into the collar, takes the bit between her teeth, and travels. Most of the people I had shuffled to the front she hustles into dusty corners ; nonentities I had put back in the shadow she pets and brings into the front row. A. becomes a blatant prig ; B. degenerates into a mere cornerman, whose ghastly jokes are not even enlivened by the banjo. She strikes all manner of astonishingsparks out of C, the despised figuring machine, and finally marries him to D. under my very nose, and

apparently with D/s very good will. The moral, moreover, has been mysteriously transformed, being now not a matter of parish politics, but an attack on the higher education. Musa has an irritating trick of finding things so like current episodes of daily life that I am continually being called a snake in the grass by my best friends, who vow that I have betrayed the secrets of the smoking-room, and given their hidden romances to a jeering world. And the stories belonged no more to them than to the Mikado, being only outland treasures that Musa had brought down from the Shining Mountain. Not only does she alter events at her own sweet will, but she alters diction as well. I prepare a fine peroration to address to my heroine, but while it is still on the tablets of my brain, Musa gives it a contemptuous look. " Don't I know how to propose to a young lady V I ask huffily. She simply takes the pen, scores out every fine phrase, and writes instead the same sort: of blundering, twoedged, take-it- or-leave-it jumble that ..you and I, gentle reader,

actually drop into on such • occasions. " That's what he said/-' is her only remark. , She is a bit of a gipsy, too, as they say in Scotland. Time after time I remonstrate with her oh her scorn of " les convenances." " Musa, you'll have me cut by the. county yet," I protest piteously.. " How is it possible that a young lady like Emily, brought up by two maiden aunts and a Rector uncle,, could go to a masked ball without so much as a skirted broomstick as chap cr one V " She did it," said Musa, with a set of her short upper lip that spells utter finality. I hav ; e shown you a little of the constant curbing, snaffling, and snubbing that my April lady inflicts upon me. And yet she is not always Musa the Despot ; there are times when she is more patient than Griselda, more meek than the tamed shrew But I have no mind to tell you about those pleasant seasons when we talk together of the Shining Mountain and other matters.. All that lies a golden secret between my April lady and myself.