XXXV
“WELL,” said Ora, when she and Ida had returned to the hotel to dress for dinner, “did you have a queer feeling when you were prowling through those dim old rooms, furnished three or four hundred years ago, and the scene of all sorts of romance and tragedy?”
“I had a queer feeling all right. Had visions of rheumatism, sciatica, pneumonia, and a red nose for a week. I suppose those wonderful velvet gowns they wore—in pictures, anyhow—were padded inside, and they slept in them; didn’t take them off all winter. If I lived in one of those palaces today I’d surely lose all my good American habits.”
“Didn’t you have any haunting sense of mystery—of having been there before?”
“Nixie! No wonder I murdered if I ever was. However,” she added thoughtfully, “there’s no telling what I might have felt if they’d had a furnace in the house. There was something wonderful about it, all right—being in those musty old rooms, that fairly smelt of the past. I guess they’ll haunt me as some of those Roman palaces have that are not shown to the public. But don’t put weird ideas into my head, Ora. They don’t gee with Butte. The severely practical is my lay.”
“Don’t you think there could be romance and tragedy in Butte?”
“Oh, plenty of shooting, if you mean that; and mixing-up. But people don’t stay jealous long enough to get real tragic about it; they just get a divorce. We’ve improved on daggers and poisoned bowls and rings, and the rest of it. Good old Butte!”
They all dined at the Bristol that night, and soon after nine o’clock had the smoking-room to themselves. Ida, indeed, carried Mowbray off into the reading-room. Ora sighed as she found herself alone with the handsome distinguished Roman of the type that even in minor exponentsso often compelled her response. Why didn’t she love him? He was proving himself the ideal companion. There was apparently no question to which he had not given some thought, and he knew far more about the subjects that appealed to her than she did herself. They discussed the ever-fascinating sexual problems impersonally, delicately, and exhaustively, a feat in itself, an experience Ora never had enjoyed before; for while it drew them together it apparently neither disturbed Valdobia nor altered his attitude toward her. His analyses of politics and of the fashionable authors of the day were the acutest she had heard or read, and he enlarged her knowledge of the world by his anecdotes of life in the different capitals of Europe that he knew so well. He could be personal without egotism, and his sense of humour was keener than her own. While he treated her ideas and criticisms with deference he forced her to look up to him and to feel only pleasure in his masterful mind and great experience.
Tonight he made her talk about herself; and, artfully beating about her life’s most significant chapter, she expressed herself with a freedom and veracity which she found another novel and fascinating experience; her confidences to Ida were superficial and sporadic. She could feel his sympathy and understanding flow toward her, although he uttered no sentimental platitudes, and let only his eyes express a little of what he felt. But for the hour she glowed with a sense of utter companionship, her mind was stimulated to the pitch of excitement; she caught herself wishing that they could have these long intimate talks for the rest of their lives, and that he would sometimes hold her hand to complete the sense of perfect understanding.
When they parted at midnight and she walked slowly up the stairs alone—Ida had dismissed Mowbray an hour since—she sighed again. Why didn’t she feel the pull? What was the nature of that mysterious current that seemed to vibrate between two people only out of the world’s billions, and was quite independent of mental identities? Certainly passion was not the only source. If she had been free and never had met Gregory Compton she would have married Valdobia and given him all he craved; for his magnetism was by no means confined to his brain. Why could not she love him as it was? She had not been theheroine of one of those passionate love affairs that leave a woman cold for several years, perhaps for ever. The intensity of emotion she had experienced during these months in Europe had been one-sided, a mere madness of the imagination. She had yet to realise that a woman can live more profoundly and completely with a man in her imagination than when in daily contact with his discouraging weaknesses, his inability to reach her impossible standard, and impinged upon by the disintegrating forces of daily life.
Such women as Ora Blake, endowed with a certain measure of creative imagination, yet spending their maturing years unnaturalised citizens in a cross-section of life which barely brushes their aloofness in passing, develop as unnormally as those that cultivate this exotic garden of the mind for fame and fortune. If they find a mate while the imagination is still as young as their years, these highly organised women, with every sense and faculty keenly alert, and stimulated by mental contact as others may be by drugs and wine, have the opportunity at least to be the happiest beings on earth. If they marry a brute, or are forced to fight the world for bread, a wide channel is dug in the brain through which flow the normal and crowding thoughts of the average, commonplace, adaptable woman; which is perhaps the best of all educations for life.
But Ora had married a kind prosaic man who soon learned to let her alone, and kept her in a comfort that burdened her days with leisure. If she had been unimaginative no harm would have been done. She either would have grown fond of her essential husband and become a domestic angel, or consoled herself with society and bridge. But, misplaced in life, she belonged to the intellectual aristocracy of the earth, who are the loneliest of its inhabitants, unless they can establish an invisible bond with their fellow-beings by offerings from that mental garden which is at once their curse and their compensation for the doubtful gift of life.
Ora was too indifferent to the world to care to weave this gossamer bridge, and had grown accustomed to mental solitude. But she had never placed any curb on her imagination. In the days when her only solace was books it enabled her to visualise themise-en-scèneof the remote or immediate past, the procession of the traveller, or the abstractionsof science; as if she were in one of those theatres where the great modern manager threatens to atrophy what imagination is left in the world. It even enabled her to enjoy fiction whose scene was a land of which she had no personal knowledge; a rare gift in the American, whose demand for familiar settings and characters keeps our literature commonplace. And she could at will shut her eyes and wander in Europe when Butte became insufferable.
Her surrender to the obsession of Gregory Compton had been gradual; she had fought it, not only out of loyalty to her husband and her friend, but because the future menaced terrors against which she had no desire to pit her strength. But she had finally cast defiance to the future, and dismissed her phantom loyalty with a shrug. Mark no doubt had consoled himself for her defection long since; to Ida a husband was a money-maker pure and simple. She herself would never see Gregory Compton again if she could avoid it; or, if life took her inevitably back to Butte, no doubt her infatuation would have been cured by mental satiety, and she would be able to greet him with the indifference that is ever the portion of the discarded lover.
Having arrived at this reasonable conclusion, she had dismissed cynicism, cowardice, and qualms, to limbo, and entered upon one of those exalting, tormenting, incredibly sweet, and profoundly depressing mental love affairs, which, lacking the element of comedy inevitable in all actual relations between men and women, obsess the mind and detach it from life.
After she parted from Valdobia, puzzled and wistful, she recalled one week during which she had been completely happy. Ida was visiting friends uncongenial to herself, and she had gone alone to Bruges. In that ancient city of almost perfect beauty, she had given the wildness in her nature uninterrupted liberty. She had written letters that no woman yet has sent to a man without regretting it, for in this stage of man’s progress, at least, he wants little of the soul of woman. It is possible that the women who live in their imaginations are the most fortunate, after all, for they arbitrarily make man the perfect mate he possibly may be some centuries hence. At all events Ora imagined Gregory Compton with her unremittingly,deliberately ignoring the depression that must descend upon her when once more companioned by his wife. It had seemed to her that her step had never been so buoyant, her body so light. People had paused to stare at the beautiful young American with her head in the air looking as if she were about to sing. It had been a wonderful, an almost incredible experience, and she never had been able quite to recapture it even when alone in the night. But she had wondered sometimes if life held any happiness as real as that had been, and she wondered again as she switched off her light and flung herself into the bed that had witnessed so much despair before Valdobia had appeared and put a quietus on her imagination. She wondered also if the passion of the soul were so much greater than the common experience of man and woman that its indulgence must forever make life itself unreal. She felt that this question threw some light on her problem, then dismissed the subject peremptorily. She might regret that extraordinary love affair, with its terrors and its delights, but she would bury it once for all; and she fell asleep with the wise remark:
“What fools we are! Oh, lord, what fools!”