XXIII
When one is standing in a window looking down into a gorge a thousand feet below, the cynical reflections of a mummy in bed smoking a cigar vex the impulse of romance, quick in the brain. Ranata was in the window. The window was Zrinyi’s; so was the perpendicular mountain of which the old border fortress might have been an abrupt continuation, so indeed were the harsh wild peaks, bare but for the glittering snow, which rose high above this lofty height. The mummy was Sarolta, who was in bed with a cold. The invasion of her sacred person by impertinent microbes always put her in a bad humor, and to-day it urged her to improve one of her rare solitudes with her royal charge. Moreover, she was profoundly puzzled. If Ranata was not in love with this American, why then did she show him a preference never before won, for a moment, by another admirer? But if she were in love, why then this serenity? She had expected that Ranata’s inevitable love episode would be fraught with tragedy from the very first, and that pallid cheeks and heavy eyes would be the visible signs, haughtily as the Princess might comportherself. Had the heroine been any one but Ranata she might have drawn a characteristic deduction from this serenity; but although she was not the European to swear to the virtue of any woman, she knew that Ranata, if not bigotedly virtuous, was bigotedly loyal to her house, and had long since made her vow that by no act of hers should another of its stones be loosened; rather was she exalted by the hope that it might be her destiny to save it from destruction. And Sarolta, who had settled back comfortably into her early doctrine that life was made to live, could have gone to the stake herself for the aristocratical or the monarchical ideal. Therefore, she believed that Ranata would immolate her passion on this altar the moment it burned too fiercely; and so, after all, was prepared to take her oath upon the virtue of one woman. Nevertheless, she was curious. Of the compact, of course, she knew nothing; and had she, still would she have puzzled, knowing the power and the will of woman to torment herself; but she had come to the conclusion that it was possible Ranata, never having seen Fessenden alone—this the good lady also believed—did not wholly realize her condition, would not until he left her; so determined to do what she could in the way of preliminary disenchantment.
“There is no greater fallacy,” she was saying, “than the belief that women regret their youth—I mean women who have lived the life of the heart. Nature invariably compensates, and in exchanging wisdom for youth she is at her best. No woman ever crowded more into her youth—nor held to it longer—than I did, yet I can recall now the sensation of relief when I finally realized that henceforth I should live for myself alone; above all, that I had had my final disappointment. For love, my dear, is one exquisite disappointment from first to finish—for the woman, I mean. Men are rarely psychologicalenough for the disappointments that grind the heart of woman until it is callous. When they are, they are not able to hurt us, so may be left out of the question. The thoroughly masculine man, the only sort that is capable of inspiring thegrande passion, because he has the primal attributes designed by Nature that he may fully mate with woman, is in the very completeness of his equipment blind to all that is most subtle and feminine in woman, giving her, therefore, twenty strokes of torment to one of happiness, or even pleasure. What is the result? We live, the most irresistible of us, three-fourths—five-eighths—of our lives alone, striving to find in imagination what man will never give us. Life, with women who are not small pieces of pulp in the domestic mill, is one long chase after happiness—what is there for most of us but happiness, politics, and charities? I have sometimes envied the women who have to work their brains blunt to fill their conservative little stomachs!”
Her voice thickening, she paused to inhale the fumes of the last specific for colds. Ranata continued to stare out of the window, and her duenna continued in a moment:
“But I have also wondered,ma chère, if, did man give us what that craving thing we call our soul demands, would we enjoy ourselves even as much as we do. It is always a gamble which will tire first, the man or the woman; and on the whole I am inclined to believe that the woman of charm and brain, and the position in life which enables her to find much distraction, is the surer prey to disenchantment. If she be of a deeper nature, or if she has deluded herself for a little that the man actually loved her and not himself, she may not tire, but be so bitterly disgusted and disillusioned that, for a moment, at least, she is capable of tragedy. But theaverage man, so particular with charm at first, merely lets us down inennui. If he gave woman more of himself than he does now, perhaps she would tire sooner. He needs all the mystery he has. However, the fact remains that man is eternally unsatisfactory and woman eternally unsatisfied. I doubt if a woman of imagination ever lived who, having won what rent her soul and body while withheld, would not, after the first short chapter, exchange the reality for the previous lost world of her imagination. Good God! the disillusionment, the readjustment, the struggle through terror and despair to philosophy! If I were ordered to live my life over, I should demand, in compensation, the ever-fresh memory of a great and unsatisfied passion—after having known one man in the daily life of matrimony. A woman is briefly happy twice in her life—when a man—the man—is pursuing her, and palpitating doubt alternates with delicious certainty; and again, during the man’s first ardor, when he is so anxious to please, and so certain that he loves the woman, not himself, that his concentrated charm blinds, yet irradiates the universe. Shortly after, he becomes as matter-of-fact as he is. And then men are, no matter what their brains, utterly, irretrievably stupid where women are concerned. A man is never so happy as when he has lost the love of the woman, and she, taking refuge in duty, makes him thoroughly comfortable. On the other hand, men are abruptly left by women, again and again, and the cleverest of them never guess the reason why. They go on ruining their own lives—which they never suspect—and those of the women best worth having, without learning a lesson from the past. There is no happiness, my dear, until you are as old as I am, look like a mummy, and smokevuelta abajo.”
“Of course I recognize that all that was meant for me.”Her charge left the window and stared down at her. She puffed out a cloud, for Ranata’s eyes always made her blink. “But I am surprised that a woman of your wisdom should fancy that the person ever lived who would adjust his life by the experience of another.”
“You have a brain. Most women have not. You will always be more or less guided by it. Therefore, you are worth the trouble to warn.”
“You are the last person I should have expected advocate the happiness of the unknown; but I have thought that out for myself, and more than once. I believe that the only way a woman can avoid the cut of her sex is to avoid the fulfilment of love. Then the fates are placated, and, after the first wrench, permit the imagination a certain happiness, the soul a certain elevation, no doubt impossible in what must eventually become prosaic and disappointing.”
“I am not surprised that you have arrived at that truth by yourself; and be sure that all the troubles in the world amount to little if you can bear them alone, and that no troubles, barring poverty and pain, count an infinitesimal speck in the balance with those made by love, or the desperate attempt to find happiness. Indeed, I will modify what I said just now, and stake my life that a woman is happy only when she is not in love. There is no such thing as sympathy between the soul of man and woman. The man who thinks he sympathizes with a woman’s subtle wants is a milksop. The other, the only sort we love, doesn’t try, never thinks about it; and either way we are miserable, having the primal curse of Eve upon us. So, the old maids, or the quickly widowed, have the best of it in this life. Doubtless things are better arranged in another.”
“Perhaps in that we will be born without imagination.I don’t know but that would be the deepest definition of heaven after all.”
“I think it more likely that in alternate existences the man of one is the woman of another,” said Sarolta dryly. “That would be Nature and her compensations as we know them. On the whole she is just.”