AS I look back now on the past years, I find that the thing that penetrated most into my inner self, shocked me to the heart, and gave me no room and left no desire for any pretence about the will of fate and destiny, such as sometimes consoles grief, was the death of my friend Louis. Unlike most great friendships, mine with Louis began at school; and those, to whom circumstances have not allowed friendships at school, cannot realise the intensity of certain few friendships which, beginning on a basis of tomfoolery and ragging, as the general relations between schoolboys begin, yet survive them all, and steadily ripen with the years into a maturity of companionship, which has such a quality and nobility of its own that no other relation, not even that of passionate love, can ever take its place when it is gone.
I have not happened to mention Louis before in these papers for the reason that hehad actually come very little into my life in London. In fact, we retained our intimacy against the aggression of our different lives, which was rather paradoxical for the casual people we believed ourselves to be. (Without a sincere belief in his own casualness the modern youth would be the most self-important ass of all generations.) Our ways of life lead very contrarily; there was nowhere they could rationally touch; he, a soldier; I, a doctor, lawyer, or pedlar, I did not know which. But I had the grace, or if you like, the foolishness, to envy him the definite markings of his career; I envied him his knowledge of the road he wished to tread, and of the almost certainties which lay inevitably along that road.
Later, in those very best of days, I used to talk about him to Shelmerdene. And as I described, she listened and wondered. For, she said, such a man as I described Louis to be, and myself, could have nothing in common. But I told her that it isn't necessary for two people to have anything "in common" but friendship—and as I made that meaningless remark I put on a superior air,and she did not laugh at me. She continued to wonder during months, and at last she said, "Produce this wretched youth." But I would not produce him, "because Louis has never in his life met or dreamt of any one like you, and he will fall in love with you straight away. And as he is more honest than I am, so he will fall in love with you much more seriously, and that will be very bad for him, because you are the sort of woman that you are. It isn't fair to destroy the illusions of a helpless subaltern in the Rifle Brigade.... No, I will not produce him, Shelmerdene." But of course I did, and of course Louis saw, heard, and succumbed delightedly, and all through that lunch and for the half-hour after I had to keep a very stern eye on Shelmerdene and take great care not to let her get within a yard of him, else she would have asked him to go and see her next time he was in town, and then there would have been another wild-eyed ghost wandering about the desert places of Mayfair. As for Louis, he beat even his own record for dulness during that lunch. He admired her tremendously andobviously, and too obviously he couldn't understand a beautiful woman with beauty enough to be as dull as she liked, saying witty and amusing things every few seconds, always giving the most trivial remark, the most stereotyped phrase, such a queer twist as would make it seem delightfully new. For ever after he pestered me to "produce" him again, and I made myself rather unpopular by putting him off; and I never did let him see her again. On Shelmerdene's part it was just cussedness to worry me to see him again, for with a disgusted laugh at my "heavy father stunt," she forgot all about him; after that lunch she had found him "rather dull and a dear, and much to be loved by all women over thirty-five. I am not yet old enough to love your Louis," she said. And she retained her surprise at our friendship.
It was, perhaps, rather surprising; surprising not so much that we were friends, but how we ever became friends; for there are many people in this world, who could be great friends with each other if they could but once surmount the first barrier, if theycould butwishto surmount that barrier—and between Louis and me there was much more than a simple barrier to surmount. We became friends in spite of ourselves, then; though Louis, as you may believe, had nothing at all to do with the affair; he just sat tight and let things happen, to him, for his was not the nature consciously to defeat an invisible aim, a tyrannical decree. As one of England's governing classes, even at the age of fourteen when I first met him, such a rebellion as that of forcing God's hand about the smallest trifle would somehow have savoured to him of disloyalty to the "Morning Post" which, together with the Navy, Louis took as representing the British Empire.
I had been at school already one term when Louis came; and so it was at breakfast on the opening day of the winter term that I first noticed his bewildered face, though as we grew to prefects that same face aired so absolute a nonchalance that, together with my rather sophisticated features, we thoroughly deserved the title of theblasted roués. However, at that time,we were not prefects, but "new bugs," though Louis was by one term a newer "bug" than myself and my friends, and therefore had to sit at the bottom of the "bug" table and take his food as he found it. I, of course, took no notice of him at all; I maintained a, so to speak, officialhauteurabout our meal-time relations—one couldn't do anything else, you know, if one wished to keep unimpaired the dignity of one's seniority. I had, in fact, no use for newer "bugs" than myself; I was quite happy at my own end of the table with the three men (ages fourteen to fourteen-and-a-half) with whom I shared a study. We made a good and gay study, I remember, for they were three stalwart fellows and I, even at that age not taking my Armenianism very seriously, gave a quite passable imitation of an English public-school man.
How, as I looked round at my three friends and said to myself "here are companions for life," how was I to know of the irruption into my life of a bewildered face! I despised that face. It was the face of a newer "bug" than myself. But the wretched man could play soccer, I noticed; his deftwork at "inside right" to my "center forward" warmed my heart; and, by the time the term was half over, he had gained a certain distinction for being consistently at the bottom of the lowest form in the school; one rather liked a man for sticking to his convictions like that.
Nevertheless we became silently inimical. He ceased to look bewildered; with an English cunning he had already found that an air of nonchalance pays best. And his sort of "Oh, d'you think so?" air began to irritate me; it was no good doing my man of the world on a man who obviously made a point of not believing what I said. I rather felt in speaking to him as an irritated and fussy foreign ambassador must feel before the well-bred imperturbability of Mr. Balfour; I wasn't then old enough to know I felt like that, but myself and study had reasonable grounds for deciding that "that sloppy-haired new long bug was a conceited young swine," and that he was trading rather too much on being at the bottom of the school.
There was a dark-haired, sallow-faced youth, one Marsden, who had come the sameterm as we three; he had at first shared our study, but had been fired out for being a cub. And, by intimating to the House-Master that if he was put back in our study, new bugs or no, we wouldn't answer for his mother's knowing him, we had fired him out in such a way that he couldn't ever get back. But he didn't try to get back. He just went into the newest bug's study, and there, when Louis came the next term, made firm and fast friends with him. Marsden disliked me much more than he disliked any one else, as I had been the instigator of his ejection from our study, and so the silent and contemptuous enmity with which Louis eyed me wasn't very strange. Those two made common cause in their indifference to anything we three at the head of the table might say; and soon, things came to such a pass that we had to put lumps of salt into the potato dish before handing it down to them. And even that didn't seem to have much effect, for one tea-time I distinctly heard a murmur resembling "Armenian Jew" escape from Marsden's lips; that, of course, couldn't be borne, and I couldn't then explain to himthat there was no such person as an Armenian Jew for I wasn't myself quite certain about it—all I knew was that I wasn't a Jew, and it wasn't Marsden who was going to call me one in vain. So there and then I upped and threw my pot of jam at his head, striking him neatly just above the right eye; I didn't do it in anger, I didn't know why I did it, though now I know it was done through a base passion for notoriety, which I still have, though in a less primitive manner. I certainly got notoriety then, and also six cuts from a very supple cane and a Georgic on which to work off my ardour.
But I gained Louis for a friend. He had, it seemed, admired the deft and unassuming way in which I had thrown that pot of jam—he knew even less than I did about that passion for notoriety—and when he met me in the passage as I came back from my six cuts in the prefects' room, he said, "I say, bad luck," and I suggested that if his friend Marsden's ugly face hadn't got in the way of a perfectly harmless pot of jam I wouldn't have got a licking. Thus, in a three-minute talk, we became friends; but when we eachwent to our own studies we didn't know we were friends—in fact, I was quite prepared to go on treating him as an enemy until, when we met again, we both seemed to find that we had something to say to each other. And throughout those years of school we had always something to say to each other which we couldn't say quite in the same way to any one else, and that seems to me to be the basis of all friendship.... I don't quite know what happened to Marsden, or how Louis told him that he had decided to discontinue his friendship. I have an idea that Marsden went on disliking me through four years of school, and that if I met him on Piccadilly to-morrow would recognise me only to scowl at me, the man who not only hit him over the eye with a pot of jam, but also deprived him of his best friend.
Louis and I left school together; he on his inevitable road to Sandhurst, and I, with a puckered side glance at Oxford, to Edinburgh University. Even now I don't know why I went to Edinburgh and not to Oxford; I had always intended going to Oxford, my family had always intended that I should goto Oxford, up to the last moment I was actually going to Oxford—when, suddenly, with a bowler hat crammed over my left ear and a look of vicious obstinacy, I decided that I would go to Edinburgh instead.
Of course it was a silly mistake. The only thing I have gained by not going to Oxford is an utter inability to write poetry and a sort of superior contempt for all pale, interesting-looking young men with dark eyes and spiritual hair who are tremendously concerned about the utter worthlessness of Mr. William Watson's poetry. Of course my own superior attitude may be just as unbearable as their anaemic enthusiasm over, say, a newly discoveredrondelby the youngest son of the local fishmonger; but I at least do sincerely try to face and appreciate literature boldly, and frankly, and normally, and not self-consciously as they do, attacking literature from anywhere but a sane standpoint, trying to force a breach in any queer spot so that it is unusual and has not been thought of before; and through this original breach will suddenly appear an Oxford face with a queer unhallowed grin of self-consciouscleverness; and all this for a thin book of poems in a yellow cover, called, as like as not, "Golden Oxygen"!
Louis, down at Sandhurst, was being made into a soldier, and I, up at Edinburgh, was on the high road to general fecklessness. I only stayed there a few months; jumbled months of elementary medicine, political economy, metaphysics, theosophy—I once handed round programs at an Annie Besant lecture at the Usher Hall—and beer, lots of beer. And then, one night, I emptied my last mug, and with another side-glance at Oxford, came down to London; "to take up a literary career" my biographer will no doubt write of me. I may of course have had a "literary career" at the back of my mind, but as it was I slacked outrageously, much to Louis' disgust and envy. I have already written of those months, how I walked in the Green Park, and sat in picture galleries, and was lonely.
That first loneliness was lightened only by the occasional visits to London of Louis. He was by now a subaltern in the Rifle Brigade, with an indefinite but culturedgrowth somewhere between his nose and upper lip, and a negligent way of wearing mufti, as though to say, "God, it's good to be back in civilised things again!" They were jolly, sudden evenings, those! London was still careless then. Of an evening, a couple of young men in dress suits with top hats balanced over their eyebrows and eyes full of ablasévacancy, were not as remarkable as they now are. Life has lost its whilom courtesy to a top hat. Red flags and top hats cannot exist side by side; the world is not big enough for both. Ah, thou Bolshevik, thou class-beridden shop-steward! When ye die, how can ye say that ye have ever lived if, in your aggressive experiences, you have not known upon your foreheads the elegant weight of a top hat, made especially to suit your Marxian craniums by one Locke, who has an ancient shop at the lower end of St. James's Street and did at one time dictate the headwear of the beaux of White's and Crockford's. I warrant the life of my top hat, made by that same artist to withstand the impact of the fattest woman on earth, against all the battering eloquence ofall the orators in all the Albert Halls of all the Red Flag countries. With it on my head I will finesse any argument whatsoever with you any night of the week. And at the end of the argument, if you are still obstinate, I will cram my blessed top hat on your head and, lo and behold! you are at once a Labour Minister in the Cabinet, and a most respectable man with a most rectangular house in Portman Square!... But I must go back to Louis, who never got further in his study of Labour than an idea that all station-masters were labour leaders because they took tips so impressively.
Those occasional evenings were very good. I put away from myself writing and books—Louis hadn't really ever read anything but Kipling, "Ole-Luk-Oie" and "The Riddle of the Sands"-and I temporarily forgot Shelmerdene, and we dined right royally. I don't know what we talked about, perhaps we talked of nothing at all; but we talked all the time, and we laughed a great deal, and we still had the good old "blasted roué" touch about us. We were very, very old indeed, so old that we decided that the firstact of no play or revue in the world could compensate one for a hurried dinner; and we were old enough to know that a confidential manner tomaitres d'hôtelsis a thing to be cultivated, else a chicken is apt to be wizened and the sweet an unconscionable long time in coming. After dinner, a show, and then perhaps a night club, "to teach those gals how to dance."
We founded a Club for Good Mannered People. I, as the founder, was the president of the club, and Louis the vice-president; there were no members because we unanimously black-balled every one whom, in a moment of weakness, one or other of us might propose. We decided, in the end, that the Club could never have any members except the president and vice-president, simply because the men of our own generation were the worst mannered crew God ever put within lounging distance of a drawing-room.... There must be something wrong, we said, in a world where public-school men could be recognised by the muddy footprints they left on other people's carpets. So it was obviously left to us to supply the deficiencyof our generation, both as regards manners and everything else. We made a cult of good manners; Louis took to them as a cult where he had never taken to them as a necessity, and the happiest moments of his life were when he could work it off on to some helpless woman who had dropped an umbrella or a handkerchief. The Club, we decided, must never come to an end, it must go on being a Club until one or other of us should die ... and now the Club is no more, for suddenly a spring gave way, the world gave a lurch towards hell, and Louis stopped playing at soldiers to go away and be a real soldier, to die in his first attack with a bullet in his chest....
SOMEWHERE in these papers I have said that Shelmerdene left England, but I touched on it very lightly, for I am only half-heartedly a realist, and may yet live to be accused of shuffling humanity behind a phrase.... Youth must endure its periods of loneliness with what grace it can; and youth could endure them as resignedly as its preceptors, if it were not for its grotesque self-importance, which inflates loneliness to such a size that it envelopes a young man's whole being, leaving him at the end a sorry wreck of what was once a happy mortal. Anyway, that is what happened to me; I took the whole affair in the worst possible spirit, and, during that probation time to wisdom, thought and wrote and did so many silly things, smashed ideals and cursed idols with such morbid thoroughness and conviction (after the fashion of all the bitterest young men), that I must have been as detestablea person as ever trickled wheezily from the, well, pessimistic pen of a Mr. Wyndham Lewis.... But it takes very little effort to forget that time entirely, to let it bury itself with what mourning it can muster from the Shades which sent it to plague me. Enough that it passed, but not before it had, as they say, "put me wise" about the world and its ways.
For Shelmerdene had left behind her much more than just loneliness; much that was more precious and, thankfully, more lasting; for she had found a young man shaped entirely of acute angles and sharp corners, and had rubbed and polished them over with such delicate tact that it was only months, after she had gone that I suddenly realised how much more fit I was to cope with a complicated world since I had known her. But, more importantly, Shelmerdene to me was England. Before I met her I did not know England; I knew English, but England only as a man knows the landmarks about him in a strange country. But when she had come and gone England was a discovered country, a vast and ever-increasing panoramain which discoveries were continually made, leaving yet more hidden valleys of discoveries still to be made—and to be enjoyed! So much and much more, O unbeliever, I learnt from Shelmerdene, and in the learning of it lay the best and gladdest lesson of all.
Time, they say, can efface all things, but in truth it can efface nothing but its own inability to smooth out the real problems of life; so at least I have found in the one instance in which I have challenged time to do its best for me, a slave bound down by an unholy wizardry; or else, perhaps, it was that Shelmerdene was not made of the stuff which fades into the years and becomes musty and haggard in their increasing company. I do not know. But, take it as I will, all the service time has been able to do for me has been negative, for without disarranging one hair of her head it has only emphasised in me the profound and subtle influence of that gracefully licentious woman whom I once called Shelmerdene, because, I told her, "it is the name of an American girl which I found in a very bad American novel aboutthe fanatical Puritans of New England, and the name seems to suit you because in New England they would have treated you exactly as they treated Shelmerdene Gray, the heroine of this book, whom they branded and burnt as a shameless woman, but loved in their withered hearts for her gaiety, and elegance, and wit, which they couldn't understand, but vaguely felt was as much an expression of Christ as their own wizened virtue."
Out of the silence of two years at last came a letter from her. I found it when I came in very late one night, and for a long time I stood in my little hall and examined the Eastern stamp and postmark; and the writing on the envelope was so exactly the same as on the last note she had sent me before leaving England that I had to smile at the idea of Shelmerdene, in the rush of her last pursuit of her perfect fate, laying in a sufficient store of her own special nibs to last her for the lifetime she intended to spend abroad; for when I opened the letter I found that, as I had guessed, she would never come back to England, saying, "I am a fugitivebranch which has at last found its parent tree.... I have run my perfect fate to earth, Dikran! more perfect than any dream, more lasting than the most perfect dream. And life is so beautiful that I can scarcely bear your not being here to share it, for, you see, I am quite sure that you are still the dear you were two years ago. But it is so tiresome of you to be so young, and to have to experience so many things before you can qualify for my sort of happiness; and on top of being young you are so restless and fussy, too, with your ideas of what you are going to do, and your ambitions—how it must tire the mind to be ambitious! It would certainly tire mine in this climate, so will you please make a note of the fact that I simply forbid you to come out here to join me! You are too young to be happy, and you aren't wise enough to be contented; and you can't hope to be wise enough until you begin to lose a bit of that mane of hair of yours, which I hope you never will, for I remember how I loved one particular wave in it in the far-off age when I thought I was in love with you.... It is terrible, but I am forgettingEngland. Terrible, because it must be wrong to forget one's country, seeing how you oppressed nationalities go on remembering your wretched countries for centuries of years, and throwing bombs and murdering policemen for all the world as though you weren't just as happy as every one else, while I, with a country, which is after all worth remembering, go and forget it after a paltry two years! Of course it will always be my country, and I shall always love it for the good things it has given me, but as afactin my life it has faded into something more dim than a memory. A spell has been put upon me, Dikran, to prevent a possible ache in my heart for the things I was born among, a spell which has made me forget Europe and all my friends in it except just you, and you because, in spite of all your English airs, you will always be a pathetic little stranger in a very strange land, fumbling for the key.... Ah, this wise old East of mine! so old and so wise, my dear, that it knows for certain that nothing is worth doing; and as you happen, perhaps, on the ruins of a long-dead city by the desert, you can almost hear itchuckling to itself in its hard-earned wisdom, as though to say that since God Himself is that very same Law which creates men, and cities, and religions only to level them into the dust of the roads and the sands of the desert, why fight against God! It is a corrupt and deadening creed, this of the East, but it has a weight of ancestral will behind it which forces you to believe in it; and belief in it leaves you without your Western defences, and open to be charmed into non-resistance, as I and my Blue Bird have been charmed, else perhaps I would not now be so happy, and might even be dining with you on the terrace of the Hyde Park Hotel.... Rather bitterly you have often called me the slave of Ishtar, though at the time I did not know who the lady was, for I was always rather weak about goddesses and such like; but I guessed she had something to do with love because of the context, for you were developing your pleasant theory about how I would come to a bad end, someday.... Well, Dikran, that 'someday' of your prophecy has come. I've never belonged so wholly to Ishtar as I do now that I am perhapsin the very same country in which she once haunted the imagination of the myriad East. I've made a mess of life, I've come to my bad end, and, as I tell you, I have never known such perfect happiness. The world couldn't wish me a worse fate, and I couldn't wish myself a better.... Don't write to me, please. I can always imagine you much more clearly than your letters can express you, and if I think of you as doing big things, as I pray you may, it will be better for me than knowing that you are doing nothing at all, which might easily happen, seeing how lazy you are.... In the dim ages I was all wrong about life. For I know now that restraint in itself is the most perfect emotion...."
I laid the letter down, and as the windows were already greying with the March dawn it did not seem worth while going to a sleepless bed; and so I sat on in my chair, drawing my overcoat round me for warmth, and smoked many cigarettes. I felt very old indeed, for was not that letter the echo of a long-dead experience, and are not long-dead experiences the peculiar property of old men?
No visions of the Shelmerdene of that letter came up to disturb my peace, for she did not fit in with my ideas of the East, she had never appealed to that Eastern side which must be somewhere in me, but had always been to me a perfect symbol of the grace and kindliness and devilry of the arrogant West. I could not see her as she described herself, happy, meditative, wise in contentment.... Her contentment is too much like an emotion, and therefore spurious, I thought, and so she will still dine with me on the terrace of the Hyde Park Hotel, and will wonder why I look so differently at her, for I will still be young while she will bemiddle-aged.... No, that letter conjured up no perfect vision of her in the East, except that I saw her, melodramatically perhaps, pleading on her knees for release from the bonds of Ishtar, for I knew that not even a Shelmerdene among women can evade the penalty of so many unsuccessful love-affairs just by the success of one.
The grey of the March dawn became paler, and the furniture and books in my room seemed so wan and unreal that I thought drowsily that they were a dream of last night and were fading before the coming daylight; and later, when my thoughts had mellowed into a security of retrospect, I may have slept, for I realised with a start that the maid had come in to tidy up the room for breakfast, but had got no further than the door, perhaps wondering whether I had been very drunk the night before, or only just "gay."
Retrospect came naturally after that letter, for she had written at the end how she had found the true worth of "restraint"; it would have been just a phrase in a letter if I had not remembered, as she must havewhen she wrote it, that the word had a context, and that the context lay in a long summer afternoon on a silent reach of the river many miles from Maidenhead.... One day that summer I had suggested to her that, as the world was becoming a nuisance with its heat and dust, we might go and stay on the river for a few days, but she had said, quite firmly, "No, I can't do that. I am not yet old enough to put my name down for the divorce stakes, so if you don't mind, Dikran, we will call that bet off and think of something else. For if that same husband heard of my staying on the river with a young man of uncelibate eye and uncertain occupation, he would at once take steps about it, and although I like you well enough as a man, I couldn't bear you as a co-respondent.... But if you really do want to stay on the river, I will get the Hartshorns to ask us both down, for they have a delightful house on a little hill, from which you can see the twilight creeping over the Berkshire downs across the river."
"Oh, we can't do that," I said; "GuyHartshorn is such a stiffnecked ass and his wife is dull enough to spoil any river—"
"Tolerance, my dear, is what you lack," she said; "tolerance and a proper understanding of the relation between a stiffnecked ass and a possible host. And Guy, poor dear, always does his duty by his guests.... Please don't be silly about it, Dikran. The Hartshorns distinctly need encouragement as hosts, so you and I will go down and encourage them. And if you can manage to cloak your evil thoughts behind a hearty manner and watch Guy as he swings a racing punt down the river, you will learn more about punting and the reason why Englishmen are generally considered to be superior to foreigners than I could teach you in a lifetime."
We had been two days at the house on the little hill by the river (for, of course, we went there) before, on the third afternoon, after lunch, our chance came, and Shelmerdene and I were at last alone on the river; I had not the energy to do more than paddle very leisurely and look from here to there, but always in the end to come back to thewoman who lay facing me against the pale green cushions of the Hartshorn punt, steeped in the happy sunshine of one of those few really warm days which England now and again manages to steal from the molten South, and exhibits in a new green and golden loveliness. From round a bend of the river we could quite clearly see the ivy-covered Georgian house of our host, perched imperiously up on the top of its little hill, but not imperiously enough to prevent the outlet of two days' impatience in the curse I vented on it.
"Little man with little toy wants big toy of the same pattern and cries when he can't have it," she mocked me, and smiled away my bad temper, which had only a shallow root in impatience. But I would not let it go all at once, for man is allowed licence on summer afternoons on the river, and I challenged her to say if she did not know of better ways of spending the whole glorious time between dinner and midnight than by playing bridge, "as we tiresomely do at the house on the hill, much to the delight of that sombre weeping elm which looks in at thewindow and can then share the burden of its complaining leaves with my pessimistic soul."
"We will leave your soul severely alone for the moment, but as for playing bridge, I think it is very good for you," she said. "It is very good for you to call three No Trumps, and be doubled by some one who won't stand any nonsense, and go down four hundred or so. It teaches you restraint."
"Restraint," I said, "is the Englishman's art of concealing his emotions in such a way that every one can guess exactly what they are. And I have acquired it so perfectly that you know very well that only the other day you told me how you admired my restraint, and how I would never say to a man's face what I couldn't say just as well behind his back." But she did not answer, and in silence I pulled into a little aimless backwater, and moored by a willow which let through just enough sun to speck Shelmerdene's dress with bright arabesques.
I changed my seat for the cushions and lay full length in front of Shelmerdene, but it was as though she had become part of theriver, she was so silent. I said something, I can't remember what it was, but it must have suited the day and my mood. I could not see her face because she had turned it towards the bank and it was hidden under the brim of her pale blue hat, but when my words had broken the quietness and she turned it towards me, I was surprised at the firm set of her lips and the sadness of her smile.
"You are making love to me, and that is quite as it should be," she said. "But on the most beautiful of all days I have the saddest thoughts, for though you laughed at me when I talked about restraint, I was really very serious indeed. I know a lot about restraint, my dear, and how the lack of it can make life suddenly very horrible ... for once upon a time I killed an old man because I didn't know the line between my desires and his endurance." She shook her head at me gently. "No, that won't do, Dikran. You were going to say something pretty about my good manners, but that is all so much play-acting, and, besides, good manners are my trade and profession, andwithout them I should long ago have been down and under, as I deserve to be much more than Emma Hamilton ever did.... The tragedy about people like me is that we step into life at the deep end and find only the shallow people there, and when we meet some one really deep and very sincere, like that old man, we rather resent it, for we can't gauge him by the standards we use for each other. Men like that bring a sudden reality into life, but the reality is unacceptable and always ugly because it is forced upon one, while the only realities that are beautiful are those that were born in your heart when you were born; just like your country for you, which you have never seen and may never see, and yet has been your main reality in life since you were born; a reality as sad and beautiful as the ancestral memories which must lurk somewhere in you, but which you can't express because you have not learnt yet how to be really natural with yourself. And when you have learnt that you will have learnt the secret of great writing, for literature is the natural raw material which every man secretes within himself, butonly a few can express it to the world. But I may be wrong about all that, and anyway you must know a great deal more about great thinking and great writing than I do, for you have read about it in dull books while I have only sensed it in my trivial way...."
"Shelmerdene, I want to hear about your old man," I said, "whom you say you killed. But that is only your way of saying that he was in love with you, and that you hurt him so much that he died of it."
"Ah, if it had been only that I would not be so sad this afternoon! In fact, I would not be sad at all, for he was old and had to die, and all that about love and being hurt is fair and open warfare. But it was something much beastlier than that, something animal in me, which will make me ashamed whenever I think of that day when we three gave our horses rein down to the Breton coast, and I turned on the old man, a very spitfire of a girl broken loose from the restraint of English generations, forgetting for one fierce moment that her saddle was not covered with the purple of a Roman Augusta, and that she couldn't do as sheliked in a world of old men.... Have you ever seen a quarrel, a real quarrel, Dikran? When some one is so bitterly and intensely angry that he loses all hold on everything but his wretched desire to hurt, and unchains a beast which in a second maims him as deeply as his enemy—no, it maims him more.
"The old Frenchman was my guardian," she said, "and the last of a name which you can find here and there in Court Memoirs, in the thick of that riot of gallantry and intrigue which passed for life at old Versailles. But the world has grown out of that and does things much better now, for gallantry has been scattered to the four winds of democracy and is the navvy's part as much as the gentleman's, while intrigue has become the monopoly of the few darling old men who lead governments, more as a way of amusing their daughters than for any special purpose of their own. But if the world has grown old since then so had my old man, for he was none of your rigid-mindedcidevant aristoswhom you can see any day at the Ritz keeping up appearances on an occasionalcocktail and the use of the hotel note-paper; but the air of thegrand seigneurhadn't weathered proscriptions and revolutions for nothing, and so still clung rather finely to him in spite of himself, and made him seem as old and faded as his ancestors in the world in which he had to live, poor old dear! It was cruel of that other nice old gentleman above him to put him through the ordeal, for he did so bitterly and genuinely resent a world in which honour was second to most things and above nothing. He couldn't forgive, you see. He couldn't forgive himself, nor France, nor God, but especially he couldn't forgive France. Sedan, revolution, republic—and no Turenne or Bonaparte to thrash a Moltke with the flat of his sword, for he wasn't worth more! And all a France could muster were the trinkets of hermondeanddemimonde, and a threatening murmur of 'revanche' and 'Alsace-Lorraine'—as though threats and hatred could wipe out the memory of that day of surrender at Sedan, when he stood not ten yards away among only too polite Prussian aides-de-camp while Napoleon put the sealon his last mistake, and signed away an empire.... And allowing for exaggeration, and the white-hot excitement to which folk who fuss about honour, etc., are liable, there may have been something in his point of view about it all, for I once heard a man with a lot of letters behind his name say that when a country gives up a limb it also gives up its body; but he may have been wrong, for after all France is still France!
"But you would have adored my old man, Dikran, just as I did. He treated life, and men, and women with all that etiquette which you so admire, he was simply bristling with etiquette—a deal too much of it for my taste, for I was only seventeen then and liked my freedom like any other Englander.... But I'm finding it very difficult to describe the man he was, my dear, for in our slovenly sort of English we've got used to describing a person by saying he is like another person, and I can't do that in this case because he belongs as much to a past age as Hannibal, and there isn't any one like him now. And even when he was alive there were very few—two or three oldmen as fierce and unyielding and vital as himself, who used to come and dine, and say pretty things to little me who sat at the end of the table with very large eyes and fast-beating heart, wondering why they weren't all leading Cabinets and squashing revolutions, for they seemed to know the secrets of every secret cabal and camarilla in Europe.
"Yes, my old guardian was a remnant of an empire—but what a remnant! Such a fierce-looking little man he was, with pale, steel-blue eyes which pierced into you from under a precipice of a forehead, a bristling Second Empire moustache, and thin bloodless lips which parted before the most exquisite French I've ever heard; I can scarcely bear it when you say I talk French divinely, for I know how pitiful mine is compared to the real thing, as done by that old man and Sarah Bernhardt, for they were very old friends and she used often to come and lunch with us.
"He talked well, too, and all the better for having something to say, as well he might have since he had been everything andknown every one worth knowing of his time—ministers, and rebels, and artists, and all the best-known prostitutes of the day; but they did those things better then, Dikran. In fact, more as an excuse for getting away from a parvenu Paris than from any Bonapartist feelings, for he was always an Orleanist, I think he had represented Louis Napoleon at every city which could run to an Embassy from London to Pekin; from where he brought back that ivory Buddha which is on my writing-table, and which has an inscription in ancient Chinese saying that every man is his own god, but that Buddha is every man's God, which goes a long way to prove that the wisdom of the East wasn't as wise as all that, after all.
"But you are getting restless," she said suddenly. "You probably want to open the tea-basket to see what's inside, or you've just seen a water rat——"
"No, it's a little more subtle than that, Shelmerdene, although as a fact I do see a water rat not a yard from you on the bank.... I merely wanted to know how it was that, since you had a perfectly good fatheralive in England, you were allowed to go gadding about in France with a guardian, soi-disant——"
"We will ignore your soi-disant, young man. But I'll allow your interruption, for it may seem a bit complicated.... It was like this: as the fortunes of our family had run rather to seed through generations of fast women and slow horses, my father who was utterly a pet, succumbed to politics for an honest living, or, if you pull a face like that about it, for a dishonest living. For up to that time, in spite of having exactly the figure for it, he had always refused to enter Parliament, because his idea was that the House was just a club, and one already belonged to so many better clubs. But once there nothing could stop him, and when he entered for the Cabinet stakes he simply romped home with a soft job and a fat income.... But all that is really beside the point, for between politics and guineas father and I had had a slight disagreement about a certain young man whom I was inclined to marry offhand, being only sixteen, you know, and liking the young man—and, of course,my father did the correct thing, as he always did, gave the young man a glass of port and told him not to be an ass, and shipped me off to Paris to his very old friend. You see, he knew about that old Marquis, and how I'd be quite safe in his care, for any young man who as much as looked at me would have a pair of gimlet eyes asking him who the devil he might be and why he chose to desecrate a young lady's virginal beauty by his so fatuous gaze.
"I've been saying a lot of nice things about that old man to you, but I didn't feel quite like that about him at the time. I liked him, of course, because he was a man; but all that French business about the sanctity of a young maid's innocence got badly on my nerves, for innocence was never my long suit even from childhood, having ears to hear and eyes to see; and I soon began to get very bored with life as my old Frenchman saw it. So it wasn't surprising that I broke out now and again just to shock him, he was so rigid, but I was always sorry for it afterwards because he just looked at me and said not a word for a minute or so, and then wenton talking as though I hadn't hurt him—but I had, Dikran! I had hurt him so much that for the rest of the day he often couldn't bear to see me.... But though I was ashamed of myself for hurting him, I couldn't stop; life with him was interesting enough in a way, of course, but it left out so much, you see; it entirely left out the stupendous fact that I was almost a woman, and a very feminine one at that, who liked an odd young man about now and again just to play about with. But I wasn't allowed any young men, except a twenty-five-year-old over-manicured Vicomte who was so unbearably worldly and useless that I wanted to hit him on the head with my guardian's sword-stick, which he always carried about with him, as a sort of mental solace, I think. No, there weren't any young men, nor any restaurants, for the old man simply ignored them; my dear, there wasn't anything at all in my young life except a few old dukes and dowagers, and the aforesaid young Vicomte, who had manicured himself out of existence and was considered harmless. And so Paris was a dead city to me who lived in the heartof it, and all the more dead for the faded old people who moved about in my life, and tried to change my heart into a Louis-Quinze drawing-room hung with just enough beautiful and musty tapestries to keep out the bourgeois sunshine and carelessness, which I so longed for.
"So I had to amuse myself somehow.... I was a bad young woman then, as I am a bad woman now, Dikran; for I've always had a particular sort of vanity which, though it doesn't show on the surface like most silly women's, is deep down in me and has never left me alone; a sort of vanity which makes itself felt in me only in the off-seasons when no one happens to be in love with me and I in love with no one, and tells me that I must be dull and unattractive, utterly insignificant and non-existent; it is a weakness in me, but much stronger than I am, for I've never resisted it, but been only too glad to fall in love again as soon as I could; and that is why I've never made a stand against my impressionableness, why I've never run away from or scotched a love-affair which I knew wouldn't last two weeks, however muchI loved the wretched man at the time; it was so much the line of least resistance, it drowned that infernal whisper in me that I was of no account at all in the world. But the tragedy of it was, and is, my dear, that indulgence made the monster grow; it was like a drug, for as soon as the off-season came again it was at its old tricks with twice its old virulence and malice, and, of course, I gave way again. And so on, and so on—did you murmurdies iræ, Dikran? Well, perhaps, but who knows? There's a Perfect Fate for every one in this world, and if any one deserves to find it, it's myself who has failed to find it so often....
"At that time that wretched vanity of mine was only a faint whisper, but there it was, and it had to be satisfied, or else I should have become a good woman, which never did attract me very much. I simply had to amuse myself somehow—and so I formedla grande idéeof my young life, just as Napoleon III had long ago formed his equallygrande idéeabout Mexico and Maximilian, and with the same disastrous results. True, there was no young man about, but there was a man, anyway,and a Marquis to boot, even though he was a bit old and rigid. But it was exactly that rigidity of his which I wanted to see about; I wanted to find out things, and in my own way, don't you see? And so, deliberately and with all the malice in me, I set out to subdue the old man. Not childishly and gushingly, although I was so young, but with all the finesse of the eternal game, for clever women are born withrougeon their cheeks.
"But it was a disappointing business; I didn't seem to make the impression I wanted to make; all my finesse went for nothing, except as signs of the affection of a ward. Obviously, I thought hopelessly, I don't know all there is to be known about subduing old French marquises, and I had almost decided to try some other amusement when one May morning, a few months after my father had died and appointed him as my guardian and executor, he came into my little boudoir, looking more stern and adorable than ever. And as he came in I knew somehow that big things were coming into my little life; I don't know how, but I knew itas surely as I knew that for all his grand air of calmness he was as shy as any schoolboy.
"'My child,' he said very gently, 'I am intruding on you only because I have something to say to you of the utmost importance and delicacy. I am too old and too much of the world to do things by impulse, and so if I seem to offend against your unworldliness now it is not because I have not thought very carefully about what I am going to say.... And I beg you not to count it as any more than the suggestion of an old man who thinks only of your good, and to tell me quite frankly at the end what you think of it.
"'My old friend, your father,' he said, 'honoured me by placing you entirely in my charge as guardian and executor; but on looking into matters I find that he has left very little for me to do in the latter capacity—very little, in fact, besides that small estate in Shropshire which is entailed on you and your children, as with all its associations of that beautiful girl—scarcely older than you are now, your mother—your father could notbear the thought of it ever passing to strangers. And so, my child, without any reflection on my friend, when you leave my care you enter the world with an old enough name to ensure your position, but without the income to maintain it, and, if you will forgive me, a quite insignificantdot; though in your case, as in your beautiful mother's,' he added, with his little gallant smile, the first and last of the morning, 'adotwould be the requirement of a blind man.
"'All this preamble must seem very aimless and tiresome to you, but I wish to put all the facts before you, my dear, before asking you to take the responsibility, as indeed it is, of weighing the suggestion I am going to make.... You must have seen that I am out of sympathy with this modern world of yours, that I belong to some other period, better or worse, what does it matter? And this world, my child, has little use for those hard-headed persons who cannot change the bent of their minds according to its passing whims, and so it has little use for me who cannot and will not change.... Do you understand? I mean that I am an oldman who is every day losing touch with life, and that I know here, quite certainly, that I have only a very few more years to live. Do not look sad, child,' he said, almost impatiently, 'it is not that I am complaining, but that I wish you to understand my thoughts.... Into an old life you have come like a ray of sunshine which is even now making light of your little puzzled frown; and I have a debt of gratitude to pay to you, my child, which I wish to pay at the expense even of your young peace of mind this morning. Although this new world has passed out of my grasp, and will soon pass out of my understanding, I know that it is the proper setting for you, the only subtle and beautiful thing that I have found in it, and my greatest wish is to leave you in a position worthy of your beauty and intelligence. It is not that I am afraid for you, for you are no trivial chit of a girl, but merely that I wish to leave you both happy and independent.... And, as it is, I can do nothing, nothing at all! For it has been a fixed rule of our family that we may not leave our fortune and property to any onewho does not bear our name, and thus, though my nephew and I have had no occasion to meet for some fifteen years, I must leave him such money as I have and all this not unappreciated furniture.... And that is why, my child, because of my wish to leave you all I have, I have been forced to suggest the only alternative, for I would not have even considered it otherwise, that you should consent to bear my name with me for the few years I have to live, and then, as a young and beautiful widow of means, and bearing an old French name which may still be worth a little consideration, you can take your fit position in the world in which you, and not I, were born to be happy....'
"There it is, Dikran, or as much of it as I can remember. And do you need a setting for it? Oh, yes, you do, for you are a little lost. Imagine then, sitting by a window of a large house in theRue Colbert, a young girl with a battered copy of Madame Bovary skilfully hidden beside her, and a little erect old man, very stiff butsoigné, and cruelly aged by the sunlight which poured blessedly into the room, standing by the arm of herchair, asking her to marry him. Oh! but you can't imagine it, you will think of him as pleading, and of me as surprised. He didn't plead, he couldn't and I, my dear, by the time he had finished, wasn't surprised.... I knew, you see. Why, I knew everything! Lexicons and encyclopædias had toppled off their dusty shelves, and the Sibylline books had come running to my feet, and the whole world had come trotting out with its wisdom, wisdom as clear and cold as any Dân-nan-Rón that your friend Gloom ever played on hisfeadan, and all in the few minutes that an old man was speaking to me! Of course, it should all have happened differently; I should have been just a 'trivial chit of a girl,' and then I would have accepted all the old darling said, and gaped, and cried, and said 'thank you.' But as it was I did none of those things; I'm not quite sure what I did, unless it was nothing at all.... It all seems rather mixed now, but on that May morning it was as clear as the sunlight in my cruel young mind—how young and how cruel, Dikran!
"You see, as he spoke, he opened out theworld which he so despised to me; page by page he showed me life, how beastly and how beautiful; he showed me both sides, because he himself was both beastly and beautiful.... And I gloried in it all! At my knowledge and the power it gave me over life. After a while the old man didn't seem to matter—there he was, talking away! I knew about him, and just how beastly and beautiful he was. For hewasbeautiful in his sincerity; I knew that he wished for my good, that to leave me well provided was the only condition he made with death; but I knew too that there was a beastly little imp somewhere in him, as in other men, which turned his finest thoughts into so much bluff, which told him through the locked and bolted doors of his honour that he wanted me for my own sake, and just for that, because I was young and because he loved me, and, stripped of all his honour and guardianship, because he loved me just as Solomon loved his wives, and Lucifer loved Lilith, and as you love me now....
"There it was, then, the whole damnable world, and I, only eighteen, in the middleof it! And there he was, my dear old man, more rigid and more adorable than ever; for, cruel as I was in seeing through him, I loved him all the more for his sweet naïveté and for his old, so old illusions about his motives. While as for being shocked at the way he loved me, I've never been shocked by anything but the vulgarity and the indecencies of respectable people, who seem to think that sex is purely a sort of indoor sport to be indulged in darkness and behind barricaded doors, while it is really a setting for the most beautiful Bacchanal that was ever devised by the fairest and purest of God's children. In spite of bibles and the Bishop of London, Mary knew what she was about, Dikran. Love doesn't grow anywhere, to be picked up by the wayside. Pure beauty grows only where beauty already is....
"But, wise as I was, I didn't know what to say; what could I say? He was waiting; I had to say, do something. I did—flung my arms round his neck and told him he was a pet to be so nice to me, and that I must think about it. For the first time that he had wanted me to behave like a womanI behaved consciously like a child—it seemed the easiest way out. And I think he saw that I was acting; he had expected something else, for he smiled very sadly down at me, and patted my hair, saying I was a sweet child not to be angry with him for making life so suddenly serious, and then, very gently, he went away, leaving me in the sunshine, a playmate of the gods.... And yet I was so sorry for him that I almost cried when I thought of him sitting alone and lonely in his library.
"We never spoke of it again. At first it was as though he was waiting for me to say yes, or no, or something, but I didn't say anything, and, later, he seemed to forget. I didn't do it out of cruelty, my dear; I simply couldn't say anything, that's all. After sunshine, rain, you know; I was dismal, frightened of him a little. The romance of that May morning when he had come to me in my room had become a ridiculous fantasy, so that it seemed to me that any reference to it would rather tarnish the very splendid dignity which he had kept, and sort of increased, through it all. Besides,anyway, what was there to say? I had made up my mind as he spoke that morning, through all the clearness of my new-found knowledge. I had never a doubt as to what I was going to do. It wasn't in me to do as he asked, or rather, as he advised, the old dear! I wish it had been in me, for to be a rich French marquise without a marquis is no bad fate for any girl, and it might have helped me to steer clear of many complications. But I couldn't, because all my life, Dikran, I've been cursed by an utter inability to make any money out of love. And that is why I would never be a success in my mother's country of America, where men throw pearls and beauty roses about as a matter of course and are very offended if one suggests an economical flirtation on a gross of diamonds and a hundredweight of Russian sables.... It isn't that I am mean-minded, but I cannot take presents from men who love me, for, after all, the old Marquis' offer was a present. When I see other women with relays of fur coats, and pearl necklaces, and no visible means of support, I am thoroughly sorry for myself,for it isn't through any excess of morals that I haven't just as many furs and pearls; it is simply because I don't see life that way, as, ten years ago, I didn't see life as the wife of an old man, whom I adored but didn't love, and couldn't have thought of marrying him even if he had promised to arrange for his death an hour after the wedding.... Do you understand, Dikran? For all this while I've been trying to tell you that whatever else I am not, I am an honest woman; a very upright gentleman in my way, which is more than you can say for most really nice women.
"The reason why realistic tragedies are impossible, or at best only melodramatic, on the stage is that the Person who arranges life has no sense of drama at all. Imagine how Sardou, the wretched man who turned Sarah Bernhardt into an exhibition, would have worked it out: the young girl would have run away from the lustful old man to Nice; the old man would have followed her to her boarding-house and made faces at the landlady's fair-haired son, who was the girl's destiny; a duel, tears, another duel, more tears, and Sarah falling about the stage in exhaustedattitudes, as well she might.... And then imagine how life worked out the tragedy of that girl and old man; it let them be, or it seemed to let them be! No, God can have no dramatic sense, as we know it, because all the tragedies He arranges for us are slow-moving, so slow and moving none of the actors know whither; perhaps this tragedy we are acting will fade away, they say hopefully to themselves, and leave us again happy and careless; a little later they are happily sure that their tragedy is fading, there is no possible climax in sight, and then suddenly, out of the inmost earth, from some really foul spot of their animal natures, come the sudden ingredients for the tragical climax; the climax lasts only a second, but after it no blessed curtain falls; God has interfered again, Life is more cruel than Art, He says, so away with your tricks, your curtains and your finales. And I suppose He is right, you know; it must be right that shameful memories live beside the beautiful ones, as twenty years from now the memory of that old man and myself will live beside this very moment of you and I under this willow; formy abundant confession of it all seems to make it as much yours as mine, Dikran.
"My guardian and I lived on smoothly enough, then; as before I broke out now and again when he stepped too sternly between myself and an amusing indiscretion, but rebellions always ended in my smiling at some cutting remark of his, and in his always sweet dismissal of the subject; there was nothing to show that we were different with each other. But we were, indeed we were. I did not know it then, but I knew it very clearly later; how we two people, really loving each other, though in our different ways, had found a deep, subtle antagonism in each other, a very real antagonism, which it would have shamed us to realise at the time, and with a very real and inevitable climax; but like God's creatures, mummers in yet another of His cruelly monstrous plays, we thought the tragedy was fading, had faded, and were forgetting it, for what climax could there possibly be?
"Four or five months after that May morning he took me to stay at a château in Brittany; a very beautiful, tumble-down,draughty place, my dear, standing proudly at the head of a valley like a dissipated actor who feels that he must have done great things in the past to be what he now is, and with nothing to show for its draughty arrogance but a few rakish stones which were once the embattlement from which the Huguenotseigneurof the day defied the old Medici; and the slim, white-haired old woman who charmingly met me at the door, the châtelaine of only one castle, but with the dignity of an empire in her kind, calm elegance. My hostess and my guardian were old, old friends, and to watch them in their gentle, courteous intimacy was a lesson on the perfect management of such things. When we are old and white-haired, will you come and stay at my place, Dikran, and will you pretend that you have forgotten that you ever liked me for anything else than my mind? Just like those two old people in the Breton château, who a thousand years ago may have been lovers or may have only loved one another.... Who knows? and does it matter?
"The idea of this visit, on my guardian's part, to the solitary château from whose highestwindows one could just see the sea curling round the Breton coast, was of course excellent. He wanted me to be out of harm's way and entirely his own, and was there any better way of achieving that than by putting me in a lonely château with only my hostess as an alternative to himself? But, poor old dear, it didn't fall out like that; for we had only been there two days when the alternative presented himself in the person of the young man of the house, my hostess's son, the young lord of Tumbledown Castle.... He went and spoilt it all, good and proper, did that young man. His mother hadn't expected him, my guardian didn't want him, and I didn't mind him—there he was, all the way from England on a sudden desire to see his mother, the only woman whom Raoul had ever a decent thought about, I suppose. (His name wasn't really Raoul, you know, but it is a sort of convention that all young Frenchmen with the title of Vicomte and with languid eyes and fragile natures are called Raoul.) For he wasn't by any means a nice young man, except facially, but how was I to know that! And besides, the mancould sit a horse as gallantly as any young prince who ever went crusading, and I strained my eyes in prolonging the little thrill I had when, the morning after he came, I saw him from a window riding out of the gates and down into the valley, very much the young lord of the manor, on the huge white stallion which, with such a master, defied a Republic and still proclaimed him as theSieur du Château-Mauvraito the dour and morose-minded peasants of the Breton villages....
"When I say that Raoul was not a nice young man, I mean that he was a very agreeable companion; but, like little Billee, in 'Trilby,' and Maurice, the stone-image of my dreams, that poor young man couldn't love, it wasn't in him to love; but unlike the other two, who were sweet about it and made up for it as much as they could, Raoul had taken it into his head that love was all stuff and nonsense, anyway, and that he could do a deal better with the very frequent and not very fastidious pretences of it; and, according to his little-minded lights, he seems to have been right, for he had already donefairly well for himself in London—this I found much later, of course—with a flat in Mayfair which was much more consistent with the various middle-aged ladies who came to tea with him than with the extent of his income.
"No reasonable person could expect that a young man like that and I could stay in the same house and no trouble come of it. But my guardian wasn't reasonable. He seemed still to expect me to go riding with him, and let a perfectly good young man run to waste for want of a companion to say pretty things to. Raoul and I, in that beautiful spot, were scarcely ever allowed to be alone, and only twice did we manage to ride away together to the sea for a delicious, exciting few hours; only twice, I said, for the second time was very definitely the last.... Somehow the Marquis was always there. Not in any unpleasant way, but he would just happen to come into the room or the particular corner of the large garden where we also happened to be; he didn't rebuke or look sulky, he was just the same, except, perhaps, for a little irony to Raoul, whomhe refused to take seriously as a young man of the world. And there is where the old man made his mistake with me, for I, too, didn't take Raoul seriously; I took him for just what he was, more knave than fool, a charming companion, and a very personable young man, as far as being just 'personable' counts, and only so far. If I had been allowed to deal with the matter in my own way, without let or hindrance, it would only have been very pleasant trifling, and certainly no more; even as it was, the 'no more' part of it was still safe in my keeping, thanks entirely to my having brought myself up properly; but for the rest a simple amusement became a rather sordid tragedy, for God and guardian had combined to use a commonplace young man as the climax to a faded and forgotten little fantasy, once sun-kissed by a May morning, now to be shivered and scattered by the shrieking sea wind, discordant chorus enough for the unmingled destinies of any Tristans and Isoldas, which kept forcing our horses apart on that last morning of all, when we three rode by the sea, and made a world of anger for ourselvesbecause some one, something, had suddenly pushed us out of the other world where we had been so careless and happy....
"Once things happened, they happened quickly. For all my not taking him at all seriously, I suppose I liked him quite a lot, really—I must have done, else I would not have been such a fool. He was my first experience of dishonesty in man, and I suppose I wanted to plumb this dishonesty of his to the depths, which was very stupid of me because he was much more likely to find out about me than I about him.... Raoul had been at the château two weeks, and our little affair had taken the important and unpleasant air of a conspiracy. Our own stay was to last another month, and if it hadn't been that my guardian would not for the world have offended his old friend by cutting short this long-looked-for visit, he would very soon have taken me away from the so desecrating gaze of young Raoul.
"On that day, towards evening, he and I had managed to steal out walking for an hour. Agreeable enough as he was, he would have bored me if I had let him. But Iwanted him, I intended to keep him in my mind; I wanted him as an assertion of my independence from the old man. As we went back up the drive to the château I carefully became as animated and smiling as I could, for I knew that he would be watching us from the drawing-room windows, and I wanted to irritate him as much as his incessant care was irritating me, though that would have been impossible, for that evening I was absurdly, fiercely angry with him. Life seemed made up of the interferences of old men. I didn't want old men in my life. I wanted young men, and sunshine, and fun. And so, as Raoul and I went up the steps to the massive door, and as I turned to him just below the drawing-room window and gave him my most trustful smile, I was feeling reckless, unrestrained, fiercely independent.... Oh, Dikran! what idiocies we do for the fancied sake of independence!
"It was time to dress for dinner, so I left Raoul and went straight to my room. A minute later came a knock on the door, and as I turned sharply from the mirror, itopened and Raoul stood there, rather shy, smiling. I wasn't old enough to know the proper way of dealing with young men in one's bedroom, even if I had overpoweringly wanted to.
"'I had an impulse,' he said, but he still stood in the doorway, a little question somewhere about him. I didn't answer it; just watched him, rather interested in his methods.
"'Because,' he went on, 'I used to sleep in this room once, and remember it as a dreary little place, and I wanted to see what it looked like with you in it.' Poor silly fool, I thought, but rather loved him. I have found since then, though, that his fatuous speech was quite the proper one to make, for the established way of entering a woman's room is by expressing an interest in the furniture, thus making the lady self-conscious and not so sure about her dignity; seductions are successful through women fearing to look fools if they refuse to be seduced.
"But this time, as he spoke, he closed the door behind him and came into the room towardsme. 'This isn't playing fair, Raoul,' I only said; 'you will get me into a row.'
"'Fair!' he said, lifting his eyebrows, the gallant ass. 'My sweet, do you think anything real is fair in this world? And don't you trust me? That isn't fair of you, you know—haven't I made love to you for two weeks, haven't I loved you for two weeks, haven't I loved you all my life—and now?' And with that he had me in his arms, not for the first time, mind you, but this time very differently; and, over his shoulder, as he held me, I saw the door open, and the Marquis stood there, outraged. Raoul didn't seem to know, still held me, and I, for a paralysed moment, couldn't move, just stared at the old man standing very stiffly in the doorway, a hand outstretched on the door-knob—hell seemed to have opened for him through that door, and he could move as little as I. At last I jumped away from Raoul with a sort of cry, and he turned quickly round to the door. He didn't go pale, or look a fool; he must have made a study of such contretemps; nothing was said,the old man waiting in the doorway, with words terribly smothered; he moved aside a little from the door as though to let a dog slink through. But Raoul wasn't going to slink; he was rather pink, negligent, resigned; and as, without the least hurry, he bent over my fingers and his eyes smiled gently at me, I found myself admiring him, really loving him for the first time. Women are like that.... All this, of course, had happened in less than a minute; from point of time my guardian came into my room and Raoul left it—but in point of fact a great deal happened. For, as Raoul left me and walked across the room to the door, and through it without taking the least notice of the old man, and as I heard his even steps receding down theparquetcorridor, my first paralysed fear simmered in me and boiled up into a fierce, vixen anger. I simply trembled now with anger at the old man as I had first trembled with fear of him. What right had he to be standing there, ordering about my life and my young men? What right had he to be closing the door, as he was doing now? What right, what right? Thewords were throbbing inside me, just those words, fixed unrestrainedly on the old man, who had made a step towards me, and stopped again....