CHAPTER XXII.MISUNDERSTANDING.
A quarrel with Victoria?—no, not a quarrel, I want another word. Only ‘a something.’ What is it? I do not know.
Victoria has become ‘unaccountable’—we will put it in that way. There is no knowing what to be at with Victoria: the grievance is there. And I have tried so hard to find out.
That affair of the Peak was a lesson, or I tried to make it one. ‘Leave Victoria alone,’ it seemed to say, ‘and keep your homage, respectful and other, to yourself. Victoria wants to tell you something, but does not know how to begin. Cannot you save her the trouble? You confuse her with your homage, respectful and other, and she wants you to leave her alone. Curly stops the way.
‘What matter that Curly is as vague as something in Orion! He has taken her heart with him into space. Leave her alone.
‘Do you want further proof of it? How many more times must you see her prostrate before his shrine in the thicket, as you saw her yesterday, when you dogged her footsteps like a spy? How many more times must you hear her cry, “Come back, come back, and help me!” between her passionate kisses of the bits of fetich on the boughs?
‘And, if there were no Curly, how would that avail? Victoria is not for you. Are you to stay here for ever? You know you are not. And how could you take Victoria away?
‘Victoria is a savage; and who would have her anything else? Will you put Pocahontas in crêpe de Chine and surah, in lace, embroideries, and gimp, and transplant her to the London drawing-rooms, to make sport for the London crowd? Are you looking forward to this: “A lady whose tall figure is well known in London society wore black silk, opening over a front of white silk muslin, draped from neck to feet, and confined at thewaist with a pointed band of black velvet, fastened by a diamond clasp”?
‘It will not do.
‘Friendship is impossible on your side: when you are with her, you invariably play the fool. Keep out of her way.’
So, I am on longer Victoria’s shadow. I wander alone. I make up to the Ancient, and borrow his fowling piece, to pay my respects to the wild birds. The wild birds do not mind. I trouble them a good deal less than I trouble Victoria. It is an old fowling piece; how did men contrive to kill anything in the days when it was made, especially to kill one another? The slaughter of Malplaquet quite enhances one’s respect for the race, and takes rank with Stonehenge and the Pyramids among material marvels wrought by simple means.
I have kept this up for some days, and I am popping at a flock of gulls this morning, with so slight a breach of the good understanding between us that the flock increases, by the effect of intelligent curiosity, as the sport goes on, when Victoria stands between me and the light.
It is here that Victoria begins to be unaccountable: on the strength of this incident, I made the charge.
For Victoria has come to look for me. There is no need to guess it: she says so in terms. Only mark what follows this admission, and say if I am without a grievance.
‘Why have you come to look for me, Victoria?’
‘I am so miserable.’
‘Why?’
‘You make me miserable.’
‘What have I done, Princess?’
‘What haveIdone? You have hardly spoken to me for three days.’
‘I thought you would like that best, Victoria.’
‘Why should you think so? What would this place be to me, if we were bad friends?’
‘I trouble you.’
‘Leave me to judge of that. There cannot be any harm in seeing you, in talking to you.’
So, I leave the disgusted gulls; and we ramble to the further side of the Island, to the place where I landed in the dawn of history to find the New World.
We do not talk much at first. I am working out the situation, with due aid from certain phrases of convention that help to reconcile poverty of thought to self-respect. These little felicities of epigram on the inconsistency of Woman never helped anybody to comprehension of her; yet, if they were taken out of its phrase books, the world would be acutely sensible of the void. Few people are inconsistent, but a good many people fail to understand. I wish I were not so dull. I seem to have found Victoria to about as much purpose as a savage might find a watch.
So, for some precious moments, it is the old footing again. We are as free as the other animals about us, and perhaps still more exquisitely happy. It might be rash, though, to attempt to answer for any but ourselves. Our myriads of birds and insects, and our select assortment of beasts, seem to have a good time—a life in the sun, and a quick death in their prime of strength, with their business hours mainly employed in dining, and in exercise in the open air. Most of the beasts belong to the Island family as much as the men and women; and Victoria could givethem each a name. With her, they only play at being wild; and the outlaw goats seek her as regularly for their morning caress as their friends who have made their peace with civilisation.
If she and I could be like this for ever! But we cannot. We seem to be friends and strangers, by turns; for the life of me, I know not why. We move to and from each other in some mysterious way. For, what happened just now, happens again and again. I am with her, as I could always wish to be, till some subtle change in her manner makes me think she wants me to keep away. I keep away, and she seeks me out, with reproaches for coldness and neglect. We reach perfection, and then imperfection begins. Slowly, slowly, as some change in the colour of a plant, comes Victoria’s new mistrust of me, or of herself. What is it? what can it be? It is a movement of some strange law of her emotions; but what is the law? The savage has learned so much about his watch as to feel the utter inadequacy of the reflection that watches have curious ways. He cannot examine, but he begins to guess. There isbut one guess to make, the old one—it must be the phantasm of the living Curly that stands between us and the perfect light. We know what came of that guess before. If I step back to make way for him, Victoria will follow, to know the reason why. A pest on him for a phantom that plays us on and off: it is neither my fault, nor Victoria’s; it is the phantom that does not know its own mind!