Train journeys have too often been sorrowful for me, so much so that the conception itself of a train, crawling over the country like a snake, or flying across it like a winged monster, fills me with melancholy. Trains loaded with human parcels of sadness and illusion and brief joy, wandering about, crossing, and occasionally colliding in the murk of existence; trains warmed and lighted in winter; trains open to catch the air of your own passage in summer; night-trains that pierce the night with your yellow, glaring eyes, and waken mysterious villages, and leave the night behind and run into the dawn as into a station; trains that carry bread and meats for the human parcels, and pillows and fountains of fresh water; trains that sweep haughtily and wearily indifferent through the landscapes and the towns, sufficient unto yourselves, hasty, panting, formidable, and yet mournful entities: I have understood you in your arrogance and your pathos.
That little journey from Knype to Shawport had implanted itself painfully in my memory, as though during it I had peered too close into the face of life. And now I had undertaken another, and a longer one. Three months had elapsed—three months of growing misery and despair; three months of tedious familiarity with lawyers and distant relatives, and all the exasperating camp-followers of death; three months of secret and strange fear, waxing daily. And at last, amid the expostulations and the shrugs of wisdom and age, I had decided to go to London. I had little energy, and no interest, but I saw that I must go to London; I was driven there by my secret fear; I dared not delay. And not a soul in the wide waste of the Five Towns comprehended me, or could have comprehended me had it been so minded. I might have shut up the house for a time. But no; I would not. Always I have been sudden, violent, and arbitrary; I have never been able to tolerate half-measures, or to wait upon occasion. I sold the house; I sold the furniture. Yes; and I dismissed my faithful Rebecca and the clinging Lucy, and they departed, God knows where; it was as though I had sold them into slavery. Again and again, in the final week, I cut myself to the quick, recklessly, perhaps purposely; I moved in a sort of terrible languor, deaf to every appeal, pretending to be stony, and yet tortured by my secret fear, and by a hemorrhage of the heart that no philosophy could stanch. And I swear that nothing desolated me more than the strapping and the labelling of my trunks that morning after I had slept, dreamfully, in the bed that I should never use again—the bed that, indeed, was even then the property of a furniture dealer. Had I wept at all, I should have wept as I wrote out the labels for my trunks: ‘Miss Peel, passenger to Golden Cross Hotel, London. Euston via Rugby,’ with two thick lines drawn under the ‘Euston.’ That writing of labels was the climax. With a desperate effort I tore myself up by the roots, and all bleeding I left the Five Towns. I have never seen them since. Some day, when I shall have attained serenity and peace, when the battle has been fought and lost, I will revisit my youth. I have always loved passionately the disfigured hills and valleys of the Five Towns. And as I think of Oldcastle Street, dropping away sleepily and respectably from the Town Hall of Bursley, with the gold angel holding a gold crown on its spire, I vibrate with an inexplicable emotion. What is there in Oldcastle Street to disturb the dust of the soul?
I must tell you here that Diaz had gone to South America on a triumphal tour of concerts, lest I forget! I read it in the paper.
So I arrived in London on a February day, about one o’clock. And the hall-porter at the Golden Cross Hotel, and the two pale girls in the bureau of the hotel, were sympathetic and sweet to me, because I was young and alone, and in mourning, and because I had great rings round my eyes. It was a fine day, blue and mild. At half-past three I had nothing in the world to do. I had come to London without a plan, without a purpose, with scarcely an introduction; I wished simply to plunge myself into its solitude, and to be alone with my secret fear. I walked out into the street, slowly, like one whom ennui has taught to lose no chance of dissipating time. I neither liked nor disliked London. I had no feelings towards it save one of perplexity. I thought it noisy, dirty, and hurried. Its great name roused no thrill in my bosom. On the morrow, I said, I would seek a lodging, and perhaps write to Ethel Ryley. Meanwhile I strolled up into Trafalgar Square, and so into Charing Cross Road. And in Charing Cross Road—it was the curst accident of fate—I saw the signboard of the celebrated old firm of publishers, Oakley and Dalbiac. It is my intention to speak of my books as little as possible in this history. I must, however, explain that six months before my aunt’s death I had already written my first novel, The Jest, and sent it to precisely Oakley and Dalbiac. It was a wild welter of youthful extravagances, and it aimed to depict London society, of which I knew nothing whatever, with a flippant and cynical pen. Oakley and Dalbiac had kept silence for several months, and had then stated, in an extremely formal epistle, that they thought the book might have some chance of success, and that they would be prepared to publish it on certain terms, but that I must not expect, etc. By that time I had lost my original sublime faith in the exceeding excellence of my story, and I replied that I preferred to withdraw the book. To this letter I had received no answer. When I saw the famous sign over a doorway the impulse seized me to enter and get the manuscript, with the object of rewriting it. Soon, I reflected, I might not be able to enter; the portals of mankind might be barred to me for a space.... I saw in a flash of insight that my salvation lay in work, and in nothing else. I entered, resolutely. A brougham was waiting at the doors.
After passing along counters furnished with ledgers and clerks, through a long, lofty room lined with great pigeon-holes containing thousands of books each wrapped separately in white paper, I was shown into what the clerk who acted as chamberlain called the office of the principal. This room, too, was spacious, but so sombre that the electric light was already burning. The first thing I noticed was that the window gave on a wall of white tiles. In the middle of the somewhat dingy apartment was a vast, square table, and at this table sat a pale, tall man, whose youth astonished me—for the firm of Oakley and Dalbiac was historic.
He did not look up exactly at the instant of my entering, but when he did look up, when he saw me, he stared for an instant, and then sprang from his chair as though magically startled into activity. His age was about thirty, and he had large, dark eyes, and a slight, dark moustache, and his face generally was interesting; he wore a dark gray suit. I was nervous, but he was even more nervous; yet in the moment of looking up he had not seemed nervous. He could not do enough, apparently, to make me feel at ease, and to show his appreciation of me and my work. He spoke enthusiastically of The Jest, begging me neither to suppress it nor to alter it. And, without the least suggestion from me, he offered me a considerable sum of money in advance of royalties. At that time I scarcely knew what royalties were. But although my ignorance of business was complete, I guessed that this man was behaving in a manner highly unusual among publishers. He was also patently contradicting the tenor of his firm’s letter to me. I thanked him, and said I should like, at any rate, to glance through the manuscript.
‘Don’t alter it, Miss Peel, I beg,’ he said. ‘It is “young,” I know; but it ought to be. I remember my wife said—my wife reads many of our manuscripts—by the way—’ He went to a door, opened it, and called out, ‘Mary!’
A tall and slim woman, extremely elegant, appeared in reply to this appeal. Her hair was gray above the ears, and I judged that she was four or five years older than the man. She had a kind, thin face, with shining gray eyes, and she was wearing a hat.
‘Mary, this is Miss Peel, the author of The Jest—you remember. Miss Peel, my wife.’
The woman welcomed me with quick, sincere gestures. Her smile was very pleasant, and yet a sad smile. The husband also had an air of quiet, restrained, cheerful sadness.
‘My wife is frequently here in the afternoon like this,’ said the principal.
‘Yes,’ she laughed; ‘it’s quite a family affair, and I’m almost on the staff. I distinctly remember your manuscript, Miss Peel, and how very clever and amusing it was.’
Her praise was spontaneous and cordial, but it was a different thing from the praise of her husband. He obviously noticed the difference.
‘I was just saying to Miss Peel—’ he began, with increased nervousness.
‘Pardon me,’ I interrupted. ‘But am I speaking to Mr. Oakley or Mr. Dalbiac?’
‘To neither,’ said he. ‘My name is Ispenlove, and I am the nephew of the late Mr. Dalbiac. Mr. Oakley died thirty years ago. I have no partner.’
‘You expected to see a very old gentleman, no doubt,’ Mrs. Ispenlove remarked.
‘Yes,’ I smiled.
‘People often do. And Frank is so very young. You live in London?’
‘No,’ I said; ‘I have just come up.’
‘To stay?’
‘To stay.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes. My aunt died a few months ago. I am all that is left of my family.’
Mrs. Ispenlove’s eyes filled with tears, and she fingered a gold chain that hung from her neck.
‘But have you got rooms—a house?’
‘I am at a hotel for the moment.’
‘But you have friends?’
I shook my head. Mr. Ispenlove was glancing rapidly from one to the other of us.
‘My dear young lady!’ exclaimed his wife. Then she hesitated, and said: ‘Excuse my abruptness, but do let me beg you to come and have tea with us this afternoon. We live quite near—in Bloomsbury Square. The carriage is waiting. Frank, you can come?’
‘I can come for an hour,’ said Mr. Ispenlove.
I wanted very much to decline, but I could not. I could not disappoint that honest and generous kindliness, with its touch of melancholy. I could not refuse those shining gray eyes. I saw that my situation and my youth had lacerated Mrs. Ispenlove’s sensitive heart, and that she wished to give it balm by being humane to me.
We seemed, so rapid was our passage, to be whisked on an Arabian carpet to a spacious drawing-room, richly furnished, with thick rugs and ample cushions and countless knicknacks and photographs and delicately-tinted lampshades. There was a grand piano by Steinway, and on it Mendelssohn’s ‘Songs without Words.’ The fire slumbered in a curious grate that projected several feet into the room—such a contrivance I had never seen before. Near it sat Mrs. Ispenlove, entrenched behind a vast copper disc on a low wicker stand, pouring out tea. Mr. Ispenlove hovered about. He and his wife called each other ‘dearest.’ ‘Ring the bell for me, dearest.’ ‘Yes, dearest.’ I felt sure that they had no children. They were very intimate, very kind, and always gently sad. The atmosphere was charmingly domestic, even cosy, despite the size of the room—a most pleasing contrast to the offices which we had just left. Mrs. Ispenlove told her husband to look after me well, and he devoted himself to me.
‘Do you know,’ said Mrs. Ispenlove, ‘I am gradually recalling the details of your book, and you are not at all the sort of person that I should have expected to see.’
‘But that poor little book isn’t me,’ I answered. ‘I shall never write another like it. I only—’
‘Shall you not?’ Mr. Ispenlove interjected. ‘I hope you will, though.’
I smiled.
‘I only did it to see what I could do. I am going to begin something quite different.’
‘It appears to me,’ said Mrs. Ispenlove—‘and I must again ask you to excuse my freedom, but I feel as if I had known you a long time—it appears to me that what you want immediately is a complete rest.’
‘Why do you say that?’ I demanded.
‘You do not look well. You look exhausted and worn out.’
I blushed as she gazed at me. Could she—? No. Those simple gray eyes could not imagine evil. Nevertheless, I saw too plainly how foolish I had been. I, with my secret fear, that was becoming less a fear than a dreadful certainty, to permit myself to venture into that house! I might have to fly ignominiously before long, to practise elaborate falsehood, to disappear.
‘Perhaps you are right,’ I agreed.
The conversation grew fragmentary, and less and less formal. Mrs. Ispenlove was the chief talker. I remember she said that she was always being thrown among clever people, people who could do things, and that her own inability to do anything at all was getting to be an obsession with her; and that people like me could have no idea of the tortures of self-depreciation which she suffered. Her voice was strangely wistful during this confession. She also spoke—once only, and quite shortly, but with what naïve enthusiasm!—of the high mission and influence of the novelist who wrote purely and conscientiously. After this, though my liking for her was undiminished, I had summed her up. Mr. Ispenlove offered no commentary on his wife’s sentiments. He struck me as being a reserved man, whose inner life was intense and sufficient to him.
‘Ah!’ I reflected, as Mrs. Ispenlove, with an almost motherly accent, urged me to have another cup of tea, ‘if you knew me, if you knew me, what would you say to me? Would your charity be strong enough to overcome your instincts?’ And as I had felt older than my aunt, so I felt older than Mrs. Ispenlove.
I left, but I had to promise to come again on the morrow, after I had seen Mr. Ispenlove on business. The publisher took me down to my hotel in the brougham (and I thought of the drive with Diaz, but the water was not streaming down the windows), and then he returned to his office.
Without troubling to turn on the light in my bedroom, I sank sighing on to the bed. The events of the afternoon had roused me from my terrible lethargy, but now it overcame me again. I tried to think clearly about the Ispenloves and what the new acquaintance meant for me; but I could not think clearly. I had not been able to think clearly for two months. I wished only to die. For a moment I meditated vaguely on suicide, but suicide seemed to involve an amount of complicated enterprise far beyond my capacity. It amazed me how I had managed to reach London. I must have come mechanically, in a heavy dream; for I had no hope, no energy, no vivacity, no interest. For many weeks my mind had revolved round an awful possibility, as if hypnotized by it, and that monotonous revolution seemed alone to constitute my real life. Moreover, I was subject to recurring nausea, and to disconcerting bodily pains and another symptom.
‘This must end!’ I said, struggling to my feet.
I summoned the courage of an absolute disgust. I felt that the power which had triumphed over my dejection and my irresolution and brought me to London might carry me a little further.
Leaving the hotel, I crossed the Strand. Innumerable omnibuses were crawling past. I jumped into one at hazard, and the conductor put his arm behind my back to support me. He was shouting, ‘Putney, Putney, Putney!’ in an absent-minded manner: he had assisted me to mount without even looking at me. I climbed to the top of the omnibus and sat down, and the omnibus moved off. I knew not where I was going; Putney was nothing but a name to me.
‘Where to, lady?’ snapped the conductor, coming upstairs.
‘Oh, Putney,’ I answered.
A little bell rang and he gave me a ticket. The omnibus was soon full. A woman with a young child shared my seat. But the population of the roof was always changing. I alone remained—so it appeared to me. And we moved interminably forward through the gas-lit and crowded streets, under the mild night. Occasionally, when we came within the circle of an arc-lamp, I could see all my fellow-passengers very clearly; then they were nothing but dark, featureless masses. The horses of the omnibus were changed. A score of times the conductor came briskly upstairs, but he never looked at me again. ‘I’ve done with you,’ his back seemed to say.
The houses stood up straight and sinister, thousands of houses unendingly succeeding each other. Some were brilliantly illuminated; some were dark; and some had one or two windows lighted. The phenomenon of a solitary window lighted, high up in a house, filled me with the sense of the tragic romance of London. Why, I cannot tell. But it did. London grew to be almost unbearably mournful. There were too many people in London. Suffering was packed too close. One can contemplate a single affliction with some equanimity, but a million griefs, calamities, frustrations, elbowing each other—No, no! And in all that multitude of sadnesses I felt that mine was the worst. My loneliness, my fear, my foolish youth, my inability to cope with circumstance, my appalling ignorance of the very things which I ought to know! It was awful. And yet even then, in that despairing certainty of disaster, I was conscious of the beauty of life, the beauty of life’s exceeding sorrow, and I hugged it to me, like a red-hot iron.
We crossed a great river by a great bridge—a mysterious and mighty stream; and then the streets closed in on us again. And at last, after hours and hours, the omnibus swerved into a dark road and stopped—stopped finally.
‘Putney!’ cried the conductor, like fate.
I descended. Far off, at the end of the vista of the dark road, I saw a red lamp. I knew that in large cities a red lamp indicated a doctor: it was the one useful thing that I did know.
I approached the red lamp, cautiously, on the other side of the street. Then some power forced me to cross the street and open a wicket. And in the red glow of the lamp I saw an ivory button which I pushed. I could plainly hear the result; it made me tremble. I had a narrow escape of running away. The door was flung wide, and a middle-aged woman appeared in the bright light of the interior of the house. She had a kind face. It is astounding, the number of kind faces one meets.
‘Is the doctor in?’ I asked.
I would have given a year of my life to hear her say ‘No.’
‘Yes, miss,’ she said. ‘Will you step in?’
Events seemed to be moving all too rapidly.
I passed into a narrow hall, with an empty hat-rack, and so into the surgery. From the back of the house came the sound of a piano—scales, played very slowly. The surgery was empty. I noticed a card with letters of the alphabet printed on it in different sizes; and then the piano ceased, and there was the humming of an air in the passage, and a tall man in a frock-coat, slippered and spectacled, came into the surgery.
‘Good-evening, madam,’ he said gruffly. ‘Won’t you sit down?’
‘I—I—I want to ask you—’
He put a chair for me, and I dropped into it.
‘There!’ he said, after a moment. ‘You felt as if you might faint, didn’t you?’
I nodded. The tears came into my eyes.
‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘I’ll just give you a draught, if you don’t mind.’
He busied himself behind me, and presently I was drinking something out of a conical-shaped glass.
My heart beat furiously, but I felt strong.
‘I want you to tell me, doctor,’ I spoke firmly, ‘whether I am about to become a mother.’
‘Ah?’ he answered interrogatively, and then he hummed a fragment of an air.
‘I have lost my husband,’ I was about to add; but suddenly I scorned such a weakness and shut my lips.
‘Since when—’ the doctor began.
‘No,’ I heard him saying. ‘You have been quite mistaken. But I am not surprised. Such mistakes are frequently made—a kind of auto-suggestion.’
‘Mistaken!’ I murmured.
I could not prevent the room running round me as I reclined on the sofa; and I fainted.
But in the night, safely in my room again at the hotel, I wondered whether that secret fear, now exorcised, had not also been a hope. I wondered....
And now I was twenty-six.
Everyone who knows Jove knows the poignant and delicious day when the lovers, undeclared, but sure of mutual passion, await the magic moment of avowal, with all its changeful consequences. I resume my fragmentary narrative at such a day in my life. As for me, I waited for the avowal as for an earthquake. I felt as though I were the captain of a ship on fire, and the only person aware that the flames were creeping towards a powder magazine. And my love shone fiercely in my heart, like a southern star; it held me, hypnotized, in a thrilling and exquisite entrancement, so that if my secret, silent lover was away from me, as on that fatal night in my drawing-room, my friends were but phantom presences in a shadowy world. This is not an exaggerated figure, but the truth, for when I have loved I have loved much....
My drawing-room in Bedford Court, that night on which the violent drama of my life recommenced, indicated fairly the sorts of success which I had achieved, and the direction of my tastes. The victim of Diaz had gradually passed away, and a new creature had replaced her—a creature rapidly developed, and somewhat brazened in the process under the sun of an extraordinary double prosperity in London. I had soon learnt that my face had a magic to win for me what wealth cannot buy. My books had given me fame and money. And I could not prevent the world from worshipping the woman whom it deemed the gods had greatly favoured. I could not have prevented it, even had I wished, and I did not wish, I knew well that no merit and no virtue, but merely the accident of facial curves, and the accident of a convolution of the brain, had brought me this ascendancy, and at first I reminded myself of the duty of humility. But when homage is reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and satisfying a caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with the hazards of heredity.
However, in the end fate has no favourites. A woman who has beauty wants to frame it in beauty. The eye is a sensualist, and its appetites, once aroused, grow. A beautiful woman takes the same pleasure in the sight of another beautiful woman as a man does; only jealousy or fear prevents her from admitting the pleasure. I collected beautiful women.... Elegance is a form of beauty. It not only enhances beauty, but it is the one thing which will console the eye for the absence of beauty. The first rule which I made for my home was that in it my eye should not be offended. I lost much, doubtless, by adhering to it, but not more than I gained. And since elegance is impossible without good manners, and good manners are a convention, though a supremely good one, the society by which I surrounded myself was conventional; superficially, of course, for it is the business of a convention to be not more than superficial. Some persons after knowing my drawing-room were astounded by my books, others after reading my books were astounded by my drawing-room; but these persons lacked perception. Given elegance, with or without beauty itself, I had naturally sought, in my friends, intellectual courage, honest thinking, kindness of heart, creative talent, distinction, wit. My search had not been unfortunate.... You see Heaven had been so kind to me!
That night in my drawing-room (far too full of bric-a-brac of all climes and ages), beneath the blaze of the two Empire chandeliers, which Vicary, the musical composer, had found for me in Chartres, there were perhaps a dozen guests assembled.
Vicary had just given, in his driest manner, a description of his recent visit to receive the accolade from the Queen. It was replete with the usual quaint Vicary details—such as the solemn warning whisper of an equerry in Vicary’s ear as he walked backwards, ‘Mind the edge of the carpet’; and we all laughed, I absently, and yet a little hysterically—all save Vicary, whose foible was never to laugh. But immediately afterwards there was a pause, one of those disconcerting, involuntary pauses which at a social gathering are like a chill hint of autumn in late summer, and which accuse the hostess. It was over in an instant; the broken current was resumed; everybody pretended that everything was as usual at my receptions. But that pause was the beginning of the downfall.
With a fierce effort I tried to escape from my entrancement, to be interested in these unreal shadows whose voices seemed to come to me from a distance, and to make my glance forget the door, where the one reality in the world for me, my unspoken lover, should have appeared long since. I joined unskilfully in a conversation which Vicary and Mrs. Sardis and her daughter Jocelyn were conducting quite well without my assistance. The rest were chattering now, in one or two groups, except Lord Francis Alcar, who, I suddenly noticed, sat alone on a settee behind the piano. Here was another unfortunate result of my preoccupation. By what negligence had I allowed him to be thus forsaken? I rose and went across to him, penitent, and glad to leave the others.
There are only two fundamental differences in the world—the difference between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age. Lord Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy, men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their trembling and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human wisdom. They gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and even their folly is wise then. Lord Francis was eighty-six; his faculties enfeebled but intact after a career devoted to the three most costly of all luxuries—pretty women, fine pictures, and rare books; a tall, spare man, quietly proud of his age, his ability to go out in the evening unattended, his amorous past, and his contributions to the history of English printing.
As I approached him, he leaned forward into his favourite attitude, elbows on knees and fingertips lightly touching, and he looked up at me. And his eyes, sunken and fatigued and yet audacious, seemed to flash out. He opened his thin lips to speak. When old men speak, they have the air of rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so, and what they say becomes accordingly oracular.
‘Pallor suits you,’ he piped gallantly, and then added: ‘But do not carry it to extremes.’
‘Am I so pale, then?’ I faltered, trying to smile naturally.
I sat down beside him, and smoothed out my black lace dress; he examined it like a connoisseur.
‘Yes,’ he said at length. ‘What is the matter?’
Lord Francis charged this apparently simple and naïve question with a strange intimate meaning. The men who surround a woman such as I, living as I lived, are always demanding, with a secret thirst, ‘Does she really live without love? What does she conceal?’ I have read this interrogation in the eyes of scores of men; but no one, save Lord Francis, would have had the right to put it into the tones of his voice. We were so mutually foreign and disinterested, so at the opposite ends of life, that he had nothing to gain and I nothing to lose, and I could have permitted to this sage ruin of a male almost a confessor’s freedom. Moreover, we had an affectionate regard for each other.
I said nothing, and he repeated in his treble:
‘What is the matter?’
‘Love is the matter!’ I might have passionately cried out to him, had we been alone. But I merely responded to his tone with my eyes. I thanked him with my eyes for his bold and flattering curiosity, senile, but thoroughly masculine to the last. And I said:
‘I am only a little exhausted. I finished my novel yesterday.’
It was my sixth novel in five years.
‘With you,’ he said, ‘work is simply a drug.’
‘Lord Francis,’ I expostulated, ‘how do you know that?’
‘And it has got such a hold of you that you cannot do without it,’ he proceeded, with slow, faint shrillness. ‘Some women take to morphia, others take to work.’
‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘I have quite determined to do no more work for twelve months.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously.’
He faced me, vivacious, and leaned against the back of the settee.
‘Then you mean to give yourself time to love?’ he murmured, as it were with a kind malice, and every crease in his veined and yellow features was intensified by an enigmatic smile.
‘Why not?’ I laughed encouragingly. ‘Why not? What do you advise?’
‘I advise it,’ he said positively. ‘I advise it. You have already wasted the best years.’
‘The best?’
‘One can never afterwards love as one loves at twenty. But there! You have nothing to learn about love!’
He gave me one of those disrobing glances of which men who have dedicated their existence to women alone have the secret. I shrank under the ordeal; I tried to clutch my clothes about me.
The chatter from the other end of the room grew louder. Vicary was gazing critically at his chandeliers.
‘Does love bring happiness?’ I asked Lord Francis, carefully ignoring his remark.
‘For forty years,’ he quavered, ‘I made love to every pretty woman I met, in the search for happiness. I may have got five per cent. return on my outlay, which is perhaps not bad in these hard times; but I certainly did not get even that in happiness. I got it in—other ways.’
‘And if you had to begin afresh?’
He stood up, turned his back on the room, and looked down at me from his bent height. His knotted hands were shaking, as they always shook.
‘I would do the same again,’ he whispered.
‘Would you?’ I said, looking up at him. ‘Truly?’
‘Yes. Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage through this world. Nothing is so interesting as love and grief, and the one involves the other. Ah! would I not do the same again!’
He spoke gravely, wistfully, and vehemently, as if employing the last spark of divine fire that was left in his decrepit frame. This undaunted confession of a faith which had survived twenty years of inactive meditation, this banner waved by an expiring arm in the face of the eternity that mocks at the transience of human things, filled me with admiration. My eyes moistened, but I continued to look up at him.
‘What is the title of the new book?’ he demanded casually, sinking into a chair.
‘Burning Sappho,’ I answered. ‘But the title is very misleading.’
‘Bright star!’ he exclaimed, taking my hand. ‘With such a title you will surely beat the record of the Good Dame.’
‘Hsh!’ I enjoined him.
Jocelyn Sardis was coming towards us.
The Good Dame was the sobriquet which Lord Francis had invented to conceal—or to display—his courteous disdain of the ideals represented by Mrs. Sardis, that pillar long established, that stately dowager, that impeccable doyenne of serious English fiction. Mrs. Sardis had captured two continents. Her novels, dealing with all the profound problems of the age, were read by philosophers and politicians, and one of them had reached a circulation of a quarter of a million copies. Her dignified and indefatigable pen furnished her with an income of fifteen thousand pounds a year.
Jocelyn Sardis was just entering her mother’s world, and she had apparently not yet recovered from the surprise of the discovery that she was a woman; a simple and lovable young creature with brains amply sufficient for the making of apple-pies. As she greeted Lord Francis in her clear, innocent voice, I wondered sadly why her mother should be so anxious to embroider the work of Nature. I thought if Jocelyn could just be left alone to fall in love with some average, kindly stockbroker, how much more nearly the eternal purpose might be fulfilled....
‘Yes, I remember,’ Lord Francis was saying. ‘It was at St. Malo. And what did you think of the Breton peasant?’
‘Oh,’ said Jocelyn, ‘mamma has not yet allowed us to study the condition of the lower classes in France. We are all so busy with the new Settlement.’
‘It must be very exhausting, my dear child,’ said Lord Francis.
I rose.
‘I came to ask you to play something,’ the child appealed to me. ‘I have never heard you play, and everyone says—’
‘Jocelyn, my pet,’ the precise, prim utterance of Mrs. Sardis floated across the room.
‘What, mamma?’
‘You are not to trouble Miss Peel. Perhaps she does not feel equal to playing.’
My blood rose in an instant. I cannot tell why, unless it was that I resented from Mrs. Sardis even the slightest allusion to the fact that I was not entirely myself. The latent antagonism between us became violently active in my heart. I believe I blushed. I know that I felt murderous towards Mrs. Sardis. I gave her my most adorable smile, and I said, with sugar in my voice:
‘But I shall be delighted to play for Jocelyn.’
It was an act of bravado on my part to attempt to play the piano in the mood in which I found myself; and that I should have begun the opening phrase of Chopin’s first Ballade, that composition so laden with formidable memories—begun it without thinking and without apprehension—showed how far I had lost my self-control. Not that the silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past. No! But I saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she. She was for me one of those ladies that have loved and are dead. The simplicity of her mind and her situation, compared with my mind and my situation, seemed unbearably piteous to me. Why, I knew not. The pathos of that brief and vanished idyll overcame me like some sad story of an antique princess. And then, magically, I saw the pathos of my present position in it as in a truth-revealing mirror. My fame, and my knowledge and my experience, my trained imagination, my skill, my social splendour, my wealth, were stripped away from me as inessential, and I was merely a woman in love, to whom love could not fail to bring calamity and grief; a woman expecting her lover, and yet to whom his coming could only be disastrous; a woman with a heart divided between tremulous joy and dull sorrow; who was at once in heaven and in hell; the victim of love. How often have I called my dead Carlotta the victim of Diaz! Let me be less unjust, and say that he, too, was the victim of love. What was Diaz but the instrument of the god?
Jocelyn stood near me by the piano. I glanced at her as I played, and smiled. She answered my smile; her eyes glistened with tears; I bent my gaze suddenly to the keyboard. ‘You too!’ I thought sadly, ‘You too!... One day! One day even you will know what life is, and the look in those innocent eyes will never be innocent again!’
Then there was a sharp crack at the other end of the room; the handle of the door turned, and the door began to open. My heart bounded and stopped. It must be he, at last! I perceived the fearful intensity of my longing for his presence. But it was only a servant with a tray. My fingers stammered and stumbled. For a few instants I forced them to obey me; my pride was equal to the strain, though I felt sick and fainting. And then I became aware that my guests were staring at me with alarmed and anxious faces. Mrs. Sardis had started from her chair. I dropped my hands. It was useless to fight further; the battle was lost.
‘I will not play any more,’ I said quickly. ‘I ought not to have tried to play from memory. Excuse me.’
And I left the piano as calmly as I could. I knew that by an effort I could walk steadily and in a straight line across the room to Vicary and the others, and I succeeded. They should not learn my secret.
‘Poor thing!’ murmured Mrs. Sardis sympathetically. ‘Do sit down, dear.’
‘Won’t you have something to drink?’ said Vicary.
‘I am perfectly all right,’ I said. ‘I’m only sorry that my memory is not what it used to be.’ And I persisted in standing for a few moments by the mantelpiece. In the glass I caught one glimpse of a face as white as milk, Jocelyn remained at her post by the piano, frightened by she knew not what, like a young child.
‘Our friend finished a new work only yesterday,’ said Lord Francis shakily. He had followed me. ‘She has wisely decided to take a long holiday. Good-bye, my dear.’
These were the last words he ever spoke to me, though I saw him again. We shook hands in silence, and he left. Nor would the others stay. I had ruined the night. We were all self-conscious, diffident, suspicious. Even Vicary was affected. How thankful I was that my silent lover had not come! My secret was my own—and his. And no one should surprise it unless we chose. I cared nothing what they thought, or what they guessed, as they filed out of the door, a brilliant procession of which I had the right to be proud; they could not guess my secret. I was sufficiently woman of the world to baffle them as long as I wished to baffle them.
Then I noticed that Mrs. Sardis had stayed behind; she was examining some lustre ware in the further drawing-room.
‘I’m afraid Jocelyn has gone without her mother,’ I said, approaching her.
‘I have told Jocelyn to go home alone,’ replied Mrs. Sardis. ‘The carriage will return for me. Dear friend, I want to have a little talk with you. Do you permit?’
‘I shall be delighted,’ I said.
‘You are sure you are well enough?’
‘There is nothing whatever the matter with me,’ I answered slowly and distinctly. ‘Come to the fire, and let us be comfortable. And I told Emmeline Palmer, my companion and secretary, who just then appeared, that she might retire to bed.
Mrs. Sardis was nervous, and this condition, so singular in Mrs. Sardis, naturally made me curious as to the cause of it. But my eyes still furtively wandered to the door.
‘My dear co-worker,’ she began, and hesitated.
‘Yes,’ I encouraged her.
She put her matron’s lips together:
‘You know how proud I am of your calling, and how jealous I am of its honour and its good name, and what a great mission I think we novelists have in the work of regenerating the world.’
I nodded. That kind of eloquence always makes me mute. It leaves nothing to be said.
‘I wonder,’ Mrs. Sardis continued, ‘if you have ever realized what a power you are in England and America to-day.’
‘Power!’ I echoed. ‘I have done nothing but try to write as honestly and as well as I could what I felt I wanted to write.’
‘No one can doubt your sincerity, my dear friend,’ Mrs. Sardis said. ‘And I needn’t tell you that I am a warm admirer of your talent, and that I rejoice in your success. But the tendency of your work—’
‘Surely,’ I interrupted her coldly, ‘you are not taking the trouble to tell me that my books are doing harm to the great and righteous Anglo-Saxon public!’
‘Do not let us poke fun at our public, my dear,’ she protested. ‘I personally do not believe that your books are harmful, though their originality is certainly daring, and their realism startling; but there exists a considerable body of opinion, as you know, that strongly objects to your books. It may be reactionary opinion, bigoted opinion, ignorant opinion, what you like, but it exists, and it is not afraid to employ the word “immoral.”’
‘What, then?’
‘I speak as one old enough to be your mother, and I speak after all to a motherless young girl who happens to have genius with, perhaps, some of the disadvantages of genius, when I urge you so to arrange your personal life that this body of quite respectable adverse opinion shall not find in it a handle to use against the fair fame of our calling.’
‘Mrs. Sardis!’ I cried. ‘What do you mean?’
I felt my nostrils dilate in anger as I gazed, astounded, at this incarnation of mediocrity who had dared to affront me on my own hearth; and by virtue of my youth and my beauty, and all the homage I had received, and the clear sincerity of my vision of life, I despised and detested the mother of a family who had never taken one step beyond the conventions in which she was born. Had she not even the wit to perceive that I was accustomed to be addressed as queens are addressed?... Then, as suddenly as it had flamed, my anger cooled, for I could see the painful earnestness in her face. And Mrs. Sardis and I—what were we but two groups of vital instincts, groping our respective ways out of one mystery into another? Had we made ourselves? Had we chosen our characters? Mrs. Sardis was fulfilling herself, as I was. She was a natural force, as I was. As well be angry with a hurricane, or the heat of the sun.
‘What do you mean?’ I repeated quietly. ‘Tell me exactly what you mean.’
I thought she was aiming at the company which I sometimes kept, or the freedom of my diversions on the English Sabbath. I thought what trifles were these compared to the dilemma in which, possibly within a few hours, I should find myself.
‘To put it in as few words as possible,’ said she, ‘I mean your relations with a married man. Forgive my bluntness, dear girl.’
‘My—’
Then my secret was not my secret! We were chattered about, he and I. We had not hidden our feeling, our passions. And I had been imagining myself a woman of the world equal to sustaining a difficult part in the masque of existence. With an abandoned gesture I hid my face in my hands for a moment, and then I dropped my hands, and leaned forward and looked steadily at Mrs. Sardis. Her eyes were kind enough.
‘You won’t affect not to understand?’ she said.
I assented with a motion of the head.
‘Many persons say there is a—a liaison between you,’ she said.
‘And do you think that?’ I asked quickly.
‘If I had thought so, my daughter would not have been here to-night,’ she said solemnly. ‘No, no; I do not believe it for an instant, and I brought Jocelyn specially to prove to the world that I do not. I only heard the gossip a few days ago; and to-night, as I sat here, it was borne in upon me that I must speak to you to-night. And I have done so. Not everyone would have done so, dear girl. Most of your friends are content to talk among themselves.’
‘About me? Oh!’ It was the expression of an almost physical pain.
‘What can you expect them to do?’ asked Mrs. Sardis mildly.
‘True,’ I agreed.
‘You see, the circumstances are so extremely peculiar. Your friendship with her—’
‘Let me tell you’—I stopped her—‘that not a single word has ever passed between me and—and the man you mean, that everybody might not hear. Not a single word!’
‘Dearest girl,’ she exclaimed; ‘how glad I am! How glad I am! Now I can take measures to—.
‘But—’ I resumed.
‘But what?’
In a flash I saw the futility of attempting to explain to a woman like Mrs. Sardis, who had no doubts about the utter righteousness of her own code, whose rules had no exceptions, whose principles could apply to every conceivable case, and who was the very embodiment of the vast stolid London that hemmed me in—of attempting to explain to such an excellent, blind creature why, and in obedience to what ideal, I would not answer for the future. I knew that I might as well talk to a church steeple.
‘Nothing,’ I said, rising, ‘except that I thank you. Be sure that I am grateful. You have had a task which must have been very unpleasant to you.’
She smiled, virtuously happy.
‘You made it easy,’ she murmured.
I perceived that she wanted to kiss me; but I avoided the caress. How I hated kissing women!
‘No more need be said,’ she almost whispered, as I put my hand on the knob of the front-door. I had escorted her myself to the hall.
‘Only remember your great mission, the influence you wield, and the fair fame of our calling.’
My impulse was to shriek. But I merely smiled as decently as I could; and I opened the door.
And there, on the landing, just emerging from the lift, was Ispenlove, haggard, pale, his necktie astray. He and Mrs. Sardis exchanged a brief stare; she gave me a look of profound pain and passed in dignified silence down the stairs; Ispenlove came into the flat.
‘Nothing will convince her now that I am not a liar,’ I reflected.
It was my last thought as I sank, exquisitely drowning, in the sea of sensations caused by Ispenlove’s presence.