Of course the cultivated reader has heard of Aubrey Vair. He has
published on three several occasions volumes of delicate verses,--some,
indeed, border on indelicacy,--and his column "Of Things Literary" in
the _Climax_ is well known. His Byronic visage and an interview have
appeared in the _Perfect Lady_. It was Aubrey Vair, I believe, who
demonstrated that the humour of Dickens was worse than his sentiment,
and who detected "a subtle bourgeois flavour" in Shakespeare. However,
it is not generally known that Aubrey Vair has had erotic experiences
as well as erotic inspirations. He adopted Goethe some little time
since as his literary prototype, and that may have had something to do
with his temporary lapse from sexual integrity.
For it is one of the commonest things that undermine literary men,
giving us landslips and picturesque effects along the otherwise even
cliff of their respectable life, ranking next to avarice, and certainly
above drink, this instability called genius, or, more fully, the
consciousness of genius, such as Aubrey Vair possessed. Since Shelley
set the fashion, your man of gifts has been assured that his duty to
himself and his duty to his wife are incompatible, and his renunciation
of the Philistine has been marked by such infidelity as his means and
courage warranted. Most virtue is lack of imagination. At anyrate,
a minor genius without his affections twisted into an inextricable
muddle, and who did not occasionally shed sonnets over his troubles, I
have never met.
Even Aubrey Vair did this, weeping the sonnets overnight into his
blotting-book, and pretending to write literary _causerie_ when his
wife came down in her bath slippers to see what kept him up. She did
not understand him, of course. He did this even before the other woman
appeared, so ingrained is conjugal treachery in the talented mind.
Indeed, he wrote more sonnets before the other woman came than after
that event, because thereafter he spent much of his leisure in cutting
down the old productions, retrimming them, and generally altering this
readymade clothing of his passion to suit her particular height and
complexion.
Aubrey Vair lived in a little red villa with a lawn at the back and a
view of the Downs behind Reigate. He lived upon discreet investment
eked out by literary work. His wife was handsome, sweet, and gentle,
and--such is the tender humility of good married women--she found her
life's happiness in seeing that little Aubrey Vair had well-cooked
variety for dinner, and that their house was the neatest and brightest
of all the houses they entered. Aubrey Vair enjoyed the dinners, and
was proud of the house, yet nevertheless he mourned because his genius
dwindled. Moreover, he grew plump, and corpulence threatened him.
We learn in suffering what we teach in song, and Aubrey Vair knew
certainly that his soul could give no creditable crops unless his
affections were harrowed. And how to harrow them was the trouble, for
Reigate is a moral neighbourhood.
So Aubrey Vair's romantic longings blew loose for a time, much as a
seedling creeper might, planted in the midst of a flower-bed. But at
last, in the fulness of time, the other woman came to the embrace
of Aubrey Vair's yearning heart-tendrils, and his romantic episode
proceeded as is here faithfully written down.
The other woman was really a girl, and Aubrey Vair met her first at
a tennis party at Redhill. Aubrey Vair did not play tennis after the
accident to Miss Morton's eye, and because latterly it made him pant
and get warmer and moister than even a poet should be; and this young
lady had only recently arrived in England, and could not play. So they
gravitated into the two vacant basket chairs beside Mrs. Bayne's deaf
aunt, in front of the hollyhocks, and were presently talking at their
ease together.
The other woman's name was unpropitious,--Miss Smith,--but you would
never have suspected it from her face and costume. Her parentage
was promising, she was an orphan, her mother was a Hindoo, and her
father an Indian civil servant; and Aubrey Vair--himself a happy
mixture of Kelt and Teuton, as, indeed, all literary men have to be
nowadays--naturally believed in the literary consequences of a mixture
of races. She was dressed in white. She had finely moulded pale
features, great depth of expression, and a cloud of delicately _frisé_
black hair over her dark eyes, and she looked at Aubrey Vair with a
look half curious and half shy, that contrasted admirably with the
stereotyped frankness of your common Reigate girl.
"This is a splendid lawn--the best in Redhill," said Aubrey Vair in the
course of the conversation; "and I like it all the better because the
daisies are spared." He indicated the daisies with a graceful sweep of
his rather elegant hand.
"They are sweet little flowers," said the lady in white, "and I have
always associated them with England, chiefly, perhaps, through a
picture I saw 'over there' when I was very little, of children making
daisy chains. I promised myself that pleasure when I came home. But,
alas! I feel now rather too large for such delights."
"I do not see why we should not be able to enjoy these simple pleasures
as we grow older--why our growth should have in it so much forgetting.
For my own part"--
"Has your wife got Jane's recipe for stuffing trout?" asked Mrs.
Bayne's deaf aunt abruptly.
"I really don't know," said Aubrey Vair.
"That's all right," said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt. "It ought to please
even you."
"Anything will please me," said Aubrey Vair; "I care very little"--
"Oh, it's a lovely dish," said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt, and relapsed
into contemplation.
"I was saying," said Aubrey Vair, "that I think I still find my keenest
pleasures in childish pastimes. I have a little nephew that I see a
great deal of, and when we fly kites together, I am sure it would be
hard to tell which of us is the happier. By the bye, you should get at
your daisy chains in that way. Beguile some little girl."
"But I did. I took that Morton mite for a walk in the meadows, and
timidly broached the subject. And she reproached me for suggesting
'frivolous pursuits.' It was a horrible disappointment."
"The governess here," said Aubrey Vair, "is robbing that child of its
youth in a terrible way. What will a life be that has no childhood at
the beginning?"
"Some human beings are never young," he continued, "and they never
grow up. They lead absolutely colourless lives. They are--they are
etiolated. They never love, and never feel the loss of it. They
are--for the moment I can think of no better image--they are human
flower-pots, in which no soul has been planted. But a human soul
properly growing must begin in a fresh childishness."
"Yes," said the dark lady thoughtfully, "a careless childhood, running
wild almost. That should be the beginning."
"Then we pass through the wonder and diffidence of youth."
"To strength and action," said the dark lady. Her dreamy eyes were
fixed on the Downs, and her fingers tightened on her knees as she
spoke. "Ah, it is a grand thing to live--as a man does--self-reliant
and free."
"And so at last," said Aubrey Vair, "come to the culmination and crown
of life." He paused and glanced hastily at her. Then he dropped his
voice almost to a whisper--"And the culmination of life is love."
Their eyes met for a moment, but she looked away at once. Aubrey Vair
felt a peculiar thrill and a catching in his breath, but his emotions
were too complex for analysis. He had a certain sense of surprise,
also, at the way his conversation had developed.
Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt suddenly dug him in the chest with her
ear-trumpet, and someone at tennis bawled, "Love all!"
"Did I tell you Jane's girls have had scarlet fever?" asked Mrs.
Bayne's deaf aunt.
"No," said Aubrey Vair.
"Yes; and they are peeling now," said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt, shutting
her lips tightly, and nodding in a slow, significant manner at both of
them.
There was a pause. All three seemed lost in thought, too deep for words.
"Love," began Aubrey Vair presently, in a severely philosophical tone,
leaning back in his chair, holding his hands like a praying saint's
in front of him, and staring at the toe of his shoe,--"love is, I
believe, the one true and real thing in life. It rises above reason,
interest, or explanation. Yet I never read of an age when it was so
much forgotten as it is now. Never was love expected to run so much in
appointed channels, never was it so despised, checked, ordered, and
obstructed. Policemen say, 'This way, Eros!' As a result, we relieve
our emotional possibilities in the hunt for gold and notoriety. And
after all, with the best fortune in these, we only hold up the gilded
images of our success, and are weary slaves, with unsatisfied hearts,
in the pageant of life."
Aubrey Vair sighed, and there was a pause. The girl looked at him out
of the mysterious darkness of her eyes. She had read many books, but
Aubrey Vair was her first literary man, and she took this kind of thing
for genius--as girls have done before.
"We are," continued Aubrey Vair, conscious of a favourable
impression,--"we are like fireworks, mere dead, inert things until the
appointed spark comes; and then--if it is not damp--the dormant soul
blazes forth in all its warmth and beauty. That is living. I sometimes
think, do you know, that we should be happier if we could die soon
after that golden time, like the Ephemerides. There is a decay sets in."
"Eigh?" said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt startlingly. "I didn't hear you."
"I was on the point of remarking," shouted Aubrey Vair, wheeling the
array of his thoughts,--"I was on the point of remarking that few
people in Redhill could match Mrs. Morton's fine broad green."
"Others have noticed it," Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt shouted back. "It is
since she has had in her new false teeth."