As ill-luck would have it Saturday was a wet day, and Durant,
instead of riding the mare, was wandering aimlessly about the house.
He had finished all the books in his bedroom and was badly in want
of more. He knocked up against Frida Tancred in a dark passage,
apologized, and confided in her. As usual she was sorry for him.
"I'm afraid we haven't many books; but you'll find some of mine in
here." She opened a door as she spoke, and passed on.
Durant found himself in a room which he had not yet investigated.
It was somewhat bare as to furniture; it struck strange to his
senses as if he had stumbled into another world; in some occult
way it preserved a tradition of travel and adventure. The bookcase
he came to inspect was flanked by a small cabinet of coins and
curios--Italian, Grecian, Egyptian, and Japanese; the walls were
hung with bad landscapes interspersed with maps.
One of these, an uncolored map of Europe, attracted his attention.
It was drawn by hand in Indian ink, a red line and accompanying
arrow heads followed the coast and strung together such inland
places as were marked upon the blank. The line started from
Southampton and reached the Mediterranean by the Bay of Biscay; it
shot inland to the great cities of Italy, returning always to the
sea. It skirted Greece, wound in and out of the Ionian islands,
touched at Constantinople, ringed the Bosporus and the Black Sea,
wheeled to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then swept wildly up the
north of Russia to Archangel and the Arctic Ocean; thence it
followed the Scandinavian coast-line, darted to Iceland, and dipped
southward again to Britain by way of the Hebrides. Off Queenstown
the arrowheads pointed west, winged for the Atlantic. He found the
same red line again on a blank map of Asia heading for India by
China and Japan. An adventurous, erratic line, whose stages were now
the capitals of the world, and now some unknown halting-place in the
immeasurable waste. And what on earth did it mean? Was it the record
of an actual journey, or some yet untraveled visionary route?
But it was not these things alone that gave the room its fantastic
and alien air. What dominated the place was the portrait of a woman,
a woman who had Frida's queer accented eyebrows and Frida's eyes,
with some more fiery and penetrating quality of her own, something
more inimitably fine and foreign. The portrait (which struck Durant
as decidedly clever) was signed by some unknown Russian artist, and
he recognized it as that of Frida's mother, the lady of the
landscapes. He wondered if it was the demon of _ennui_ that had
driven poor Mrs. Tancred to the practice of her terrible art, if she
had had a spite against Coton Manor, which she vented by covering
its walls with bad pictures.
He turned to the bookcase. Frida's library offered him an amazing
choice of polyglot fiction. It contained nearly all Balzac and the
elder Dumas, Tolstoi and Turgenieff, Bjoernsen and Ibsen, besides a
great deal of miscellaneous literature, chiefly Russian and
Norwegian. Here and there he came across some odd volumes of modern
Greek. A whole shelf was devoted to books of travel; grammars and
dictionaries made up the rest. Miss Tancred's taste in books was a
little outlandish, but it was singularly virile and robust. He had
been prepared to suspect her of a morbid pedantry, having known more
than one lady in her desperate case who found consolation in the
dead languages. But Miss Tancred betrayed no ghoulish appetites; if
she had a weakness for tongues, she had also the good taste to
prefer them living.
Durant was so much absorbed in these observations that he did not
hear her come into the room.
"Have you found anything you can read?" she asked.
"I've found a great deal that I can't read. You _do_ go in strong
for languages."
"That's nothing; my mother was a Russian, and Russians know every
language better than their own. I don't know more than seven besides
mine. And I can only read and write them. They will never be any use
to me."
"How can you tell what may be of use to you? Even Mrs. Fazakerly, or
I?" Durant was anxious to give a playful turn to that remarkable
discussion they once had; he thus hoped to set the tone for all
future conversations with Miss Tancred. "I admit that you can't live
on languages, they are not exactly safety-valves for the emotions;
nobody can swear in more than three of them at a time. I think
music's better. Instead of playing whist you ought to play Chopin."
"It's better to play whist well than Chopin badly."
"Better to rule in Hades than fool in the other place, you think?
Miss Tancred, you are as proud as Lucifer."
"I don't see that any good is got by murdering the masters."
"It saves some women from worse crimes, I believe. Why didn't you
take to sketching, then? _That_ only kills time."
Miss Tancred was splendid in her scorn. "Kill time with painting bad
pictures? I'd rather time killed me."
Ah, that was what he liked about her. She had not revenged herself
on Nature by making hideous caricatures of Nature's face; she did
not draw in milk-and-water colors, and she did not strum. She had
none of the exasperating talents, the ludicrous ambitions of the
amateur; she was altogether innocent of intellectual vanity.
"That reminds me," said she, "that I've seen nothing of those
wonderful sketches you said you'd show me."
He had clean forgotten the things. Well, he could hardly do better
than exhibit them; it would keep her quiet, and save him from
perilous personalities.
At first he thought the exhibition was going to give her more pain
than pleasure. He sat beside her, and she took the sketches from him
gingerly, one by one, and looked at them without a word. A visible
nervousness possessed her; her pulses clamored, she seemed to
struggle with her own unsteady breathing. Once, when in the transfer
of a drawing her hand brushed against his, she drew it back again as
if it had dashed against a flame. Durant had noticed once or twice
before that she avoided his touch.
Suddenly she awoke out of the agony of her consciousness. One
picture had held her longer than the rest.
"It's beautiful--beautiful," she murmured.
"I'm glad you like it," said Durant, pleased at her first sign of
admiration.
"Oh, I don't mean your picture--I mean the place."
"It's not a very good picture perhaps----"
"I don't know whether it's good or bad; it seems to me rather bad,
though I can't say what's wrong with it. It looks unfinished."
"It _is_ unfinished, but that's not what's wrong with it. These are
better--better painting."
His hand brushed hers in vain this time. She remained absorbed. "I
don't care two straws about the painting; they may be masterpieces
for all I know; it's _that_--that stretch of sand licked by the sea,
and the grass trodden down by the wind--the agony and beauty and
desolation of it----" She laid it down unwillingly, and took the
others from his hand.
"Oh, what's this?"
"A wall in Suza."
"I've never seen anything like that. The light seems to be
moving--soaking into it and streaming out again. It looks as if it
would burn if you touched it."
The artist in him laughed for pure pleasure. "It's all very well,
you know, but they must be infernally good if they make you feel
like that."
"They may be. Have you seen all these things, or have you done any
of them out of your head?"
"Seen them, of course. I never paint 'out of my head'; I haven't
enough imagination."
"Show me more places where you've been. Tell me about them. You
might have done that before."
He obeyed, giving her his experience, his richest and his best; he
drew for her scenes and things, not in their crude and temporary
form, but as they lived for him and for his art, idealized,
eternalized by the imagination that sees them as parts of the
immortal whole; and yet vivid, individual, drenched with the
peculiar color that made them equally and forever one with the soul
of Maurice Durant. She hardly seemed to heed, hardly seemed to
listen or to follow. She looked as if hearing were already absorbed
in sight.
Durant put a small oil painting into her hand. He had kept his
finest to the last. "If you're fond of the sea that may please you."
Mid-ocean, the slope and trough of a luminous sea; in the foreground
one smooth, high-bosomed, unbroken wave, the light flung off from
its crest like foam, to slide down its shoulder like oil on rounded
glass. On the sky-line the white peak of a sail; the whole a heaving
waste of wind and water, light and air. It was a consummate bit of
painting, as nobody knew better than Maurice Durant.
She looked at it as though she would never be tired of looking. A
sudden impulse seized him, a blind instinct to give pleasure at any
cost, to make amends for pain.
"If you honestly like it, I wish you'd keep it."
"Keep it? Keep it? Do you really mean it?"
"It would give me pleasure if you would."
"But isn't--might it not be valuable?"
It was valuable, as Durant reflected somewhat regretfully, but he
answered well. "Valuable chiefly to me, I fancy. Which is all the
more reason, if you like it----"
"Like it? I should lo----" She drew back her breath. "No; I think
I'd better not. Thank you very much, all the same." She laid the
canvas down with a gesture of renunciation.
"Now that's foolish. Why ever won't you?"
"I daren't. I daren't live with it. It would remind me of all the
things I want to forget."
"What things?" He felt that the question was cruel, it was probing
the very heart of pain. But his curiosity was too strong. The
fountains of the deep were breaking up; he knew that he had only to
give the word to witness an astounding transformation of the woman.
He had given the word. Her face was changing; it had taken on the
likeness of her foreign mother, intensified in its subtlety and
fire.
"What things? The things I want to do and can't; the things I want
to see--the things----" She stopped. "Do you know, I don't even like
to have those sketches of my mother's hanging about; they haunt me
so intolerably, they tempt me to that degree that sometimes I can
hardly bear to look at them."
He glanced at the drawings. _He_ could hardly bear to look at them
either. Poor wraiths and skeletons of landscapes, he would have
thought them too fleshless and bloodless to touch even the ghost of
longing.
She took up the picture she had just laid down. "But _this_--it's
not painting, it's real; it's a piece torn out of the living world.
It would bring it so horribly near me--don't you see?"
He thought he saw. He looked, and she lowered her eyelids. On to
the slope of his wave there splashed a tear, salt to the salt.
She got up, turned away from him, and leaned against the window
frame, staring out at the gravel walk, the lawn, the paddock, all
the sedate, intolerable scene. Her breast heaved; she was shaken by
a tumult of vision and desire.
"If only I could get away--get away from this!"
It was not she that cried out, but some other self, unacknowledged
and unappeased, smothered and crushed and hidden out of sight.
Durant was moved by the revelation, and a little frightened, too.
"And why not get away?" he asked gently.
"Because I can't do anything like other people, by bits and halves.
If I once go, I shall never come back--never. There's no use
thinking about it. I've thought about it till I could have gone
mad." She faced him bravely. "Mr. Durant, if you ever want a thing
as badly as I want that, let me tell you that it will be simpler and
easier to give it up altogether, for always, than to keep on looking
at it and touching it and letting it go."
"Do you apply that principle to everything?"
"Nearly everything."
"H'm. Uncompromising. Yet I doubt if you are wise."
"Wise? Isn't it wiser to stand a little hunger than to go back to
starvation after luxury?"
"Oh, of course; at that rate you can bring your soul down to a straw
a day. But in the end, you know, it dies."
"If it comes to that, mine was dead ages ago, and buried quite
decently, too. I think we won't dig it up again; by this time it
might not look pretty."
At any other time she would have alienated his sympathy by that
nasty speech; it was the sort of thing he hated women to say. But he
forgave her because of her evident sincerity.
She dried her eyes and left him to his own reflections.
So this was Frida Tancred? And he had thought of her as the
Colonel's daughter, a poor creature, subdued to the tyranny of
habit. Habit indeed! She had never known even that comparative calm.
It was not habit that had bound her to that dreadful old man, who
was the father of her body, but with whom her soul recognized no
kinship. Her life must have been an agony of self-renunciation, an
eternal effort not to be.
He doubted her wisdom; but he was not sure that he did not admire
her courage. That uncompromising attitude was more dignified than
the hesitations of weaker natures. When women set out with the bold
intention of living resolutely in the Whole, the Good, and the
Beautiful, they sometimes find themselves brought up sharply midway
at the threshold of the Good; and there they stand vacillating all
the time, or at the most content themselves now and then with a
terrified rush for the Beautiful and the Whole. They are fascinated
by all three and faithful to none. Frida Tancred scorned their
fatuous procedure. Balked of the best, she would never console
herself with half-measures and the second best; as for all lesser
values, there was something in her which would always mark her from
Mrs. Fazakerly and her kind. With Frida it was either the whole or
nothing; either four bare walls or the open road where there is no
returning.
She would go no way where the Colonel could not follow.
Durant, on his way to bed that night, saw something that told him
so much. Father and daughter stood with their backs to him at the
end of the long corridor. The Colonel was putting out the lights.
Frida had just nodded good night to him at her bedroom door, when
she turned impetuously and flung her arms round the little
gentleman. She pressed his head against her neck and held it there
an instant, a passion of remorse and tenderness in the belated
caress. The Colonel was, as it were, taken off his feet; he was
visibly embarrassed. Durant saw his eyes staring over her shoulder,
in their profound stupidity helpless and uncomprehending.