He cared immensely. But not to come behind her in generosity and
comprehension he owned that he had no right to complain because this
remarkable woman loved the world better than one man, even if that
man happened to be himself; in fact, while his heart revolted
against it, his pure intellect admired her attitude, for the world
is a greater thing that any man in it.
Now and again letters reached him across seas and continents, letters
with strange, outlandish postmarks, wonderful, graphic, triumphant
letters, which showed him plainly, though unintentionally, that Frida
Tancred was still on the winning side, that she could do without him.
Across seas and continents he watched her career with a sad and
cynical sympathy, as a man naturally watches a woman who triumphs
where he has failed.
Meanwhile he lived on her letters, long and expansive, or short and
to the point. They proved a stimulating diet; they had so much of
her full-blooded personality in them. His own grew shorter and
shorter and more and more to the point, till at last he wrote:
"Delightful. Only tell me when you've had enough of it."
The answer to that came bounding, as it were, from the other side of
the Atlantic. "Not yet. I shall never have enough of it. I've only
been 'seeing the world,' only traveling from point to point along an
infinite surface, and there's no satisfaction in that. I'm not
tired--not tired, Maurice, remember. I don't want to stop. I want to
strike down--deeper. It doesn't matter what point you take, so long
as you strike down. Just at present I'm off for India."
Her postscript said: "If you ever hear of me doing queer things,
remember they were all in the day's pleasure or the day's work."
He remembered--that Frida was only thirty-five; which was young for
Frida. And he said to himself, "It is all very well now, but what
will she be in another three years? I will give her another three
years. By that time she will be tired of the world, or the world
will be tired of her, which comes to the same thing, and her heart
(for she has a heart) will find her out. With Frida you never know.
I will wait and see."
He waited. The three years passed; he saw nothing and he had ceased
to hear. He concluded that Frida still loved the world.
As if in a passionate resentment against the rival that had
fascinated and won her, he had left off wandering and had buried
himself in an obscure Cornish village, where he gave himself up
to his work. He was not quite so successful as he had been; on
the other hand, he cared less than ever about success. It was the
end of the century, a century that had been forced by the
contemplation of such realities as plague and famine, and war and
rumors of war, to forego and forget the melancholy art of its
decadence. And from other causes Durant had fallen into a state
of extreme dissatisfaction with himself. Five years ago he had
found himself, as they said; found himself out, _he_ said, when
at the age of thirty-three he condemned himself and his art as
more decadent than the decadents. Frida Tancred had shown insight
when she reproached him with his inability to see anything that
he could not paint, or to paint anything that he could not see.
She had shown him the vanity of the sensuous aspect, she had
forced him to love the intangible, the unseen, till he had almost
come to believe that it was all he loved. The woman lived for him
in her divine form, as his imagination had first seen her, as an
Idea, an eternal dream. It was as if he could see nothing and
paint nothing else. And when a clever versatile artist of
Durant's type flings himself away in a mad struggle to give form
and color to the invisible it is not to be wondered at if the
world is puzzled and fights shy of him.
Meanwhile the critic who had a right to his opinion said of him:
"Now that he has thrown the reins on the back of his imagination it
will carry him far. Ten years hence the world will realize that
Maurice Durant is a great painter. But in those ten years he must
work hard."
As if to show how little he cared he left off working hard and
bestirred himself for news of Frida Tancred.
It came at last--from Poona of all places. Frida wrote in high
spirits and at length. "I like writing to you," she said, "because I
can say what I like, because you always know--you've been there.
Where? Oh, everywhere where I've been, except Whithorn-in-Arden.
And, now I come to think of it, you were there, too--for a
fortnight" ("three weeks--three long weeks--and for your sake,
Frida!"). "No, I'm not 'coming home.' Why _must_ I 'stop somewhere'?
I can't stop, didn't I tell you? I can only strike down where it's
deepest.
"It seems to be pretty deep here. If I could only understand these
people--but what European can? They mean something we don't mean....
You should see my Munshi, a terrifically high-caste fellow with a
diminutive figure and unfathomable eyes. I am trying to learn
Sanscrit. He is trying to teach me. We sit opposite each other at a
bamboo table with an immense Sanscrit dictionary between us. He
smiles in his sleeve at my attempt to bridge the gulf between Europe
and Asia with a Sanscrit dictionary. He is always smiling at me in
his sleeve. I know it, and he knows that I know it, which endears me
to him very much.
"My Munshi is a bottomless well of Western wisdom. He takes
anything that Europe can give him--art, literature, science,
metaphysics. He absorbs it all, and Heaven only knows what he is
going to do with it, or it with him. He swallows it as a juggler
swallows fire, and with about as much serious intention of
assimilating it. That smile of his intimates that the things that
matter to us do not matter to him; that nothing matters--neither
will nor conscience, nor pain nor passion, nor man nor woman, nor
life nor death. There's an attitude for you!
"That attitude is my Munshi, and my Munshi is Asia."
He smiled. He had seen Frida in many attitudes, Frida in love with
nothing, Frida in love with a person, Frida in love with a thing.
Here was Frida in love with an idea. It was just like her. She was
seeing Asia from the Asiatic point of view.
"Meanwhile," she went on, "there's a greater gulf fixed between my
Munshi and my 'rickshaw coolie than there is between me and my
'rickshaw coolie, or my Munshi and me."
He wondered if she meant to remind him that there was a still
greater gulf between him and her.
"To-morrow I and two coolies are going up to Gujerat where the
famine is. I inclose a snapshot of the party. My effacement by the
coolie is merely a photographic freak--his grin is the broadest part
of him, poor fellow. In the autumn I go down to Bombay. I am deep in
bacteriology, which reminds me of father and the first time I met
you, and your bad puns."
The snapshot was an unflattering likeness of Frida in a 'rickshaw.
The foreground was filled by the figure of the grinning coolie.
Behind him Frida's face showed dim and small and far-off; she was
smiling with the sun in her eyes.
Such as it was he treasured it as his dearest possession. He had
been painting pictures all his life, but he had none of Frida.
Silence again. "In the autumn," she had said, "I go down to Bombay."
But the autumn passed and there was no news of her. Durant provided
himself with an Indian outfit. He was going out to look for her; he
was ready to go to the ends of the world to find her. "The day after
to-morrow," he said, "I shall start for Bombay."
That night he dreamed of her; or, rather, not of her, but of a
coolie who stood before the door of a wayside bungalow, and held in
his hands shafts that were not the shafts of a 'rickshaw. And the
coolie's face was all one broad grin.
Two days later--the day he was to have sailed for India--hurriedly
skimming a column of the _Times_ he came upon the news he was
looking for.
"It is with much regret that we record the death from bubonic plague
of Miss Frida Tancred. It was quite recently that this lady gave up
a large part of her fortune to founding the Bacteriological
Laboratory in Bombay, more recently still that she distinguished
herself by her services to the famine-stricken population of
Gujerat. Miss Tancred has added to the immense debt our Indian
Empire owes her by this final example of heroic self-sacrifice. It
is said that she contracted plague while nursing one of her coolies,
who has since recovered."
He bowed his head.
It was not grief he felt, but a savage exultant joy. The world could
have no more of her. She was his, in some inviolable, irrevocable
way. He knew. He understood her now, clearly and completely.
His joy deepened to a passionless spiritual content; as if in the
fulness of his knowledge he had embraced the immortal part of her.
Why had he not understood her long ago? She had never changed. As he
had first seen her, playing cards with her father in the
drawing-room at Coton Manor, as he had last seen her, pacing the
deck of the _Windward_, intoxicated with her freedom, as he saw her
now, bending her head over the plague-poisoned body of the coolie,
she was the same tender, resolute, passionate Frida, who ruined her
life and glorified it, laid it down and took it up again at her
will. And as he saw--would always see her, in this new light of her
death, she was smiling, as if she defied him to see anything
pathetic in it.
She had loved the world, the mystic maddening beauty of it, the
divine darkness and glory of it. She had taken to her heart the
rapture and the pain of it. She had stretched out her hands to the
unexplored, to the unchanged and changing, the many-faced,
incomprehensible, finite, infinite Whole.
And she had flung it all up; for what?
For a 'rickshaw coolie's life?--Or for something--yet--beyond?
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Macmillan novels