Meanwhile, Dilling had been an unwilling victim to Hebe Barrington’s
charms.
“Your wife is coming home with me for a bite of supper,” she had written
him, “and I want you, too. The bald truth is—I don’t trust Toddles with
a pretty woman, so you must be on hand to see her home.”
But although he had signified his readiness to perform this happy task
several times, she had made it impossible for him to break away.
“Don’t you love my little nest?” asked Hebe, closing the door and
leading him by the arm to a deep couch, standing well beyond the faint
light thrown by a winking oriental lantern.
“It’s very unusual,” said Dilling.
“Everything here has a history,” she told him, “but I won’t tell you
about any of my treasures just now. You need only know that this room is
called the Eyrie, and I want you to feel that it is your own. Any time,
day or night, that you want to run away from the abominations of
politics, this place is ready for you. You need not even share it with
me—if you don’t wish.”
“Thank you,” muttered Dilling, seeing that she expected him to speak.
“And now, let’s talk about your speech. It was tremendous! How easy it
seems to be for you to avoid the feeble word and choose those that
thrill one with a sense of power. Every fibre of my being was alive with
response to you, to-night. But why didn’t you look at me, Raymond?”
“I? Er—why—I didn’t know that you were there,” stammered the man who
was supposed to avoid the trite and obvious.
“But why didn’t you look and _see_?” insisted Hebe. “Is the admiration
of mankind in general, and of woman in particular so unimportant? Does
it give you no stimulation?”
“Oh, it isn’t that,” said Dilling.
He was very ill at ease. Admitting her intellectual attainments, yet he
never enjoyed talking with Hebe Barrington as he enjoyed talking with
Azalea. He was too conscious of her, too acutely aware of the fact that
she sought to attach his scalp to her belt, his frail person to her
chariot wheels. Instinctively, he was on his guard against a temptation
to which he could not imagine himself surrendering.
“What is it, then?” she asked, passing her fingers through his thin
hair.
As Marjorie recoiled from Sullivan, so Dilling tried to withdraw from
the caresses of Mrs. Barrington. He had never received advances from
women—decent women—and he was shocked, revolted. Even her use of his
Christian name jarred unpleasantly upon him whose social standards
decreed that although a man and woman might address one another
familiarly before the marriage of either party, the instant they turned
from the altar, rigid formality should be observed. To be called
“Raymond” by a married woman whom he had known but a few weeks, smacked
strongly of indecency.
“Is it possible that beneath your discomfiting iciness of manner,” Hebe
continued, “you want to attract men, hold them and make them your
friends? Do you feel the need of friends, Raymond Dilling?”
“I am only human,” he returned.
Suddenly he felt an overpowering urge to talk, an imperious need for
candour. He wanted to open his heart, deplore his failures and the
unfulfilment of his desires. He saw his inability to draw men to him,
and surround them with a vivid atmosphere of comradeship in political
endeavour and a common patriotic inspiration. He felt that men did not
like him, that he would never be an adornment to their clubs, one upon
whom the success of a social event depended. And, unaccountably, he
realised that he cared—cared for himself, and for Marjorie, and for
Azalea Deane. As though reading his thoughts, Hebe went on,
“You’ll never do it as you are, Raymond. You are suffering the result of
the habit contracted, I have learned, in your college days, when you
withdrew yourself from all but the few who recognised your talents and
thrust themselves upon you for your worldly, and other-worldly behoof. A
native shyness of strangers and an inherited reluctance to spend money
on the amenities of life, moved you to live in cloistered exclusiveness,
when you should have been expanding your soul in joyous contact with
your fellow men. Am I not right?”
“I don’t think it was so bad as that,” said Dilling, fighting against
the stupefying effect of the perfume he had learned to associate with
her.
“But it was! You avoided human contact, and only by such means is life
rid of its tendency to become set and small. Don’t you remember the
French axiom, ‘_L’esprit de l’homme n’est malleable que dans sa
jeunesse_’? You are still young, Raymond, but it is high time that you
began remoulding. If you had only allowed yourself the Paganism of
Youth, you would have spared yourself the Philistinism of Maturity.”
“It’s all very well to preach conviviality and _bon camaraderie_,”
Dilling returned, stung into making what he afterwards felt to be an
undignified defence, “but you must remember that I couldn’t afford to
hold my own with the roisterers at college.” He moved, with a gesture of
impatience, beyond the reach of her marauding fingers. “It was not so
much inherited caution as immediate limitations that made my ‘exclusive
cloistering’ necessary. I put myself through college, you know,” he
added, with a touch of unconscious pride, “and I couldn’t afford to
enjoy it.”
“But that’s the very point—the very point I’m driving at,” she
triumphed. “If only you _had_ spent beyond your means—if only once you
had overstepped your limitations! We all do, all of us who have souls.
One way or another, the artist is always spending. The lover never
counts the cost. You can’t—you shouldn’t want to—reduce emotions to
blue prints and specifications, and that’s what you have done! Listen,
Raymond, and forgive me if I offend you. There is a corner of your
personality that lies fallow because its dull atmosphere refuses
nourishment to artistic taste and sensuous beauty. In other words, you
are afraid to spend, even now, lest the ultimate cost may prove to be
something you think you can’t afford. You are afraid to let yourself go,
for emotions lead one even farther than the tangible medium of
exchange.” Her tone changed. “How you ever came to marry a pretty woman
is something of a mystery to me—a frump would have answered just as
well. Indeed, I ask myself, why did you ever marry at all. Will you tell
me?”
“I don’t think there’s any mystery about it,” parried Dilling.
He was not prepared to confess that love had played a very small part in
his relations with Marjorie, nor that his need of her was more that of
an amiable associate than wife. With the simplicity that marked so many
of his social adventurings, he believed that when he could support a
wife and family he should marry; and he chose the least
objectionable—and most desirable externally—woman of his
acquaintanceship. There was the explanation in a nutshell.
“Have you ever felt the appeal of sensuous beauty?” Hebe Barrington
persisted. “No! I am answered. The very phrase revolts you as I speak
it. It is an evocation of the Seventh Commandment and a ruined
household. Queer fellow! Your insensibility to beauty in line and
colour, not only in Art but in life, proclaims you a Philistine.”
“You’ve called me that before.”
“And I call you so again. You had no ear for the cry from Paxos, ‘When
you are come to Pallodes announce that the Great Pan is dead’,” she
cried theatrically. “Little you understand how it was that Pan’s trumpet
terrified and dispersed the Titans in their fight with the Olympian
gods.”
“You have a harsh opinion of me,” said Dilling, a little nettled. “I
thought I knew my classics.”
“You read them—you bathed in their sensuous beauty, but you never felt
it, Raymond, even while imagining that you were mewing a mighty youth of
the intellect. Deluded boy,” she murmured. “Blind boy!” Her hand
fluttered over his face and rested upon his eyes. For the life of him he
could not respond to this woman, but at the same time he made no
definite resistance, judging that by so doing he would lay himself open
to the charge of priggishness. Dilling had little dread of ridicule when
he trod upon familiar ground, but of late he had realised how virginal
he was in the social struggle. Quite still he sat, while Hebe
Barrington’s hands moved softly about him. He did not know that to her
his unresponsiveness was incredible; the web she was weaving was as
apparent to him as his power to break it. “It is not too late,” she
whispered, “to save yourself, to save your soul alive.”
“Am I to take that as encouragement?” he enquired, with intentional
rudeness.
“As the body in its vigour renews itself every seven years, so it is
possible for the spirit to open its doors periodically upon new realms
of percipience and creative power. Set about your own rebirth, Raymond!
Don’t imagine that you can achieve re-genesis by pondering the sources
that gave the pagan Greek his apprehension, shall I say, of the joy of
life. The Greek lived in a narrow time and in a narrow world, in spite
of which he made living glorious. You, on the other hand, live in a big
world where there is room for the coming of the superman. Oh, Raymond,
lay hold of the sensuous beauty that lies within your very grasp. Come
out of your barren cloister and inhale the warmth of the sun and perfume
of the blossoming flowers! Mere intellect has never achieved perfect
happiness for any man. He must develop his emotional nature in order to
get the most life has to offer and in order that he may give her of his
best,” she added, quickly. “He must learn to understand men and women,
and to understand them he must—live!”
“You seem to be very certain that I am one of the unburied dead!”
“Exactly! Every man who doesn’t love is dead. Oh, don’t point to your
wife and children as contradictory evidence. You love neither, Raymond,
I mean, with the love that is like a great, engulfing tide, the love
that haunts and tortures, and racks and exalts. I mean the love that is
like a deep, ecstatic pain, that simultaneously is a feast and a cruel
hunger.”
Her words poured over him like a warm scented flood. He was conscious of
a curious desire to plunge his body into their deeps, to feel their heat
and moisture. But the impression eluded him. He could not abandon
himself to the enchantment Hebe Barrington was trying to cast over him.
No glamorous mist blurred his vision. He saw with penetrating clarity,
and his only sensation was one of distaste.
“I am of opinion that life can be useful without these exaggerated,
emotional outbursts,” said Dilling, “that where so much energy is
expended in one direction the drain is felt in other lines of
endeavour.”
“But will you never open your eyes to the radiant truth that a great
love is not a drain but a reservoir, a source of supply? It enlarges
one’s power and stimulates creation. Did not every conspicuous figure in
history have his feminine complement, and is not at least a part of his
achievement credited to the stimulation of an overmastering love?”
Dilling was not so sure. Average and sub-average persons, wholly unable
to apprehend the subtle forces of will and intellect behind a great
achievement, accept it with dull simplicity and dismiss it with a word
of praise. But average and sub-average persons experiencing the driving
power of emotion in varied degrees think themselves capable of
understanding a sublime passion and therefore place it—perhaps
unconsciously—ahead of intellectual accomplishment. In fine, we bring
others down to our own level, a fact that explains why “human interest”
and “heart interest” make a wider appeal than things that live and move
and have their being on the higher plane of mind and spirit.
“I doubt it,” he said, answering Hebe’s question. “I doubt, for example,
that Parnell’s skill in leadership depended upon the dashing Kitty
O’Shea, or that Nelson would have failed at Trafalgar save for Lady
Hamilton.”
“Do you mean that no _particular_ woman is necessary to a man, or that
emotional relationship between two persons of opposite sexes is
over-estimated?”
“Either, and both,” laughed Dilling, and rose. “But I really must find
my wife. She will think I have deserted her, and, anyway, late hours are
forbidden in our house. Shall we go down?”
But Hebe held him.
“Just a moment,” she begged. “I can’t allow you to leave me with a wrong
impression. Oh, I know quite well how my conduct to-night must appear in
your eyes—your blind eyes, Raymond, and it is not a sense of
prudishness that impels me to explain that I do not throw myself at you
for a narrow, personal satisfaction. It is true that I love you, but I
love the big You, the public man, the orator, the statesman, and I have
a supreme longing to see you attain greater honours and bring greater
glory to Canada. To achieve this, I am firmly convinced that a closed
door in your nature must be opened. You are like a man working in
artificial light. He can see, yes—but he attains results through
greater strain than is immediately apparent and, therefore, his season
of usefulness is lessened. There is sunshine, Raymond, and in its
radiance, much of what was work becomes play. Love is my sunshine and is
a miraculous creative force. With your frail body, you must draw power
from an outside source, Raymond, and what other reservoir is there but
Love? Listen, dear, just a moment more,” she cried, tightening her arms
about him. “I would rather see you love some other woman than not love
at all, for I know that the awakening of your soul would be Canada’s
great gain. And now,” she concluded, rising, “will you kiss me before
you go?”
Dilling hesitated, and in that instant’s delay a step sounded on the
stair and a gentle tattoo beat upon the door.
“Come in,” cried Hebe, crossly. “Oh, Uncle Rufus, we were just going
down!”