_Wednesday Night, November 4th_.
Margot has gone to bed at last, and I am alone. This has been a horrible
day--horrible; but I will not dwell upon it.
After the death of my grandmother, I went back to school again. But
Willoughby was gone, and he could not forgive me. He wrote to me once or
twice from New York, and then I ceased to hear from him. He died out of
my life. His affection for me had evidently declined from the day when
he took it into his head that I was only a money-grubber, like the
rest of the world, and that the Jew instinct had developed in me at an
abnormally early age. I let him go. What did it matter? But I was always
glad that I had been cruel on the day my grandmother died. I never
repented of what I did--never. If I had, I might be happier now.
I went back to school. I studied, played, got into mischief and out of
it again, like other boys; but in my life there seemed to be an eternal
coldness, that I alone, perhaps, was conscious of. My deed of cruelty,
of brutal revenge on the thing that had never done me injury, had
seared my soul. I was not sorry, but t could not forget; and sometimes
I thought--how ridiculous it looks written down!--that there was a power
hidden somewhere which could not forget either, and that a penalty might
have to be paid. Because a creature is dumb, must its soul die when it
dies? Is not the soul, perhaps--as _he_ said--a wanderer through many
bodies?
But if I did not kill a soul, as I killed a body, the day my grandmother
died, where is that soul now? That is what I want to arrive at, that is
what I must arrive at, if I am to be happy.
I went back to school, and I passed to Oxford. I tasted the strange,
unique life of a university, narrow, yet pulsating, where the youth,
that is so green and springing, tries to arm itself for the battle with
the weapons forged by the dead and sharpened by the more elderly among
the living. I did well there, and I passed on into the world. And then
at last I began to understand the value of my inheritance; for all that
had been my grandmother’s was now mine. My people wished me to marry,
but I had no desire to fetter myself. So I took the sponge in my strong,
young hands, and tried to squeeze it dry. And I did not know that I was
sad--I did not know it until, at the age of thirty-three, just seventeen
years after my grandmother died, I understood the sort of thing
happiness is. Of course, it was love that brought to me understanding.
I need not explain that. I had often played on love; now love began to
play on me. I trembled at the harmonies his hands evoked.
I met a young girl, very young, just on the verge of life and of
womanhood. She was seventeen when I first saw her, and she was valsing
at a big ball in London--her first ball. She passed me in the crowd
of dancers, and I noticed her. As she was a _debutante_ her dress was
naturally snow-white. There was no touch of colour about it--not a
flower, not a jewel. Her hair was the palest yellow I had almost ever
seen--the colour of an early primrose. Naturally fluffy, it nearly
concealed the white riband that ran through it, and clustered in
tendrils and tiny natural curls upon her neck. Her skin was whiter than
ivory--a clear, luminous white. Her eyes were very large and china-blue
in colour.
This young girl dancing passed and repassed me, and my glance rested
on her idly, even cynically. For she seemed so happy, and at that time
happiness won my languid wonder, if ingenuously exhibited. To be happy
seemed almost to be mindless. But by degrees I found myself watching
this girl, and more closely. Another dance began. She joined it with
another partner. But she seemed just as pleased with him as with her
former one. She would not let him pause to rest; she kept him dancing
all the time, her youth and freshness spoken in that gentle compelling.
I grew interested in her, even acutely so. She seemed to me like the
spirit of youth dancing over the body of Time. I resolved to know her. I
felt weary; I thought she might revive me. The dance drew to an end,
and I approached my hostess, pointed the girl out, and asked for an
introduction. Her name was Margot Magendie, I found, and she was an
heiress as well as a beauty.