There was in her blood that which bade her hasten, lest there should be
something still new to her when she died. Death! She was continually
haunted by the fear lest that itself might be new. And she would say:
“Do you know what it feels like to be dead? I do.” If she had not
known this, she felt that she would not have lived her life to the
full. And one must live one’s life to the full. Indeed, yes! One must
experience everything. In her relations with men, for instance, there
was nothing, so far as she could see, to prevent her from being a
good wife, good mother, good mistress, and good friend--to different
men all at the same time, and even to more than one man of each kind,
if necessary. One had merely to be oneself, a full nature, giving
and taking generously. Greed was a low and contemptible attribute,
especially in woman; a woman wanted nothing more than--everything, and
the best of that. And it was intolerable if one could not have that
little. Woman had always been kept down. Not to be kept down was still,
on the whole, new. Yet sometimes, after she had not been kept down
rather violently, she would feel: Oh, the weariness! I shall throw it
all up, and live on a shilling a day, like a sweated worker--that, at
all events, will be new! She even sometimes dreamed of retirement to
convent life--the freshness of its old-world novelty appealed to her.
To such an idealist, the very colours of the rainbow did not suffice,
nor all the breeds of birds there were; her life was piled high with
cages. Here she had had them one by one, borrowed their songs, relieved
them of their plumes; then, finding that they no longer had any, let
them go; for to look at things without possessing them was intolerable,
but to keep them when she had got them even more so.
She often wondered how people could get along at all whose natures
were not so full as hers. Life, she thought, must be so dull for the
poor creatures, only doing one thing at a time, and that time so long.
What with her painting, and her music, her dancing, her flying, her
motoring, her writing of novels and poems, her love-making, maternal
cares, entertaining, friendships, housekeeping, wifely duties,
political and social interests, her gardening, talking, acting,
her interest in Russian linen and the woman’s movement; what with
travelling in new countries, listening to new preachers, lunching new
novelists, discovering new dancers, taking lessons in Spanish; what
with new dishes for dinner, new religions, new dogs, new dresses, new
duties to new neighbours, and newer charities--life was so full that
the moment it stood still and was simply old “life,” it seemed to be no
life at all.
She could not bear the amateur; feeling within herself some sacred fire
that made her “an artist” whatever she took up--or dropped. She had a
particular dislike, too, of machine-made articles; for her, personality
must be deep-woven into everything--look at flowers, how wonderful they
were in that way, growing quietly to perfection, each in its corner,
and inviting butterflies to sip their dew! She knew, for she had been
told it so often, that she was the crown of creation--the latest thing
in women, who were, of course, the latest thing in creatures. There
had never, till quite recently, been a woman like her, so awfully
interested in so many things, so likely to be interested in so many
more. She had flung open all the doors of life, and was so continually
going out and coming in, that life had some considerable difficulty in
catching a glimpse of her at all. Just as the cinematograph was the
future of the theatre, so was she the future of women, and in the words
of the poet “prou’ title.” To sip at every flower before her wings
closed; if necessary, to make new flowers to sip at. To smoke the whole
box of cigarettes straight off, and in the last puff of smoke expire!
And withal, no feverishness, only a certain reposeful and womanly
febrility; a mere perpetual glancing from quick-sliding eyes, to see
the next move, to catch the new movement--God bless it! And, mind
you, a high sense of duty--perhaps a higher sense of duty than that
of any woman who had gone before; a deep and intimate conviction that
women had an immensity of leeway to make up, that their old, starved,
stunted lives must be avenged, and that right soon. To enlarge the
horizon--this was the sacred duty! No mere Boccaccian or Louis Quinze
cult of pleasurable sensations; no crude, lolling, plutocratic dollery
of a spoiled dame. No! the full, deep river of sensations nibbling each
other’s tails. Life was real, life was earnest, and time the essence of
its contract.
To say that she had favourite books, plays, men, dogs, colours, was
to do her but momentary justice. A deeper equity assigned her only
one favourite--the next; and, for the sake of that one favourite, no
Catharine, no Semiramis or Messalina, could more swiftly dispose of
all the others. With what avidity she sprang into its arms, drained
its lips of kisses, looking hurriedly the while for its successor; for
Heaven alone--she felt--knew what would happen to her if she finished
drinking before she caught sight of that next necessary one.
And yet, now and again, time played her false, and she got through too
soon. It was then that she realised the sensation of death. After the
first terrible inanition, those moments lived without “living” would
begin to assume a sort of preciousness, to acquire holy sensations of
their own. “I am dead,” she would say to herself: “I really am dead; I
lie motionless, hearing, feeling, smelling, seeing, thinking nothing.
I lie impalpable--yes, that is the word--completely impalpable; above
me I can see the vast blue blue, and all around me the vast brown
brown--it is something like what I remember of Egypt. And there is
a kind of singing in my ears, that are really not ears now, a grey,
thin sound, like--ah!--Maeterlinck, and a very faint honey smell,
like--er--Omar Khayyám. And I just move as a blade of grass moves
in the wind. Yes, I am dead. It feels exactly like it.” And a new
exhilaration would seize her, for she felt that, in that sensation of
death, she was living! At lunch, or it might be dinner, she would tell
her newest man, already past the prime of her interest, exactly what it
felt like to be dead. “It’s not really disagreeable,” she would say;
“it has its own flavour. You know, like Turkish coffee, just a touch of
india-rubber in it--I mean the coffee.” And the poor man would sneeze,
and answer: “Yes, I know a little what you mean; asphodels, too; you
get it in Greece. My only difficulty is that, if you _are_ dead, you
know--you--er--are.” She would not admit that; it sounded true, but
the man was getting stupid--to be dead like that would be the end of
novelty, which was, to her, unthinkable.
Once, in a new book, she came across a little tale of a man who “lived”
in Persia, of all heavenly places, frantically pursuing sensation.
Entering one day the courtyard of his house, he heard a sigh behind
him, and, looking round, saw his own spirit, apparently in the act
of breathing its last. The little thing, dry and pearly-white as a
seed-pod of “honesty,” was opening and shutting its mouth, for all the
world like an oyster trying to breathe. “What is it?” he said; “you
don’t seem well.” And his spirit answered: “All right, all right! Don’t
distress yourself--it’s nothing! I’ve just been crowded out. That’s
all. Good-bye!” And, with a wheeze, the little thing went flat, fell
onto the special blue tiles he had caused to be put down there, and
lay still. He bent to pick it up, but it came off on his thumb in a
smudge of grey-white powder.
This fancy was so new that it pleased her greatly, and she recommended
the book to all her friends. The moral, of course, was purely Eastern,
and had no applicability whatever to Western life, where, the more one
did and expressed, the bigger and more healthy one’s spirit grew--as
witness what she always felt to be going on within herself. But next
spring she changed the blue tiles of her Persian smoking-room, put in
a birch-wood floor, and made it all Russian. This she did, however,
merely because one new room a year was absolutely essential to her
spirit.
In her perpetual journey toward an ever-widening horizon of woman’s
life, she was not so foolish as to prize danger for its own sake--that
was by no means her idea of adventure. That she ran some risks it
would be idle to deny, but only when she had discerned the substantial
advantage of a new sensation to be had out of adventures, not at all
because they were necessary to keep her soul alive. She was, she felt,
a Greek in spirit, only more so perhaps, having in her also something
of America and the West End.
How she came to be at all was only known to that age--whose daughter
she undoubtedly was--an age which ran all the time, without any foolish
notion where it was running to. There was no novelty in a destination,
and no sensation to be had from sitting cross-legged in a tub of
sunlight--not, at least, after you had done it once. _She_ had been
born to dance the moon down, to ragtime. The moon, the moon! Ah, yes!
It was the one thing that had as yet eluded her avidity. That, and her
own soul.