LA FEMME INCOMPRISE.
Lord Silverdale had gone and there was now no need for Lillie to
preserve the factitious cheerfulness with which she had listened to his
usual poem, while her thoughts were full of other and even more
depressing things. Margaret Linbridge's miracle had almost undermined
the President's faith in the steadfastness of her sex; she turned
mentally to the yet unaccepted Wee Winnie for consolation, condemning
her own half-hearted attitude towards that sturdy soul, and almost
persuading herself that salvation lay in spats. At any rate long skirts
seemed the last thing in the world to find true women in.
But providence had not exhausted its miracles, and Lillie was not to
spend a miserable afternoon. The miracle was speeding along towards her
on the top of an omnibus--a miracle of beauty and smartness. On reaching
the vicinity of the Old Maid's Club, the miracle, which was of course of
the female gender, tapped the driver amicably upon the hat with her
parasol and said "Stop please." The _petite_ creature was the spirit of
self-help itself and scorned the aid of the gentleman in front of her,
preferring to knock off his hat and crush the driver's so long as the
independence of womanhood was maintained. But she maintained it
charmingly and without malice and gave the conductor a sweet smile in
addition to his fare as she tripped away to the Old Maids' Club.
[Illustration: _Amicably said, "Stop please."_]
Lillie was fascinated the instant Turple the magnificent announced "Miss
Wilkins" in suave tones. The mere advent of a candidate raised her
spirits and she found herself chatting freely with her visitor even
before she had put her through the catechism. But the catechism came at
last.
"Why do I want to join you?" asked the miracle. "Because I am disgusted
with my lover--because I am a _femme incomprise_. Oh, don't stare at me
as if I were a medley of megrims and fashionable ailments, I'm the very
opposite of that. Mine is a buoyant, breezy, healthy nature,
straightforward and simple. That's why I complain of being
misunderstood. My lover is a poet--and the misunderstanding I have to
endure at his hands is something appalling. Every man is a bit of a poet
where woman is concerned, and so every woman is more or less
misunderstood, but when you are unfortunate enough to excite the
affection of a real whole poet--well, that way madness lies. Your words
are twisted into meanings you never intended, your motives are
misconstrued, and your simplest actions are distorted. Silverplume, for
it is the well-known author of 'Poems of Compassion' that I have had the
misfortune to captivate, never calls without laying a sonnet next day;
in which remarks, that must be most misleading to those who do not know
me, occur with painful frequency. His allowance is two kisses per
day--one of salutation, one of farewell. We have only been actually
engaged two months, yet I have counted up two hundred and thirty-nine
distinct and separate kisses in the voluminous 'Sonnet Series' which he
has devoted to our engagement, and, what is worse, he describes himself
as depositing them.
"'Where at thy flower-mouth exiguous
The purple passion mantles to the brim.'
It sounds as if I was berouged like a dowager. Purple passion, indeed!
I let him kiss me because he appears to like it and because there
seems something wrong about it--but as for really caring a pin one way
or another, well, you Miss Dulcimer, know how much there is in that!
This 'Sonnet Series' promises to be endless, the course of our
acquaintanceship is depicted in its most minute phases with the most
elaborate inaccuracy--if I smile, if I say: 'How do you do?' if I put my
hand to my forehead, if I look into the fire, down go fourteen lines
giving a whole world of significance to my meanest actions, and making
Himalayas out of the most microscopic molehills. I am credited with
thoughts I never dreamed of and sentiments I never felt, till I ask
myself whether any other woman was ever so cruelly misunderstood as I? I
grow afraid to do or say anything, lest I bring upon my head a new
sonnet. But even so I cannot help _looking_ something or the other; and
when I come to read the sonnet I find it is always the other. Once I
refused to see him for a whole week, but that only resulted in seven
'Sonnets of Absence,' imaginatively depicting what I was saying and
doing each day, and containing a detailed analysis of his own
sensations, as well as reminiscences of past happy hours together. Most
of them I had no recollection of, and the only one I could at all share
was that of a morning we spent on the Ramsgate cliffs where Silverplume
put his handkerchief over his face and fell asleep. In the last line of
the sonnet it came out:
"'There mid the poppies of the planisphere,
I swooned for very joy and wearihead.'
But I knew it by the poppies. Then, dear Miss Dulcimer, you should just
see the things he calls me--'Love's gonfalon and lodestar' and what-not.
Very often I can't even find them in the dictionary and it makes me
uneasy. Heaven knows what he may be saying about me! When he talks of
"'The rack of unevasive lunar things'
I do not so much complain, because it's their concern if they are
libelled. It is different with incomprehensible remarks flung
unmistakably at my own head such as
"'O chariest of Caryatides.'
It sounds like a reproach and I should like to know what I have done to
deserve it. And then his general remarks are so monotonously
unintelligible. One of his longest poetical epistles, which is burnt
into my memory because I had to pay twopence for extra postage, began
with this lament:
"'O sweet are roses in the summer time
And Indian naiads' weary walruses
And yet two-morrow never comes to-day.'
I cannot see any way out of it all except by breaking off our
engagement. When we were first engaged, I don't deny I rather liked
being written about in lovely-sounding lines but it is a sweet one is
soon surfeited with, and Silverplume has raved about me to that extent
that he has made me look ridiculous in the eyes of all my friends. If he
had been moderate, they would have been envious; now they laugh when
they read of my wonderful charms, of my lithe snake's mouth, and my face
which shames the sun and my Epipsychidiontic eyes (whatever that may be)
and my
"'Wee waist that holds the cosmos in its span,'
and say he is poking fun at me. But Silverplume is quite serious--I am
sure of that, and it is the worst feature of the case. He carries on
just the same in conversation, with the most improper allusions to
heathen goddesses, and seems really to believe that I am absorbed in the
sunset when I am thinking what to wear to-morrow. Just to give you an
idea of how he misinterprets my silence let me read to you one of his
sonnets called:
"'MOONSHINE.
"'Walking a space betwixt the double Naught,
The What Is Bound to Be and What Has Been,
How sweet with Thee beneath the moonlit treen,
O woman-soul immaculately wrought,
To sit and catch a harmony uncaught
Within a world that mocks with margarine,
In chastened silence, mystic, epicene,
Exchanging incommunicable thought.
"'Diana, Death may doom and Time may toss,
And sundry other kindred things occur,
But Hell itself can never turn to loss,
Though Mephistopheles his stumps should stir,
That day, when introduced at Charing Cross,
I smiled and doffed my silken cylinder.'
"Another distressing feature about Silverplume--indeed, I think about
all men--is their continuous capacity for love-making. You know, my dear
Miss Dulcimer, with us it is a matter of times and seasons--we are
creatures of strange and subtle susceptibilities, sometimes we are in
the mood for love and ready to respond to all shades of sentimentality,
but at other moments (and these the majority) men's amorous advances jar
horribly. Men do not know this. Ever ready to make love themselves they
think all moments are the same to us as to them. And of all men, poets
are the most prepared to make love at a moment's notice. So that
Silverplume himself is almost more trying than his verses."
"But after all you need not read them," observed Lillie. "They please
him and they do not hurt you. And you have always the consolation of
remembering it is not you he loves but the paragon he has evolved from
his inner consciousness. Even taking into account his perennial
affectionateness, your reason for refusing him seems scarcely strong
enough."
"Ah, wait a moment--You have not heard the worst! I might perhaps have
tolerated his metrical misinterpretations--indeed on my sending him a
vigorous protest against the inaccuracies of his last collection (they
came out so much more glaringly when brought all together from the
various scattered publications to which Silverplume originally
contributed them) he sent me back a semi-apologetic explanation thus
conceived:
"'TO CELIA.'
"(You know of course my name is Diana, but that is his way.)
"''Tis not alone thy sweet eyes' gleam
Nor sunny glances,
For which I weave so oft a dream
Of dainty fancies.
"''Tis not alone thy witching play
Of grace fantastic
That makes me chant so oft a lay
Encomiastic.
"'Both editors and thee I see,
Thy face, their purses.
I offer heart and soul to thee,
To them my verses.'
"I was partially mollified by this, for if his poems were not merely
complimentary, and he really got paid for them, one might put up with
inspiring them. We were reconciled and he took me to a reception at the
house of a wealthy friend of his, a fellow-member of the Sonneteers'
Society. It was here that I saw a sight that froze my young blood and
warned me upon the edge of what a precipice I was standing. When we got
into the drawing-room, the first thing we saw was an awful apparition in
a corner--a hideous, unkempt, unwashed man in a dressing-gown and
slippers, with his eyes rolling wildly and his lips moving rhythmically.
It was the host.
"'Don't speak to him,' whispered the hostess. 'He doesn't see us. He has
been like that all day. He came down to look to the decorations this
morning, when the idea took him and he has been glued to the spot ever
since. He has forgotten all about the reception--he doesn't know we're
here and I thought it best not to disturb him till he is safely
delivered of the sonnet.'
"'You are quite right,' everybody said in sympathetic awestruck tones
and left a magic circle round the poet in labor. But I felt a shudder
run through my whole being. 'Goodness gracious, Silverplume,' I said,
'is this the way you poets go on?'"
"'No, no, Diana,' he assured me. 'It is all tommyrot (I quote
Silverplume's words). The beggar is just bringing out a new volume, and
although his wife has always distributed the most lavish hospitality to
the critics, he has never been able to get himself taken seriously as a
poet. There will be lots of critics here to-night and he is playing his
last card. If he is not a genius now, he never will be.'
[Illustration: _The poet plays his last card._]
"'Oh, of course,' I replied sceptically, 'two of a trade.' I made him
take me away and that was the end of our engagement. Even as it was,
Silverplume's neglect of his appearance had been a constant thorn in my
side, and if this was so before marriage, what could I hope for after?
It was all very well for him to say his friend was only shamming, but
even so, how did I know he would not be reduced to that sort of thing
himself when his popularity faded and younger rivals came along."
Lillie, who seemed to have some _arrière-pensée_, entered into an
animated defence of the poet, but Miss Wilkins stood her ground and
refused to withdraw her candidature.
"I don't want you to withdraw your candidature," said Lillie, frankly.
"I shall be charmed to entertain it. I am only arguing upon the general
question."
And, indeed, Lillie was enraptured with Miss Wilkins. It was the
attraction of opposites. A matter-of-fact woman who could reject a
poet's love appealed to her with irresistible piquancy. Miss Wilkins
stayed on to tea (by which time she had become Diana) and they gossiped
on all sorts of subjects, and Lillie gave her the outlines of the
queerest stories of past candidates and in the Old Maids' Club that
afternoon all went merry as a marriage bell.
"Well, good-bye, Lillie," said Diana at last.
"Good-bye, Diana," returned Lillie. "Now _I_ understand you I hope you
won't consider yourself a _femme incomprmise_ any longer."
"It is only the men I complained of, dear."
"But we must ever remain _incomprises_ by man," said Lillie. "_Femme
incomprise_--why, it is the badge of all our sex."
"Yes," answered Diana. "A woman letting down her back hair is tragic to
a man; to us she only recalls bedroom gossip. Good-bye."
And nodding brightly the brisk little creature sallied into the street
and captured a passing 'bus.