Seymour Sturgis (who, Berts thought, ought to have been drowned when he
was a girl) was employed one morning in July in dusting his jade. He
lived in a small flat just off Langham Place, with a large, capable,
middle-aged Frenchwoman, who worshiped the ground on which he so
delicately trod with the cloth-topped boots which she made so
resplendent. She cooked for him in the inimitable manner of her race,
she kept his flat speckless and shining, she valeted him, she did
everything in fact except dust the jade. Highly as Seymour thought of
Antoinette he could not let her do that. He always alluded to her as "my
maid," and used to take her with him, as valet, to country-houses. It
must, however, be added that he did this largely to annoy, and he
largely succeeded.
The room which was adorned by his collection of jade, seemed somehow
strangely unlike a man's room. A French writing-table stood in the
window with a writing-case and blotting-book stamped with his initials
in gilt; by the pen-tray was a smelling-bottle with a gold screw-top to
it. Thin lace blinds hung across the windows, and the carpet was of
thick fawn-colored fabric with remarkably good Persian rugs laid down
over it. On the chimney-piece was a Louis Seize garniture of clock and
candlesticks, and a quantity of invitation cards were stuck into the
mirror behind. There were half-a-dozen French chairs, a sofa, a
baby-grand, a small table or two, and a book-case of volumes all in
morocco dress-clothes. On the walls there were a few prints, and in
glazed cabinets against the wall was the jade. Nothing, except perhaps
the smelling-bottle, suggested a mistress rather than a master, but the
whole effect was feminine. Seymour rather liked that: he had very little
liking for his own sex. They seemed to him both clumsy and stupid, and
his worst enemies (of whom he had plenty) could not accuse him of being
either the one or the other. On their side they disliked him because he
was not like a man: he disliked them because they were.
But while he detested his own sex, he did not regard the other with the
ordinary feeling of a man. He liked their dresses, their perfumes, their
hair, their femininity, more than he liked them. He was quite as
charming to plain old ladies, even as Dodo had said, as he was to girls,
and he was perfectly happy, when staying in the country, to go a motor
drive with aunts and grandmothers. He had a perfectly marvelous
digestion; ate a huge lunch, sat still in the motor all afternoon, and
had quantities of buttered buns for tea. He dressed rather too carefully
to be really well-dressed and always wore a tie and socks of the same
color, which repeated in a more vivid shade the tone of his clothes. He
had a large ruby ring, a sapphire ring and an emerald ring: they were
worn singly and matched his clothes. He spoke French quite perfectly.
All these depressing traits naturally enraged such men as came in
contact with him, but though they abhorred him they could not openly
laugh at him, for he had a tongue, when he chose, of quite unparalleled
acidity, and was markedly capable of using it when required and taking
care of himself afterwards. In matters of art, he had a taste that was
faultless, and his taste was founded on real knowledge and technique, so
that really great singers delighted to perform to his accompaniment, and
in matters of jewelry he designed for Cartier. In fact, from the point
of view of his own sex, he was detestable rather than ridiculous, while
considerable numbers of the other sex did their very best to spoil him,
for none could want a more amusing companion, and his good looks were
quite undeniable. But somewhere in his nature there was a certain grit
which quite refused to be ground into the pulp of a spoiled young man.
In his slender frame, too, there were nerves of steel, and, most amazing
of all, when not better employed in designing for Cartier, or engaged in
bloodless flirtations, he was a first-class golfer. But he preferred to
go for a drive in the afternoon, and smoke a succession of rose-scented
cigarettes, which could scarcely be considered tobacco at all. He was
fond of food, and drank a good many glasses of port rather petulantly,
after dinner, as if they were medicine.
This morning he was particularly anxious that his jade should show to
advantage, for Nadine was coming to lunch with him, to ask his advice
about something which she thought was old Venetian-point lace. He had
taken particular pains also about the lunch: everything was to be _en
casserole_; there were eggs in spinach, and quails, and a marvelous
casseroled cherry tart. He could not bear that anything about him,
whether designed for the inside or the outside, should be other than
exquisite, and he would have been just as sedulous a Martha, if that
strange barbarian called Berts was coming, only he would have given
Berts an immense beefsteak as well.
The bell of his flat tinkled announcing Nadine. He did not like the
shrill treble bells, and had got one that made a low bubbling note like
the laugh of Sir Charles Wyndham; and Nadine came in.
"Enchanted!" he said. "How is Philistia?"
"Not being the least glad of you," she said. "I wish I could make people
detest me, as Berts detests you. It shows force of character. Oh,
Seymour, what jade! It is almost shameless! Isn't it shameless jade I
mean? Is any one else coming to lunch?"
"Of course not. I don't dilute you with other people; I prefer Nadine
neat. Now let's have the crisis at once. Bring out the lace."
Nadine produced a small parcel and unfolded it.
"Pretty," said he.
Then he looked at it more closely, and tossed it aside. "I hoped it was
more like Venetian point than that," he said. "It's all quite wrong:
the thread's wrong: the stitch is wrong: it smells wrong. Don't tell me
you've bought it."
"No, I shan't tell you," she said.
He took it up again and pondered.
"You got it at Ducane's," he said. "I remember seeing it. Well, take it
back to Ducane, and tell him if he sold it as Venetian, that he must
give you back your money. My dear, it is no wonder that these dealers
get rich, if they can palm off things like that. _C'est fini._--Ah, but
that is an exquisite aquamarine you are wearing. Those little diamond
points round it throw the light into it. How odd people usually are
about jewelry. They think great buns of diamonds are sufficient to make
an adornment. You might as well send up an ox's hind-leg on the table.
What makes the difference is the manner of its presentation. Who is that
lady who employs herself in writing passionate love-novels? She says on
page one that he was madly in love with her, on page two that she was
madly in love with him, on page three that they were madly in love with
each other, and then come some asterisks. (How much more artistic, by
the way, if they printed the asterisks and left out the rest! Then we
should know what it really was like.) You can appreciate nothing until
it is framed or cooked: then you can see the details. The poor lady
presents us with chunks of meat and informs us that they are amorous men
and women. I will write a novel some day, from the detached standpoint,
observing and noting. Then I shall go away, abroad. It is only
bachelors who can write about love. Do you like my tie?"
Seymour had a trick of putting expression into what he said by means of
his hands. He waved and dabbed with them: they fondled each other, and
then started apart as if they had quarreled. Sometimes one finger
pointed, sometimes another, and they were all beautifully manicured.
Antoinette did that, and as she scraped and filed and polished, he
talked his admirable French to her, and asked after the old home in
Normandy, where she learned to make wonderful soup out of carrots and
turnips and shin-bones of beef. At the moment she came in to announce
the readiness of lunch.
"Oh, is it lunch already?" said Nadine. "Can't we have it after half an
hour? I should like to see the jade."
"Oh, quite impossible," said he. "She has taken such pains. It would
distress her. For me, I should prefer not to lunch yet, but she is the
artist now. They are fragile things, Nadine, eggs in spinach. You must
come at once."
"How greedy you are," she said.
"For you that is a foolish thing to say. I am simply thinking of
Antoinette's pride. It is as if I blew a soap-bubble, all iridescent,
and you said you would come to look at it in ten minutes. You shall tell
me news: if you talk you can always eat. What has happened in
Philistia?"
Nadine frowned.
"You think of us all as Philistines," she said, "because we like
simple pleasures, and because we are enthusiastic."
"Ah, you mistake!" he said. "You couple two reasons which have nothing
to do with each other. To be enthusiastic is the best possible
condition, but you must be enthusiastic over what is worth enthusiasm.
Is it so lovely really, that Aunt Dodo has settled to marry the Ripper?
Surely that is a _rechauffée_. You wrote me the silliest letter about
it. Of course it does not matter at all. Much more important is that you
look perfectly exquisite. Antoinette, the spinach is _sans pareil_: give
me some more spinach. But it is slightly _bourgeois_ in Jack the R. to
have been faithful for so many years. It shows want of imagination, also
I think a want of vitality, only to care for one woman."
"That is one more than you ever cared for," remarked Nadine.
"I know. I said it was _bourgeois_ to care for one. There is a
difference. It is also like a troubadour. I am not in the least like a
troubadour. But I think I shall get married soon. It gives one more
liberty: people don't feel curious about one any more. English people
are so odd: they think you must lead a double life, and if you don't
lead the ordinary double life with a wife, they think you lead it with
somebody else and they get curious. I am not in the least curious about
other people: they can lead as many lives as a piano has strings for all
I care, and thump all the strings together, or play delicate arpeggios
on them. Nadine, that hat-pin of yours is simply too divine. I will eat
it pin and all if it is not Fabergé."
Nadine laughed.
"I can't imagine you married," she said. "You would make a very odd
husband."
"I would make a very odd anything," said he. "I don't find any
recognized niche that really fits me, whereas almost everybody has some
sort of niche. Indeed in the course of hundreds of years the niches,
that is the manners of life, have been evolved to suit the sorts of
types which nature produces. They live in rows and respect each other.
But why it should be considered respectable to marry and have hosts of
horrible children I cannot imagine. But it is, and I bow to the united
strength of middle-class opinion. But neither you nor I are really made
to live in rows. We are Bedouins by nature, and like to see a different
sunrise every day. There shall be another tent for Antoinette."
That admirable lady was just bringing them their coffee, and he spoke to
her in French.
"Antoinette, we start for the desert of Sahara to-morrow," he said. "We
shall live in tents."
Antoinette's plump face wrinkled itself up into enchanted smiles.
"_Bien, m'sieur_," she said. "_A quelle heure?_"
Nadine crunched up her coffee-sugar between her white teeth.
"You are as little fitted to cross the desert of Sahara as any one I
ever met," she said.
"I should not cross it: I should--"
"You would be miserable without your jade or your brocade and the sand
would get into your hair, and you would have no bath," she said. "But
every one who thinks has a Bedouin mind: it always wants me to go on and
find new horizons and get nearer to blue mountains."
"The matter with you is that you want and you don't know what you want,"
said he.
Nadine nodded at him. Sometimes when she was with him she felt as if she
was talking to a shrewd middle-aged man, sometimes to a rather affected
girl. Then occasionally, and this had been in evidence to-day, she felt
as if she was talking to some curious mixture of the two, who had a
girl's intuition and a man's judgment. Fond as she was of the friends
whom she had so easily gathered round her, gleeful as was the nonsense
they talked, serious as was her study of Plato, she felt sometimes that
all those sunny hours concerned but the surface of her, that, as she had
said before, the individual, the character that sat behind was not
really concerned in them. And Seymour, when he made mixture of his two
types, had the effect of making her very conscious of the character that
sat behind. He had described it just now in a sentence: it wanted it
knew not what.
"And I want it so frightfully," she said. "It is a pity I don't know
what it is. Because then I should probably get it. One gets what one
wants if one wants enough."
"A convenient theory," he said, "and if you don't get it, you account
for it by saying you didn't want it enough. I don't think it's true. In
any case the converse isn't; one gets a quantity of things which one
doesn't want in the least. Whereas you ought not to get, on the same
theory, the things you passionately desire not to have."
Nadine finished her sugar and lit a cigarette.
"Oh, don't upset every theory," she said. "I am really rather serious
about it."
He regarded her with his head on one side for a moment. "What has
happened is that somebody has asked you to do something, and you have
refused. You are salving your conscience by saying that he doesn't want
it enough, or you would not have refused."
She laughed.
"You are really rather uncanny sometimes," she said.
"Only a guess," he said.
"Guess again then: define," she said.
"The obvious suggestion is that Hugh has proposed to you again."
"You would have been burned as a witch two hundred years ago," said she.
"I should have contributed fagots. Oh, Seymour, that was really why I
came to see you. I didn't care two straws about the foolish lace. They
all tell me I had better marry Hugh, and I wanted to find somebody to
agree with me. I hoped perhaps you might. He is such a dear, you know,
and I should always have my own way: I could always convince him I was
right."
"Most girls would consider that an advantage."
"In that case I am not like most girls; I often wish I was. I wrote an
article a month or two ago about Tolstoi, and read it him, and he
thought it quite wonderful. Well, it wasn't. It was silly rot: I wrote
it, and so of course I know. It came out in a magazine."
"I read it," remarked Seymour in a strictly neutral voice.
"Well, wasn't it very poor stuff?" asked Nadine.
"To be quite accurate," said Seymour, "I only read some of it. I thought
it very poor indeed. If was ignorant and affected."
Nadine gave him an approving smile.
"There you are then! And with Hugh it would be the same in everything
else. He would always think what I did was quite wonderful. They say
love is blind, don't they? So much the worse for love. It seems to me a
very poor sort of thing if in order to love anybody you must lose, with
regard to her, any power of mind and judgment that you may happen to
possess. I don't want to be loved like that. I want people to sing my
praises with understanding, and sit on my defects also with discretion.
If I was perfectly blind too, I suppose it would be quite ideal to marry
him. But I'm not, and I'm not even sure that I wish I was. Again if Hugh
was perfectly critical about me, it would be quite ideal. It seems to me
you must have the same quality of love on both sides, or at any rate
the same quality of affection. People make charming marriages without
any love at all, if they have affection and esteem and respect for each
other."
They had gone back to the drawing-room and Seymour was handing pieces of
his most precious jade to Nadine, who looked at them absently and then
gave them back to him, with the same incuriousness as people give
tickets to be punched by the collector. This Seymour bore with
equanimity, for Nadine was interesting on her own account, and he did
not care whether she looked at his jade or not. But at this moment he
screamed loudly, for she put a little round medallion of exquisitely
carved yellow jade up to her mouth, as if to bite it.
"Oh, Seymour, I'm so sorry," she said. "I wasn't attending to your jade,
which is quite lovely, and subconsciously this piece appeared like a
biscuit. Tell me, do you like jade better than anything else? It is part
of a larger question, which is: 'Do you like things better than people?'
Personally I like people so far more than anything else in the world,
but I don't like any particular person nearly as much. I like them in
groups I suppose. If I married at all, I should probably be a
polyandrist. Certainly if I could marry four or five people at once, I
should marry them all. But I don't want to marry any one of them."
Seymour put the priceless biscuit back into its cabinet.
"Who," he asked, "are this quartette of fortunate swains?"
"Well, Hugh of course would be one," said she, "and I think Berts would
be another. And if it won't be a shock to you, you would be the third,
and Jack the R. would be the fourth. I should then have a variety of
interests: this would be the world and the flesh and the devil, and a
saint."
"St. Seymour," said he, as if trying how it sounded, like a Liberal peer
selecting his title.
"I am afraid you are cast for the devil," said Nadine candidly. "Berts
is the world because he thinks he is cynical. And Jack is the flesh--"
"Because he is so thin?"
"Partly. But also because he is so rich."
Seymour turned the key on his jade. This interested him much more. But
he had to make further inquiries.
"If every girl wanted four husbands," he said, "there wouldn't be enough
men to go round."
"Round what?" asked Nadine, still entirely absorbed in what she was
thinking.
"Round the marriageable females. Or does your plan include poly-womany,
whatever the word is, for men?"
"But of course. There are such lots of bachelors who would marry if they
could have two or three wives, just as there are such lots of girls who
would marry if they could have two or three husbands. All those laws
about 'one man, one wife' were made by ordinary people for ordinary
people. And ordinary people are in the majority. There ought to be a
small county set apart for ridiculous people, with a rabbit fence all
round it, and any one who could be certified to be ridiculous in his
tastes should be allowed to go and live there unmolested. That would be
much better than your plan of going to the Sahara with Antoinette. You
would have to get five householders to certify you as ridiculous, in
order to obtain admission. Then you would do what you chose within the
rabbit fence, but when you wanted to be what they call sensible again
you would come out, and be bound to behave like anybody else, as long as
you were out, under penalty of not being admitted again."
Seymour considered this.
"There's a lot in it," he said, "and there would be a lot of people in
the rabbit fence. I should go there to-morrow and never come out at all.
But a smaller county would be no use. I should start with Kent, not
Rutlandshire, and be prepared to migrate to Yorkshire. I accept the
position of one of your husbands."
"That is sweet of you. I think--"
He interrupted.
"I shall have some more wives," he said. "I should like a lunch wife and
a dinner wife. I want to see a certain kind of person from about mid-day
till tea-time."
"Is that a hint that it is time for me to go?" asked Nadine.
"Nearly. Don't interrupt. But then, if one is not in love with anybody
at all, as you are not, and as I am not, you want a perfectly different
kind of person in the evening. To be allowed only one wife, has evolved
a very tiresome type of woman; a woman who is like a general servant,
and can, so to speak, wait at table, cook a little, and make beds. You
look for somebody who, on the whole, suits you. It is like buying a
reach-me-down suit, which I have never done. It probably fits pretty
well. But if it is to be worn every day until you die, it must fit
absolutely. If it doesn't, there are fifty other suits that would do as
well."
"Translate," said Nadine.
"Surely there is no need. What I mean is that occasionally two people
are ideally fitted. But the fit only occurs intermittently: it is not
common. Short of that, as long as people don't blow their noses wrong,
or walk badly, or admire Carlo Dolci, or fail to admire Bach, so long,
in fact, as they do not have impossible tastes, any phalanx of a
thousand men can marry a similar phalanx of a thousand women, and be as
happy, the one with the other, as with any other permutation or
combination of the thousand. There is a high, big, tremulous, romantic
attachment possible, and it occasionally occurs. Short of that, with the
limitation about Carlo Dolci and Bach, anybody would be as happy with
anybody else, as anybody would be with anybody. We are all on a level,
except the highest of all, and the lowest of all. Life, not death, is
the leveler!"
"Still life is as bad as still death," said she.
Seymour groaned and waved his hands.
"You deserve a good scolding, Nadine, for saying a foolish thing like
that," he said. "You are not with your Philistines now. There is not
Esther here to tell you how marvelous you are, nor Berts to wave his
great legs and say you are like the moon coming out of the clouds over
the sea. I am not in the least impressed by a little juggling with words
such as they think clever. It isn't clever: it is a sort of parrot-talk.
You open your mouth and say something that sounds paradoxical and they
all hunt about to find some sense in it, and think they do."
Seymour got up and began walking up and down the room with his little
short-stepped, waggling walk. "It is the most amazing thing to me," he
said, "that you, who have got brains, should be content to score absurd
little successes with your dreadful clan, who have the most ordinary
intelligences. I love your Philistines, but I cannot bear that they
should think they are clever. They are stupid, and though stupid people
are excellent in their way, they become trying when they think they are
wise. You are not made wise by bathing all day in the silly salt sea,
and reading a book--"
"How did you know?" asked Nadine.
"I didn't: it is merely the sort of thing I imagine you do at Meering.
Aunt Dodo is different: there is no rot about Aunt Dodo, nor is there
about Hugh. But Esther, my poor sister, and the beautiful Berts!"
Nadine took up the cudgels for the clan.
"Ah, you are quite wrong," she said. "You do us no justice at all. We
are eager, we are, really: we want to learn, we think it waste of time
to spend all day and night at parties and balls. We are critical, and
want to know how and why. Seymour, I wish we saw more of you. Whenever I
am with you, I feel like a pencil being sharpened. I can make fine marks
afterwards."
"Keep them for the clan," he said. "No, I can't stand the clan, nor
could they possibly stand me. When Esther squirms and says, 'O Nadine,
how wonderful you are,' I want to be sick, and when I wave my hands and
talk in a high voice as I frequently do, I can see Berts turning pale
with the desire to kill me. Poor Berts! Once I took his arm and he
shuddered at my baleful touch. I must remember to do it again. Really, I
don't think I can be one of your husbands if Berts is to be another."
"Very well: I'll leave out Berts," said she.
"This is almost equivalent to a proposal," said Seymour in some alarm.
She laughed.
"I won't press it," she said. "And now I must go. Thanks for sharpening
me, my dear, though you have done it rather roughly. I am going down to
Meering again to-morrow: London is a mere rabble of colonels and
colonials. Come down if you feel inclined."
"God forbid!" said Seymour piously.
Nadine had spent some time with him, but long after she had gone
something of her seemed to linger in his room. Some subtle aroma of her,
too fine to be purely physical, still haunted the room, and the sound of
her detached crisp speech echoed in the chambers of his brain. He had
never known a girl so variable in her moods: on one day she would talk
nothing but the most arrant nonsense; on another, as to-day, there
mingled with it something extraordinarily tender and wistful; on a third
day she would be an impetuous scholar; on the fourth she threw herself
heart and soul (if she had a heart) into the gay froth of this London
life. Indeed "moods" seemed to be too superficial a word to describe her
aspects: it was as if three or four different personalities were lodged
in that slim body or directed affairs from the cool brain in that small
poised head. It would be scarcely necessary to marry other wives,
according to their scheme, if Nadine was one of them, for it was
impossible to tell even from minute to minute with which of her you were
about to converse, or which of her was coming down to dinner. But all
these personalities had the same vivid quality, the same exuberance of
vitality, and in whatever character she appeared she was like some
swiftly acting tonic, that braced you up and, unlike mere alcoholic
stimulant, was not followed by a reaction. She often irritated him, but
she never resented the expression of his impatience, and above all
things she was never dull. And for once Seymour left incomplete the
dusting of the precious jade, and tried to imagine what it would be like
to have Nadine always here. He did not succeed in imagining it with any
great vividness, but it must be remembered that this was the first time
he had ever tried to imagine anything of the kind.
* * * * *
Edith had left Meering with Dodo two days before and was going to spend
a week with her in town since she was rather tired of her own house. But
she had seen out of the railway-carriage window on the north coast of
Wales, so attractive-looking a golf-links, that she had got out with
Berts at the next station, to have a day or two golfing. The obdurate
guard had refused to take their labeled luggage out, and it was whirled
on to London to be sent back by Dodo on arrival. But Edith declared that
it gave her a sense of freedom to have no luggage, and she spent two
charming days there, and had arrived in London only this afternoon. She
had gone straight to Dodo's house, and had found Jack with her and then
learned the news of their engagement which had taken place only the day
before. Upon which she sprang up and remorselessly kissed both Dodo and
Jack.
"I can't help it if you don't like it," she said; "but that's what I
feel like. Of course it ought to have happened more than twenty years
ago, and it would have saved you both a great deal of bother. Dodo, I
haven't been so pleased since my mass was performed at the Queen's Hall.
You must get married at once, and must have some children. It will be
like living your life all over again without any of those fatal
mistakes, Dodo. Jack--I shall call you Jack now--Jack, you have been
more wonderfully faithful than anybody I ever heard of. You have seen
all along what Dodo was, without being put off by what she did--"
Dodo screamed with laughter.
"Are these meant to be congratulations?" she said. "It is the very
oddest way to congratulate a man on his engagement, by telling him that
he is so wise to overlook his future wife's past. It is also so pleasant
for me."
Edith was still shaking hands with them both, as if to see whether their
hands were fixtures or would come off if violently agitated.
"You know what I mean," she said. "It is useless my pretending to
approve of most things you have done: it is useless for Jack also. But
he marries the essential you, not a parcel of actions."
Jack kept saying "Thanks awfully" at intervals, like a minute gun, and
trying to get his hand away. Eventually Edith released it.
"I am delighted with you both," she said. "And to think that only a
fortnight ago I was still not on speaking terms with you, Dodo. And Jack
wasn't either. I love having rows with people if I know things are going
to come straight afterwards, because then you love them more than ever.
And I knew that some time I should have to make it up with you, Dodo,
though if I was Jack I don't think I could have forgiven--well, you
don't wish me to go on about that. Anyhow, you are ducks, and I shall
leave the young couple alone, and have a wash and brush-up. I have been
playing golf quite superbly."
* * * * *
Edith banged the door behind her, and they heard her shrilly whistling
as she went off down the passages.
Then Dodo turned to Jack.
"Jack, dear, I thought I should burst when Edith kissed you," she said.
"You half shut your eyes and screwed up your face like a dog that is
just going to be whipped. But I love Edith. Now come and sit here and
talk. I have hardly seen you, since--well, since we settled that we
should see a good deal more of each other in the future. I want you to
tell me, oh, such lots of things. How often a month on the average have
you thought about me during all these years? Jack, dear, I want to be
wanted, so much."
"You have always been wanted by me," he said. "It is more a question of
how many minutes in the month I haven't thought about you. They are
easily counted."
He sat down on the sofa by her, as her hand indicated.
"Dodo," he said, "I don't make demands of you, except that you should be
yourself. But I do want that. We are all made differently: if we were
not the world would be a very stupidly simple affair. And you must know
that in one respect anyhow I am appallingly simple. I have never cared
for any woman except you. That is the fact. Let us have it out between
us just once. I have never worn my heart on my sleeve, for any woman to
pluck at, and carry away a mouthful of. There are no bits missing, I
assure you. It is all there, and it is all yours. It is in no way the
worse for wear, because it has had no wear. I feel as if--"
Jack paused a moment: he knew the meaning of his thought, but found it
not so easy to make expression of it.
"I feel as if I had been sitting all my life at a window in my heart,"
he said, "looking out, and waiting for you to come by. But you had to
come by alone. You came by once with my cousin. You came by a second
time with Waldenech. You were bored the first time, you were frightened
the second time. But you were not alone. I believe you are alone now: I
believe you look up to my window. Ah, how stupid all language is! As if
you looked up to it!"
Dodo was really moved, and when she spoke her voice was unsteady.
"I do look up to it, Jack," she said. "Oh, my dear, how the world would
laugh at the idea of a woman already twice married, having romance still
in front of her. But there is romance, Jack. You see--you see you have
run through my life just as a string runs through a necklace of pearls
or beads: beads perhaps is better--yet I don't know. Chesterford gave me
pearls, all the pearls. A necklace of pearls before swine shall we say?
I was swine, if you understand. But you always ran through it all, which
sounds as if I meant you were a spendthrift, but you know what I do
mean. Really I wonder if anybody ever made a worse mess of her life than
I have done, and found it so beautifully cleaned up in the middle. But
there you were--I ought to have married you originally: I ought to have
married you unoriginally. But I never trusted my heart. You might easily
tell me that I hadn't got one, but I had. I daresay it was a very little
one, so little that I thought it didn't matter. I suppose I was like the
man who swore something or other on the crucifix, and when he broke his
oath, he said the crucifix was such a small one."
She paused again.
"Jack, are you sure?" she asked. "I want you to have the best life that
you can have. Are you sure you give yourself the best chance with me? My
dear, there will be no syllable of reproach, on my lips or in my mind,
if you reconsider. You ought to marry a younger woman than me. You will
be still a man at sixty, I shall be just a thing at fifty-eight."
Dodo took a long breath and stood up.
"Marry Nadine," she said. "She is so like what I was: you said it
yourself. And she hasn't been battered like me. I think she would marry
you. I know how fond she is of you, anyhow, and the rest will follow. I
can't bear to think of you pushing my Bath chair. God knows, I have
spoiled many of your years. But, God knows, I don't want to spoil more
of them. She will give you all that I could have given you twenty years
ago. Ah, my dear, the years. How cruel they are! How they take away from
us all that we want most! You love children, for instance, Jack. Perhaps
I shall not be able to give you children. Nadine is twenty-one. That is
a long time ago. You should consider. I said 'yes' to you yesterday, but
perhaps I had not thought about it sufficiently. I have thought since.
Before you came down to Meering I was awake so long one night, wondering
why you came. I was quite prepared that it should be Nadine you wanted.
And, oh, how gladly I would give Nadine to you, instead of giving
myself: I should see: I should understand. At first I thought that I
should not like it, that I should be jealous, to put it quite frankly,
of Nadine. But somehow now that I know that your first desire was for
me, I am jealous no longer. Take Nadine, Jack! I want you to take
Nadine. It will be better. We know each other well enough to trust each
other, and now that I tell you that there will be nothing but rejoicing
left in my heart, if you want Nadine, you must believe that I tell you
the entire truth. I know very well about Nadine. She will not marry
Hugh. She wants somebody who has a bigger mind. She wants also to put
Hugh out of the question. She does not mean to marry him, and she would
like it to be made impossible. Woo Nadine, dear Jack, and win her. She
will give you all I could once have given you, all that I ought to have
given you."
At that moment Dodo was making the great renunciation of her life. She
had been completely stirred out of herself and she pleaded against her
own cause. She was quite sincere and she wanted Jack's happiness more
than her own. She believed even while she renounced all claim on him,
that her best chance of happiness was with him, for it had taken her no
time at all to make up her mind when he proposed to her yesterday. And
she had not exaggerated when just now she told him that he ran through
her life like a string that keeps the beads of time in place. She had
never felt for another man what she had felt for him, and her
declaration of his freedom was a real renunciation, made impulsively but
most generously and completely. She really meant it, and she did not
pause to consider that the offer was one of which no man could
conceivably take advantage. And Jack felt and knew her sincerity.
"You are absolutely free, my dear," she said. "Absolutely! And I will
come to your wedding, and dance at it if you like, for joy that you are
happy."
He got up too.
"There will be no wedding unless you come to it," he said. "Dance at it,
Dodo, but marry me. Nobody else will do."
Dodo looked him full in the face.
"Edith was quite right to remind you of--of what I have done," she said.
"And I am quite right to forget it," said he.
She shook her head, smiling a little tremulously.
"Oh, Jack," she said in a sigh.
He took her close to him.
"My beloved," he said, and kissed her.