MISUNDERSTANDING.
A quarrel with Victoria?--no, not a quarrel, I want another word. Only
‘a something.’ What is it? I do not know.
Victoria has become ‘unaccountable’--we will put it in that way. There
is no knowing what to be at with Victoria: the grievance is there. And
I have tried so hard to find out.
That affair of the Peak was a lesson, or I tried to make it one. ‘Leave
Victoria alone,’ it seemed to say, ‘and keep your homage, respectful
and other, to yourself. Victoria wants to tell you something, but does
not know how to begin. Cannot you save her the trouble? You confuse her
with your homage, respectful and other, and she wants you to leave her
alone. Curly stops the way.
‘What matter that Curly is as vague as something in Orion! He has taken
her heart with him into space. Leave her alone.
‘Do you want further proof of it? How many more times must you see her
prostrate before his shrine in the thicket, as you saw her yesterday,
when you dogged her footsteps like a spy? How many more times must
you hear her cry, “Come back, come back, and help me!” between her
passionate kisses of the bits of fetich on the boughs?
‘And, if there were no Curly, how would that avail? Victoria is not for
you. Are you to stay here for ever? You know you are not. And how could
you take Victoria away?
‘Victoria is a savage; and who would have her anything else? Will you
put Pocahontas in crêpe de Chine and surah, in lace, embroideries, and
gimp, and transplant her to the London drawing-rooms, to make sport for
the London crowd? Are you looking forward to this: “A lady whose tall
figure is well known in London society wore black silk, opening over a
front of white silk muslin, draped from neck to feet, and confined at
the waist with a pointed band of black velvet, fastened by a diamond
clasp”?
‘It will not do.
‘Friendship is impossible on your side: when you are with her, you
invariably play the fool. Keep out of her way.’
So, I am on longer Victoria’s shadow. I wander alone. I make up to the
Ancient, and borrow his fowling piece, to pay my respects to the wild
birds. The wild birds do not mind. I trouble them a good deal less than
I trouble Victoria. It is an old fowling piece; how did men contrive
to kill anything in the days when it was made, especially to kill one
another? The slaughter of Malplaquet quite enhances one’s respect
for the race, and takes rank with Stonehenge and the Pyramids among
material marvels wrought by simple means.
I have kept this up for some days, and I am popping at a flock of gulls
this morning, with so slight a breach of the good understanding between
us that the flock increases, by the effect of intelligent curiosity, as
the sport goes on, when Victoria stands between me and the light.
It is here that Victoria begins to be unaccountable: on the strength of
this incident, I made the charge.
For Victoria has come to look for me. There is no need to guess it: she
says so in terms. Only mark what follows this admission, and say if I
am without a grievance.
‘Why have you come to look for me, Victoria?’
‘I am so miserable.’
‘Why?’
‘You make me miserable.’
‘What have I done, Princess?’
‘What have _I_ done? You have hardly spoken to me for three days.’
‘I thought you would like that best, Victoria.’
‘Why should you think so? What would this place be to me, if we were
bad friends?’
‘I trouble you.’
‘Leave me to judge of that. There cannot be any harm in seeing you, in
talking to you.’
So, I leave the disgusted gulls; and we ramble to the further side of
the Island, to the place where I landed in the dawn of history to find
the New World.
We do not talk much at first. I am working out the situation, with due
aid from certain phrases of convention that help to reconcile poverty
of thought to self-respect. These little felicities of epigram on the
inconsistency of Woman never helped anybody to comprehension of her;
yet, if they were taken out of its phrase books, the world would be
acutely sensible of the void. Few people are inconsistent, but a good
many people fail to understand. I wish I were not so dull. I seem to
have found Victoria to about as much purpose as a savage might find a
watch.
So, for some precious moments, it is the old footing again. We are as
free as the other animals about us, and perhaps still more exquisitely
happy. It might be rash, though, to attempt to answer for any but
ourselves. Our myriads of birds and insects, and our select assortment
of beasts, seem to have a good time--a life in the sun, and a quick
death in their prime of strength, with their business hours mainly
employed in dining, and in exercise in the open air. Most of the beasts
belong to the Island family as much as the men and women; and Victoria
could give them each a name. With her, they only play at being wild;
and the outlaw goats seek her as regularly for their morning caress as
their friends who have made their peace with civilisation.
If she and I could be like this for ever! But we cannot. We seem to
be friends and strangers, by turns; for the life of me, I know not
why. We move to and from each other in some mysterious way. For, what
happened just now, happens again and again. I am with her, as I could
always wish to be, till some subtle change in her manner makes me think
she wants me to keep away. I keep away, and she seeks me out, with
reproaches for coldness and neglect. We reach perfection, and then
imperfection begins. Slowly, slowly, as some change in the colour of a
plant, comes Victoria’s new mistrust of me, or of herself. What is it?
what can it be? It is a movement of some strange law of her emotions;
but what is the law? The savage has learned so much about his watch
as to feel the utter inadequacy of the reflection that watches have
curious ways. He cannot examine, but he begins to guess. There is but
one guess to make, the old one--it must be the phantasm of the living
Curly that stands between us and the perfect light. We know what came
of that guess before. If I step back to make way for him, Victoria
will follow, to know the reason why. A pest on him for a phantom that
plays us on and off: it is neither my fault, nor Victoria’s; it is the
phantom that does not know its own mind!