I asked her once, but long after I had realised that loving Shelmerdene
could not be my one business in life, if she did not feel that
perhaps--I was tentative--she would some day be punished. "But how young
you are!" she said. "You don't really think I am a sort of Zuleika
Dobson, do you?--just because one wretched man once thought it worth
while to shoot himself because of me, and just because men have that
peculiar form of Sadism which makes them torture themselves through
their love, when they have ceased to be loved.... It's a horrible sight,
my dear--men grovelling in their unreturned emotions so as to get the
last twinge of pain out of their humiliation. I've seen them grovelling,
and they knew all the time that it would do no good, merely put them
farther away from me--or from any woman, for the matter of that. But
they like grovelling, these six-foot, stolid men."
"But haven't _you_ ever been on your knees, Shelmerdene?"
"Of course I have. Lots of times. I always begin like that--in fact,
I've never had an affair which didn't begin with my being down and
under. I am so frightfully impressionable....
"You see," she touched my arm, "I am rather a quick person. I mean I
fall in love, or whatever you call my sort of emotion, quickly. While
the man is just beginning to think that I've got rather nice eyes, and
that I'm perhaps more amusing than the damfool women he's known so far,
I'm frantically in love. I do all my grovelling then. And, Dikran! if
you could only see me, if you could only be invisible and see me loving
a man more than he loves me--you simply wouldn't know me. And I make
love awfully well, in my quiet sort of way, much better than any
man--and different love-speeches to every different man, too! I say the
divinest things to them--and quite seriously, thank God! The day I can't
fall in love with a man seriously, and tell him he's the only man I've
ever _really_ loved, and _really_ believe it when I'm saying it--the day
I can't do that I shall know I'm an old, old woman, too old to live any
more."
"Then, of course, you will die?" I suggested.
"Of course I will die," she said. "But not vulgarly--I mean I won't make
a point of it, and feel a fat coroner's eyes on my body as my soul goes
up to Gabriel. I shall die in my bed, of a broken heart. My heart will
break when I begin to fade. I shall die before I have faded...."
"No, you won't, Shelmerdene," I said. "Many women have sworn that, from
Theodosia to La Pompadour, but they have not died of broken hearts
because they never realised when they began to fade, and no man ever
dared tell them, not even a Roi Soleil."
"Oh, don't be pedantic, Dikran, and don't worry me about what other
women will or won't do. You will be quoting the 'Dolly Dialogues' at me
next, and saying 'Women will be women all the world over.'
"It is always like that about me and men," she said. "I burn and burn
and fizzle out. And all the time the man is wondering if I am playing
with him or not, if it is worth his while to fall in love with me or
not--poor pathos, as if he could help it in the end! And then, at last,
when he realises that he is in love, he begins to say the things I had
longed for him to say four weeks before; every Englishman in love is
simply bound to say, at one time or another, that he would adore to lie
with his beloved in a gondola in Venice, looking at the stars; any
Englishman who doesn't say that when he is in love is a suspicious
character, and it will probably turn out that he talks French perfectly.
"And when at last he has fallen in love," she said dreamily, "he wants
me to run away with him, and he is very hurt and surprised when I
refuse, and pathetically says something 'about my having led him to
expect that I loved him to death, and would do anything for or with
him.' The poor little man doesn't know that he is behind the times, that
he could have done anything he liked with me the first week we met, when
I was madly in love with him, that when I was dying for him to ask me to
go away with him, and would gladly have made a mess of my life at one
word from him--but four weeks later I would rather have died than go
away with him.
"Only once," she said, "I was almost beaten. I fell in love with a stone
figure. Women are like sea-gulls, they worship stone figures.... I went
very mad, Dikran. He told me that he didn't deserve being loved by
me--he admired me tremendously, you see--because he hadn't it in his
poor soul to love any one. He simply couldn't love, he said ... and he
felt such a brute. He said that often, poor boy--he felt such a brute!
He passed a hand over his forehead and, with a tragic little English
gesture, tried to be articulate, to tell me how intensely he felt that
he was missing the best things in life, and yet couldn't rectify it,
because .... 'Oh, my dear, I'm a hopeless person!' he said despairingly,
and I forgot to pity myself in pitying him.
"But he got cold again. He weighed his words carefully: No, he liked me
as much as he could like any one, but he didn't _think_ he loved
me--mark that glorious, arrogant _think_, Dikran!... He was very
ambitious; with the sort of confident, yet intensive, nerve-racking
ambition which makes great men. Very young, very wonderful, brilliantly
successful in his career at an age when other men were only beginning
theirs--an iron man, with the self-destructive selfishness of ice, which
freezes the thing that touches it, but itself melts in the end.... He
froze _me_. Don't think I'm exaggerating, please, but, as he spoke--it
was at lunch, and a coon band was playing--I died away all to myself. I
just died, and then came to life again, coldly, and bitterly, and
despairingly, but still loving him.... I couldn't _not_ love him, you
see. His was the sort of beauty that was strong, and vital, and a little
contemptuous, and with an English cleanness about it that was
scented.... I am still loyal to my first despairing impression of him.
And I knew that I was really in love with him, because I couldn't bear
the idea of ever having loved any one else. I was sixteen again, and
worshipped a hero, a man who did things.
"I was a fool, of course--to believe him, I mean. But when women lose
their heads they lose the self-confidence and pride of a lifetime,
too--and, anyway, it's all rubbish about pride; there isn't any pride in
absolute love. There's a name to be made out of a brilliant epigram on
love and pride--think it over, Dikran.... What an utter fool I was to
believe him! As he spoke, over that lunch-table, I watched his grey
English eyes, which tried to look straight into mine but couldn't,
because he was shy; he was trying to be frightfully honest with me, you
see, and being so honest makes decent men shy. He felt such a brute, but
he had to warn me that in any love affair with him, he ... yes, he did
love me, in his way, he suddenly admitted. But his way wasn't, couldn't
ever be, mine. He simply couldn't give himself wholly to any one, as I
was doing. And he so frightfully wanted to--to sink into my love for
him.... 'Shelmerdene, it's all so damnable,' he said pathetically, and
his sincerity bit into me. But I had made up my mind. I was going to do
the last foolish thing in a foolish life--I'm a sentimentalist, you
know.
"I believed him. But I clung to my pathetic love affair with both hands,
so tight--so tight that my nails were white and blue with their pressure
against his immobility. I made up my mind not to let go of him, however
desperate, however hopeless ... it was an attempt at life. He was all I
wanted, I could face life beside him. Other men had been good enough to
play with, but my stone figure--why, I had been looking for him all my
life! But in my dreams the stone figure was to come wonderfully to life
when I began to worship it--in actual life my worshipping could make the
stone figure do nothing more vital than crumble up bits of bread in a
nervous effort to be honest with me! I took him at that--I told you I
was mad, didn't I?--I took him at his own value, for as much as I could
get out of him.
"I set out to make myself essential to him, mentally, physically, every
way.... If he couldn't love me as man to woman, then he would have to
love me as a tree trunk loves the creepers round it; I was going to
cling all round him, but without his knowing. But I hadn't much
time--just a month or perhaps six weeks. He was under orders for Africa,
where he was going to take up a big administrative job, amazing work for
so young a man; but, then, he was amazing. Just a few weeks I had, then,
to make him feel that he couldn't bear life, in Africa or anywhere,
without me. And, my dear! life didn't hold a more exquisite dream than
that which brought a childish flush under my rouge, the very dream of
dreams, of how, a few days before he went, he would take me in his arms
and tell me that he couldn't bear to go alone, and that I must follow
him, and together we would face all the scandal that would come of
it.... I passionately wanted the moment to come when he would offer to
risk his career for me; I wanted him to offer me his ambition, and then
I would consider whether to give it back to him or not. But he didn't. I
lost.
"And I had seemed so like winning during that six weeks between that
horrible lunch and his going away! London love affairs are always
scrappy, hole-in-the-corner things, but we managed to live together now
and again. And then, _mon Dieu_! he suddenly clung to me and said he
wasn't seeing enough of me, that London was getting between us, and that
we must go away somewhere into the country for at least a week before he
left, to breathe and to love.... Wouldn't you have thought I was
winning? I thought so, and my dreams were no more dreams, but actual,
glorious certainties; he would beg me on his knees to follow him to
Africa!
"We went away ten days before he sailed, to a delightful little inn a
few miles from Llangollen. Seven days we spent there. Wonderful,
intimate days round about that little inn by the Welsh stream; we were
children playing under a wilderness of blue sky, more blue than Italy's
because of the white and grey puffs of clouds which make an English sky
more human than any other; and we played with those toy hills which are
called mountains in Wales, and we were often silent because there was
too much to talk about.... And as we sat silently facing each other in
the train back to London, I knew I had won. There were three days left.
"In London, he dropped me here at my house, and went on to his flat; he
was to come in the evening to fetch me out to dinner. But he was back
within an hour. I had to receive him in a kimono. I found him pacing up
and down this room, at the far end there, by the windows. He came
quickly to me, and told me that his orders had been changed--he had to
go to Paris first, spend two days there, and then to Africa via
Marseilles. 'To Paris?' I said, not understanding. 'Yes, to-night--in
two hours,' he said, quickly, shyly. He was embarrassed at the idea of a
possible scene. But he was cold. He must go at once, he said. And he
looked eager to go, to go and be doing. He shook both my hands--I hadn't
a word--and almost forgot to kiss me. It was just as though nothing had
ever happened between us, as though we hadn't ever been to Wales, or
played, and laughed, and loved; as though he had never begged me to run
my fingers through his hair, because I had said his hair was a garden
where gold and green flowers grew. He was going away; and he was just as
when I had first met him, or at that lunch--I hadn't gained anything at
all, it was all just a funny, tragic, silly dream ... he had come and
now he was going away. He would write to me, he said, and he would be
back in sixteen months....
"I'm not a bad loser, you know; I can say such and such a thing isn't
for me, and then try and undermine my wretchedness with philosophy. But
I simply didn't exist for a few months; I just went into my little shell
and stayed there, and was miserable all to myself, and not bitter at
all, because I sort of understood him, and knew he had been true to
himself. It was I who had failed in trying to make him false to his own
nature.... But there's a limit to all things; there comes a time when
one can't bear any more gloom, and then there is a reaction. No one with
any courage can be wretched for ever--anyway, I can't. So, suddenly,
after a few months, I went out into the world again, and played and
jumped about, and made my body so tired that my mind hadn't a chance to
think.
"His first few letters were cold, honest things, a little pompous in
their appreciations of me tacked on to literary descriptions of the
Nile, and the desert, and the natives. I wrote to him only once, a
wonderful letter, but I hadn't the energy to write again--what was the
good?
"At the end of a year I was really in the whirl of the great world
again. There were a few kicks left in Shelmerdene yet, I told myself
hardly, and Maurice became just a tender memory. I never thought of how
he would come back to England soon, as he had said, and what we would do
then, for I had so dinned it into myself that he wasn't for me that I
had entirely given up the quest of the Blue Bird. He was just a tender
memory ... and impressionable me fell in love again. But not as with
Maurice--I was top-dog this time. He was the sort of man that didn't
count except in that I loved him. He was the servant of my reaction
against Maurice, and to serve me well he had to help me wipe out all the
castles of sentiment I had built around Maurice. And the most gorgeous
castle of all I had built round that little Welsh inn! Something must be
done about that, I told myself, but for a long time I was afraid of the
ghost of Maurice, which might still haunt the place, and bring him back
overpoweringly to me. It was a risk; by going there with some one else I
might either succeed in demolishing Maurice's last castle, or I might
tragically have to rebuild all the others, and worship him again.
"He had continued to write to me, complaining of my silence. And he had
somehow become insistent--he missed me, it seemed. He didn't write that
he loved me, but he forgot to describe the Nile, and wrote about love as
though it were a real and beautiful thing and not a pastime to be wedged
in between fishing and hunting. I wrote to him once again, rather
lightly, saying that I had patched up my heart and might never give him
a chance to break it again. That was just before I went to demolish the
last castle of my love for him. For I did go; one day my young man
produced a high-powered car which could go fast enough to prevent one
sleeping from boredom, and I said 'Us for Llangollen,' and away we
went....
"The divinest thing about that little inn was its miniature dining-room,
composed almost entirely of a large bow-window and a long Queen Anne
refectory table. There were three tables, of which never more than one
was occupied. Maurice and I had sat at the table by the window, and now
my reaction and I sat there again; we looked out on to a toy garden
sloping down to a brown stream which made much more noise than you could
think possible for so narrow a thing. My back was to the door, and I sat
facing a large mirror, with the garden and the stream on my right; he
sat facing the window, adoring me, the adventure, the stream, and the
food. And I was happy too, for now I realised that I had fallen out of
love with Maurice, for his ghost didn't haunt the chair beside me, and I
could think of him tenderly, without regret. I was happy--until, in the
mirror in front of me, I saw the great figure of Maurice, and his face,
at the open door. Our eyes met in the mirror, the eyes of statues,
waiting.... I don't know what I felt--I wasn't afraid, I know. Perhaps I
wasn't even ashamed. I don't know how long he stood there, filling the
doorway. Not more than a few seconds, but all the intimacy of six weeks
met in our glance in that mirror. At last he took his eyes off mine and
looked at the man beside me, who hadn't seen him. I thought his lips
twitched, and his eyes became adorably stern, and then the mirror
clouded over.... When I could see again the door was closed, and Maurice
was gone. The magic mirror was empty of all but my unbelieving eyes, and
the profile of the man beside me, who hadn't seen him and never knew
that I had lived six weeks while he ate a potato....
"I stayed my week out in Wales, because I always try to do what is
expected of me. When I got home, right on the top of a pile of
letters--I had given orders for nothing, not even wires, to be sent on
to me--was a wire, which had arrived one hour after I had left for
Wales. It was from Southampton, and it said: 'Just arrived. Am going
straight up to the little palace in Wales because of memories. Will
arrive there dinner-time. Shall we dine together by the window?'
"And so, you see, I had won and lost and won again, but how
pathetically.... Am I such a bad woman, d'you think?"
_The London Venture_: VIII
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