Talk about the complex heart of a woman. It is nothing to that of a man.
Trennahan had loved a good many women in a good many ways. Perhaps he
understood women as well as any man of his day: he had been bred by
women of the world, and his errant fancy had occasionally sent him into
other strata. He also thought that he knew himself. His mind, his heart,
his senses, the best and the worst in him, had been engaged so often and
so actively that he could have drawn diagrams of each, alone or in
combination, with accommodating types of woman. He also, without
generalising too freely, knew men, and he had spent ten years of his
life in diplomacy. But he now stood before himself as puzzled as he was
aghast.
If his grip upon himself had suddenly relaxed, and he had spent a wild
night with the wild young men of San Francisco, he should not have been
particularly surprised: he had been living on an exalted plane for the
last ten months. But that he loved Magdaléna with the love of his life,
that he realised in her some vague youthful ideal, that she was the
woman created for the better part of him, that his highest happiness was
to be found in her, he had never doubted from the minute he had finished
his long communion with himself and determined to marry her. And every
moment he had spent with her had strengthened the tie. Nothing about her
but had pleased him: her intellect, her pride, her reticence, her
difference from other women; even, after the first shock to his taste
was over, her lack of beauty. It was true that she had no great power
over his pulses, but he was tired of his pulses. She appealed to his
tenderness and deeper affections as no woman had done. Above all, she
had given him peace of mind; and she held his future in her hands.
And now?
Helena Belmont was that most dangerous rival of other women,--a girl
whom men loved desperately with no attendant loss of self-respect.
Whatever their passion, they felt a keen personal delight in the purity
of her mind; and they admired themselves the more that they appreciated
her cleverness. She was not only a woman to love but to idolise; she
gave even these prosaic San Francisco youths vague promptings to
distinguish themselves by some great and noble action, sending her
shafts straight through the American brain to those dumb inherited
instincts which had straggled down through the centuries from mediæval
ancestors. Her very selfishness--which she was pleased to call
Paganism--charmed them: it was one of the divine rights of the woman
born to rule men and to create a happiness for one unimagined by lesser
women. No man but idealised her, unfanciful as he might be, not so much
for her beauty or gifts, or for all combined, as because when she gave
herself it would be for the last as it was for the first time. As the
reader knows, there was nothing ideal about Helena. Even her
fastidiousness was natural in view of her upbringing. She was a most
practical young flirt, with a very distinct intention of having her own
way as long as she lived. The wealth and petting and adulation which had
surrounded her from birth had made a thorough-going egoist of her,
albeit a most charming one; for she was warm-hearted, impulsive,
generous, and kind--in her own way. Naturally the men for whom her
lovely eyes beamed welcome, for whom her tantalising mouth pouted into
smiles, thought her nothing short of a goddess, and were moved to
inarticulate rhyme.
* * * * *
Trennahan had met many more women who were beautiful, seductive,
dashing, and withal fastidious, than had these young men of a
cosmopolitan and still chaotic State; nevertheless, he might have been
Adam ranging the dreary solitudes of Paradise, facing about for the
first time upon the first woman. Helena was the type of woman for whom
such men as meet her have the strongest passion of their lives, if for
no other reason than because she induces an exaggeration of their best
faculties and a consequent exaltation of self-appreciation, as
distinguished from mere masculine self-sufficiency. Never is the briefly
favoured one so much of a man apart from a type, looking down upon that
type with pitying scorn. This is a mere matter of fascination, too
subtle, and composed of too many parts for man's analysis, but it is the
most telling force in the clashing of the sexes.
Trennahan was an extremely practical man. He called things by their
right names, and scorned to turn his head aside when life or himself was
to be looked squarely in the eye. It is true that he cursed himself for
a fool. He was neither in his youth nor in his dotage; he was in that
long intermediate period where a man may hope that his will and sound
common-sense are in their prime,--the interval of the minimum of
mistakes. Nevertheless, he was as madly in love with Helena Belmont as
was the first man with the first woman, as a boy with his first
mistress, an old man with his last. He admitted the fact and ordered his
brain to make the best of the situation.
He was not conscious of any change in his feelings for Magdaléna except
that he no longer desired to marry her. The sense of rest, of
comradeship, the tenderness and affection, had not abated. He was just
as sure that she was the woman for him to marry as he had been two weeks
ago; and he knew that he could not make a greater mistake than to marry
Helena Belmont. He believed that it would be years before she would be
capable of loving any man for any length of time. Such women not only
develop slowly, but they have too much to give, men too little. The
clever woman is abnormal in any case, being a divergence from the
original destiny of her sex. The woman who is beautiful, fascinating,
passionate, and clever is a development with which man has not kept
pace.
He spent the greater part of the three days following the dinner, on the
cliffs beyond the Golden Gate. There was no great moral battle going on
in his mind; he intended to marry Magdaléna. One of his pet theories was
that one secret of the rottenness underlying the social, and in natural
sequence, the political structure of the United States was the absence
of a convention. Men were on their knees to women so long as their
pleasure was materially abetted by the attitude; but the moment the
motive ceased to exist, any display of chivalry toward her would be as
useless and wasted as toward the ordinary run of women. It is always the
woman of the moment, never woman in general. The so-called chivalry of
American men does not exist; the misconception has arisen out of the
multitudinous examples of American subserviency to the individual
woman,--which is part of a habit of exaggeration natural to a youthful
nation. There is an utter absence of all responsibility that is not the
concomitant of personal desire.
The new country is full of good impulses with little to bind them
together. Children respect their parents if they feel like it, just as
they are polite when in a responsive mood, not through any sense of
convention. The American press is an exemplification of this absence of
_noblesse oblige_, and more particularly in its treatment of women. Even
when not moved by personal jealousy or spite, the total lack of respect
with which the American press treats women who have not in any way
challenged public opinion--society women with whom the public has no
concern, women upon whom either the misfortune of circumstances or of a
powerful individuality has fallen--is the most significant foreboding of
the degeneration of a national character while yet half grown. It is
individualism, which is a polite term for rampant selfishness, run mad,
a fussy contempt and hatred for the traditions of older nations.
Fifty years ago, when the United States was still so old-fashioned as to
be hardly "American," it was more or less bound together by the
conventions it had inherited from the great civilisations that begat it.
These conventions exist to-day only in men of the highest breeding,
those with six or eight generations behind them of refinement,
consequence, and fastidiousness in association. In these men, the
representatives of an aristocracy that is in danger of being crippled
and perhaps swamped by plutocracy, exists the convention which forces
the most deplorable degenerate of old-world aristocracy to manifest
himself a gentleman in every crucial test. So thoroughly did Trennahan
comprehend these facts, so profound was his contempt for the second-rate
men of his country, that he was almost self-conscious about his honour.
He would no more have asked Magdaléna to release him, nor have adopted
the still more contemptible method of forcing her to break the
engagement, than he would have been the ruin of an ignorant girl. But he
would have sacrificed every green blade in his soul to have met Helena
Belmont a year ago, and would have taken the chances with defiance and
the consequences without a murmur.
To marry Magdaléna in June was impossible. That he should ever cease to
desire Helena Belmont, to regret the very complete happiness which might
have been his for a few years, was a matter of doubt,--with even
possibilities. But there must be a long intermission before he could
marry another woman. His determination to leave California for a year
was fixed, but what excuse to offer Don Roberto and Magdaléna was the
question which beset him in all his waking hours and amid all his
torments.
During these three days he avoided seeing Magdaléna alone. On the
afternoon of the fourth day he came face to face with Helena Belmont in
the Mercantile Library.
She was leaving as he entered. They looked at each other for a moment,
then without a word both walked toward a room at the right of the door.
This was a long narrow apartment leading off the great room, and was
darker, dustier, gloomier, grimmer. As the building stood almost against
another of equal height, its side windows looked upon blank walls; but
some measure of grey light was coaxed down from the narrow strip above
by means of reflectors. The walls were lined with old books bound in
calf black with age, and in the centre was a long narrow table which
looked as if it should have a coffin on it. This room had depressed many
cheerful lovers in its time; it was enough to drive tormented souls to
suicide.
Trennahan and Helena sat down in an angle where they were least likely
to be seen.
"What are you going to do?" asked Helena.
"I am going away for a year as soon as I can invent a decent excuse."
"Then shall you come back and marry 'Léna?"
"Yes."
"Suppose you still love me?"
"It will make no difference. And Time works wonders. You will have quite
forgotten me."
"I sincerely hope I shall." Her voice shook. There was agitation in
every curve of her figure. But had anyone entered, their faces could not
have been distinguished two feet away. The sky was grey. There was no
light to reflect.
"It is the first time I haven't got what I wanted," she said
ingenuously.
"It will make your next triumph the keener. I shall be glad to serve as
a shadow for the high lights."
"I have suffered horribly in the last week."
"So have I, if that consoles you. But I have had a good deal of
suffering in my life, one way and another, and I shall weather it. I
wish I could take your share."
"Shouldn't you like to marry me?"
"Of course I should. Why do you ask such foolish questions?"
"I want to talk it all out. I love 'Léna, but I don't love her better
than I do myself, and I don't see why I should suffer instead of she.
Don't you think that if we told her she would release you?"
"Undoubtedly; but I shall not ask her. Nor must you think of such a
thing. Why two young and exceptionally fortunate girls should want what
is left of me God only knows; but if they do the prior rights must win
the day. If I don't marry 'Léna, I shall marry no woman,--not even you."
She gave him a swift glance. His face was not as stern as his words.
"You know that you would," she said with decision. "You are too
honourable to break the engagement, but you would marry me if it were
broken for you."
He drew his brows together and bent his face to hers. "Listen to me," he
said. "I mean what I say. I love you,--how much you have not the vaguest
idea; but I will not have her happiness ruined. If you ask her to break
the engagement, I shall never see you again. Will you remember that?"
"I suppose you are right. I had not really thought of asking her. But
I've got to tell her that I love you. I feel like a hideous hypocrite. I
can hardly look her in the face. I'll promise not to betray you, but I
must tell her that. She has been so sweet to me this last week, ever
since that night at Monterey. She's the very best creature that ever
lived. Then I'll ask papa to take me away. You need not go."
"I shall go. Can't you go away without saying anything to her about it?
I don't see why her peace of mind should be disturbed."
"I should feel just as guilty when I came back."
"You would have forgotten it by that time."
"Oh, no; I shouldn't! I shouldn't!"
There was no mistaking the passion in her voice. Trennahan half rose,
but sat down again. "I would rather you wrote it to her after you left,"
he said. "Then there would be no danger of saying too much. If you want
to go to Europe, I will go to the South Sea Islands."
"Well, I will arrange it that way, if you like."
Her head was lowered. She spoke dejectedly. There was little of the old
Helena manifest. In truth, she had been making a mighty effort to
control herself for the first time in her life. She hardly knew whether
she wished to do what was right or not; for the moment she was dominated
by a stronger will than her own. She drew a deep sigh. "I wish I could
take it as coolly as you do," she said.
"I take it less coolly. But I am older and used to self-control."
"I hate self-control."
"So do I."
"I feel as if life were quite over. I would a great deal rather die than
not. I wish I were older. I don't know what to do. I feel that it cannot
be right to throw away the happiness of one's life, but I don't know how
to hold you, and, above all, I don't want to hurt 'Léna. I thought that
I knew so much; but I know nothing at all--nothing."
"If you do what is right, you will be very glad a year hence."
"A year is such a long time." Her head dropped lower. She looked utterly
dejected. In a moment she put her handkerchief to her face and cried
silently. The undemonstrativeness of the act, so unlike her usual
volcanic energy, touched him out of prudence. He put his arm about her
and pressed her head against his shoulder. In a moment he laid his face
against hers and closed his eyes to crowd back the tears that sprang
from the depths of his soul. When he opened his eyes, it was to meet
those of Magdaléna.