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LOVE,--AND
THE PHILOSOPHER
MARIE CORELLI
LOVE,--AND
THE PHILOSOPHER
_A Study in Sentiment_
BY
MARIE CORELLI
AUTHOR OF
_“Thelma,” “Barrabas,” “The Sorrows of Satan,”
“The Life Everlasting,” “Innocent,”
“The Young Diana,” etc._
THE RYERSON PRESS
TORONTO
COPYRIGHT, 1923,
By GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
[Illustration]
LOVE,--AND THE PHILOSOPHER. II
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOREWORD
The following story is of the simplest character, purposely so designed.
It has no “abnormal” or “neurotic” episodes; no “problems” and no
“psychoanalysis.” Its “sentiment” is of an ordinary, everyday type,
common to quiet English homes where the “sensational” press finds no
admittance, and where a girl may live her life as innocent of evil as a
rose;--where even the most selfish of cynical “philosophers” may
gradually evolve something better than Self. There are no “thrills,” no
“brain storms,” no “doubtful moralities”--no unnatural overstrained
“emotionalisms,” whatever. The personages who figure in the tale are
drawn absolutely from life--“still life” I might call it--and are fit to
make the acquaintance of any “Young Person” of either sex. I have hopes
that the “Philosopher,” though selfish, may be liked, when he is known,
for his _un_selfishness,--and that the “Sentimentalist” may waken a
sister-sympathy among those many charming women, who though wishing to
be gentle and just to their admirers, do not always know their own minds
in affairs of love. Whether my heroine chose the right partner for life
is for my readers to determine. I myself am not more sure about it than
she was!
RIGHT
M. C.
LOVE,--AND THE PHILOSOPHER
CHAPTER I
“You women are always so sentimental!” said the Philosopher, leaning
back in a comfortable garden chair and lazily flicking off the ash from
an excellent cigar;--“You overdo the thing. You carry every emotion to
an extreme limit. It shows a lamentable lack of judgment.”
She listened to him with the tiniest quiver of a smile, but offered no
reply. She did not even look at the Philosopher. There were many other
things which (apparently) engaged her attention, so that unless you knew
her very well, you might have said she was not even aware of the
Philosopher’s existence. This would have been a mistake,--but no matter!
However, there was the garden, to begin with. It was a lovely garden,
full of sweet-smelling, old-fashioned flowers. There were roses in such
lavish quantity that they seemed to literally blaze upon the old brick
walls and rustic pergolas which surrounded and hemmed in the numerous
beds and borders set in among the grass. Then there were two white doves
strutting on the neatly kept path and declaring their loves, doubts or
special mislikings in their own curiously monotonous manner. There was
also a thrush perched on a spray of emerald green leaves and singing to
his own heart’s content, oblivious of an audience. All these trifles of
a summer’s day pleased her;--but then, she was easily pleased.
“You magnify trifles into momentous incidents,” went on the Philosopher,
placidly smoking. “Look at the way you behaved about that dead robin
yesterday! Found it lying in the garden path,--picked it up and actually
cried over it! Now think of the hundreds of men and women starving to
death in London! You never cry over _them_! No! Like all women you must
see a dead robin before you can cry!”
She turned her eyes towards him. They were soft eyes, with a rather
pleading look just now in their blue depths.
“The poor bird!” she murmured. “Such an innocent little thing! It was
sad to see it lying dead in the bright sunshine.”
“Innocent! Sad! Poor!” exclaimed the Philosopher. “Good heavens! What of
the human beings who are poor and sad and innocent and all the rest of
it, and who die uncared for every day? Besides, how do you know a robin
is innocent or sad? I’ve watched the rascal, I tell you, many a time! He
fights with all the other birds as hard as he can,--he is spiteful,--he
is cruel,--and he positively trades on his red breast. Trades on it, I
tell you! You women again! If he hadn’t a red breast you would never be
sorry for him. You wouldn’t weep for a sparrow. I tell you, as I’ve
often told you before, that you women overdo sentiment and make too much
fuss about nothing.”
She perceived that his cigar had gone out, and handed him a match from a
small box on a garden table near them. He accepted it condescendingly.
“If you ever fall in love--” pursued the Philosopher. Here he paused,
and striking the match she had given him, relighted his cigar and began
to puff out smoke with evident enjoyment. She stood patiently watching
him.
“If you ever fall in love--” he went on, ... Now it was very strange
that the Philosopher should pause again. He was seldom at a loss for
words, but for the moment his profuse vocabulary appeared to have given
out.
“If you ever fall in love--” he murmured.
Again that tiny quiver of a smile appeared on her face.
“Well! Go on!” she said.
The Philosopher nerved himself to an effort.
“If you ever fall in love,” he continued, “never try on sentiment with a
man. He won’t like it. He won’t understand it. No man ever does.”
The little quivering smile deepened.
“I’m sure you are quite right!” she answered, in a voice that was almost
dove-like in its humility.
The Philosopher was silent for a moment. He seemed nonplussed. There is
perhaps nothing that so completely bewilders and confuses even a
philosopher as an agreeable acquiescence in all his opinions, whether
such opinions be sagacious or erroneous.
“Well!” he added, somewhat lamely--“Don’t you forget it!”
She moved a step or two from his side.
“I should never dream of forgetting it!” she said.
Her back was now turned to him. Furtively, and one would almost have
said with an air of timidity, the Philosopher peeped at her sideways.
Decidedly her back was not unpleasing. The folds of her skirt fell
exactly as the Philosopher would have had them fall could he have stood
in the shoes of Worth or Paquin,--her hair was arranged in precisely the
way he considered becoming. The garden hat, ... but no!... no
philosopher is capable of describing a woman’s garden hat. There
followed a silence which was embarrassing,--not to her, but to him.
Presently he said:
“Are you going?”
She turned her head, ever so slightly.
“Do you wish me to go?”
Another silence, more embarrassing than the previous one.
“I like to see you about,” said the Philosopher at last. “You give a
touch to the landscape which is--which is natural and agreeable.”
She moved slowly away, her back still turned towards him, and presently
stepped lightly among the flower borders, lifting a trailing rose here
or setting aside a straying branch there, and looking, in her simple
white gown, like the presiding goddess of the garden, as indeed she was.
The Philosopher heaved a sigh,--whether of relief or vexation he hardly
knew. He had a book to read,--a rather dull and drily written volume of
profound essays, entitled “The Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations,”
and, opening it at the place he had left off, he endeavoured to immerse
himself in its contents. Nevertheless, now and again his attention
wandered. His eyes roved away from the printed page and followed the
slow gliding of the white-robed figure through the garden. He liked to
watch it,--and yet in a curious way was half ashamed of his liking.
Needless to say the Philosopher was a very well-balanced,
self-restrained man. He was a profound student of logic and prided
himself on his sound reasoning ability. He was also a good orator, and
had astonished numerous audiences by his eloquence on the general
inability of the human being to understand reason. The human being was,
in his opinion, a poor creature at best, and sometimes he quite forgot
that he was a human being himself. The feminine human being came into
his calculations as the merest appendage to the intricate and mysterious
scheme of existence--an appendage which, though apparently necessary,
seemed a little unfortunate,--except--well!--except when it wore a white
gown and a fascinating garden hat and moved gracefully among flowering
plants and was not too much in the way. He began to think in a curious
desultory fashion about incidents and circumstances which had nothing
whatever to do with “The Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations.”
“She’s really quite gentle and amenable,” he said to himself--“if it
were not for that sentiment of hers! She has too much of it altogether.
If I allowed myself to fall in love with her she would make my life a
burden--a positive burden! If I ever did anything that seemed to suggest
indifference to, or neglect of her--such as reading a book like this,
for example,--or a newspaper,--her eyes would fill with tears and she
would say: ‘Ah! You don’t love me any more!’ She would! All women do
that sort of thing! It’s the most fatal mistake in the world! But they
all make it!”
Here his attention was distracted by the swinging noise of an opening
gate, and turning his looks in the direction indicated, he saw a young
man walking with a breezy air up the garden path to the place where the
white figure with the pretty hat strolled by itself among the flowers.
This young man had no eyes for the Philosopher;--he was bent on one
goal, and made straight for it.
“Hello! How are you?” he called, in much too robust a voice for the
Philosopher’s delicate sense of hearing. “Charming afternoon, isn’t it?
Can I help you to prune the roses?”
The white figure paused. The Philosopher saw a little hand stretched out
in welcome to the owner of the robust voice and heard a laugh ripple on
the air.
“It isn’t the pruning season,” she answered. “But you can come and help
me gather a few for the drawing-room.”
“Nothing I should like better!”--and the young man immediately joined
her, thus presenting to the Philosopher the picture of two figures
walking among the flowers instead of one.
Somehow the prospect was not so agreeable. The Philosopher shut out the
scene by holding his book well up before his eyes and severely scanning
the printed page which told him about the “Natural Evolution and Decay
of Nations.” Every now and again he heard that robustious laugh which
almost shattered his nerves, accompanied by a little silvery ripple of
merriment, which gave his heart a rather unusual thrill. “The Natural
Evolution and Decay of Nations” was fast becoming a bore. He puffed at
his cigar. It had gone out. He shook the match-box on the table--there
was not a match left in it. He felt in his pocket--no matches there.
Whereupon he leaned back in his chair with a heavy sigh and looked
forlornly at the dull end of his Havana.
“What a confounded bore!” he murmured. “If that ass were not here I’d
call her--and she would come,--I’m sure she’d come!--and she’d get me a
match directly.”
He thought a little, then laid the half-smoked cigar down. Sitting bolt
upright he watched the two figures strolling among the flower-borders.
“How she can put up with that insufferable idiot passes my
comprehension!” he ejaculated. “But women are all like that! The fool
can talk a little sentiment--quotes poetry--talks about dewdrops and
sunsets,--and that always goes down. Heigh-ho!”
Here he fell upon “The Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations” with a
kind of avidity, and perused page after page with the sternest
attention.
“I’m afraid you’ve no matches!” said a sweet voice near him. “Shall I
get you some?”
He started.
“If you would be so kind,” he murmured, with elaborate courtesy.
A light movement and she was gone. Another light movement and she was
back again with the box of matches desired. The Philosopher looked up as
he took them from her hand.
“You have a visitor this afternoon?”
“Only Jack,” she replied.
“Jack seems a good deal about here,” remarked the Philosopher, airily.
“Yes,” she said, with gentle unconcern. “Quite harmless, I assure you!”
He laughed despite himself. There was something quaint in the accent of
her voice.
“He’s a sentimental sort of boy,” she went on. “He’s very fond of
gardening, and he attaches the greatest possible importance to trifles.
For instance, I gave him a rose a week ago and he tells me he has
pressed it in a book of favourite poems so that he may keep it for
ever.”
“Young noodle!” growled the Philosopher. “Spoiling the book with messy
crushed petals which are sure to stain it. I wouldn’t do such a thing
for the world.”
“I know you wouldn’t,” she agreed, calmly.
He glanced at “The Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations,” marked the
place where he had been reading, and shut it up.
“You know you like all that sort of thing,” he said, settling himself
in his chair ready for an argument. “Has he gone?”
“Yes!”
“Well, he didn’t stay long,” admitted the Philosopher, rather
reluctantly. “Did he take another rose to damage a book with?”
She laughed.
“I’m afraid he did!”
“Come now, you’re not afraid he did. You _know_ he did! And you know you
gave it to him.”
The Philosopher’s voice was decidedly raspy. She raised her eyes to
his,--her face was dimpled with smiles.
“Well, if I must be accurate--” she began.
“Of course you must!” snapped the Philosopher. “Accuracy is always
desirable, and accuracy is what you women always fail in! Briefly,--to
be perfectly accurate, you gave him a rose. Didn’t you?”
She nodded with a charmingly assumed air of mock penitence.
“To a noodle like that,” said the Philosopher, sternly, “the gift of a
rose from you means encouragement. You have given him an inch--he will
take an ell. Of course if you _wish_ to encourage him--”
“Encourage him in what?” she asked, demurely.
“In--in--his attentions to you,” said the Philosopher.
She smiled sweetly, but said nothing.
“I don’t consider it a good match,” went on the Philosopher.
“Oh! Wouldn’t it light?” she asked, innocently. “I thought it was a wax
one--not one of those things that must have its own box.”
The Philosopher’s mouth twitched under his moustache and his eyes
sparkled. But he maintained a dignified demeanour.
“I wasn’t speaking of either a Vesta or of a Bryant and May,” he said.
“And you know I wasn’t.”
She drew a small rustic bench towards him and sat down very nearly at
his feet,--then looked up from under her garden hat.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
The Philosopher wished her eyes would not swim in such liquid blue, and
that the garden hat was not quite so becoming.
“Nothing that you would care for,” he answered, with condescending
politeness. “It’s called ‘The Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations’.”
She nodded sagaciously.
“_I_ know!” she said. “It’s all the same thing and it all seems no use.
Nations begin and grow and progress, and then just like fruit they get
over-ripe and the wasps begin to eat them and they rot and fall off the
tree. Oh, yes! It can all be said in quite a few lines. There’s really
no occasion to write a thick book about it; unless the man wants to show
himself off.”
The Philosopher gasped and glared.
“The man! Show himself off! You foolish child! The man is a Fellow of
Balliol and a most profound scholar.”
“Is he?” And she shrugged her pretty shoulders indifferently. “Well, I
suppose he wants the public to know it.”
The Philosopher was for the moment rendered speechless. He looked down
at her, but her face was bent and he could only see the crown of the
garden hat; there was a most absurd little knot of ribbon on that crown,
perfectly useless and half lost in a twisted mist of pale blue chiffon.
“I suppose you don’t care much about poetry?” she said, raising her head
so suddenly that the light of her eyes quite dazzled him. “It would be
too sentimental for you. But if you did, I could tell you some lines
that would quite cover the ground.”
“Could you?” he murmured.
“Yes! Shall I say them?”
The Philosopher was conscious of an uncomfortable nervousness.
“If you like,” he answered, rather slowly. “But poetry is not in my
line.”
“I know it isn’t,” she agreed emphatically. “But just listen!”
And in a soft musical voice she repeated slowly and with well-modulated
emphasis and intonation:
“Hence pageant history!--hence gilded cheat!
Swart planet in the universe of deeds!”
“Keats!” murmured the Philosopher, dreamily. “Honey and water!”
“Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds
Along the pebbled shores of memory!
Many old rotten-timbered boats there be
Upon thy vaporous bosom magnified
To goodly vessels; many a sail of pride,
And golden-keeled, is left unlaunched and dry!
But wherefore this? What care, though owl did fly
About the great Athenian admiral’s mast
The Indus with his Macedonian numbers?
Though old Ulysses tortured from his slumbers
The glutted Cyclops, what care?...”
“Not in the least!” interposed the Philosopher. “What do you know about
‘glutted Cyclops’?”
She continued:
“Juliet leaning
Amid her window-flowers--sighing--weaning
Tenderly her fancy from its maiden snow,
Doth more avail than these: ...”
“Ah! Of course you like that,” interrupted the Philosopher.
She went on, calmly:
“the silver flow
Of Hero’s tears, the swoon of Imogen,
Fair Pastorella in the bandit’s den,
Are things to brood on with more urgency
Than the death-day of empires.”
The sweet voice ceased. The Philosopher’s hand inadvertently fell at his
side and came in contact with a deliciously soft arm.
“Have you done?” he enquired, in mild accents.
“Yes!” was the reply.
“Well,” he observed, “you spoke your lines very prettily,--that’s all I
can say. Your quotation is from ‘Endymion,’ and I suppose you realise
that ‘Endymion’ is utterly spoilt by its excess of cloying
sentimentality. Yet--”
Absent-mindedly he began to stroke the soft arm up and down with a light
caress such as he would have bestowed on a child.
“What I should like to explain,” he said, with an argumentative air,
“and what you women will never understand, is that any exaggeration of
feeling is always bad form, both in literature and in life. You’ve got
plenty of intelligence and you ought to grapple with and master this
fact. Certain things are taken for granted and it is not necessary to
dwell upon them. Outward displays of emotion should always be
suppressed. The brave man hides his wound,--and of course in matters of
love the one who says least loves most.”
“I thought,” she interposed, in the most dulcet accents, “that to be in
really good form one should never love at all.”
Her eyes were full of the most melting enquiry. The Philosopher began to
feel a little confusion in his head. But he rallied his forces.
“Regard and esteem,” he said, sententiously, “are safer emotions than
what is called love, which is a term often used to cover the lowest
passions. An affection founded on mutual respect is dignified, sober and
acceptable and generally leads to great tranquillity and happiness in
marriage.”
She sprang up laughing.
“How dull!” she exclaimed. “I’m sure you are quite right! You always are
quite right; but, oh, how dull! Dull, dull, dismally dull!” And
throwing herself into one of the most picturesque attitudes imaginable,
she uttered a soft call, apparently to the air, whereupon in swift
response one of the white doves on the garden path flew up and settled
on her outstretched hand.
The Philosopher gazed, as well he might. Such a charming curve to the
back! Such a fall and flow of the white garments!--such a sudden tilt of
the garden hat, showing the clustering hair underneath it, and, oh, dear
me! such a very small hand,--as white as the dove that had settled upon
it. She made a perfect picture in which “The Natural Evolution and Decay
of Nations” had no part. She was a living, breathing embodiment of joy,
and there was no reasoning her away. The Philosopher took refuge in a
kind of hypocrisy.
“Do you want any more roses gathered?” he asked, with a deep sigh.
She smiled.
“Come and choose one for yourself,” she answered.
Now the Philosopher did not want a rose. He was the last man in the
world to wear a flower in his coat, and as for gathering a rose for
himself--the idea was perfectly monstrous. However, he left his chair
quite obediently and followed his fair guide, with the dove still
perched on her hand, through the intertwisting pergolas, wondering
vaguely what they all meant and where they would lead to. A bright idea
presently struck the profound recesses of his brain, and this was that
he would actually gather a rose on his own account and offer it to her!
She might press it in a book--who could tell? Women are always so
sentimental! He perceived a beautiful dewy blush-pink bud, and made for
it at once, recklessly plunging his hand awkwardly through the bush to
get at its stalk. Suddenly he uttered a piercing howl:
“Damnation!”
This was a rude word. It was one he was rather fond of using. A thorn
had scratched him mercilessly, drawing blood.
“Look here!” he cried, loudly. “Here’s a pretty business. My hand’s
disfigured for life!”
She ran to his side, her face full of the prettiest sympathy.
“Oh! You poor thing!” she murmured. “But it’s only a scratch!”
“Only a scratch! Come, I like that! The most awful cases of
blood-poisoning have been set up by a scratch. I may be dead in three
days! Don’t you know that? Look at the blood! Why, it’s horrible!”
She drew out the daintiest handkerchief, and dipping it in a cool spring
of water that bubbled in a nook of the old rose-covered wall, bathed the
wounded hand gently, though her face was dimpled all over with smiles.
“‘Outward displays of emotion should always be suppressed,’” she said,
in a soft small voice that shook with restrained laughter. “‘The brave
man hides his wound’--doesn’t he?” Here she peeped up at him in the most
fascinating manner. “‘Certain things,’--like scratches--‘are taken for
granted and it is not necessary to dwell on them!’ Isn’t that right?
There!” And she tied the handkerchief deftly round the “disfigured”
hand. “It will be all right in a very little while.”
“Not at all!” said the Philosopher, drearily, with almost a wail. “It
won’t be all right--it will be all wrong! _You_ call it a scratch. You
women never pay attention to anything that’s really serious, though you
make no end of a fuss over trifles. This is a positive scar! and it’s
most painful--most painful, I tell you! Why, it’s quite hot and
throbbing!”
She smiled up into his eyes.
“Is it? I’m so sorry! But,--do think of Napoleon’s march to Moscow!”
The Philosopher’s brow clouded.
“What’s that to do with it?” he demanded, sharply.
“Well!--the poor soldiers were starved and frozen to death,” she said,
“and you are only scratched by a rose thorn. Of course the march to
Moscow happened a long time ago--but _that_ doesn’t matter!--you ought
to feel it just as much--so much that your scratch should seem nothing
but purest joy if you had the _right_ sort of sentiment.”
A reluctant smile overspread his face and presently shone so broadly
that in spite of his being a Philosopher he became almost good-looking.
“Don’t play!” he urged. “I’m in earnest--I am really!”
“About what?” she asked, mirthfully.
“About the scratch--and--perhaps--about you,” he said, suddenly, moved
by an impulse he could not understand. “I don’t know whether you come
before the scratch or after. You see I wanted to get you a rose--”
“Most kind of you,” she murmured, pretending not to be aware that his
arm had somehow got round her waist. “Why?”
“I don’t know why,” he said. “Oh, that scratch! Really, joking apart,
it’s very painful!”
She unbound the handkerchief and looked at the damage critically.
Suddenly, and with a fleeting blush, she stooped and kissed it.
“There!” she said. “That’s what _we women_ do to--babies! Kiss the place
and make it well! All _sentiment_! Better now?”
“Positively I think it is!” admitted the Philosopher, his eyes beginning
to shine in quite a human and unphilosophical manner. “But what a goose
you are! The absurdity--”
“Yes!” she interrupted quickly. “I quite agree with you! The absurdity
of a clever man,--a learned man,--a distinguished man,--giving way to
his emotions on account of a scratch! Well! But that’s the way you men
always go on! You neglect the most serious things of life and you fret
and fidget yourselves over the merest trifles! You are the slaves of
your feelings! Even swearing! Oh! Now if it had been Jack--”
“Hang Jack!” said the Philosopher. “You’re always trotting him out!
You’d better marry him!”
“Would you like me to?” she asked, demurely.
His arm was still round her waist. For a Philosopher he felt fairly
comfortable. He peered under the garden hat--and found an expression of
face that pleased him. Proud of his discovery he enjoyed it in silence
for a while.
“Would I like you to marry Jack?” he repeated. “Well! Let me
consider--you know these sort of questions take a long time to answer!
‘Would I like you to marry Jack?’ No!--I don’t think so--not just yet!”