'Bulwer has said that none preserve imagination after forty; does
anyone preserve illusions after thirty?' said a very pretty woman on
her thirty-second birthday.
Her husband chivalrously replied, 'Any one who lives beside you will
preserve them until he is a hundred.'
She looked at him dubiously, curiously, with a slight smile which was a
little cynical and a little pensive.
'I was never famous for the culture of them,' she said, a little
regretfully. 'I do not know why you should have found me so favourable
to yours--if you have found me favourable,' she added, after a pause.
As the most eloquent and comprehensive answer he could give, he kissed
her hands.
She glanced at her face in the mirror; she was certainly thirty-two
years old on this last day of February. She did not like it; no woman
likes it. The way is not actually longer because the traveller reads on
a milestone the cipher which tells him how many thousands of yards he
has traversed and has still to traverse, but the milestone suddenly and
distastefully testifies to distance, and increases the sense of fatigue
which the road has given.
'If women had all a happy Euthanasia,' she said dreamily, 'when they
reach the age I am now, what a good thing it would be for the world.
On her thirtieth birthday every woman ought to be put to death;
mercifully, poetically, as the girl dies in the "Faute de l'Abbé
Mouret," stifled in flowers, but securely put to death.'
'The world,' said Othmar, smiling, 'would certainly be rid of its most
perilous enchantresses if your proposal became law.'
'And how much prettier our drawing-rooms would look, and how much
effort and heartburning would be spared, if every woman died before she
began to "make up!" Do you know last night, in the mirror figure of
the cotillion, as the men looked over my shoulder one by one, I forgot
all about them. I only looked at my own face; it seemed to me that
there was a sort of dimness in it, as there is on a photograph which
has been some years done; not age exactly, but the shadow of age which
was coming up behind me as the men were coming, and was looking over
my shoulder as they looked. Why do you laugh? It was not agreeable to
me. I was startled when the voice of Hugo de Rochefort came behind my
ear, "Ah, Madame, is it possible? Do you reject us all?" I had quite
forgotten where I was, and why they were all waiting. Perhaps Age only
meant to say to me, "Do not stay for the cotillions any more!"'
'If Age did, it certainly found no man living to agree with it,' said
her companion. 'If you will allow me to say so, I do not recognise you
in this unusual phase of self-depreciation. What bee has stung you
to-day?'
'Self-knowledge, I suppose. Whatever philosophers may declare to the
contrary, it is a very uncomfortable companion.'
'Surely that depends on one's mood?'
'Everything in life depends on one's mood. When I am in another mood
I shall say to myself that I have ten years left in which I shall be
agreeable to myself and other people; that the young girls do not
understand men and do not influence them; that a woman is always young
so long as she retains her power to please and to be pleased. There are
five hundred sophisms with which I can console myself, but just now I
am not in a humour to be consoled by them. I am only sensible of what
is very frightful to think of--that a woman is allotted threescore
and ten years as well as a man, but that he may enjoy himself to the
end of them, if only he keep his health; she comes to the close of
her pleasures before her life is half lived. With her, the preface
is exquisite, the poem is delightful, but the colophon is of such
preposterous and odious length and dulness, that it is out of all
proportion to the brevity of the romance.'
He smiled. 'I know that it is always hopeless to convince you when you
are in a pessimistic humour.'
'Oh yes; into one's character, as into the characters of others, one
gets little flashes of real light here and there, now and then; the
moments are not agreeable; they are the flashes of a policeman's
lanthorn; while they are shining disguise is not possible.'
'What do you see when they flash upon me?'
'Not very much that I would have changed except your sentimentalities.'
'I am grateful.'
She looked at him curiously. 'Did you doubt it?'
He answered, 'Well, no; not precisely. But with such a character as
yours one never knows.'
'Is not that the charm of my character?'
'I think it is the secret of your ascendancy. No one can be wholly,
absolutely sure of what you are thinking far down in the recesses of
your immense thoughts.'
'That was what people use to say of Louis Napoleon, and there never was
a shallower creature. I think I have more profundity than he; but I
have not so much as I had. Happiness is not intellectual; it tends to
make one content, and content is stupidity; that is why Age looked into
the cotillion mirror to-night to remind me that I was getting stupid.
No, you are not to pay me any compliments, my dear; after ten years of
them they have a certain _fadeur_, though I am sure you are sincere
when you make them.'
She smiled and rose.
This was her thirty-second birthday. That unpleasant and unpoetic fact
shadowed life to her for the moment. She was still young enough, and
had potent charm enough, of which she was fully conscious, to own it
frankly. The world was still at her feet. She could afford to confess
that she foresaw the time when it would not be so. True, in a way she
would have a certain empire always. She would never altogether lose
her power over the minds of men when she should lose it over their
passions. But it would be a pale-grey kingdom, a sad shore, with
sea-lavender blowing above silvery sand instead of her own Ogygia, with
its world of roses and its smiling suns.
Face it with what courage and charm she may, the thought of age must
always appal a woman. It takes so much; it offers nothing. True, some
of the greatest passions the world has seen have been born after youth
had long passed, and have burned on till death with deeper fires of
sunset than ever dawn has seen. But a woman is not consoled by that
possibility as morning slides past her and the shadows grow long.
Othmar, without other reply, opened the door of her dressing-room, and
there entered two small children, a boy and a girl with faces like
flowers, and sweet rosy mouths, carrying a large gilded basket between
them, filled with white lilac and gardenia. They came up to her hand in
hand, not very certain upon their feet or in their speech, and bowed
their little golden heads with pretty reverence, and stammered together
with birdlike voices, '_Bonne fête, maman_.'
'Here are your eternal courtiers,' said their father. 'Time will make
no difference in their worship of you.'
She smiled again, and took them together on her lap, and kissed them
with tenderness, her hand playing with their soft, light curls.
But she said perversely, and a little sadly: 'My dear, how can one
tell? That is only a phrase also. One never knows what children may
become. In fifteen or twenty years' time Otho may send me a _sommation
respectueuse_, because he wants to marry a circus-rider, and Xenia
may hate me because I make her accept a grand-duke whilst she is in
love with an attaché. One never can tell. They are fond of me now,
certainly.'
'They will as certainly love you always.'
'What an optimist you have grown! It is flattering to me,' she
answered, as she caressed the children and gave them some crystals of
sugar. 'I cannot help seeing things as they are; you know I never could
help it; and the relations of parents with their children, which are
pretty and idyllic to begin with, are often apt to alter to very grim
prose as time goes on, and separate interests arise to part them. Why
does no sovereign who ever lived like his or her immediate heir? Why is
the crown prince always arrayed against the crown?'
'I am very fond of my crown prince,' said Othmar, as he drew his young
son to him.
'He is not a crown prince yet; he is a baby. Wait until he does want
to marry that circus-rider, or until you see him take an opposite side
in European politics to yourself. It is when the distinct Ego asserts
itself in your child, in opposition to your own entity, that the
separation begins and the antagonism rises.'
'You will always analyse so mercilessly!'
'I can never be content with the world's commonplaces and sophisms,
if you mean that. And on this day, when I am thirty-two years old, no
persuasion on earth would convince me that, when the time should come
which will make me twice that age, I shall be anything but an unhappy
woman. It will not console me in the least that my grandchildren may
wish me _bonne fête_.'
'I wonder if you are serious?'
'I was never more so, I assure you. Life is a series of losses; but a
woman's losses outweigh a man's by a million. From the first little
line she sees between her eyebrows or about her mouth, existence is
nothing but a _dégringolade_ for her. To say that she is compensated
for the loss of her empire by becoming a grandmother is wholly absurd.'
'You always allot such a small space to the affections!'
'Madame de Sévigné allotted the largest that any clever woman ever did
or could. Do you think the chill philosophies of Madame de Grignan
rewarded her? Myself, _je n'ai pas cette bosse là_. You know it very
well. I am fond of these children, because they are yours; but I do not
think them in the least a compensation for growing old!'
'As if years mattered to a woman of your wit!'
She smiled.
'That is so like a man's clumsy idea of consolation. True, wit, in
theory, is very much admired, but, practically, nobody cares much
about it, unless it comes out of a handsome mouth. Men prefer white
shoulders. And----'
'And your shoulders?' said Othmar, with a smile. 'Are they not of snow,
and fit for Venus' self?'
'Oh, they are white as yet,' she cried indifferently.
'For myself,' he added, 'I shall be delighted when the faces of no
aspirants are reflected in your cotillion mirror. I detest all those
men----'
'Oh no, you do not,' she said tranquilly. 'If there were none of them
you would say to yourself, "Really, she is very much aged." A man's
love is always so made up of pride and prejudice that if no one envy
him what he has he soon ceases to value it. On the whole, men go much
more by the opinion of the world than women do. A woman, if she take
a fancy to a cripple, or a hunchback, or a _crétin_, makes herself
ridiculous over him, without any regard to how she may be laughed at;
but a man is always thinking of what they say at the clubs. In his
most headlong follies he is always nervous about the opinion of the
_galerie_.'
'You always think us such fools,' said Othmar, with some ill humour.
'Oh, no,' she said again with a smile, 'only I think you are, in a
way, more conscientious than we are, and in another way more nervous.
A woman, when she has a fancy for a thing, would burn down half the
world to get at it; a man would hesitate to sacrifice so many cities
and people, and would also be preoccupied with the idea that he would
be badly placed in history for his exploit.'
'Then he is no true lover.'
'Are there any true lovers?'
'I think you should be the last woman who could doubt it.'
'You want a compliment, but I shall not give it you. Or if you mean
the others--well, perhaps they have been, or they are, true enough;
but then that is only because a passion for me has always been thought
_d'un chic incroyable_. I should believe in the love of a man if I were
a milkmaid, but when to be in love with one is a mere fashion like the
height of your wheels or the shape of your mail, one may question its
single-mindedness. I have never, either, observed that the most devoted
of them eat their dinner less regularly, or smoke less often when they
were unhappy. Even you, yourself, when you were wasting with despair,
did not refuse to dine or smoke.'
'Do not speak of that time,' said Othmar, with a look of distress. 'As
for your complaint against us, we are mere machines in a great deal;
the machine goes on mechanically in its daily exercise for its daily
necessities; that movement of mechanism has nothing to do with the
suffering of the soul. Nothing can be more unjust than to confuse the
one with the other. You say a man cannot be a poet or a lover because
he eats a truffled beefsteak. I say it is the mechanical part of him
which eats the beefsteak, and eating it impairs neither his sensitive
nerves nor his passions. As for smoking, it is a consolation because it
is a sedative.'
'Admirably reasoned,' said Nadine, 'but you do not convince me. I
am certain that the conventionalities and habits of modern life do
diminish the forces of passion. When Tityæus was forsaken by Musidora,
and had only the primæval woods, the _fons sylvæ_, the mountain
solitudes, and the silent sheep, his grief could reign over him
undivided; but nowadays, when he dines out every evening, is made to
laugh whether he will or no, finds a hundred engagements waiting for
every hour, and has the babble of the world eternally in his ear, his
remembrance is of a very attenuated sort. I do not say that he suffers
nothing, but I do say that he often forgets that he suffers.'
'I am not at all sure of that,' said Othmar, 'and what is more, I am
almost disposed to think that the effort to affect indifference which
Society compels, is much more suffering than the delightful permission
which Nature gave your shepherd to be as miserable as he pleased,
unchecked and unremarked. The world may cause the most excruciating
torture to a man who is compelled to be in it and of it, while some
great preoccupation makes every thought except one alien and hateful.'
'If the man have a great nature, perhaps. But how many have?'
'As many, or as few, as in the days of the shepherds. The ordinary
Tityæus, I imagine, did not weep long for the ordinary Musidora, but
soon tuned his pipe afresh and put new ribbons on his crook.'
'I do not quite think that; I think all feelings were stronger, warmer,
deeper, more concentrated in the earlier ages of the world. Nowadays we
contrive to make everything absurd--our heroes, our poets, our sorrows,
our loves, all are dwarfed by our treatment of them. Even death itself
we have managed to make ridiculous, and strip of all its majesty.
Ulysses' self would have looked grotesque if buried with the civil
rites which attended Gambetta to his tomb, or the religious rites which
mocked the prince of mockers, Disraeli. Whenever I die, I hope you will
let me be carried by young children clad in white to some green grave
in your own woods, where only a stag will come or a pretty hare. Will
you be unconventional enough for that? Or will you be afraid of the
French municipalities and the Russian popes? I should have courage to
execute your last wishes so, but whether you will have the courage to
execute mine----Men are so much more timid than women!'
'Do not talk of death!' said Othmar, with a passing shudder.
'Did I not say that men are cowards?'
'Not for ourselves; for those we love we are.'
She smiled a little contemptuously, a little sadly.
'Ah, my dear! who knows! Death would not be so dreadful to me as
if I lived to incur Horace's reproach to Lyce. What is it? "_Fis
anus, et tamen_," &c., &c., though that reproach perhaps belongs to
a more unsophisticated age than our own. Nowadays the _perruquiers_
let nobody get grey, and there are a great many grandmothers, even
great-grandmothers, who are entirely charming--more charming than the
girls who are just out.'
'I do not think you will ever go to the _perruquiers_, but you will
always be charming, and you will never be old.'
'One would think you were my lover!'
'Why will you never believe that I am still so?'
'Because I do not believe in any miracles; I go to no Loretto. Love is
a volatile precipitate, and marriage a solvent in which it disappears.
If we are exceptions to that rule of chemistry and life, we are
so extraordinarily exceptional that fate must have some dreadful
punishment in store for us.'
'Or some exceptional reward.'
'Is not virtue always punished!' she said, with her enigmatical smile.
'You are a very handsome man, and have been the most poetic of lovers.
But in the nature of things I grow used to your good looks, and in
the nature of things you do not make love to me any longer. Love may
be the most delightful thing in the world, but it cannot resist the
pressure of daily intercourse. It is doomed when it has to look over
a common visiting list, and scold the same house-steward about the
weekly expenditure. "_Ah--ouiche_, Madame!" said one of the peasants
at Amyôt to me once, "where is love when you dip two spoons in one
soup-pot?--you only quarrel about the onions." That is always the
fault of marriage. It is always putting two spoons in one pot. Whether
it is an earthen pitcher or a Cellini vase does not make the least
difference. Poor love runs away from the clash of the spoons.'
Othmar laughed, but he was irritated. 'I should be miserable if I
believed you were in earnest,' he said impatiently. 'But I know you
would sacrifice your own life to an epigram.'
'I am entirely in earnest,' she replied. 'But if you do not believe me
that shows that you are a less changeable man than most, or I a wiser
woman. Ah, my dear,' she added, with a smile and a sigh, 'when men do
not admire me any longer then you will not admire me either, I imagine;
I wonder you do as it is--you see so much of me!'
'I shall adore you all my life,' said Othmar, with almost as much
fervour as when he had been the most impassioned and the most hopeless
of her lovers.
'You fancy so; and that is very pretty in you, after so many years;
but it does not follow that you will think so still in twelve months'
time,' said his wife, with the smile of her incurable scepticism upon
her lips. 'And do not insist on it too much. Things which are insisted
on too much have a knack of making themselves tiresome, and you know of
old that repetition has no great charm for me, and say what you will
you cannot prevent me from feeling that very soon I shall grow old!'
She rose and looked over her shoulder at the silver-framed mirror with
its three glasses, showing her profile to her as she turned.
'I could not brave the sunrise after a ball _now_,' she thought, with a
little pang.
'Has not a poet said,' she added aloud:
I fear
Life's many changes; not Death's changelessness?'
There was a touch of graver sadness in the tone with which she quoted
the line of verse, which forbade reply either by persiflage or
compliment.
Othmar kissed her hand with almost the same emotion as when he had
declared to her a passion hopeless, and therefore for the time
changeless; and he remained mute.
'The same poet says:
Love's words are weak, but not Love's silences,'
she added, with a smile. 'Well, I will believe you----as yet.'
She had in nowise resigned the power of, and the diversion afforded her
by, what in a lesser person would have been called endless flirtation.
She amused herself constantly with the follies of men and their
subjugation.
'If you do not make yourself attractive to others, the man to whom you
care to be attractive will soon not find you so,' she was wont to say.
'Those women who make themselves a statue of fidelity, like the Queen
in the "Winter's Tale," will soon be left alone on their pedestals. Be
as faithful as you please, but show him that you have every temptation
and opportunity to be unfaithful if you did please.'
It was on those lines that she had traced her conduct, and whilst her
world knew that she was unaltered in coquetry, if coquetry her languid
charm and domination could be called, it also saw that she was equally
unaltered in profound and universal indifference to all those whom she
subjugated. Othmar, as he said, would have preferred that she should
subjugate none. But she frankly told him that it was of no use to wish
for subversion of the laws of nature. 'I am as nature made me,' she
said once to him. 'If you did not like the way I was made, why did
you not leave me alone? You had plenty of time to study me. I am like
Disraeli, I like power. Now the only power possible to a woman is that
which she possesses over men. If men were more interesting, the power
would be more interesting too. But then it is not our fault. It is
perhaps the fault of the millions of stupid women who swallow up the
occasional originality of men as sand swallows up the bits of agate and
cornelian on the shore. It is the fashion to say that it is the wicked,
clever women who hurt men. That is not the case; it is the good silly
ones who make of life the sahara of commonplaces and of blunders which
it is. Talent will at least always understand; blameless stupidity
understands nothing.'
She was somewhat more, rather than less, of a _charmeuse_ than she had
been. It was so natural to her to charm the lives of men that she could
have as soon ceased to breathe as to cease to use her power over them.
There were times when Othmar grew irritated and jealous, but she was
unmoved by his anger.
'It is a much greater compliment to you that men should admire me,'
she said to him, 'and it would look supremely absurd if I lapsed into
a _bonne bourgeoise_, and always went everywhere arm-in-arm with you.
I should not know myself. You would not know me. Be content. You are
aware that I think very little about any one of them; they are none of
them so interesting as you used to be. But I must have them about me.
They are like my fans; I never scarcely use a fan or look at one, but
still a fan is indispensable; it is a part of one's toilette.'
Othmar, who retained for her much of the imperious and perfervid
passion which he had had as a lover, resigned himself with a bad grace
to her arguments. Something of the old tyrannical feeling with which he
would once have liked to bear her out of sight and hearing of the world
for ever still moved in him at times, though he had grown diffident of
displaying it, having grown afraid of her delicate ironies.
'It is so good for him,' she said to herself; 'that sort of irritation
and jealousy keeps his affections and his admirations alive: they are
not allowed to go to sleep, as both have a knack of going to sleep in
marriage. Anything is less dangerous than stagnant water. If a man
be not made jealous he must drift imperceptibly into indifference.
Monotony is like a calm at sea; everyone yawns, and in time even a
shark would be welcomed as a delightful interruption. To avoid sameness
is the first requisite for the endurance of love. If he love me as much
as he did nine years ago--and I think he does--it is only because at
the bottom of his heart he never feels absolutely sure of me. He has
always a faint unacknowledged sense that I may any day do something
entirely unexpected by him; may even fly away, as a bird does, off a
bough which it has tired of. I am like a book of alchemy to him, of
which he has mastered all the secrets save just one or two lines, but
in which those lines always remain in unintelligible abracadabra to
perplex and interest him. He will never tire of the book till he thinks
he can decipher those lines. It is a mistake to suppose that men are
only allured by their senses; there is an intellectual mystery which
fascinates them, and which is not so easily exhausted. All men are
amused by me, all men are more or less attracted by me. I should not
wish my husband, alone of all men, to become tired of me. Of course it
is very difficult to prevent it when he is so used to me, but I think
it is possible.'
A feeble woman, a dull woman, a woman of that kind of self-complacency
which goes with stupidity, would not have allowed so much even in her
own thoughts; but she, who was deemed the vainest of her kind, had no
such vanity wherewith to deceive herself. Her high intelligence and her
unerring penetration were glasses forever turned upon herself no less
than upon others. Othmar was at times surprised and almost irritated
that she left him so often to go on her own visits or travels, or sent
him alone upon his. But she knew very well what she did.
'Frequent absences are like those pauses in the music which in French
we call _silences_, and in German _Pausen_,' she said to herself.
'They make us care for the music more than we should do if it were
always on our ear. Monotony is the most terrible enemy that affection
or enjoyment ever has. Unfortunately, most women are so eternally
monotonous that they can never understand why men are not as pleased
with the defect as they are themselves. Lord Beaconsfield was not
an apostle of love, but he was a shrewd observer of mankind, and I
always think that he suggested the most admirable phase of modern love
possible, when he depicted two people who were fond of one another
as going their different ways every evening to different houses, and
meeting again to talk it all over with champagne and chicken at dawn.
If people are always together in the same places, what have they left
to tell one another in their own house? Myself, I don't like either
champagne or chicken, but that is a mere matter of detail. You can say,
Rhine wine and green oysters, or yellow tea and Russian cigarettes. It
is, no doubt, only another form of vanity; but I wish our lives not
to break down and drift away in little bits of wreck wood, as most
peoples' lives do. It is not goodness in me; it is only _amour propre_.'
She had more sympathy for him than she would in other years have
supposed herself capable of feeling, but with her regard for him
there was mingled that habit of analysis which was so inveterate
in her, and that indulgence to his weaknesses which arose from her
condescending comprehension of them. She, as yet, made the preservation
of his admiration her study, but in her study there was blended the
sense of amusement and disdain, which always came to her before the
inconsistencies and the unwisdom of men. She loved him perhaps; but she
never failed to weigh him accurately. To Yseulte, he had been as a lord
and a god; to her he was dearer than other men, but not more imposing.
Even when the first winelike fumes of awakened passion had touched her,
she had been clear of judgment and unerring in vision. She had said to
herself: 'He looked larger than others once, through the mists of my
preference, but he is not so really.'