WHEN Strange set out on his honeymoon, it was with a distinct project
simmering in his brain. He meditated a good three months’ loiter through
the byways of the Tyrol, on into Switzerland, and then home through the
towns of the Netherlands, and all by routes best known to himself.
It becomes, however, a moral impossibility for a man to loiter with any
comfort by the side of a new-made wife, into whose very bones and marrow
the spirit of unrest has crept, and so, by intangible gradations the
loiter had developed into a tumultuous forging on.
Gwen seemed possessed by a very dignified and quite calm-seeming devil;
he was a gentlemanly creature and made no untoward fuss or excitement,
but movement he must have, he dared not rest.
In spite of herself, Gwen found growing in her from the very day of her
marriage, a craving, full of subdued fierceness, to be in the very
middle of the hurly-burly, no matter whether it raged in a fashionable
hotel, or, in the market-place of a country town. She had, besides,
other uncomfortable ways. In valleys, where the sun shone and the wind
rested, and where ordinary mortals were bathed in a soft entrancement of
delight, she seemed to lose half her life.
On the contrary, she lived, her voice regained its timbre, her eyes
shone, her mouth laughed, her very hair sparkled with vitality, as soon
as ever she got high on a mountain—the bleaker and harsher the better.
One day they had climbed to the top of the D’Auburg, a dour-looking
mountain in the Tyrol generally avoided of tourists, but for some reason
Gwen took it into her head to ascend it.
She now sat glowing and tingling with radiant health, leaning up against
a rock that sheltered her from the blast that was screeching across the
ledge of the mountain. She looked as cool, and as beautiful and
unruffled, as if she had just dropped from the clouds, instead of
climbing up to them by a most villainous path. There was always a sort
of exotic splendour about her, and yet she never seemed out of place.
“Are you never tired?” said her husband, as he was pouring some wine
into a little silver cup.
“Never! I don’t remember ever once having been tired.”
“Looked at from the carnal mind of a chaperon, that was rather a
nuisance, wasn’t it?”
“It was; Lady Mary suffered a good deal from it. I used to try to
accommodate myself to her in this matter and to look tired, but I never
could manage it.”
“Have another sandwich?”
She went on in a reflective way as she ate it,
“It is a wretched thing generally, for a woman to be absolutely
untireable. A very strong woman is docked of half the privileges of her
sex. If you notice the stock devoted husband, he has always a sickly
creature of a wife to devote himself to—or one that poses as sickly—or
if her body isn’t sickly, her brain is. You hardly ever find a woman
quite sound in wind and limb and intellect, with an absolutely unselfish
husband, ready to think all things for her, and to dance attendance on
her to all eternity. Helplessness is such supreme flattery. I tell you,
the modern man doesn’t like intellect any more than his fathers before
him did, if it comes home too much to him.”
“No! Sickliness and softness of brain don’t, however, appeal equally to
all men.”
“I suppose not; but the things they carry in their train do. The
parasitical, gracious, leaning ways, the touch of pathos and
pleading,—those are the things I should look for if I were a man, they
charm me infinitely. Then that lovely craving for sympathy, and that
delicious feeling of insecurity they float in, which makes the touch of
strong hands a Heaven-sent boon to them—those women, you see, strew
incense in your path and they get it back in service. When one hears of
a devoted couple and is called on to admire with bated breath, I never
can till I have dug out the reason of this devotion. I hate sticking up
people on pinnacles, and then having to knock them down like a pair of
nine-pins.”
“Hero worship isn’t your tap evidently, but if one makes a principle of
never smelling a flower or eating fruit until one has ascertained the
manure used in its growth, one gets put off a lot. By the way, I haven’t
noticed any marked symptoms of mental or physical decay in you, and yet,
God knows and can possibly score up the number of your lovers—they
certainly were beyond all human computation.”
She flashed a quick untranslatable look at him and smiled.
“My lovers? They weren’t lovers at all, they were explorers,
experimental philosophers. They had the same strong yearning for me that
a botanist has for a blue chrysanthemum or a yellow aster. If a man
could succeed in getting this thing he would go mad over it and put it
in the best house in his grounds for all his neighbours and friends to
admire, but do you think he would love it like an ordinary sweet red
rose that he can gather, and smell, and caress, and bury his nose in,
and wear near his heart? Not he!
“Do you think one of these men ever wanted to touch me,” she went on
calmly, taking little sips of wine, “or to ruffle the hair round my
forehead which is their invariable habit in novels, or to lay his hand
on my bare shoulder—they do that, too, I have read—or to clasp me to his
breast, the climax to these pretty little customs of theirs? Goodness!
And imagine my feelings if one had! But they didn’t even want to; and
yet they were my slaves, to do with precisely as I liked.
“When I was in the thick of it I thought I could not live without all
this, yet it was disappointing on the whole, I believe. I remember
wishing now and then that I could flirt like other girls, and make men
make palpable fools of themselves for my sake. It looks such a very
delightful pastime! I have seen plain girls look positively quite
beautiful when engaged in it. The under-current of heaps of girls lives,
upon which it seems to me all the rest is built up, is a sort of
simmering, unconfessed, vague longing for the sensation of being ‘caught
and kissed’, like the little brown maid in the old rhyme; not in a
general vulgar way, but in a well-bred particular way. It is a quite
incomprehensible sensation to me.”
“Probably. It’s natural all the same,” he said looking at her eyes which
regarded him curiously, “and Nature is such a vindictive grasping beast
it is as well not to run counter to her, or she will have limb for
limb.”
“I wonder what limb of mine she will want?”
“Oh you, she’ll trip you up in your own coils somehow! Fill you with an
overpowering desire to be ‘caught and kissed’,” he said with a short
laugh, “and have no one handy to do it.”
“Oh, then she must make me over again!”
She stood up and looked down over the gloomy valley.
“What is it to be natural, I wonder? I don’t know.”
“Time will tell you all about it. Now, you want to be down over that
precipice? Well, anyway, I am glad you are warranted sound. Come on, my
yellow aster!”
They were past the precipice, far down the other side when Gwen spoke
again.
“Humphrey,” she said, with a stronger trace of emotion in her voice than
he had ever detected there before, “upon my word, I often wish for your
sake I was just a good common frowsy red cabbage-rose.”
“Ah, do you?—Well, ‘_die Zeit bringt Rosen!_’”