GWEN was in an unusual humour this afternoon. She was silent until they
got into the _fiacre_, but directly it moved she began to talk in a
swift even way peculiarly her own.
Everything she said had the calm cold brilliancy of steel about it, and
she advanced the most dangerously heterodox opinions in a most
unimpassioned and frozen style.
Strange shrugged his shoulders with grim good humour as she went on. He
admired her splendid insolence, as any man would have done; all the
same, he felt a half frantic longing for that picture-bride and an
ever-increasing wonder as to how any woman cast in the same mould, eye
for eye, mouth for mouth, dimple for dimple, curve for curve, could so
atrociously belie her nature.
Suddenly Gwen veered round and turned the conversation into a personal
and analytical channel. She had never done it before, except in her one
brief allusion to the yellow aster.
“That boy of yours is a genius, Humphrey, your swan is no goose,” said
she, “but, tell me, did I look in the very least like that woman, the
day you married me?”
He looked at her face of fine scorn.
“Not in the least, except in the matter of form, and colour, and pose.
These are you in tangible flesh and blood.”
“What did you mean by your ‘prophetic’?” she demanded, casting pink
shadows over her face as she moved the red silk blind slowly to and fro.
“The possibility of your being as she is one day.”
“Ah!”
The blind moved a little faster and her hand held it tighter.
“I put it to you as a reasonable man—do you believe in that
possibility?”
“As a reasonable man, I do,” said he watching the pink shadows playing
in her dimples.
“Yes—? And how is this to come to pass?”
“Ah, there you have me!” he said, “I don’t know—possibly God may, or the
modern monster, Evolution.”
“Through what processes, I should very much like to know?”
“So should I, but I don’t, you see.”
“She’d feel better if her face flushed like other women’s,” he thought;
“it must be ghastly to have to consume all one’s own smoke like that.”
Gwen looked out of the window, laughing softly to herself.
“You look super-humanly cool,” she said, “but this minute your pride is
all agog to knead and mould me into that bridal creature. It would be a
triumph of Art assuredly, and to your credit. I wish you might have the
kudos of it—why can’t you—why can’t I help you to, for the life of me?”
There came a rush of calm restrained vehemence into her cold tones that
brought them to a sort of white heat. “Why am I not mouldable—or like
other women?”
“My good child, you could hardly expect that from the daughter of your
father and mother—you are unreasonable!”
“Yes, you are right, I had forgotten them,” she said.
“It is abominable we should be such puppets, not only present chances to
play fast and loose with us, but to have to dance to the tune of old,
ignorant, half-daft ones, that should go and rot in the grave of old
failures! Why should they stay and torment us? We have enough of their
kind to deal with on our own account. Have you ever read the Bible?”
“Have I ever read the Bible! Do I not know every inch of Syria, and
every second inch of Egypt? Yes, I have read the Book, and on its native
soil.”
“Perhaps that may suit it, I don’t think ours does. There was one thing,
however, I read in it, that took hold of me; you may know it—‘God’s ways
are past finding out,’—this seems to me to contain a whole philosophy,
capable of universal application, and reaching to the present time.”
“You are going too fast, my good Gwen; isn’t that rather the philosophy
of ignorance? You are arguing from a point you rarely affect—from the
point of view of Jewish theology with its strong, and primitive, and
mystery-loving methods. God’s ways, after all, if we choose to dig into
them are no denser, and are just on the same line as Nature’s. She
permits no cause without an effect, or she will very well know the
reason why.”
“I wasn’t arguing from any point of view, Jewish or otherwise, I was
just applying a theological axiom personally, thinking of parents and
other chances.”
“Ah, that’s an idle subject, isn’t it? By the way, you have a sneaking
regard yourself for that bridal creature—you admire the woman, don’t
you?”
“Admire her! Yes, as a woman, of course I do. Why, she is—superb! With
that mature strong tenderness in every line of her, and that divine
protecting patient air of hers—that woman might be a mother of nations.”
Strange started and his mouth twitched suddenly, the blood stopped in
his veins and red and blue stars swam before his eyes. Gwen went on
unheeding, in her passionless tones—
“That woman is not, however, me. I am a beautiful girl—that, and no
more—I contain nothing, I assure you, nothing that could be moulded into
that woman.”
“You contain everything,” said her husband slowly, “only the deuce of
the matter is, that none of us know where to find it!”
“No, nor ever will.”
She leant forward so that her breath touched his cheek. “Humphrey, I
wish you had never seen that picture! This necessity for idealization is
an insult to me and to yourself—you should have had more insight from
the beginning.”
“My good child,” he said laughing softly, “I thought the experiment was
an avowed fact.”
She drew in her lips sharply, and was silent.
When she spoke again her voice was rather hoarse.
“I have often tried to imagine the things that go to a murder, and I
really do think I understand the impulse now. I shall never altogether
hate a murderer again. I am glad I know; one feels better—more liberal,
for every new sensation.”
Strange laughed.
“And, after all, it was supremely silly,” she went on, “the experiment
_is_ two-sided, but you have no idea how infinitely brutal the bald fact
sounded.”
“Bald facts mostly do.”
“Well—there is reason even in experiments, and remember, once for all, I
am not a dramatic creature given to sudden new developments, I am no
emporium for the creation of fresh sensations; here I am, finished and
complete.”
Strange laughed.
“‘Finished and complete!’ Was ever conceit like unto hers! My good girl,
you are neither.”
She threw up her head.
“Well, here I am then, unfinished and incomplete.”
“Ah, but Nature invariably finishes her work if it’s worth the tools.”
“Like Providence shapes our ends,” she sneered with modulated
savageness. “Ah, this marriage truly is an experiment! Look at those two
at the window—that girl and that man, that stunted creature there!
Perhaps he’s an artist. She has a measly look and the man’s nose is
awful! They are not a scrap like Browning’s artist and the girl, and
yet, I fancy, they think themselves in love with one another—tell the
man to stop for a minute!—here, here, at this house—there, do you see
the idiotic simpers! Ah, yes, that’s love! And the two will marry, no
doubt, on next Shrove Tuesday, but it won’t be an experiment, I don’t
think either of the pair looks as if he or she went in for observing new
phases.”
“They’ll have enough to do to keep the wolf from the door. Perhaps in
time, instead of observing new phases they’ll punch one another’s heads
if they must have fresh sensations.”
“Is that the usual and orthodox end to being in love—punching the head
physically or morally, according to the rank of the lovers?”
“No, the methods vary according to the quality of the love. Have you had
enough, shall we drive on?”
She nodded.
“If it’s worth its salt, of course there’s no end.”
“One even continuous stream into the ocean of—Nothingness! How
appallingly trite and stale—nothing fresh, nothing new!”
“The state has a quite peculiar freshness and newness of its own, I am
told, which is perennial—and here we are at the door.”