A last hour of vivid blue and gold glare; but now the twilight sheds softly
upon the darting jays, and only the little oval frames catch the fleeting
beams. I go to the miniatures. Amid the parliamentary faces, all strictly
garrotted with many-folded handkerchiefs, there is a metal frame enchased
with rubies and a few emeralds. And this _chef d'oeuvre_ of antique
workmanship surrounds a sharp, shrewdish, modern face, withal pretty. Fair
she is and thin.
She is a woman of thirty,--no,--she is the woman of thirty. Balzac has
written some admirable pages on this subject; my memory of them is vague
and uncertain, although durable, as all memories of him must be. But that
marvellous story, or rather study, has been blunted in my knowledge of this
tiny face with the fine masses of hair drawn up from the neck and arranged
elaborately on the crown. There is no fear of plagiary; he cannot have said
all; he cannot have said what I want to say.
Looking at this face so mundane, so intellectually mundane, I see why a
young man of refined mind--a bachelor who spends at least a pound a day on
his pleasures, and in whose library are found some few volumes of modern
poetry--seeks his ideal in a woman of thirty.
It is clear that, by the very essence of her being, the young girl may
evoke no ideal but that of home; and home is in his eyes the antithesis of
freedom, desire, aspiration. He longs for mystery, deep and endless, and he
is tempted with a foolish little illusion--white dresses, water colour
drawings, and popular music. He dreams of Pleasure, and he is offered Duty;
for do not think that that sylph-like waist does not suggest to him a yard
of apron string, cries of children, and that most odious word, "Papa." A
young man of refined mind can look through the glass of the years.
He has sat in the stalls, opera-glass in hand; he has met women of thirty
at balls, and has sat with them beneath shadowy curtains; he knows that the
world is full of beautiful women, all waiting to be loved and amused, the
circles of his immediate years are filled with feminine faces, they cluster
like flowers on this side and that, and they fade into garden-like spaces
of colour. How many may love him? The loveliest may one day smile upon his
knee! and shall he renounce all for that little creature who has just
finished singing, and is handing round cups of tea? Every bachelor
contemplating marriage says, "I shall have to give up all for one, one."
The young girl is often pretty but her prettiness is vague and uncertain,
it inspires a sort of pitying admiration, but it suggests nothing; the very
essence of the young girl's being is that she should have nothing to
suggest, therefore the beauty of the young face fails to touch the
imagination. No past lies hidden in those translucent eyes, no story of
hate, disappointment, or sin. Nor is there in nine hundred and ninety-nine
cases in a thousand any doubt that the hand, that spends at least a pound a
day in restaurants and cabs, will succeed in gathering the muslin flower if
he so wills it, and by doing so he will delight every one. Where, then, is
the struggle? where, then, is the triumph? Therefore, I say that if a young
man's heart is not set on children, and tiresome dinner parties, the young
girl presents to him no possible ideal. But the woman of thirty presents
from the outset all that is necessary to ensnare the heart of a young man.
I see her sitting in her beautiful drawing-room, all composed by, and all
belonging to her. Her chair is placed beneath an evergreen plant, and the
long leaves lean out as if to touch her neck. The great white and red roses
of the _d'aubusson_ carpet are spread enigmatically about her feline
feet; a grand piano leans its melodious mouth to her; and there she sits
when her visitors have left her, playing Beethoven's sonatas in the dreamy
firelight. The spring-tide shows but a bloom of unvarying freshness; August
has languished and loved in the strength of the sun. She is stately, she is
tall. What sins, what disappointments, what aspirations lie in those grey
eyes, mysteriously still, and mysteriously revealed. These a young man
longs to know of, they are his life. He imagines himself sitting by her,
when the others have gone, holding her hand, calling on her name; sometimes
she moves away and plays the moonlight sonata. Letting her hands droop upon
the keys she talks sadly, maybe affectionately; she speaks of the tedium of
life, of its disenchantments. He knows well what she means, he has suffered
as she has; but could he tell her, could she understand, that in his love
reality would dissolve into a dream, all limitations would open into
boundless infinity.
The husband he rarely sees. Sometimes a latchkey is heard about half-past
six. The man is thick, strong, common; his jaws are heavy; his eyes are
expressionless; there is about him the loud swagger of the _caserne_;
and he suggests the inevitable question, Why did she marry him?--a question
that every young man of refined mind asks a thousand times by day and ten
thousand times by night, asks till he is five-and-thirty, and sees that his
generation has passed into middle age.
Why did she marry him? Not the sea, nor the sky, nor the great mysterious
midnight, when he opens his casement and gazes into starry space will give
him answer; riddle that no Oedipus will ever come to unravel; this sphinx
will never throw herself from the rock into the clangour of the seagulls
and waves; she will never divulge her secret; and if she is the woman and
not a woman of thirty, she has forgotten.
The young man shakes hands with the husband; he strives not to look
embarrassed, and he talks of indifferent things--of how well he (the
husband) is looking, of his amusements, his projects; and then he (the
young man of refined mind) tastes of that keen and highly-seasoned
delight--happiness in crime. He knows not the details of her home life, the
husband is merely a dark cloud that fills one side of the picture,
sometimes obliterating the sunlight; a shadowy shape that in certain
moments solidifies and assumes the likeness of a rock-sculptured, imminent
monster; but the shadow and the shape and the threat are magnetic, and in a
sense of danger the fascination is sealed....
See the young man of refined mind in a ball room! He is leaning against the
woodwork in a distant doorway, he scarcely knows what to do with himself;
and he is now striving to interest himself in the conversation of a group
of men twice his age. I will not say he is shunned; but neither the matrons
nor the young girls make any advances towards him. The young girls looking
so sweet--in the oneness of their fresh hair, flowers, dresses, and
glances--are being introduced, are getting up to dance, and the hostess is
looking round for partners. She sees the young man in the doorway; but she
hesitates and goes to some one else; and if you asked her why, she could
not tell you why she avoided him. Presently the woman of thirty enters. She
is in white satin and diamonds. She looks for him,--a circular glance,--and
calm with possession she passes to a seat. She dances the eighth, twelfth,
and fifteenth waltz with him.
Will he induce her to visit his rooms? Will they be like mine--strange
debauches of colour and Turkish lamps, Marshall's taste, an old cabinet, a
faded pastel which embalms the memory of a pastoral century, my taste; or
will it be a library,--two leather library chairs, a large escritoire,
etc.? Be this as it may, whether the apartments be the ruthless
extravagance of artistic impulse, or the subdued taste of the student, she,
the woman of thirty, shall be there by night and day: her statue is there,
and even when she is sleeping safe in her husband's arms with fevered brow,
he, the young man of refined mind, alone and lonely shall kneel and adore
her.
And should she _not_ visit his rooms? If the complex and various
accidents of existence should have ruled out her life virtuously; if the
many inflections of sentiment have decided against this last consummation,
then she will wax to the complete, the unfathomable temptress--the Lilith
of old--she will never set him free, and in the end will be found about his
heart "one single golden hair." She shall haunt his wife's face and words
(should he seek to rid himself of her by marriage), a bitter sweet, a
half-welcome enchantment; she shall consume and destroy the strength and
spirit of his life, leaving it desolation, a barren landscape, burnt and
faintly scented with the sea. Fame and wealth shall slip like sand from
him. She may be set aside for the cadence of a rhyme, for the flowing line
of a limb, but when the passion of art has raged itself out, she shall
return to blight the peace of the worker.
A terrible malady is she, a malady the ancients knew of and called
nympholepsy--a beautiful name evocative and symbolic of its ideal aspect,
"the breast of the nymph in the brake." And the disease is not extinct in
these modern days, nor will it ever be so long as men shall yearn for the
unattainable; and the prosy bachelors who trail their ill-fated lives from
their chambers to their clubs know of, and they call their malady--the
woman of thirty.