have such a curious effect on my subsequent life, the evening of the
Duke’s visit to the Morgue, a visit as I then imagined out of ordinary
curiosity. As I previously mentioned, I had returned late that night
to dispose of the friendless man, whose soul I had previously guided
as well as I could into the shadows of the other world. I was reading
the last words of my Breviary by the flickering gaslight, when suddenly
shadows passed the frosted glass, and to my horror I heard the Duke
making arrangements for the temporary watching of the beautiful woman
I had already seen him cover with piteous eyes. I gathered that it
was not considered discreet, and would entail a licence from the
police, to remove the body from the Morgue to his private house. So
saying, they both entered where I was standing. It was one of the most
embarrassing moments of my life. The Duke turned as pale as one of
the marble mortuary slabs, and the Commissioner actually seized me as
though to prevent my escape. When they realised that I was a priest,
they seemed relieved, for a priest becomes so used to the seal imposed
upon the confessional that even secrets which come to him in other
ways join that silence of the grave. They both read what came in my
face, and without a word nodded to each other, and passed on their
way. I finished writing the formularies descriptive of my unknown
client, and left him lying with the others. I noticed that he was on
the next slab to the mysterious woman. It was beyond human nature for
me to refrain from glancing a second time at her features. They were
beautiful with the pallid unreality of the sculptor’s art. I have
observed that if the sculptor attains the slightest line of beauty or
personality in his art, it is far more wonderful than the painter’s.
It is more difficult to raise life out of the marble depths than upon
the surface of canvas or paint. But to leave by brush or chisel any
idea of the life that has recently left the countenance is the most
difficult. And this lovely model from the Divine sculptor conveyed that
haunting expression which sometimes the mediæval tombs possessed, as
though life lingered in death. How can I describe it? If you have ever
seen a fort or town which has been surrendered to the enemy, there is
a moment of tremendous pathos after the flag has been lowered and the
garrison withdrawn, before the enemy have taken possession. The prize
lies like the body of Patroclus between contending rivals. So, I may
say, lay the body of this beautiful woman, over whom life and death had
contended, and now that the colours of life had been lowered she lay
awaiting the legions of death and corruption. I turned away, making
the Sign of the Cross, and said the _De Profundis_ for the absent
soul. It was well that it had passed from its hostel’s desecration.
The next morning the body was gone. And then the weeks and the months
passed.... I was agreeably surprised that winter to be summoned by my
Bishop, and told that the moment of my promotion had arrived. I was to
be sent to a fashionable parish, where I would find more leisure to
continue my taste for historical studies, which the Bishop was gracious
enough to say had met his attention when inspecting the Seminary. He
wished me to leave my curacy, and with it those unhealthy but rather
fascinating duties at the Morgue, while another priest took my place.
I bowed to the Bishop’s decision, and kissed his ring. As I rose to
leave his anticamera he mentioned without a trace of inner meaning,
as though he were saying the most natural thing in the world, ‘You
owe your promotion to the kind offices of the Duke.’ To my amazement
he mentioned the name of the Duke I had reason to remember under
ineffaceable circumstances. The Bishop looked at me with the gentle
wondering look as though to say: ‘Go in peace, my son, your career is
made. You know how to keep secrets. To those who can keep the secrets
of humanity or of the Church all things will come.’ At least this came
into a mind, alert to guess the reasons of the Duke’s action in my
favour.
“I found my new position delightful--new interests, new ecclesiastical
visions, new friends. My confessional was thronged, which is always
pleasing to a young priest. When one becomes older, one’s professional
vanity can be adequately satisfied by shriving one old washerwoman _per
diem_. One day the confessional bell rang out of my usual hours. I
descended into the Church and a woman heavily veiled began telling me
the history of her life. As a good confessor, I forget all she said.
It is a blank, but I can say that the sweat poured down my face before
I left my seat. She joined me in the sacristy as she wished to speak
to me of other matters, and once outside the sacred seal my memory of
course returns. I recall that she was anxious for me to arrange her
private wedding. She wished to be married at the dead of night, and
my name had been mentioned as the only one fit and willing to perform
the ceremony. I replied that I could do nothing without my Bishop’s
consent, but that I would take him the particulars immediately, if she
would leave me her name and address. She replied that that she could
not, but a carriage would come to fetch me that night to perform the
ceremony, which would take place in a private house. So saying she laid
the marriage fees on the table, and without letting me look through her
veil handed me a letter from her bosom, which she requested me to give
the Bishop. Then she withdrew.
“That afternoon I called on the Bishop without giving notice, and to my
surprise was admitted immediately. He listened quietly to my request,
which I never dreamed for a moment he would permit, but I gave him the
lady’s letter. He glanced at the contents as though he knew it all
in advance. Without a trace of surprise or reflection in his eyes he
nodded and told me to perform the ceremony that night if I was sent
for. I gasped something about papers and ecclesiastical authorisation.
He forestalled me with a packet of papers, bidding me fill all the
particulars except the names of those about to be married. He ordered
me under severe penalties to bring back the papers without attempting
to read the signatures. He himself would fill in the names in the body
of the document. I respectfully withdrew, and waited in my rooms that
evening with some of the trepidation that I can imagine a girl feeling
while waiting for her first romance.
“After a solitary dinner I waited and waited. I finished reading
my Office for the day, and still sat waiting. I was too excited to
pray, too curious to meditate, too tired to read any book of piety.
I waited from nine to eleven, and from eleven to half-past eleven. A
bell rang and to my amazement my friend the Duke was introduced. He
explained that he had come because he was not sure if I would come on
such a wild goose chase, and also because it was necessary for me to
come blindfolded. Under his guarantee I naturally lent myself to the
adventure, and left the clergy house in a two-horsed carriage with a
tight bandage round my eyes. The Duke never spoke to me, but he helped
me very graciously out of the carriage, and through a courtyard, and up
what seemed a very fine flight of stairs, for I quickly felt that I was
treading marble, not wood.
“Then my eyes were released and I found myself standing in a long
and richly curtained apartment. There were two witnesses blindfolded
like myself, standing in front of an altar brought apparently out of
a private chapel. Others there were none except the Duke and the lady
whose confession I had heard that afternoon. The Duke then asked me
to perform the marriage ceremony between them. I bowed and took up my
place before the altar beside which were laid the necessary vestments.
As in a dream I proceeded to recite the prayers and perform the
gestures which should symbolise and solderise the mystical union of
two human beings. I had reached the moment for the Duke to place the
ring on the finger of the bride, when she let slip her veil, and for
a minute I could neither speak nor move. I should have been prepared,
but it had never crossed my mind, not even as the wildest and maddest
possibility. My friends, the bride whom I was uniting in marriage with
the Duke was the woman whose body I had seen laid on a marble slab at
the Morgue a year previously!
“She stood there with the same transcendent beauty, but with the slight
flush of life and love recurdling in her cheeks. This was the woman
whom I had seen among the dead and for whose soul I had said Mass! The
dead shall rise up and praise Thee, O Lord!
“Truly I may say that love is stronger than death and that God had most
strangely permitted this woman to be raised from the dead, by the whim
of a madman’s sentiment. Though she had been a sinner she was found
not unworthy of what I account as a miracle. Like the Prince and the
sleeping Beauty in the Fairy tale the Duke had restored her to life.
Their marriage was naturally morganatic, but as the incident restored
the Duke to his normal senses, it was a marriage that neither Church
nor State cared to forbid.”
THE BEAU GESTE
The _Beau geste_ is rare enough but not unknown in English life.
Certainly there is no English paraphrase. “Beautiful gesture” bespeaks
the orator or actor without conveying a certain brilliance, a sense of
the unique and sometimes the sheer spirituality which is inherent in
the _Beau geste_. “Noble act” sounds like a subscription to a hospital.
The schoolboy who thought that _Beau geste_ was another French way
of saying _Bon mot_ could not have been further astray. The _Beau
geste_ must be heroically conceived and, what is harder, artistically
expressed!
The Saints have often shown themselves capable of the _Beau geste_,
which carried to a sublime degree in supernatural matters can often be
advanced as a reason for canonisation. An ordinary soul may cherish
the sense of the _Beau geste_ through a lifetime without finding the
occasion. Expression does require an occasion, a crisis or a crash.
Nothing became King Charles so well in his life as leaving it. Charles
on the scaffold, Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen and Byron at Missolonghi,
knew how to make the _Beau geste_ to posterity. There is no life
however spoilt or degraded that cannot be irradiated if not redeemed by
the _Beau geste_ at its close. There is the _Beau geste_ of the sinner
as well as the _Beau geste_ of the righteous. The Good Samaritan was
of the latter and many a pardoning husband since. The _Beau geste_
of the profligate is rarer, but neither disgrace nor degradation can
tarnish the _Beau geste_ when it is made. The American clergyman,
who was executed for poisoning an unfortunate sweetheart when he saw
the chance of marrying a richer, seemed beyond the pale. There was
possibly nothing he could do to redeem himself, but with a supreme
effort he succeeded in blinding himself in prison. “If thine eye offend
thee pluck it out.” Well, he did so, and went not unjustified to the
gruesome chair. Again, the Dutch dancer, whose career of spycraft was
brought to book by the punctuation of a French firing squad, rose to
that occasion. Dressing herself for execution in a superb opera cloak
she only asked leave to give the signal unblindfolded. This was granted
by the officer on duty. She gave the signal by lifting her arms and
revealing her person to the bullets. “_C’était beau_” quoth the Gallic
centurion in charge.
Men and women are both capable of the _Beau geste_, but it takes a
woman to appreciate it sometimes, to accept its shining significance
or to bow to its grim subtlety. A woman’s _Beau geste_ is often lost
on a man’s intelligence but a man’s is never lost on a woman’s. Even
in connubial life the _Beau geste_ occurs and in the hour of greatest
disaster. Couples are too often coupled like railway carriages on
well worn lines by certificated couplers. They are expected to roll
placidly from Junction to Junction with occasional rests in the siding.
Everything is done to avoid accidents, but accidents will occur on the
best regulated lines and the collapse, like the start, of married life
can be relieved by a _Beau geste_ embalming even what may be a broken
memory for both. In any case a _Beau geste_ is never lost on a woman.
Let me think of two instances, one at the commencement, and the other
at the end of a married career.
I remember a young Italian Prince, the future head of a family, whose
veins ran with patrician and papal blood. At one moment of his life
he insisted on entering a _mésalliance_ by marrying a very beautiful
courtesan, whom many of his friends had known under attached but
detachable circumstances. They were naturally very distressed when he
insisted on crowning his deep love with marriage. It seemed unnecessary
and suicidal and caused his family the utmost apprehension. As a matter
of fact courtesans who have made their career and their fortunes may
yet make admirable wives. Everything however was done in this case
to avert the catastrophe. Even the lady, who loved him with equal
nobility of passion, refused to allow him to sacrifice himself. But
her unselfishness made him more desperate and more determined to wreck
his prospects at her feet. His friends were equally determined, and in
a last effort to avert the marriage confronted him with legal proofs
that his intended bride had been confined of an illegitimate child. Of
her lovers he was aware, but this was new to him, and for a moment he
was staggered. Recovering himself, he said, with one superb gesture
of contempt, “Then it was by an immaculate conception!” and married
her the next day. It was the _Beau geste_ of a great lover and of a
Catholic nobleman. A Protestant bourgeois would have virtuously slunk
out of the affair and left her to the streets.
But John Betterman, whose marriage story supplies me with the second
of my instances, was just a well-meaning and wealthy English
public-school man, two generations away from Trade and, if truth be
told, three generations off a butler. There was no glowing blood in his
descent and no noble obligations held sway in his composition, but when
his wife left him he behaved with real magnanimity. And in his case the
_Beau geste_ repaid him a hundredfold. Like most of us, he had to pass
through the experience of feminine desertion.
John Betterman was no lover, and, much as he loved the affectionate
woman who married him for his well-furnished house in Belgravia, his
choice cook, butler and housekeeper, he could never inspire her with
more than a deep appreciation. Affectionate appreciation lasted until
his wife fell in love with one of those American officers who caused
such havoc in the Allied ranks. Cornelius Murphy stood about six foot
four and looked a cross between George Washington and Adonis. He danced
like an Archangel on the tight-rope, and Broadway had taught him to be
a real lover. He was fatal, like all his type, to the unsophisticated
women of Europe. John Betterman’s wife had dreamed of such a find
before she met him. Once she had found her dream, she never stopped
meeting him. Captain Murphy received a standing invitation for lunch,
dinner and tea and a sitting invitation for most moments between. It
came under the Hospitality to Allies scheme. After the Armistice they
danced together for six weeks. The Armistice was not made applicable
to the war of sexes, which raged all the fiercer after the suspension
of masculine hostilities. Man’s earthly warfare was not intended to
be against his own sex. He must eternally meet the approaches and
desertions of the beloved enemy, whose adorable artillery has always
included all the refinements of poisoned breath, scraps of paper and
submarine poignarding. The question was how would John Betterman take
it. Quiet, inoffensive and obedient husbands can be far more dangerous
than the blustering Pasha.
Cornelius Murphy and Mrs. Betterman withdrew to a Railway Hotel, from
which she telephoned the first news of her flight to her husband. He
took the parting like a hero. He would cause the necessary reasons for
her to divorce him, and he only asked her to come and fetch her things
the next day and promised that she would not find him in the house. He
added his word of honour. With a sudden sigh she hung up the receiver,
but grateful that she was spared pursuit or scenes. “I will go round
to-morrow and fetch my clothes and all I need travelling abroad,”
she said to Murphy. “It is such a relief that he takes it so kindly.
English gentleman, you know.”
“No, you don’t,” shot Murphy, alert and suspicious, “No such thing as
an English gentleman when it comes to that. It’s bound to be a trap.
You’ll find lawyers and detectives waiting for you.”
Immediately she felt stung with a faint pity for her husband and
insisted on obeying his last unselfish request. “No,” she said firmly,
“I know John Betterman. He would cut off his hand rather than set a
dirty trap. I shall go to-morrow alone.”
“For God’s sake, you shall not!” shouted Murphy. She drew herself up
and said, “It is the price of my remaining with you to-night.” He bowed
his head ashamed. “I was afraid some harm might come to you, darling.
If I were your husband and could trap you I would kill you.”
The next morning he motored her to her husband’s house and waited
while she collected her luggage. A letter was waiting for her on the
hall table in his handwriting. She opened and read. A cheque for ten
thousand pounds fell to the floor. There was no mention of it in the
letter, which ran simply:
DEAR JULIA,
I have been a good husband but not good enough for you. You have been
a perfect wife and to you I assign no fault. If there is something
lacking in your life you must complete yourself elsewhere. When I
come to the end of my life, I shall be as glad as I am now unhappy
that I did not hinder you mounting a flame, which would bring any
other woman unto earth and ashes but upon which I know you will
rise to the highest heaven. When your life is complete, perfect and
finished, let my love still lie like a wreath of immortelles at your
feet.
JOHN.
She cried a little when she read it. A new kind of feeling rose in her
heart which possibly she could not explain. It has been said that every
man kills the thing he loves. Perhaps it is sometimes true that a woman
loves the thing she kills. It was her soul’s response to his _Beau
geste_, the tiniest seed of a love he had never awakened in their whole
married life.
Cornelius Murphy was relieved when he saw her emerge, but he spied her
tears in a second. “Is he there? Did he frighten you?” and he pulled
out his army pistol and dragged her across the threshold. She did not
like his roughness and deliberately backed into the house. Murphy
followed. “Of course he’s not here. I only felt a little sorry going
away, that is all,” she explained. “I guess he had better not follow
us,” said the other and, by way of a visible hint, he loaded his pistol
and left it in the tray of visitors’ cards. Then they both went to
America.
When John Betterman returned to his house that evening it looked as
empty as the shell without the pearl. He gave one glance at the pistol
in the hall, read the name, “Capt. Cornelius Murphy, 105 U.S. Cavalry,”
and gave orders that it was never to be touched. In the morning he
stood staring at that implement of ruffianism and feeling ironical
amusement. But the impetus of his _Beau geste_ was unabated and he
consulted his lawyers on his wife’s behalf. They showed the same sleek
sympathy which coffin-makers always extend to their clients and gave
him the necessary instructions how to enable his wife to divorce him
with least expense and most credit to herself. It was necessary that
he should find a lady who was willing to share the same room (nothing
more, but to be legal hardly less) at an hotel and to forward the
written testimony to the proper quarters.
That evening, accordingly, John Betterman walked round and round the
purlieus of Victoria Station until he was accosted by a cheery lady
with a head of red tow, who suggested drinks in Victoria Station. To
this proposition he agreed, and under these amical surroundings she
confided to him that she was locally known as “Pink Tart” and that
she was ready to pass the evening with bachelors for the sum of ten
shillings sterling. John Betterman offered her five pounds on condition
that she spent the night sitting on one chair, while he sat reading in
another, and that she made no sign of her existence until the morning.
Her name was Susan Honeyman, and she decidedly wished there were
more wealthy lunatics and less impoverished rakes in the vicinity of
Victoria Station.
Evidence of this extraordinary evening was duly furnished to the
lawyers of Mrs. Betterman, who brought proceedings for divorce in the
most respectable fashion, and received a good deal of broadcasted
sympathy from readers of the best read column in the _Daily Press_,
especially when the flagrant details of Mr. Betterman’s infidelities
were exposed and even the nickname of Miss Susan Honeyman was set down
in stark print and read eagerly by those who would never have allowed
it to soil their lips.
John Betterman felt these shameful and painful details intensely,
but he had come to take a strange and fantastic pleasure in his own
sufferings. His suffering and his shame were for the sake of the woman
he loved. He could ask no more.
Every night washed he his pillow with his tears and imagined deeper
sufferings and further humiliations for himself. Toward his wife he
felt no resentment in the least, not even a little. It had all turned
and curdled into a bitter resentment against himself, bitterer than
death. The months passed and his wife’s divorce was made absolute.
He had borne up his heart while in the twilight stage of “decree
nisi,” but dark finality bowed him to the ground. All that night he
sat wishing to make an end of himself. At last he felt that death
and suicide were too good for him. He must make himself suffer even
more than he had suffered all those weeks, but how? He felt that no
scourging could have hurt him as much as that undefended divorce trial,
the crushing allusions of the paid lawyers, the scornful comment of
the Judge, and, what cut him like vinegar poured into a slit spleen,
the nickname of the woman with whom he was proved to have passed the
stipulated time of lust. If it had been a “Green Goddess” or a “Black
Beauty” it would not have looked so ridiculous in the evening papers,
but the fatal synonym of Miss Susan Honeyman lost him all sympathy even
from himself. He could not help hating himself like Hell.
The next night the house became more than he could endure, and he
strode into the lamp-speckled dark. This way and that, like an
unimaginative madman longing by some astounding stroke to trouble the
mocking world, he sought some action that would help her and hurt
himself, even if it were criminal. He would have gladly gone to prison
to explain this sin of hers. No! by the sweet bones of Christ! she was
sinless and immaculate! But he would willingly have gone to prison to
serve some long sentence incurred by Murphy so that she might live
happily with him. He would out-Enoch Enoch Arden in that way. How could
he sufficiently lower and degrade himself to justify her desertion of
home and husband in the face of the world?
A familiar figure reeled against him near Victoria Station. “Got
any more fivers for sitting up to watch you read all night?” quoth
a coarse but kindly voice. Why, of course he had, and he laughed a
skeleton laugh as he recognised his old friend, who had often told
her friends the story of her midnight escapade with a madman and was
often reminiscent of the divorce proceedings in which her name and
style had been taken by hired lawyers in vain. “Out for a lark?” she
asked, but John Betterman was in dead earnest, when he asked her to go
even further than on their former meeting and consent to marry him at
a registry office the next day. Miss Honeyman would have been really
surprised had she not taken his proposal for a joke. “Why, won’t one
night at the hotel do you again? What do yer want marrying me at the
end of me life?” And she roared with laughter. Only once before had
she been asked in marriage, and that was by her original seducer, who
had subsequently thrown her on the streets. However, John Betterman
not only treated her to supper but gave her twenty pounds to pay her
arrears of rent and buy a decent dress to make a proper appearance the
next morning. No wonder that she went her way rejoicing, astounded at
her luck in falling in again with so profitable a madman. It was in
hopes of another windfall and not of the matrimonial position that
she made her way to the registry the following day. To her amazement
and perhaps a little to his own, John Betterman awaited her, prim
and punctual, but with a look of insane pride in his face. He took a
perverted pride in the depth of degradation and misery he found it
possible to inflict upon his own soul. Before noon they were united
legally by the law of England, and by three o’clock Mrs. John Betterman
the second was lying quite drunk under his dining-room table. It was
years since she had tasted champagne. She had that excuse. She lay
there while John Betterman wrote to his first wife. He wished to put
her into a position from which she could for ever more look down upon
him. He took no further notice of his second wife. Had an angel from
Heaven picked her up and made her drunk with the wine of celestial
grapes she could not have been enjoying greater bliss. In fact at each
interval of sick gratitude she constantly expressed her opinion that
such was the actual case.
He looked up when he had finished writing and at the same moment heard
the bell ring. His housekeeper entered. It was a cable from America
sent by his first wife and it read with tragic simplicity:
“All I have done has been a horrible mistake. I am on the returning
boat. Please meet me on Saturday at Liverpool and forgive your
adoring wife.”