May 22d.
I wonder whether I should be happier now if I had lived in a garret “in
the brave days when I was twenty-one,” if I had undergone the lessons
of misery with the attendant compensations of “_une folle maitresse, de
francs amis et l’amour des chansons_,” and had joyous-heartedly mounted
my six flights of stairs. I lived modestly, it is true; but never for a
moment was I doubtful as to my next meal, and I have always enjoyed the
creature comforts of the respectable classes; never did Lisette pin her
shawl curtain-wise across my window. Sometimes, nowadays, I almost wish
she had. I never dreamed of glory, love, pleasure, madness, or spent my
lifetime in a moment, like the singer of the immortal song. Often the
weary moments seemed a lifetime.
And now that I am forty, “it is too late a week.” Boon companions, of
whom I am thankful to say I have none, would drive me crazy with their
intolerable heartiness. I once spent an evening at the Savage Club.
As for the _folle maitresse_--as a concomitant of my existence she
transcends imagination.
“What are you thinking of?” asked Judith.
“I was thinking how the _‘Dans un grenier qu’on est bien a vingt ans’_
principle would have worked in my own case,” I answered truthfully, for
the above reflections had been Passing through my mind.
Judith laughed.
“You in a garret? Why, you haven’t got a temperament!”
I suppose I haven’t. It never occurred to me before. Beranger omitted
that from his list of attendant compensations.
“That’s the difference between us,” she added, after a pause. “I have a
temperament and you haven’t.”
“I hope you find it a great comfort.”
“It is ten times more uncomfortable than a conscience. It is the bane of
one’s existence.”
“Why be so proud of having it?”
“You wouldn’t understand if I told you,” said Judith.
I rose and walked to the window and gazed meditatively at the rain which
swept the uninspiring little street. Judith lives in Tottenham Mansions,
in the purlieus of the Tottenham Court Road. The ground floor of the
building is a public-house, and on summer evenings one can sit by the
open windows, and breathe in the health-giving fumes of beer and whisky,
and listen to the sweet, tuneless strains of itinerant musicians. When
my new fortunes enabled me to give the dear woman just the little help
that allowed her to move into a more commodious flat, she had the many
mansions of London to choose from. Why she insisted on this abominable
locality I could never understand. It isn’t as if the flat were
particularly cheap; indeed the fact of its being situated over a
public-house seems to enhance the rent. She said she liked the shape of
the knocker and the pattern of the bathroom taps. I dimly perceive that
it must have had something to do with the temperament.
“It always seems to rain when we propose an outing together. This is the
fourth time since Easter,” I remarked.
We had planned a sedate country jaunt, but as the day was pouring wet we
remained at home.
“Perhaps this is the way the _bon Dieu_ has of expressing his
disapproval of us,” said Judith.
“Why should he disapprove?” I asked.
A shrug of her shoulders ended in a shiver.
“I am chilled through.”
“My dear girl,” I cried, “why on earth haven’t you lit the fire?”
“The last time I lit it you said the room was stuffy.”
“But then it was beautiful blazing sunshine, you illogical woman,” I
exclaimed, searching my pockets for a match-box.
I struck a match. To apply it to the fire I had to kneel by her chair.
She stretched out her hand--she has delicate white hands with slender
fingers--and lightly touched my head.
“How long have we known each other?” she asked.
“About eight years.”
“And how long shall we go on?”
“As long as you like,” said I, intent on the fire.
Judith withdrew her hand. I knelt on the hearthrug until the merry blaze
and crackle of the wood assured me of successful effort.
“These are capital grates,” I said, cheerfully, drawing a comfortable
arm-chair to the front of the fire.
“Excellent,” she replied, in a tone devoid of interest.
There was a long silence. To me this is one of the great charms of human
intercourse. Is there not a legend that Tennyson and Carlyle spent the
most enjoyable evenings of their lives enveloped in impenetrable silence
and tobacco-smoke, one on each side of the hob? A sort of Whistlerian
nocturne of golden fog!
I offered Judith a cigarette. She declined it with a shake of the head.
I lit one myself and leaning back contentedly in my chair watched her
face in half-profile. Most people would call her plain. I can’t make up
my mind on the point. She is what is termed a negative blonde--that is
to say, one with very fair hair (in marvellous abundance--it is one of
her beauties), a sallow complexion and deep violet eyes. Her face is
thin, a little worn, that of the woman who has suffered--temperament
again! Her mouth, now, as she looks into the new noisy flames, is drawn
down at the corners. Her figure is slight but graceful. She has pretty
feet. One protruded from her skirt, and a slipper dangled from the tip.
At last it fell off. I knew it would. She has a craze for the minimum of
material in slippers--about an inch of leather (I suppose it’s leather)
from the toe. I picked the vain thing up and balanced it again on her
stocking-foot.
“Will you do that eight years hence?” said Judith.
“My dear, as I’ve done it eight thousand times the last eight years, I
suppose I shall,” I replied, laughing. “I’m a creature of habit.”
“You may marry, Marcus.”
“God forbid!” I ejaculated.
“Some pretty fresh girl.”
“I abominate pretty fresh girls. I would just as soon talk to a baby in
a perambulator.”
“The women men are crazy to marry are not always those they particularly
delight to converse with, my friend,” said Judith.
I lit another cigarette. “I think the sex feminine has marriage on the
brain,” I exclaimed, somewhat heatedly. “My Aunt Jessica was worrying me
about it the day before yesterday. As if it were any concern of hers!”
Judith laughed below her breath and called me a simpleton.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you haven’t got a temperament.”
This was a foolish answer, having no bearing on the question. I told
her so. She replied that she was years older than I, and had learned
the eternal relevance of all things. I pointed out that she was years
younger.
“How many heart-beats have you had in your life--real, wild, pulsating
heart-beats--eternity in an hour?”
“That’s Blake,” I murmured.
“I’m aware of it. Answer my question.”
“It’s a silly question.”
“It isn’t. The next time you see a female baby in a perambulator, take
off your hat respectfully.”
I am afraid I am clumsy at repartee.
“And the next time you engage a cook, my dear Judith,” said I, “send for
a mere man.”
She coloured up. I dissolved myself in apologies. Her wounded
susceptibilities required careful healing. The situation was somewhat
odd. She had not scrupled to attack the innermost weaknesses of my
character, and yet when I retaliated by a hit at externals, she was
deeply hurt, and made me feel a ruffianly blackguard. I really think if
Lisette had pinned up that curtain I should have learned something more
about female human nature. But Judith is the only woman I have known
intimately all my life long, and sometimes I wonder whether I shall ever
know her. I told her so once. She answered: “If you loved me you would
know me.” Very likely she was right. Honestly speaking, I don’t love
Judith. I am accustomed to her. She is a lady, born and bred. She is
an educated woman and takes quite an intelligent interest in the
Renaissance. Indeed she has a subtler appreciation of the Venetian
School of Painting than I have. She first opened my eyes, in Italy, to
the beauties, as a gorgeous colourist, of Palma Vecchio in his second or
Giorgionesque manner. She is in every way a sympathetic and entertaining
companion. Going deeper, to the roots of human instinct, I find she
represents to me--so chance has willed it--the _ewige weibliche_ which
must complement masculinity in order to produce normal existence. But as
for the “_zieht uns hinan_”--no. It would not attract me hence--out of
my sphere. I could commit an immortal folly for no woman who ever made
this planet more lustrous to its Bruderspharen.
I don’t understand Judith. It doesn’t very greatly matter. Many things
I don’t understand, the spiritual attitude towards himself, for example,
of the intelligent juggler who expends his life’s energies in balancing
a cue and three billiard-balls on the tip of his nose. But I know that
Judith understands me, and therein lies the advantage I gain from our
intimacy. She gauges, to an absurdly subtle degree, the depth of my
affection. She is really an incomparable woman. So many insist upon
predilection masquerading as consuming passion. There is nothing
theatrical about Judith.
Yet to-day she appeared a little touchy, moody, unsettled. She broke
another pleasant spell of fireside silence, that followed expiation of
my offence, by suddenly calling my name.
“Yes?” said I, inquiringly.
“I want to tell you something. Please promise me you won’t be vexed.”
“My dear Judith,” said I, “my great and imperial namesake, in whose
meditations I have always found ineffable comfort, tells me this: ‘If
anything external vexes you, take notice that it is not the thing which
disturbs you, but your notion about it, which notion you may dismiss
at once, if you please!’ So I promise to dismiss all my notions of your
disturbing communication and not to be vexed.”
“If there is one platitudinist I dislike more than another, it is Marcus
Aurelius,” said Judith.
I laughed. It was very comfortable to sit before the fire, which
protested, in a fire’s cheery, human way, against the depression of the
murky world outside, and to banter Judith.
“I can quite understand it,” I said. “A man sucks in the consolations of
philosophy; a woman solaces herself with religion.”
“I can do neither,” she replied, changing her attitude with an
exaggerated shaking down of skirts. “If I could, I shouldn’t want to go
away.”
“Go away?” I echud.
“Yes. You mustn’t be vexed with me. I haven’t got a cook--”
“No one would have thought it, from the luncheon you gave me, my dear.”
The alcoholized domestic, by the way, was sent out, bag and baggage,
last evening, when she was sober enough to walk.
“And so it is a convenient opportunity,” Judith continued, ignoring my
compliment--and rightly so; for as soon as it had been uttered, I was
struck by an uneasy conviction that she had herself disturbed the French
caterers in the Tottenham Court Road from their Sabbath repose in order
to provide me with food.
“I can shut up the flat without any fuss. I am never happy at the
beginning of a London season. I know I’m silly,” she went on, hurriedly.
“If I could stand your dreadful Marcus Aurelius I might be wiser--I
don’t mind the rest of the year; but in the season everybody is in
town--people I used to know and mix with--I meet them in the streets
and they cut me and it--hurts--and so I want to get away somewhere by
myself. When I get sick of solitude I’ll come back.”
One of her quick, graceful movements brought her to her knees by my
side. She caught my hand.
“For pity’s sake, Marcus, say that you understand why it is.”
I said, “I have been a blatant egoist all the afternoon, Judith. I
didn’t guess. Of course I understand.”
“If you didn’t, it would be impossible for us.”
“Have no doubt,” said I, softly, and I kissed her hand.
I came into her life when she counted it as over and done with--at eight
and twenty--and was patiently undergoing premature interment in a small
pension in Rome. How long her patience would have lasted I cannot say.
If circumstances had been different, what would have happened? is the
most futile of speculations. What did happen was the drifting together
of us two bits of flotsam and our keeping together for the simple reason
that there were no forces urging us apart. She was past all care for
social sanctions, her sacred cap of good repute having been flung over
the windmills long before; and I, friendless unit in a world of shadows,
why should I have rejected the one warm hand that was held out to me?
As I said to her this afternoon, Why should the _bon Dieu_ disapprove? I
pay him the compliment of presuming that he is a broad-minded deity.
When my fortune came, she remarked, “I am glad I am not free. If I were,
you would want to marry me, and that would be fatal.”
The divine, sound sense of the dear woman! Honour would compel the
offer. Its acceptance would bring disaster.
Marriage has two aspects. The one, a social contract, a _quid_ of
protection, maintenance, position and what not, for a _quo_ of the
various services that may be conveniently epitomized in the phrase _de
mensa et thoro_. The other, the only possible existence for two beings
whose passionate, mutual attraction demands the perfect fusion of their
two existences into a common life. Now to this passionate attraction
I have never become, and, having no temperament (thank Heaven!), shall
never become, a party. Before the turbulence therein involved I stand
affrighted as I do before London or the deep sea. I once read an epitaph
in a German churchyard: “I will awake, O Christ, when thou callest me;
but let me sleep awhile, for I am very weary.” Has the human soul ever
so poignantly expressed its craving for quietude? I fancy I should have
been a heart’s friend of that dead man, who, like myself, loved the cool
and quiet shadow, and was not allowed to enjoy it in this world. I may
not get the calm I desire, but at any rate my existence shall not
be turned upside down by mad passion for a woman. As for the
social-contract aspect of marriage, I want no better housekeeper than
Antoinette; and my dining-table having no guests does not need a lady to
grace its foot; I have no _a priori_ craving to add to the population.
“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason
alone,” says Schopenhauer, “would the human race continue to exist?
Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation
as to spare it the burden of existence? or at any rate not take it
upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?” By bringing
children into the world by means of a marriage of convenience I should
be imposing the burden of existence upon them in cold blood. I agree
with Schopenhauer.
And the dreadful bond of such a marriage! To have in the closest
physical and moral propinquity for one hundred and eighty-six hours
out of the week, each hour surcharged with an obligatory exchange of
responsibilities, interests, sacrifices of every kind, a being who is
not the utter brother of my thoughts and sister of my dreams--no, never!
_Au grand non, au grand jamais!_
Judith is an incomparable woman, but she is not the utter brother of my
thoughts and the sister of my dreams; nor am I of hers.
But the comradeship she gives me is as food and drink, and my affection
fulfils a need in her nature. The delicate adjustment of reciprocals
is our sanction. Marriage, were it possible, would indeed be fatal. Our
pleasant, free relations, unruffled by storm, are ideal for us both.
Why, I wonder, did she think her proposal to go away for a change would
vex me?
The idea implies a right of veto which is repugnant to me. Of all the
hateful attitudes towards a woman in which a decent man can view himself
that of the Turkish bashaw is the most detestable. Women seldom give men
credit for this distaste.
I kissed the white hand of Judith that touched my wrist, and told her
not to doubt my understanding. She cried a little.
“I don’t make your path rougher, Judith?” I whispered.
She checked her tears and her eyes brightened wonderfully.
“You? You do nothing but smooth it and level it.”
“Like a steam-roller,” said I.
She laughed, sprang to her feet, and carried me off gaily to the kitchen
to help her get the tea ready. My assistance consisted in lighting the
gas-stove beneath a waterless kettle. After that I sprawled against
the dresser and, with my heart in my mouth, watched her cut thin
bread-and-butter in a woman’s deliciously clumsy way. Once, as the
bright blade went perilously near her palm, I drew in my breath.
“A man would never dream of doing it like that!” I cried, in rebuke.
She calmly dropped the wafer on to the plate and handed me the knife and
loaf.
“Do it your way,” she said, with a smile of mock humility.
I did it my way, and cut my finger.
“The devil’s in the knife!” I cried. “But that’s the right way.”
Judith said nothing, but bound up my wound, and, like the well-conducted
person of the ballad, went on cutting bread-and-butter. Her smile,
however, was provoking.
“And all this time,” I said, half an hour later, “you haven’t told me
where you are going.”
“Paris. To stay with Delphine Carrere.”
“I thought you said you wanted solitude.”
I have met Delphine Carrere--_brave femme_ if ever there was one, and
the loyalest soul in the world, the only one of Judith’s early women
friends who has totally ignored the fact of the Sacred Cap of Good
Repute having been thrown over the windmills (indeed who knows whether
dear, golden-hearted Delphine herself could conscientiously write the
magic initials S.C.G.R. after her name?); but Delphine has never struck
me as a person in whose dwelling one could find conventual seclusion.
Judith, however, explained.
“Delphine will be painting all day, and dissipating all night. I can’t
possibly disturb her in her studio, for she has to work tremendously
hard--and I’m decidedly not going to dissipate with her. So I shall have
my days and nights to my sequestered and meditative self.”
I said nothing: but all the same I am tolerably certain that Judith,
being Judith, will enjoy prodigious merrymaking in Paris. She is
absolutely sincere in her intentions--the earth holds no sincerer
woman--but she is a self-deceiver. Her about-to-be-sequestered and
meditative self was at that moment sitting on the arm of a chair and
smoking a cigarette, with undisguised relish of the good things of this
life. The blue smoke wreathing itself amid her fair hair resembled, so I
told her in the relaxed intellectual frame of mind of the contented man,
incense mounting through the nimbus of a saint. She affected solicitude
lest the life-blood of my intelligence should be pouring out through my
cut finger. No, I am convinced that the _recueillement_ (that beautiful
French word for which we have no English equivalent, meaning the
gathering of the soul together within itself) of the rue Boissy
d’Anglais is the very happiest delusion wherewith Judith has hitherto
deluded herself. I am glad, exceedingly glad. Her temperament--I have
got reconciled to her affliction--craves the gaiety which London denies
her.
“And when are you going?” I asked.
“To-morrow.”
“To-morrow?”
“Why not? I wired Delphine this morning. I had to go out to get
something for lunch (my conviction, it appears, was right), and I
thought I might as well take an omnibus to Charing Cross and send a
telegram.”
“But when are you going to pack?”
“I did that last night. I didn’t get to bed till four this morning. I
only made up my mind after you had gone,” she added, in anticipation of
a possible question.
It is better that we are not married. These sudden resolutions would
throw my existence out of gear. My moral upheaval would be that of a hen
in front of a motor-car. When I go abroad, I like at least a fortnight
to think of it. One has to attune one’s mind to new conditions, to map
out the pleasant scheme of days, to savour in anticipation the delights
that stand there, awaiting one’s tasting, either in the mystery of the
unknown or in the welcoming light of familiarity. I love the transition
that can be so subtly gradated by the spirit between one scene and
another. The man who awakens one fine morning in his London residence,
scratches his head, and says, “What shall I do to-day? By Jove! I’ll
start for Timbuctoo!” is to me an incomprehensible, incomplete being. He
lacks an aesthetic sense.
I did not dare tell Judith she lacked an aesthetic sense. I might just
as well have accused her of stealing silver spoons. I said I should miss
her (which I certainly shall), and promised to write to her once a week.
“And you,” said I, “will have heaps of time to write me the History of a
Sequestered and Meditative Self--meanwhile, let us go out somewhere and
dine.”
When I got home, I found a card on my hall-table. “Mr. Sebastian
Pasquale.”
I am sorry I missed Pasquale. I haven’t seen him for two or three years.
He is a fascinating youth, a study in reversion. I will ask him to
dinner here some day soon. It will be quieter than at the club.