THEOPHIL ALL THIS TIME
Have I seemed to shirk the subject of Theophil's feelings all this time?
Well, I confess I have rather shrunk from writing down in so many words
that he was in love with Isabel,--obvious as the fact has been,--just as
he himself shrank from admitting the same truth even to his own soul.
When he had sat up in his study that night of the recital, he had looked
the whole sad splendid truth in its wonderful face, had loved it wildly
for an hour, and then shut his eyes to it for ever.
He knew that Isabel was the woman God had made for him, sweet, dear
Jenny the woman he had made for himself, and he bowed before the work of
the greater artist.
Never voice nor look nor touch of woman had affected Theophil before as
the least tone or glance or movement of Isabel stirred him to the centre
of his being. To meet her eyes was to release a music that went
shuddering through the whole world; her lightest word was filled with
echoes of infinite things. Not a lover only, but anyone with instincts
for such perceptions, looking at Isabel, would have said: There is a
woman who is needed to make some man a great poet, a great artist, some
kind of great man! She belongs to the history-making women. Hundreds of
women will attract men by the hundred where she will attract
comparatively few, but that few will be the pick of men; and some day,
when the other women have gone the way of all sweet roses, she will
still remain (if she has found an artist to understand her face) the
frontispiece of some distinguished biography, or hang in a gallery of
the period among the few faces that were indestructibly personal; not
the faces that have lived, but the faces that still go on living, the
faces that are influences still, the unique, daemonic faces.
Isabel was indeed a muse that waited for her poet. The mere idea of such
a woman, cherished across dividing seas and separating years, will help
a man be great. To grow great near or far is the one way to be hers, and
to pile up great work for her sake is perhaps the best way to love her.
She could never be his wife, but she might still be his muse, resolved
Theophil, feigning in that reflection for the moment a more human
comfort than, alas! there really was.
But was there to be no loss to Jenny in this?
"True love in this differs from gold or clay,
That to divide is not to take away."
It is the convenient old plea of the poets, and yet it is sometimes
true. It was true here. There is, I know, a sort of primitive man or
woman--I believe they will some day be exhibited in menageries--who
cannot be on with a new love without being ungratefully off with the
old. All depends of what the two loves are made. If it is bodily fire
and no more, of course the new love will put out the old as the great
sun puts out a little smouldering fire; and the majority of so-called
love-stories are merely disastrous conflagrations of that sort. In such
cases the new love is no sooner found than the old becomes grievous, a
burden; by a malignant witchcraft the old charms have grown veritably
repellent, and "all the heaven that was" irretrievably disenchanted.
Which is the illusion, one wonders,--the original enchantment or the
final disenchantment?
When, however, love can give a better account of its preferences than
this, and point out, say in Jenny, many good reasons why she was at
first and must for ever remain love-worthy, whatever rival reasons for
love another woman may bring; when too there is added to those reasons
for loving Jenny the dear habit of loving her, the gratitude--love must
forgive the word--which has accumulated interest upon the original love,
the beauties that have been gained by becoming familiarities, and the
familiarities that have become beauties by very use,--well, really, is
it such a hardship, after all, for a man to be expected to keep true to
his Jenny?
Oh! but passion doesn't reason like this. Indeed, O passionate reader!
Is passion, then, merely a wild beast, a savage, a blind fire? Must it
forfeit its fine name if it remembers mercy or owns duty? Is it any less
passion because it refuses sometimes to glut itself, and dares to go
hungry all its days instead; any less passion because it chooses to burn
up its own heart in an agony of its own consuming fire?
Mere violence is not a strength but a weakness in passion, and sometimes
there is more passion in patience than in anything else in the world. A
passion that knows not pity is merely a daemonic possession, and should
be taken to the madhouse.
I confess that there is nothing in the world more amazing to me than the
easy brutality with which one hears of some men doing what is called
"breaking off their engagements." Only a new face has to show itself,
and the old face at once disappears with a blow and a wail.
Murder, of course, is one way out of many difficult situations, and the
worst kinds of murder are by no means capital offences. It is true that
all engagements are not made by the same vital bonds as that of Jenny's
and Theophil's, but many are. For a man wilfully to break an engagement
means sometimes that the whole love-life in a woman is atrophied, all
that made her woman stabbed to the quick of life.
Yet no one who knows anything of women can have failed to remark that
women themselves are even more brutal in this matter. Nothing could
exceed the executioner-like promptitude with which a woman will despatch
a man for whom she has ceased to care. But in her case there is to be
urged that, though fundamentally love is of equal importance to man and
woman, it does not so often mean the absolute saving or wrecking of a
man's life as it does a woman's. It is not a disgrace to a man to be
jilted; it is to a woman. For a woman to be jilted is for her to have
failed,--as a woman; and for a woman to have failed as a woman is for
her to value no other success.
All this to maintain, in spite of the reader, that Londonderry is no
milksop because he is not going to jilt--that is, murder--poor little
Jenny, throw up New Zion, and seek his new love on the wild winds. But
the agony of it none the less! O Jenny! Jenny! sweet and true and good
and dear as ever,--if only you would just take a sudden fancy for
someone else!
Meanwhile the months were going by, and the day drawing nearer when, for
a brief moment of fire, the orbits of those two separated lives were to
touch once more.
What of Isabel during these months? The woman whom God had created for
Theophilus Londonderry did not forget her promise to write to the woman
whom Theophilus Londonderry had created in his own image. Wonderful
letters, of course! Why don't women publish volumes of their letters, as
men collect their scattered essays? There is no writing in the world
more immediately, conqueringly personal than a really clever woman's
letters; and they are not always compromising.
Isabel's letters were the perfection of self-expression. Her handwriting
swept across the page just as she would walk down a street, at once
eager and yet stately and subtle-rhythmed; the shape of some of the
words reminded you of her hats,--hats everyone thought she paid guineas
for, but which she made for herself at a cost perhaps of five shillings:
hats which were Paris with a touch of fairyland, somewhere an
unobtrusive feather of the fantastic, somewhere a personal magic in the
inimitable twist or lie of a bow--; her face looked out at you from a
_g_ or an _x_, a gesture flashed back to you in a sudden distinguished
stroke of the pen, and her voice was somewhere, everywhere, among the
words, like a violin.
Without any apparent literary device she contrived to make you, while
you read her letters, do what she was doing, see what she was seeing,
and form, as though acted on by some magic property in the words,
pictures of all she told you.
One piece of news you would not expect her to have told. I have said
that women are both executioners of the tiresome. In this Isabel, I
fear, was no exception to her sex. Like most independent girls in
London, she had a little theatre-guard of devoted men friends, who took
it in turn to companion her to plays or picture-galleries; and these,
with admirable tact, she contrived to keep in, to them, the
unsatisfactory relation of brothers. One of these, however, had of late
been growing dangerously unfraternal. His presents had been growing
expensive. Cigarettes and chocolates, and pretty editions, like gloves,
and boxes of flowers, are every pretty woman's lawful spoils; but
costlier gifts are to be looked on with suspicion. Besides, the doomed
man's letters had been growing warmer. Indeed, Isabel remembered with
something like a shudder, so soon as she was back in her little room,
with its curious pictures and its general sense of exotic refinement,
that she had allowed him to kiss her the last time they had been
together. The reminiscence decided her. Theophil could never be hers;
but at least no facile or mediocre attachments should fill his place. So
at once there is posted a letter, as kind as cruelty can make it, and
with it go a little ormolu clock, a pair of mother-of-pearl
opera-glasses, a lovely fan it was hard, Isabel, to part with,--and
there is an end of that.
"Not after Theophil!" she sighed, as she took up her great Persian cat,
and, like it, sat gazing into the fire that flickered dreamily among her
fantastic possessions,--a mystery gazing idly into a mystery.