When one is standing in a window looking down into a gorge a thousand
feet below, the cynical reflections of a mummy in bed smoking a cigar
vex the impulse of romance, quick in the brain. Ranata was in the
window. The window was Zrinyi’s; so was the perpendicular mountain of
which the old border fortress might have been an abrupt continuation,
so indeed were the harsh wild peaks, bare but for the glittering snow,
which rose high above this lofty height. The mummy was Sarolta, who was
in bed with a cold. The invasion of her sacred person by impertinent
microbes always put her in a bad humor, and to-day it urged her to
improve one of her rare solitudes with her royal charge. Moreover, she
was profoundly puzzled. If Ranata was not in love with this American,
why then did she show him a preference never before won, for a moment,
by another admirer? But if she were in love, why then this serenity?
She had expected that Ranata’s inevitable love episode would be fraught
with tragedy from the very first, and that pallid cheeks and heavy eyes
would be the visible signs, haughtily as the Princess might comport
herself. Had the heroine been any one but Ranata she might have drawn
a characteristic deduction from this serenity; but although she was
not the European to swear to the virtue of any woman, she knew that
Ranata, if not bigotedly virtuous, was bigotedly loyal to her house,
and had long since made her vow that by no act of hers should another
of its stones be loosened; rather was she exalted by the hope that it
might be her destiny to save it from destruction. And Sarolta, who had
settled back comfortably into her early doctrine that life was made
to live, could have gone to the stake herself for the aristocratical
or the monarchical ideal. Therefore, she believed that Ranata would
immolate her passion on this altar the moment it burned too fiercely;
and so, after all, was prepared to take her oath upon the virtue of one
woman. Nevertheless, she was curious. Of the compact, of course, she
knew nothing; and had she, still would she have puzzled, knowing the
power and the will of woman to torment herself; but she had come to the
conclusion that it was possible Ranata, never having seen Fessenden
alone--this the good lady also believed--did not wholly realize her
condition, would not until he left her; so determined to do what she
could in the way of preliminary disenchantment.
“There is no greater fallacy,” she was saying, “than the belief that
women regret their youth--I mean women who have lived the life of
the heart. Nature invariably compensates, and in exchanging wisdom
for youth she is at her best. No woman ever crowded more into her
youth--nor held to it longer--than I did, yet I can recall now
the sensation of relief when I finally realized that henceforth I
should live for myself alone; above all, that I had had my final
disappointment. For love, my dear, is one exquisite disappointment from
first to finish--for the woman, I mean. Men are rarely psychological
enough for the disappointments that grind the heart of woman until it
is callous. When they are, they are not able to hurt us, so may be left
out of the question. The thoroughly masculine man, the only sort that
is capable of inspiring the _grande passion_, because he has the primal
attributes designed by Nature that he may fully mate with woman, is in
the very completeness of his equipment blind to all that is most subtle
and feminine in woman, giving her, therefore, twenty strokes of torment
to one of happiness, or even pleasure. What is the result? We live,
the most irresistible of us, three-fourths--five-eighths--of our lives
alone, striving to find in imagination what man will never give us.
Life, with women who are not small pieces of pulp in the domestic mill,
is one long chase after happiness--what is there for most of us but
happiness, politics, and charities? I have sometimes envied the women
who have to work their brains blunt to fill their conservative little
stomachs!”
Her voice thickening, she paused to inhale the fumes of the last
specific for colds. Ranata continued to stare out of the window, and
her duenna continued in a moment:
“But I have also wondered, _ma chère_, if, did man give us what that
craving thing we call our soul demands, would we enjoy ourselves even
as much as we do. It is always a gamble which will tire first, the
man or the woman; and on the whole I am inclined to believe that the
woman of charm and brain, and the position in life which enables her
to find much distraction, is the surer prey to disenchantment. If she
be of a deeper nature, or if she has deluded herself for a little that
the man actually loved her and not himself, she may not tire, but be
so bitterly disgusted and disillusioned that, for a moment, at least,
she is capable of tragedy. But the average man, so particular with
charm at first, merely lets us down in _ennui_. If he gave woman more
of himself than he does now, perhaps she would tire sooner. He needs
all the mystery he has. However, the fact remains that man is eternally
unsatisfactory and woman eternally unsatisfied. I doubt if a woman of
imagination ever lived who, having won what rent her soul and body
while withheld, would not, after the first short chapter, exchange
the reality for the previous lost world of her imagination. Good God!
the disillusionment, the readjustment, the struggle through terror
and despair to philosophy! If I were ordered to live my life over, I
should demand, in compensation, the ever-fresh memory of a great and
unsatisfied passion--after having known one man in the daily life of
matrimony. A woman is briefly happy twice in her life--when a man--the
man--is pursuing her, and palpitating doubt alternates with delicious
certainty; and again, during the man’s first ardor, when he is so
anxious to please, and so certain that he loves the woman, not himself,
that his concentrated charm blinds, yet irradiates the universe.
Shortly after, he becomes as matter-of-fact as he is. And then men
are, no matter what their brains, utterly, irretrievably stupid where
women are concerned. A man is never so happy as when he has lost the
love of the woman, and she, taking refuge in duty, makes him thoroughly
comfortable. On the other hand, men are abruptly left by women, again
and again, and the cleverest of them never guess the reason why. They
go on ruining their own lives--which they never suspect--and those of
the women best worth having, without learning a lesson from the past.
There is no happiness, my dear, until you are as old as I am, look like
a mummy, and smoke _vuelta abajo_.”
“Of course I recognize that all that was meant for me.” Her charge
left the window and stared down at her. She puffed out a cloud, for
Ranata’s eyes always made her blink. “But I am surprised that a woman
of your wisdom should fancy that the person ever lived who would adjust
his life by the experience of another.”
“You have a brain. Most women have not. You will always be more or less
guided by it. Therefore, you are worth the trouble to warn.”
“You are the last person I should have expected advocate the happiness
of the unknown; but I have thought that out for myself, and more than
once. I believe that the only way a woman can avoid the cut of her sex
is to avoid the fulfilment of love. Then the fates are placated, and,
after the first wrench, permit the imagination a certain happiness, the
soul a certain elevation, no doubt impossible in what must eventually
become prosaic and disappointing.”
“I am not surprised that you have arrived at that truth by yourself;
and be sure that all the troubles in the world amount to little if you
can bear them alone, and that no troubles, barring poverty and pain,
count an infinitesimal speck in the balance with those made by love,
or the desperate attempt to find happiness. Indeed, I will modify what
I said just now, and stake my life that a woman is happy only when she
is not in love. There is no such thing as sympathy between the soul
of man and woman. The man who thinks he sympathizes with a woman’s
subtle wants is a milksop. The other, the only sort we love, doesn’t
try, never thinks about it; and either way we are miserable, having the
primal curse of Eve upon us. So, the old maids, or the quickly widowed,
have the best of it in this life. Doubtless things are better arranged
in another.”
“Perhaps in that we will be born without imagination. I don’t know but
that would be the deepest definition of heaven after all.”
“I think it more likely that in alternate existences the man of one is
the woman of another,” said Sarolta dryly. “That would be Nature and
her compensations as we know them. On the whole she is just.”