LIFE'S GLAMOUR
With the death of her husband, freedom had descended upon Anne like a
gift of the gods. A divine ointment, it penetrated her bruised spirit,
allaying the stored-up bitterness of years. Her heart emptied itself of
poison and welled with compassion for the pitiful ending of a futile
life. As her husband lay back upon the pillows, broken beyond all aid,
unbelievably aged, she almost forgave the insult to her youth that their
common life had proved. If it had only been a case of disparity of age,
no question of forgiveness would have existed at all. The twenty odd
years between them might have been forged into the strongest instead of
the weakest link that bound them together. It was this very disparity,
in fact, which at first had attracted her to him, with the enormous
flattery it implied. Her immaturity had thrilled to the condescension as
it could never thrill for the horde of barbaric youngsters who formed
the guard-gallant of her first New York season. Emerging from an
environment entirely continental, she was accustomed to the attentions
of men belonging to an older race, whose suave courtesy had its roots in
the antique. From the consulates in Rome and Florence which her father
had occupied ingloriously but with utter content, she had brought an
old-world respect and appreciation for maturity utterly foreign to young
America of even fifteen years ago. And in these respects Julius Schuyler
had satisfied her entirely. In her eyes he was not only a polished,
traveled and well-read man of the world, he was brilliant. He dominated.
His sketches were not the mere fads of a supremely idle and blasé man.
They flamed with talent. Their very unfinished condition proved it. When
so much can be suggested by the mere sweep of a line, why satiate the
spectator further? So she had accepted him at her own adolescent
valuation, glowing dewily beneath his tired, vivacious gaze.
For it was his forte to be sprightly. The ready repartee was ever on his
lips, nor was the pun scorned. No matter how trite, how forced the
shaft, it played the most important rôle in his armory. To the ears of
eighteen the pompous straining was inaudible, the weary dissatisfaction
which it served to conceal, practically invisible. It was not until the
forcing-house of marriage, the constant companionship, had opened her
eyes that she glimpsed the actual man through the shallow smoke-screen
behind which he strove to cover an aching ennui, an intolerable
insufficiency.
Meanwhile his admiration had gone completely to her young head. The
fumes of it were sweet to her unaccustomed nostrils. Almost before she
was aware of it, she had consented to marry him. So it came about that
before the end of her first season she had acquired a husband
twenty-five years her senior, still active, distinguished in appearance,
although already gray, and incidentally wealthy, besides whose fortune
her father's very comfortable means dwindled ludicrously.
And yet perhaps it had not been so bad in the long run. After all,
Julius Schuyler had been a gentleman and always acquitted himself as
such. For Anne there had been no brutality, no animalism to encounter.
Only the monotony of an endless and artificial vivacity, the ever
forcing of herself to keep up her rôle of amused and humble spectator
and playmate.
He was so small, so finicky, with his endless devices for passing the
time. His double solitaire, his dominoes, his checkers which he would
always produce at the hint of an empty half hour. Multi-subterfuges for
cheating the gnawing ennui which with the years had fastened itself upon
him like a cancer. Disliking all games intensely, Anne had at first
absolutely refused to share in these puerile feints against time. But,
after a while, when all effort at conversation languished in the anæmic
soil of his irritating triteness, she had capitulated. They played
checkers in Amalfi, his back turned to the glorious bay, her
subconscious bathing in its blue flame; dominoes in Luxor with the Tombs
of the Kings beckoning on the glamorous horizon line; two-handed bridge
on the terrace of their villa in Florence, while the setting sun tinted
the Arno and set afire the mammoth dome of the old cathedral.
However, there had been compensations. The silver lining to her cloud
had provided a background of decided luxury. Travel brought contact with
a cosmopolitan, ever-changing, group who gave the beautiful American
that delicate homage, tinged with desire, which is stimulating to a
feminine ego, dissatisfied and unawakened. Intervals between tête-à-tête
games were sometimes brilliant and prolonged. The buying of the villa in
Florence was a joy, almost unmitigated by the fussy alterations of
Julius who imagined he understood old furniture, and the Cinque-Cento.
It was sheer rapture to return to Florence, to resume old friendships,
revisit in stealth old haunts.
But her vitality was sapped by Julius' greedy monopoly. He clung with
the persistency of an âme damnée. He accompanied her to the dressmaker,
where she was draped according to his finicky conception of her type.
He chose her hats. He bought her underwear, all of the very finest,
of course. But when she wore it beneath his complacent eyes,
self-consciousness became an agony which habit refused to dull. If
passion had underlain the complacence, she would not have minded even
this. But Julius never forgot himself in his love for her. His natural
diffidence was a perpetual audience, the unwelcome third in all their
intercourse. Never impulsive, his caresses lacked the white heat of
passion which is clean because spontaneous. Beneath his touch, Anne felt
herself perpetually under the microscope. It seemed as if he were vain,
not of his prowess, but of still being capable of harboring sensation at
all. And habit made her quick to notice that these lapses into anæmic
appetite usually followed the prodding of some erotic book or play, and
were seldom occasioned by her own desirability. She became practiced in
the art of retreat and withdrawal, so that the whole nature of love was
distorted. Still, a sort of pity for his maimed spirit kept her silent.
She closed her eyes and tried deliberately to become callous. However,
she made up her mind that if so precious a commodity as freedom ever
came within her grasp again, she would never permit it to escape.
And now that this freedom had been hers for almost five years, its
realization had exceeded her keenest expectations. Evading every
opportunity of remarriage, she had skilfully apportioned her seasons
between the United States and Europe. The New York season was invariably
followed by a few weeks in Egypt or the Riviera and capped by three
sensuous months in the Florentine villa. And this was the best-loved
time of all, in which she renewed body and soul, absorbing peace and
serenity from the olive-crusted hills upon whose sides multi-colored
villas gleamed like jewels in dark tresses.
Within her small but cherished garden, rose a terrace paved with bricks.
One attained it by a narrow flight of moss-grown steps. Here she would
sit for hours, basking beneath the sun which rode the heavens like an
impartial god, while beyond the pallid balustrade, cypress-studded hills
merged into the horizontal purple.
Here it was that she received her friends for tea, listening indulgently
to lascivious, Tuscan, gossip. Then, alone once more, after her late
dinner, or companioned by the man of the hour, it was here she would
pace up and down in the sweet-scented dusk while myriads of fireflies
like a flaming milky way disbanded at her approach. And high above the
swarthy cypresses the sun's paramour, the moon, shamelessly flaunted in
his reflected rays.
Those were enchanted nights into which Julius's memory intruded like the
sordid wraith from another existence; a warning wraith with finger on
lips, whose image tempered Anne's blood. Not that she was discreet, for
that was a quality Anne had never troubled to acquire. In fact, her
dealings were so recklessly above-board that she was suspected of untold
depths of wickedness. A beautiful woman who paces under the stars at
midnight with now one man, now another, cannot hope to escape slander.
Although perfectly aware of this fact, Anne chose to ignore it. Even the
nominal chaperonage of some poor, but genteel, relative seemed
insupportable to the fierce and rapturous reaction through which she was
passing. She remained defiantly alone. Her charm, her elegance, and most
certainly her wealth (in that way Florentines are most human) carried
her through. But rumor was building a wall of eccentricity about her and
she was rapidly becoming known, both on the Continent and in America, as
rather terrifyingly individual, and an image-breaker.
The most conservative began to drop off almost imperceptibly, leaving a
large circle of spirits who prided themselves upon a freedom akin to
looseness, and a small band of intimates too close to be affected by the
whispers of the scurrilous. Among the latter, the Marchese Torrigiani
and his mother refused steadfastly to believe anything but the best of
Anne. Their friendship of years continued undisrupted, and both mother
and son looked forward with eagerness to the day when Anne would weary
of her precarious liberty, and consent to become Vittorio's wife. But
although she admitted to an affection for Vittorio which at times
flickered into transient tenderness, her marriage with Julius had
developed a complex which made it impossible for her to contemplate the
subject without a shrinking horror. Meanwhile the Marchese waited,
hoping almost against hope, that with the passing of time the lacerating
memory would fade away. But so far it had refused to do so and there
were hours when it seemed to the steadfast man as if the scar were
branded into Anne's very soul. Accepting his homage as a matter of
course, she had continued to drift along the path of least resistance.
But latterly, a new restlessness was creeping in, and life had somehow
lost its savour. The New York season was becoming a grind. Her friends
were either blatantly rich, meretricious and over-fed, mere excitement
chasers, or else pretenders, art fainéants, who dabbled in cubes and
sex. Neurotic composers who dribbled mediocrities over the piano keys.
Pseudo writers who reveled in the drab, perhaps because any further
flight was beyond their stunted wings. Anne was growing to hate them
all, and herself the most, because she had remained too indolent or too
powerless to rise above their level. There were superior beings, of
course, who were achieving the real thing somewhere. But they dwelt on a
different plane, in a workers' world of their own, whose fastnesses she
had never as yet been able to scale. Her music was good, even excellent,
almost professional, but that irritating adverb "almost" rose like an
impassable Chinese wall, thrusting her forever into the destinationless
region of the dilettantes.
Beautiful, brilliant, talented, she remained negligible in her own
hypercritical eyes.
To oust this growing dissatisfaction which had sifted into the indolent
drift of her life and was gradually embittering it, Anne had literally
taken to her heels. Two weeks alone with the mountains had brought a
certain serenity. Already the miserly future looked less blank. Soothed
by solitudes and distance, her inflamed ego was content to sink into the
great whole. After all, there were compensations. She might not be a
genius, but that did not prevent genius from existing! And personality
was only an illusion after all, a hollow shell, within which the Great
Spirit differentiated. Who was she to grumble in the the face of this
universal oneness, into which her littleness merged so superbly? The
healing breath of the forest swept her clean of vanity. Her soul
rejoiced in the vigor of its new-found simplicity. She spent her days
roaming in the woods, or paddling about in a canoe on the unrippled
waters of the chaste little lake. She re-read one or two favorite books,
but all the time her mind remained contentedly empty and receptive, like
an airing room whose windows are unclosed to the winds of heaven.
It was in this mood she had come upon the hut and Alexis. Her sleeping
self had reawakened and once more taken her into possession. But it was
a rested and less inverted self, a younger and more ingenuous self, who
still admitted the futility of happiness but dimly craved it. In her
present chastened mood she was determined to oust the personal factor.
There had been too much of that in all her previous dealings with men.
It had always been to that quality of pervasive femininity to which they
had succumbed, and consciously or unconsciously, she had never failed to
assert it. She was going to change all that. Here was a boy, probably
ten years her junior, whose plight would arouse the sympathy of the
veriest egotist. Whose unhappiness, combined with his genius, stirred
the stagnant pool of her soul. Her quickened spirit responded to his
need with almost complete self-forgetfulness. That genius should come to
her door in the guise of a postulant, just as she herself had become
resigned to her own lack of it, seemed the culminating miracle to her
new-found peace of mind. To heal this bruised spirit and send it back to
the world in the glory of renewed splendor was her job. And nothing less
than success would satisfy her. For once she would step out of the
amateur class and prove that she could do one thing thoroughly and well,
even if it were so infinitesimal a thing as the rescue of a soul.