“THE MURDER OF DELICIA” AND “ZISKA”[C]
In the former of these works Marie Corelli has much to say about men
that is very disagreeable and, as it appears to us, only partially true.
It would seem that the novelist is too prone to seize upon a particular
instance of “man’s ingratitude,” laziness, cruelty, and general
worthlessness, and set it up as a frequently occurring type.
In “The Murder of Delicia,” for example, a handsome guardsman, nicknamed
by his fellow-officers “Beauty Carlyon,” marries a lady novelist who is
equally gifted in brain and person, and, after spending her money for a
considerable period, finally breaks her heart--in short, “murders”
her--by his neglect and infidelity.
The keynote of the story--which is, we are assured by its writer, a true
one--may be found in an introductory note, which contains the following:
“_To put it plainly and bluntly, a great majority of the men of the
present day want women to keep them._”
Now surely this is an over-statement which will not strengthen Marie
Corelli’s case. We grant that a certain number of men marry for money,
and that the women they so marry are only too glad to be married on
those or any terms; but the social conditions of this era have not
become so cankered as to lead the “great majority of men” to seek a
livelihood at the altar steps! Would it not be altogether more
reasonable to substitute “a certain minority” for “a great majority”? In
fairness to the novelist, we must add that her remarks on this subject
apply principally to the aristocracy. The worthy lover or husband of the
middle classes may therefore breathe again.
Nevertheless, we will venture to present the other aspect of this matter
of marrying for money. It is well-known that many a wealthy woman
languishes in virgin solitude on account of those very shekels of gold
and shekels of silver which she possesseth, while her penniless
girl-friends are donning their marital veils and going through the sweet
old business of marrying and being given in marriage. This applies to
the upper as well as to the lower ranks of society.
Many a man--aye, many a guardsman--would now be a happy Benedict had a
certain girl of “once upon a time” been possessed of no riches save the
inestimable wealth of a loving heart, no diamonds except those shining
in her eyes, no pearls but what one might see when her lips parted in
shy smile or merry laughter.
For the average man--be his rank high or low--loves a woman, as the
saying is, for herself. While recognizing the value and usefulness of
money, while raising no objection should his father-in-law allow the
young wife pin-money, the average man who marries in the ordinary way
sets little store on what his bride brings him in the shape of earthly
dross.
It is, however, incumbent on a writer of contemporary biography to be in
the main courteous and commendatory, else we might apply a harsher
criticism to “The Murder of Delicia” than a mere statement to the effect
that this book is the least worthy of all the books Marie Corelli has
written. It is far too full of railing against men; it is far too
one-sided and far too bitter. Granted that a novelist must put his or
her case strongly, in order to drive conviction home to the reader’s
mind--granted this, it must be at the same time pointed out that there
are generally two sides to every question. Given that a certain number
of men marry for money--for money and nothing else--it must be
recollected that there are at the present moment thousands of
Englishwomen devoting whatever powers of mental arithmetic they may be
endowed with to reckoning up exactly what pecuniary advantages shall
accrue to them if they marry Jack Jones, or, failing Jack Jones, John
Smith! And a cross-Channel _père de famille_ would tell you that they
are quite right to do this, that, indeed, if they were his daughters, he
would do it for them, and have the whole thing put down in black and
white at a notary’s office.
But--thank heaven!--we are a little more sentimental on this side of the
narrow strip of silver sea. We still believe in the love marriage, and
so an approving Dame Nature gives us healthy sons and daughters for the
regular renewal of the nation’s strength. Whereas in la belle France,
with her businesslike matrimonial alliances, they have to offer prizes
for babies! Truly a pathetic endeavor to stem a national decay!
“The Murder of Delicia” is a short story, soon told. Lord Carlyon takes
a strong fancy to Delicia Vaughan, the popular and beautiful
lady-novelist, and his liking is returned tenfold. They marry, and
Delicia supplies him with money for his clothes, club expenses, cabs,
and card games. Were it not that we are aware that even the wisest of
women may, in spite of their wisdom, love unwisely, we should marvel at
a woman of Delicia Vaughan’s intellectual gifts (which were coupled, we
may presume, with the keen insight into human nature that a novelist
should possess) marrying a man of the Lord Carlyon type--a big, handsome
animal, whose conversation must have afforded her very little
entertainment. She loved him because to her (to quote the book) he was a
“strong, splendid, bold, athletic, masterful creature who was hers--hers
only!” Is it possible that a woman of Delicia Vaughan’s alleged
intelligence would have fallen so completely in love with a man who “was
absolutely devoid of all ambition, save a desire to have his surname
pronounced correctly”? Truly, a dull dog--yet Delicia worshiped him. She
disregarded the apostolic command to little children not to take unto
themselves idols. She doted on this man of inches. She housed and fed
him, pampered him, showered money on him, and he repaid her by indulging
in a low intrigue with a music-hall dancer.
Marie Corelli almost laughs at her heroine. But, even while the smile
hovers on her lips, she explains poor Delicia’s phantasy. It was “the
rare and beautiful blindness of perfect love”--squandered on an entirely
worthless object. And this is quite a true touch, for even
lady-novelists are only human.
Delicia had to pay the penalty of her passion. Her eyes were opened all
in good time, and from showering the wealth of her hand and all the
treasures of her heart upon Carlyon, she came, in the end, to
threatening him with a revolver when he would have healed their
differences with a kiss.
The book, as its title implies, ends sadly. How sadly, those who have
read it will know, and those who may read it hereafter will soon
discover, for it is quite a little book, and its price but a florin.
* * * * *
“These are the people,” writes Marie Corelli in “Ziska,” alluding to the
tourists assembled in Cairo, “who usually leave England on the plea of
being unable to stand the cheery, frosty, and in every respect healthy
winter of their native country--
“that winter, which with its wild winds, its sparkling frost and
snow, its holly trees bright with scarlet berries, its merry
hunters galloping over field and moor during daylight hours, and
its great log fires roaring up the chimneys at evening, was
sufficiently good for their forefathers to thrive upon and live
through contentedly up to a hale and hearty old age in the times
when the fever of traveling from place to place was an unknown
disease, and home was indeed ‘sweet home.’ Infected by strange
maladies of the blood and nerves, to which even scientific
physicians find it hard to give suitable names, they shudder at the
first whiff of cold, and, filling huge trunks with a thousand
foolish
[Illustration: "KILLIECRANKIE COTTAGE” WHERE “ZISKA” WAS FINISHED]
[Illustration: "AVON CROFT” WHERE “THE MASTER CHRISTIAN” WAS FINISHED]
things which have, through luxurious habit, become necessities to
their pallid existences, they hastily depart to the Land of the
Sun, carrying with them their nameless languors, discontents, and
incurable illnesses, for which Heaven itself, much less Egypt,
could provide no remedy.”
Be that as it may, the tourists assembled at the Gezireh Palace Hotel
one winter were treated to a vision of loveliness which for a time made
them momentarily forget their nameless languors in spells of admiration
and envy, according to the sex which claimed them, the vision in
question taking an apparently human shape in the person of the Princess
Ziska.
Reputedly a Russian lady, Ziska was in reality the flesh-clad ghost of
Ziska-Charmazel, the favorite of the harem of a great Egyptian warrior,
described in forgotten histories as “The Mighty Araxes.” Visiting Egypt
at the same time as the Princess was Armand Gervase, a French painter of
great renown, and the interest of the story may be imagined when it is
explained that Armand was the nineteenth-century incarnation of Araxes,
who, it must be understood, had, in the dim long-ago, slain
Ziska-Charmazel because she stood in the way of his ambition.
The modern Araxes is quickly enslaved by Ziska’s loveliness, but the
passion that consumes him is a decidedly uncanny one, as the following
passage will show. Armand is speaking to Helen Murray, the sister of his
great friend, Denzil Murray. In Scotland during the previous summer
Armand had paid Helen some attentions, and Helen does not fail to note
that the charms of Ziska have dissipated any tender feeling which Armand
might have once entertained for the Scottish girl. “How was I to know,”
cries Armand, “that this horrible thing would happen?” “What horrible
thing?” enquires Helen.
“This,” he answers: “the close and pernicious enthralment of a
woman I never met till the night before last; a woman whose face
haunts me; a woman who drags me to her side with the force of a
magnet, there to grovel like a brain-sick fool and plead with her
for a love which I already know is poison to my soul! Helen, Helen!
You do not understand--you will never understand! Here, in the very
air I breathe, I fancy I can trace the perfume she shakes from her
garments as she moves; something indescribably fascinating yet
terrible attracts me to her; it is an evil attraction, I know, but
I cannot resist it. There is something wicked in every man’s
nature; I am conscious enough that there is something detestably
wicked in mine, and I have not sufficient goodness to overbalance
it. And this woman,--this silent, gliding, glittering-eyed creature
that has suddenly taken possession of my fancy--she overcomes me in
spite of myself; she makes havoc of all the good intentions of my
life. I admit--I confess it!”
Unfortunately, the painter’s very good friend, Denzil Murray, also
becomes inspired with a passion for Ziska, and the lad’s temper is
roused when Armand openly admits that his intentions with regard to the
Princess are strictly dishonorable. Murray suggests that it were well
Ziska should know this, but Armand laughs at the other’s idea that the
bringing of such tidings to Ziska’s ears would lower him one jot in that
lovely lady’s estimation:
“My good boy, do you not know that there is something very
marvelous in the attraction we call love? It is a preordained
destiny,--and if one soul is so constituted that it must meet and
mix with another, nothing can hinder the operation. So that,
believe me, I am quite indifferent as to what you say of me to
Madame la Princesse or to any one else. It will not be for either
my looks or my character that she will love me, if, indeed, she
ever does love me; it will be for something indistinct,
indefinable, but resistless in us both, which no one on earth can
explain.”
The hot-headed young Highlander, however, will not be put off with any
such reasoning, and the rivalry might have resulted awkwardly at an
early date of its upspringing had not Armand steadfastly refused to
quarrel.
There is one person at the hotel who makes a shrewd guess at the
spiritual identity of both Ziska and Armand--an old _savant_ named Dr.
Dean, who is visiting Egypt for the purpose of studying its hieroglyphs
and other matters possessing interest for an antiquarian. A knowing
fellow is this Doctor, and a fine little character, whose good-humored
personality and quiet, shrewd observations present a soothing contrast
to the passionate utterances of Murray and Armand, and the dramatic
outbursts of Ziska when she scornfully taunts the painter with his
vileness.
In conversation with the Doctor, Gervase Armand admits that there is
something about Ziska which has struck him as being familiar. “The tone
of her voice and the peculiar cadence of her laughter” affect him
peculiarly. When he wonders whether he has ever come across her before
as a model either in Paris or Rome, the Doctor shakes his head. “Think
again,” he says. “You are now a man in the prime of life, Monsieur
Gervase, but look back to your early youth,--the period when young men
do wild, reckless, and often wicked things,--did you ever in that
thoughtless time break a woman’s heart?”
Armand admits that he may have done so, and the Doctor propounds his
theory:
“Suppose that you, in your boyhood, had wronged some woman, and
suppose that woman had died. You might imagine that you had got rid
of that woman. But if her love was very strong and her sense of
outrage very bitter, I must tell you that you have not got rid of
her by any means; moreover, you never will get rid of her. And why?
Because her Soul, like all Souls, is imperishable. Now, putting it
as a mere supposition, and for the sake of the argument, that you
feel a certain admiration for the Princess Ziska, an admiration
which might possibly deepen into something more than platonic,
...”--here Denzil Murray looked up, his eyes glowing with an angry
pain as he fixed them on Gervase,--“why, then the Soul of the other
woman you once wronged might come between you and the face of the
new attraction and cause you to unconsciously paint the tortured
look of the injured and unforgiving Spirit on the countenance of
the lovely fascinator whose charms are just beginning to ensnare
you. I repeat, I have known such cases.”
For it should be explained that, when Ziska gave the celebrated painter
a sitting, he could produce nothing on his canvas, in spite of his
genius, but a strange and awful face distorted with passion and pain,
agony in every line of the features--“agony in which the traces of a
divine beauty lingered only to render the whole countenance more
repellent and terrific.”
Dr. Dean quickly comes to the conclusion, and very reasonably, that this
is the most interesting problem he has ever had a chance of studying.
It could be only one case out of thousands, he decides.
“Great heavens! Among what terrific unseen forces we live! And in
exact proportion to every man’s arrogant denial of the ‘Divinity
that shapes our ends,’ so will be measured out to him the
revelation of the invisible. Strange that the human race has never
entirely realized as yet the depth of the meaning in the words
describing hell: ‘Where the worm dieth not, and where the flame is
never quenched.’ The ‘worm’ is Retribution, the ‘flame’ is the
immortal Spirit,--and the two are forever striving to escape from
the other. Horrible! And yet there are men who believe in neither
one thing nor the other, and reject the Redemption that does away
with both! God forgive us all our sins--and especially the sins of
pride and presumption!”
Other of the Doctor’s thoughtful utterances are well worth quoting. “To
the wise student of things there is no time and no distance. All history
from the very beginning is like a wonderful chain in which no link is
ever really broken, and in which every part fits closely to the other
part,--though why the chain should exist at all is a mystery we cannot
solve. Yet, I am quite certain that even our late friend Araxes has his
connection with the present, if only for the reason that he lived in the
past.”
Armand asks him how he argues out that theory, and the Doctor replies:
“The question is, how can you argue at all about anything that is
so plain and demonstrated a fact? The doctrine of evolution proves
it. Everything that we were once has its part in us now. Suppose,
if you like, that we were originally no more than shells on the
shore,--some remnant of the nature of the shell must be in us at
this moment. Nothing is lost,--nothing is wasted,--not even a
thought. I carry my theories very far indeed, especially in regard
to matters of love. I maintain that if it is decreed that the soul
of a man and the soul of a woman must meet,--must rush
together,--not all the forces of the universe can hinder them; aye,
even if they were, for some conventional cause or circumstance,
themselves reluctant to consummate their destiny, it would,
nevertheless, despite them, be consummated. For mark you,--in some
form or other they have rushed together before! Whether as flames
in the air, or twining leaves on a tree, or flowers in a field,
they have felt the sweetness and fitness of each other’s being in
former lives,--and the craving sense of that sweetness and fitness
can never be done away with,--never! Not as long as this present
universe lasts! It is a terrible thing,” continued the Doctor in a
lower tone, “a terrible fatality,--the desire of love. In some
cases it is a curse; in others, a divine and priceless blessing.
The results depend entirely on the temperaments of the human
creatures possessed by its fever. When it kindles, rises, and burns
towards Heaven in a steady flame of ever-brightening purity and
faith, then it makes marriage the most perfect union on earth,--the
sweetest and most blessed companionship; but when it is a mere gust
of fire, bright and fierce as the sudden leaping light of a
volcano, then it withers everything at a touch,--faith, honor,
truth,--and dies into dull ashes in which no spark remains to warm
or inspire man’s higher nature. Better death than such a
love,--for it works misery on earth; but who can tell what horrors
it may not create Hereafter!”
When the Princess Ziska betakes herself to the Mena House Hotel, near
the Pyramids, Dr. Dean, Gervase Armand, and Denzil Murray follow her.
She entertains them at dinner, and after dinner, while the Doctor and
Armand are strolling without, Murray puts his fate to the touch, with
results as might have been expected, for the Princess has displayed
little emotion in respect to anybody save Armand, and in his case it is
clear that her interest has a malignant foundation.
Armand comes after him, and, in a passionate scene, audaciously proposes
to “play the part of Araxes over again.” Ziska promises to give him her
answer on the morrow, and on the morrow Armand receives it.
The last scene of this “Problem of a Wicked Soul” takes place beneath
the Great Pyramid. Why and how the modern Araxes and the modern
Ziska-Charmazel come together in the end in this strangest of
meeting-places, we will leave the reader to discover for him or herself.
But we may at least record our admiration for the feat of imagination of
which “Ziska” is the result, and indicate the lesson that is to be
learned from its pages. “Ziska” teaches that sin shall not escape
punishment, that a man shall not play fast and loose with women’s hearts
and yet go scotfree. “Ziska” shows how the mutilated soul of the
beautiful dancer arises after many centuries and exacts vengeance from
its enemy; and again “Ziska” shows how, when Araxes, in his modern
painter guise, cries for pardon, the eyes of his one-time victim soften
and flash with love and tenderness.
Truly a fragrant passage is this, wherein the old story is once again
told of man’s repentance and woman’s sweet forgiveness.