common-sense, and was nervous, and said foolish things about new plays,
and the probability of rain--to keep from saying still more foolish
things about herself; and refused to talk personalities; and let him
go, with the knowledge that he would not come back. Then she went to
her room, and had a good cry. Now," she added, after a pause, "you
understand."
"I do not," I said, very firmly, "understand a lot of things."
"Yet a woman would," she murmured.
This being a statement I was not prepared to contest, I waved it aside.
"And so," said I, "they laughed; and agreed it was a boy-and-girl
affair; and were friends."
"It was the best thing--" said she.
"Yes," I assented,--"for Orlando."
"--and it was the most sensible thing."
"Oh, eminently!"
This seemed to exhaust the subject, and I lay down once more among the
pine-needles.
"And that," said Rosalind, "was the reason Jaques came to Arden?"
"Yes," said I.
"And found it--?"
"Shall we say--Hades?"
"Oh!" she murmured, scandalised.
"It happened," I continued, "that he was cursed with a good memory. And
the zest was gone from his little successes and failures, now there was
no one to share them; and nothing seemed to matter very much. Oh, he
really was the sort of man that never grows up! And it was dreary to
live among memories of the past, and his life was now somewhat
perturbed by disapproval of his own folly and by hunger for a woman who
was out of his reach."
"And Rosalind--I mean the girl--?"
"She married Orlando--or Gamelyn, or Alfred, or Athelstane, or
Ethelred, or somebody,--and, whoever it was, they lived happily ever
afterward," I said, morosely.
Rosalind pondered over this dénouement for a moment.
"Do you know," said she, "I think--"
"It's a rather dangerous practice," I warned her.
Rosalind sighed, wearily; but in her cheek at about this time occurred
a dimple.
"--I think that Rosalind must have thought the play
very badly named."
"_As You Like It_?" I queried, obtusely.
"Yes--since it wasn't, for her."
It is unwholesome to lie on the ground after sunset.
4
"I had rather a scene with Alfred yesterday morning. He said you drank,
and gambled, and were always running after--people, and weren't in
fine, a desirable person for me to know. He insinuated, in fact, that
you were a villain of the very deepest and non-crocking dye. He told me
of instances. His performance would have done credit to Ananias. I was
_mad_! So I gave him his old ring back, and told him things I can't
tell _you_,--no, not just yet, dear. He is rather like a muffin, isn't
he?" she said, with the lightest possible little laugh--"particularly
like one that isn't quite done."
"Oh, Rosalind," I babbled, "I mean to prove that you were right. And I
_will_ prove it, too!"
And indeed I meant all that I said--just then.
Rosalind said: "Oh, Jaques, Jaques! what a child you are!"
19.
_He Plays the Improvident Fool_
Now was I come near to the summit of my desires, and advantageously
betrothed to a girl with whom I was, in any event, almost in love; but
I presently ascertained, to my dismay, that sophisticated, "proper"
little Rosalind was thoroughly in love with me, and always in the back
of my mind this knowledge worried me.
Imprimis, she persisted in calling me Jaques, which was uncomfortably
reminiscent of that time wherein I was called Jack. Yet my objection to
this silly nickname was a mischancy matter to explain. There was no way
of telling her that I disliked anything which reminded me of Gillian
Hardress, without telling more about Gillian than would be pleasant to
tell. So Rosalind went on calling me Jaques; and I was compelled to put
up with a trivial and unpremeditated, but for all that a daily,
annoyance; and I fretted under it.
Item, she insisted on presenting me with all sorts of expensive
knick-knacks, and being childishly grieved when I remonstrated.
"But I have the money," Rosalind would say, "and you haven't. So why
shouldn't I? And besides, it's really only selfishness on my part,
because I like doing things for you, and _if_ you liked doing things
for me, Jaques, you'd understand."
So I would eventually have to swear that I did like "doing things" for
her; and it followed--somehow--that in consequence she had a perfect
right to give me anything she wanted to.
And this too fretted me, mildly, all the summer I spent at Birnam Beach
with Rosalind and with the opulent friends of Rosalind's aunt from St.
Louis.... They were a queer lot. They all looked so unspeakably new;
their clothes were spick and span, and as expensive as possible, but
that was not it; even in their bathing suits these middle-aged
people--they were mostly middle-aged--seemed to have been very recently
finished, like animated waxworks of middle-aged people just come from
the factory. And they spent money in a continuous careless way that
frightened me.
But I was on my very best, most dignified behavior; and when Aunt Lora
presented me as "one of the Lichfield Townsends, you know," these
brewers and breweresses appeared to be properly impressed. One of
them--actually--"supposed that I had a coat-of-arms"; which in
Lichfield would be equivalent to "supposing" that a gentleman possessed
a pair of trousers. But they were really very thoughtful about never
letting me pay for anything; in this regard there seemed afoot a sort
of friendly conspiracy.
So the summer passed pleasantly enough; and we bathed, and held hands
in the moonlight, and danced at the Casino, and rode the
merry-go-round, and played ping-pong, and read _Dorothy Vernon of
Haddon Hall_,--which was much better, I told everybody, than that
idiotic George Clock book, _The Imperial Votaress_. And we drank
interminable suissesses, and it was all very pleasant.
Yet always in the rear of my mind was stirring restively the instinct
to get back to my writing; and these sedately frolicsome benevolent
people--even Rosalind--plainly thought that "writing things" was just
the unimportant foible of an otherwise fine young fellow.
2
And in September Rosalind came to visit her Aunt Marcia in Lichfield,
to get clothes and all other matters ready for our wedding in November;
and Lichfield, as always, made much of Rosalind, and she had the honor
of "leading" the first Lichfield German with Colonel Rudolph Musgrave.
My partner at that dance was the Marquise d'Arlanges....
I was seeing a deal of the Marquise d'Arlanges. She was Stella's only
sister, as you may remember, and was that autumn paying a perfunctory
visit to her parents--the second since her marriage.
I shall not expatiate, however, concerning Madame la Marquise. You have
doubtless heard of her. For Lizzie has not, even yet, found a time
wherein to be idle; she has been busied since the hour of her birth in
acquiring first, plain publicity, and then social power, and every
other amenity of life in turn. I had not the least doubt even then of
her ending where she is now....
She was at this time still well upon the preferable side o! thirty, and
had no weaknesses save a liking for gossip, cigarettes, and admiration.
Lizzie was never the woman to marry a Peter Blagden. Once Stella was
settled, Lizzie Musgrave had sailed for Europe, and eventually had
arrived at Monaco with an apologetic mother, several letters of
introduction, and a Scotch terrier; and had established herself at the
Hôtel de la Paix, to look over the "available" supply of noblemen in
reduced circumstances. Before the end of a month Miss Musgrave had
reached a decision, had purchased her Marquis, much as she would have
done any other trifle that took her fancy, and had shipped her mother
back to America. Lizzie retained the terrier, however, as she was
honestly attached to it.
Her marriage had been happy, and she found her husband on further
acquaintance, as she told me, a mild-mannered and eminently suitable
person, who was unaccountably addicted to playing dominoes, and who
spent a great deal of money, and dined with her occasionally. In a
sentence, the marquise was handsome, "had a tongue in her head," and,
to utilise yet another ancient phrase, was as hard as nails.
And yet there was a family resemblance. Indeed, in voice and feature
she was strangely like an older Stella; and always I was cheating
myself into a half-belief that this woman I was talking with was
Stella; and Lizzie would at least enable me to forget, for a whole
half-hour sometimes, that Stella was dead....
* * * * *
"I must thank you," I said, one afternoon, when I arose to go, "for a
most pleasant dream of--what we'll call the Heart's Desire. I suppose I
have been rather stupid, Lizzie; and I apologise for it; but people are
never exceedingly hilarious in dreams, you know."
She said, very gently: "I understand. For I loved Stella too. And that
is why the room is never really lighted when you come. Oh, you stupid
man, how could I have _helped_ knowing it--that all the love you have
made to me was because you have been playing I was Stella? That
knowledge has preserved me, more than once, my child, from succumbing
to your illicit advances in this dead Lichfield."
And I was really astonished, for she was not by ordinary the sort of
woman who consents to be a makeshift.
I said as much, "And it _has_ been a comfort, Lizzie, because she
doesn't come as often now, for some reason--"
"Why--what do you mean?"
The room was very dark, lit only by the steady, comfortable glow of a
soft-coal fire. For it was a little after sunset, and outside,
carriages were already rumbling down Regis Avenue, and people were
returning from the afternoon drive. I could not see anything
distinctly, excepting my own hands, which were like gold in the
firelight; and so I told her all about _The Indulgences of Ole-Luk-Ole_.
"She came, that first time, over the crest of a tiny upland that lay in
some great forest,--Brocheliaunde, I think. I knew it must be autumn,
for the grass was brown and every leaf upon the trees was brown. And
she too was all in brown, and her big hat, too, was of brown felt, and
about it curled a long ostrich feather dyed brown; and my first
thought, as I now remember, was how in the dickens could any mediaeval
lady have come by such a garb, for I knew, somehow, that this was a
woman of the Middle Ages.
"Only her features were those of Stella, and the eyes of this woman
were filled with an unutterable happiness and fear, as she came toward
me,--just as the haunting eyes of Stella were upon the night she
married Peter Blagden, and I babbled nonsense to the moon.
"'Oh, I have wanted you,--I have wanted you!' she said; and afterward,
unarithmeticably dimpling, just as she used to do, you may remember:
_'Depardieux,_ messire! have you then forgotten that upon this forenoon
we hunt the great boar?"
"'Stella!' I said, 'O dear, dear Stella! what does it mean?'
"'You silly! it means, of course, that Ole-Luk-Oie is kind, and has put
us both into the glaze of the mustard-jar--only I wonder which one we
have gotten into?' Stella said. 'Don't you remember them, dear--the
blue mustard-jar and the red one your Mammy had that summer at the
Green Chalybeate, with men on them hunting a boar?'
"'They stood, one on each corner of the mantelpiece,' I said; 'and in
the blue one she kept matches, and in the other--'
"'She kept buttons in the red one,' said Stella,--'big, shiny white
buttons, with four holes in them, that had come off your underclothes,
and were to be sewed on again. One day you swallowed one of 'em, I
remember, because you _would_ keep it in your mouth while you swung in
the hammock. And you thought it would surely kill you, so you knelt
down in the dry leaves and prayed God He wouldn't let it kill you.'
"'But you weren't there,' I protested; 'nobody was there. So nobody
ever knew anything about it, though may be you--' For I had just
remembered that Stella was dead, only I knew it was against some rule
to mention it.
"'Well, at any rate I'm _here_,' said Stella, 'and Ole-Luk-Oie is kind;
and we had better go and hunt the great boar at once, I suppose, since
that is what the people on the mustard-jars always do.'
"'But how did you come hither, O my dear--?'
"'Why, through your wanting me so much,' she said. 'How else?'
"And I understood....
"So we went and slew the great boar. I slew it personally, with a long
spear, and with Stella clasping her hands in the background. Only there
was a nicked place in the mustard-jar, where I had dropped it on the
hearth some fifteen years ago, and my horse kept stumbling over this
crevice, so that I knew it was the red jar and the buttons we were
riding around. And afterward I made a song in honour of my Stella,--a
song so perfect that I presently awoke, weeping with joy that I had
made a song so beautiful, and with the knowledge I could not now
recollect a single word of it; and I knew that neither I nor any other
man could ever make again a song one-half so beautiful....
"Since then Ole-Luk-Oie--or someone--has been very kind at times. He
always lets me into pictures, though, never into mouse-holes and
hen-houses and silly places like that, as he did little Hjalmar. I
don't know why....
"Once it was into the illustrations to the _Popular Tales of
Poictesme_, and we met my great grandfather Jurgen there. And once it
was into the picture on the cover of that unveracious pamphlet the
manager of the Green Chalybeate sends in the spring to everybody who
has once been there. That time was very odd.
"It is a picture of the Royal Hotel, you may remember, as it used to be
a good ten years ago. Both fountains were playing in the sunlight,
--they were torn down when I was at college, and I had almost forgotten
their existence; and elegant and languid ladies were riding by, in
victorias, and under tiny parasols trimmed with fringe, and all these
ladies wore those preposterously big sleeves they used to wear then;
and men in little visored skull caps were passing on tall old-fashioned
bicycles, just as they do in the picture. Even the silk-hatted
gentleman in the corner, pointing out the beauties of the building with
his cane, was there.
"And Stella and I walked past the margin of the picture, and so on down
the boardwalk to the other hotel, to look for our parents. And we
agreed not to tell anyone that we had ever grown up, but just to let it
be a secret between us two; and we were to stay in the picture forever,
and grow up all over again, only we would arrange everything
differently. And Stella was never to go driving on the twenty-seventh
of April, so that we would be quite safe, and would live together for a
long, long while.
"She wouldn't promise, though, that when Peter Blagden asked to be
introduced, she would refuse to meet him. She just giggled and shook
her sunny head. She hadn't any hat on. She was wearing the
blue-and-white sailor-suit, of course."....
4
But a servant was lighting up the front-hall, and the glare of it came
through the open door, and now the room was just like any other room.
"And you are Robert Townsend!" the marquise observed. "The one my
mother doesn't approve of as a visitor!"
Madame d'Arlanges said, with a certain lack of sequence: "And yet you
are planning to do precisely what Peter Blagden did. He liked Stella,
she amused him, and he thought her money would come in very handy; and
so he, somehow, contrived to marry her in the end, because she was just
a child, and you were a child, and he wasn't. And he always lied to her
about--about those business-trips--even from the very first. I knew,
because I'm not a sentimental person. But, Bob, how can you stoop to
mimic Peter Blagden! For you are doing precisely what he did; and for
Rosalind, just as it was for Stella, it is almost irresistible, to have
the chance of reforming a man who has notoriously been 'talked about.'
Still, I see that for Stella's sake you won't lie as steadfastly to
Rosalind as Peter did to Stella. It is none of my business of course;
oh, I don't meddle. I merely prophesy that you won't."
But those lights had made an astonishing difference. And so, "But why
not?" said I. "It is the immemorial method of dealing with savages; and
surely women can never expect to become quite civilised so long as
chivalry demands that a man say to a woman only what he believes she
wants to hear? Ah, no, my dear Lizzie; when a man tries to get into a
woman's favour, custom demands that he palliate the invasion with
flatteries and veiled truths--or, more explicitly, with lies,--just as
any sensible explorer must come prepared to leave a trail of
looking-glasses and valueless bright beads among the original owners of
any unknown country. For he doesn't know what obstacles he may
encounter, and he has been taught, from infancy, to regard any woman as
a baleful and unfathomable mystery--"
"She is never so--heaven help her!--if the man be sufficiently
worthless."
"I rejoice that we are so thoroughly at one. For upon my word, I
believe this widespread belief in feminine inscrutability is the result
of a conspiracy on the part of the weaker sex; and that every mother is
somehow pledged to inculcate this belief into the immature masculine
mind. Apparently the practice originated in the Middle Ages, for it
never seemed to occur to anybody before then that a woman was
particularly complex. Though, to be sure, Catullus now--" "This is not
a time for pedantry. I don't in the least care what Catullus or anyone
else observed concerning anything--" "But I had not aspired, my dear
Lizzie, to be even remotely pedantic. I was simply about to remark that
Catullus, or Ariosto, or Coventry Patmore, or King Juba, or Posidonius,
or Sir John Vanbrugh, or perhaps, Agathocles of Chios, or else
Simonides the Younger, has conceded somewhere, that women are, in
certain respects, dissimilar, as it were, to men." "I am merely urging
you not to marry this silly little Rosalind, for the excellent reason
that you _did_ love my darling Stella even more than I, and that
Rosalind is in love with you." "Do you really think so?" said I. "Why,
then, actuated by the very finest considerations of decency and
prudence and generosity, I shall, of course, espouse her the very next
November that ever is."
The marquise retorted: "No,--because you are at bottom too fond of
Rosalind Jemmett; and, besides, it isn't really a question of your
feeling toward _her_. In any event, I begin to like you too well, Bob,
to let you kiss me any more."
I declared that I detested paradox. Then I went home to supper.
5
But, for all this, I meditated for a long while upon what Lizzie had
said. It was true that I was really fond of "proper" little Rosalind
Jemmett; concerning myself I had no especial illusions; and, to my
credit, I faced what I considered the real issue, squarely.
We were in Aunt Marcia's parlour. Rosalind was an orphan, and lived in
turn with her three aunts. She said the other two were less unendurable
than Aunt Marcia, and I believed her. I consider, to begin with, that a
person is not civilised who thumps upon the floor upstairs with a
poker, simply because it happens to be eleven o'clock; and moreover,
Aunt Marcia's parlour--oh, it really was a "parlour,"--was entirely too
like the first night of a charity bazaar, when nothing has been sold.
The room was not a particularly large one; but it contained exactly
three hundred and seven articles of bijouterie, not estimating the
china pug-dog upon the hearth. I know, for I counted them.
Besides, there were twenty-eight pictures upon the walls--one in oils
of the late Mr. Dumby (for Aunt Marcia was really Mrs. Clement Dumby),
painted, to all appearances, immediately after the misguided gentleman
who married Aunt Marcia had been drowned, and before he had been wiped
dry,--and for the rest, everywhere the eye was affronted by engravings
framed in gilt and red-plush of "Sanctuary," "Le Hamac," "Martyre
Chrétienne," "The Burial of Latané," and other Victorian outrages.
Then on an easel there was a painting of a peacock, perched upon an
urn, against a gilded background; this painting irrelevantly deceived
your expectations, for it was framed in blue plush. Also there were
"gift-books" on the centre table, and a huge volume, again in red
plush, with its titular "Album" cut out of thin metal and nailed to the
cover. This album contained calumnious portraits of Aunt Marcia's
family, the most of them separately enthroned upon the same imitation
rock, in all the pride of a remote, full-legged and starchy youth, each
picture being painfully "coloured by hand."
6
"Do you know why I want to marry you?" I demanded of Rosalind, in such
surroundings, apropos of a Mrs. Vokins who had taken a house in
Lichfield for the winter, and had been at school somewhere in the
backwoods with Aunt Marcia, and was "dying to meet me."
She answered, in some surprise: "Why, because you have the good taste
to be heels over head in love with me, of course."
I took possession of her hands. "If there is anything certain in this
world of uncertainties, it is that I am not the least bit in love with
you. Yet, only yesterday--do you remember, dear?"
She answered, "I remember."
"But I cannot, for the life of me, define what happened yesterday. I
merely recall that we were joking, as we always do when together, and
that on a wager I loosened your hair. Then as it tumbled in great
honey-coloured waves about you, you were silent, and there came into
your eyes a look I had never seen before. And even now I cannot define
what happened, Rosalind! I only know I caught your face between my
hands, and for a moment held it so, with fingers that have not yet
forgotten the feel of your soft, thick hair,--and that for a breathing
space your eyes looked straight into mine. Something changed in me
then, my lady. Something changed in you, too, I think."
Then Rosalind said, "Don't, Jaques--!" She was horribly embarrassed.
"For I knew you willed me to possess you, and that possession would
seem as trivial as a fiddle in a temple.... Yet, too, there was a
lustful beast, somewhere inside of me, which nudged me to--kiss you,
say! But nothing happened. I did not even kiss you, my beautiful and
wealthy Rosalind."
"Don't keep on talking about the money," she wailed. "Why, you can't
believe I think you mercenary!"
"I would estimate your intellect far more cheaply, my charming
Rosalind, if you thought anything else; for of course I am. I wanted to
settle myself, you conceive, and as an accomplice you were very
eligible. I now comprehend it is beyond the range of rationality, dear
stranger, that we should ever marry each other; and so we must not. We
must not, you comprehend, since though we lived together through ten
patriarchal lifetimes we would die strangers to each other.
For you, dear clean-souled girl that you are, were born that you might
be the wife of a strong man and the mother of his sturdy children. The
world was made for you and for your offspring; and in time your
children will occupy this world and make the laws for us irrelevant
folk that scribble and paint and design all useless and beautiful
things, and thus muddle away our precious lives. No, you may not wisely
mate with us, for you are a shade too terribly at ease in the universe,
you sensible people."
"But I love Art," said Rosalind, bewildered.
"Yes,--but by the tiniest syllable a thought too volubly, my dear. You
are the sort that quotes the Rubaiyat. Whereas I--was it yesterday or
the day before you told me, with a wise pucker of your beautiful low,
white brow, that I had absolutely no sense of the responsibilities of
life? Well, I really haven't, dear stranger, as you appraise them; and,
indeed, I fear we must postpone our agreement upon any possible
subject, until the coming of the Coquecigrues. We see the world so
differently, you and I,--and for that same reason I cannot but adore
you, Rosalind. For with you I can always speak my true thought and know
that you will never for a moment suspect it to be anything but irony.
Ah, yes, we can laugh and joke together, and be thorough friends; but
if there is anything certain in this world of uncertainties, it is that
I am not, and cannot be, in love with you. And yet--I wonder now?" said
I, and I rose and paced Aunt Marcia's parlour.