EROS THE RELUCTANT
So many dreams must fail us, dear,
So many springs to autumn turn,
Let us, in one memorial year,
Learn all there is of love to learn.
JOHN HARTLEY, "Pale Souls."
A husband's jealousies, my dear, are the mushrooms on the beefsteak
of matrimony.--"The Silver Poppy."
"My dear, are you falling in love?"
It was Mrs. Spaulding who suddenly asked this of Cordelia, tumbling a
lump of sugar into the depths of her coffee-cup as a figure and symbol
of some vaster emotional descent.
Cordelia looked across the breakfast table at her abstractedly.
"Why not?" she asked lazily.
Mrs. Spaulding looked up, about to speak. The right light, however, was
not on Cordelia's brow, and there were certain bounds beyond which she
had learned not to trespass. So she only sighed.
"Fall in love, my dear, a dozen times, if you like. But----"
And again Mrs. Spaulding sighed. Cordelia perhaps understood more than
she pretended. Only that morning Mrs. Spaulding had read aloud to her a
little note from Repellier--a most formal little note making excuses for
being unable to join them in their box party at Wallack's.
From the first, almost, Cordelia had comprehended that silent unshifting
drama, undreamed of by even its hero and central figure, the gentle,
upright, honest old artist himself. At one time that patient but
perverse adoration on the part of Mrs. Spaulding had impressed Cordelia
as beautiful in its constancy, as ethereal in its very intangibility.
But of late it was beginning to stand before her as the foolish caprice
of a pertinacious and yet idle and dissatisfied woman.
But it was Mrs. Spaulding's one romance--wilful and unreasonable, yet
none the less golden. Wealth had brought her many things, but out of the
midst of her opulence she reached eagerly for the unattainable--seeking,
without knowing it, for life's relieving burden of sorrow, for her
woman's due heritage of tears.
"You ought to be happy," Cordelia one day had said to her; "_you_ get
everything you want." She had been trying to scold Cordelia out of a
passing mood of discontent.
"I don't get anything I want," she had cried back at her bitterly. "We
can't even have a Long Island place. We can't go to Aiken. We can't go
abroad for a summer. Even if we did go, it would be on the wrong
steamer, and we'd sit at the wrong table and meet the wrong people. And
I can't _drag_ Alfred to a Waldorf dance, and Horse Show week I've
always had to sit up alone in a box like a bump on a log. And he insists
on driving in the Park on Sundays--_Sundays_, mind you--and he always
wants to go to Sherry's or Martin's for Saturday dinner, and wear a
Tuxedo coat at a cotillon. Why we've even bought our house here on the
wrong street, and to make it even worse we're on the wrong _side_ of the
street. We go and sit through those everlasting operas on the wrong
night. When we leave town it's always at the wrong season. Then we come
back wrong--about the time other people are leaving. Is it any wonder I
feel like giving up? Why, Cordelia, my dear, you've met more people and
got to be better known in five months than I have in five years!"
And she stirred her coffee with the vigor with which she had once
dreamed to stir the social world.
"And you can hold people and make them like you," she went on. "And you
aren't afraid to show people that you care for them."
It was Cordelia's turn to drive trouble from a softly rebellious breast.
"If he only guessed how sweet and good you are, some wise man I know
would surely come and run off with you."
Mrs. Spaulding looked at her tragically and heaved a ponderous sigh.
Then her American saving sense of humor came to her rescue and she clung
to it, like the drowning to a raft.
"I'm a sentimental old fool, my dear," was all she said. And Cordelia
was left to her own troubled thoughts.
More than once the author of The Silver Poppy had been heard to say that
she was a greatly misjudged woman. The world accepted her as austere and
impassive. The myriad readers of her book thought of her as clever but
chilly, as talented but retiring. Yet "upon the stern and somber loom of
passion and love," her publisher's announcement had read, "the girlish
hand of this fair daughter of Dixie has wielded a shuttle wound with the
odorous warmth of the Southland and dyed with the bright fancy of one
who has loved and known and suffered. From the story of one woman's
tenderest devotion and one man's deepest love this young hand has
intuitively woven the magic woof of many-hued romance."
Precisely what it meant no one attempted to define, but it sounded very
well, and what was more, it seemed to hint that the pale young authoress
from the hills of Kentucky had once known her own romance of the heart,
and that the gates of feeling had thereafter been closed to all
supplicants. This was a deduction so natural that the elderly maiden
lady who conducted a column of society chatter on one of the back pages
of a daily newspaper had even ventured to print--this was after a very
substantial dinner at Sherry's, where-at Cordelia herself was the
gracious and generous hostess--that many a stout heart of Manhattan had
reason to lament the fact that the feelings of a certain golden-haired
daughter of Kentucky were impregnable to all assault. The lady, indeed,
was so closely allied to literature that, unlike the philosopher of the
Rubaiyat, she could never be divorced from barren reason and make a
second marriage. This was all put with a slyness so adroit and yet with
an application so undoubted that it had once more been whispered about
that the beautiful young Kentucky genius preferred great dreams to Dan
Cupid. Her studious maiden-hood seemed hedged about by a bulwark of
half-written books. It was a sad example of beauty sacrificed on the
altar of bookishness.
And yet, it was argued, this precocious child of letters at some time
during her career must have learned to love, and love deeply; one critic
declared her pen to have been dipped not in ink, but "in the ruddy flood
of a warm and palpitating heart." If, in truth, she had never loved,
how, then, had that fluent pen of hers ever learned to write so movingly
and so masterfully of the divine passion?
How, indeed? That was the riddle which more than one puzzled mind had to
leave unread. That was a thought, too, that had troubled Hartley not a
little; there were times when he felt vaguely envious of that unknown,
mysterious, shrouded past. He had read also that Cordelia had declared
that she could never marry, that devotion to her art precluded any such
worldly consummation. It had even crept into print that Iscaro, the
Egyptian palmist, had sealed her girlhood decision by prophesying that
she was to achieve immortality only through a life of celibacy.
Yet such are the cross-threads of fate. For Hartley, puzzling over these
things as others before him had done, had built up in his consciousness
an incongruous, self-contradictory, impossible character of a woman who
seemed to him always warm to the eye and was yet destined to prove
marble cold to the touch.
It was for Cordelia, perhaps, the penalty of eminence. For little as she
had ever shown any sign of sacrificing her artistic aspirations in the
rose-grown temple of matrimony, the hunger of the unmated and maturing
animal, the wavering passion that arises at times involuntarily in the
breast of the coldest priestess amid her coldest marbles, quiescent, but
quiescent only as a tiger sleeping in its noonday cave, was now not
unknown to the heart of Cordelia Vaughan. She wanted to be loved; but
above all things, she wanted to love.
The cry of ripe womanhood for its mate awoke at times, but only of late,
she knew, with an intensity that was sadly disturbing. Through her
girlhood, she remembered, she had often said with a great air that she
could never love. To love other than uprightly was even more
impossible--yet she had secretly tired of the hollow part of an Aspasia
without a Pericles. She had often tried to convince herself that she was
too happily neutral, too indeterminate of temperament, to stray from the
lonely heights to which she had so painfully climbed for the mere
passing glint of a bubble. Now, for at least once in her life, half
weary of all her comfortless basking at the too fierce fireside of her
early fame she was beginning to ask more and more passionately for some
touch of the mellow sun of actual affection, for some gentle warmth of
disinterested tenderness.
For with all her activity and with all the attention she seemed to
receive, Cordelia's life was still a desolately lonely one. An early
girlish pose of protesting a fear of men had crystallized into a habit
of evading them, except in not infrequent cases of late where they
stepped before her as instruments of literary destiny. Good men, she had
once said, are like good roads: made for walking over. As the belle of
her little Kentucky town she had held herself proudly above each and all
of her young suitors. As the successful author of a great book, as the
woman of wit and reason, she had tended to repel that attention at the
hand of the admiring male which such charm in woman as she might lay
claim to invariably called for. She had known many courtships, though,
in her own way. Yet she asked herself if she had ever known one absolute
and unselfish love.
It was Mrs. Spaulding's lightly put question that drove her into a
dreary retrospect of a youth she seldom cared to look back on. But was
this love now coming to her on belated wings?
She wondered where the difference lay, wherein John Hartley was not like
all other men. Why had she looked out on him with awakened eyes? She
remembered how, at the first, that grave considerateness with which he
had treated her had caused an immediate muffled fluttering in the
sleeping cotes of affection. There was an answering seriousness in his
steady gray eyes that had appealed to her. He was manly, and honest, and
strong. Yet she knew that explained nothing. Nor did the fact that he
had continuously eluded her, that in some way he stood above her in a
masterfulness that caused dormant femininity ever dumbly to bow to it.
And still she probed herself for reasons, and still she stood
unsatisfied. Was it true, even, that she could ever be in love with him?
When she leaned down and asked herself, in the mirror, that strange and
disturbing question, one gray day late in September, she neither smiled
nor sighed. For she tried to tell herself that it was not love, but
loneliness. She, too, like Mrs. Spaulding, had never been given all that
her heart desired.
It was not until Cordelia had read and reread Hartley's first twenty
chapters of his reconstructed version of The Unwise Virgins--and what
wondrous chapters, she saw, he had made them--that her plaintive and
unconfessed longing for companionship, by some strange caprice of
impression, deepened into a stronger and more compelling emotion. She
felt then, of a sudden, that he held the reins of her destiny in his
hands. She wanted him near her. Not only in her loneliness, but also in
her weakness, she needed him to lean upon. The little that she had
already asked of him she would repay a thousandfold.
And as the result of that day's silent questioning of herself she went
in person from editor to editor, as she had never done before, with a
bundle of his manuscripts. And before many days, after numerous
disappointments and more than one humiliation, she succeeded in
disposing of no less than five of his stories. If, as a distributer of
his wares she had moments of suffering, she learned to take an
incongruous joy out of them, and no word of what she passed through ever
reached Hartley's ears.