CHAPTER XX
[Note: The print copy had a missing page here.]
‘No man knows the sex. Women are like Tennyson’s description of the law—a wilderness of single instances; but except for those surprising examples which are detected for us only by the talisman of a great love, there is a family likeness amongst them. The woman is the tougher-fibred creature, and there is excellent good reason why she should be so. She suffers as no man ever suffers, and she could not bear her pangs—she would go mad under them—if she were half as sensitive to suffering as the less-tried male; and on the moral side the lady is a pachyderm and the average workman an un-shelled polype in comparison. I invoke,’ he cried, striding the little grassy platform on which his feet had worn a pathway between his tent-door and the chattering runnel—‘I invoke the unnumbered squads and battalions and armies of shame which are known, and always have been known, to every town and city which has ever dared to call itself civilized since history began. From Lais in her jewelled litter to Cora in her English landau in the Bois, and on to the shabbiest small slut who flaunts her raddle and her broken feather in the slums of London, the same story is told and the same moral preached. Where is an equal army of men to be found to invite the contumely of their own sex? A woman’s virtue is her continence, and a man’s virtues are truthfulness and courage. There is an unspeakably great army of the one sex which makes a show and a lure of its penal uniform. Find me anywhere a band of men who flaunt themselves in an equal denial of the virtues proper to man, who parade themselves as cowards and liars, and strive to make a living by the parade of their own desertion from the manly principle. The tender sensibility of the generic woman is a fraud, and I should know that better than most men, because I so long believed in it and had so many rude awakenings from faith. But, oh I now and again—happy the man who learns it early!—there is a woman to be found so strong and delicate, so tender yet courageous, so much beyond the best that men ever find in men, that there is nothing for us but to abase our souls in gratitude and worship and wonder. We—we have genius of a hundred sorts, and still genius is rare; we invent, we construct, we drag new sciences, patient fact by fact, from the regions of darkness; we think great thoughts and speak great words—there is no limit set to the passion of our intellectual greed, no limit to the conquering march of eternal achievement; and when all is said and done there never lived a woman who had true genius for anything but love and goodness. There in that glorious small specialized field they shine, and they shine the brighter and more splendid because of their contrast with a sordid, heartless, stupid, and greedy sex. And there,’ he said, kneeling to stir the slumbering embers of his camp-fire—‘there, shining in that little shining field, are you, Madge, brightest amongst the brightest and saddest among the saddest, and here am I who wrecked your life for you with such admirable good intent’
The rage flamed out. He took his seat upon his camp-stool, and shredded tobacco for his pipe, staring with vacant eyes into the smoke-fog which everywhere imprisoned his gaze, and in a minute he was back at his dreams again, and the past once more unrolled itself before him.
He was back in Montcourtois, marching the cobbled pavement of the place in front of the Hotel of the Three Friends, hatless and just half conscious of the touch of the wintry air on his cheek. The Baroness was newly rankling under an insult now so many years of age; and Annette, clearly visible at moments between the slits of the Venetian blinds, was still pacing the lamplit salon. The whole thing happened in his mind again precisely as it had happened in fact so very long ago.
A sudden remembrance and a sudden impulse moved him almost in the same instant. When the bracelet had fallen from her arm, the Baroness had cried out to the effect that it was her most valued treasure, and Paul suddenly called to mind the fact that it still lay on the floor of the salon. Annette might observe it at any moment, and might choose to wreak her supposed offence upon it; and, thinking thus, he hastened back to the apartment, prepared for any storm that might assail him. But Annette, who, in the inexplicable changes of mood which affected her at such times as these, was marching gaily up and down the room singing ‘Tout le long de la route ‘to a swinging rhythm, chose to disregard him. He saw the precious ornament lying where it had fallen, possessed himself of it, and passed out at the further door. For any sign she gave Annette may not have seen him, and Paul had time, as he crossed the corridor to his study, to remark upon a form of alcoholism which allowed its victim unembarrassed speech in combination with a steady gait and an entire irresponsibility of thought. The manifestation was comparatively new to him, and he had spent some thought upon it It was so foreign to the popular idea of drunkenness that it accounted to him for his long-continued blindness to the truth.
He was tarred with the literary brush, which is to say that he was eternally bent upon the examination of all human symptoms, whether they displayed themselves in himself or in another. He had made it the business of his life to analyze those symptoms, though he was but as yet a chemist’s apprentice, wandering and wondering through the vast laboratory of the world. Yet, apprentice as he was, he had learned enough of the secret of his own craft to know that the professional analyst of emotion quickens perception at the expense of sensation. The man who is always pulling emotion to pieces as a part of the day’s work grows to a philosophic indifference about it, as a vivisector becomes dead to a sense of pain. Yet neither the anatomist of the living soul nor the anatomist of the living body becomes insensible in any appreciable degree to the exigence of his own pains, and the memories of a thousand triumphant operations will not hinder the start and outcry of the greatest of surgeons if you stick an unexpected pin into any part of his anatomy.
Paul had laid his hand upon the handle of the door of the study, and with his disengaged hand was fumbling in his pocket for a match, when he heard a tripping footstep on the stairs behind him, and he was hailed by the Baroness’s Parisian maid. Madame la Baronne, so the maid explained, had let fall a valuable ornament in the salon; had Mr. Armstrong seen it, and, if not, would he give orders that it should be sought for and returned? Paul felt the precious object in his pocket.
‘I do not know Madame’s arrangements,’ he said, ‘but I have the bracelet, and, if it were possible for her to receive me, I should like to hand it to her personally.’
‘Oh, but yes,’ said the maid. Madame la Baronne had her little suite of rooms, and was quite in position to receive. M. Armstrong’s desire should be named to her, and the maid would bring an answer.
She fluttered upstairs with swashing petticoats and a flutter of ribbons, and Paul waited in the corridor below. On the waxed floor of the salon Annette’s feet still moved to a rhythmic, half-dancing walk, and her bird-like voice soared to—
‘Tons les deux, la main dans la main,
Nous poursuivions notre chemin,
Sous la celeste voûte.’
‘Under the celestial vault,’ said Paul; ‘and bent on the discovery of what infernal regions?’
The maid came back, pruning herself with coquettish graces, to answer that Madame la Baronne would have pleasure in receiving M. Armstrong in five minutes, and, having delivered her message, rustled rapidly upstairs again. She paused at the turning of the stair, and leaned over to say:
‘Numéro quinze, the fifth door to the right of monsieur.’
‘Thank you,’ Paul answered, and, turning into the darkened study, struck a light and consulted his watch. It was ten minutes past nine, and he sat still to await the quarter hour. There was a clattering of pots and pans in the distant kitchen, and Annette was still singing and walking in the near apartment An occasional murmur of voices, a click of billiard-balls, and even the faint noise made by the shuffle of a set of dominoes in the café over the road reached his ears, but save for these slight signs of life the world seemed asleep. Annette suddenly ceased to sing in the middle of a bar. He heard her open the door of the salon. She passed the little corridor in silence, and ascended the stair. He heard the key turn, first in the lock of one door and then in that of another. He consulted his watch once more by the flickering light of a lucifer match. He was within a minute of the appointed time, and he began to ask himself with a fluttering heart what he was to say, and how he was to bear himself in the coming interview. Upstairs outraged purity and dignity were waiting for him, and he himself, innocent as he had meant to be, was yet in a sense the author of the outrage. The minute crawled. It ticked its final second out at last, and he arose holding the bracelet in his hand. He mounted the stair, knocked at the door the maid had indicated to him, and was bidden to enter. The Baroness was seated in a sea-green dressing-gown ornamented by many pretty devices in lace of priceless fabric, which had taken a coffee tint by reason of its age. A book was lying on her knees, and she was toying with an ivory paper-knife which had its haft in a silver embossed rhinoceros tooth. She nodded Paul to a chair which had evidently been placed for him.
‘I see,’ she said, ‘that you have found my bracelet’
He handed it to her without a word. She purred a ‘Thank you,’ and tested its clasp about her arm.
‘Sit down, Mr. Armstrong,’ she said.
Paul was still voiceless, but he echoed the coldly courteous Mr. Armstrong ‘in his mind with some dismay.
‘I do not see,’ said the Baroness de Wyeth, ‘how it is possible to pass over the incident of to-night in silence. Perhaps we may speak one explanatory word about it and let it go. What have you to tell me, Mr. Armstrong?’
‘Well——’
Paul balanced appealing hands in front of him, waved them, suffered them to fall at his sides, and said no more.
‘You must be conscious,’ said the Baroness, tapping the book which lay before her with her paper-knife, ‘that it was by accident that the incident which is only known to ourselves did not happen in public. In a measure I have compromised myself, and, if you will permit me to say so, I am not a woman who is accustomed to be compromised. Your wife objects—a little unconventionally perhaps—to our association. I am a woman of the world, and I know very well what construction might be placed on such an episode. We can both see clearly that such a thing might happen again at any instant under circumstances less favourable to my reputation, and I cannot afford to risk the renewing of it I am seriously afraid that I shall have in future to deny myself the privileges of a very pleasant friendship.’
‘Your will shall be my law,’ said Paul ‘I have no excuse to urge, and have certainly no complaint to make of your decision. I shall go at your command, Gertrude——’
She waved the paper-knife against him with a gesture which seemed to protest against that one dear familiarity.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he cried; ‘the name escaped me. I shall not have the chance to use it often after this, and you may let it pass. I am going, but I must tell you this: I have not been very fortunate in my choice of friends amongst women, or in the choice which has been thrust upon me, and so long as I live I shall remember——’ He paused, and waited for a while until he regained the mastery of himself. Then he went on steadily, with a level voice almost as if he were a schoolboy reading from a lesson-book: ‘I shall remember as long as I live the beautiful thoughts with which you have inspired me, your kindness, your friendship—and, and——’
He never knew how it happened—men of his temperament never do know—but he was on his knees before her, and the words burst from him with a sob.
‘And—you!’
She smiled upon him from the maternal height of the coquette who is a year or two older than the man she coquets with.
The tears were in his eyes and on his cheeks, and glistened in the virgin beard. She stooped forward and laid a hand upon his head.
‘Do you care so much to leave me, Paul?’ she asked.
A man of the world would have known the studied quaver in the voice—the throaty, stagey sweetness of it. What was to be expected of a yokel of genius who had been rushed through a hundred towns or so in everlasting association with De Vavasours and Montmorencys—rushed through London and through Paris under much the same inauspicious petticoat influences, and had hardly ever met a real live lady in his life on terms of intimacy until now? And Madame la Baronne de Wyèth had told him enough and had shown him enough in the way of correspondence with distinguished people of both hemispheres to let him know that she could play the part of grand dame at discretion anywhere. That was possibly the preponderant influence in his mind. Had he himself been a gentleman by extraction, had he been able to meet this exquisite and delicate creature of old dreams and modern conditions on any terms of equality, he would not have abased himself in spirit as he did. The woman was regnant The woman is always regnant, whether she be queen or dairymaid, but the barrier between himself and her was built of the old hurdles of low birth and iron fortune. Here anyway in his heart rang the knell ‘Good-bye,’ the farewell, farewell, farewell which every poet worth his salt has heard not once but many times, and, in the middle of the dirge the bell rang so remorselessly, came the exquisite chrysm of a fondling hand upon his head.
It dwelt there scarcely for a moment, and if every nerve had not been vibrant with feeling, the touch was so light that it might almost have passed unnoticed. As things happened it was like a torch touching a torch as yet unlighted, and the young man flamed. He caught the caressing hand as it left his hair, and kissed it.
Ah! the weeping tears and the melancholy Touchstone humour that smiled wryly to see them, each as big as a pea.
The Baroness surrendered her hand, and Paul kissed it with that passion which inspires a pilgrim at the shrine, and the odd something superadded which has made fools of men since Eve plucked her first girdle of fig-leaves. He wept above the hand, and he fondled the hand, and he kissed it with protesting murmurs of undying affection and esteem, and whilst this storm was in danger of playing itself out, and the unsuing suitor was likely to make an end of the business and go, the disengaged hand of the Baroness stole out and took him maternally by the chin, under the rain-soaked beard.
‘Paul dear,’ said the Baroness, ‘I did not think that you would have felt our parting like this. We can’t help it, we literary people—we must quote, we must express the profoundest feelings of our souls in the words of other people. What’s the Shakespearian line? “I hold it good that we shake hands and part”, Good-bye, Paul.’
He was on his feet again, and they were hand in hand. Her left hand was on his right shoulder. Their eyes met and lingered on each other.
‘We’re saying good-bye, Paul,’ purred the Baroness in a voice of tenderest cadence. ‘You see the need for it, don’t you, you dear boy? Perhaps we may see each other later on, but it is good-bye now, for the time being. It must be so. You see that, don’t you, Paul dear?
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I see it. Who could fail to see it? You shall have my thanks when I can offer them for having asked no explanation, no apology.’
‘Paul,’ said the Baroness, and the left hand on his right shoulder drew him a little nearer to her. Once, a year or two before, he had been up in the Yorkshire dales, and had strolled along by the side of the Wharfe on a day when the river ran beryl-brown or sapphire clear as it glanced over pebbly shallow or rocky depth. There was the beryl glint in her eye—the darling brown with the liquid light playing upon it. He looked now. The woodlands were about him; the river murmured near. The damnable artistic gift which made use of all accomplished experience helped him to obey the impulse of the slow, persuasive hand. The beryl light in the eyes invited him, and the faint droop of languishing eyelid did the rest ‘Paul dear,’ she whispered, ‘it is good-bye. You may kiss me just this once and go. Kiss me, Paul dear, as you would kiss your mother’s ghost, and go.’
He stooped and kissed her, reverently and lingeringly, upon the forehead.
‘Good-bye,’ he said—‘good-bye.’
Then, with an electric amazement, her lips were on his for a single instant, and she strained him near to her.
‘Now, go,’ she said, withdrawing herself before he had found time to answer her embrace. ‘Go, and farewell!’
He was in the upper corridor almost before he knew it, in the confusion of his nerves. The key snapped quickly in the lock, and he was alone. He groped his way along the darkened passage until he reached the head of the stairs, and there he recovered some consciousness of fact. He drooped slowly down into his study, and sat there in the dark and cold for hours, swearing fealty to contradictory deities of passion and of friendship.