CHAPTER 16.
Meanwhile, Dilling had been an unwilling victim to Hebe Barrington’s charms.
“Your wife is coming home with me for a bite of supper,” she had written him, “and I want you, too. The bald truth is—I don’t trust Toddles with a pretty woman, so you must be on hand to see her home.”
But although he had signified his readiness to perform this happy task several times, she had made it impossible for him to break away.
“Don’t you love my little nest?” asked Hebe, closing the door and leading him by the arm to a deep couch, standing well beyond the faint light thrown by a winking oriental lantern.
“It’s very unusual,” said Dilling.
“Everything here has a history,” she told him, “but I won’t tell you about any of my treasures just now. You need only know that this room is called the Eyrie, and I want you to feel that it is your own. Any time, day or night, that you want to run away from the abominations of politics, this place is ready for you. You need not even share it with me—if you don’t wish.”
“Thank you,” muttered Dilling, seeing that she expected him to speak.
“And now, let’s talk about your speech. It was tremendous! How easy it seems to be for you to avoid the feeble word and choose those that thrill one with a sense of power. Every fibre of my being was alive with response to you, to-night. But why didn’t you look at me, Raymond?”
“I? Er—why—I didn’t know that you were there,” stammered the man who was supposed to avoid the trite and obvious.
“But why didn’t you look and see?” insisted Hebe. “Is the admiration of mankind in general, and of woman in particular so unimportant? Does it give you no stimulation?”
“Oh, it isn’t that,” said Dilling.
He was very ill at ease. Admitting her intellectual attainments, yet he never enjoyed talking with Hebe Barrington as he enjoyed talking with Azalea. He was too conscious of her, too acutely aware of the fact that she sought to attach his scalp to her belt, his frail person to her chariot wheels. Instinctively, he was on his guard against a temptation to which he could not imagine himself surrendering.
“What is it, then?” she asked, passing her fingers through his thin hair.
As Marjorie recoiled from Sullivan, so Dilling tried to withdraw from the caresses of Mrs. Barrington. He had never received advances from women—decent women—and he was shocked, revolted. Even her use of his Christian name jarred unpleasantly upon him whose social standards decreed that although a man and woman might address one another familiarly before the marriage of either party, the instant they turned from the altar, rigid formality should be observed. To be called “Raymond” by a married woman whom he had known but a few weeks, smacked strongly of indecency.
“Is it possible that beneath your discomfiting iciness of manner,” Hebe continued, “you want to attract men, hold them and make them your friends? Do you feel the need of friends, Raymond Dilling?”
“I am only human,” he returned.
Suddenly he felt an overpowering urge to talk, an imperious need for candour. He wanted to open his heart, deplore his failures and the unfulfilment of his desires. He saw his inability to draw men to him, and surround them with a vivid atmosphere of comradeship in political endeavour and a common patriotic inspiration. He felt that men did not like him, that he would never be an adornment to their clubs, one upon whom the success of a social event depended. And, unaccountably, he realised that he cared—cared for himself, and for Marjorie, and for Azalea Deane. As though reading his thoughts, Hebe went on,
“You’ll never do it as you are, Raymond. You are suffering the result of the habit contracted, I have learned, in your college days, when you withdrew yourself from all but the few who recognised your talents and thrust themselves upon you for your worldly, and other-worldly behoof. A native shyness of strangers and an inherited reluctance to spend money on the amenities of life, moved you to live in cloistered exclusiveness, when you should have been expanding your soul in joyous contact with your fellow men. Am I not right?”
“I don’t think it was so bad as that,” said Dilling, fighting against the stupefying effect of the perfume he had learned to associate with her.
“But it was! You avoided human contact, and only by such means is life rid of its tendency to become set and small. Don’t you remember the French axiom, ‘L’esprit de l’homme n’est malleable que dans sa jeunesse’? You are still young, Raymond, but it is high time that you began remoulding. If you had only allowed yourself the Paganism of Youth, you would have spared yourself the Philistinism of Maturity.”
“It’s all very well to preach conviviality and bon camaraderie,” Dilling returned, stung into making what he afterwards felt to be an undignified defence, “but you must remember that I couldn’t afford to hold my own with the roisterers at college.” He moved, with a gesture of impatience, beyond the reach of her marauding fingers. “It was not so much inherited caution as immediate limitations that made my ‘exclusive cloistering’ necessary. I put myself through college, you know,” he added, with a touch of unconscious pride, “and I couldn’t afford to enjoy it.”
“But that’s the very point—the very point I’m driving at,” she triumphed. “If only you had spent beyond your means—if only once you had overstepped your limitations! We all do, all of us who have souls. One way or another, the artist is always spending. The lover never counts the cost. You can’t—you shouldn’t want to—reduce emotions to blue prints and specifications, and that’s what you have done! Listen, Raymond, and forgive me if I offend you. There is a corner of your personality that lies fallow because its dull atmosphere refuses nourishment to artistic taste and sensuous beauty. In other words, you are afraid to spend, even now, lest the ultimate cost may prove to be something you think you can’t afford. You are afraid to let yourself go, for emotions lead one even farther than the tangible medium of exchange.” Her tone changed. “How you ever came to marry a pretty woman is something of a mystery to me—a frump would have answered just as well. Indeed, I ask myself, why did you ever marry at all. Will you tell me?”
“I don’t think there’s any mystery about it,” parried Dilling.
He was not prepared to confess that love had played a very small part in his relations with Marjorie, nor that his need of her was more that of an amiable associate than wife. With the simplicity that marked so many of his social adventurings, he believed that when he could support a wife and family he should marry; and he chose the least objectionable—and most desirable externally—woman of his acquaintanceship. There was the explanation in a nutshell.
“Have you ever felt the appeal of sensuous beauty?” Hebe Barrington persisted. “No! I am answered. The very phrase revolts you as I speak it. It is an evocation of the Seventh Commandment and a ruined household. Queer fellow! Your insensibility to beauty in line and colour, not only in Art but in life, proclaims you a Philistine.”
“You’ve called me that before.”
“And I call you so again. You had no ear for the cry from Paxos, ‘When you are come to Pallodes announce that the Great Pan is dead’,” she cried theatrically. “Little you understand how it was that Pan’s trumpet terrified and dispersed the Titans in their fight with the Olympian gods.”
“You have a harsh opinion of me,” said Dilling, a little nettled. “I thought I knew my classics.”
“You read them—you bathed in their sensuous beauty, but you never felt it, Raymond, even while imagining that you were mewing a mighty youth of the intellect. Deluded boy,” she murmured. “Blind boy!” Her hand fluttered over his face and rested upon his eyes. For the life of him he could not respond to this woman, but at the same time he made no definite resistance, judging that by so doing he would lay himself open to the charge of priggishness. Dilling had little dread of ridicule when he trod upon familiar ground, but of late he had realised how virginal he was in the social struggle. Quite still he sat, while Hebe Barrington’s hands moved softly about him. He did not know that to her his unresponsiveness was incredible; the web she was weaving was as apparent to him as his power to break it. “It is not too late,” she whispered, “to save yourself, to save your soul alive.”
“Am I to take that as encouragement?” he enquired, with intentional rudeness.
“As the body in its vigour renews itself every seven years, so it is possible for the spirit to open its doors periodically upon new realms of percipience and creative power. Set about your own rebirth, Raymond! Don’t imagine that you can achieve re-genesis by pondering the sources that gave the pagan Greek his apprehension, shall I say, of the joy of life. The Greek lived in a narrow time and in a narrow world, in spite of which he made living glorious. You, on the other hand, live in a big world where there is room for the coming of the superman. Oh, Raymond, lay hold of the sensuous beauty that lies within your very grasp. Come out of your barren cloister and inhale the warmth of the sun and perfume of the blossoming flowers! Mere intellect has never achieved perfect happiness for any man. He must develop his emotional nature in order to get the most life has to offer and in order that he may give her of his best,” she added, quickly. “He must learn to understand men and women, and to understand them he must—live!”
“You seem to be very certain that I am one of the unburied dead!”
“Exactly! Every man who doesn’t love is dead. Oh, don’t point to your wife and children as contradictory evidence. You love neither, Raymond, I mean, with the love that is like a great, engulfing tide, the love that haunts and tortures, and racks and exalts. I mean the love that is like a deep, ecstatic pain, that simultaneously is a feast and a cruel hunger.”
Her words poured over him like a warm scented flood. He was conscious of a curious desire to plunge his body into their deeps, to feel their heat and moisture. But the impression eluded him. He could not abandon himself to the enchantment Hebe Barrington was trying to cast over him. No glamorous mist blurred his vision. He saw with penetrating clarity, and his only sensation was one of distaste.
“I am of opinion that life can be useful without these exaggerated, emotional outbursts,” said Dilling, “that where so much energy is expended in one direction the drain is felt in other lines of endeavour.”
“But will you never open your eyes to the radiant truth that a great love is not a drain but a reservoir, a source of supply? It enlarges one’s power and stimulates creation. Did not every conspicuous figure in history have his feminine complement, and is not at least a part of his achievement credited to the stimulation of an overmastering love?”
Dilling was not so sure. Average and sub-average persons, wholly unable to apprehend the subtle forces of will and intellect behind a great achievement, accept it with dull simplicity and dismiss it with a word of praise. But average and sub-average persons experiencing the driving power of emotion in varied degrees think themselves capable of understanding a sublime passion and therefore place it—perhaps unconsciously—ahead of intellectual accomplishment. In fine, we bring others down to our own level, a fact that explains why “human interest” and “heart interest” make a wider appeal than things that live and move and have their being on the higher plane of mind and spirit.
“I doubt it,” he said, answering Hebe’s question. “I doubt, for example, that Parnell’s skill in leadership depended upon the dashing Kitty O’Shea, or that Nelson would have failed at Trafalgar save for Lady Hamilton.”
“Do you mean that no particular woman is necessary to a man, or that emotional relationship between two persons of opposite sexes is over-estimated?”
“Either, and both,” laughed Dilling, and rose. “But I really must find my wife. She will think I have deserted her, and, anyway, late hours are forbidden in our house. Shall we go down?”
But Hebe held him.
“Just a moment,” she begged. “I can’t allow you to leave me with a wrong impression. Oh, I know quite well how my conduct to-night must appear in your eyes—your blind eyes, Raymond, and it is not a sense of prudishness that impels me to explain that I do not throw myself at you for a narrow, personal satisfaction. It is true that I love you, but I love the big You, the public man, the orator, the statesman, and I have a supreme longing to see you attain greater honours and bring greater glory to Canada. To achieve this, I am firmly convinced that a closed door in your nature must be opened. You are like a man working in artificial light. He can see, yes—but he attains results through greater strain than is immediately apparent and, therefore, his season of usefulness is lessened. There is sunshine, Raymond, and in its radiance, much of what was work becomes play. Love is my sunshine and is a miraculous creative force. With your frail body, you must draw power from an outside source, Raymond, and what other reservoir is there but Love? Listen, dear, just a moment more,” she cried, tightening her arms about him. “I would rather see you love some other woman than not love at all, for I know that the awakening of your soul would be Canada’s great gain. And now,” she concluded, rising, “will you kiss me before you go?”
Dilling hesitated, and in that instant’s delay a step sounded on the stair and a gentle tattoo beat upon the door.
“Come in,” cried Hebe, crossly. “Oh, Uncle Rufus, we were just going down!”