I should be doing injustice to my manners and (a more serious offence) distorting truth, if I represented myself as a shy gaby, afraid or ashamed to make love because people knew the business on which I was engaged. Holding a position like mine has at least the virtue of curing a man of such folly; I had been accustomed to be looked at from the day I put on breeches, and, thanks to unfamiliarity with privacy, had come not to expect and hardly to miss it. The trouble was unhappily of a deeper and more obstinate sort, rooted in my own mind and not due to the covert stares or open good-natured interest of those who surrounded me. There is a quality which is the sign and soul of high and genuine pleasure, whether of mind or body, of sight, feeling, or imagination; I mean spontaneity. This characteristic, with its included incidents of unexpectedness, of suddenness, often of unwisdom and too entire absorption in the moment, comes, I take it, from a natural agreement of what you are with what you do, not planned or made, but revealed all at once and full-grown; when the heart finds it, it knows that it is satisfied. The action fits the agent—the exercise matches the faculty. Thenceforward what you are about does itself without your aid, but pours into your hand the treasure that rewards success, the very blossom of life. There may be bitterness, reproaches, stings of conscience, or remorse. These things are due to other claims and obligations, artificial, perhaps, in origin, although now of binding force. Beneath and beyond them is the self-inspired harmony of your nature with your act, sometimes proud enough to claim for itself a justification from the mere fact of existence, oftener content to give that question the go-by, whispering softly, "What matters that? I am."
By some such explanation as this, possibly not altogether wide of the mark, I sought to account for my disposition in the days that followed Elsa's arrival. I was conscious of an extreme reluctance to set about my task. I have used the right word there; a task it seemed to me. The trail of business and arrangement was over it; it was defaced by an intolerable propriety, ungraced by a scrap of uncertainty; its stages had been marked, numbered, and catalogued beforehand. Bederhof knew the wedding-day to within a fortnight, the settlement to within a shilling, the addresses of congratulation to a syllable. To this knowledge we were all privy. God save us, how we played the hypocrite!
I am fully aware that there are men to whom these feelings would not have occurred. There are probably women in regard to whom nobody would have experienced them in a very keen form. Insensibility is infectious. We have few scruples in regard to the unscrupulous. We feel that the exact shade of colour is immaterial when we present a new coat to a blind man. Had Hammerfeldt left as his legacy the union with some rude healthy creature, to follow his desire might have been an easy thing—one which, on a broad view of my life, would have been relatively insignificant. I should have disliked my duty and done it, as I did a thousand things I disliked. But I should not have been afflicted with the sense that where I endured ten lashes another endured a thousand; that, being a fellow-sufferer, I seemed the executioner; that, myself yearning to be free, I was busied in forging chains. It was in this light that Elsa made me regard myself, so that every word to her from my lips seemed a threat, every approach an impertinence, every hour of company I asked a forecast of the lifelong bondage that I prepared for her. This was my unhappy mood, while Victoria laughed, jested, and spurred me on; while William Adolphus opined that Elsa must get used to me; while Cousin Elizabeth smiled open motherly encouragement; while Princess Heinrich moved through the appropriate figures as though she graced a stately minuet. I had come to look for little love in the world; I was afflicted with the new terror that I must be hated.
Yet she did not hate me; or, at least, our natures were not such as to hate one another or to be repugnant naturally. Nay, I believe that we were born to be good and appreciative friends. Sometimes in those early days we found a sympathy of thought that made us for the moment intimate and easy, forgetful of our obligation, and frankly pleased with the society which we afforded one another. Soon I came to enjoy these intervals, to look and to plan for them. In them I seemed to get glimpses of what my young cousin ought to be always; but they were brief and fleeting. An intrusion ended them; or, more often, they were doomed to perish at my hands or at hers. A troubled shyness would suddenly eclipse her mirth; or I would be seized with a sense that my cheating of fate was useless, and served only to make the fate more bitter. She seemed to dread any growth of friendship, and to pull herself up abruptly when she felt in danger of being carried away into a genuine comradeship. I was swiftly responsive to such an attitude; again we drew apart. Here is an extract from a letter which I wrote to Varvilliers:
"My dear Varvilliers: The state of things here is absurd enough. My cousin and I can't like, because we are ordered to love; can't be friends, because we must be mates; can't talk, because we must flirt; can't be comfortable alone together, because everybody prepares our tête-à-tête for us. She is in apprehension of an amourousness which I despair of displaying; I am ashamed of a backwardness which is her only comfort. And the audience grows impatient; had the gods given them humour they would laugh consumedly. Surely even they must smile soon, and so soon as they smile I must take the leap; for, my dear friend, we may be privately unhappy, but we must not be publicly ludicrous. To-day, as we walked a yard apart along the terrace, I seemed to see a smile on a gardener's face. If it were of benevolence, matters may not advance just yet; if I conclude that amusement inspired it, even before you receive this I may have performed my duty and she her sacrifice. Pray laugh at and for me from your safe distance; in that there can be no harm. I laugh myself sometimes, but dare not risk sharing my laugh with Elsa. She has humour, but to ask her to turn its rays on this situation would be too venturous a stroke. An absolute absorption in the tragic aspect is probably the only specific which will enable her to endure. Unhappily the support of pure tragedy, with its dignity of unbroken gloom, is not mine. I forget sometimes to be unhappy in reflecting that I am damnably ridiculous. What, I wonder, were the feelings of Coralie at the first attentions of her big-bellied impresario? Did stern devotion nerve her? Was her face pale and her lips set in tragic mode? Or did she smile and yawn and drawl and shrug in her old delightful fashion? I would give much to be furnished with details of this parallel. Meanwhile Bederhof tears his hair, for I threaten to be behind time, and the good Duchess tells me thrice daily that Elsa is timid. Princess Heinrich has made no sign yet; when she frowns I must kiss. So stands the matter. I must go hence to pray her to walk in the woods with me. She will flush and flutter, but, poor child, she will come. What I ask she will not and must not refuse. But, deuce take it, I ask so little! There's the rub! I hear your upbraiding voice, 'Pooh, man, catch her up and kiss her!' Ah, my dear Varvilliers, you suffer under a confusion. She is a duty; and who is impelled by duty to these sudden cuttings of a knot? And she does a duty, and would therefore not kiss me in return. And I also, doing duty, am duty. Thus we are both of us strangled in the black coils of that belauded serpent."
I did not tell Varvilliers everything. Had I allowed myself complete unreserve I must have added that she charmed me, and that the very charm I found in her made my work harder. There was a dainty delicacy about her, the freshness of a flower whose velvet bloom no finger-touch has rubbed. This I was to destroy.
But at last from fear, not of the gardener's smiles, but of my own ridicule, I made my start, and, as I foreshadowed to Varvilliers, it was as we walked in the woods that I began.
"What of that grenadier?" I asked her—she was sitting on a seat, while I leaned against a tree-trunk—"the grenadier you were in love with when I was at Bartenstein. You remember? You described him to me."
She blushed and laughed a little.
"He married a maid of my mother's, and became one of the hall-porters. He's grown so fat."