He sat a while over his port that night. He contemplated Virginia. A strange woman she is, he thought. Every woman has a legend, there is a legend to every woman, but what is Virginia’s? She’s so pitiful—yet why? You see, he explained to himself, she seems to have made a fool of herself in a deep, secret way. People don’t understand her, and she despises people, and because she despises people she thinks she despises life....
Her name and face were familiar—too familiar—to that increasing part of England that must read its daily and weekly lot of gossip in the papers. The Romans had gladiators to amuse the mob, Ivor thought, but England can do it quite cheaply, for the mob has learned to read.... Yet, somehow, Virginia had licensed this interest; maybe she had licensed it by so whole-heartedly despising it, for there are ways and ways of despising things. No one could deny that there was a glamour about her, certainly there was a glamour. But there was a rottenness in that glamour—now where did that come from? And why? Quite decent men took faint licence with her name, while lewd men who had never met Virginia, could never have met her, said that they had touched her, they chuckled at the mention of her name....
Glamour! Now this glamour is a very remarkable thing, a strange and indefinable thing, and very rare: for it does not fall on women because they have many lovers, it does not fall on women because they are wonderfully constant to one lover, and it certainly does not fall on women who Do Things. Sometimes it happens on a courtesan, sometimes on a great lady; but this glamour is no snob, it cares nothing for the claims of fashion, for it may quite well happen on a dairymaid, so that a whole countryside grows aware of her and a whole country sorrows for her death. Philosophers have spun and metaphysicians toiled, yet this stuff of glamour still evades the mortal coils of definition. And whence it comes, no one can tell; nor why it comes—nor whither it goes! though poets do say that they can smell the faint, musty smell of tragedy in its destiny, and historians can never resist ascribing it to luckless men and women of high degree. And sometimes you may love a woman mightily, yet try as you will you cannot find glamour in her, you simply cannot; she is just a woman, yours to love but not to dream about. Yes, this glamour is a wayward thing, it just comes and touches a lovely woman in each generation, and because of it her youth is long remembered and her middle-age forgiven, if she live so long. It carries something fey with it, this glamour. It is a mysterious and uncommon thing. Poetry is written about it, and it is as wan as the poetry that is written about it....
2
Virginia’s marriage to the American in 1913 had turned out a sorry business. He was never known but as “the American”—but how unlike Henry James’s it only appeared later!—and it was only by an effort of memory that Ivor remembered his name had been Hector Sardon. He was dead. Ivor had never met him, but had heard of him as a small, very feverish man, and handsome of his kind, which was deep-eyed and sardonic; he was said to speak with charming and vivid gestures of the hands. It had been a love-match between him and Virginia, people said. Later, it was whispered that “the American” had turned bad. The fever of his deep-set eyes and nervous gestures was now explained. Cocaine. But all this leaked very gradually out, for Virginia was secret, she never confided. Virginia was always with him, they were silent companions, exquisite dancers together; other people might whirl round a ballroom—for exercise?—but Virginia and “the American” danced slowly, softly, in exquisite certainty of movement. In life they might fumble, but not in dancing.... And then, in the awful winter of 1915, Hector Sardon died suddenly.
He died so suddenly that there had to be an inquest; and the question of drugs was for some time uppermost in the minds of the public, the press, and the coroner—so intimate did they become with it, indeed, that it was never called but by its christian name of “dope.” The coroner, Mr. Odleby Ingle, was inclined to be critical, though of course always just. The press was also critical. And in warlike minds the question of “drugs” was found to be inseparable from the question of “aliens.” It was suggested that this kind of thing was un-English; and the “Huns” got somehow mixed up with the death by cocaine of an American gentleman. The Daily Mail, in quest of honour, Mr. Asquith’s head, two-million circulation and as yet uninterned Germans, jousted once again with The Hidden Hand of the Hun. Fierce gentlemen in Parliament were moved to denunciation of England’s levity in its treatment of “aliens”; and Mr. Pemberton Billing got the whole thing frightfully mixed up with the inadequacy of London’s Air Defences.... The war-fever was at its highest in 1915. The only person who kept his head, besides the soldiers who were too busy fighting, was Mr. Bernard Shaw: which was why every one wanted to punch it for him. It was generally conceded that England was altogether too kind to aliens. (Before the war only foreigners without money were called “aliens”; during the war all foreigners were called aliens. Bella, horrida bella!) It was suggested that the march of civilisation had taken us past the point when gentlemen need be gentlemen in war-time. “Remember we are at war!” you could say, and at once forget everything else. Only the police exempted themselves from this remembering business in their treatment of aliens; for the English police are the most courtly and the most incorruptible police in the world—which was why every one said they were inefficient about the “alien menace.” Soldiers laughed, but among civilians the alien-fever ran brave and high, and ever braver and higher. “We cannot fight in Flanders, but we will do our duty here!” cried fierce, and otherwise quite pleasant, old gentlemen in clubs and trains.
The French civilian, imagined by the English civilian to be so excitable, managed these things differently; the French civilian, in fact, did not manage them at all; the French civilian said “Nous sommes trahis!” at least once every day, and then, carelessly leaving the “alien menace” to the police, set about the bloodshot business of life in war-time. But the English civilian was made of sterner stuff; and while young men were dying in the sky and on the land, on the sea and under the sea, old men waxed worthy of the sons and nephews they had “given” to England. “We are all pacifists at heart,” they said grimly, “but war is the test of manhood.”
(It has become the fashion to slang old men in general. It is not a bad fashion. Superior people despise all fashions; they smile. But it is a pity that superior women despise all fashions.)
The inquest on Hector Sardon, conducted though it was with every tact and discretion by Mr. Odleby Ingle, gave the alien agitation yet another impetus. All this “dope” mess was due to aliens, it was said. No Englishman took dope, unless he was lured to it by an alien’s fiendish charm. (The fiendish charm of aliens in war-time, male and female, is of course notorious. Ladies of title were supposed to fall to it every day, and policemen had to harden their hearts like anything. Every one had to harden his or her heart.) Nor did our allies take “dope.” Neither France, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Serbia, Roumania, Czecho-Slovakia, Japan, Montenegro, Siam, nor the Hedjaz—only neutrals and “alien enemies.” And it was suspected (shrewdly) that an American citizen would not so readily have died of “dope” if America had been fighting with us; the death by cocaine of Hector Sardon was considered to serve President Wilson jolly well right for being “too proud to fight.”
The inquest was, of course, a very sad business for Virginia. Many people carried away from the inquest an “indelible” picture of a hard, white face with tired, defensive eyes; and the illustrated papers had to pay through the nose for her likenesses from the photographers who had always made Virginia’s life a burden by clamours for a “sitting.” The traffic in “dope” was noticeably on the overworked police’s nerves that year; and common-or-garden policemen were discovering an acute nose for opium—“It makes you sick, the first pipe,” said people who had friends who knew—all the way from Dover Street to Chinatown. (Poor little Chinatown! what a boon thou hast been to Mr. Burke, and what little profit hast thou had from him!) The dead American, that quiet and feverish gentleman of the nervous gestures, was made the scapegoat of the public’s interest and the press’s violence. An overdose of cocaine was found to be the direct cause of Hector Sardon’s death. And the just but severe inquisition of Mr. Odleby Ingle, “in probing this matter to its very core,” unearthed some nasty details about Hector Sardon’s even more private life. It was a bad look-out for certain gentlemen of his acquaintance, it seemed. People began to read Petronius. It was only too evident that Hector Sardon had gone the limit in more ways than one; and Mr. Bottomley was furious about it, crying: “What shall be done with these Pests? Shall England never be clean?” A nasty business! Virginia suffered her ordeal intelligently, but in cold contempt. What had she to do with this? There was no one but sympathised with her, and even Mr. Odleby Ingle was noticeably considerate, though just, towards innocence in so sorry a plight. Every one sympathised with Virginia; it was an awful shame for her, they said. And yet, somehow, there was in their voices a suggestion, ever so faint, that it was rather the kind of thing which just might happen to Virginia rather than to any other woman....