The Romantic Lady

by Michael Arlen

"But it's simply impossible to carry on that explanation, the method and the conviction of it, to you," he said. "In fact, if you will look about you at methods of expression, you will find that it's just there that life takes its leave of literature—just at that point where, in this instance, one impulse kissed another! It is as though life and literature had been travelling companions a good way, both helping the other—until at a cross-road life, with a sudden realisation akin to contempt, goes off on its own different road, a boundless and secret road where men and women passionately tell God what, on that other cruder road, they can't tell their fellows.... Sex, of course, is generally the most convincing explanation of inconsistencies—but it's not, by an exquisite subtraction, quite enough! It is only people who cannot go one better who live and love and lie in terms of sex alone; because, after all, there are additions to it, not so definite, perhaps, but more satisfying—and more lasting! So, anyway, the memory of one night tells me.

"That night was, as you realise, an amazing inconsistency in the Fay Richmond I've told you about. But if you will look even at that photograph you will see that such sincerity couldn't really be consistently sincere without, just once, being inconsistent to itself. I know that that sounds rather like a remark made by a young man after a liqueur brandy, but somehow it's very true.

"Hours later, as though she had suddenly awoken to a memory, she asked me very seriously if I remembered how there had been no sugar or chocolate on any of the cakes she had thought about on a certain afternoon? 'And all my long self-conscious speech, which you listened to so brutally well that I almost hated you—even though I didn't know for certain then that I loved you! And when you were going away, d'you remember, I was smiling "all over my face" like Carlo wanted me to, and being a frightfully jolly person? But afterwards I cried, Oh, how I cried! I liked you so much, and I liked Carlo so much—but so differently!...

"'It was all arranged that I should marry Carlo,' she said, 'and then you came along and just ruffled the surface of things—but ever so slightly! If you had kissed me you might have ruffled them too much, things might have been different, and now I would still be an honest woman instead of just a helpless creature in your arms, never, never wanting to leave them to go back to the world, where there's no passion for me....' Her voice was lower than a whisper, a murmur in my ears, and I would have preferred it to fade entirely into the silence it scarce left, for she was hurting us both with what she said.

"But the whisper went on, telling me how bitterly she had been hurt because I had been to see them so little in the weeks before the wedding—and how, missing me, she had found out her own secret.

"'If you had come to me then and said, "Fay, come away with me," I suppose I would have thrown over Carlo. Yes, I suppose I would, but I'm not sure, because it would have been so frightfully difficult to have hurt him, the dearest man in the world! He would have died.... But it doesn't matter what I would have done or not done in that wonderful moment, because it never came—it was quite hopeless to hope that it would! I felt that right in my bones, I felt that you were a hopeless person to love, and very, very far away. Oh, so far away you seemed to be, Howard! And getting farther and farther every day, a cold, friendly figure coming to see us now and again, like a character in a play who has nothing to do but watch and make a sensible sort of joke when the real people get over-excited. And so I let everything go on, quite terrified and miserable, wondering what to do. It wasn't the idea of marrying Carlo that made me terrified or miserable, it was the thought of losing all hope of you—the thought of putting a husband between me and all hope of ever being loved by you.... But I let those last days pass, one by one, full of prophecy about myself, like a tragic figure in the Bible; and I didn't lift my voice, I did nothing at all, I let each day pass. I suppose it was because I was so hopeless about you, and laziness must have had something to do with it, too! That special sort of laziness which tells you that one effort is easier to make than the other—it was easier not to hurt Carlo and mother. But I couldn't resist just telephoning to you at the last moment to let you know what a pig you were, and, if you liked me at all, to make you see that the whole thing served you jolly well right. But I suppose I didn't control my voice very well and so gave myself away—though I didn't mind, really, because I had it firmly fixed in my mind that it was too late, I was going to marry Carlo whatever happened. And something did happen on that telephone, vaguely—I found that you did like me quite a lot after all, you poor man! And all this time that I've been away, a respectable married woman, I've been building up the romance of my life on a break in your voice—growing more and more certain that you loved me, until I had to come back to England to find out. And when you opened the door I found out....

"'On my way to St. George's to marry Carlo,' she said, 'it seemed as though I had to wrap you up in a parcel, and go round by Westminster Bridge and drop you into the river. Yes ... and that's what I did, really, Howard dear. I have lost you, and you me, even though you are beside me now, a figure in a dream from which I shall wake up—just in time to catch my train! And that train is going to take me such a long way away from you, Howard, that we will be dead and buried and reincarnated before it can bring me back to see your beloved face again. It seems to be that sort of train, my dear....'

"Of course, I said things, I protested, I implored. It simply couldn't be that I was not to see her again!... There was misery enough, but there was no heart in my entreaties, for I knew all the time that what she said must be, and why it must be. It was the only right thing in a wrong business, that last cruelty. Oh, I knew, I knew! And there was a quality of fatalism about Fay's voice, which made its softness as hard to pierce as adamant. I was quite dull and flat, listening to her numbly, so that her words seemed to write themselves vividly in my mind, unalterable words never to be forgotten, each one like a fate in itself.

"It was more than martyrdom to an idea, it was a principle of living, that determined her to that course, the inevitable course; something in her much more human than can be found in such philandering with oneself as martyrdom, and that's why it was so inevitable, why I couldn't fight against it heartily and actively. It was simply that her whole being, the very insides and outsides, was in revolt against the treachery of any change in the road she had, however undecidedly once, set herself to travel; it was not possible for her to burn a single boat even on the certain chance of finding a palace in the romantic land—and so it was like a Roman Catholic marriage, as she had told me that afternoon, ages ago, when I had been so seriously concerned about her indecision to marry Carlo!... My dear old man, hers was an aristocrat among souls!

"It was past six o'clock, and I was in an arm-chair watching her do her hair at the dressing-table, when she suddenly let it fall again over her shoulders, and came and knelt by the arm of my chair, and said: 'I'm not a very tiresome woman, really, because I know quite well that often in your life you will be saying beautiful things to beautiful women—but you will think it awfully bad luck if they believe you, won't you, Howard?