"Oh, ever so slightly," he gently waived my question; then turned to me, as though confidingly: "but just well enough to be terribly shocked at the sort of death she chose for herself.... As aimless, foolish, and certainly as useless as you like, she had after all lived a wonderful, perhaps a beautiful life—only to die as any damned bankrupt might die in a 15th floor-flat in a Manhattan block!"
The sudden bitterness in his voice made me look sharply at him, but he was too quick for me, and retrieved himself with a frank and altogether engaging smile which deprecated his involuntary—as he naïvely showed it to have been—seriousness. By this time I had quite recovered from my bad-tempered stupor, and was acutely interested. I just waited.
"Curiously enough," he said, after a short silence, "when I read about her suicide in the paper the other day it was not so much about her that I thought, as about an incident which arose from my acquaintance with her, years ago.... But are you sure I am not being very tedious?"
"Each word you say is shortening this walk," I answered quickly; how seldom can one dress the truth in purple and fine linen!
"Well, then," he went on genially, "in connection with Consuelo's name came to my mind an incident in which an acquaintance, almost a stranger, stood me in better stead than a friend has ever done. I have never seen him since, I have never thanked him—nor cursed him, as I will explain—for his startling help in that really cruel emergency. But I can't give you the incident without its background; for standing alone it means almost nothing, it is just a trick, one of destiny's sleights of hand. It takes its colour from a, well, imperfect passion, its background. And its background is Consuelo Carew, as I knew her twenty years ago.
"I met her just after she had married my friend Tristram Carew. She may have been, at the outside, twenty years old, then, but though there was nothing of the precocious young minx about her, she was more fully developed, more complete, than any other young woman of that age that I am now likely to meet. The only thing that was clear about her was her complexion. She wasn't what we mean by a 'girl' except in freshness, colouring, and zest—and what an amazing, embracing zest for life that was! She never lost it, she can't ever have lost it, it was her very being. I almost believe that, if we but knew the secret, this last impulsive stupidity of hers might somehow take on the splendour of an enthusiasm—but for what, for what?
"Tristram Carew was of my age, we had been friends at school and had gone up together to Balliol. And we had come down only a very few months before he ran amok and married the local parson's daughter, the beautiful Consuelo Trent. I was living in London at that time, and was too busy—I forget what about—to go down to Wiltshire to stay with him, and so I never saw him or her in the 'engaged couple' state. But I tried to imagine him in the role and drew a good deal of innocent amusement from my imaginings—for Tristram, somehow, very definitely didn't fit into the picture as either fiancé or husband. But though I laughed, I was fond enough of him to be a little anxious—one didn't see how it could turn out happily, come what would! For when I say that Carew ran amok in marrying, I mean that in the ordinary way he was intelligent enough about himself to know that his devil's temper and insane jealousy would ruin the life and sour the love of any young woman who had the misfortune to marry him.
"Though, mind you, no woman could be blamed for being carried away by the man. That presence of his, that shock of auburn hair, those wild eyes, and that infernally fluent tongue—why, the deuce take it, I, his best friend of that time, spent my days in loving him and being jealous of him! And though it sounds a fatuous thing to say about oneself, I haven't an atom of jealousy in my nature—I'm quite proud to say that I've never in my life envied any man his particular luck since that Saturday, down at Tristram Carew's place, on which I first met his young wife Consuelo, on their return from their honeymoon, and envied him his possession of her. But then that probably because I've never met another Consuelo.
"Consuelo wasn't made for a comfortable happiness, you understand. But neither was she strange, nor exotic, nor bizarre, nor Belladonnaish, nor any of those things that make a man think twice before introducing a woman to a superior sister at the Bath Club—but even so no man, unless he were a Tristram Carew, would too easily dare to marry her. I don't know why, but it was so, for since she divorced Carew she has had the pick of a thousand lovers, but not of many solid husbands. It sounds a cruel thing to say, but I don't mean it cruelly; it is just interesting as an instance of the curiously similar effect which one woman may have on a thousand different, very different men. You just loved her—and if you weren't turned down at the start you were certain to be turned down after a while; and then you went your way, and you knew why Menelaus had made such a nuisance of himself about Helen, for, like him, you had known, and loved, and had been loved by a marvellous woman; but, unlike that persistent Argive, you dimly realised that if she turned you down in the quick end, then that was probably your fault—and, anyway, it is only an indecent sort of man who quibbles about the pain after the pleasure. And for many years after that, long after you had married a steady young woman, you were Consuelo's devoted friend—and, by God, she was your devoted friend too! I never knew a woman break so many hearts and patch up so many quarrels as Consuelo; but it is generally the sort of woman who looks on fidelity and infidelity as moods rather than principles who makes the truest and sincerest friend....
"But I envied my friend Carew overmuch, as even my English denseness about these things found out soon enough. She loved him for six months, and she detested him for years. And she grew to hate him so bitterly that Tristram Carew, the most jealous and unrestrained man I ever knew, was at last persuaded to let her divorce him. For, mind you, that woman was strong. She had personality at the back of her power to charm—and a rare, dangerous kindliness which makes it impossible for one's love for her to be goaded into dislike. There wasn't a drop of affectation in her, she was just an almost perfect type of that 'modern' woman who has held her place in the life and poetry and prose of ages, from the wife of Uriah to Mary Stuart, and onwards to Consuelo; women born with just that mixture of essential breeding and adventurousness which will turn the heads of most normal and decent men, and leave them gaping and grovelling and smiling at their own damn-foolishness in thinking that such a woman could ever have loved them! I said 'normal and decent men' because it seems almost invariably to be the poor old sahibs who fall in love with this type of woman—while the outsiders step in and take them, and leave them. Anyway, it seems always to be your 'manly' man who odes the grovelling and the effeminate man to be the master of women. Just a theory, of course....