Little Dinners With the Sphinx, and Other Prose Fancies

by Richard Le Gallienne

In vain Sid protested that it was preposterous, that he was incapable of seriously undertaking any such fanciful absurdity. Rosamund remained obdurate. She would never marry him, she said, till he had subjected himself to the proposed ordeal.

“Besides, if you refuse,” she continued, “I shall always feel that you were afraid of it, secretly afraid that the temptations of it would be too strong for your faith.”

To this Sid made a singularly blundering retort, which he tried in vain to take back as he uttered it, to the effect that, however certain one was of one’s love, there was no sense in playing with fire. This settled the matter.

“Fire!” laughed Rosamund mercilessly—he admitted the danger then!

After that there was no argument—and this is the explanation of Sid Norton’s sudden departure for Europe.

Say what you will, the test was a little unfair. So Sid Norton said to himself, as he paced the moonlit deck in mid-ocean, and strove to analyse his feelings toward the situation in which Rosamund’s whim had placed him. He thought of the lady of old time who had thrown her glove into the arena. Of course, no lover could decline such a challenge ... but he hastily dismissed the image as unfortunate, for he was not allowed to admit the existence of the lions. To recognise any possibility of danger in his present so-called ordeal was in itself an unfaithfulness. To admit that there was any element of an ordeal in his fantastic adventure was to fail right away. To confess any temptation in the circumstances was a sufficient backsliding. And yet would any man in a like situation, dealing honestly with his own thoughts, declare confidently that there was no danger here to a true love? The answer of theory and idealism would of course be that there could evidently be none. The words “true love” imply that, and a certain old writer has disparaged “a fugitive and cloistered virtue” that shrinks from taking the open field against temptation. Which is all very beautiful, but another saying as to the relation of discretion to valour comes nearer to the truth of a human nature, which, with the best will in the world, is apt to be sorely tripped up in the very moment of its strength by some half-forgotten weakness.

Sid Norton’s love for Rosamund Lowther was no less real and deep than he deemed it. She was for him the divine event toward which his whole life had deviously moved. To lose her love would be loss irremediable. She was that final joy and enchantment which he had pursued from face to face, yet found only at last in hers. She was the fairy tale of life come true. He had no wish, no hope, no aim, beyond her. With his meeting her life had at last seriously begun. Its future success was to be the making perfect this love which she had brought him. This was the serious truth about Sid Norton; it represented the serious responsible self which had at length asserted its domination over the warring minor selves that had preceded it—the self he seriously wished to go on being. But alas! in this multiple being called man those minor selves, though conquered and perhaps mortally wounded, are apt to die hard, and occasionally one of them, in a last dying flash of vitality, will gain the upper hand, and, in some fleeting but fatal moment, tragically belie the self that is real and lasting. Sid, who was learned in his own psychology, knew himself, or rather him-selves, too well to be vaingloriously confident that no such disastrous aberration on the part of one or other of his dead or dying selves might not in some unguarded moment betray him. He did not, of course, seriously fear it, and it seemed impossible indeed, as out there on the midnight ocean he lifted up his eyes to the moon, as though she were the silver spirit of his love.

Still, like a wise soldier, he prayed hard that night not to be led into temptation.

In this spirit of discreet valour, he had, on embarking, after making a survey of his fellow-passengers, congratulated himself on the singular unseductiveness of the array feminine. As in the days of Odysseus, the siren remains one of the most dreaded dangers of those that go down to the sea in ships, and Sid’s previous crossings had not been uneventful in this respect.

On coming on deck rather late next forenoon, Sid was immediately aware, before he traced his impression to its cause, of a subtle attractive change in the human atmosphere—just, as in early spring, suddenly, one morning, we come out into the air, and know, before we have seen them, that there are flowers in the garden. So poor Sid’s terribly sensitive instinct warned him immediately of the unexpected presence of a beautiful woman. Casting his eyes along the prosaic line of deck chair mummies, he saw that his instinct had not been at fault. A beautiful woman had blossomed there in the night. With the vividness of almond stars among the bare boughs, she shone among the other passengers, an apparition of fragrance, all dew and danger. One of the chairs had remained vacant up till this morning. It was the chair next to Sid’s own, and it was with a quick thrill in which pleasure was quaintly blended with alarm, that he realised that it was in this chair that the apparition was sitting.