Little Dinners With the Sphinx, and Other Prose Fancies

by Richard Le Gallienne

They were nearing the sad shores of the shamrock, and they had escaped from the after-dinner promenade, and had made themselves cosey near the bow of the ship, in some nook of windlass and sailing tackle close to the bulwark, where they could watch the phosphorescent spume of the ship’s course, and speak of it, if necessary.

So far, though not entirely satisfied with himself, Sid had combined faithfulness with flirtation in a blending so adroit that the ache of his conscience was just bearable; and, he told himself, that Rosamund, of all women, would be the last to withhold her admiration from so brilliant a feat of sentimental tight-rope walking. Any student of the ars amatoria knows how fine is the line between faithfulness and unfaithfulness, finer far than a hair from the beloved’s head; and Sid had the right to congratulate himself with his deft-footed adhesion to that moonbeam of a path. The siren was too expert herself in such perilous experiment not to have observed and admired Sid’s achievement, and, naturally, she was piqued by it to a special effort of conquest this last evening. Not, of course, that she really cared for Sid, any more than he cared for her. It was merely two flirts making a trial of strength, the old eternal duel between man and woman; but, for once, the man had most to lose—and that Sid kept reiterating to himself: for this momentary diversion he might lose Rosamund, lose his whole life, and the meaning of it—for this!

The siren, who had not known him for three days without knowing all about him, estimated accurately with what she had to contend. For the woman flirt there is no incentive like—Another Woman! It was not this quite attractive man whose scalp she was after. It was the woman to whom he was so ridiculously constant that she burned to humiliate.

Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way. I said that the line is fine, and often, to sincere observers, the adherence to it has a somewhat technical value. Was it casuistry or simplicity in Sid that made him feel that his faith was still intact so long as he had not actually—kissed the siren? We live in a legal, concrete world, a world that judges us by our definite completed actions rather than by our feelings, or our cunningly restricted evasions of the penalty. A kiss—whatever the motive—is a concrete decisive act. A kiss is evidence. The desire to kiss, however powerful, is not. Now Sid had not yet kissed the siren. According to any external tribunal, Sid was still faithful to his Rosamund.

This unkissed kiss, so to say, was the key of the castle; at all events from the siren’s point of view. Sid’s heart, to tell the truth, ached with a sincerer standard; but, at all events, be its value what it might, this unkissed kiss was the redoubt on which he had hoisted his colours, to fly or fall. And it was to be no easy fight, he realised, as the siren nestled herself into a comfortable position in that sheltered nook of windlass and sailing-tackle, and phosphorescence and gold-dust stars, and the importunate surge of the sea.

He braced himself with the thought of Rosamund as with a prayer. He crossed himself with the remembrance of his last look as they had parted. It may sound laughable that anyone should arm himself so cap-à-pie against a kiss, yet the stakes in any contest are represented by some apparently trivial symbol. A kiss was the symbol here; and the siren, at all events, did not under-rate its symbolic value. She fought for it as though it had been the cross of the Legion of Honour, fought with all the delicate skill of an artist, and she laughed softly now and again as she came near winning, winning—the kiss that belonged to another woman.

She was terribly beautiful was the siren, terribly everything that a seductive woman can be. The atmosphere about her was a dreamy whirlpool, of which the vortex was her lips, and Sid felt himself being drawn closer and closer to that vortex. How he longed to throw up his arms and drown—but, instead, suddenly, brusquely, rudely, he sprang up.

“I won’t,” he cried abruptly, and left her.

It was not gracefully done, but it was the only way he could do it. Victories are seldom graceful. In the thick of battle it is occasionally necessary to be impolite. Suddenly Sid had seen, as it were, luridly embodied the moment he had told himself might some day come—the moment of temptation. Here was he face to face with it at last, one of those terrible moments of trial which divide the past from the future, and challenge us to decide then and there, once and for all, what we really mean about ourselves; one of those moments that cannot be postponed, but must be met and fought just how and when they come; and, as Sid realised all the moment meant, those perfumed alluring lips so dangerously near to his filled him with a veritable terror, and his heart almost stopped beating with dread of succumbing. Poor Sid, he had been so accustomed to take such kisses as they came with a light heart; but now suddenly, as in a lightning flash, he seemed to see the meaning of those mysterious standards by which the faith of men and women has been immemorially judged, a meaning he had never suspected before; and he saw, too, the divine beauty of them; and the vivid revelations thus made to him, not a moment too soon, had given him that strength to cry out “I won’t,” and tear himself away.

As with a burning heart, he arraigned himself before himself in the solitude of his stateroom, it seemed at first that his victory had been but a poor one, a victory only in name. He had desired to kiss the siren—it was impossible to deny that; and surely the very wish to do so was unfaithfulness; and the only reason that had restrained him—was it not the fear of losing Rosamund? No, it was more than that, and with the realisation that it was really more than that—a real aspiration, however feeble, toward the better way of loving, a repugnance for the old way, and a genuine preference, very young and tender indeed as yet, for a finer ideal—he grew a little comforted. Yes, it had been a victory, a greater one than it had seemed. He had not really wanted to kiss the siren, after all, in spite of compromising appearances—not really deep down. It was only an old habit of the surface that had momentarily got the better of him! And, though it may sound like casuistry, it was not so. Poor boy, it might not have seemed a brilliant victory to the looker-on. But flirtation is a habit that dies hard, and, till he had known Rosamund, the mere idea of faithfulness to a woman had never remotely entered into his mind. This passage with the siren, however, had proved him so far on the road to regeneration as to have developed an actual preference for being faithful! He was himself surprised at the feeling, and it filled him with a certain awe, made him almost a little frightened, though curiously happy. Did he really love one woman like that at last? Just one woman, out of all the women in the world? Yes, just one woman. It was a wonderful feeling.