“Yes, you mayn’t have meant to laugh, but you must have laughed. Your mind, your intellect must have laughed. Don’t say they haven’t. I wouldn’t believe you. And I know your mind—at any rate, I know that. Not your heart! I shall never pretend—I shall never think again for a moment that I know anything—anything at all—about a man’s heart. But I do know something about your mind. And I know the irony in it. What a subject I have presented to you all these years for the exercise of your ironic faculty! You ought to thank me! You ought to go on your knees and thank me and bless me for that!”
“Hermione!”
“Just now you talked of my coming into your room in Kairouan all covered with dust. You asked me if I remembered it. Yes, I do. And I remember something you don’t—probably you don’t—remember. There was no looking-glass in your room.”
She stopped.
“No looking-glass!” he repeated, wondering.
“No, there was no looking-glass. And I remember when I came in I saw there wasn’t, and I was glad. Because I couldn’t look at myself and see how dreadful and dishevelled and hideous I was—how dirty even I was. My impulse was to go to a glass. And then I was glad I couldn’t. And I looked at your face. And I thought ‘he doesn’t care. He loves me, all dusty and hideous and horrid, as I am.’ And then I didn’t care either. I said to myself, ‘I look an object, and I don’t mind a bit, because I see in his face that he loves me for myself, because he sees my heart, and—‘”
And suddenly in her voice there was a sharp, hissing catch, and she stopped short. For a full minute she was silent. And Artois did not speak. Nor did he move.
“I felt then, perhaps for the first time, ‘the outside doesn’t matter to real people.’ I felt that. I felt, ‘I’m real, and he is real, and—and Maurice is real. And though it is splendid to be beautiful, and beauty means so much, yet it doesn’t mean so much as I used to think. Real people get beyond it. And when once they have got beyond it then life begins.’ I remember thinking that, feeling that, and—just for a minute loving my own ugliness. And then, suddenly, I wished there was a looking-glass in the room that I might stand before it and see what an object I was, and then look into your face and see that it didn’t matter. And I even triumphed in my ugliness. ‘I have a husband who doesn’t mind,’ I thought. ‘And I have a friend who doesn’t mind. They love me, both of them, whatever I look like. It’s me—the woman inside—they love, because they know I care, and how I care for them.’ And that thought made me feel as if I could do anything for Maurice and anything for you; heroic things, or small, dreadful, necessary things; as if I could be the servant of, or sacrifice my life easily for, those who loved me so splendidly, who knew how to love so splendidly. And I was happy then even in sacrificing my happiness with Maurice. And I thanked God then for not having given me beauty.
“And I was a fool. But I didn’t find it out. And so I revelled in self-sacrifice. You don’t know, you could never understand, how I enjoyed doing the most menial things for you in your illness. Often you thanked me, and often you seemed ashamed that I should do such things. And the doctor—that little Frenchman—apologized to me. And you both thought that doing so much in the frightful heat would make me ill. And I blessed the heat and the flies and everything that made what I did for you more difficult to do. Because the doing of what was more difficult, more trying, more fatiguing needed more love. And my gratitude to you for your loving friendship, and for needing me more than any one else, wanted to be tried to the uttermost. And I thought, too, ‘When I go back to Maurice I shall be worth a little more, I shall be a little bit finer, and he’ll feel it. He’ll understand exactly what it was to me to leave him so soon, to leave—to leave what I thought of then as my Garden of Paradise. And he’ll love me more because I had the courage to leave it to try and save my friend. He’ll realize—he’ll realize—’ But men don’t. They don’t want to. Or they can’t. I’m sure—I’m positive now that men think less of women who are ready to sacrifice themselves than of women who wish to make slaves of them. I see that now. It’s the selfish women they admire, the women who take their own way and insist on having all they want, not the women who love to serve them—not slavishly, but out of love. A selfish woman they can understand; but a woman who gives up something very precious to her they don’t understand. Maurice never understood my action in going to Africa. And you—I don’t believe you ever understood it. You must have wondered at my coming as much as he did at my going. You were glad I came at the moment. Oh yes, you were glad. I know that. But afterwards you must have wondered, you did wonder. You thought it Quixotic, odd. You said to yourself, ‘It was just like Hermione. How could she do it? How could she come to me if she really loved her husband?’ And very likely my coming made you doubt my really loving Maurice. I am almost sure it did. I don’t believe all these years you have ever understood what I felt about him, what his death meant to me, what life meant to me afterwards. I told—I tried to tell you in the cave—that day. But I don’t think you really understood at all. And he—he didn’t understand my love for him. But I suppose he didn’t even want to. When I went away he simply forgot all about me. That was it. I wasn’t there, and he forgot. I wasn’t there, and another woman was there—and that was enough for him. And I dare say—now—it is enough for most men, perhaps for every man. And then I’d made another mistake. I was always making mistakes when my heart led me. And I’d made a mistake in thinking that real people get beyond looks, the outside—and that then life begins. They don’t—at least real men don’t. A woman may spend her heart’s blood for a man through years, and for youthful charm and a face that is pretty, for the mere look in a pair of eyes or the curve of a mouth, he’ll almost forget that she’s alive, even when she’s there before him. He’ll take the other woman’s part against her instinctively, whichever is in the right. If both women do exactly the same thing a man will find that the pretty woman has performed a miracle and the ugly woman made some preposterous mistake. That is how men are. That is how you are, I suppose, and that was Maurice, too. He forgot me for a peasant. But—she must have been pretty once. And I was always ugly!”
“Delarey loved you,” Artois said, suddenly, interrupting her in a strong, deep voice, a voice that rang with true conviction.