CHAPTER VII[ToC]
A CAUSE CÉLÈBRE
"Conventional women—but was not the phrase tautological?"
George Gissing: "Born in Exile."
I always look back with regret to our return to London after Commemoration. Our parting at the door of the Rodens' house in Cadogan Square was more than the dispersal of a pleasant, youthful, light-hearted gathering; it marked out a definite end to my first careless, happy weeks in England, and foreshadowed a period of suspense and heart-burning that separated old friends and strained old alliances. As we shook hands and waved adieux, we were slipping unconsciously into a future where none of us were to meet again on our former frank, trustful footing.
I doubt if any of us recognised this at the time—not even the Seraph, for a man is notoriously a bad judge in his own cause. Looking back over the last six months, I appreciate that the seeds of trouble had already been sown, and that I ought to have been prepared for much that followed.
To begin with, the astonishing acrimony of speech and writing that characterised both parties in the Suffrage controversy should have warned me of the futility of trying to retain the friendship of Joyce Davenant on the one hand and the Rodens on the other. Bitter were their tongues and angry their hearts in the old, forgotten era of demonstrations and hecklings; the bitterness increased with the progress of the arson campaign, and its prompt, ruthless reprisals; but I remember no political sensation equalling the suppressed, vindictive anger of the days when the abduction policy was launched, and no clue could be found to incriminate its perpetrators. I suffered the fate of most neutral powers, and succeeded in arousing the suspicions of both belligerents.
Again, the Wylton divorce proved—if proof were ever needed—that when English Society has ostracised a woman, her sympathisers gain nothing for themselves by championing her cause. They had better secure themselves greetings in the market-place by leading the chorus of moral condemnation. Elsie Wylton would scarcely have noticed the two added voices, and the Seraph and I might have spared ourselves much unnecessary discomfort. He was probably too young to appreciate that Quixotism does not pay in England, while I—well, there is no fool like a middle-aged fool.
Lastly, I ought to have seen the shadow cast by Sylvia's tropical intimacy with the Seraph at Oxford. She was unquestionably intriguée, and I should have seen it and been on my guard. Resist as she might, there was something arresting in his other-world, somnambulant attitude towards life; for him, at least, his dreams were too real to be lightly dismissed. And his sensitive feminine sympathy was something new to her, something strangely stimulating to a girl who but half understood her own moods and ambitions. I have no doubt that in their solitary passage back to Oxford she had unbent and revealed more to him than to any other man, had unbent as far as any woman of reserve can ever unbend to a man. Equally, I have no doubt that in cold retrospect her passionate, uncontrolled pride exaggerated the significance of her conduct, and magnified the moment of unaffected friendliness into an humiliating self-betrayal.
The Seraph—it is clear—had not responded. I know now—indeed, I knew at the time—that Sylvia had made an indelible impression on his receptive, emotional nature. Her wilful, rebellious self-confidence had galvanised him as every woman of strong character will galvanise a man of hesitations and doubts, reservations, and self-criticism. Knowing Sylvia, I find no difficulty in understanding the ascendancy she had established over his mind; knowing him, I can well appreciate his exasperating diffidence and self-depreciation. It never occurred to him that Sylvia could forget his relative poverty, obscurity, and their thousand points of conflict; it never dawned on her that he could be held back by honourable scruples from accepting what she had shown herself willing to offer. The Seraph came back from Oxford absorbed and pre-occupied with haunting memories of Sylvia; with his curious frankness he told her in so many words that she possessed his mind to the exclusion of every other thought. There he had stopped short—for no reason she could see, and it was not possible for her to go further to meet him. Next to the Capitol stands the Tarpeian Rock. I ought to have remembered that with Sylvia it was now crown or gibbet, and that there was no room for platonic admirers.