Part 2. Three Human Hearts - Chapter 1

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_ PART II. THREE HUMAN HEARTS. CHAPTER I

And now I was twenty-six.

Everyone who knows Jove knows the poignant and delicious day when the lovers, undeclared, but sure of mutual passion, await the magic moment of avowal, with all its changeful consequences. I resume my fragmentary narrative at such a day in my life. As for me, I waited for the avowal as for an earthquake. I felt as though I were the captain of a ship on fire, and the only person aware that the flames were creeping towards a powder magazine. And my love shone fiercely in my heart, like a southern star; it held me, hypnotized, in a thrilling and exquisite entrancement, so that if my secret, silent lover was away from me, as on that fatal night in my drawing-room, my friends were but phantom presences in a shadowy world. This is not an exaggerated figure, but the truth, for when I have loved I have loved much....

My drawing-room in Bedford Court, that night on which the violent drama of my life recommenced, indicated fairly the sorts of success which I had achieved, and the direction of my tastes. The victim of Diaz had gradually passed away, and a new creature had replaced her--a creature rapidly developed, and somewhat brazened in the process under the sun of an extraordinary double prosperity in London. I had soon learnt that my face had a magic to win for me what wealth cannot buy. My books had given me fame and money. And I could not prevent the world from worshipping the woman whom it deemed the gods had greatly favoured. I could not have prevented it, even had I wished, and I did not wish, I knew well that no merit and no virtue, but merely the accident of facial curves, and the accident of a convolution of the brain, had brought me this ascendancy, and at first I reminded myself of the duty of humility. But when homage is reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and satisfying a caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with the hazards of heredity.

However, in the end fate has no favourites. A woman who has beauty wants to frame it in beauty. The eye is a sensualist, and its appetites, once aroused, grow. A beautiful woman takes the same pleasure in the sight of another beautiful woman as a man does; only jealousy or fear prevents her from admitting the pleasure. I collected beautiful women.... Elegance is a form of beauty. It not only enhances beauty, but it is the one thing which will console the eye for the absence of beauty. The first rule which I made for my home was that in it my eye should not be offended. I lost much, doubtless, by adhering to it, but not more than I gained. And since elegance is impossible without good manners, and good manners are a convention, though a supremely good one, the society by which I surrounded myself was conventional; superficially, of course, for it is the business of a convention to be not more than superficial. Some persons after knowing my drawing-room were astounded by my books, others after reading my books were astounded by my drawing-room; but these persons lacked perception. Given elegance, with or without beauty itself, I had naturally sought, in my friends, intellectual courage, honest thinking, kindness of heart, creative talent, distinction, wit. My search had not been unfortunate.... You see Heaven had been so kind to me!

That night in my drawing-room (far too full of bric-a-brac of all climes and ages), beneath the blaze of the two Empire chandeliers, which Vicary, the musical composer, had found for me in Chartres, there were perhaps a dozen guests assembled.

Vicary had just given, in his driest manner, a description of his recent visit to receive the accolade from the Queen. It was replete with the usual quaint Vicary details--such as the solemn warning whisper of an equerry in Vicary's ear as he walked backwards, '_Mind the edge of the carpet';_ and we all laughed, I absently, and yet a little hysterically--all save Vicary, whose foible was never to laugh. But immediately afterwards there was a pause, one of those disconcerting, involuntary pauses which at a social gathering are like a chill hint of autumn in late summer, and which accuse the hostess. It was over in an instant; the broken current was resumed; everybody pretended that everything was as usual at my receptions. But that pause was the beginning of the downfall.

With a fierce effort I tried to escape from my entrancement, to be interested in these unreal shadows whose voices seemed to come to me from a distance, and to make my glance forget the door, where the one reality in the world for me, my unspoken lover, should have appeared long since. I joined unskilfully in a conversation which Vicary and Mrs. Sardis and her daughter Jocelyn were conducting quite well without my assistance. The rest were chattering now, in one or two groups, except Lord Francis Alcar, who, I suddenly noticed, sat alone on a settee behind the piano. Here was another unfortunate result of my preoccupation. By what negligence had I allowed him to be thus forsaken? I rose and went across to him, penitent, and glad to leave the others.

There are only two fundamental differences in the world--the difference between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age. Lord Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy, men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their trembling and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human wisdom. They gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and even their folly is wise then. Lord Francis was eighty-six; his faculties enfeebled but intact after a career devoted to the three most costly of all luxuries--pretty women, fine pictures, and rare books; a tall, spare man, quietly proud of his age, his ability to go out in the evening unattended, his amorous past, and his contributions to the history of English printing.

As I approached him, he leaned forward into his favourite attitude, elbows on knees and fingertips lightly touching, and he looked up at me. And his eyes, sunken and fatigued and yet audacious, seemed to flash out. He opened his thin lips to speak. When old men speak, they have the air of rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so, and what they say becomes accordingly oracular.

'Pallor suits you,' he piped gallantly, and then added: 'But do not carry it to extremes.'

'Am I so pale, then?' I faltered, trying to smile naturally.

I sat down beside him, and smoothed out my black lace dress; he examined it like a connoisseur.

'Yes,' he said at length. 'What is the matter?'

Lord Francis charged this apparently simple and naive question with a strange intimate meaning. The men who surround a woman such as I, living as I lived, are always demanding, with a secret thirst, 'Does she really live without love? What does she conceal?' I have read this interrogation in the eyes of scores of men; but no one, save Lord Francis, would have had the right to put it into the tones of his voice. We were so mutually foreign and disinterested, so at the opposite ends of life, that he had nothing to gain and I nothing to lose, and I could have permitted to this sage ruin of a male almost a confessor's freedom. Moreover, we had an affectionate regard for each other.

I said nothing, and he repeated in his treble:

'What is the matter?'

'Love is the matter!' I might have passionately cried out to him, had we been alone. But I merely responded to his tone with my eyes. I thanked him with my eyes for his bold and flattering curiosity, senile, but thoroughly masculine to the last. And I said:

'I am only a little exhausted. I finished my novel yesterday.'

It was my sixth novel in five years.

'With you,' he said, 'work is simply a drug.'

'Lord Francis,' I expostulated, 'how do you know that?'

'And it has got such a hold of you that you cannot do without it,' he proceeded, with slow, faint shrillness. 'Some women take to morphia, others take to work.'

'On the contrary,' I said, 'I have quite determined to do no more work for twelve months.'

'Seriously?'

'Seriously.'

He faced me, vivacious, and leaned against the back of the settee.

'Then you mean to give yourself time to love?' he murmured, as it were with a kind malice, and every crease in his veined and yellow features was intensified by an enigmatic smile.

'Why not?' I laughed encouragingly. 'Why not? What do you advise?'

'I advise it,' he said positively. 'I advise it. You have already wasted the best years.'

'The best?'

'One can never afterwards love as one loves at twenty. But there! You have nothing to learn about love!'

He gave me one of those disrobing glances of which men who have dedicated their existence to women alone have the secret. I shrank under the ordeal; I tried to clutch my clothes about me.

The chatter from the other end of the room grew louder. Vicary was gazing critically at his chandeliers.

'Does love bring happiness?' I asked Lord Francis, carefully ignoring his remark.

'For forty years,' he quavered, 'I made love to every pretty woman I met, in the search for happiness. I may have got five per cent. return on my outlay, which is perhaps not bad in these hard times; but I certainly did not get even that in happiness. I got it in--other ways.'

'And if you had to begin afresh?'

He stood up, turned his back on the room, and looked down at me from his bent height. His knotted hands were shaking, as they always shook.

'I would do the same again,' he whispered.

'Would you?' I said, looking up at him. 'Truly?'

'Yes. Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage through this world. Nothing is so interesting as love and grief, and the one involves the other. Ah! would I not do the same again!'

He spoke gravely, wistfully, and vehemently, as if employing the last spark of divine fire that was left in his decrepit frame. This undaunted confession of a faith which had survived twenty years of inactive meditation, this banner waved by an expiring arm in the face of the eternity that mocks at the transience of human things, filled me with admiration. My eyes moistened, but I continued to look up at him.

'What is the title of the new book?' he demanded casually, sinking into a chair.

'_Burning Sappho_,' I answered. 'But the title is very misleading.'

'Bright star!' he exclaimed, taking my hand. 'With such a title you will surely beat the record of the Good Dame.'

'Hsh!' I enjoined him.

Jocelyn Sardis was coming towards us.

The Good Dame was the sobriquet which Lord Francis had invented to conceal--or to display--his courteous disdain of the ideals represented by Mrs. Sardis, that pillar long established, that stately dowager, that impeccable _doyenne_ of serious English fiction. Mrs. Sardis had captured two continents. Her novels, dealing with all the profound problems of the age, were read by philosophers and politicians, and one of them had reached a circulation of a quarter of a million copies. Her dignified and indefatigable pen furnished her with an income of fifteen thousand pounds a year.

Jocelyn Sardis was just entering her mother's world, and she had apparently not yet recovered from the surprise of the discovery that she was a woman; a simple and lovable young creature with brains amply sufficient for the making of apple-pies. As she greeted Lord Francis in her clear, innocent voice, I wondered sadly why her mother should be so anxious to embroider the work of Nature. I thought if Jocelyn could just be left alone to fall in love with some average, kindly stockbroker, how much more nearly the eternal purpose might be fulfilled....

'Yes, I remember,' Lord Francis was saying. 'It was at St. Malo. And what did you think of the Breton peasant?'

'Oh,' said Jocelyn, 'mamma has not yet allowed us to study the condition of the lower classes in France. We are all so busy with the new Settlement.'

'It must be very exhausting, my dear child,' said Lord Francis.

I rose.

'I came to ask you to play something,' the child appealed to me. 'I have never heard you play, and everyone says--'

'Jocelyn, my pet,' the precise, prim utterance of Mrs. Sardis floated across the room.

'What, mamma?'

'You are not to trouble Miss Peel. Perhaps she does not feel equal to playing.'

My blood rose in an instant. I cannot tell why, unless it was that I resented from Mrs. Sardis even the slightest allusion to the fact that I was not entirely myself. The latent antagonism between us became violently active in my heart. I believe I blushed. I know that I felt murderous towards Mrs. Sardis. I gave her my most adorable smile, and I said, with sugar in my voice:

'But I shall be delighted to play for Jocelyn.'

It was an act of bravado on my part to attempt to play the piano in the mood in which I found myself; and that I should have begun the opening phrase of Chopin's first Ballade, that composition so laden with formidable memories--begun it without thinking and without apprehension--showed how far I had lost my self-control. Not that the silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past. No! But I saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she. She was for me one of those ladies that have loved and are dead. The simplicity of her mind and her situation, compared with my mind and my situation, seemed unbearably piteous to me. Why, I knew not. The pathos of that brief and vanished idyll overcame me like some sad story of an antique princess. And then, magically, I saw the pathos of my present position in it as in a truth-revealing mirror. My fame, and my knowledge and my experience, my trained imagination, my skill, my social splendour, my wealth, were stripped away from me as inessential, and I was merely a woman in love, to whom love could not fail to bring calamity and grief; a woman expecting her lover, and yet to whom his coming could only be disastrous; a woman with a heart divided between tremulous joy and dull sorrow; who was at once in heaven and in hell; the victim of love. How often have I called my dead Carlotta the victim of Diaz! Let me be less unjust, and say that he, too, was the victim of love. What was Diaz but the instrument of the god?

Jocelyn stood near me by the piano. I glanced at her as I played, and smiled. She answered my smile; her eyes glistened with tears; I bent my gaze suddenly to the keyboard. 'You too!' I thought sadly, 'You too!... One day! One day even you will know what life is, and the look in those innocent eyes will never be innocent again!'

Then there was a sharp crack at the other end of the room; the handle of the door turned, and the door began to open. My heart bounded and stopped. It must be he, at last! I perceived the fearful intensity of my longing for his presence. But it was only a servant with a tray. My fingers stammered and stumbled. For a few instants I forced them to obey me; my pride was equal to the strain, though I felt sick and fainting. And then I became aware that my guests were staring at me with alarmed and anxious faces. Mrs. Sardis had started from her chair. I dropped my hands. It was useless to fight further; the battle was lost.

'I will not play any more,' I said quickly. 'I ought not to have tried to play from memory. Excuse me.'

And I left the piano as calmly as I could. I knew that by an effort I could walk steadily and in a straight line across the room to Vicary and the others, and I succeeded. They should not learn my secret.

'Poor thing!' murmured Mrs. Sardis sympathetically. 'Do sit down, dear.'

'Won't you have something to drink?' said Vicary.

'I am perfectly all right,' I said. 'I'm only sorry that my memory is not what it used to be.' And I persisted in standing for a few moments by the mantelpiece. In the glass I caught one glimpse of a face as white as milk, Jocelyn remained at her post by the piano, frightened by she knew not what, like a young child.

'Our friend finished a new work only yesterday,' said Lord Francis shakily. He had followed me. 'She has wisely decided to take a long holiday. Good-bye, my dear.'

These were the last words he ever spoke to me, though I saw him again. We shook hands in silence, and he left. Nor would the others stay. I had ruined the night. We were all self-conscious, diffident, suspicious. Even Vicary was affected. How thankful I was that my silent lover had not come! My secret was my own--and his. And no one should surprise it unless we chose. I cared nothing what they thought, or what they guessed, as they filed out of the door, a brilliant procession of which I had the right to be proud; they could not guess my secret. I was sufficiently woman of the world to baffle them as long as I wished to baffle them.

Then I noticed that Mrs. Sardis had stayed behind; she was examining some lustre ware in the further drawing-room.

'I'm afraid Jocelyn has gone without her mother,' I said, approaching her.

'I have told Jocelyn to go home alone,' replied Mrs. Sardis. 'The carriage will return for me. Dear friend, I want to have a little talk with you. Do you permit?'

'I shall be delighted,' I said.

'You are sure you are well enough?'

'There is nothing whatever the matter with me,' I answered slowly and distinctly. 'Come to the fire, and let us be comfortable. And I told Emmeline Palmer, my companion and secretary, who just then appeared, that she might retire to bed.

Mrs. Sardis was nervous, and this condition, so singular in Mrs. Sardis, naturally made me curious as to the cause of it. But my eyes still furtively wandered to the door.

'My dear co-worker,' she began, and hesitated.

'Yes,' I encouraged her.

She put her matron's lips together:

'You know how proud I am of your calling, and how jealous I am of its honour and its good name, and what a great mission I think we novelists have in the work of regenerating the world.'

I nodded. That kind of eloquence always makes me mute. It leaves nothing to be said.

'I wonder,' Mrs. Sardis continued, 'if you have ever realized what a power _you_ are in England and America to-day.'

'Power!' I echoed. 'I have done nothing but try to write as honestly and as well as I could what I felt I wanted to write.'

'No one can doubt your sincerity, my dear friend,' Mrs. Sardis said. 'And I needn't tell you that I am a warm admirer of your talent, and that I rejoice in your success. But the tendency of your work--'

'Surely,' I interrupted her coldly, 'you are not taking the trouble to tell me that my books are doing harm to the great and righteous Anglo-Saxon public!'

'Do not let us poke fun at our public, my dear,' she protested. 'I personally do not believe that your books are harmful, though their originality is certainly daring, and their realism startling; but there exists a considerable body of opinion, as you know, that strongly objects to your books. It may be reactionary opinion, bigoted opinion, ignorant opinion, what you like, but it exists, and it is not afraid to employ the word "immoral."'

'What, then?'

'I speak as one old enough to be your mother, and I speak after all to a motherless young girl who happens to have genius with, perhaps, some of the disadvantages of genius, when I urge you so to arrange your personal life that this body of quite respectable adverse opinion shall not find in it a handle to use against the fair fame of our calling.'

'Mrs. Sardis!' I cried. 'What do you mean?'

I felt my nostrils dilate in anger as I gazed, astounded, at this incarnation of mediocrity who had dared to affront me on my own hearth; and by virtue of my youth and my beauty, and all the homage I had received, and the clear sincerity of my vision of life, I despised and detested the mother of a family who had never taken one step beyond the conventions in which she was born. Had she not even the wit to perceive that I was accustomed to be addressed as queens are addressed?... Then, as suddenly as it had flamed, my anger cooled, for I could see the painful earnestness in her face. And Mrs. Sardis and I--what were we but two groups of vital instincts, groping our respective ways out of one mystery into another? Had we made ourselves? Had we chosen our characters? Mrs. Sardis was fulfilling herself, as I was. She was a natural force, as I was. As well be angry with a hurricane, or the heat of the sun.

'What do you mean?' I repeated quietly. 'Tell me exactly what you mean.'

I thought she was aiming at the company which I sometimes kept, or the freedom of my diversions on the English Sabbath. I thought what trifles were these compared to the dilemma in which, possibly within a few hours, I should find myself.

'To put it in as few words as possible,' said she, 'I mean your relations with a married man. Forgive my bluntness, dear girl.'

'My--'

Then my secret was not my secret! We were chattered about, he and I. We had not hidden our feeling, our passions. And I had been imagining myself a woman of the world equal to sustaining a difficult part in the masque of existence. With an abandoned gesture I hid my face in my hands for a moment, and then I dropped my hands, and leaned forward and looked steadily at Mrs. Sardis. Her eyes were kind enough.

'You won't affect not to understand?' she said.

I assented with a motion of the head.

'Many persons say there is a--a liaison between you,' she said.

'And do you think that?' I asked quickly.

'If I had thought so, my daughter would not have been here to-night,' she said solemnly. 'No, no; I do not believe it for an instant, and I brought Jocelyn specially to prove to the world that I do not. I only heard the gossip a few days ago; and to-night, as I sat here, it was borne in upon me that I must speak to you to-night. And I have done so. Not everyone would have done so, dear girl. Most of your friends are content to talk among themselves.'

'About me? Oh!' It was the expression of an almost physical pain.

'What can you expect them to do?' asked Mrs. Sardis mildly.

'True,' I agreed.

'You see, the circumstances are so extremely peculiar. Your friendship with her--'

'Let me tell you'--I stopped her--'that not a single word has ever passed between me and--and the man you mean, that everybody might not hear. Not a single word!'

'Dearest girl,' she exclaimed; 'how glad I am! How glad I am! Now I can take measures to--.

'But--' I resumed.

'But what?'

In a flash I saw the futility of attempting to explain to a woman like Mrs. Sardis, who had no doubts about the utter righteousness of her own code, whose rules had no exceptions, whose principles could apply to every conceivable case, and who was the very embodiment of the vast stolid London that hemmed me in--of attempting to explain to such an excellent, blind creature why, and in obedience to what ideal, I would not answer for the future. I knew that I might as well talk to a church steeple.

'Nothing,' I said, rising, 'except that I thank you. Be sure that I am grateful. You have had a task which must have been very unpleasant to you.'

She smiled, virtuously happy.

'You made it easy,' she murmured.

I perceived that she wanted to kiss me; but I avoided the caress. How I hated kissing women!

'No more need be said,' she almost whispered, as I put my hand on the knob of the front-door. I had escorted her myself to the hall.

'Only remember your great mission, the influence you wield, and the fair fame of our calling.'

My impulse was to shriek. But I merely smiled as decently as I could; and I opened the door.

And there, on the landing, just emerging from the lift, was Ispenlove, haggard, pale, his necktie astray. He and Mrs. Sardis exchanged a brief stare; she gave me a look of profound pain and passed in dignified silence down the stairs; Ispenlove came into the flat.

'Nothing will convince her now that I am not a liar,' I reflected.

It was my last thought as I sank, exquisitely drowning, in the sea of sensations caused by Ispenlove's presence. _

Read next: Part 2. Three Human Hearts: Chapter 2

Read previous: Part 1. In The Night: Chapter 5

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