________________________________________________
_ The sun streamed through the bay-window of a "best" bedroom in the
Warden's house, and glorified the pale crayon-portraits on the wall,
the dimity curtains, the old fresh chintz. He invaded the many trunks
which--all painted Z. D.--gaped, in various stages of excavation,
around the room. The doors of the huge wardrobe stood, like the doors
of Janus' temple in time of war, majestically open; and the sun seized
this opportunity of exploring the mahogany recesses. But the carpet,
which had faded under his immemorial visitations, was now almost
ENTIRELY hidden from him, hidden under layers of fair fine linen,
layers of silk, brocade, satin, chiffon, muslin. All the colours of
the rainbow, materialised by modistes, were there. Stacked on chairs
were I know not what of sachets, glove-cases, fan-cases. There were
innumerable packages in silver-paper and pink ribands. There was a
pyramid of bandboxes. There was a virgin forest of boot-trees. And
rustling quickly hither and thither, in and out of this profusion,
with armfuls of finery, was an obviously French maid. Alert, unerring,
like a swallow she dipped and darted. Nothing escaped her, and she
never rested. She had the air of the born unpacker--swift and firm,
yet withal tender. Scarce had her arms been laden but their loads were
lying lightly between shelves or tightly in drawers. To calculate,
catch, distribute, seemed in her but a single process. She was one of
those who are born to make chaos cosmic.
Insomuch that ere the loud chapel-clock tolled another hour all the
trunks had been sent empty away. The carpet was unflecked by any scrap
of silver-paper. From the mantelpiece, photographs of Zuleika surveyed
the room with a possessive air. Zuleika's pincushion, a-bristle with
new pins, lay on the dimity-flounced toilet-table, and round it stood
a multitude of multiform glass vessels, domed, all of them, with dull
gold, on which Z. D., in zianites and diamonds, was encrusted. On a
small table stood a great casket of malachite, initialled in like
fashion. On another small table stood Zuleika's library. Both books
were in covers of dull gold. On the back of one cover BRADSHAW, in
beryls, was encrusted; on the back of the other, A.B.C. GUIDE, in
amethysts, beryls, chrysoprases, and garnets. And Zuleika's great
cheval-glass stood ready to reflect her. Always it travelled with her,
in a great case specially made for it. It was framed in ivory, and of
fluted ivory were the slim columns it swung between. Of gold were its
twin sconces, and four tall tapers stood in each of them.
The door opened, and the Warden, with hospitable words, left his
grand-daughter at the threshold.
Zuleika wandered to her mirror. "Undress me, Melisande," she said.
Like all who are wont to appear by night before the public, she had
the habit of resting towards sunset.
Presently Melisande withdrew. Her mistress, in a white peignoir tied
with a blue sash, lay in a great chintz chair, gazing out of the
bay-window. The quadrangle below was very beautiful, with its walls of
rugged grey, its cloisters, its grass carpet. But to her it was of no
more interest than if it had been the rattling court-yard to one of
those hotels in which she spent her life. She saw it, but heeded it
not. She seemed to be thinking of herself, or of something she
desired, or of some one she had never met. There was ennui, and there
was wistfulness, in her gaze. Yet one would have guessed these things
to be transient--to be no more than the little shadows that sometimes
pass between a bright mirror and the brightness it reflects.
Zuleika was not strictly beautiful. Her eyes were a trifle large, and
their lashes longer than they need have been. An anarchy of small
curls was her chevelure, a dark upland of misrule, every hair
asserting its rights over a not discreditable brow. For the rest, her
features were not at all original. They seemed to have been derived
rather from a gallimaufry of familiar models. From Madame la Marquise
de Saint-Ouen came the shapely tilt of the nose. The mouth was a mere
replica of Cupid's bow, lacquered scarlet and strung with the littlest
pearls. No apple-tree, no wall of peaches, had not been robbed, nor
any Tyrian rose-garden, for the glory of Miss Dobson's cheeks. Her
neck was imitation-marble. Her hands and feet were of very mean
proportions. She had no waist to speak of.
Yet, though a Greek would have railed at her asymmetry, and an
Elizabethan have called her "gipsy," Miss Dobson now, in the midst of
the Edvardian Era, was the toast of two hemispheres. Late in her
'teens she had become an orphan and a governess. Her grandfather had
refused her appeal for a home or an allowance, on the ground that he
would not be burdened with the upshot of a marriage which he had once
forbidden and not yet forgiven. Lately, however, prompted by curiosity
or by remorse, he had asked her to spend a week or so of his declining
years with him. And she, "resting" between two engagements--one at
Hammerstein's Victoria, N.Y.C., the other at the Folies Bergeres,
Paris--and having never been in Oxford, had so far let bygones be
bygones as to come and gratify the old man's whim.
It may be that she still resented his indifference to those early
struggles which, even now, she shuddered to recall. For a governess'
life she had been, indeed, notably unfit. Hard she had thought it,
that penury should force her back into the school-room she was scarce
out of, there to champion the sums and maps and conjugations she had
never tried to master. Hating her work, she had failed signally to
pick up any learning from her little pupils, and had been driven from
house to house, a sullen and most ineffectual maiden. The sequence of
her situations was the swifter by reason of her pretty face. Was there
a grown-up son, always he fell in love with her, and she would let his
eyes trifle boldly with hers across the dinner-table. When he offered
her his hand, she would refuse it--not because she "knew her place,"
but because she did not love him. Even had she been a good teacher,
her presence could not have been tolerated thereafter. Her corded
trunk, heavier by another packet of billets-doux and a month's salary
in advance, was soon carried up the stairs of some other house.
It chanced that she came, at length, to be governess in a large family
that had Gibbs for its name and Notting Hill for its background.
Edward, the eldest son, was a clerk in the city, who spent his
evenings in the practice of amateur conjuring. He was a freckled
youth, with hair that bristled in places where it should have lain
smooth, and he fell in love with Zuleika duly, at first sight, during
high-tea. In the course of the evening, he sought to win her
admiration by a display of all his tricks. These were familiar to this
household, and the children had been sent to bed, the mother was
dozing, long before the seance was at an end. But Miss Dobson,
unaccustomed to any gaieties, sat fascinated by the young man's
sleight of hand, marvelling that a top-hat could hold so many
goldfish, and a handkerchief turn so swiftly into a silver florin. All
that night, she lay wide awake, haunted by the miracles he had
wrought. Next evening, when she asked him to repeat them, "Nay," he
whispered, "I cannot bear to deceive the girl I love. Permit me to
explain the tricks." So he explained them. His eyes sought hers across
the bowl of gold-fish, his fingers trembled as he taught her to
manipulate the magic canister. One by one, she mastered the paltry
secrets. Her respect for him waned with every revelation. He
complimented her on her skill. "I could not do it more neatly myself!"
he said. "Oh, dear Miss Dobson, will you but accept my hand, all these
things shall be yours--the cards, the canister, the goldfish, the
demon egg-cup--all yours!" Zuleika, with ravishing coyness, answered
that if he would give her them now, she would "think it over." The
swain consented, and at bed-time she retired with the gift under her
arm. In the light of her bedroom candle Marguerite hung not in greater
ecstasy over the jewel-casket than hung Zuleika over the box of
tricks. She clasped her hands over the tremendous possibilities it
held for her--manumission from her bondage, wealth, fame, power.
Stealthily, so soon as the house slumbered, she packed her small
outfit, embedding therein the precious gift. Noiselessly, she shut the
lid of her trunk, corded it, shouldered it, stole down the stairs with
it. Outside--how that chain had grated! and her shoulder, how it was
aching!--she soon found a cab. She took a night's sanctuary in some
railway-hotel. Next day, she moved into a small room in a lodging-
house off the Edgware Road, and there for a whole week she was
sedulous in the practice of her tricks. Then she inscribed her name on
the books of a "Juvenile Party Entertainments Agency."
The Christmas holidays were at hand, and before long she got an
engagement. It was a great evening for her. Her repertory was, it must
be confessed, old and obvious; but the children, in deference to their
hostess, pretended not to know how the tricks were done, and assumed
their prettiest airs of wonder and delight. One of them even pretended
to be frightened, and was led howling from the room. In fact, the
whole thing went off splendidly. The hostess was charmed, and told
Zuleika that a glass of lemonade would be served to her in the hall.
Other engagements soon followed. Zuleika was very, very happy. I
cannot claim for her that she had a genuine passion for her art. The
true conjurer finds his guerdon in the consciousness of work done
perfectly and for its own sake. Lucre and applause are not necessary
to him. If he were set down, with the materials of his art, on a
desert island, he would yet be quite happy. He would not cease to
produce the barber's-pole from his mouth. To the indifferent winds he
would still speak his patter, and even in the last throes of
starvation would not eat his live rabbit or his gold-fish. Zuleika, on
a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a
man's foot-print. She was, indeed, far too human a creature to care
much for art. I do not say that she took her work lightly. She thought
she had genius, and she liked to be told that this was so. But mainly
she loved her work as a means of mere self-display. The frank
admiration which, into whatsoever house she entered, the grown-up sons
flashed on her; their eagerness to see her to the door; their
impressive way of putting her into her omnibus--these were the things
she revelled in. She was a nymph to whom men's admiration was the
greater part of life. By day, whenever she went into the streets, she
was conscious that no man passed her without a stare; and this
consciousness gave a sharp zest to her outings. Sometimes she was
followed to her door--crude flattery which she was too innocent to
fear. Even when she went into the haberdasher's to make some little
purchase of tape or riband, or into the grocer's--for she was an
epicure in her humble way--to buy a tin of potted meat for her supper,
the homage of the young men behind the counter did flatter and
exhilarate her. As the homage of men became for her, more and more, a
matter of course, the more subtly necessary was it to her happiness.
The more she won of it, the more she treasured it. She was alone in
the world, and it saved her from any moment of regret that she had
neither home nor friends. For her the streets that lay around her had
no squalor, since she paced them always in the gold nimbus of her
fascinations. Her bedroom seemed not mean nor lonely to her, since the
little square of glass, nailed above the wash-stand, was ever there to
reflect her face. Thereinto, indeed, she was ever peering. She would
droop her head from side to side, she would bend it forward and see
herself from beneath her eyelashes, then tilt it back and watch
herself over her supercilious chin. And she would smile, frown, pout,
languish--let all the emotions hover upon her face; and always she
seemed to herself lovelier than she had ever been.
Yet was there nothing Narcissine in her spirit. Her love for her own
image was not cold aestheticism. She valued that image not for its own
sake, but for sake of the glory it always won for her. In the little
remote music-hall, where she was soon appearing nightly as an "early
turn," she reaped glory in a nightly harvest. She could feel that all
the gallery-boys, because of her, were scornful of the sweethearts
wedged between them, and she knew that she had but to say "Will any
gentleman in the audience be so good as to lend me his hat?" for the
stalls to rise as one man and rush towards the platform. But greater
things were in store for her. She was engaged at two halls in the West
End. Her horizon was fast receding and expanding. Homage became
nightly tangible in bouquets, rings, brooches--things acceptable and
(luckier than their donors) accepted. Even Sunday was not barren for
Zuleika: modish hostesses gave her postprandially to their guests.
Came that Sunday night, notanda candidissimo calculo! when she
received certain guttural compliments which made absolute her vogue
and enabled her to command, thenceforth, whatever terms she asked for.
Already, indeed, she was rich. She was living at the most exorbitant
hotel in all Mayfair. She had innumerable gowns and no necessity to
buy jewels; and she also had, which pleased her most, the fine cheval-
glass I have described. At the close of the Season, Paris claimed her
for a month's engagement. Paris saw her and was prostrate. Boldini did
a portrait of her. Jules Bloch wrote a song about her; and this, for a
whole month, was howled up and down the cobbled alleys of Montmartre.
And all the little dandies were mad for "la Zuleika." The jewellers of
the Rue de la Paix soon had nothing left to put in their windows--
everything had been bought for "la Zuleika." For a whole month,
baccarat was not played at the Jockey Club--every member had succumbed
to a nobler passion. For a whole month, the whole demi-monde was
forgotten for one English virgin. Never, even in Paris, had a woman
triumphed so. When the day came for her departure, the city wore such
an air of sullen mourning as it had not worn since the Prussians
marched to its Elysee. Zuleika, quite untouched, would not linger in
the conquered city. Agents had come to her from every capital in
Europe, and, for a year, she ranged, in triumphal nomady, from one
capital to another. In Berlin, every night, the students escorted her
home with torches. Prince Vierfuenfsechs-Siebenachtneun offered her
his hand, and was condemned by the Kaiser to six months' confinement
in his little castle. In Yildiz Kiosk, the tyrant who still throve
there conferred on her the Order of Chastity, and offered her the
central couch in his seraglio. She gave her performance in the
Quirinal, and, from the Vatican, the Pope launched against her a Bull
which fell utterly flat. In Petersburg, the Grand Duke Salamander
Salamandrovitch fell enamoured of her. Of every article in the
apparatus of her conjuring-tricks he caused a replica to be made in
finest gold. These treasures he presented to her in that great
malachite casket which now stood on the little table in her room; and
thenceforth it was with these that she performed her wonders. They did
not mark the limit of the Grand Duke's generosity. He was for
bestowing on Zuleika the half of his immensurable estates. The Grand
Duchess appealed to the Tzar. Zuleika was conducted across the
frontier, by an escort of love-sick Cossacks. On the Sunday before she
left Madrid, a great bull-fight was held in her honour. Fifteen bulls
received the coup-de-grace, and Alvarez, the matador of matadors, died
in the arena with her name on his lips. He had tried to kill the last
bull without taking his eyes off la divina senorita. A prettier
compliment had never been paid her, and she was immensely pleased with
it. For that matter, she was immensely pleased with everything. She
moved proudly to the incessant music of a paean, aye! of a paean that
was always crescendo.
Its echoes followed her when she crossed the Atlantic, till they were
lost in the louder, deeper, more blatant paean that rose for her from
the shores beyond. All the stops of that "mighty organ, many-piped,"
the New York press, were pulled out simultaneously, as far as they
could be pulled, in Zuleika's honour. She delighted in the din. She
read every line that was printed about her, tasting her triumph as she
had never tasted it before. And how she revelled in the Brobdingnagian
drawings of her, which, printed in nineteen colours, towered between
the columns or sprawled across them! There she was, measuring herself
back to back with the Statue of Liberty; scudding through the
firmament on a comet, whilst a crowd of tiny men in evening-dress
stared up at her from the terrestrial globe; peering through a
microscope held by Cupid over a diminutive Uncle Sam; teaching the
American Eagle to stand on its head; and doing a hundred-and-one other
things--whatever suggested itself to the fancy of native art. And
through all this iridescent maze of symbolism were scattered many
little slabs of realism. At home, on the street, Zuleika was the
smiling target of all snap-shooters, and all the snap-shots were
snapped up by the press and reproduced with annotations: Zuleika
Dobson walking on Broadway in the sables gifted her by Grand Duke
Salamander--she says "You can bounce blizzards in them"; Zuleika
Dobson yawning over a love-letter from millionaire Edelweiss;
relishing a cup of clam-broth--she says "They don't use clams out
there"; ordering her maid to fix her a warm bath; finding a split in
the gloves she has just drawn on before starting for the musicale
given in her honour by Mrs. Suetonius X. Meistersinger, the most
exclusive woman in New York; chatting at the telephone to Miss Camille
Van Spook, the best-born girl in New York; laughing over the
recollection of a compliment made her by George Abimelech Post, the
best-groomed man in New York; meditating a new trick; admonishing a
waiter who has upset a cocktail over her skirt; having herself
manicured; drinking tea in bed. Thus was Zuleika enabled daily to be,
as one might say, a spectator of her own wonderful life. On her
departure from New York, the papers spoke no more than the truth when
they said she had had "a lovely time." The further she went West--
millionaire Edelweiss had loaned her his private car--the lovelier her
time was. Chicago drowned the echoes of New York; final Frisco dwarfed
the headlines of Chicago. Like one of its own prairie-fires, she swept
the country from end to end. Then she swept back, and sailed for
England. She was to return for a second season in the coming Fall. At
present, she was, as I have said, "resting."
As she sat here in the bay-window of her room, she was not reviewing
the splendid pageant of her past. She was a young person whose
reveries never were in retrospect. For her the past was no treasury of
distinct memories, all hoarded and classified, some brighter than
others and more highly valued. All memories were for her but as the
motes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous
the pathway of her future. She was always looking forward. She was
looking forward now--that shade of ennui had passed from her face--to
the week she was to spend in Oxford. A new city was a new toy to her,
and--for it was youth's homage that she loved best--this city of
youths was a toy after her own heart.
Aye, and it was youths who gave homage to her most freely. She was of
that high-stepping and flamboyant type that captivates youth most
surely. Old men and men of middle age admired her, but she had not
that flower-like quality of shyness and helplessness, that look of
innocence, so dear to men who carry life's secrets in their heads. Yet
Zuleika WAS very innocent, really. She was as pure as that young
shepherdess Marcella, who, all unguarded, roved the mountains and was
by all the shepherds adored. Like Marcella, she had given her heart to
no man, had preferred none. Youths were reputed to have died for love
of her, as Chrysostom died for love of the shepherdess; and she, like
the shepherdess, had shed no tear. When Chrysostom was lying on his
bier in the valley, and Marcella looked down from the high rock,
Ambrosio, the dead man's comrade, cried out on her, upbraiding her
with bitter words--"Oh basilisk of our mountains!" Nor do I think
Ambrosio spoke too strongly. Marcella cared nothing for men's
admiration, and yet, instead of retiring to one of those nunneries
which are founded for her kind, she chose to rove the mountains,
causing despair to all the shepherds. Zuleika, with her peculiar
temperament, would have gone mad in a nunnery. "But," you may argue,
"ought not she to have taken the veil, even at the cost of her reason,
rather than cause so much despair in the world? If Marcella was a
basilisk, as you seem to think, how about Miss Dobson?" Ah, but
Marcella knew quite well, boasted even, that she never would or could
love any man. Zuleika, on the other hand, was a woman of really
passionate fibre. She may not have had that conscious, separate, and
quite explicit desire to be a mother with which modern playwrights
credit every unmated member of her sex. But she did know that she
could love. And, surely, no woman who knows that of herself can be
rightly censured for not recluding herself from the world: it is only
women without the power to love who have no right to provoke men's
love.
Though Zuleika had never given her heart, strong in her were the
desire and the need that it should be given. Whithersoever she had
fared, she had seen nothing but youths fatuously prostrate to her--not
one upright figure which she could respect. There were the middle-aged
men, the old men, who did not bow down to her; but from middle-age, as
from eld, she had a sanguine aversion. She could love none but a
youth. Nor--though she herself, womanly, would utterly abase herself
before her ideal--could she love one who fell prone before her. And
before her all youths always did fall prone. She was an empress, and
all youths were her slaves. Their bondage delighted her, as I have
said. But no empress who has any pride can adore one of her slaves.
Whom, then, could proud Zuleika adore? It was a question which
sometimes troubled her. There were even moments when, looking into her
cheval-glass, she cried out against that arrangement in comely lines
and tints which got for her the dulia she delighted in. To be able to
love once--would not that be better than all the homage in the world?
But would she ever meet whom, looking up to him, she could love--she,
the omnisubjugant? Would she ever, ever meet him?
It was when she wondered thus, that the wistfulness came into her
eyes. Even now, as she sat by the window, that shadow returned to
them. She was wondering, shyly, had she met him at length? That young
equestrian who had not turned to look at her; whom she was to meet at
dinner to-night . . . was it he? The ends of her blue sash lay across
her lap, and she was lazily unravelling their fringes. "Blue and
white!" she remembered. "They were the colours he wore round his hat."
And she gave a little laugh of coquetry. She laughed, and, long after,
her lips were still parted in a smile.
So did she sit, smiling, wondering, with the fringes of her sash
between her fingers, while the sun sank behind the opposite wall of
the quadrangle, and the shadows crept out across the grass, thirsty
for the dew. _
Read next: CHAPTER 3
Read previous: CHAPTER 1
Table of content of Zuleika Dobson
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
