Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 18

Real love is sacred in all its expressions of itself; my ideal of love, just because it includes that one, can do without it."

"But, on your theory, why should it do without it?" Mrs. Dallas, all mildness, inquired.

His mind was driven back to those questionings in the studio, when he had thought of the incongruous yet allied themes of pa.s.sion and perambulators, and groped again, angrily, in the same obscurity.

"It's--it's--a matter of convenience," he found, frowning; "it--it wouldn't work in with other beautiful things. It wouldn't be convenient."

"I'm glad to hear you find such a reasonable objection," said Mrs.

Dallas. "There could hardly be a better one. It wouldn't be at all convenient. Though, I gather, if it could be made convenient, you still think that Marian would have nothing to complain of."

"I don't know why you are trying to pin me down like this." Rupert, stooping, gathered some flakes of stone from the path and scattered them with a sharp gesture that expressed his exasperation. "You know what I believe. Love is free, free as air and sunshine. How can one stop one's self from loving? Why should one? And if our love, yours and mine, could mean that complete relation, then, yes, the ideal thing, the really ideal thing, would be for Marian to feel it right and beautiful and to be glad that there should be two perfected and complete relations instead of one. As it is, that inclusive vision isn't asked of her."

"She's not, in fact, to be asked to be a Mormon," Mrs. Dallas remarked.

"All that she has to put up with is that her husband should be in love, platonically, with another woman, and should have ceased to be in love with her. It's hard, you know, when some one has been in love with you, to give it up."

"But I have not ceased to love Marian!" Rupert cried. "Why should you suppose it? My love for you doesn't shut out my love for her. It's a vulgar old remnant of s.e.xual savagery to think it does. A mother doesn't love one child the less for loving another. Why can't people purify and widen their minds by looking at the truth?--That jeer about Mormons is unworthy of you. Marriage is a prison unless husband and wife are both free to go on giving and growing. What does love mean but growth?"

Mrs. Dallas's eyes had drifted away to her beds of carnations and they now rested on them for a little while. Rupert took up his hat and fanned himself. He was hot, and very miserable.

"It always strikes me, when I hear talk like yours," said Mrs. Dallas presently, "that it is so much less generous and n.o.ble than it imagines itself to be. It's the man, only, who frames the new code and the man, only, who is to enlarge himself and run two or three loves abreast."

"Not at all. Marian is precisely as free as I am to love somebody else as well as me."

"As free? Oh no," said Mrs. Dallas, laughing softly. "Theoretically, perhaps, but not actually. Nature has seen to that. When women have babies and lose their figures it's most unlikely that they'll ever be given an opportunity to exercise their freedom. That fact in itself should make you reconsider your ideas about love. Own frankly that they apply only to men and don't pretend to generosity. The only free women are the _femmes galantes_; and you'll observe that they are seldom burdened with a nursery, and that they never grow fat."

She touched, with an accuracy malignant in its clairvoyance, his subconscious awareness of Marian's physical alteration. Something in him shrank away from her in fear and indignation. She was trying to make him see things from a false and petty standpoint, the standpoint of a woman of the world, a mere woman of the world--that world of shameful tolerances and cruel stupidities. "I don't know anything about _femmes galantes_," he said, "nor do I wish to. You misunderstand me if you think that by love I mean sensuality."

With slightly lifted brows she looked out at the carnations; and had she been angry with him he could have felt less angry with her. He was, indeed, very angry with her when she remarked, tranquilly, "I don't think you know what you mean by love."

"I mean by love what Sh.e.l.ley meant by it," Rupert declared.

"True love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away.

Love is like understanding that grows bright Gazing on many truths.

"I mean what all the true, great hearts of the world have meant by it,--poetry, rapture, religion; and they can only be sustained, renewed, created, by emotion, by pa.s.sion, by s.e.xual pa.s.sion--if you like to call it by a name you imagine to be derogatory." He felt himself warmed and sustained against the menace that emanated from her by the sound of his own familiar eloquence.

But Mrs. Dallas still tranquilly contemplated the carnations.

"That's the man's point of view. The view of the artist, the creator.

Perhaps there's truth in it. Perhaps he can't write his poems and paint his pictures without taking intoxicants. But it will never be the view of the woman. Mary Sh.e.l.ley will never really like it when Sh.e.l.ley makes love to Jane Clairmont; Marian will never like it when you make love to me. They'll try to believe it's the ideal, to please him, when they are the ones he is in love with; but when he is in love with other women they won't go on believing."

"That is their fault, their littleness, then. The wide, glorious outlook is theirs, too, if they choose to open their eyes. I don't accept your ant.i.thesis for women,--humdrum respectability, roast mutton, milk pudding, or dissipation. I don't believe that when a woman marries and becomes a mother she must turn her back on love."

Mrs. Dallas at this began to laugh, unkindly. "Turn her back on love? No indeed. Why should she? Hasn't she her husband and children, to say nothing of her friends, her father and mother, her sisters and brothers?

You idealists seem always to forget these means of expansion. By love you mean simply and solely the intoxicant. Call it poetry and religion, if you like, but don't expect other people, who merely see that you are intoxicated, to call it that."

He sat, trying to think. Idly, half absently, with languid fingers, she seemed to be breaking his idols as though they had been silly little earthenware figures, not good enough--here was the stab, the bewilderment--for her drawing-room. And who was she to do it, this remote, mysterious creature, steeped in the perfume of her pa.s.sionate past? He felt as he gazed at her that it was not only himself he must defend against her.

"It's curious to me to hear you talk in this way." He armed himself, as he spoke, with all that he could muster of wisdom and of weight. "You are the last woman I'd have expected to hear it from. You've made me your friend, so that I'd have a right to be frank, even if you hadn't let me love you. What right have you to turn your back on all the beauty and romance of life--to smile at them and mock them? You haven't allowed yourself to be bandaged and crippled by convention, I'm sure of it. You have followed your heart--bravely, truly--out into life. You have loved--and loved--and loved--I know it. It breathes from you. It's all you've lived for."

"And you think the result so satisfactory?" said Mrs. Dallas. She looked at him now, and if it was with irony it was with sadness. She turned from her question. "Well, if you like, I am one of the _femmes galantes_; they are of many types, you know; I wasn't thinking, when I shocked you so, of the obvious, gross type. I was thinking of the woman who corresponds to you--the idealist, the spiritual _femme galante_.

And, I'm convinced of it, for a woman, it doesn't work. A man, if he is a big man, or has a big life,--it isn't always the same thing by the way,--may have his succession of pa.s.sions, or, as you'd claim,--and I don't believe it,--his contemporaneities; he has a context to frame them in; they may fall into place. But a woman's life can't be calculated in those terms of dimension. It is big enough for the emotion that leads to marriage and to the loves that grow from that, the loves you think so little of. It is an emotion that can't be repeated over and over again, simply because, in a normal life, it has grown into something else, something even better, I should say: a form of poetry and rapture and religion quite compatible with roast mutton and respectability. But the women who miss the normal life and who try to live on the emotions, they--well, I can only say that to my mind they always come to look silly. Silly is the only word for them."

He stared at her. "You don't look silly."

"Why should I?" Mrs. Dallas asked. "I'm not of the idealist type. I don't confuse intoxication with religion and think I have the one when I've only the other. I may have missed the real thing, but I've not repeated the emotion that ought to lead to it. You are quite mistaken in imagining that I've loved and loved and loved. I haven't. I have allowed other people to love me. That, as you'll own, is a very different matter. I am hard and cold and disillusioned. I am not soft and yearning and frustrated. Why should I look silly?"

He stared at her, and his heart was flooded with pain. What was she, then? What was her feeling for him? What had she meant? As she spoke and as he looked at her, the veil of romance dissolved from about her and he saw her for the first time with her own eyes,--devoid of poetry, a hard, cold, faded, worldly woman. Yet she was still a Sphinx, strange and alluring, and still he struggled against her, for her, saying hotly, though his heart was chilled, "If it's true, you've hurt yourself--you've hurt yourself horribly, through fear of looking silly."

"No, I've not hurt myself," said Mrs. Dallas. "I've been hurt, perhaps; but I've not allowed my hurts to repeat themselves too often. Some things in life should be unique and final. The people who don't keep them so become shoddy. Marian, for instance, is neither hard nor cold, nor shoddy either. You have made one of the mistakes that idealists are always making in imagining that she was humdrum respectability and that I was poetry and rapture and religion.--Oh, it's no good protesting. If I had a double chin and thin hair you'd never have wanted to help my soul, however unhappy I was. And if Marian had sat about in carefully chosen clothes and looked mysterious and not let you feel sure that she cared about you, you would probably have remained in love with her. So please own that you have been mistaken and that on the one side is love, the love that Marian feels for you, although she knows you; because she knows you; and on the other is illusion, intoxication, sensuality; yes, my dear Rupert, such as you felt when I let you kiss my hand a little while ago."

He sat, sullen, even sulky, half turned from her, and again he stooped and gathered up the flakes of stone and tossed them away down the path.

The clink and c.h.i.n.k of ice and gla.s.s was heard approaching through the drawing-room, and the maid stepped out bearing the tray, which she set down on a wicker table before her mistress. The tall crystal jug, veiled in frosty rime, showed tones of jade and chalcedony, and fillets of lemon peel threaded it like pale, bright enamel. This gem-like beaker, the plate of golden cakes, with the scent of the carnations, with Mrs.

Dallas's little foot on its cushion, with her rings of pearl and ruby, had all been part of the magic she had meant to him. The very sound of the ice, dully yet resonantly c.h.i.n.king, brought a suffocating sense of nostalgia. It was over, all over. He was disenchanted. She was cruel to him, to him who had loved her. She had cut into him and killed bright, ingenuous, trustful things. And, in a placid voice, she asked him if he would have some cake, and filled his gla.s.s.

He took it from her and drank it off in silence. The icy, aromatic liquid seemed an antidote to that other intoxicant she had mocked. Irony flowed through his veins; a bitter-sweet sense of vengeful maturity.

When he set down the gla.s.s, he looked up at her, and he felt himself measuring his sword against the stiletto of an adversary.

"Well, I've had my lesson," he said. "I've been a generous but deluded idealist, it seems, in imagining that men and women are equals in their claims on life. Since I'm an artist, I have a right to my raptures, I take it. And poor Marian must be jealous with reason. Well, well; it's an odd morality to hear preached."

Mrs. Dallas still sipped her lemonade and she quietly considered him.

She said nothing, and even after she had finished and set down her gla.s.s she sat for still a little while in silence.

"I'm sorry I've seemed to preach," she then remarked, "and I certainly think that Marian has every reason to be jealous. What more did I say?

That a man isn't as ridiculous and undignified as a woman when he falls in and out of love-affairs on the condition that he has a big life? That was it, wasn't it?"

"That was it, and I'm glad to have your a.s.surance that I am in no danger of being ridiculous or undignified."

"Do you mean," said Mrs. Dallas, looking at him, "that you think yours such a big life?"

It had been, before, his heart, its tenderness, its devotion and dedication, that she had cut into; it was into something deeper now, something more substantially and vitally at the centre of his life, something of which his heart and all its ardours were but tributaries.

He was to learn that self-love could bleed with a fiercer, darker gush.

The blood, as if foretelling his ordeal, sprang to his forehead as he looked back at her.

"I have my art," he said, and he disdained any pretended humility; he spoke with pride and even with solemnity. "I live for my art. I don't think that I am an insignificant man."

"Don't you?" said Mrs. Dallas. It was with an unaffected curiosity that her eyes rested on him, and it sank into him, drop by drop, like poison.

"Not insignificant, perhaps," she took up after a moment. "That's not quite the word, perhaps. You are very intelligent and appreciative and good-hearted. I don't suppose one can be quite insignificant if one is that. But--do you call it art, your writing? I wonder. Oh, you are quite right to live for it, of course, just as other men do for stock-broking or fox-hunting or print-collecting, or anything else that employs their energies or satisfies their tastes or brings in money; but, to count as art, a man's activities must mean more than just his own satisfaction in them, mustn't they? You write careful, intelligent, sentimental little books; but I can't feel that the world would be any the poorer if you were to take to stock-broking or fox-hunting instead. No, it doesn't seem to me, my dear Rupert, that your life is nearly large enough for a succession of love-affairs. It's all right when one is young and looking for a mate; experiments are in order then; but you've found your mate, and you'll soon be not so very young, and if on the strength of your art you imagine yourself ent.i.tled to unseasonable intoxications, you'll become, in time, an emotional dram-drinker, one of those foolish old inebriates we are all familiar with, and you'll spoil yourself for what you were meant to be and can be,--a devoted husband and an excellent _pere de famille_."

Stretched on his rack, broken, bleeding, Rupert stared at her. Who was this woman, this cruel, ambiguous woman who watched his agony with deliberating, drowsy eyes? There came into his mind the memory of a picture seen in childhood, some sentimental print that had strongly impressed his boyish sensibilities. A corner of a Roman amphitheatre, a rising tier of seats; sham architecture, sham Romans, no doubt, and a poor piece of claptrap, looked back on from his maturity; but the face of the Roman woman, leaning so quietly forward under its gold tiara, to watch, unmoved, the tormented combatants below, was it not like this face? Yes, she was of that stony-hearted breed, unaltered by the centuries.

The torment of his humiliation s.n.a.t.c.hed at anger for a veil. He said, smiling, "You have been very successful till now in concealing your real opinion of me."

"Have I concealed it?"

"My work certainly seemed to be of absorbing interest to you."

"I listened to it; yes."