Five Nights Part 43

Month after month went by and I worked at the painting, turning into finished pictures the many sketches life with Suzee had given me.

As I worked on some of these a wave of sad reflection would sweep over me, of memory of her, but the recollection of the deceit and lies in which her love for me had been always cloaked came with that memory and blunted the poignant edge of it.

Then suddenly one morning came a letter from Viola, and my heart seemed at the sight of it to fly upwards and forwards to the future as a swallow let out of a darkened room flies upwards and outwards with a swift rush to the open light.

"Bletchner's Hotel, Paris." "If you wish, you may come to me."

That was all, but it was enough. Within a few moments I was ready for departure. For weeks a little case had stood ready packed against the wall of my room. All else was left standing.

I went to town, caught the morning train to Dover, and crossed to Calais.

I reached Paris finally about six and drove to a hotel. I dined in my travelling clothes in the restaurant, and then went up to my room to dress. What keen life I felt in all my veins! How strongly all the power of living had come back to me! Ordinarily, when we are well we get so accustomed to our health and strength we are hardly aware of either, but there are times when we become supremely conscious of both, as I was now. As I walked about my small apartment I felt a pride and joy in my strength such as a woman feels, I suppose, in her beauty when she surveys it in the mirror--a wild elation, a sense of triumph, as she realises in it her power. The thought of the approaching meeting with Viola danced before my mind, filling it with superb delight. All my veins seemed filled with fire instead of blood.

My limbs and muscles flew to do the bidding of the eager, impatient brain.

I drove to Bletchner's Hotel and enquired for Madame Lonsdale, and was immediately shewn up to her suite of apartments. The salon I entered was empty. A door faced me at the other end. It was closed. My heart leapt up as I saw it. Was she there--just on the other side? The salon was lighted with shaded electric lamps and furnished and hung entirely in white, so that there was that dazzling effect of light I knew she always loved. I walked up and down in short quick turns, longing to go up to that tantalising door and knock, but holding myself back.

After a moment it opened and she came through it towards me. For one second before I rushed forward to clasp her in my arms, I stood to gaze at her, and the sweetness, the enchanting glamour of the vision was borne in upon me and locked itself into my memory for ever. She was in white, some soft white tissue that fell round her closely, edged with silver that seemed like moonlight on white clouds, and there was a little silver on her shoulders and round the breast that seemed like moonlight upon snow. Her fair hair shone in the blaze of light, her face raised to mine was pale and smiling, with a wonderful l.u.s.tre in the azure eyes.

She seemed, as ever, the dream, the vision, the ideal, the unattainable divinity man's soul continually strives after.

A moment more and she was in my arms. Her physical semblance was mine, in which her spirit walked and moved, and I was the owner and conqueror of that at least.

"Trevor dear, be gentle!" she murmured in laughing remonstrance, but her white arms did not unlock from my neck nor her soft lips move far from mine.

"How happy I am now," she said, sinking into my embrace, "and how well you look, Trevor, how splendid! So strong and gloriously full of life!"

"I wonder I do," I answered, "after this cruel year you gave me. How could you leave me as you did while I was asleep beside you, and what was your reason? You will have to tell me now."

"I believe you would be happier if I did not, if you just trusted me and never asked to know," she answered, smiling back at me. "Are we not perfectly happy now? You have me again; look at me, am I just the same as when we parted?"

I looked at her intently, eagerly, my eyes drinking in all the perfect vision before me, each slim outline of the body, lying back now on the couch where we both were sitting, all the delicacy of the transparent skin, the smooth white forehead with its fine, straight-drawn eyebrows, the lovely eyes searching mine. Yes, I had lost nothing of my possession, and there seemed rather something added to that inner light and that wonderful look of intellect and power that shone through the face.

"I think you are the same," I said slowly, seeking vainly to express that indefinable extra light that seemed upon her face.

"Only perhaps more lovely. But tell me what your reason was. I cannot bear to think there is a dark gap between us."

"You are so happy at this moment it seems a pity," she murmured softly. "You will not feel so happy when you know, and it's all over and past and forgotten. It's a thunderstorm that has rolled by and left us again in the sunlight. We are in Paradise now, are we not?"

I looked at her, and the triumph of delighted joy I had in her rose up to my brain, filling it, making all else seem obscure and of no account. Yet something in her words stirred my brain anxiously. Why should I mind hearing what she had to say? Was it possible that she had acted on her first letter to me, after all, and, while forcing freedom on me, taken it also for herself? Was it possible she had lent my possession, herself, to another? That blind, insensate jealousy of the male in physical matters instantly flamed up through me. In that moment of extreme pa.s.sion for her, of expected triumph and delight, it burnt at its most furious pitch. I felt I must _know_, must drag the secret out of her, and if it was what I thought in that unreasoning moment, I would kill us both.

I threw myself forward on her so that she could not move. "Now tell me," I said. "You shall tell me, you promised you would."

Viola looked up at me with a regretful gaze but without any shrinking from my savage look and grasp.

"Certainly I will," she said gently; "but you will regret forcing me to tell you. Well, I left you, Trevor, because I found I was going to be the mother of your child."

"Viola!"

Had she stabbed me in the breast as I leant over her, the shock could not have been more great. To me the words seemed to go straight to my heart and stop it. I could not speak beyond that one word. For the moment I was absolutely stunned, paralysed. I took my hands from her arms which I had been holding, rose from the couch mechanically, and walked away from her, trying to realise, to understand what she had said and its meaning.

This was the fact that stood out most clearly before my disordered mental vision: knowing she was going to be in danger, to suffer, she had fled from me to bear the burden of it alone. And, next, that I had brought that burden and suffering on her. That spirit, so far above earthly things, as I always thought her, I had dragged down to know the common trials, share the common lot of earthly womanhood. The pain of these two ideas, the agony they brought with them to me in those moments was something almost unendurable. I felt crushed, absolutely ground into the dust before it. I sat down by the table and put both hands across my eyes, shutting out her exquisite vision, trying to shut out my thoughts. I felt as a religious enthusiast might feel who in a moment of drunken madness had outraged a sacred shrine.

Viola was to me, had always been, far more than a wife or a mistress is to a man; she was also the Idea to my brain, and what his Idea is to an artist an artist alone can know. But it is something he will live and die for, and count his heart's blood as nothing beside it.

That she was a sacred thing, to be protected and guarded from the sordid incidents of daily life that she hated, had always been my thought. She was an artist, and as such had Art's own penalties to pay--the excessive nervous strain it puts upon the body, the long weakening tension, the extreme mental and bodily fatigue that sometimes accompanies or follows an artist's flight into the Elysian fields, from which he brings back those deathless flowers of music, verse, song, or colour to plant in the world. It is not fair that such a one should have to bear the common ills of life as well as pay those penalties.

That had always been my view. Viola was apart from the world, a daughter of the G.o.ds, not suited for, nor designed for the common sufferings of the clay. Love she might know, or rather must know, for love is always the handmaiden to Art, but motherhood, no. For those thousands and thousands of women who inhabit this world and have no divine gifts to bestow maternity is a pleasing and natural occupation; for the one amongst those thousands who has heard the Divine whisper and walked and conversed with the G.o.ds, and who can repeat those whispers to mortals, it is a waste of divine energy--a sacrilege. For genius is not handed down. It is given to one alone. It is not hereditary. For genius acc.u.mulated through heredity would at last produce a G.o.d. And that the jealous G.o.ds will not allow.

Therefore the child of a genius is rarely a genius itself. It is born with a veil across its eyes that it may not see divinity and so return to the common type.

Knowing all this and feeling it keenly to my heart's core, I had given my promise to Viola. A promise, which indeed was part of a religion to me, and this was how I had kept it!

The intense humiliation of it all rolled through me, stunning me like a physical agony.

I heard her voice speaking gently to me, but I could not understand what she said, could not respond.

In memory, I was listening again to her voice when she had come that first night to the studio:

"You will not let our love drag us down to earth, will you? Let it only inspire us more. We will go to the Elysian fields together to gather the amaranth flowers. You will not try to turn me into the ordinary married woman. I could not accept those duties and that life. I want to live in my music, in the heaven of Ideas, as I do now.

And to you I want always to be the vision, the dream, the spirit of your thoughts: never the wife, the mother, the keeper of the household, occupied with worldly matters."

And I had promised with all the rapture and the fervour of one who understood and thought her thoughts, and who had always longed to escape from the commonplace, the trivial matters of the world, to whom, as to her, the deathless amaranth flowers of beauty, of art, of Idea, of inspiration were all.

But the promise had been broken. Through me she had known pain, suffering, danger, inability to work, anxiety, daily care for months and months alone. The exquisite, perfect form I had counted so sacred, had suffered the common earthly lot. And through me. My thoughts seemed crushing me, grinding me beneath them, but at last her voice penetrated to my brain, through its anguish of self-reproach.

"I knew you would feel it so much, dear Trevor, that was why I kept it secret from you and went away, but now it is all over and past, you must not dwell on it. It is irrevocable. Don't reproach yourself about it. Let us be glad we are in Heaven now."

I rose and went over to her and knelt by the couch, raising one of her hands to my lips and holding it against me.

"Dear! Dearest one! You went away to endure all that misery alone, so that it should not distress me? How wonderfully unselfish you have always been to me!"

"Oh, no," she answered quickly, a light colour rising all over her face.

"You must not think that. I went away for myself, too. I could not bear that you should see me disfigured, spoiled, as you would think. I had always been the ideal to you. I could not bear to let you see me as an ordinary woman. I was afraid I should lose your pa.s.sion for me, which I value more than anything else in the world. I felt I could face everything but that. Terrifying and horrible as it all was to meet quite alone, still it was better than feeling I was losing your love and desire."

"But you would not have done," I said vehemently; "nothing could make any difference to my love for you."

"Not to your love, perhaps, but our pa.s.sions are not in our own control. They rise under certain influences, sink and decline under others, and we can do nothing. We must look these things in the face.

See now, if I were suddenly turned to an old, old woman, withered before your eyes, would you feel as you feel now?"

"No," I answered slowly, "I admit old age...."

"Or hopelessly disfigured--my face rendered hideous by burns or loathsome with disease? You could not desire me then, I should not expect it. Love is unchangeable, but pa.s.sion is a flame that shivers in every transient breeze. We can't help it. It _is_ so. As I look at you now I love you for your strength and grace, above all for your beautiful form. If you hobbled into the room, bent and lame, I should love you still but not as I do now, quite, quite otherwise. And I was disfigured, temporarily, I know, but it went on for months and months.

I was no longer your gay, glad spirit with the radiant wings. I was broken, distorted, hideous."

"Don't tell me," I muttered; "I can't bear it." She put one arm round my neck and her soft lips on my hair.

"It is over," she whispered. "Do not be sorry, do not reproach yourself. It was so much better for you not to know, not to see it. It would all have preyed upon you so from day to day. _I_ felt the long waiting. It seemed the time would never pa.s.s, and each day and night I felt so glad to know you were not there, to suffer with me, but away, quite out of reach of it all."

"But suppose you had died ... without me."