The Dangerous Age Part 3

All the same I am proud of my self-control. Many women do not possess as much.

The moon is in her first quarter; a cold dry wind is blowing up; it makes one cough merely to hear it whistle.

I hate winds of all kinds, and here my enemy seems to have free entry. I ought to have built my house facing south and in some hollow sheltered from the wind. Unfortunately it looks to the north, straight across the open sea.

I have not yet been outside the garden. I have made up my mind to keep to this little spot as long as possible. I shall get accustomed to it. I _must_ get accustomed to it.

Dear souls, how they worry me with their letters. Only Malthe keeps silence. Will he deign to answer me?

Jeanne follows me with her eyes as though she wanted to learn some art from me. What art?

Good heavens, what can that girl be doing here?

She does not seem made for the celibate life of a desert island. Yet I cannot set up a footman to keep her company. I will not have men's eyes prying about my house, I have had enough of that.

A manservant--that would mean love affairs, squabbles, and troubles; or marriage, and a change of domestics. No, I have a right to peace, and I will secure it. The worst that could happen to me would be to find myself reduced to playing whist with Jeanne and Torp. Well, why not?

Torp spends all her evenings playing patience on the kitchen window-sill. Perhaps she is telling her fortune and wondering whether some good-looking sailor will be wrecked on the sh.o.r.es of her desert island.

Meanwhile Jeanne goes about in silk stockings. This rather astonishes me. Lillie reproved me for the pernicious custom. Are they a real necessity for Jeanne, or does she know the masculine taste so well?

From all the birch trees that stand quivering around the house a golden rain is falling. There is not a breath of wind, but the leaves keep dropping, dropping. This morning I stood on the little balcony and looked out over the forest. I do not know why or wherefore, but such a sense of quiet came over me. I seemed to hear the words: "and behold it was very good." Was it the warm russet tint of the trees or the profound perfume of the woods that induced this calm?

All day long I have been thinking of Malthe, and I feel so glad I have acted as I have done. But he might have answered my letter.

Jeanne has discovered the secret of my hair. She asked permission to dress it for me in the evening when my hair is "awake." She is quite an artist in this line, and I let her occupy herself with it as long as she pleased. She pinned it up, then let it down again; coiled it round my forehead like a turban; twisted it into a Grecian knot; parted and smoothed it down on each side of my head like a hood. She played with it and arranged it a dozen different ways like a bouquet of wild flowers.

My hair is still my pride, although it is losing its gloss and colour.

Jeanne said, by way of consolation, that it was like a wood in late autumn....

I should like to know whether this girl sprang from the gutter, or was the child of poor, honest parents....

"Thousands of women may look at the man they love with their whole soul in their eyes, and the man will remain as unmoved as a stone by the wayside. And then a woman will pa.s.s by who has no soul, but whose artificial smile has a mysterious power to spur the best of men to painful desire...."

One day I found these words underlined in a book left open on my table.

Who left it there, I cannot say; nor whether it was underlined with the intention of hurting my feelings, or merely by chance.

I sit here waiting for my mortal enemy. Will he come gliding in imperceptibly or stand suddenly before me? Will he overcome me, or shall I prove the stronger? I am prepared--but is that sufficient?

Torp is really too romantic! To-day it pleased her to decorate the table with Virginia creeper. Virginia creeper festooned the hanging lamp; Virginia creeper crept over the cloth. Even the joint was decked out with wine-red leaves, until it looked like a ship flying all her flags on the King's birthday. Amid all this pomp and ceremony, I sat all alone, without a human being for whom I might have made myself smart. I, who for the last twenty years, have never even dressed the salad without at least one pair of eyes watching me toss the lettuce as though I was performing some wonderful Indian conjuring trick.

A festal board at which one sits in solitary grandeur is the dreariest thing imaginable.

I rather wish Torp had less "style," as she calls it. Undoubtedly she has lived in large establishments and has picked up some habits and customs from each of them. She is welcome to wait at table in white cotton gloves and to perch a huge silk bow on her hair, which is redolent of the kitchen, but when it comes to tr.i.m.m.i.n.g her poor work-worn nails to the fashionable pyramidal shape--she really becomes tragic.

She "romanticises" everything. I should not be at all surprised if some day she decked her kitchen range with wreaths of roses and hung up works of art between the stewpans.

I am really glad I did not bring Samuel the footman with me. He could not have waited on me better than Jeanne, and at any rate I am free from his eyes, which, in spite of all their respectful looks, always reminded me of a fly-paper full of dead and dying flies.

Jeanne's look has a something gliding and subtle about it that keeps me company like a witty conversation. It is really on her account that I dress myself well. But I cannot converse with her. I should not like to try, and then to be disillusioned.

Men have often a.s.sured me that I was the only woman they could talk with as though I were one of themselves. Personally I never feel at one with menkind. I only understand and admire my own s.e.x.

In reality I think there is more difference between a man and a woman than between an inert stone and a growing plant. I say this ... I who ...

What business is it of mine? We were not really friends. The fact of her having confided in me makes no demands on my feelings. If this thing had happened five years ago, I should have taken it as a rather welcome sensation--nothing more. Or had I read in the paper "On the--inst., of heart disease, or typhoid fever," my peace of mind would not have been disturbed for an hour.

I have purposely refrained from reading the papers lately. Chancing to open one to-day, after a month's complete ignorance of all that had been happening in the world, I saw the following headline: Suicide of a Lady in a Lunatic Asylum.

And now I feel as shaken as though I had taken part in a crime; as though I had had some share in this woman's death.

I am so far to blame that I abandoned her at a moment when it might still have been possible to save her.... But this is a morbid notion! If a person wants "to shuffle off this mortal coil" it is n.o.body's duty to prevent her.

To me, Agatha Ussing's life or death are secondary matters; it is only the circ.u.mstances that trouble me.

Was she mad, or no? Undoubtedly not more insane than the rest of us, but her self-control snapped like a bowstring which is overstrained. She saw--so she said--a grinning death's head behind every smiling face.

Merely a bee in her bonnet! But she was foolish enough to talk about it; and when people laughed at her words with a good-natured contempt, her glance became searching and fixed as though she was trying to convince herself. Such an awful look of terror haunted her eyes, that at her gaze a cold shiver, born of one's own fears and forebodings, ran through one.

She compelled us to realise the things we scarcely dare foresee....

I shall never forget a letter in which she wrote these words in a queer, faltering handwriting:

"If men suspected what took place in a woman's inner life after forty, they would avoid us like the plague, or knock us on the head like mad dogs."

Such a philosophy of life ended in the poor woman being shut up in a madhouse. She ought to have kept it to herself instead of posting it up on the walls of her house. It was quite sufficient as a proof of her insanity.

I cannot think what induced me to visit her in the asylum. Not pure pity. I was prompted rather by that kind of painful curiosity which makes a patient ask to see a limb which has just been amputated. I wanted to look with my own eyes into that shadowy future which Agatha had reached before me.

What did I discover? She had never cared for her husband; on the contrary she had betrayed him with an effrontery that would hardly have been tolerated outside the smart world; yet now she suffered the torments of h.e.l.l from jealousy of her husband. Not of her lovers; their day was over; but of him, because he was the one man she saw. Also because she bore his name and was therefore bound to him.

On every other subject she was perfectly sane. When we were left alone together she said: "The worst of it is that I know my 'madness' will only be temporary. It is a malady incident to my age. One day it will pa.s.s away. One day I shall have got through the inevitable phase. But how does that help me now?"

No, it was no more help to her than the dreadful paint with which she plastered her haggard features.

It was not the least use to her....

Her death is the best thing that could have happened, for her own sake and for those belonging to her. But I cannot take my thoughts off the hours which preceded her end; the time that pa.s.sed between the moment when she decided to commit suicide until she actually carried out her resolve.