The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes Part 16

At last she rose and walked unsteadily forward. He followed her in mute misery. In a moment or two they found themselves on the outskirts of the deserted heath. How beautiful stretched the gorsy rolling country! The sun was setting in great burning furrows of gold and green--a panorama to take one's breath away. The beauty and peace of Nature pa.s.sed into the poet's soul.

"Forgive me, dearest," he begged, taking her hand.

She drew it away sharply. "I cannot forgive you. You have shown yourself in your true colours."

Her unreasonableness angered him again. "What do you mean? I only came in accordance with our long-standing arrangement. You have put me off long enough."

"It is fortunate I did put you off long enough to discover what you are."

He gasped. He thought of all the weary months of waiting, all the long comedy of telegrams and express letters, the far-off flirtations of the cosy corner, the baffled elopement to Paris. "Then you won't marry me?"

"I cannot marry a man I neither love nor respect."

"You don't love me!" Her spontaneous kiss in his sober Oxford study seemed to burn on his angry lips.

"No, I never loved you."

He took her by the arms and turned her round roughly. "Look me in the face and dare to say you have never loved me."

His memory was buzzing with pa.s.sionate phrases from her endless letters. They stung like a swarm of bees. The sunset was like blood-red mist before his eyes.

"I have never loved you," she said obstinately.

"You--!" His grasp on her arms tightened. He shook her.

"You are bruising me," she cried.

His grasp fell from her arms as though they were red-hot. He had become a woman beater.

THE ETERNAL FEMININE

He wore a curious costume, representing the devil carrying off his corpse; but I recognised him at once as the lesser lion of a London evening party last season. Then he had just returned from a Polar expedition, and wore the glacier of civilisation on his breast.

To-night he was among the maddest of the mad, dancing savagely with the Bacchantes of the Latin Quarter at the art students' ball, and some of his fellow-Americans told me that he was the best marine painter in the _atelier_ which he had joined. More they did not pause to tell me, for they were anxious to celebrate this night of nights, when, in that fine spirit of equality born of belonging to two Republics, the artist lowers himself to the level of his model.

The young Arctic explorer, so entirely at home in this more tropical clime, had relapsed into respectability when I spoke to him. He was sitting at a supper-table smoking a cigarette, and gazing somewhat sadly--it seemed to me--at the pandemoniac phantasmagoria of screaming dancers, the glittering cosmopolitan chaos that multiplied itself riotously in the mirrored walls of the great flaring ball-room, where under-dressed women, waving many-coloured paper lanterns, rode on the shoulders of grotesquely clad men prancing to joyous music. For some time he had been trying hard to get some one to take the money for his supper; but the frenzied waiters suspected he was clamouring for something to eat, and would not be cajoled into attention.

Moved by an impulse of mischief, I went up to him and clapped him on his corpse, which he wore behind.

There was a death-mask of papier-mache on the back of his head with appropriate funereal drapings down the body.

"I'll take your money," I said.

He started, and turned his devil upon me. The face was made Mephistophelian, and the front half of him wore scarlet.

"Thanks," he said, laughing roguishly, when he recognised me. "It's darned queer that Paris should be the place where they refuse to take the devil's money."

I suggested smilingly that it was the corpse they fought shy of.

"I guess not," he retorted. "It's dead men's money that keeps this place lively. I wish I'd had the chance of some anyhow; but a rolling stone gathers no moss, they say--not even from graveyards, I suppose."

He spoke disconsolately, in a tone more befitting the back than the front of him, and quite out of accord with the reckless revelry around him.

"Oh! you'll make lots of money with your pictures," I said heartily.

He shook his head. "That's the chap who's going to scoop in the dollars," he said, indicating a brawny Frenchman attired in a blanket that girdled his loins, and black feathers that decorated his hair.

"That fellow's got the touch of Velasquez. You should see the portrait he's doing for the Salon."

"Well, I don't see much art in his costume, anyhow," I retorted.

"Yours is an inspiration of genius."

"Yes; so prophetic, don't you know," he replied modestly. "But you are not the only one who has complimented me. To it I owe the proudest moment of my life--when I shook hands with a European prince." And he laughed with returning merriment.

"Indeed!" I exclaimed. "With which?"

"Ah! I see your admiration for my rig is mounting. No; it wasn't with the Prince of Wales--confess your admiration is going down already.

Come, you shall guess. _Je vous le donne en trois_."

After teasing me a little he told me it was the Kronprinds of Denmark.

"At the _Kunstner Karneval_ in Copenhagen," he explained briefly. His front face had grown sad again.

"Did you study art in Copenhagen?" I inquired.

"Yes, before I joined that expedition," he said. "It was from there I started."

"Yes, of course," I replied. "I remember now. It was a Danish expedition. But what made you chuck up your studies so suddenly?"

"Oh! I don't know. I guess I was just about sick of most things. My stars! Look at that little gypsy-girl dancing the can-can; isn't she fresh? Isn't she wonderful? How awful to think she'll be used up in a year or two!"

"I suppose there was a woman--the eternal feminine," I said, sticking him to the point, for I was more interested in him than in the seething saturnalia, our common sobriety amid which seemed somehow to raise our casual acquaintanceship to the plane of confidential friendship.

"Yes, I suppose there was a woman," he echoed in low tones. "The eternal feminine!" And a strange unfathomable light leapt into his eyes, which he raised slightly towards the gilded ceiling, where countless l.u.s.tres glittered.

"Deceived you, eh?" I said lightly.

His expression changed. "Deceived me, as you say," he murmured, with a faint, sad smile, that made me conjure up a vision of a pa.s.sionate lovely face with cruel eyes.

"Won't you tell me about it?" I asked, as I tendered him a fresh cigarette, for while we spoke his half-smoked one had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from his mouth by a beautiful Maenad, who whirled off puffing it.