Читать книгу Othmar - Ouida - Страница 5

Table of Contents

'Bulwer has said that none preserve imagination after forty; does anyone preserve illusions after thirty?' said a very pretty woman on her thirty-second birthday.

Her husband chivalrously replied, 'Any one who lives beside you will preserve them until he is a hundred.'

She looked at him dubiously, curiously, with a slight smile which was a little cynical and a little pensive.

'I was never famous for the culture of them,' she said, a little regretfully. 'I do not know why you should have found me so favourable to yours—if you have found me favourable,' she added, after a pause.

As the most eloquent and comprehensive answer he could give, he kissed her hands.

She glanced at her face in the mirror; she was certainly thirty-two years old on this last day of February. She did not like it; no woman likes it. The way is not actually longer because the traveller reads on a milestone the cipher which tells him how many thousands of yards he has traversed and has still to traverse, but the milestone suddenly and distastefully testifies to distance, and increases the sense of fatigue which the road has given.

'If women had all a happy Euthanasia,' she said dreamily, 'when they reach the age I am now, what a good thing it would be for the world. On her thirtieth birthday every woman ought to be put to death; mercifully, poetically, as the girl dies in the "Faute de l'Abbé Mouret," stifled in flowers, but securely put to death.'

'The world,' said Othmar, smiling, 'would certainly be rid of its most perilous enchantresses if your proposal became law.'

'And how much prettier our drawing-rooms would look, and how much effort and heartburning would be spared, if every woman died before she began to "make up!" Do you know last night, in the mirror figure of the cotillion, as the men looked over my shoulder one by one, I forgot all about them. I only looked at my own face; it seemed to me that there was a sort of dimness in it, as there is on a photograph which has been some years done; not age exactly, but the shadow of age which was coming up behind me as the men were coming, and was looking over my shoulder as they looked. Why do you laugh? It was not agreeable to me. I was startled when the voice of Hugo de Rochefort came behind my ear, "Ah, Madame, is it possible? Do you reject us all?" I had quite forgotten where I was, and why they were all waiting. Perhaps Age only meant to say to me, "Do not stay for the cotillions any more!"'

'If Age did, it certainly found no man living to agree with it,' said her companion. 'If you will allow me to say so, I do not recognise you in this unusual phase of self-depreciation. What bee has stung you to-day?'

'Self-knowledge, I suppose. Whatever philosophers may declare to the contrary, it is a very uncomfortable companion.'

'Surely that depends on one's mood?'

'Everything in life depends on one's mood. When I am in another mood I shall say to myself that I have ten years left in which I shall be agreeable to myself and other people; that the young girls do not understand men and do not influence them; that a woman is always young so long as she retains her power to please and to be pleased. There are five hundred sophisms with which I can console myself, but just now I am not in a humour to be consoled by them. I am only sensible of what is very frightful to think of—that a woman is allotted threescore and ten years as well as a man, but that he may enjoy himself to the end of them, if only he keep his health; she comes to the close of her pleasures before her life is half lived. With her, the preface is exquisite, the poem is delightful, but the colophon is of such preposterous and odious length and dulness, that it is out of all proportion to the brevity of the romance.'

He smiled. 'I know that it is always hopeless to convince you when you are in a pessimistic humour.'

'Oh yes; into one's character, as into the characters of others, one gets little flashes of real light here and there, now and then; the moments are not agreeable; they are the flashes of a policeman's lanthorn; while they are shining disguise is not possible.'

'What do you see when they flash upon me?'

'Not very much that I would have changed except your sentimentalities.'

'I am grateful.'

She looked at him curiously. 'Did you doubt it?'

He answered, 'Well, no; not precisely. But with such a character as yours one never knows.'

'Is not that the charm of my character?'

'I think it is the secret of your ascendancy. No one can be wholly, absolutely sure of what you are thinking far down in the recesses of your immense thoughts.'

'That was what people use to say of Louis Napoleon, and there never was a shallower creature. I think I have more profundity than he; but I have not so much as I had. Happiness is not intellectual; it tends to make one content, and content is stupidity; that is why Age looked into the cotillion mirror to-night to remind me that I was getting stupid. No, you are not to pay me any compliments, my dear; after ten years of them they have a certain fadeur, though I am sure you are sincere when you make them.'

She smiled and rose.

This was her thirty-second birthday. That unpleasant and unpoetic fact shadowed life to her for the moment. She was still young enough, and had potent charm enough, of which she was fully conscious, to own it frankly. The world was still at her feet. She could afford to confess that she foresaw the time when it would not be so. True, in a way she would have a certain empire always. She would never altogether lose her power over the minds of men when she should lose it over their passions. But it would be a pale-grey kingdom, a sad shore, with sea-lavender blowing above silvery sand instead of her own Ogygia, with its world of roses and its smiling suns.

Face it with what courage and charm she may, the thought of age must always appal a woman. It takes so much; it offers nothing. True, some of the greatest passions the world has seen have been born after youth had long passed, and have burned on till death with deeper fires of sunset than ever dawn has seen. But a woman is not consoled by that possibility as morning slides past her and the shadows grow long.

Othmar, without other reply, opened the door of her dressing-room, and there entered two small children, a boy and a girl with faces like flowers, and sweet rosy mouths, carrying a large gilded basket between them, filled with white lilac and gardenia. They came up to her hand in hand, not very certain upon their feet or in their speech, and bowed their little golden heads with pretty reverence, and stammered together with birdlike voices, 'Bonne fête, maman.'

'Here are your eternal courtiers,' said their father. 'Time will make no difference in their worship of you.'

She smiled again, and took them together on her lap, and kissed them with tenderness, her hand playing with their soft, light curls.

But she said perversely, and a little sadly: 'My dear, how can one tell? That is only a phrase also. One never knows what children may become. In fifteen or twenty years' time Otho may send me a sommation respectueuse, because he wants to marry a circus-rider, and Xenia may hate me because I make her accept a grand-duke whilst she is in love with an attaché. One never can tell. They are fond of me now, certainly.'

'They will as certainly love you always.'

'What an optimist you have grown! It is flattering to me,' she answered, as she caressed the children and gave them some crystals of sugar. 'I cannot help seeing things as they are; you know I never could help it; and the relations of parents with their children, which are pretty and idyllic to begin with, are often apt to alter to very grim prose as time goes on, and separate interests arise to part them. Why does no sovereign who ever lived like his or her immediate heir? Why is the crown prince always arrayed against the crown?'

'I am very fond of my crown prince,' said Othmar, as he drew his young son to him.

'He is not a crown prince yet; he is a baby. Wait until he does want to marry that circus-rider, or until you see him take an opposite side in European politics to yourself. It is when the distinct Ego asserts itself in your child, in opposition to your own entity, that the separation begins and the antagonism rises.'

'You will always analyse so mercilessly!'

'I can never be content with the world's commonplaces and sophisms, if you mean that. And on this day, when I am thirty-two years old, no persuasion on earth would convince me that, when the time should come which will make me twice that age, I shall be anything but an unhappy woman. It will not console me in the least that my grandchildren may wish me bonne fête.'

'I wonder if you are serious?'

'I was never more so, I assure you. Life is a series of losses; but a woman's losses outweigh a man's by a million. From the first little line she sees between her eyebrows or about her mouth, existence is nothing but a dégringolade for her. To say that she is compensated for the loss of her empire by becoming a grandmother is wholly absurd.'

'You always allot such a small space to the affections!'

'Madame de Sévigné allotted the largest that any clever woman ever did or could. Do you think the chill philosophies of Madame de Grignan rewarded her? Myself, je n'ai pas cette bosse là. You know it very well. I am fond of these children, because they are yours; but I do not think them in the least a compensation for growing old!'

'As if years mattered to a woman of your wit!'

She smiled.

'That is so like a man's clumsy idea of consolation. True, wit, in theory, is very much admired, but, practically, nobody cares much about it, unless it comes out of a handsome mouth. Men prefer white shoulders. And——'

'And your shoulders?' said Othmar, with a smile. 'Are they not of snow, and fit for Venus' self?'

'Oh, they are white as yet,' she cried indifferently.

'For myself,' he added, 'I shall be delighted when the faces of no aspirants are reflected in your cotillion mirror. I detest all those men——'

'Oh no, you do not,' she said tranquilly. 'If there were none of them you would say to yourself, "Really, she is very much aged." A man's love is always so made up of pride and prejudice that if no one envy him what he has he soon ceases to value it. On the whole, men go much more by the opinion of the world than women do. A woman, if she take a fancy to a cripple, or a hunchback, or a crétin, makes herself ridiculous over him, without any regard to how she may be laughed at; but a man is always thinking of what they say at the clubs. In his most headlong follies he is always nervous about the opinion of the galerie.'

'You always think us such fools,' said Othmar, with some ill humour.

'Oh, no,' she said again with a smile, 'only I think you are, in a way, more conscientious than we are, and in another way more nervous. A woman, when she has a fancy for a thing, would burn down half the world to get at it; a man would hesitate to sacrifice so many cities and people, and would also be preoccupied with the idea that he would be badly placed in history for his exploit.'

'Then he is no true lover.'

'Are there any true lovers?'

'I think you should be the last woman who could doubt it.'

'You want a compliment, but I shall not give it you. Or if you mean the others—well, perhaps they have been, or they are, true enough; but then that is only because a passion for me has always been thought d'un chic incroyable. I should believe in the love of a man if I were a milkmaid, but when to be in love with one is a mere fashion like the height of your wheels or the shape of your mail, one may question its single-mindedness. I have never, either, observed that the most devoted of them eat their dinner less regularly, or smoke less often when they were unhappy. Even you, yourself, when you were wasting with despair, did not refuse to dine or smoke.'

'Do not speak of that time,' said Othmar, with a look of distress. 'As for your complaint against us, we are mere machines in a great deal; the machine goes on mechanically in its daily exercise for its daily necessities; that movement of mechanism has nothing to do with the suffering of the soul. Nothing can be more unjust than to confuse the one with the other. You say a man cannot be a poet or a lover because he eats a truffled beefsteak. I say it is the mechanical part of him which eats the beefsteak, and eating it impairs neither his sensitive nerves nor his passions. As for smoking, it is a consolation because it is a sedative.'

'Admirably reasoned,' said Nadine, 'but you do not convince me. I am certain that the conventionalities and habits of modern life do diminish the forces of passion. When Tityæus was forsaken by Musidora, and had only the primæval woods, the fons sylvæ, the mountain solitudes, and the silent sheep, his grief could reign over him undivided; but nowadays, when he dines out every evening, is made to laugh whether he will or no, finds a hundred engagements waiting for every hour, and has the babble of the world eternally in his ear, his remembrance is of a very attenuated sort. I do not say that he suffers nothing, but I do say that he often forgets that he suffers.'

'I am not at all sure of that,' said Othmar, 'and what is more, I am almost disposed to think that the effort to affect indifference which Society compels, is much more suffering than the delightful permission which Nature gave your shepherd to be as miserable as he pleased, unchecked and unremarked. The world may cause the most excruciating torture to a man who is compelled to be in it and of it, while some great preoccupation makes every thought except one alien and hateful.'

'If the man have a great nature, perhaps. But how many have?'

'As many, or as few, as in the days of the shepherds. The ordinary Tityæus, I imagine, did not weep long for the ordinary Musidora, but soon tuned his pipe afresh and put new ribbons on his crook.'

'I do not quite think that; I think all feelings were stronger, warmer, deeper, more concentrated in the earlier ages of the world. Nowadays we contrive to make everything absurd—our heroes, our poets, our sorrows, our loves, all are dwarfed by our treatment of them. Even death itself we have managed to make ridiculous, and strip of all its majesty. Ulysses' self would have looked grotesque if buried with the civil rites which attended Gambetta to his tomb, or the religious rites which mocked the prince of mockers, Disraeli. Whenever I die, I hope you will let me be carried by young children clad in white to some green grave in your own woods, where only a stag will come or a pretty hare. Will you be unconventional enough for that? Or will you be afraid of the French municipalities and the Russian popes? I should have courage to execute your last wishes so, but whether you will have the courage to execute mine——Men are so much more timid than women!'

'Do not talk of death!' said Othmar, with a passing shudder.

'Did I not say that men are cowards?'

'Not for ourselves; for those we love we are.'

She smiled a little contemptuously, a little sadly.

'Ah, my dear! who knows! Death would not be so dreadful to me as if I lived to incur Horace's reproach to Lyce. What is it? "Fis anus, et tamen," &c., &c., though that reproach perhaps belongs to a more unsophisticated age than our own. Nowadays the perruquiers let nobody get grey, and there are a great many grandmothers, even great-grandmothers, who are entirely charming—more charming than the girls who are just out.'

'I do not think you will ever go to the perruquiers, but you will always be charming, and you will never be old.'

'One would think you were my lover!'

'Why will you never believe that I am still so?'

'Because I do not believe in any miracles; I go to no Loretto. Love is a volatile precipitate, and marriage a solvent in which it disappears. If we are exceptions to that rule of chemistry and life, we are so extraordinarily exceptional that fate must have some dreadful punishment in store for us.'

'Or some exceptional reward.'

'Is not virtue always punished!' she said, with her enigmatical smile. 'You are a very handsome man, and have been the most poetic of lovers. But in the nature of things I grow used to your good looks, and in the nature of things you do not make love to me any longer. Love may be the most delightful thing in the world, but it cannot resist the pressure of daily intercourse. It is doomed when it has to look over a common visiting list, and scold the same house-steward about the weekly expenditure. "Ah—ouiche, Madame!" said one of the peasants at Amyôt to me once, "where is love when you dip two spoons in one soup-pot?—you only quarrel about the onions." That is always the fault of marriage. It is always putting two spoons in one pot. Whether it is an earthen pitcher or a Cellini vase does not make the least difference. Poor love runs away from the clash of the spoons.'

Othmar laughed, but he was irritated. 'I should be miserable if I believed you were in earnest,' he said impatiently. 'But I know you would sacrifice your own life to an epigram.'

'I am entirely in earnest,' she replied. 'But if you do not believe me that shows that you are a less changeable man than most, or I a wiser woman. Ah, my dear,' she added, with a smile and a sigh, 'when men do not admire me any longer then you will not admire me either, I imagine; I wonder you do as it is—you see so much of me!'

'I shall adore you all my life,' said Othmar, with almost as much fervour as when he had been the most impassioned and the most hopeless of her lovers.

'You fancy so; and that is very pretty in you, after so many years; but it does not follow that you will think so still in twelve months' time,' said his wife, with the smile of her incurable scepticism upon her lips. 'And do not insist on it too much. Things which are insisted on too much have a knack of making themselves tiresome, and you know of old that repetition has no great charm for me, and say what you will you cannot prevent me from feeling that very soon I shall grow old!'

She rose and looked over her shoulder at the silver-framed mirror with its three glasses, showing her profile to her as she turned.

'I could not brave the sunrise after a ball now,' she thought, with a little pang.

'Has not a poet said,' she added aloud:

I fear

Life's many changes; not Death's changelessness?'

There was a touch of graver sadness in the tone with which she quoted the line of verse, which forbade reply either by persiflage or compliment.

Othmar kissed her hand with almost the same emotion as when he had declared to her a passion hopeless, and therefore for the time changeless; and he remained mute.

'The same poet says:

Love's words are weak, but not Love's silences,'

she added, with a smile. 'Well, I will believe you——as yet.'

She had in nowise resigned the power of, and the diversion afforded her by, what in a lesser person would have been called endless flirtation. She amused herself constantly with the follies of men and their subjugation.

'If you do not make yourself attractive to others, the man to whom you care to be attractive will soon not find you so,' she was wont to say. 'Those women who make themselves a statue of fidelity, like the Queen in the "Winter's Tale," will soon be left alone on their pedestals. Be as faithful as you please, but show him that you have every temptation and opportunity to be unfaithful if you did please.'

It was on those lines that she had traced her conduct, and whilst her world knew that she was unaltered in coquetry, if coquetry her languid charm and domination could be called, it also saw that she was equally unaltered in profound and universal indifference to all those whom she subjugated. Othmar, as he said, would have preferred that she should subjugate none. But she frankly told him that it was of no use to wish for subversion of the laws of nature. 'I am as nature made me,' she said once to him. 'If you did not like the way I was made, why did you not leave me alone? You had plenty of time to study me. I am like Disraeli, I like power. Now the only power possible to a woman is that which she possesses over men. If men were more interesting, the power would be more interesting too. But then it is not our fault. It is perhaps the fault of the millions of stupid women who swallow up the occasional originality of men as sand swallows up the bits of agate and cornelian on the shore. It is the fashion to say that it is the wicked, clever women who hurt men. That is not the case; it is the good silly ones who make of life the sahara of commonplaces and of blunders which it is. Talent will at least always understand; blameless stupidity understands nothing.'

She was somewhat more, rather than less, of a charmeuse than she had been. It was so natural to her to charm the lives of men that she could have as soon ceased to breathe as to cease to use her power over them. There were times when Othmar grew irritated and jealous, but she was unmoved by his anger.

'It is a much greater compliment to you that men should admire me,' she said to him, 'and it would look supremely absurd if I lapsed into a bonne bourgeoise, and always went everywhere arm-in-arm with you. I should not know myself. You would not know me. Be content. You are aware that I think very little about any one of them; they are none of them so interesting as you used to be. But I must have them about me. They are like my fans; I never scarcely use a fan or look at one, but still a fan is indispensable; it is a part of one's toilette.'

Othmar, who retained for her much of the imperious and perfervid passion which he had had as a lover, resigned himself with a bad grace to her arguments. Something of the old tyrannical feeling with which he would once have liked to bear her out of sight and hearing of the world for ever still moved in him at times, though he had grown diffident of displaying it, having grown afraid of her delicate ironies.

'It is so good for him,' she said to herself; 'that sort of irritation and jealousy keeps his affections and his admirations alive: they are not allowed to go to sleep, as both have a knack of going to sleep in marriage. Anything is less dangerous than stagnant water. If a man be not made jealous he must drift imperceptibly into indifference. Monotony is like a calm at sea; everyone yawns, and in time even a shark would be welcomed as a delightful interruption. To avoid sameness is the first requisite for the endurance of love. If he love me as much as he did nine years ago—and I think he does—it is only because at the bottom of his heart he never feels absolutely sure of me. He has always a faint unacknowledged sense that I may any day do something entirely unexpected by him; may even fly away, as a bird does, off a bough which it has tired of. I am like a book of alchemy to him, of which he has mastered all the secrets save just one or two lines, but in which those lines always remain in unintelligible abracadabra to perplex and interest him. He will never tire of the book till he thinks he can decipher those lines. It is a mistake to suppose that men are only allured by their senses; there is an intellectual mystery which fascinates them, and which is not so easily exhausted. All men are amused by me, all men are more or less attracted by me. I should not wish my husband, alone of all men, to become tired of me. Of course it is very difficult to prevent it when he is so used to me, but I think it is possible.'

A feeble woman, a dull woman, a woman of that kind of self-complacency which goes with stupidity, would not have allowed so much even in her own thoughts; but she, who was deemed the vainest of her kind, had no such vanity wherewith to deceive herself. Her high intelligence and her unerring penetration were glasses forever turned upon herself no less than upon others. Othmar was at times surprised and almost irritated that she left him so often to go on her own visits or travels, or sent him alone upon his. But she knew very well what she did.

'Frequent absences are like those pauses in the music which in French we call silences, and in German Pausen,' she said to herself. 'They make us care for the music more than we should do if it were always on our ear. Monotony is the most terrible enemy that affection or enjoyment ever has. Unfortunately, most women are so eternally monotonous that they can never understand why men are not as pleased with the defect as they are themselves. Lord Beaconsfield was not an apostle of love, but he was a shrewd observer of mankind, and I always think that he suggested the most admirable phase of modern love possible, when he depicted two people who were fond of one another as going their different ways every evening to different houses, and meeting again to talk it all over with champagne and chicken at dawn. If people are always together in the same places, what have they left to tell one another in their own house? Myself, I don't like either champagne or chicken, but that is a mere matter of detail. You can say, Rhine wine and green oysters, or yellow tea and Russian cigarettes. It is, no doubt, only another form of vanity; but I wish our lives not to break down and drift away in little bits of wreck wood, as most peoples' lives do. It is not goodness in me; it is only amour propre.'

She had more sympathy for him than she would in other years have supposed herself capable of feeling, but with her regard for him there was mingled that habit of analysis which was so inveterate in her, and that indulgence to his weaknesses which arose from her condescending comprehension of them. She, as yet, made the preservation of his admiration her study, but in her study there was blended the sense of amusement and disdain, which always came to her before the inconsistencies and the unwisdom of men. She loved him perhaps; but she never failed to weigh him accurately. To Yseulte, he had been as a lord and a god; to her he was dearer than other men, but not more imposing. Even when the first winelike fumes of awakened passion had touched her, she had been clear of judgment and unerring in vision. She had said to herself: 'He looked larger than others once, through the mists of my preference, but he is not so really.'