WHEN the men left the dining-room they found the women in the patio, or scattered about the corridor. There was no moon, but the clear sky blazed with stars, and colored lanterns swung between the pillars or among the broad leaves of the palm-trees. The girls (the married women were little more) had thrown lace or silken scarves over their heads, and fluttered their fans idly. Clive recalled all he had read of the old time, and imagined himself back among the careless dons and doñas who lived for little but pleasure, and had not a prescience of the complex civilization to enter their Arcadia and rout its very memory.
Miss Belmont was sitting on the corridor, leaning over the low balustrade, her hands lightly clasped. She had draped a white lace mantilla about her head, and looked more Spanish than Miss West. It seemed to Clive that she had a faculty of looking whatever she wished. Someone handed her a guitar. She leaned against the pillar and tuned it absently. Clive walked over and stood staring down on her, his hands in his pockets. She sang, in a rich contralto voice, a Spanish song, whose words he could not understand, but which was the most passionate he had ever heard. Her head was thrown back. She sang frankly to Clive; her face changed with every line.
When it was over Mrs. Cartright breathed a plaintive sigh. “That’s the handsomest song that Helena sings,” she announced.
Helena arose abruptly. “Come,” she said to Clive. “Let us go for a walk.”
He followed her out into the rose-garden. There were no lanterns here, and it looked wilder than by day. The air was very warm and sweet. Helena plucked one of the pink Castilian roses, and fastened back her mantilla with it, exposing a charming ear.
“You will never find any occupation so becoming to your hands,” said Clive dutifully. “Are your feet as perfect?”
“They are something to dream of,” said Miss Belmont flippantly.
They went out on to the terrace. The ocean pounded monotonously, tossing spray high into the air. Clive looked at his companion. Her head was thrown back, her lips were slightly apart. She looked like a woman who held a ball of fire between her finger-tips, and toyed with it caressingly.
“Shall we walk along the cliffs?”
She hesitated a moment. “No; let us go into the forest.”
As they entered they were greeted by a rush of cool perfumed air, the scent of wild lilac and lily, the strong bracing odor of redwood and pine. For a hundred yards or more there was little brush; the great trees stood far apart; but as they left the plateau and ascended a narrow trail, the young redwoods and ferns and lilacs grew thick. It was a hard pull and they said little. He helped her up the almost perpendicular ascent, over fallen trees and rocks, and huge roots springing across the path like pythons, and wondered if they were penetrating wilds hitherto sacred to the red man. Presently the low roar of water greeted them, and pushing their way through a small grove of ferns they came upon the high bank of a broad creek. Beyond and around rose the dark rigid forest, but into the opening the stars flung plentiful light. They revealed the clear rapid rush of water over huge stones and logs that looked like living things, great bunches of maiden-hair springing from dripping boulders, the dark mysterious perspective of the creek.
Clive did not wonder if he would lose his head. He had no intention of keeping it.
“Sit down,” she said, arranging herself on a fallen pine and leaning against a redwood. Clive made himself as comfortable as he could, and she gave him permission to light his pipe.
The lace mantilla, in spite of brush and briar, still clung to her head and shoulders. She looked very lovely and womanly.
“Why did you bring me here?” he asked. “You told me the other night that you would never trust yourself alone with me. This is equivalent to saying that you want me to make love to you. I am quite ready.”
“How brutally abrupt you are. I don’t want you to make love to me. I meant to tell you before we started that I did not expect it. Most women do, I know, and it must be such a relief to a man to be let off occasionally.” She opened and closed her large fan, with a graceful motion of the wrist, and then turned and looked straight at him. “I have never walked alone with a man in this forest before,” she said; “neither at night nor in the daytime. It would have been spoiled for me if I had.”
He pulled at his pipe. “You are a very brave woman. If what you say is true, what is your reason for bringing me here?”
“I felt a desire to do so, and I always obey my whims.”
“You know that my vanity is touched to the quick. But will you tell me why you are doing all you can to turn my head, if you don’t want me to make love to you?”
“I do want you to.”
Clive laid down his pipe.
“No! It would be a pity to let it go out, and it might set my forest on fire. Do let me finish. Women are not like men. A man is fascinated by a woman, and his one impulse is to get at her, and without loss of time; a woman may have the same impulse, but the dislike of being won too quickly, the desire to be sure of herself, above all, the wish to make the man more serious—all these things hold her back. So I don’t want you to make love to me to-night.”
“Which means that I may later?”
“I don’t know. That will depend on a good many things, one of which is whether I break my engagement with Schuyler Van Rhuys or not. I have some slight sense of honor.”
Clive colored hotly, and for the moment his ardor left him.
“Are you thinking of breaking it off?”
“Somewhat.”
“Is it true that you have been engaged fifteen times?”
“No; only eight. I have not yet discovered that there are fifteen interesting men in the world. I have only met nine.”
“You can flatter charmingly. But you say you have a sense of honor. What would you think of a man who deceived and jilted eight girls?”
“It is quite different with a man: women are so helpless. But when a woman has the reputation of being fickle, men know what to expect and propose with their eyes open. As a matter of fact, there is not an atom of the flirt in me; of coquetry, perhaps, for I have an irrepressible desire to please the man who has pleased me. To most men I am clay. I am doing all I can to fascinate you, and I shall continue to do so. I engaged myself to each of those eight men, honestly believing that I could love him—that I had found a companion. If I ever suffered the delusion that any one of them was my grande passion, the delusion was brief. Still, I gave up all idea of that some years ago. With each of those men I set myself honestly to work to get into sympathy, and to love him. Of course, you will understand that I had been more or less fascinated in each case. If a man has not magnetism for me, he might have every other quality given to mortal, and he would not attract my passing interest. Well, I could not find anything in any one of them to get hold of. One cannot love a clever mind, nor personal magnetism, nor a charming trick of manner, nor a kind heart; nor all. There is something else. One hates to be sentimental, but I suppose what those men have lacked is soul. Our men don’t seem to have time for that. It isn’t in the make-up of this country. Perhaps I haven’t it; but, at all events, I have a mental conception of it, and know that it is what I want.”
Clive puffed at his pipe for a moment.
“Are you talking pretty nonsense,” he asked, “or do you mean that?”
She turned her head away angrily.
“You are just like other men,” she said. “I have always been laughed or stared at by every man I have ever had the courage to broach the subject to. I was a fool to speak to you. It is two or three years since I let myself go like this.”
“I am not laughing. It is a very serious subject: the most serious in life. Girls and men and minor poets are always prating of it, but it is a good subject to keep quiet about until you understand it.”
“Don’t you think I understand it?”
“I think you will some time—yes, certainly. And you had better not marry Mr. Van Rhuys.”
“We are so new,” she said, leaning her elbows on her knees, her chin on her clasped hands. “It is as if the Almighty had flung a lot of brilliant particles together, which cohered symmetrically, and so quickly that the spiritual essence of the universe had no time to crawl inside. I stayed here last winter by myself trying to solve the problem of life, but I only addled my brain. I read and read and read, and thought and thought and thought, and in the end I felt sadder, but not wiser.”
“You can’t find it alone.”
She flushed, and he saw her eyes deepen.
“Then Schuyler Van Rhuys turned up, and I concluded that the best thing I could do was to go to New York and cut a dash in the smart set. And he is such a good fellow. He would fight superbly if there were a war; he would carry me safely out of a mob; he would always be kind, and in a manner companionable, for he is well up on affairs and current art and literature. I should like you to know him, for he is one of the best types of American you will ever meet. But—there is nothing else. And I am the stronger of the two. There is nothing as solitary as that.”
“Don’t marry him. You have no excuse—at your age and with your brain. Wait until you find the right man, even if it is a million years hence.”
“Oh, I’ve heard that——” She paused abruptly. “It isn’t like you to talk exaggerated nonsense. What did you mean by that last?”
“What I said.”
Her lip curled. “You don’t mean to say that you believe in a life after this—you.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t see why any belief of mine should interest you.”
“But it does. Tell me!”
“This is not my hour for lecturing. I’d much rather talk about you.”
“Oh, please don’t be unhumanly modest. Go on, you’ve roused my curiosity now, and I will know what you think.”
“Very well. Not being an unreasoning oyster, I believe in a future state. Not in the old-fashioned business, of course; but if a man has ever thought, and if he has had two or three generations of thinking ancestors behind him, he hardly believes that the scheme of creation is so purposeless as to turn people of progressive development loose on one unsatisfactory plane, only.” Clive spoke rapidly when he spoke at length, but paused abruptly every now and again, then resumed without impulsion. “What would be the object? What meaning? Everything else in the scheme of creation has a meaning, leads to something definite.... That is the significance of the lack of soul you search for in a race of men that have not yet had time to develop it—who are yet surely progressing toward such a consummation.... On this earth it takes generations of leisure, of art, of literature, of science, but mainly of individual thinking, to develop the subtle combination which puts man in relation with the divine principle in the universe. The pre-eminent development of England over all other nations is as indisputable as it is natural. What would be the object of such mental and spiritual development if this incomplete life of ours were all? We go on afterward, of course; ascending by slow and laborious evolution, from plane to plane.”
“And about the other thing? You believe that in one existence or another you meet the person who satisfies you in all things—your other part?”
“Perhaps two in a century meet in this existence. But most of us don’t—for centuries. Perhaps millions of centuries. Time is nothing. Your man may not be born here for several centuries—but you will find him some time. And when you do, you and he will become biunial—one in a sense that I believe passes all understanding here—except, perhaps, that of the one or two fortunate ones of each century or so.... The ancients had some such idea when they took Eve out of Adam.”
Helena rose and went to the edge of the creek. She stood there without speaking for ten minutes, kicking stones down into the water. Then she turned about.
“I have always looked upon that sort of thing as poetical rot,” she said; “beneath the consideration of anyone of the higher order of intelligence; probably because in this country, particularly in this State, everything occult, except religion, and sometimes that, is enveloped fifteen times over in vulgar and mercenary fraud. Even well written treatises on such subjects have never interested me—my American intolerance of anything which cannot be demonstrated, I suppose. But if a man like you believes, it makes one think.”
She came and sat close beside him on the log, her gown brushing his feet.
“It is true——” she began.
“This is hardly fair, you know,” said Clive.
“You know as well as I do. If I am not to make love to you—and in a way you have placed me on my honor—go and sit at the other end of the log.”
“Pshaw! After what you have just said, you should be above such things.”
“I am not a spirit yet, please remember. And I am not by any means so highly developed as I ought to be. If you don’t go away I shall take hold of you.”
Helena went back to her former position.
“The Delilah becomes you,” he pursued, “until one realizes that it is not you at all. You look the most womanly of women now that you have forgotten you brought me here to make a fool of me——”
“I did not! Indeed, I did not. I brought you here because I wanted to talk to you in this forest, and because the moment I saw you I recognized something in you that I have found in no other man.”
“You take great risks, Miss Belmont; I should seize and kiss you after that remark, and you know it. To-morrow you will think me an ass because I did not, and I am.”
“I want to talk some more about that other thing. I thought, as I stood by the creek, of our literature. Has it occurred to you that no American author has ever written a genuine all-round love scene? They are either thin or sensual, almost invariably the former. The soul and passion of the older races they have never developed. If a woman writer breaks out wildly sometimes, she merely voices the lack we all feel in this section of the world—in life as well as in literature. That explains why I have tried to care for eight clever and interesting men and turned away chilled.”
“You must love an Englishman,” said Clive, smiling. “If you notice, a good many American women do. An Englishwoman never marries an American. It goes to prove what I said a little while ago: leisure is needed for development; consequently the women of America have developed far more rapidly than the men.”
“Don’t imagine for a moment that I am disparaging my own country,” said Helena hurriedly; “I am the best American in the world—I wouldn’t be anything else; and I like and admire our men for their cleverness and pluck and wonderful go-aheadness. But I will confide to you something that I have never told a living soul—I have such a contempt for the Anglomaniac that I have a horror of being taken for one. It is this: something English in me has survived through five generations. I was brought up in a library of English literature; perhaps that fostered it. As long as I merely read and studied I lived in imagination among English scenes and people—the people of your history and those created by your authors and poets. Something in me responded to every line that I read; I felt at home; singularly enough much more so than when I finally visited England. Until a few years ago I could not force myself to read American literature—with the sole exception of Bret Harte. It is so cold, so slight, so forbidding. It is the piano of letters. Now, of course, I appreciate the mentality in it and the delicate art, the light rapid sketches of passing phases. And it seems to me that before we produce a Shakspere or Byron we shall have to relapse into barbarism, and emerge and develop by slow and sure stages to the condition of England when she evolved her great men. We have gone ahead too fast to ever become great from our present beginnings; we are all brilliant shallows and no depths.”
“You disprove a good deal that you say.”
Helena bent forward, pressing her chin hard into the palm of her hand. She had forgotten that she was a beautiful woman, but even so she was graceful.
“If we Californians have a stronger fibre and richer blood in us than other Americans,” she replied, “it is because we are cruder, savager, close to nature. I do things that no Eastern girl in the same social position would even think of doing, much less dare; but, on the other hand, I have a better chance of getting what I want out of life, for I go straight for it, undeterred by any traditions or scruples. And I have more to give.”
She paused and Clive filled and lit another pipeful of tobacco.
“You take great satisfaction out of that pipe,” she said pettishly.
“It is my only safeguard.”
She laughed and he could see her flush.
“I suppose that English something in me, which has survived, was what sprang so instantly to you—recognition.”
“You have been in England, and you have met many Englishmen.”
“I have liked some of them tremendously, although I never would admit it, and always bullyragged them; that mixture of subtlety and brutality is very attractive. But it was not the same—not by any means.”
“You force me to repeat that you take very great risks.”
“No, no,” she said plaintively. “How could I? I am not what you imagined me. But I must stay here and talk to you.”
They talked until the night turned grey, drifting no more toward personalities. Then Clive looked at his watch.
“Do you know what time it is?”
“I do not in the least care.”
“It is three o’clock. And I can see that you are tired. Come!”
She rose and he jerked her shawl across her chest and threw one end over her shoulder. “What a silly child you are to come out with that bare neck. Aren’t you chilled?”
She smiled up at him as gratefully as if unused to the tender care of man.
They went down the mountain without further conversation; it was very dark and steep; a mis-step might have sent one or both headlong.
The house was without lights; even the lanterns on the corridors had burned out. As they entered the court a man rose from a long chair, yawning and stretching himself. It was Charley Rollins.
“My God, Helena!” he exclaimed, “this is going too far. You know that all of us who know you swear by you, but you can’t do this sort of thing with such women as Mrs. Volney and Harriet Lord in the house. Sitting up all night under a tree in full view of all Del Monte is one thing, but the middle of a forest, where you have never taken a man in the daytime before—for heaven’s sake, my dear child, have a care.”
He ended rather feebly; for Helena had brought down her foot and thrown back her head with flashing eyes. “I shall do exactly what I choose to do,” she cried. “And I hope Amy Volney and Harriet Lord have their heads out of their doors this minute. What business is it of yours, I should like to know? How dare you take me to task? Take Mr. Clive over to the dining-room, and give him some brandy, and then go home; or stay all night if you choose; there are two empty rooms at the corner. Good-night, Mr. Clive.” And without taking further notice of Rollins she crossed over to the opposite corridor and disappeared.