CHAPTER XVIII.
“THE REAL TRAGEDY OF LIFE.”
MARLOWE had been held above his normal self, not by Emily, but by an exalting love for her. Except in occasional momentary moods of exuberant animalism, he had not been low and coarse. Whatever else might be said of the love affairs whose tombstones strewed his past, it could not be said that they were degrading to the parties at interest. But there was in his mind a wide remove between all the others and Emily. His love for her was as far above him as her love for him after she ceased to respect him had been beneath her. And her courage and independence came to her rescue none too soon. He could not much longer have persisted in a state so unnatural to his character and habit. Indeed it was unconsciously the desire to get her where he could gradually lead her down to his fixed and unchangeable level, that forced him on to join that disastrous issue.
As he journeyed toward London the next night, he was industriously preparing to eject love for her by a vigorous campaign of consolation. Vanity had never ceased to rule him. It had tolerated love so long as love seemed to be coöperating with it. It now resumed unchecked sway.
Before he went to Paris he was much stirred by Victoria’s beauty. He thought that fear of her becoming a menace to his loyalty had caused him to appeal to Emily. And naturally he now turned toward Victoria, and made ready for a deliberately reckless infatuation. He plunged the very afternoon of his return to London, and he was soon succeeding beyond the bounds which his judgment had set in the planning. This triumph over a humiliating defeat was won by many and powerful allies—resentment against Emily for her wounds to his vanity, craving for consolation, a vigorous and passionate imagination, the desire to show his superiority over the fascinating Kilboggan, and, strongest of all, Victoria’s fame and extraordinary physical charms. If Emily could have looked into his mind two weeks after he left her, she would have been much chagrined, and would no doubt have fallen into the error of fancying that his love had not been genuine and, for him, deep.
He erected Victoria into an idol, put his good sense out of commission, fell down and worshipped. He found her a reincarnation of some wonderful Greek woman who had inspired the sculptors of Pericles. He wrote her burning letters. When he was with her he gave her no opportunity to show him whether she was wise or silly, deep or shallow, intelligent or stupid. When she did speak he heard, not her words, but only the vibrations of that voice which had made her the success of the season—the voice that entranced all and soon seemed to him to strike the chord to which every fibre of his every nerve responded. He dreamed of those gold braids, unwound and showering about those strange, lean, maddening shoulders and arms of hers.
In that mood, experience, insight into the ways and motives of women went for no more than in any other mood of any other mode of love. He knew that he was in a delirium, incapable of reason or judgment. But he had no desire to abate, perhaps destroy, his pleasure by sobering and steadying himself.
He convinced himself that Kilboggan was an unsatisfied admirer of Victoria. When Kilboggan left her to marry the rich wife his mother had at last found for him, he believed that the “nobleman” had been driven away by Victoria because she feared her beloved Marlowe disapproved of him. And when he found that Victoria would never be his until they should marry, he began to cast about to free himself. After drafting and discarding many letters, and just when he was in despair—“It’s impossible even to begin right”—he had what seemed to him an inspiration. “The telegraph! One does not have to begin or end a telegram; and it can be abrupt without jar, and terse without baldness.” He sent away his very first effort:
EMILY BROMFIELD,
—Boulevard Haussmann, Paris.
Will you consent to quiet Dakota divorce on ground of incompatibility. No danger publicity. You will not need leave Paris or take any trouble whatever. Please telegraph answer to—Dover Street, Piccadilly.
MARLOWE.
He was so bent upon his plan that not until he had handed in the telegram did the other side of what he was doing come forcibly to him. With a sudden explosion there were flung to the surface of his mind from deep down where Emily was uneasily buried, a mass of memories, longings, hopes, remnants of tenderness and love, regrets, remorse. He had no definite impulse to recall the telegram but, as he went out into the thronged and choked Strand, he forgot where he was and let the crowd bump and thump and drift him into a doorway; and he stood there, not thinking, but feeling—forlorn, acutely sensitive of the loneliness and futility of life.
“I was just going to ask you to join me at luncheon,” said a man at his side—Blackwell, an old acquaintance. “But if you feel as you look, I prefer my own thoughts.”
“I was thinking of a paragraph I read in Figaro this morning,” said Marlowe. “It went on to say that the real tragedy of life is not the fall of splendid fortunes, nor the death of those who are beloved, nor any other of the obvious calamities, but the petty, inglorious endings of friendships and loves that have seemed eternal.”
When Marlowe went to his lodgings after luncheon, he found Emily’s answer: “Certainly, and I know I can trust you completely.”
He expected a note from her, but none came. He cabled for leave of absence and in the following week sailed for New York. He “established a residence” one morning at Petersville, an obscure county seat in a remote corner of South Dakota, engaged a lawyer for himself and another for Emily in the afternoon, and in the evening set out for New York. At the end of three months, spent in New York, he returned to his “residence”—a bedroom in Petersville. The case was called the afternoon of his arrival. Emily “put in an appearance” through her lawyer, and he submitted to the court a letter from her in which she authorised him to act for her, and declared that she would never return to her husband. After a trial which lasted a minute and three-quarters—consumed in reading Emily’s letter and in Marlowe’s testimony—the divorce was granted. The only publicity was the never-read record of the Petersville court.
Marlowe reappeared in London after an absence of three months and three weeks. When Victoria completed her tour of the provinces, they were married and went down to the South Coast for the honeymoon.
The climax of a series of thunderclaps in revelation of Victoria as an intimate personality came at breakfast the next morning. She was more beautiful than he had ever seen her, and her voice had its same searching vibrations. But he could think of neither as he watched her “tackle”—the only word which seemed to him descriptive—three enormous mutton chops in rapid succession. He noted each time her long white teeth closed upon a mouthful of chop and potato; and as she chewed with now one cheek and now the other distended and with her glorious eyes bright like a feeding beast’s, he repeated to himself again and again: “My God, what have I done?”—not tragically, but with a keen sense of his own absurdity. He turned away from her and stood looking out across the channel toward France—toward Emily.
“What shall I do?” he said to himself. “What shall I do?”
He was compelled to admit that she was not in the least to blame. She had made no pretences to him. She had simply accepted what he cast at her feet, what he fell on his knees to beg her to take. She had not deceived him. Her hair, her teeth—what greedy, gluttonous teeth!—her long, slender form, her voice, all were precisely as they had promised. He went over their conversations. He remembered much that she had said—brief commonplaces, phrases which revealed her, but which he thought wonderful as they came to his entranced ears upon that shimmering stream of sound. Not an idea! Not an intelligent thought except those repeated—with full credit—from the conversation of others.
“Fool! Fool!” he said to himself. “I am the most ridiculous of men. If I tried to speak, I should certainly bray.”
He turned and looked at her as she sat with her back toward him. Her hair was caught up loosely, coil on coil of dull gold. It just revealed the nape of her neck above the lace of her dressing-gown. “Yes, it is a beautiful neck! She is a beautiful woman.” Yet the thought that that beauty was his, thrust at him like the red-hot fork of a teasing devil. “It is what I deserve,” he said. “But that makes it the more exasperating. What shall I do?”
“Why are you so quiet, sweetheart?” she said, throwing her napkin on the table. “Come here and kiss me and say some of those pretty things. You Americans do have a queer accent. But you know how to make love cleverly. No wonder you caught poor, foolish me.”
“My wife,” he thought. “Good God, what have I done? It must be a ghastly dream.” But he crossed the room and sat opposite her without looking at her. “I’m not very fit this morning,” he said.
“I thought you weren’t.” Her spell-casting voice was in the proper stage-tone for sympathy. “I saw that you didn’t eat.”
“Eat!” He shuddered and closed his eyes to prevent her seeing the sullen fury which blazed there. He was instantly ashamed of himself. Only—if she would avoid reminding him of the chops and potato disappearing behind that gleaming screen of ivory. He was sitting on a little sofa. She sat beside him and drew his head down upon her shoulder. She let her long, cool fingers slide slowly back and forth across his forehead.
“I do love you.” There was a ring of reality in her tone beneath the staginess. “We are going to be very, very happy. You are so different from Englishmen. And I’m afraid you’ll weary of your stupid English wife. I’m not a bit clever, you know, like the American women.”
He was unequal to a hypocritical protest in words, so he patted her reassuringly on the arm. He was less depressed now that she had stopped eating and was at her best. He rose and with ashamed self-reproach kissed her hair. “I shall try to make you not repent your bargain,” he said, with intent to conceal the deeper meaning of his remark. “But I must send off some telegrams. Then we’ll go for a drive. I need the air.”
He liked her still better as she came down in a becoming costume; he particularly liked the agitation her appearance created in the lounging rooms. They got through the day well, and after a dinner with two interesting men—a dinner at which he drank far more than usual—he felt temporarily reconciled to his fate.
But at the end of a week, in which he had so managed it that they were alone as little as possible he had not one illusion left. He did not love her. She did not attract him. She was tiresome through and through. Instead of giving life a new meaning and him a new impetus, she was an added burden, another source of irritation. He admitted to himself that he had been tricked by his senses, as a boy of twenty might have been. He felt like a professional detective who has yielded to a familiar swindling game.
She had grown swiftly fonder of him, won by his mental superiority, by his gentleness exaggerated in his anxiety not basely to make her suffer for his folly. “He’s a real gentleman,” she thought. “His manners are not pretence. I’ve done much better than I fancied.” And she began further to try his nerves by a dog-like obedience. She would not put on a dress without first consulting him. She had no will but his in any way—except one. She insisted upon ordering her own meals. There she did not care what he thought.
Once they were back in London, his chain became invisible and galled him only in imagination. She had an exacting profession, and so had he. When they were together, they would talk about her work, and, as he was interested in it and intelligent about it and she docile and receptive, he was content. While she was of no direct use to him, he found that she was of great indirect use. He worked more steadily, more ambitiously. The ideal woman, which had always been distracting and time-wasting, ceased to have any part in his life.
He turned his attention to play-writing and play-carpentry. He became a connoisseur of food and drink, a dabbler in old furniture and tapestries. He did not regret the event of his first venture in marriage and only venture in love. “As it is, it’s a perfect gem,” he finally came to sum the matter up, “a completed work of art. If I’d had my way, still it must have ended some time, and not so artistically or so comfortably.” When he reflected thus, his waist-line was slowly going.