AFTER that night Lady Holme began to do something she had never done before—to idealise her husband. Hitherto she had loved him without weaving pretty fancies round him, loved him crudely for his strength, his animalism, his powerful egoism and imperturbable self-satisfaction. She had loved him almost as a savage woman might love, though without her sense of slavery. Now a change came over her. She thought of Fritz in a different way, the new Fritz, the Fritz who was a believer in the angel. It seemed to her that he could be kept faithful most easily, most surely, by such an appeal as Robin Pierce would have loved. She had sought to rouse, to play upon the instincts of the primitive man. She had not gone very far, it is true, but her methods had been common, ordinary. She had undervalued Fritz’s nature. That was what she felt now. He had behaved badly to her, had wronged her, but he had believed in her very much. She resolved to make his belief more intense. An expression on his face—only that—had wrought a vital change in her feeling towards him, her conception of him. She ranged him henceforth with Sir Donald, with Robin Pierce. He stood among the believers in the angel.
She called upon the angel passionately, feverishly.
There was strength in Lady Holme’s character, and not merely strength of temper. When she was roused, confident, she could be resolute, persistent; could shut her eyes to side issues and go onward looking straight before her. Now she went onward and she felt a new force within her, a force that would not condescend to pettiness, to any groping in the mud.
Lord Holme was puzzled. He felt the change in his wife, but did not understand it. Since the fracas with Leo Ulford their relations had slightly altered. Vaguely, confusedly, he was conscious of being pitied, yes, surely pitied by his wife. She shed a faint compassion, like a light cloud, over the glory of his wrongdoing. And the glory was abated. He felt a little doubtful of himself, almost as a son feels sometimes in the presence of his mother. For the first time he began to think of himself, now and then, as the inferior of his wife, began even, now and then, to think of man as the inferior of woman—in certain ways. Such a state of mind was very novel in him. He stared at it as a baby stares at its toes, with round amazement, inwardly saying, “Is this phenomenon part of me?”
There was a new gentleness in Viola, a new tenderness. Both put him—as one lifted and dropped—a step below her. He pulled his bronze moustache over it with vigour.
His wife showed no desire to control his proceedings, to know what he was about. When she spoke of Miss Schley she spoke kindly, sympathetically, but with a dainty, delicate pity, as one who secretly murmurs, “If she had only had a chance!” Lord Holme began to think it a sad thing that she had not had a chance. The mere thought sent the American a step down from her throne. She stood below him now, as he stood below Viola. It seemed to him that there was less resemblance between his wife and Miss Schley than he had fancied. He even said so to Lady Holme. The angel smiled. Somebody else in her smiled too. Once he remarked to the angel, a propos de bottes, “We men are awful brutes sometimes.” Then he paused. As she said nothing, only looked very kind, he added, “I’ll bet you think so, Vi?”
It sounded like a question, but she preferred to give no answer, and he walked away shaking his head over the brutishness of men.
The believers in the angel naturally welcomed the development in Lady Holme and the unbelievers laughed at it, especially those who had been at Arkell House and those who had been influenced by Pimpernel Schley’s clever imitation. One night at the opera, when Tannhauser was being given, Mr. Bry said of it, “I seem to hear the voice of Venus raised in the prayer of Elizabeth.” Mrs. Wolfstein lifted large eyebrows over it, and remarked to Henry, in exceptionally guttural German:
“If this goes on Pimpernel’s imitation will soon be completely out of date.”
To be out of date—in Mrs. Wolfstein’s opinion—was to be irremediably damned. Lady Cardington, Sir Donald Ulford, and one or two others began to feel as if their dream took form and stepped out of the mystic realm towards the light of day. Sir Donald seemed specially moved by the change. It was almost as if something within him blossomed, warmed by the breath of spring.
Lady Holme wondered whether he knew of the fight between her husband and his son. She dared not ask him and he only mentioned Leo once. Then he said that Leo had gone down to his wife’s country place in Hertfordshire. Lady Holme could not tell by his intonation whether he had guessed that there was a special reason for this departure. She was glad Leo had gone. The developing angel did not want to meet the man who had suffered from the siren’s common conduct. Leo was not worth much. She knew that. But she realised now the meanness of having used him merely as a weapon against Fritz, and not only the meanness, but the vulgarity of the action. There were moments in which she was fully conscious that, despite her rank, she had not endured unsmirched close contact with the rampant commonness of London.
One of the last great events of the season was to be a charity concert, got up by a Royal Princess in connection with a committee of well-known women to start a club for soldiers and sailors. Various amateurs and professionals were asked to take part in it, among them Lady Holme and Miss Schley. The latter had already accepted the invitation when Lady Holme received the Royal request, which was made viva voce and was followed by a statement about the composition of the programme, in which “that clever Miss Schley” was named.
Lady Holme hesitated. She had not met the American for some time and did not wish to meet her. Since she had bathed her husband’s wound she knew—she could not have told how—that Miss Schley’s power over him had lessened. She did not know what had happened between them. She did not know that anything had happened. And, as part of this new effort of hers, she had had the strength to beat down the vehement, the terrible curiosity—cold steel and fire combined—that is a part of jealousy. That curiosity, she told herself, belonged to the siren, not to the angel. But at this Royal request her temper waked, and with it many other children of her temperament. It was as if she had driven them into a dark cave and had rolled a great stone to the cave’s mouth. Now the stone was pushed back, and in the darkness she heard them stirring, whispering, preparing to come forth.
The Royal lady looked slightly surprised. She coughed and glanced at a watch she wore at her side.
“I shall be delighted to do anything, ma’am,” Lady Holme said quickly.
When she received the programme she found that her two songs came immediately after “Some Imitations” by Miss Pimpernel Schley.
She stood for a moment with the programme in her hand.
“Some Imitations”; there was a certain crudeness about the statement, a crudeness and an indefiniteness combined. Who were to be the victims? At this moment, perhaps, they were being studied. Was she to be pilloried again as she had been pilloried that night at the British Theatre? The calm malice of the American was capable of any impudent act. It seemed to Lady Holme that she had perhaps been very foolish in promising to appear in the same programme with Miss Schley. Was it by accident that their names were put together? Lady Holme did not know who had arranged the order of the performances, but it occurred to her that there was attraction to the public in the contiguity, and that probably it was a matter of design. No other two women had been discussed and compared, smiled over and whispered about that season by Society as she and Miss Schley had been.
For a moment, while she looked at the programme, she thought of the strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider’s web of apparently frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her world was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that was compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What freedom was there for her and women like her, what reality of freedom? Even beauty, birth, money were gossamer to hold the fly. For they concentrated the gaze of those terrible watchful eyes which govern lives, dominating actions, even dominating thoughts.
She moved, had always moved, in a maze of complications. She saw them tiny yet intense, like ants in their hill. They stirred minds, hearts, as the ants stirred twigs, leaves, blossoms, and carried them to the hill for their own purposes. In this maze free will was surely lost. The beautiful woman of the world seems to the world to be a dominant being, to be imposing the yoke of her will on those around her. But is she anything but a slave?
Why were she and Miss Schley enemies? Why had they been enemies from the moment they met? There was perhaps a reason for their hostility now, a reason in Fritz. But at the beginning what reason had there been? Civilisation manufactures reasons as the spider manufactures threads, because it is the deadly enemy of peace—manufactures reasons for all those thoughts and actions which are destructive of inward and exterior peace.
For a moment it seemed to Lady Holme as if she and the American were merely victims of the morbid conditions amid which they lived; conditions which caused the natural vanity of women to become a destroying fever, the natural striving of women to please a venomous battle, the natural desire of women to be loved a fracas, in which clothes were the armour, modes of hair-dressing, manicure, perfumes, dyes, powder-puffs the weapons.
What a tremendous, noisy nothingness it was, this state of being! How could an angel be natural in it,—be an angel at all?
She laid down the programme and sighed. She felt a vague yet violent desire for release, for a fierce change, for something that would brush away the spider’s web and set free her wings. Yet where would she fly? She did not know; probably against a window-pane. And the change would never come. She and Fritz—what could they ever be but a successful couple known in a certain world and never moving beyond its orbit?
Perhaps for the first time the longing that she had often expressed in her singing, obedient to poet and composer, invaded her own soul. Without music she was what with music she had often seemed to be—a creature of wayward and romantic desires, a yearning spirit, a soaring flame.
At that moment she could have sung better than she had ever sung.
On the programme the names of her songs did not appear. They were represented by the letters A and B. She had not decided yet what she would sing. But now, moved by feeling to the longing for some action in which she might express it, she resolved to sing something in which she could at least flutter the wings she longed to free, something in which the angel could lift its voice, something that would delight the believers in the angel and be as far removed from Miss Schley’s imitations as possible.
After a time she chose two songs. One was English, by a young composer, and was called “Away.” It breathed something of the spirit of the East. The man who had written it had travelled much in the East, had drawn into his lungs the air, into his nostrils the perfume, into his soul the meaning of desert places. There was distance in his music. There was mystery. There was the call of the God of Gold who lives in the sun. There was the sound of feet that travel. The second song she chose was French. The poem was derived from a writing of Jalalu’d dinu’r Rumi, and told this story.
One day a man came to knock upon the door of the being he loved. A voice cried from within the house, “Qui est la?” “C’est moi!” replied the man. There was a pause. Then the voice answered, “This house cannot shelter us both together.” Sadly the lover went away, went into the great solitude, fasted and prayed. When a long year had passed he came once more to the house of the one he loved, and struck again upon the door. The voice from within cried, “Qui est la?” “C’est toi!” whispered the lover. Then the door was opened swiftly and he passed in with outstretched arms.
Having decided that she would sing these two songs, Lady Holme sat down to go through them at the piano. Just as she struck the first chord of the desert song a footman came in to know whether she was at home to Lady Cardington. She answered “Yes.” In her present mood she longed to give out her feeling to an audience, and Lady Cardington was very sympathetic.
In a minute she came in, looking as usual blanched and tired, dressed in black with some pale yellow roses in the front of her gown. Seeing Lady Holme at the piano she said, in her low voice with a thrill in it:
“You are singing? Let me listen, let me listen.”
She did not come up to shake hands, but at once sat down at a short distance from the piano, leaned back, and gazed at Lady Holme with a strange expression of weary, yet almost passionate, expectation.
Lady Holme looked at her and at the desert song. Suddenly she thought she would not sing it to Lady Cardington. There was too wild a spell in it for this auditor. She played a little prelude and sang an Italian song, full, as a warm flower of sweetness, of the sweetness of love. The refrain was soft as golden honey, soft and languorous, strangely sweet and sad. There was an exquisite music in the words of the refrain, and the music they were set to made their appeal more clinging, like the appeal of white arms, of red, parting lips.
“Torna in fior di giovinezza
Isaotta Blanzesmano,
Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:
Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
Tears came into Lady Cardington’s eyes as she listened, brimmed over and fell down upon her blanched cheeks. Each time the refrain recurred she moved her lips: “Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano: Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
Lady Holme’s voice was like honey as she sang, and tears were in her eyes too. Each time the refrain fell from her heart she seemed to see another world, empty of gossamer threads, a world of spread wings, a world of—but such poetry and music do not tell you! Nor can you imagine. You can only dream and wonder, as when you look at the horizon line and pray for the things beyond.
“Tutto—tutto al mondo a vano: Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
“Why do you sing like that to-day?” said Lady Cardington, wiping her eyes gently.
“I feel like that to-day,” Lady Holme said, keeping her hands on the keys in the last chord. There was a vagueness in her eyes, a sort of faint cloud of fear. While she was singing she had thought, “Have I known the love that shows the vanity of the world? Have I known the love in which alone all sweetness lives?” The thought had come in like a firefly through an open window. “Have I? Have I?”
And something within her felt a stab of pain, something within her soul and yet surely a thousand miles away.
“Tutto—tutto al mondo e vano,” murmured Lady Cardington. “We feel that and we feel it, and—do you?”
“To-day I seem to,” answered Lady Holme.
“When you sing that song you look like the love that gives all sweetness to men. Sing like that, look like that, and you—If Sir Donald had heard you!”
Lady Holme got up from the piano.
“Sir Donald!” she said.
She came to sit down near Lady Cardington.
“Sir Donald! Why do you say that?”
And she searched Lady Cardington’s eyes with eyes full of inquiry.
Lady Cardington looked away. The wistful power that generally seemed a part of her personality had surely died out in her. There was something nervous in her expression, deprecating in her attitude.
“Why do you speak about Sir Donald?” Lady Holme said.
“Don’t you know?”
Lady Cardington looked up. There was an extraordinary sadness in her eyes, mingled with a faint defiance.
“Know what?”
“That Sir Donald is madly in love with you?”
“Sir Donald! Sir Donald—madly anything!”
She laughed, not as if she were amused, but as if she wished to do something else and chose to laugh instead. Lady Cardington sat straight up.
“You don’t understand anything but youth,” she said.
There was a sound of keen bitterness in her low voice.
“And yet,” she added, after a pause, “you can sing till you break the heart of age—break its heart.”
Suddenly she burst into a flood of tears. Lady Holme was so surprised that she did absolutely nothing, did not attempt to console, to inquire. She sat and looked at Lady Cardington’s tall figure swayed by grief, listened to the sound of her hoarse, gasping sobs. And then, abruptly, as if someone came into the room and told her, she understood.
“You love Sir Donald,” she said.
Lady Cardington looked up. Her tear-stained, distorted face seemed very old.
“We both regret the same thing in the same way,” she said. “We were both wretched in—in the time when we ought to have been happy. I thought—I had a ridiculous idea we might console each other. You shattered my hope.”
“I’m sorry,” Lady Holme said.
And she said it with more tenderness than she had ever before used to a woman.
Lady Cardington pressed a pocket-handkerchief against her eyes.
“Sing me that song again,” she whispered. “Don’t say anything more. Just sing it again and I’ll go.”
Lady Holme went to the piano.
“Torna in fior di giovinezza
Isaotta Blanzesmano,
Dice: Tutto al mondo a vano:
Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
When the last note died away she looked towards the sofa. Lady Cardington was gone. Lady Holme leaned her arm on the piano and put her chin in her hand.
“How awful to be old!” she thought.
Half aloud she repeated the last words of the refrain: “Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.” And then she murmured:
“Poor Sir Donald!”
And then she repeated, “Poor—” and stopped. Again the faint cloud of fear was in her eyes.
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