V.—The Thousand and the Boy
AFTER a woman has once met the Real One, and met him to no purpose, she is in danger of several things. She is in danger of immediately accepting, on the rebound, some man with whom she is not in the least in love; she is in danger of a deep and self-sacrificing interest in the poor of the East-end, which interest—subsequently proving evanescent—fends to make the poor of the East-end somewhat cynical; she is in danger of showing her hand, a bitter humiliation that, however, most women are clever enough to avoid; lastly, she is in danger of a prolonged course of rather wild flirtation. It was the last of these dangers into which I fell. Of course a strong-minded woman would avoid all the dangers and preserve her even, normal condition. But I thank the goodness and the grace that on my birth have smiled and not made me a strong-minded woman. The merits of that kind are disputed; her hygienic boots are hideously obvious. Besides, the strong-minded woman is rarely placed in such a predicament; when she meets the Real One, she mostly marries him mercilessly, whether he likes it or not.
And so for two seasons I behaved rather badly. I went everywhere. I believed that I was enjoying it. On the night that I heard of Gaston Travers's death I went to a dance, and danced until three the next morning. I exceeded—wildly and improbably exceeded—my dress-allowance. I looked well at Henley, and better at Ascot. I had myself photographed many times. I was painted by Vermont, and my portrait was on the line at the New. I attracted the attention of a most important personage. I became the subject of one or two personal paragraphs, and—Heaven forgive my vulgarity!—rather liked it than not. I refused old Lord Rappary on his own Berkeley Square staircase. His habit of universal acquiescence—which has made that wicked and kindly nobleman a by word—was illustrated on this occasion even. “No, my dear lady? You think not? Well, I won't deny that you're right. In fact, I'll go so far as to affirm positively that you are right. I have the most perfect confidence in your judgment. We will continue to be friends—you shall be a sister to me.”
He was sixty-one years of age, and I own that I looked at him amusedly and questioningly.
“Sister, did I say?” he went on. “I accept your unspoken correction. I am always wrong, but no one could possibly be more glad to be put right. I will regard you as a mother—I mean, as a daughter. Never was at all strong on relationships. Merely wanted to take your hint about my advanced age and approaching decease, and so on.”
By all the rules of the game Lord Rappary ought to have come out of this interview feeling contemptible; but, in spite of his universal aquiescence, I fancy that he had made me feel worse than he did. I wished that I had not made that tacit allusion to his age. These people, who are not such fools as they appear, or as they are reputed to be, are a great nuisance; they cause one to make mistakes. At any rate I found myself arguing with myself, some few minutes later, that I had behaved like a lady; and it is horribly bad when one has to do that.
I did not refuse many men, in spite of my thousand flirtations. I rarely allowed it to go so far. I refused enough to enable me to keep in after life that most blessed possession—a good conceit of one's self.
My unmarried sisters—you who more for the ways of luck than for the want of charm are unmarried, and are now likely to remain so!—is it not a consolation to you to recall your beautiful moment—the time when you held, say, a dozen men in the hollow of a pretty hand, and then threw them away? The world is probably saying that you have lost the game; you can bow your head and acquiesce cheerfully, for you know that at any rate you held winning cards if you had cared to play them.
There was the Hon. Patrick Delahay, since gone, I am sorry to say, completely to the bad. He expatiated to me, I remember, on the necessity for courage in courtship, with too soft a touch of the soft accent of his native land for any printer to reproduce. “A lover,” he told me, in a poetical moment, “should be like a deep-sea diver, ready to pluck even from the cannon's mouth the fairest pearl of all, that it may wave at the end of his own dinner-table and point him upwards.” I did not care to let it go any further than that. The Hon. Patrick Delahay subsequently married his mother's maid, which was bad. It was also inexplicable; at least he wrote me letters afterwards (one every three months, as a rule) to explain it, and in spite of that I confess that I never understood it or answered his letters. Shortly afterwards he did very much worse. He was a right man with wrong impulses; and he mostly acted on the impulses. When he went under—scandalously—he ceased writing to me. But I have now taken to writing to him; he has replied with an ashamed letter, thanking me and asking me not to write any more; but there was that in his letter which makes me go on. No one else writes to him now—no, not even the woman who was his mother's maid.
There was young Reddamore, who is not only on 'Change, but never seems to be quite able to come off it. There was a politician, who was nothing if he was not polemical; an American, who was nothing if he was not rich; and an author, who was nothing any way. There was a barrister, who always gave me the impression that he was defending me on a capital charge. There were crowds, and it is no great loss that I have forgotten most of them.
I behaved, as I have said, rather badly. I went out—as mamma frequently pointed out to me—far too much. I came ultimately upon a time that frightened me. I began to get thinner and very pale. I could not sleep at nights, and took to chloral. My chloral was discovered and confiscated, and I was driven off to Sir Peter. We know him well, and doctors are privileged; but—even with these allowances—it struck me that he was abominably rude. The least impertinent thing he said was that I was dancing myself to death. He told me that I was to go north, be in bed by ten, and up at eight, take exercise—yes, sea-bathing would be excellent—and so on. There were more details, and there was a prescription. I can remember the curious twang in the taste of that tonic still.
We went north, and it is not necessary to give the name of the seaside resort. Jimmy and Alice came to see us for a few days. Jimmy told me that I was but a wreck of my former self—Jimmy is a kind friend to decayed phrases—and thought that it would exhilarate me if I were to take an active share in some mission work. I explained that I was already taking a tonic. Alice said, “Well, you have changed, Cynnie. No one would know us for sisters now.” I said, “No, dear; and I suppose that—being a clergyman's wife—it wouldn't be right for you to dye it. Still, there are only those streaks on the forehead, and I should hardly have noticed them. Now your back hair is just as it always was.” She took a great deal of trouble to explain to me that she was not in the least offended; and women rarely are fond of things in general when they have to do that. I was not exactly surprised when they abbreviated their stay. I did my best to be nice to them, but I own that they irritated me. Everybody irritated me just then, except mamma.
There is probably no spot on this globe where mamma cannot safely be calculated upon to meet, with enthusiasm, a friend of her youth. It was so at this watering- place. The very first time that I took her on the Spa she fell into the arms of a Mrs. Raymond. After that we met fresh batches of the Raymonds every day. They had come down in great numbers. “We've taken a street,” said Ainslie Raymond rather gloomily. He always seemed to regard the monstrous size of the family party as a kind of personal disgrace.
It must not be supposed that Ainslie was the head of the family; he was not even the eldest son. He looked as if he might be about eighteen, and he was still at an Army-crammer's. He was a very good-looking boy; dressed immaculately, behaved naturally, and was from the first quite inclined to be friendly with me. He spoke with feeling on the subject of the Army and the Sandhurst examinations. “It isn't that I'm thinking of my own case. I shall be through all right next time, though not particularly high up. It's, the principle of the thing that I bar. What practical good's Latin prose going to be to an officer? Besides, here's a case. We sent up a regular crock last time; well, that crock got no less than three unseens that he had done before, risked three or four wild shots at other things—all of which came off—and passed easily. There's too much luck about it.”
As the intimacy progressed he began to tell me a good deal about himself. He had a friend whom he spoke of as Bill; I noticed that whenever he told me a story about himself and Bill there was a probability that the story would either obviously stop half-way or would obviously be edited. From this I drew the conclusion that Bill could not be a very nice boy, and told Ainslie as much.
“Ah, but he is!” said Ainslie. “You couldn't find a better fellow at heart than old Bill. The trouble is that Bill despises women.”
“How old is Bill?”
“He's a month or two younger than myself, properly speaking; but then Bill's been through a good deal in the time, you know. Of course it's a pity. When a man gets to be fond of a woman, she acts as a kind of—er—a kind of steadier—that seems to—er—steady him.”
The feebleness and the implications showed me whither he was drifting; he was eighteen and I was perilously near twenty-eight; I was amused.
Then came a period of floral offerings. Undisguisedly, openly, and frequently he gave me flowers. They were always very expensive flowers. I am sure that price was his guide to selection, and that he habitually chose the dearest. I stopped him in this recklessness whenever I could. He was a restless boy, and always wanted to be doing something—walking somewhere to see something, or buying something, or going to the local theatre, or sailing about on the silly sea.
He wanted me to go for a sail with him.
I said that I would, if he would take the test of his family with him. He replied that you could not hire an Atlantic liner on that beach. He finally agreed to take a small selection of his sisters. It was, in the interests of romance, a particularly calm day. He told them, I remember, to their faces and in my presence, that he could respect them more if they would dress as I did. They grinned good-temperedly as they did at most things, but it was enough to have made some girls one's enemies for life. We had a very good mutiny and a plot to maroon him, which we only gave up because there was absolutely nothing to maroon him on. It was rather an amusing morning.
The next day I had a fit of remorse, but I got over it. From my point of view I was not flirting with the boy at all; he was so much too young. I felt sure that every one else saw the thing as I saw it—except the boy, and surely I was not responsible for his want of judgment.
He began to want me to do improbable things and to make his references to his devotion to me more frequent and less veiled. Then I tried to discourage him, but that was not easy. Finally, I decided to give him his opportunity to make an idiot of himself and get it over. It was on the night before my departure, and as it was a very fine moonlight night, the whole party of us had gone down to the beach after dinner to witness the effect. I calmly told Ainslie to get me out of the crowd; he looked as pleased as I had expected, and took me further along the beach. There we stood looking at the moonlight on the water; I had picked up a handful of pebbles and began throwing them into the sea. I was waiting for him to begin. He began:
“You need not be afraid. I am not going to ask you to marry me. I know perfectly well that you do not—never did—never will—love me.”
“Do you want to reproach me?” I said. I felt somewhat at a loss. He was not going on the lines that I had anticipated.
“Reproach you? Why, of course not. Why should I? I'm very young, as you're always telling me, but I'm not foolish enough to expect you to fall in love with me.”
“I like you very much, Ainslie; you're a boy as you say, and I'm an old lady, as you imply; it never entered my head that you could regard the relation in any other way. Why take the trouble to tell me the very obvious fact that I am not in love with you?”
In the course of the above remark I am afraid I was rather inaccurate.
“Oh, it was only something Bill said about women who pretend to be in love with you when they aren't, in order to draw you on and torture you, and laugh at you. Well, I wanted you to understand that I had not mistaken you for one of that kind. With you it's all been straight sailing from the first. I wanted to make it clear that I had entered into it the way you meant me to enter into it. Of course I'm in love with you—everybody is. But I never have made the mistake of supposing that I had any right to—to expect anything.”
I dropped the rest of the pebbles from my hand, and looked away from him. Then I yielded to an impulse and gave him my hand. He bent over it and kissed it. I could have screamed with laughter, because he was so young and doleful, and because the whole thing was so hideously funny. But I could have also cried my heart out because I was so bitterly ashamed of myself. He took me back to the others, and I made a point of being humbly nice to him all the rest of the evening.
I sent him a little present—a gold cigar-cutter. It was not romantic, but I hope it was useful. I owed him something for floral offerings and a salutary lesson. I made up my mind not to behave badly any more.