The Cords of Vanity. A Comedy of Shirking Read online

  "Oh, Rosalind," I babbled, "I mean to prove that you were right. And I will prove it, too!"

  And indeed I meant all that I said—just then.

  Rosalind said: "Oh, Jaques, Jaques! what a child you are!"

  19. He Plays the Improvident Fool

  1

  Now was I come near to the summit of my desires, and advantageously betrothed to a girl with whom I was, in any event, almost in love; but I presently ascertained, to my dismay, that sophisticated, "proper" little Rosalind was thoroughly in love with me, and always in the back of my mind this knowledge worried me.

  Imprimis, she persisted in calling me Jaques, which was uncomfortably reminiscent of that time wherein I was called Jack. Yet my objection to this silly nickname was a mischancy matter to explain. There was no way of telling her that I disliked anything which reminded me of Gillian Hardress, without telling more about Gillian than would be pleasant to tell. So Rosalind went on calling me Jaques; and I was compelled to put up with a trivial and unpremeditated, but for all that a daily, annoyance; and I fretted under it.

  Item, she insisted on presenting me with all sorts of expensive knick-knacks, and being childishly grieved when I remonstrated.

  "But I have the money," Rosalind would say, "and you haven't. So why shouldn't I? And besides, it's really only selfishness on my part, because I like doing things for you, and if you liked doing things for me, Jaques, you'd understand."

  So I would eventually have to swear that I did like "doing things" for her; and it followed—somehow—that in consequence she had a perfect right to give me anything she wanted to.

  And this too fretted me, mildly, all the summer I spent at Birnam Beach with Rosalind and with the opulent friends of Rosalind's aunt from St. Louis…. They were a queer lot. They all looked so unspeakably new; their clothes were spick and span, and as expensive as possible, but that was not it; even in their bathing suits these middle-aged people—they were mostly middle-aged—seemed to have been very recently finished, like animated waxworks of middle-aged people just come from the factory. And they spent money in a continuous careless way that frightened me.

  But I was on my very best, most dignified behavior; and when Aunt Lora presented me as "one of the Lichfield Townsends, you know," these brewers and breweresses appeared to be properly impressed. One of them—actually—"supposed that I had a coat-of-arms"; which in Lichfield would be equivalent to "supposing" that a gentleman possessed a pair of trousers. But they were really very thoughtful about never letting me pay for anything; in this regard there seemed afoot a sort of friendly conspiracy.

  So the summer passed pleasantly enough; and we bathed, and held hands in the moonlight, and danced at the Casino, and rode the merry-go-round, and played ping-pong, and read Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall,—which was much better, I told everybody, than that idiotic George Clock book, The Imperial Votaress. And we drank interminable suissesses, and it was all very pleasant.

  Yet always in the rear of my mind was stirring restively the instinct to get back to my writing; and these sedately frolicsome benevolent people—even Rosalind—plainly thought that "writing things" was just the unimportant foible of an otherwise fine young fellow.

  2

  And in September Rosalind came to visit her Aunt Marcia in Lichfield, to get clothes and all other matters ready for our wedding in November; and Lichfield, as always, made much of Rosalind, and she had the honor of "leading" the first Lichfield German with Colonel Rudolph Musgrave. My partner at that dance was the Marquise d'Arlanges….

  I was seeing a deal of the Marquise d'Arlanges. She was Stella's only sister, as you may remember, and was that autumn paying a perfunctory visit to her parents—the second since her marriage.

  I shall not expatiate, however, concerning Madame la Marquise. You have doubtless heard of her. For Lizzie has not, even yet, found a time wherein to be idle; she has been busied since the hour of her birth in acquiring first, plain publicity, and then social power, and every other amenity of life in turn. I had not the least doubt even then of her ending where she is now….

  She was at this time still well upon the preferable side o! thirty, and had no weaknesses save a liking for gossip, cigarettes, and admiration. Lizzie was never the woman to marry a Peter Blagden. Once Stella was settled, Lizzie Musgrave had sailed for Europe, and eventually had arrived at Monaco with an apologetic mother, several letters of introduction, and a Scotch terrier; and had established herself at the Hôtel de la Paix, to look over the "available" supply of noblemen in reduced circumstances. Before the end of a month Miss Musgrave had reached a decision, had purchased her Marquis, much as she would have done any other trifle that took her fancy, and had shipped her mother back to America. Lizzie retained the terrier, however, as she was honestly attached to it.

  Her marriage had been happy, and she found her husband on further acquaintance, as she told me, a mild-mannered and eminently suitable person, who was unaccountably addicted to playing dominoes, and who spent a great deal of money, and dined with her occasionally. In a sentence, the marquise was handsome, "had a tongue in her head," and, to utilise yet another ancient phrase, was as hard as nails.

  And yet there was a family resemblance. Indeed, in voice and feature she was strangely like an older Stella; and always I was cheating myself into a half-belief that this woman I was talking with was Stella; and Lizzie would at least enable me to forget, for a whole half-hour sometimes, that Stella was dead….

  * * * * *

  "I must thank you," I said, one afternoon, when I arose to go, "for a most pleasant dream of—what we'll call the Heart's Desire. I suppose I have been rather stupid, Lizzie; and I apologise for it; but people are never exceedingly hilarious in dreams, you know."

  She said, very gently: "I understand. For I loved Stella too. And that is why the room is never really lighted when you come. Oh, you stupid man, how could I have helped knowing it—that all the love you have made to me was because you have been playing I was Stella? That knowledge has preserved me, more than once, my child, from succumbing to your illicit advances in this dead Lichfield."

  And I was really astonished, for she was not by ordinary the sort of woman who consents to be a makeshift.

  I said as much, "And it has been a comfort, Lizzie, because she doesn't come as often now, for some reason—"

  "Why—what do you mean?"

  The room was very dark, lit only by the steady, comfortable glow of a soft-coal fire. For it was a little after sunset, and outside, carriages were already rumbling down Regis Avenue, and people were returning from the afternoon drive. I could not see anything distinctly, excepting my own hands, which were like gold in the firelight; and so I told her all about The Indulgences of Ole-Luk-Ole.

  "She came, that first time, over the crest of a tiny upland that lay in some great forest,—Brocheliaunde, I think. I knew it must be autumn, for the grass was brown and every leaf upon the trees was brown. And she too was all in brown, and her big hat, too, was of brown felt, and about it curled a long ostrich feather dyed brown; and my first thought, as I now remember, was how in the dickens could any mediaeval lady have come by such a garb, for I knew, somehow, that this was a woman of the Middle Ages.

  "Only her features were those of Stella, and the eyes of this woman were filled with an unutterable happiness and fear, as she came toward me,—just as the haunting eyes of Stella were upon the night she married Peter Blagden, and I babbled nonsense to the moon.

  "'Oh, I have wanted you,—I have wanted you!' she said; and afterward, unarithmeticably dimpling, just as she used to do, you may remember: 'Depardieux, messire! have you then forgotten that upon this forenoon we hunt the great boar?"

  "'Stella!' I said, 'O dear, dear Stella! what does it mean?'

  "'You silly! it means, of course, that Ole-Luk-Oie is kind, and has put us both into the glaze of the mustard-jar—only I wonder which one we have gotten into?' Stella said. 'Don't you remember them, dear—the blue mustard-jar and t
he red one your Mammy had that summer at the Green Chalybeate, with men on them hunting a boar?'

  "'They stood, one on each corner of the mantelpiece,' I said; 'and in the blue one she kept matches, and in the other—'

  "'She kept buttons in the red one,' said Stella,—'big, shiny white buttons, with four holes in them, that had come off your underclothes, and were to be sewed on again. One day you swallowed one of 'em, I remember, because you would keep it in your mouth while you swung in the hammock. And you thought it would surely kill you, so you knelt down in the dry leaves and prayed God He wouldn't let it kill you.'

  "'But you weren't there,' I protested; 'nobody was there. So nobody ever knew anything about it, though may be you—' For I had just remembered that Stella was dead, only I knew it was against some rule to mention it.

  "'Well, at any rate I'm here,' said Stella, 'and Ole-Luk-Oie is kind; and we had better go and hunt the great boar at once, I suppose, since that is what the people on the mustard-jars always do.'

  "'But how did you come hither, O my dear—?'

  "'Why, through your wanting me so much,' she said. 'How else?'

  "And I understood….

  "So we went and slew the great boar. I slew it personally, with a long spear, and with Stella clasping her hands in the background. Only there was a nicked place in the mustard-jar, where I had dropped it on the hearth some fifteen years ago, and my horse kept stumbling over this crevice, so that I knew it was the red jar and the buttons we were riding around. And afterward I made a song in honour of my Stella,—a song so perfect that I presently awoke, weeping with joy that I had made a song so beautiful, and with the knowledge I could not now recollect a single word of it; and I knew that neither I nor any other man could ever make again a song one-half so beautiful….

  "Since then Ole-Luk-Oie—or someone—has been very kind at times. He always lets me into pictures, though, never into mouse-holes and hen-houses and silly places like that, as he did little Hjalmar. I don't know why….

  "Once it was into the illustrations to the Popular Tales of Poictesme, and we met my great grandfather Jurgen there. And once it was into the picture on the cover of that unveracious pamphlet the manager of the Green Chalybeate sends in the spring to everybody who has once been there. That time was very odd.

  "It is a picture of the Royal Hotel, you may remember, as it used to be a good ten years ago. Both fountains were playing in the sunlight, —they were torn down when I was at college, and I had almost forgotten their existence; and elegant and languid ladies were riding by, in victorias, and under tiny parasols trimmed with fringe, and all these ladies wore those preposterously big sleeves they used to wear then; and men in little visored skull caps were passing on tall old-fashioned bicycles, just as they do in the picture. Even the silk-hatted gentleman in the corner, pointing out the beauties of the building with his cane, was there.

  "And Stella and I walked past the margin of the picture, and so on down the boardwalk to the other hotel, to look for our parents. And we agreed not to tell anyone that we had ever grown up, but just to let it be a secret between us two; and we were to stay in the picture forever, and grow up all over again, only we would arrange everything differently. And Stella was never to go driving on the twenty-seventh of April, so that we would be quite safe, and would live together for a long, long while.

  "She wouldn't promise, though, that when Peter Blagden asked to be introduced, she would refuse to meet him. She just giggled and shook her sunny head. She hadn't any hat on. She was wearing the blue-and-white sailor-suit, of course."….

  4

  But a servant was lighting up the front-hall, and the glare of it came through the open door, and now the room was just like any other room.

  "And you are Robert Townsend!" the marquise observed. "The one my mother doesn't approve of as a visitor!"

  Madame d'Arlanges said, with a certain lack of sequence: "And yet you are planning to do precisely what Peter Blagden did. He liked Stella, she amused him, and he thought her money would come in very handy; and so he, somehow, contrived to marry her in the end, because she was just a child, and you were a child, and he wasn't. And he always lied to her about—about those business-trips—even from the very first. I knew, because I'm not a sentimental person. But, Bob, how can you stoop to mimic Peter Blagden! For you are doing precisely what he did; and for Rosalind, just as it was for Stella, it is almost irresistible, to have the chance of reforming a man who has notoriously been 'talked about.' Still, I see that for Stella's sake you won't lie as steadfastly to Rosalind as Peter did to Stella. It is none of my business of course; oh, I don't meddle. I merely prophesy that you won't."

  But those lights had made an astonishing difference. And so, "But why not?" said I. "It is the immemorial method of dealing with savages; and surely women can never expect to become quite civilised so long as chivalry demands that a man say to a woman only what he believes she wants to hear? Ah, no, my dear Lizzie; when a man tries to get into a woman's favour, custom demands that he palliate the invasion with flatteries and veiled truths—or, more explicitly, with lies,—just as any sensible explorer must come prepared to leave a trail of looking-glasses and valueless bright beads among the original owners of any unknown country. For he doesn't know what obstacles he may encounter, and he has been taught, from infancy, to regard any woman as a baleful and unfathomable mystery—"

  "She is never so—heaven help her!—if the man be sufficiently worthless."

  "I rejoice that we are so thoroughly at one. For upon my word, I believe this widespread belief in feminine inscrutability is the result of a conspiracy on the part of the weaker sex; and that every mother is somehow pledged to inculcate this belief into the immature masculine mind. Apparently the practice originated in the Middle Ages, for it never seemed to occur to anybody before then that a woman was particularly complex. Though, to be sure, Catullus now—" "This is not a time for pedantry. I don't in the least care what Catullus or anyone else observed concerning anything—" "But I had not aspired, my dear Lizzie, to be even remotely pedantic. I was simply about to remark that Catullus, or Ariosto, or Coventry Patmore, or King Juba, or Posidonius, or Sir John Vanbrugh, or perhaps, Agathocles of Chios, or else Simonides the Younger, has conceded somewhere, that women are, in certain respects, dissimilar, as it were, to men." "I am merely urging you not to marry this silly little Rosalind, for the excellent reason that you did love my darling Stella even more than I, and that Rosalind is in love with you." "Do you really think so?" said I. "Why, then, actuated by the very finest considerations of decency and prudence and generosity, I shall, of course, espouse her the very next November that ever is."

  The marquise retorted: "No,—because you are at bottom too fond of Rosalind Jemmett; and, besides, it isn't really a question of your feeling toward her. In any event, I begin to like you too well, Bob, to let you kiss me any more."

  I declared that I detested paradox. Then I went home to supper.

  5

  But, for all this, I meditated for a long while upon what Lizzie had said. It was true that I was really fond of "proper" little Rosalind Jemmett; concerning myself I had no especial illusions; and, to my credit, I faced what I considered the real issue, squarely.

  We were in Aunt Marcia's parlour. Rosalind was an orphan, and lived in turn with her three aunts. She said the other two were less unendurable than Aunt Marcia, and I believed her. I consider, to begin with, that a person is not civilised who thumps upon the floor upstairs with a poker, simply because it happens to be eleven o'clock; and moreover, Aunt Marcia's parlour—oh, it really was a "parlour,"—was entirely too like the first night of a charity bazaar, when nothing has been sold.

  The room was not a particularly large one; but it contained exactly three hundred and seven articles of bijouterie, not estimating the china pug-dog upon the hearth. I know, for I counted them.

  Besides, there were twenty-eight pictures upon the walls—one in oils of the late Mr. Dumby (for Aunt M
arcia was really Mrs. Clement Dumby), painted, to all appearances, immediately after the misguided gentleman who married Aunt Marcia had been drowned, and before he had been wiped dry,—and for the rest, everywhere the eye was affronted by engravings framed in gilt and red-plush of "Sanctuary," "Le Hamac," "Martyre Chrétienne," "The Burial of Latané," and other Victorian outrages.

  Then on an easel there was a painting of a peacock, perched upon an urn, against a gilded background; this painting irrelevantly deceived your expectations, for it was framed in blue plush. Also there were "gift-books" on the centre table, and a huge volume, again in red plush, with its titular "Album" cut out of thin metal and nailed to the cover. This album contained calumnious portraits of Aunt Marcia's family, the most of them separately enthroned upon the same imitation rock, in all the pride of a remote, full-legged and starchy youth, each picture being painfully "coloured by hand."

  6

  "Do you know why I want to marry you?" I demanded of Rosalind, in such surroundings, apropos of a Mrs. Vokins who had taken a house in Lichfield for the winter, and had been at school somewhere in the backwoods with Aunt Marcia, and was "dying to meet me."

  She answered, in some surprise: "Why, because you have the good taste to be heels over head in love with me, of course."

  I took possession of her hands. "If there is anything certain in this world of uncertainties, it is that I am not the least bit in love with you. Yet, only yesterday—do you remember, dear?"