Sacred and Profane Love - Arnold Bennett (digital e reader .TXT) 📗

my life. As for me, I waited for the avowal as for an earthquake. I felt as though I were the captain of a ship on fire, and the only person aware that the flames were creeping towards a powder magazine. And my love shone fiercely in my heart, like a southern star; it held me, hypnotized, in a thrilling and exquisite entrancement, so that if my secret, silent lover was away from me, as on that fatal night in my drawing-room, my friends were but phantom presences in a shadowy world. This is not an exaggerated figure, but the truth, for when I have loved I have loved much....

My drawing-room in Bedford Court, that night on which the violent drama of my life recommenced, indicated fairly the sorts of success which I had achieved, and the direction of my tastes. The victim of Diaz had gradually passed away, and a new creature had replaced her--a creature rapidly developed, and somewhat brazened in the process under the sun of an extraordinary double prosperity in London. I had soon learnt that my face had a magic to win for me what wealth cannot buy. My books had given me fame and money. And I could not prevent the world from worshipping the woman whom it deemed the gods had greatly favoured. I could not have prevented it, even had I wished, and I did not wish, I knew well that no merit and no virtue, but merely the accident of facial curves, and the accident of a convolution of the brain, had brought me this ascendancy, and at first I reminded myself of the duty of humility. But when homage is reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and satisfying a caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with the hazards of heredity.

However, in the end fate has no favourites. A woman who has beauty wants to frame it in beauty. The eye is a sensualist, and its appetites, once aroused, grow. A beautiful woman takes the same pleasure in the sight of another beautiful woman as a man does; only jealousy or fear prevents her from admitting the pleasure. I collected beautiful women.... Elegance is a form of beauty. It not only enhances beauty, but it is the one thing which will console the eye for the absence of beauty. The first rule which I made for my home was that in it my eye should not be offended. I lost much, doubtless, by adhering to it, but not more than I gained. And since elegance is impossible without good manners, and good manners are a convention, though a supremely good one, the society by which I surrounded myself was conventional; superficially, of course, for it is the business of a convention to be not more than superficial. Some persons after knowing my drawing-room were astounded by my books, others after reading my books were astounded by my drawing-room; but these persons lacked perception. Given elegance, with or without beauty itself, I had naturally sought, in my friends, intellectual courage, honest thinking, kindness of heart, creative talent, distinction, wit. My search had not been unfortunate.... You see Heaven had been so kind to me!

That night in my drawing-room (far too full of bric-a-brac of all climes and ages), beneath the blaze of the two Empire chandeliers, which Vicary, the musical composer, had found for me in Chartres, there were perhaps a dozen guests assembled.

Vicary had just given, in his driest manner, a description of his recent visit to receive the accolade from the Queen. It was replete with the usual quaint Vicary details--such as the solemn warning whisper of an equerry in Vicary's ear as he walked backwards, 'Mind the edge of the carpet'; and we all laughed, I absently, and yet a little hysterically--all save Vicary, whose foible was never to laugh. But immediately afterwards there was a pause, one of those disconcerting, involuntary pauses which at a social gathering are like a chill hint of autumn in late summer, and which accuse the hostess. It was over in an instant; the broken current was resumed; everybody pretended that everything was as usual at my receptions. But that pause was the beginning of the downfall.

With a fierce effort I tried to escape from my entrancement, to be interested in these unreal shadows whose voices seemed to come to me from a distance, and to make my glance forget the door, where the one reality in the world for me, my unspoken lover, should have appeared long since. I joined unskilfully in a conversation which Vicary and Mrs. Sardis and her daughter Jocelyn were conducting quite well without my assistance. The rest were chattering now, in one or two groups, except Lord Francis Alcar, who, I suddenly noticed, sat alone on a settee behind the piano. Here was another unfortunate result of my preoccupation. By what negligence had I allowed him to be thus forsaken? I rose and went across to him, penitent, and glad to leave the others.

There are only two fundamental differences in the world--the difference between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age. Lord Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy, men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their trembling and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human wisdom. They gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and even their folly is wise then. Lord Francis was eighty-six; his faculties enfeebled but intact after a career devoted to the three most costly of all luxuries--pretty women, fine pictures, and rare books; a tall, spare man, quietly proud of his age, his ability to go out in the evening unattended, his amorous past, and his contributions to the history of English printing.

As I approached him, he leaned forward into his favourite attitude, elbows on knees and fingertips lightly touching, and he looked up at me. And his eyes, sunken and fatigued and yet audacious, seemed to flash out. He opened his thin lips to speak. When old men speak, they have the air of rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so, and what they say becomes accordingly oracular.

'Pallor suits you,' he piped gallantly, and then added: 'But do not carry it to extremes.'

'Am I so pale, then?' I faltered, trying to smile naturally.

I sat down beside him, and smoothed out my black lace dress; he examined it like a connoisseur.

'Yes,' he said at length. 'What is the matter?'

Lord Francis charged this apparently simple and naive question with a strange intimate meaning. The men who surround a woman such as I, living as I lived, are always demanding, with a secret thirst, 'Does she really live without love? What does she conceal?' I have read this interrogation in the eyes of scores of men; but no one, save Lord Francis, would have had the right to put it into the tones of his voice. We were so mutually foreign and disinterested, so at the opposite ends of life, that he had nothing to gain and I nothing to lose, and I could have permitted to this sage ruin of a male almost a confessor's freedom. Moreover, we had an affectionate regard for each other.

I said nothing, and he repeated in his treble:

'What is the matter?'

'Love is the matter!' I might have passionately cried out to him, had we been alone. But I merely responded to his tone with my eyes. I thanked him with my eyes for his bold and flattering curiosity, senile, but thoroughly masculine to the last. And I said:

'I am only a little exhausted. I finished my novel yesterday.'

It was my sixth novel in five years.

'With you,' he said, 'work is simply a drug.'

'Lord Francis,' I expostulated, 'how do you know that?'

'And it has got such a hold of you that you cannot do without it,' he proceeded, with slow, faint shrillness. 'Some women take to morphia, others take to work.'

'On the contrary,' I said, 'I have quite determined to do no more work for twelve months.'

'Seriously?'

'Seriously.'

He faced me, vivacious, and leaned against the back of the settee.

'Then you mean to give yourself time to love?' he murmured, as it were with a kind malice, and every crease in his veined and yellow features was intensified by an enigmatic smile.

'Why not?' I laughed encouragingly. 'Why not? What do you advise?'

'I advise it,' he said positively. 'I advise it. You have already wasted the best years.'

'The best?'

'One can never afterwards love as one loves at twenty. But there! You have nothing to learn about love!'

He gave me one of those disrobing glances of which men who have dedicated their existence to women alone have the secret. I shrank under the ordeal; I tried to clutch my clothes about me.

The chatter from the other end of the room grew louder. Vicary was gazing critically at his chandeliers.

'Does love bring happiness?' I asked Lord Francis, carefully ignoring his remark.

'For forty years,' he quavered, 'I made love to every pretty woman I met, in the search for happiness. I may have got five per cent. return on my outlay, which is perhaps not bad in these hard times; but I certainly did not get even that in happiness. I got it in--other ways.'

'And if you had to begin afresh?'

He stood up, turned his back on the room, and looked down at me from his bent height. His knotted hands were shaking, as they always shook.

'I would do the same again,' he whispered.

'Would you?' I said, looking up at him. 'Truly?'

'Yes. Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage through this world. Nothing is so interesting as love and grief, and the one involves the other. Ah! would I not do the same again!'

He spoke gravely, wistfully, and vehemently, as if employing the last spark of divine fire that was left in his decrepit frame. This undaunted confession of a faith which had survived twenty years of inactive meditation, this banner waved by an expiring arm in the face of the eternity that mocks at the transience of human things, filled me with admiration. My eyes moistened, but I continued to look up at him.

'What is the title of the new book?' he demanded casually, sinking into a chair.

'Burning Sappho,' I answered. 'But the title is very misleading.'

'Bright star!' he exclaimed, taking my hand. 'With such a title you will surely beat the record of the Good Dame.'

'Hsh!' I enjoined him.

Jocelyn Sardis was coming towards us.

The Good Dame was the sobriquet which Lord Francis had invented to conceal--or to display--his courteous disdain of the ideals represented by Mrs. Sardis, that pillar long established, that stately dowager, that impeccable doyenne of serious English fiction. Mrs. Sardis had captured two continents. Her novels, dealing with all the profound problems of the age, were read by philosophers and politicians, and one of them had reached a circulation of a quarter of a