Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm (good e books to read txt) 📗

education enough to spoil her nerve. She was able to take the rough with the smooth. She was able to take all life for her province, and death too.

The Duke was dead. This was the stupendous outline she had grasped: now let it be filled in. She had been stricken: now let her be racked. Soon after her daughter had moved away, Mrs. Batch dried her eyes, and bade Clarence tell just what had happened. She did not flinch. Modern Katie did.

Such had ever been the Duke’s magic in the household that Clarence had at first forgotten to mention that anyone else was dead. Of this omission he was glad. It promised him a new lease of importance. Meanwhile, he described in greater detail the Duke’s plunge. Mrs. Batch’s mind, while she listened, ran ahead, doglike, into the immediate future, ranging around: “the family” would all be here tomorrow, the Duke’s own room must be “put straight” tonight, “I was of speaking”⁠ ⁠…

Katie’s mind harked back to the immediate past⁠—to the tone of that voice, to that hand which she had kissed, to the touch of those lips on her brow, to the doorstep she had made so white for him, day by day⁠ ⁠…

The sound of the rain had long ceased. There was the noise of a gathering wind.

“Then in went a lot of others,” Clarence was saying. “And they all shouted out ‘Zuleika!’ just like he did. Then a lot more went in. First I thought it was some sort of fun. Not it!” And he told how, by inquiries further down the river, he had learned the extent of the disaster. “Hundreds and hundreds of them⁠—all of them,” he summed up. “And all for the love of her,” he added, as with a sulky salute to Romance.

Mrs. Batch had risen from her chair, the better to cope with such magnitude. She stood with widespread arms, silent, gaping. She seemed, by sheer force of sympathy, to be expanding to the dimensions of a crowd.

Intensive Katie recked little of all these other deaths. “I only know,” she said, “that he hated her.”

“Hundreds and hundreds⁠—all,” intoned Mrs. Batch, then gave a sudden start, as having remembered something. Mr. Noaks! He, too! She staggered to the door, leaving her actual offspring to their own devices, and went heavily up the stairs, her mind scampering again before her.⁠ ⁠… If he was safe and sound, dear young gentleman, heaven be praised! and she would break the awful news to him, very gradually. If not, there was another “family” to be solaced; “I’m a mother myself, Mrs. Noaks”⁠ ⁠…

The sitting-room door was closed. Twice did Mrs. Batch tap on the panel, receiving no answer. She went in, gazed around in the dimness, sighed deeply, and struck a match. Conspicuous on the table lay a piece of paper. She bent to examine it. A piece of lined paper, torn from an exercise book, it was neatly inscribed with the words “What is Life without Love?” The final word and the note of interrogation were somewhat blurred, as by a tear. The match had burnt itself out. The landlady lit another, and read the legend a second time, that she might take in the full pathos of it. Then she sat down in the armchair. For some minutes she wept there. Then, having no more, tears, she went out on tiptoe, closing the door very quietly.

As she descended the last flight of stairs, her daughter had just shut the front-door, and was coming along the hall.

“Poor Mr. Noaks⁠—he’s gone,” said the mother.

“Has he?” said Katie listlessly.

“Yes he has, you heartless girl. What’s that you’ve got in your hand? Why, if it isn’t the black-leading! And what have you been doing with that?”

“Let me alone, mother, do,” said poor Katie. She had done her lowly task. She had expressed her mourning, as best she could, there where she had been wont to express her love.

XXI

And Zuleika? She had done a wise thing, and was where it was best that she should be.

Her face lay upturned on the water’s surface, and round it were the masses of her dark hair, half floating, half submerged. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were parted. Not Ophelia in the brook could have seemed more at peace.

“Like a creature native and indued
Unto that element,”

tranquil Zuleika lay.

Gently to and fro her tresses drifted on the water, or under the water went ever ravelling and unravelling. Nothing else of her stirred.

What to her now the loves that she had inspired and played on? the lives lost for her? Little thought had she now of them. Aloof she lay.

Steadily rising from the water was a thick vapour that turned to dew on the windowpane. The air was heavy with scent of violets. These are the flowers of mourning; but their scent here and now signified nothing; for Eau de Violettes was the bath-essence that Zuleika always had.

The bathroom was not of the white-gleaming kind to which she was accustomed. The walls were papered, not tiled, and the bath itself was of japanned tin, framed in mahogany. These things, on the evening of her arrival at the Warden’s, had rather distressed her. But she was the better able to bear them because of that well-remembered past when a bathroom was in itself a luxury pined for⁠—days when a not-large and not-full can of not-hot water, slammed down at her bedroom door by a governess-resenting housemaid, was as much as the gods allowed her. And there was, to dulcify for her the bath of this evening, the yet sharper contrast with the plight she had just come home in, sopped, shivering, clung to by her clothes. Because this bath was not a mere luxury, but a necessary precaution, a sure means of salvation from chill, she did the more gratefully bask in it, till Mélisande came back to her, laden with warmed towels.

A few minutes before eight o’clock she was fully ready to go down to dinner, with even