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

was the conflict in him that his outward nonchalance gradually gave way. As dinner drew to its close, his conversation with the wife of the Oriel don flagged and halted. He sank, at length, into a deep silence. He sat with downcast eyes, utterly distracted.

Suddenly, something fell, plump! into the dark whirlpool of his thoughts. He started. The Warden was leaning forward, had just said something to him.

“I beg your pardon?” asked the Duke. Dessert, he noticed, was on the table, and he was paring an apple. The Oriel don was looking at him with sympathy, as at one who had swooned and was just “coming to.”

“Is it true, my dear Duke,” the Warden repeated, “that you have been persuaded to play tomorrow evening at the Judas concert?”

“Ah yes, I am going to play something.”

Zuleika bent suddenly forward, addressed him. “Oh,” she cried, clasping her hands beneath her chin, “will you let me come and turn over the leaves for you?”

He looked her full in the face. It was like seeing suddenly at close quarters some great bright monument that one has long known only as a sun-caught speck in the distance. He saw the large violet eyes open to him, and their lashes curling to him; the vivid parted lips; and the black pearl, and the pink.

“You are very kind,” he murmured, in a voice which sounded to him quite far away. “But I always play without notes.”

Zuleika blushed. Not with shame, but with delirious pleasure. For that snub she would just then have bartered all the homage she had hoarded. This, she felt, was the climax. She would not outstay it. She rose, smiling to the wife of the Oriel don. Everyone rose. The Oriel don held open the door, and the two ladies passed out of the room.

The Duke drew out his cigarette case. As he looked down at the cigarettes, he was vaguely conscious of some strange phenomenon somewhere between them and his eyes. Foredone by the agitation of the past hour, he did not at once realise what it was that he saw. His impression was of something in bad taste, some discord in his costume⁠ ⁠… a black pearl and a pink pearl in his shirtfront!

Just for a moment, absurdly overestimating poor Zuleika’s skill, he supposed himself a victim of legerdemain. Another moment, and the import of the studs revealed itself. He staggered up from his chair, covering his breast with one arm, and murmured that he was faint. As he hurried from the room, the Oriel don was pouring out a tumbler of water and suggesting burnt feathers. The Warden, solicitous, followed him into the hall. He snatched up his hat, gasping that he had spent a delightful evening⁠—was very sorry⁠—was subject to these attacks. Once outside, he took frankly to his heels.

At the corner of the Broad, he looked back over his shoulder. He had half expected a scarlet figure skimming in pursuit. There was nothing. He halted. Before him, the Broad lay empty beneath the moon. He went slowly, mechanically, to his rooms.

The high grim busts of the Emperors stared down at him, their faces more than ever tragically cavernous and distorted. They saw and read in that moonlight the symbols on his breast. As he stood on his doorstep, waiting for the door to be opened, he must have seemed to them a thing for infinite compassion. For were they not privy to the doom that the morrow, or the morrow’s morrow, held for him⁠—held not indeed for him alone, yet for him especially, as it were, and for him most lamentably?

IV

The breakfast-things were not yet cleared away. A plate streaked with fine strains of marmalade, an empty toast-rack, a broken roll⁠—these and other things bore witness to a day inaugurated in the right spirit.

Away from them, reclining along his window-seat, was the Duke. Blue spirals rose from his cigarette, nothing in the still air to trouble them. From their railing, across the road, the Emperors gazed at him.

For a young man, sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous a phantasmagoria as will not become, in the clarity of next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. “Why not?” is the sun’s bright message to him, and “Why not indeed?” his answer. After hours of agony and doubt prolonged to cockcrow, sleep had stolen to the Duke’s bedside. He awoke late, with a heavy sense of disaster; but lo! when he remembered, everything took on a new aspect. He was in love. “Why not?” He mocked himself for the morbid vigil he had spent in probing and vainly binding the wounds of his false pride. The old life was done with. He laughed as he stepped into his bath. Why should the disseizin of his soul have seemed shameful to him? He had had no soul till it passed out of his keeping. His body thrilled to the cold water, his soul as to a new sacrament. He was in love, and that was all he wished for⁠ ⁠… There, on the dressing-table, lay the two studs, visible symbols of his love. Dear to him, now, the colours of them! He took them in his hand, one by one, fondling them. He wished he could wear them in the daytime; but this, of course, was impossible. His toilet finished, he dropped them into the left pocket of his waistcoat.

Therein, near to his heart, they were lying now, as he looked out at the changed world⁠—the world that had become Zuleika. “Zuleika!” his recurrent murmur, was really an apostrophe to the whole world.

Piled against the wall were certain boxes of black japanned tin, which had just been sent to him from London. At any other time he would certainly not have left them unopened. For they