Part 12
Of course the Baroness was there. She sat by me at dinner, but on my left, and I could only see the unspoilt half of her face. Every now and then I thought of the other half, and a kind of sickness came over me. Once I turned to my other neighbour, in the middle of a sentence. But, for the most part, I forgot, and then it seemed to me that I was talking with the most accomplished woman I had ever met. She has travelled, knows many languages, many people; she has the feeling, and, I think, some of the knowledge of an artist; we spoke of music, painting, the art of living; and, oddly enough, she has a passion for just my own subject; history is her favourite reading, and when I spoke of one of my own hobbies, of Attila, she quoted Jornandes, and a passage, I remembered, that Thierry has not translated: she must have read it in Latin. How has she found time to do all this? To me she does not seem very young, but I suppose she is very little over forty. She spoke of everything with great frankness; only, never of herself. I have hardly spoken to the husband, to whom I have never seen her speak. He is very tall, very dark, very thin, with an air of politeness so excessive that it seems a kind of irony. She has asked me to come and see her; she promises me the use of her library. Can I, I wonder, ever get the better of that repugnance which rises in me when I see the ragged mask, the mended eyelid?
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April 14.--I have been filling these pages with rumours and apprehensions, and now, just when I least expected it, something definite has happened, which seems to make them all very trivial and secondary. The Argonaut Building Society, into which I had put nearly all the little money I had, has failed; there has been swindling; I am ruined. What am I to do? I shall have to earn my living, heaven knows how; I shall have to give up my work, sell my books, find some cheaper rooms. This is the one thing I never thought would happen. I have been afraid of most things but poverty, and now it is poverty which has come upon me. Perhaps something will be saved out of the wreck of this false Argonaut. I must wait until I know for certain that there is nothing.
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April 15.--I called on the Baroness von Eckenstein. I did not expect to see such a library. It was made by three generations of savants, and continued by herself. There are folios not in the British Museum; one that I had come to think had never existed. If she will really let me sometimes use her library, I can sell my books cheerfully. She has a remarkable intelligence. But for that scar she would have been singularly handsome. What can have caused it, I wonder? It is like the scar which I once saw on the face of a woman over whom her rival had thrown vitriol. I am far from supposing any such vulgar tragedy in the household of the Eckensteins!
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April 16.--No further news yet from the Argonaut. I can only anticipate the worst. Nothing but rain without, and this intolerable suspense in one's mind. I can neither work nor think.
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April 17.--To-day the weather has changed, and see how this barometer of my nerves registers the change! I have been walking in Regent's Park, the nearest country, and I feel singularly good, wise, and happy. That uninteresting park, uninteresting in itself, has a gift of refreshment, as one turns into it out of the streets. I find myself leaning against the railing to watch a little dark creature with red legs and a red bill, that swims between the swans, and clambers up on the grass, and runs about there stealthily with a shy grace. There is an island, to which all the water-birds go, and it is grown over with trees and bushes and green weeds, down to the edge of the water, and they go there when they want to be alone, as one goes into a deep wood, out of the streets in which people stare. To-day I was perfectly happy, merely walking about the park. I sat under a tree for half an hour, and it was only when I realised that a queer sound which had come to me at intervals, a mournful and deep cry, which I had heard in a kind of dream, was the crying of the wild beasts, over yonder, inside their bars, that I got up and came away.
I have gone back to my journal at three o'clock in the morning, because I cannot sleep, and one of my old horrors has taken hold of me again. I am writing in order to give myself almost a sense of companionship: this talking to oneself on paper is so different from the loud emptiness of the night, when one is awake, and one's thoughts cry out. I woke up suddenly, and felt the darkness about me, like a horrible oppression. I felt as I have sometimes felt when the train has been carrying me through a long tunnel. All the blood went to my head, as if I were stifling, and I had a need of daylight. I turned on the electric light, but it made no difference; it was no more than the light in the railway-carriage while the darkness is thundering about one's ears, I had the sensation of a world in which the daylight had been blotted out, and men stumbled in a perpetual night, which the lamps did but make visible. I felt that I should not be able to go on breathing unless I thrust the thought out of my mind, and I got up and turned on all the lights and walked to and fro in the rooms, and then came in here to quiet myself in the way I have found so good, by writing down all these fears and scruples of mine, as coldly as I can, as if they belonged to somebody else, in whose psychology I am interested. Already the uneasiness has almost left me. And yet who knows if I am only wrapping the blanket round my head once more, in order that I may run through fire and not see it?
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April 18.--I have had one of my old headaches to-day, partly because I slept so little last night and partly because there has been thunder, at intervals, all day long; and now at night, when it is quite cool again, after the rain which washed off the suffocating heat of the day, the sky still gives a nervous twitch now and again, like a face which has lost control of its muscles. Yesterday it seemed as if Spring had come, but to-day a premature Summer leapt out on the world, in one of those distressing paroxysms of the elements in which I get more than my share of the general discomfort. It is only for the last few hours that I have recognised myself, and already I find it difficult to remember that other self, which lay on the sofa with half-shut eyes and a forehead eaten away by the little sharp teeth of the nerves. How we measure ourselves by time, and time by ourselves! Then, it seemed incredible that I should ever be my usual self again; my focus had been suddenly altered, and nothing was the same. I think we ought to be more grateful for such occasions than we are; for this sort of readjustment is certainly useful. All habits, and not only what we call bad habits, are hurtful; and life is one long habit, which it is good to vary sometimes.
I suppose that my headache is not quite gone yet, and that it is this which makes me write down these obvious reflections. I must stop writing for to-night.
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April 20.--I have had a strange, generous, almost incredible letter from the Baroness. She has heard from the Kahns that I have lost all my money, and she offers me the post of librarian; I can live in the house, and I am to have a salary which is much more than I had before the Argonaut went to pieces. I have only to say yes, and I am saved.
Can I accept this charity? It is nothing less. What can I give in return? Nothing. What can have induced her to offer me this immediate kindness? That she is generous I do not doubt; but to this point? I must revise my opinions about women.
There is charity, certainly, and I shall soon be penniless, and not well able to refuse it. She prizes her library; she wishes it to be put in order, catalogued, kept in order, added to; she saw my interest, she knew that I am perfectly capable to do what she wants to have done. Is there anything unnatural after all in what must after all remain her immense kindness?
One thing remains. Can I accustom myself to see her every day, to sit at table with her, to be constantly at her call? At first it will not be easy, and then afterwards, who knows? but that would be the worst of all, I may come to find a sort of perverse pleasure in looking at her, the pleasure which is part horror, and which comes from affronting and half encouraging disgust.
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April 28.--I have written nothing in my journal for the last week; too many things have happened, and I have seemed to go through them almost mechanically. I am already in my new quarters; I have my rooms, near the library in which I work, in the vast house at Queen's Gate; and I am already more than half regretting my old flat over Regent's Canal, where I could be alone from morning to night.
There was no serious question of refusing this most fortunate opportunity; I had no choice: it was this or nothing, for if I recover £100 out of the Argonaut, it will be the utmost I have to hope for. The Baroness is a woman of action; she insisted, she arranged everything, and I found myself here without having done more than consent to let things be done for me. Certainly that is a form of arrangement which suits me, and life here seems to go not less smoothly; I have but to accept it, not without a certain satisfaction. The Baron must be enormously rich; there is something almost ostentatious in the display of gold, silver, and silk. Nothing is simple; the cost of these expensive things seems as if ticketed upon them; and there are coronets everywhere. But I, who never seriously thought about money until the little I had melted away, have never realised what an efficacious oil can be distilled out of gold for making all the wheels of life go smoothly. I am treated as one of the family; I profit hardly less than they from all that I care for in the possession of riches.
And yet, there is something here which weighs upon me; a sort of moral atmosphere which renders me uneasy. I see clearly, what I had guessed before, that there is no affection, that there is even a certain degree of alienation, between the Baron and Baroness. Nothing can be more polite, but with a sort of enigmatical politeness, which hides I know not what, than the Baron's manner towards his wife. He is scrupulously, exaggeratedly, polite towards every one; and his excessive ceremony with me puts a certain restraint upon me. I imagine that he detests me, merely from the extreme care with which he tries to convince me of his amiability. The whole man seems to me false; or, it may be, he has acted a part so long that the part has fastened itself upon him. His eyes and his mouth seem never to say the same thing; both guard, as at two doorways, the thoughts which are at work in his brain.
The attitude of the Baroness towards her husband has a different inflexion of meaning; it is frigidly polite, but with a more evident shade of aversion. If he puts forward an opinion, she contradicts it; while he assents, outwardly, to all her opinions, but with an ironical air which seems itself a negation. He is a great sportsman, and I have never seen him with a book in his hands; she cares passionately for reading, and hates every form of sport. But it is not merely a difference of temperament; there is, I am convinced, something very definite which sets a barrier between them. What is it? Here is a problem, for once outside the eternal, wearing, for the most part inevitable, problem of myself, which I shall do well to study. How gladly I welcome anything which can distract me from my own sensations, in which I have so long lived isolated, alone with myself!
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May 5.--The library is even finer than I thought. The labour of cataloguing it will be an amusement. For the present I do none of my own work; I am absorbed in this new occupation. How strange, how fortunate, to be at the same time taken outside myself in my thoughts, and away from what becomes monotonous in my studies! I have found, it would seem, precisely the distraction which the doctor ordered me. Only, the old solitary life seems a thing to regret, now I have left it behind me; and ought I not to regret the self which I left with it?
It is certain that I shall never accustom myself to look at the Baroness without repugnance. From my childhood I have never been able to endure the sight of any human disfigurement. I used to faint at the sight of blood, and I have always looked away when I have seen people crowding about a man or a horse fallen in the street. It is not pity, it is a very sensitive egoism: before an accident I imagine the thing happening to me, or I imagine myself obliged to touch the wound or the broken limb. I never look at the Baroness without a mental shiver at the thought of what that dead, furrowed, and discoloured skin must be like to the touch.
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May 9.--I have got no further in my study of these two enigmatical people, who seem to have not one thought, not one feeling, in common, and yet who seem to live so calmly side by side, in this vast house where they need never meet except at meals, or when the presence of strangers isolates them. I am wholly unable to talk with the Baron, who ignores me with the most punctilious deference. He never enters the library, and, in the drawing-room, is never without a newspaper, of which he rarely turns the pages. With the Baroness I can always talk; I can even, what is rare with me, listen. For a woman, her ideas are surprisingly well informed: quotations, of course, but arranged with a personal sense of decoration. She can discuss general questions broadly, with a rare frankness, a kind of eager sincerity. What does the Baron think, I wonder, behind that screen of the newspaper, if, as he sits motionless, he is listening, as I cannot but believe, to every word that is said? I often look at the newspaper, hoping to see it at least quiver, if not drop to the floor, and the man leap out of his ambush. The Baroness interests me a little more every day, and this interest is oddly balanced by my equal difficulty in looking or in not looking at her. When she is talking with me she invariably arranges herself so as to be on my left; often she leans her head on her left hand, as if to shield even what remains unseen. How horribly she must suffer from this living mask, under which she is condemned to exist! How long, I wonder, has she worn it, and shall I ever know the cause? Is she always conscious of its presence, of the eyes that seek to avoid it, and return, despite themselves, stealthily? I can conceive no more exquisite torture. Or yes, there is one. Suppose this woman, in whom I can distinguish a quite unusual force and energy of emotion, were to fall in love again: she is at the age of lasting passions, and what could be more natural in her? That would be a tragedy which I hardly like to think of; the more so, as I can easily conceive how powerful must have been her attraction before the time of this accident. There is something almost magnetic in her nature, and I can see that the Kahns, for instance, are attracted by her to the point of hardly seeing her as she is, of forgetting to look at her with their own eyes.
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May 15.--The dinner-parties which women in society condemn themselves to the task of giving become less and less intelligible to me as I see them from so close a point of view. How little pleasure they seem to give to any except very young or very old people! It is a kind of slavery: penal servitude with hard labour. I am sure neither of the Eckensteins gets the slightest personal pleasure out of these big dinners which they are so constantly giving. I am equally sure that the people who accept their invitations would generally rather not come; that they accept them largely because it is difficult to write and say I will not come; partly out of a vague hope, almost invariably deceived, that they will meet some delightful new person; partly out of the mere social necessity of killing time. I have never seen so much before of a London season, and I shall be glad when it is over.
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August 10.--They have taken a house for the summer down here in this remote part of my own county, Cornwall; there is fishing for the Baron, and golf not far off, and boating, I suppose. The heat in London was becoming intolerable; my old headaches began to come back; and I was only too glad to say yes when the Baroness asked me, almost hesitatingly, if I would come with them. Here I have nothing to do; we walk on the cliffs, drive across Cornwall and back again, sit under the trees on this lawn, from which one can hear the sea, not quite knowing if it is the sound of the sea or of the trees. In short, one is idle, and in the open air. I am well again already; only, inexpressibly lazy.
The Baroness and I are thrown together so much, by the mere loneliness of the place, and the determined absence of the Baron, that we are getting to know one another better. In driving and walking she invariably keeps on my left; for which I am grateful to her. She is a good walker, and cares for the sea, I think, as much as I do.
Is it chiefly the influence of the place, the weather, the homeliness and familiarity of the old manor-house, where we sit and walk in the garden, as in a grassy opening in the midst of a wood? That, and the stillness and unconfined space on the cliffs, where one can sit silent for so long, until only intimate words come; all that, I am sure, has had its influence on both of us, certainly on me. The Baroness has begun to question me about myself, and I, who hate confidences, find myself telling her what I have told no one.
I have told her about Clare, about my thoughts, my ideas, my sensations, all that I have up to now only confessed to my journal. How is it that she draws my secrets out of me, and how is it that I feel a pleasure in telling them to her?
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August 15.--To-day we drove to the Lizard, and sat for an hour on that high peak of rocks which goes down into the sea at this last southerly edge of England. The sea was steel-blue, almost motionless except where it made a little circle of foam around each rock, and it seemed to stretch endlessly, as if it flowed over all the rest of the world. Ships were going by, with sails and black smoke, with a great haste to be somewhere. We sat silent for a time, and then she began to tell me about herself; little confidences of no moment, only they seemed to be hesitating on the verge of some fuller confidence. At first I thought she was going to tell me all; but the wind began to get chill, and the sun faded out behind clouds, and her mood changed, and she got up, and we went back to the carriage.
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August 20.--At last I know the whole story, or as much of it as I am likely to know. Last night, after dinner, we were sitting alone in the garden, in a corner where the trees darken the grass; she sat with her hand half covering her face, in that attitude which is habitual with her, though only the right side of her face was visible, and the long silence became more and more intimate until at last she spoke. She began to tell me of herself, and first of her childhood among the Bohemian woods, her escapes from the army of governesses and tutors, her dreams in the depths of the forest, the 'Buch der Lieder' read by moonlight and thrust under the pillow as she fell asleep: in short, a very pretty, very German, sentimental education. Then the young English tutor, with his tragic beauty, his Byronic sighs; she pities, admires, falls in love with him; their meetings, declarations; they plot a romantic elopement, but the coachman turns traitor; the Byronic gentleman is dismissed, and the girl sent to her cousins in Vienna, where she begins to see the world, and to dream more worldly dreams. The Baron presents himself, with his title, his money, his serious reputation; the parents implore her to accept him, and she accepts him, in order that she may accomplish a social duty. By this time she has made innumerable friends, Vienna is the world to her, she cannot exist without people, excitement, admiration; and when the Baron, who hunts during half the year, takes her away to his castle, and leaves her there, from morning to night, day after day for months together, she lives the life of a prisoner, alone with her books and her more and more discontented thoughts. Time passes, and the husband whom she has never loved becomes a polite stranger, then an unwelcome guest. He sees indifference passing into aversion, and makes no attempt to arrest the course of things. It is enough if she is submissive, and his pride does not so much as dream of a revolt.
Meanwhile there are neighbours, hunting friends who come to the castle, and among them is a young Frenchman. She told me simply, quietly, as if she were telling me the story of some one else, how this man had gradually attracted her, how delicately and perseveringly he had made love to her, and how his presence rendered the tedium of her life less insupportable. She loved him, she believed that he loved her, and a new happiness came into her life. One day the husband, who had appeared to suspect nothing, came back unexpectedly. She had been playing the piano, her lover was seated just behind her, and as she rose from the piano and flung herself passionately into his arms, she saw, over his shoulder, the reflection of her husband's face in the mirror. He had opened the door while she was playing, and stood motionless, holding the door half open, with his eyes fixed upon them. Before she could make a movement the door had closed silently. It did not open again. The lover left the castle hastily, meeting no one on the way. Hours passed, and she sat watching the door, quiet with terror. At last she could bear it no longer, and she went straight to her husband's apartments. The painters had been at work, and their tools, paints, brushes, and bottles were still lying about. Her husband was seated at his writing-table. As she entered the room he put down the pen, turned to her calmly and said: 'I am writing to ask Xavier to dinner, but you will have to fix the date. I have a little surprise for him.' He rose, took three steps towards her, with a look of inexpressibly sarcastic malignity, and, stooping rapidly, picked up a bottle from the floor, and flung the contents in her face. She shrieked in agony as the vitriol burnt into her like liquid fire, and she rolled over at his feet, shrieking.
When, after months of suffering, the bandages were at last taken off, and she could resume her place at the table, she found, on coming downstairs to dinner, one guest awaiting her with her husband. It was her lover. She had not seen him, no word from him had reached her, since the accident. During dinner the Baron was cheerful, almost gay; he related amusing stories, turning from one to the other with an air of cordiality, and affecting not to notice that neither spoke more than a few words. Soon after dinner, the guest excused himself. A few days afterwards it was reported that he had left the neighbourhood.
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