Part 6

"Though, mind you, no woman could be blamed for being carried away by the man. That presence of his, that shock of auburn hair, those wild eyes, and that infernally fluent tongue--why, the deuce take it, I, his best friend of that time, spent my days in loving him and being jealous of him! And though it sounds a fatuous thing to say about oneself, I haven't an atom of jealousy in my nature--I'm quite proud to say that I've never in my life envied any man his particular luck since that Saturday, down at Tristram Carew's place, on which I first met his young wife Consuelo, on their return from their honeymoon, and envied him his possession of her. But then that probably because I've never met another Consuelo.

"Consuelo wasn't made for a comfortable happiness, you understand. But neither was she strange, nor exotic, nor bizarre, nor Belladonnaish, nor any of those things that make a man think twice before introducing a woman to a superior sister at the Bath Club--but even so no man, unless he were a Tristram Carew, would too easily dare to marry her. I don't know why, but it was so, for since she divorced Carew she has had the pick of a thousand lovers, but not of many solid husbands. It sounds a cruel thing to say, but I don't mean it cruelly; it is just interesting as an instance of the curiously similar effect which one woman may have on a thousand different, very different men. You just loved her--and if you weren't turned down at the start you were certain to be turned down after a while; and then you went your way, and you knew why Menelaus had made such a nuisance of himself about Helen, for, like him, you had known, and loved, and had been loved by a marvellous woman; but, unlike that persistent Argive, you dimly realised that if she turned you down in the quick end, then that was probably your fault--and, anyway, it is only an indecent sort of man who quibbles about the pain after the pleasure. And for many years after that, long after you had married a steady young woman, you were Consuelo's devoted friend--and, by God, she was your devoted friend too! I never knew a woman break so many hearts and patch up so many quarrels as Consuelo; but it is generally the sort of woman who looks on fidelity and infidelity as moods rather than principles who makes the truest and sincerest friend....

"But I envied my friend Carew overmuch, as even my English denseness about these things found out soon enough. She loved him for six months, and she detested him for years. And she grew to hate him so bitterly that Tristram Carew, the most jealous and unrestrained man I ever knew, was at last persuaded to let her divorce him. For, mind you, that woman was strong. She had personality at the back of her power to charm--and a rare, dangerous kindliness which makes it impossible for one's love for her to be goaded into dislike. There wasn't a drop of affectation in her, she was just an almost perfect type of that 'modern' woman who has held her place in the life and poetry and prose of ages, from the wife of Uriah to Mary Stuart, and onwards to Consuelo; women born with just that mixture of essential breeding and adventurousness which will turn the heads of most normal and decent men, and leave them gaping and grovelling and smiling at their own damn-foolishness in thinking that such a woman could ever have loved them! I said 'normal and decent men' because it seems almost invariably to be the poor old _sahibs_ who fall in love with this type of woman--while the outsiders step in and take them, and leave them. Anyway, it seems always to be your 'manly' man who odes the grovelling and the effeminate man to be the master of women. Just a theory, of course....

"But I've been wandering disgracefully all over the place, for I set out to tell you that, at the end of a few years, Tristram at last realised what a mess she and he had made of it together, and then, dear fellow that he really was, he sat up and swallowed his gruel, and put her in the way of divorcing him, as a gentleman should.

"But all that, of course, happened much later. My life touched theirs, or hers in particular, if you like, only in the first year of their marriage, when I used to see a great deal of them during the season at their house in South Audley Street; and more week-ends than not I spent with them at Carew's place in Wiltshire.... He was a very queer sort of fellow, full of odd enthusiasms and intolerances, un-English in his incessant contempt for the regularities and pretences of life, though English enough in his hearty manner of showing that contempt. He was strange, too arrogantly made to care much whether he was found acceptable or unacceptable by others, and therefore a man without friends, because, poor fool, 'he preferred his own and Consuelo's company'; and even so he didn't love his young wife half as much as he would have done if he weren't certain that she worshipped him--though that childish contempt for happiness, as it can be called, was well punished in those wretched years later on, when his six foot odd of manhood must have made begging grotesques on the floor while she, perhaps pitying him, was as cruel as only a surfeited woman can be cruel--and, my God, how cruel!... The man's nature, being what it was, then, you can well understand that, quite literally, he had no friends, and that I was about the only man he could rub along with, the only man that he liked, in fact; while, as for myself, although in the ordinary way I couldn't have borne his particular sort of arrogance too long, I would have suffered all the one-eyed giants in the nether-world for the sake of being near that chit of a girl, as she was then; and as, indeed, she always was, except to the men who bored her with too much love.

"Besides, if one has set out to be a cad for once in a way, one may as well do the thing properly--so I had to get on with Tristram, or else no Consuelo! Of course there's nothing in the world to be said for my behaviour, it was rotten-bad. Instead of running away, I hung on, and did all I could to make my friend's wife love me one tenth as much as I loved her. And you will notice that there was no limit to my utter rottenness--I not only tried all I could to snatch the man's wife, but accepted his hospitality as a means to that end. If I ever heard of any son of mine doing the like of that by a friend, I'd send him to the deuce without a penny--and, anyway, the young cub wouldn't have such an excuse, such a marvellous excuse as Consuelo!

"There's a lot of stuff talked about 'unrequited love,' and how men can go on loving a woman even though they get kicked downstairs by the butler every time they mention it; you know what I mean. Most men I suppose, are like you and I, we couldn't go on and on loving a woman who made simply no return for it, who 'repulsed our advances,' as it were. For one is human, after all, and, love or no love, I can't think that any woman ever repulsed a man's advances for long without, in the end, also repulsing him back to his club and his cocktails. All this, of course, is my way of telling you that Consuelo liked me well enough in her way, else I wouldn't have loved her so unwisely. Of course she liked me! What young woman won't like a young man who, without being too repulsive to look at, and with a certain reputation for polo and scholarship (as I had then), pesters her insistently with besotted but cynical attentions, in which there is no pretence of that platonic limitation which is all that any good woman should expect from her husband's best friend?

"'You more than like me,' I suggested to her once, (with that conceit peculiar to gentlemen when they're alone with women who they know won't tell on them to other gentlemen) and she answered that I amused and flattered her, and that she liked my particular way of being in love--though God knows there was nothing 'particular' in it except my contemptible behaviour to Tristram. But that was said later on, for as I told you she stayed in love with her husband for a whole six months, and even then she didn't react violently, but gently--just enough to keep him in his place, and to allow her to sit up and take notice again of other young men. And as I happened to be the only other young man on the spot, in whose eyes, only too obviously to her, lurked more than the pure light of friendship, I--well, damn it, that's prologue enough, isn't it?

"There wasn't the smallest jemmy missing from my burglar's outfit, you see; I had been waiting and watching, and with more cunning than you could believe possible in a common-or-garden Englishman; until one afternoon, when I was having tea with her in South Audley Street, I grabbed her up and kissed her....

"My cynicism, if it was cynicism, was born of my knowledge of Consuelo, for being in love without idealising, I really knew Consuelo. I knew her very well, what sort of a woman she was and what sort of a man she liked, and under what conditions. I had all her moods and preferences and tendencies tabulated in my mind, together with footnotes, extensions and derivations--but not possible results! Poor, poor Consuelo!

"I knew, you see, exactly what sort of a man Consuelo found dull and dismal--that is, when she was bored at home and had begun to cast her eyes abroad for her amusement; and if there is one man more than another whom a certain sort of woman finds bitterly dull, that is the friend of the husband who loves but dare not love the wife, because he is a friend of the husband--a good and sufficient reason for the likes of you and I, but not for our young woman, who finds the 'beef-and-beer' type of man quite too devastating. Of course only a very few, deplorable, charming women are like that; and we friendship-respecting men wouldn't take much notice of 'em, if they didn't, cussedly enough, happen to be the most attractive of their sex. Most women, thank the Lord, have a very real respect for men's friendships--but we are not talking of 'most women,' we are talking of Consuelo, who was neither a witch nor a whore, but whose fault and misfortune simply lay in her having no anchor in any sort of code of respectability.

"To get back to the actual point (which is always the most boring part of any story, don't you think?), one somehow didn't get much 'forrarder' with the affair. She just didn't seem to love me that way, and was too much of an artist in life to deceive herself with a forced passion when she had already tasted with Tristram, and might perhaps again taste, the real, the consummate thing. We fenced with foils, then, and she had the thrills without the wounds. But it was a very special game, with very queer rules and restrictions, which I learnt from her gradually as we went along; and so played the game as well as I could, for all my deadly seriousness. But it was an unfair one, there was nothing in its rules to provide for certain contingencies which might leave one of the players helpless and beaten before the game even began; it was unfair, because, like death, it was played with loaded dice--she simply didn't love me enough!

"Then again, after those first simple six months of domesticity, something developed in Consuelo and she began to change every day; she began to grow into what she later became in the eyes of an interested public, a 'leading beauty' of the day. Leading beauties are quite common these days, one has only to sit any day in the Ritz _foyer_ at lunchtime to see a crowd of the slim, oval faced things; though God knows whom they 'lead' nowadays, unless it's photographers and publicans. But thirty or forty years ago, as you know, they were quite rare and wondrous; just three or four of 'em, and by Royal Appointment as it were, and people used to stand upon the chairs along Rotten Row to have a better view of them as they rode or walked by. Well, Consuelo began to grow up like that, and as she only too perfectly looked the part there were only a few disgruntled 'old friends' like myself who complained of the change in her, and how she was being taken from us by a crowd of deplorable women and vapid young men who ought never to have been allowed to leave school. And already, at her ridiculous age, she had a mild reputation for breaking hearts in a casual sort of way.... Tristram, of course, wasn't at all of her way of thinking, and tried to hold her back, but she just smiled at him and told him not to be silly; she had not then begun to dislike him, she felt very tenderly about him, as a woman sometimes does feel about a _ci-devant_ lover, even if he also happens to be her husband.

"So, in that time of sudden development into 'the beautiful Mrs. Carew,' it wasn't unnatural that our affair remained, well, indefinite, and that from being 'the only other person' I became one of a crowd of crawling young men--and not all so very young either! I may have been a little more favoured than any one else, in fact now that I look back on it I see that I was, but at the time I didn't notice it, and I was bitter.

"Thus and thus, we drifted on for about three months--until I lost my temper. At that time I had rather a good thing in the way of tempers; it didn't explode suddenly and pass away into the lumber room of past follies, but it simmered and waned and waxed and seethed for a dangerous two weeks or more--and when it died, many other things somehow died with it. My extravagant love for Consuelo Carew died with my first and last fit of brooding temper at her indecision. Indecision indeed! Poor fool that I was, I didn't see that she was undecided because she didn't love enough, and that, being the absolute slave of her emotions, her decision would be born the very same moment as her love--poor, happy devil, whoever he might be, might have been!

"'You can't run a team,' I had said to her bitterly at the opening performance, as it were, of my dangerous state. And, mind you, I thought I had some right to my bad temper, because all this time she had been saying that she loved me--but, but, but the memory of her love for Tristram was so recent, and remembering how utterly she had loved him made her cautious of trusting too blindly to this repetition of that same emotion; 'for it seems quite the same, so I suppose that I must love you,' she said so sweetly that I can't blame Jupiter for withholding his thunderbolt. If I would only wait.... But I had, and wouldn't any more.

"Those two sour weeks contained the last phase of the game. I was fixing her down to that eternal 'something definite,' and I took a real, cruel pleasure in frightening her--for she was fond enough of me to be frightened at my strange lapse from the door-mat, ox-eyed amiability to which I had so far treated her. That was the only time I was ever near to being top-dog in the affair, those two weeks when I had her in a corner and made her gradually realise that it must be 'one thing or the other'; and that, best weapon of all for such a woman, I was past the stage when I would mind very much if it was 'the other.' She knew that I had the bit in my teeth and was going to run away, even if I had to live as a celibate ever after--which, believe me, is what I seriously told her I must become!

"I say that she was frightened at my sudden twist, but I am not at all sure if it was fright; it may have been just a pretty pretence of it, for she was too polished, too 'right,' to let an old friend go without showing him that she would miss him--'so marvellously much, you dear!'

"But, fright or pretence, no regrets at losing me could influence her in the least to yield to what, when the time came with some luckier wretch, she would yield with such whole-hearted abandon that I can quite understand how she sincerely thought, and sometimes said, that each new lover was her last and ultimate fate....

"The strange incident to which I referred at the beginning of my long and tiresome tale happened on the last night of those two weeks, which was also the last night on which I ever mentioned the word 'love' to Consuelo Carew; in fact, I did not see her again until ten or eleven years later.... Tristram, Consuelo, myself, and a crowd of others were staying down at the Portairleys' for a long week-end. During the last ten days in which I had so far retained my loss of temper I had thrown caution to the winds, I had got absolutely reckless in the way I badgered Consuelo--and Tristram for the first time began to suspect that there was more than friendliness in my feelings for his wife. She begged me to take care, for Tristram let loose meant hell for some one, and that some one would not be Tristram, for he was a good head taller than any bad-tempered man has a right to be. He had no more than a faint suspicion, but that faintness was fierce enough to be fanned into manslaughter at the smallest provocation. I'm not a coward, but it really is unwise to play the fool with unreasonable people like Tristram, and so on the Friday and Saturday at the Portairleys' I stepped warily and curbed my dash a good deal. And everything was all right until Sunday night after dinner....

"I don't remember who the others of the party were, except, of course, just the man of the incident; and I'm not even quite certain if the man I have in my mind was that one in particular, because I had no means of knowing exactly, as I will explain. Anyway, the one I mean was just a vague young man like myself, whom I had never happened to meet before, and would have scarcely noticed then if I hadn't felt that he was in love with Consuelo; not so hopelessly or helplessly, either, as becomes a discreet gentleman.

"I don't know if you know the Portairley's place? The summer house is about two hundred yards west of the house, at the end of a narrow, twisting gravel path which suddenly turns to its very door; and it is almost entirely shut in by shrubbery of sorts, and, at that time in full bloom, caressing its walls and roof were the sprays of lilac trees--how well I remember the scent of 'em that wretched evening!

"On Sunday I woke up in a state of chronic irritation against the young man; and as the day wore on became gradually more reckless again, until, at about ten o'clock at night, I somehow managed to inveigle Consuelo out on to the pretty, pretty lawn--and from there to the summer house wasn't a long way for an immaturely bitter man to drag an unwilling but careless young woman!

"We sat there, and between puffs of my cigar, and quite thoughtfully, I told her exactly what I thought of her; all the pent-up emotions of nine damnable months loosed themselves from my mind, and overriding my every decent instinct, found a brutal expression on my lips. Are you too 'sophisticated,' I wonder, to let me suggest that sinful thoughts have their own special punishment? that they react too articulately, they force themselves out in the end in a bitter wash of words--perhaps cleansing? That was my punishment, anyway, to _have_ to say those things that night, while she listened and looked horribly sorry. And, you know, she _was_ sorry.... I had it all my own way, and, in my vile state, I must have said all the bitter and beastly things that a man can say to a woman; but she only listened, maddeningly! I can't now imagine why she didn't rise and leave me; and then I may have crawled after her, or I may not--I don't know.

"Then, in the sudden reaction quite common, I believe, in such scenes, I began to take all I could of the worthless, surface things a woman, if she sets her teeth, can give a man; but she didn't even trouble to 'set her teeth,' she seemed more unattainable, more mocking, the more my lips touched her. She somehow made a doll of herself, and let me maul her about as I liked--but so uselessly, for though I ruffled her and myself I simply couldn't ruffle that smile! It was there right through, symbolic of my helplessness, a very sweet and tender smile, but sad, for she was pitying me. And at last she said very quietly: "If ever I had loved you, dear, and perhaps I may have, I wouldn't now be loving you any more. Because, don't you see, you have been doing all you can, you've emptied out all your box of tricks into my unworthy little lap, you've been working away ever so hard at making me love you--and even though the moon is shining through that window, and the scent of the lilac is sweetening this musty little place, I simply can't, my dear, feel romantic enough with you to dream that your kisses are the fairy-tales they should be. They are just kisses, and perhaps very nice in their way, but they don't mean anything. They don't mean rare things. Kisses which aren't fairy-tales never do.... I'm so, so sorry, you know (that cheek is getting worn away, but do try the other one, I'm told it's just as good) because I realise what I'm missing, for you would make a perfect lover, bless you. But, as it is, when your silly heart is mended again, some luckier woman will be grateful to me for having taught you to love properly, and for having brought out in you that particular mixture of brutality and delicacy which would be so thrilling if only it thrilled me! And after all the nasty things you've been saying to me it's pleasant to imagine some one sometime thinking quite nice thoughts about me....'

"What can one do with that sort of woman! More than twenty years have passed since then, and I suppose I've collected an odd bit of sense here and there, as one does--but in such a circumstance I should be as helpless now as I was then. It would have been easy enough to give up the chase if she had shown a real distaste, physical, mental, any way, for me, but she didn't--there she was, quiescent in my arms, and I, for the first and last time in my life, was as unrestrained as a Dago.... And it was just at that moment, worst moment of all, that we heard steps on the gravel path by which we had come. We heard the steady, crunching sound, and pulled quickly apart, staring at each other. They were coming nearer, there could only be one goal for them, the end of the path--at the open door! Only a few seconds divided those steady steps from us, there was nothing to be done. Consuelo was feverishly trying to tidy her hair. It was impossible to do the one obvious thing, to get up and close the door and hope that the intruder would turn at the end of the path--impossible because the door was unhinged and useless, and because, we knew, the intruder could only be Tristram Carew, for whom a closed door would mean certain proof....

"We waited breathlessly. For the first time, I noticed my crumpled, burnt out cigar, and I was going to throw it on the floor when I remembered just in time that the sight of its ruffled, unsmoked state would give the show away. Just beside me was a little window, its glass long since smashed out. The steps were perhaps five yards away now, and I blessed the winding path which hid us from him until he was actually at the very door....

"Consuelo suddenly whispered fiercely, 'We must talk, you fool,' and began talking about something as loudly and as casually as she could. And then, and then, as I lifted my arm to throw my cigar out of the window into the shrubbery, a hand came in from outside, from below, just a hand, and very, very carefully, for between the fingers of that hand was a cigar with a long ash. I didn't think, I hadn't time to be surprised at the amazing fact of it; threw my cigar away and gently took the cigar from the fingers. I knew what it meant--that long undisturbed ash! My God, how gentle I was with it, my whole soul went out into the care with which I brought it towards me! I didn't even see the mysterious hand disappear, I hadn't time to think of it....