Cynthia's Love Affairs/Chapter 6
VI.—Too Late
AFTER that episode of the Boy I did a very common thing. I purchased Motley's Dutch Republic, Gibbon's Roman Empire, and Green's Short History of the English People. I also read them, and, moreover, I read them before breakfast, chiefly because it is so unpleasant to read anything before breakfast. I was trying to persuade myself that it was an affair of culture. Of course, I know now that it was only another phase of an affair of the heart. It was part of the usual routine; you try to be saved by faith and love; in your disappointment you try to be saved by standard works. It is as well to realise the truth; in an affair of the heart you may be happy or desperate, romantic or prosaic, but you can never by any chance be original. And yet, I suppose, when your season-jaded Lady Clara falls in love with—well, with any one whom she cannot possibly marry—she believes, in spite of all her worldly wisdom, that just there lies the newest and truest thing on the face of the earth. After Gaston Travers I had taken a course of flirtation. When the Boy had in his innocent way made me see how unspeakably vulgar this was, I went in for a course of renunciation. I asked myself whether it were not possible to sink the question of one's personal present in an interest in one's national past. I am prepared to own that I was not original. I read history; I made out the genealogical tables of kings and queens, very neatly' in red and black ink; I learned other people's dates in order to forget my own failure. I renounced the affairs of the heart.
This was made the more easy for me, because I think that I was no longer very attractive. There are some people whom illness suits. They look their best when they are wan and reclining. Brutal health would ruin their individuality and make them less interesting. But illness did not suit me at all. Such beauty as I had went like smoke before the wind. I became thin and yellow, and angular. This made it the more easy for me to retire from the world. I hardly ever went out. Yet I dressed as well as I had ever done; that was intentional, because I had seen so many women in my position become careless and slovenly. I was not original, but I did not want to be too obvious.
This went on for some years. I turned from history to other studies. I went abroad for a year. While I was at Capri I took an inventory of myself. I decided definitely that I was a Shelved Woman. I reflected that the Shelved Woman, as I had known her, was not generally a nice person. She is, as a rule, too sensitive, easily offended, rather disagreeable, rather selfish. Further, she either continuously points to the fact that she is on the Shelf, which is bad, or makes continual and in effective efforts to get off the Shelf, which is worse. I decided to introduce a variation on the type. I made up my mind to be the Perfect Shelved Woman, simple, friendly, good-tempered, dignified. Now it is of no use to be as perfect as that unless you have some appreciative audience. So I made mamma see that what she really wanted was to go back to England, and take a house on the Thames for the summer.
It was a stereotyped river house, with a garden running down to the water's edge, where the boat-house was. Sometimes in the mornings I would go out in the punt, and go down one of the backwaters. That used to be very pleasant. One could lie at full length on the cushions and read. I always loved reading in the open air. I read novels at this time; the summer seemed to demand them. In the mornings I generally had the place to myself. The river's very like a railway carriage in one respect; it is public but one always resents intrusions. The graceful greedy swans always used to come and have a look at me. If there was a luncheon-basket in the punt they would stop in the neighbourhood. If not, they made contemptuous noises and disappeared in search of some more profitable person.
One day, just as I emerged from the backwater on my homeward voyage, I did a very silly thing. I dropped my punt-pole. I have no conception how I did it. There was some stream running, and the pole was gone before I could recover it. Within thirty yards of me was a happy, disgusting, tripper-laden steam-launch, and I proceeded to get out of its way as well as I could with the boat-hook. As I was doing this, another punt came up alongside of me. Its occupant had picked up my punt-pole; he handed it to me, raised his cap, and passed on. He was, I noticed, a big man with a clean shaven face. At first I put him down as an actor; but his voice, in the few words that he said, was too clumsy, and his manner of raising his cap had too much of the untutored masculine about it. Then I decided that he was a barrister. In either case, he was obviously from his build an athlete.
Just then the steam-launch passed. A gaudy youth, who had, I suppose, witnessed my accident, shouted out, “Take it 'ome, lyedy.” So I thought no more about the barrister and meditated on an extension of the muzzling orders.
About a week afterwards mamma managed to catch a cold and showed an inclination to get reckless with it. So I sent a servant for the local doctor, because in such matters mamma reverences doctors but despises me. The doctor arrived when I was out. On my return, I noticed that he drove a very good horse—the dog-cart was waiting for him. In the house I met the doctor himself, and he was of course the hypothetical actor, the imaginary barrister, the rescuer of my punt-pole, and, indirectly, of myself. I noticed now that he was much older than I had supposed when I saw him in his boating things. He had looked about twenty-eight; I now saw that he must be at least ten years older than that. We recognised each other. He was not, as a matter-of-fact, the resident doctor; he had, indeed, given up regular practise for some years; but he knew Dr. Griffen very well, and sometimes helped him when he was particularly busy. And—it was inevitable—he knew some friends of mamma's very well. His name was Romer, and I recollected vaguely that I knew of a Dr. Romer as having done something or other recently. After he had gone, I happened to glance at the current number of a learned review that mamma likes to have in the house. Yes, that was where I had seen the name. He was the writer of an article in that number. Mamma had spoken of it. I tried to read it. I could not make it out exactly, but it seemed to be a description of some experiments involving the use of vivisection. I thought—being in the sentimental girl state on this subject—that he must be a brute. I afterwards saw him one day thrash his horse, and felt quite certain that he was a brute. Yet he looked a good-tempered man; he had kindly, rather humorous eyes.
He had an irritatingly lazy way of not defending himself. I had known him some few days when I took occasion to say to him pointedly that I didn't approve of vivisection. “Don't you?” he said. “Some people don't, I know.” And then he changed the subject, as if it were a thing that didn't matter. During the first month that I knew him I never succeeded in getting from him any defence of himself. In fact, he hardly ever spoke of himself at all; but he managed to leave you with the impression that he was right and you were wrong, and that he did not think your opinion of him mattered. Now, even to the Perfect Shelved Woman that is maddening. Even when you recognise the existence of the Shelf, and have come to prefer very much that men should not make love to you, you do not care to be absolutely disregarded. I gave Dr. Romer several chances to justify himself, and he never availed himself of any of them. I never was so angry with any one before.
I must own that in spite of all this he was not in the least patronising in his manner. He did not speak as if he had a right to speak; it was only that on some points he was silent as if he had a right to be silent. Among the visitors stopping at our house was my old godfather, Eustace Orman. He has spent most of his life in his club; consequently he knows a few people, and knows something about the real. I asked him if he knew Dr. Romer.
“Known him these last ten years.”
“He's a very cruel man, isn't he?”
“Obviously not. Why do you say so?”
“He's a vivisectionist and he ill-treats his horses.”
“He may be a vivisectionist, and he may occasionally find it necessary to make a horse remember which is the man and which is the horse. But that's nothing to do with it. Cruelty always shows itself in the eye or the mouth, or both. Does he look like a man who tortures animals?”
“Well, no.”
My godfather looked at me suspiciously.
“And what are you asking me this for, Cynthia?”
“Nothing.”
“Does he want to marry you?”
“On the contrary, he talks to me as if I were a child of ten. And I feel a little large for the part.”
On reflection, I decided that this last sentence was not in strict accord with my character of the Perfect Shelved Woman, as originally conceived; it was neither simple, nor friendly, nor dignified.
Dr. Romer was popular, I think, with almost everybody except myself. Yet he gave me very little to say against him. He talked to me at times, giving me the exactly right proportion of his attention. He neither sought nor avoided my society. When he talked to me, he talked with cheerful equanimity, never about himself but very often about me. His manner was not progressive; I met him very often for about three months, and at the end of that time, when he went away, I seemed to be no more intimate with him than I had been at the commencement.
Consequently, I was somewhat surprised when on the day after his departure I received from him by post a proposal of marriage. In that letter he, for the first time, explained himself a little.
The Perfect Shelved Woman would have sent back a few words of friendly but decided refusal at once. Once more I deviated from the ideal. I considered the proposal very seriously; and the more I considered it the less certain I became that I should refuse him at all. Women like strength—strength of any kind—in men. His reticence, which had at first seemed to be a sign of indifference and had made me angry, now appeared in quite a different light as a sign of strength. He had kept his own counsel, taken no one into his confidence, allowed no one even to guess. And his method of getting what he wanted seemed to me to be particularly straight; he had not been at all anxious to make his best points prominent; he had given me a chance of judging him for myself, as he ordinarily was. I was rather fascinated by his self-reliance.
I took no counsel of any one. I did not even tell mamma about it. After long thinking I wrote a letter asking him to let me give him my decision in a month's time. I wrote that letter in the afternoon, and took it out to post myself. As I was walking down the village street I noticed a man in boating things coming towards me. As he came nearer I began to see in him a horrible likeness to Gaston Travers. The nearer he came the more vivid was the likeness. A strong likeness in the living to the dead whom you have known is always impressive. Imagine then what it was for me in this case. Imagine what things it made me remember vividly as if they had only happened a few minutes before.
I did not post that letter. I walked back and burnt it, and wrote another which was sufficiently in accord with the character of the Perfect Shelved Woman. I sometimes think that it was a pity that I did not meet Dr. Romer until it was too late.
*******
So my married sister, Alice, regards me as a failure. Personally, I prefer my own failure to her success, but still I do not deny that it is a failure of a kind. It does not lead to the convent nor to suicide. One goes on living, gradually growing more uninteresting. I am about to return to the study of history.