2. II
THE sun streamed through the bay-window of
a "best" bedroom in the Warden's house, and
glorified the pale crayon-portraits on the wall, the
dimity curtains, the old fresh chintz. He invaded
the many trunks which — all painted Z. D. — gaped,
in various stages of excavation, around the
room. The doors of the huge wardrobe stood,
like the doors of Janus' temple in time of war,
majestically open; and the sun seized this opportunity
of exploring the mahogany recesses. But
the carpet, which had faded under his immemorial
visitations, was now almost entirely hidden
from him, hidden under layers of fair fine
linen, layers of silk, brocade, satin, chiffon, muslin.
All the colours of the rainbow, materialised
by modistes, were there. Stacked on chairs were
I know not what of sachets, glove-cases, fan-cases.
There were innumerable packages in silver-paper
and pink ribands. There was a pyramid of band-boxes.
There was a virgin forest of boot-trees.
And rustling quickly hither and thither, in and
out of this profusion, with armfuls of finery, was
an obviously French maid. Alert, unerring, like
a swallow she dipped and darted. Nothing escaped
her, and she never rested. She had the air
of the born unpacker — swift and firm, yet withal
tender. Scarce had her arms been laden but
their loads were lying lightly between shelves or
tightly in drawers. To calculate, catch, distribute,
seemed in her but a single process. She was one
of those who are born to make chaos cosmic.
Insomuch that ere the loud chapel-clock tolled
another hour all the trunks had been sent empty
away. The carpet was unflecked by any scrap of
silver-paper. From the mantelpiece, photographs
of Zuleika surveyed the room with a possessive
air. Zuleika's pincushion, a-bristle with new pins,
lay on the dimity-flounced toilet-table, and round
it stood a multitude of multiform glass vessels,
domed, all of them, with dull gold, on which
Z. D., in zianites and diamonds, was encrusted.
On a small table stood a great casket of malachite,
initialled in like fashion. On another small
table stood Zuleika's library. Both books were
in covers of dull gold. On the back of one cover
BRADSHAW, in beryls, was encrusted; on the back
of the other, A.B.C. GUIDE, in amethysts, beryls,
chrysoprases, and garnets. And Zuleika's great
cheval-glass stood ready to reflect her. Always
it travelled with her, in a great case specially
made for it. It was framed in ivory, and of
fluted ivory were the slim columns it swung between.
Of gold were its twin sconces, and four
tall tapers stood in each of them.
The door opened, and the Warden, with hospitable
words, left his grand-daughter at the
threshold.
Zuleika wandered to her mirror. "Undress
me, Mélisande," she said. Like all who are wont
to appear by night before the public, she had the
habit of resting towards sunset.
Presently Mélisande withdrew. Her mistress,
in a white peignoir tied with a blue sash, lay in a
great chintz chair, gazing out of the bay-window.
The quadrangle below was very beautiful, with
its walls of rugged grey, its cloisters, its grass
carpet. But to her it was of no more interest
than if it had been the rattling court-yard to one
of those hotels in which she spent her life. She
saw it, but heeded it not. She seemed to be thinking
of herself, or of something she desired, or of
some one she had never met. There was ennui,
and there was wistfulness, in her gaze. Yet one
would have guessed these things to be transient — to
be no more than the little shadows that sometimes
pass between a bright mirror and the brightness
it reflects.
Zuleika was not strictly beautiful. Her eyes
were a trifle large, and their lashes longer than
they need have been. An anarchy of small curls
was her chevelure, a dark upland of misrule,
every hair asserting its rights over a not discreditable
brow. For the rest, her features were not
at all original. They seemed to have been derived
rather from a gallimaufry of familiar models.
From Madame la Marquise de Saint-Ouen came
the shapely tilt of the nose. The mouth was a
mere replica of Cupid's bow, lacquered scarlet
and strung with the littlest pearls. No apple-tree,
no wall of peaches, had not been robbed, nor
any Tyrian rose-garden, for the glory of Miss
Dobson's cheeks. Her neck was imitation-marble.
Her hands and feet were of very mean proportions.
She had no waist to speak of.
Yet, though a Greek would have railed at her
asymmetry, and an Elizabethan have called her
"gipsy," Miss Dobson now, in the midst of the
Edvardian Era, was the toast of two hemispheres.
Late in her 'teens she had become an
orphan and a governess. Her grandfather had
refused her appeal for a home or an allowance,
on the ground that he would not be burdened
with the upshot of a marriage which he had once
forbidden and not yet forgiven. Lately, however,
prompted by curiosity or by remorse, he
had asked her to spend a week or so of his declining
years with him. And she, "resting" between
two engagements — one at Hammerstein's
Victoria, N.Y.C., the other at the Folies Bergères,
Paris — and having never been in Oxford, had so
far let bygones be bygones as to come and gratify
the old man's whim.
It may be that she still resented his indifference
to those early struggles which, even now, she
shuddered to recall. For a governess' life she had
been, indeed, notably unfit. Hard she had thought
it, that penury should force her back into the
school-room she was scarce out of, there to
champion the sums and maps and conjugations
she had never tried to master. Hating her work,
she had failed signally to pick up any learning
from her little pupils, and had been driven from
house to house, a sullen and most ineffectual
maiden. The sequence of her situations was the
swifter by reason of her pretty face. Was there
a grown-up son, always he fell in love with her,
and she would let his eyes trifle boldly with hers
across the dinner-table. When he offered her his
hand, she would refuse it — not because she
"knew her place," but because she did not love
him. Even had she been a good teacher, her
presence could not have been tolerated thereafter.
Her corded trunk, heavier by another packet of
billets-doux and a month's salary in advance, was
soon carried up the stairs of some other house.
It chanced that she came, at length, to be
governess in a large family that had Gibbs for
its name and Notting Hill for its background.
Edward, the eldest son, was a clerk in the city,
who spent his evenings in the practice of amateur
conjuring. He was a freckled youth, with hair
that bristled in places where it should have lain
smooth, and he fell in love with Zuleika duly, at
first sight, during high-tea. In the course of the
evening, he sought to win her admiration by a
display of all his tricks. These were familiar to
this household, and the children had been sent to
bed, the mother was dozing, long before the
séance was at an end. But Miss Dobson, unaccustomed
to any gaieties, sat fascinated by the
young man's sleight of hand, marvelling that a
top-hat could hold so many gold-fish, and a handkerchief
turn so swiftly into a silver florin. All
that night, she lay wide awake, haunted by the
miracles he had wrought. Next evening, when
she asked him to repeat them, "Nay," he whispered,
"I cannot bear to deceive the girl I love.
Permit me to explain the tricks." So he explained
them. His eyes sought hers across the bowl of
gold-fish, his fingers trembled as he taught her
to manipulate the magic canister. One by one,
she mastered the paltry secrets. Her respect for
him waned with every revelation. He complimented
her on her skill. "I could not do it more
neatly myself!" he said. "Oh, dear Miss Dobson,
will you but accept my hand, all these things
shall be yours — the cards, the canister, the gold fish,
the demon egg-cup — all yours!" Zuleika,
with ravishing coyness, answered that if he would
give her them now, she would "think it over."
The swain consented, and at bed-time she retired
with the gift under her arm. In the light of her
bedroom candle Marguerite hung not in greater
ecstasy over the jewel-casket than hung Zuleika
over the box of tricks. She clasped her hands
over the tremendous possibilities it held for her — manumission
from her bondage, wealth, fame,
power. Stealthily, so soon as the house slumbered,
she packed her small outfit, embedding
therein the precious gift. Noiselessly, she shut
the lid of her trunk, corded it, shouldered it,
stole down the stairs with it. Outside — how that
chain had grated! and her shoulder, how it was
aching! — she soon found a cab. She took a
night's sanctuary in some railway-hotel. Next
day, she moved into a small room in a lodging-house
off the Edgware Road, and there for a
whole week she was sedulous in the practice of
her tricks. Then she inscribed her name on the
books of a "Juvenile Party Entertainments
Agency."
The Christmas holidays were at hand, and before
long she got an engagement. It was a great
evening for her. Her repertory was, it must be
confessed, old and obvious; but the children, in
deference to their hostess, pretended not to know
how the tricks were done, and assumed their prettiest
airs of wonder and delight. One of them
even pretended to be frightened, and was led
howling from the room. In fact, the whole thing
went off splendidly. The hostess was charmed,
and told Zuleika that a glass of lemonade would
be served to her in the hall. Other engagements
soon followed. Zuleika was very, very happy.
I cannot claim for her that she had a genuine
passion for her art. The true conjurer finds his
guerdon in the consciousness of work done perfectly
and for its own sake. Lucre and applause
are not necessary to him. If he were set down,
with the materials of his art, on a desert island,
he would yet be quite happy. He would not
cease to produce the barber's-pole from his
mouth. To the indifferent winds he would still
speak his patter, and even in the last throes of
starvation would not eat his live rabbit or his
gold-fish. Zuleika, on a desert island, would
have spent most of her time in looking for a
man's foot-print. She was, indeed, far too human
a creature to care much for art. I do not say
that she took her work lightly. She thought she
had genius, and she liked to be told that this
was so. But mainly she loved her work as a
means of mere self-display. The frank admiration
which, into whatsoever house she entered,
the grown-up sons flashed on her; their eagerness
to see her to the door; their impressive way of
putting her into her omnibus — these were the
things she revelled in. She was a nymph to
whom men's admiration was the greater part of
life. By day, whenever she went into the streets,
she was conscious that no man passed her without
a stare; and this consciousness gave a sharp
zest to her outings. Sometimes she was followed
to her door — crude flattery which she was too
innocent to fear. Even when she went into the
haberdasher's to make some little purchase of
tape or riband, or into the grocer's — for she was
an epicure in her humble way — to buy a tin of
potted meat for her supper, the homage of the
young men behind the counter did flatter and
exhilarate her. As the homage of men became
for her, more and more, a matter of course, the
more subtly necessary was it to her happiness.
The more she won of it, the more she treasured
it. She was alone in the world, and it saved her
from any moment of regret that she had neither
home nor friends. For her the streets that lay
around her had no squalor, since she paced them
always in the gold nimbus of her fascinations.
Her bedroom seemed not mean nor lonely to her,
since the little square of glass, nailed above the
wash-stand, was ever there to reflect her face.
Thereinto, indeed, she was ever peering. She
would droop her head from side to side, she
would bend it forward and see herself from beneath
her eyelashes, then tilt it back and watch
herself over her supercilious chin. And she would
smile, frown, pout, languish — let all the emotions
hover upon her face; and always she seemed to
herself lovelier than she had ever been.
Yet was there nothing Narcissine in her spirit.
Her love for her own image was not cold
æstheticism. She valued that image not for its
own sake, but for sake of the glory it always won
for her. In the little remote music-hall, where
she was soon appearing nightly as an "early
turn," she reaped glory in a nightly harvest. She
could feel that all the gallery-boys, because of
her, were scornful of the sweethearts wedged between
them, and she knew that she had but to say
"Will any gentleman in the audience be so good
as to lend me his hat?" for the stalls to rise as
one man and rush towards the platform. But
greater things were in store for her. She was
engaged at two halls in the West End. Her
horizon was fast receding and expanding. Homage
became nightly tangible in bouquets, rings,
brooches — things acceptable and (luckier than
their donors) accepted. Even Sunday was not
barren for Zuleika: modish hostesses gave her
postprandially to their guests. Came that Sunday
night,
notanda candidissimo calculo! when she
received certain guttural compliments which made
absolute her vogue and enabled her to command,
thenceforth, whatever terms she asked for.
Already, indeed, she was rich. She was living
at the most exorbitant hotel in all Mayfair. She
had innumerable gowns and no necessity to buy
jewels; and she also had, which pleased her most,
the fine cheval-glass I have described. At the
close of the Season, Paris claimed her for a
month's engagement. Paris saw her and was
prostrate. Boldini did a portrait of her. Jules
Bloch wrote a song about her; and this, for a
whole month, was howled up and down the cobbled
alleys of Montmartre. And all the little
dandies were mad for "la Zuleika." The jewellers
of the Rue de la Paix soon had nothing left
to put in their windows — everything had been
bought for "la Zuleika." For a whole month,
baccarat was not played at the Jockey Club — every
member had succumbed to a nobler passion.
For a whole month, the whole demi-monde was
forgotten for one English virgin. Never, even
in Paris, had a woman triumphed so. When the
day came for her departure, the city wore such
an air of sullen mourning as it had not worn since
the Prussians marched to its Elysée. Zuleika,
quite untouched, would not linger in the conquered
city. Agents had come to her from every capital
in Europe, and, for a year, she ranged, in triumphal
nomady, from one capital to another.
In Berlin, every night, the students escorted her
home with torches. Prince Vierfünfsechs-Siebe-nachtneun
offered her his hand, and was condemned
by the Kaiser to six months' confinement
in his little castle. In Yildiz Kiosk, the tyrant
who still throve there conferred on her the Order
of Chastity, and offered her the central couch in
his seraglio. She gave her performance in the
Quirinal, and, from the Vatican, the Pope
launched against her a Bull which fell utterly flat.
In Petersburg, the Grand Duke Salamander
Salamandrovitch fell enamoured of her. Of
every article in the apparatus of her conjuring-tricks
he caused a replica to be made in finest
gold. These treasures he presented to her in
that great malachite casket which now stood on
the little table in her room; and thenceforth it
was with these that she performed her wonders.
They did not mark the limit of the Grand Duke's
generosity. He was for bestowing on Zuleika
the half of his immensurable estates. The Grand
Duchess appealed to the Tzar. Zuleika was conducted
across the frontier, by an escort of love-sick
Cossacks. On the Sunday before she left
Madrid, a great bull-fight was held in her honour.
Fifteen bulls received the
coup-de-grâce, and
Alvarez, the matador of matadors, died in the
arena with her name on his lips. He had tried
to kill the last bull without taking his eyes off
la divina señorita. A prettier compliment had
never been paid her, and she was immensely
pleased with it. For that matter, she was immensely
pleased with everything. She moved
proudly to the incessant music of a pæan, aye! of
a pæan that was always
crescendo.
Its echoes followed her when she crossed the
Atlantic, till they were lost in the louder, deeper,
more blatant pæan that rose for her from the
shores beyond. All the stops of that "mighty
organ, many-piped," the New York press, were
pulled out simultaneously, as far as they could
be pulled, in Zuleika's honour. She delighted in
the din. She read every line that was printed about her, tasting her
triumph as she had never tasted it before. And how she revelled in the
Brobdingnagian drawings of her, which, printed in nineteen colours,
towered between the columns or sprawled across them! There she was,
measuring herself back to back with the Statue of Liberty; scudding
through the firmament on a comet, whilst a crowd of tiny men in
evening-dress stared up at her from the terrestrial globe; peering
through a microscope held by Cupid over a diminutive Uncle Sam;
teaching the American Eagle to stand on its head; and doing a
hundred-and-one other things — whatever suggested itself to the fancy
of native art. And through all this iridescent maze of symbolism were
scattered many little slabs of realism. At home, on the street,
Zuleika was the smiling target of all snap-shooters, and all the
snap-shots were snapped up by the press and reproduced with
annotations: Zuleika Dobson walking on Broadway in the sables gifted
her by Grand Duke Salamander — she says "You can bounce blizzards in
them"; Zuleika Dobson yawning over a love-letter from millionaire
Edelweiss; relishing a cup of clam-broth — she says "They don't use
clams out there"; ordering her maid to fix her a warm bath; finding a
split in the gloves she has just drawn on before starting for the
musicale given in her honour by Mrs. Suetonius X. Meistersinger, the
most exclusive woman in New York; chatting at
the telephone to Miss Camille Van Spook, the
best-born girl in New York; laughing over the
recollection of a compliment made her by George
Abimelech Post, the best-groomed man in New
York; meditating a new trick; admonishing a
waiter who has upset a cocktail over her skirt;
having herself manicured; drinking tea in bed.
Thus was Zuleika enabled daily to be, as one
might say, a spectator of her own wonderful life.
On her departure from New York, the papers
spoke no more than the truth when they said she
had had "a lovely time." The further she went
West — millionaire Edelweiss had loaned her his
private car — the lovelier her time was. Chicago
drowned the echoes of New York; final Frisco
dwarfed the headlines of Chicago. Like one of
its own prairie-fires, she swept the country from
end to end. Then she swept back, and sailed for
England. She was to return for a second season
in the coming Fall. At present, she was, as I
have said, "resting."
As she sat here in the bay-window of her room,
she was not reviewing the splendid pageant of
her past. She was a young person whose reveries
never were in retrospect. For her the past was
no treasury of distinct memories, all hoarded and
classified, some brighter than others and more
highly valued. All memories were for her but as
the motes in one fused radiance that followed her
and made more luminous the pathway of her
future. She was always looking forward. She
was looking forward now — that shade of ennui
had passed from her face — to the week she was
to spend in Oxford. A new city was a new toy
to her, and — for it was youth's homage that she
loved best — this city of youths was a toy after her
own heart.
Aye, and it was youths who gave homage to
her most freely. She was of that high-stepping
and flamboyant type that captivates youth most
surely. Old men and men of middle age admired
her, but she had not that flower-like quality of
shyness and helplessness, that look of innocence,
so dear to men who carry life's secrets in their
heads. Yet Zuleika was very innocent, really.
She was as pure as that young shepherdess Marcella,
who, all unguarded, roved the mountains
and was by all the shepherds adored. Like Marcella,
she had given her heart to no man, had
preferred none. Youths were reputed to have
died for love of her, as Chrysostom died for
love of the shepherdess; and she, like the shepherdess,
had shed no tear. When Chrysostom
was lying on his bier in the valley, and Marcella
looked down from the high rock, Ambrosio, the
dead man's comrade, cried out on her, upbraiding
her with bitter words — "Oh basilisk of our mountains!"
Nor do I think Ambrosio spoke too
strongly. Marcella cared nothing for men's admiration,
and yet, instead of retiring to one of
those nunneries which are founded for her kind,
she chose to rove the mountains, causing despair
to all the shepherds. Zuleika, with her peculiar
temperament, would have gone mad in a nun-\]nery.
"But," you may argue, "ought not she
to have taken the veil, even at the cost of her
reason, rather than cause so much despair in the
world? If Marcella was a basilisk, as you seem
to think, how about Miss Dobson?" Ah, but
Marcella knew quite well, boasted even, that she
never would or could love any man. Zuleika,
on the other hand, was a woman of really passionate
fibre. She may not have had that conscious,
separate, and quite explicit desire to be a
mother with which modern playwrights credit
every unmated member of her sex. But she did
know that she could love. And, surely, no woman
who knows that of herself can be rightly censured
for not recluding herself from the world: it is
only women without the power to love who have
no right to provoke men's love.
Though Zuleika had never given her heart,
strong in her were the desire and the need that
it should be given. Whithersoever she had fared,
she had seen nothing but youths fatuously prostrate
to her — not one upright figure which she
could respect. There were the middle-aged men,
the old men, who did not bow down to her; but
from middle-age, as from eld, she had a sanjguine
aversion. She could love none but a youth.
Nor — though she herself, womanly, would
utterly abase herself before her ideal — could she
love one who fell prone before her. And before
her all youths always did fall prone. She was
an empress, and all youths were her slaves.
Their bondage delighted her, as I have said.
But no empress who has any pride can adore one
of her slaves. Whom, then, could proud Zuleika
adore? It was a question which sometimes
troubled her. There were even moments when,
looking into her cheval-glass, she cried out
against that arrangement in comely lines and
tints which got for her the dulia she delighted in.
To be able to love once — would not that be
better than all the homage in the world? But
would she ever meet whom, looking up to him,
she could love — she, the omnisubjugant? Would
she ever, ever meet him?
It was when she wondered thus, that the wistfulness
came into her eyes. Even now, as she
sat by the window, that shadow returned to
them. She was wondering, shyly, had she met
him at length? That young equestrian who had
not turned to look at her; whom she was to meet
at dinner to-night . . . was it he? The ends of
her blue sash lay across her lap, and she was
lazily unravelling their fringes. "Blue and
white!" she remembered. "They were the colours
he wore round his hat." And she gave a
little laugh of coquetry. She laughed, and, long
after, her lips were still parted in a smile.
So did she sit, smiling, wondering, with the
fringes of her sash between her fingers, while
the sun sank behind the opposite wall of the
quadrangle, and the shadows crept out across the
grass, thirsty for the dew.