The Folly Of Eustace Part 2

Does not the safety of many of us lie merely in dressing up? Do we not buy our fate at the costumier's?

"Just tell me one thing," Winifred went on. "Are you natural?"

"Natural?" he hesitated.

"Yes; I think you must be. You've got a whimsical nature."

"I suppose so." He thought of his journey with his father years ago, and added: "I wish I hadn't."

"Why? There is a charm in the fantastic, although comparatively few people see it. Life must be a sort of Arabian Nights Entertainment to you."

"Sometimes. To-night it is different. It seems a sort of Longfellow life."

"What's that?"

"Real and earnest."

And then he proposed to her, with a laugh, to shoot an arrow at the dead poet and his own secret psalm.

And Winifred accepted him, partly because she thought him really strange, partly because he seemed so pretty in his wig, which she chose to believe his own hair.

They were married, and on the wedding-day the bridegroom astonished his guests by making a burlesque speech at the reception.

In anyone else such an exhibition would have been considered the worst taste, but n.o.body was disgusted, and many were delighted. They had begun to fear that Eustace was getting humdrum. This harlequinade after the pantomime at the church--for what is a modern smart wedding but a second-rate pantomime?--put them into a good humour, and made them feel that, after all, they had got something for their presents. And so the happy pair pa.s.sed through a dreary rain of rice to the mysteries of that Bluebeard's Chamber, the honeymoon.

II.

Winifred antic.i.p.ated this honeymoon with calmness, but Eustace was too much in love to be calm. He was, on the contrary, in a high state of excitement, and of emotion, and the effort of making his ridiculous speech had nearly sent him into hysterics. But he had now fully resolved to continue in his whimsical course, and to play for ever the part of a highly erratic genius, driven hither and thither by the weird impulses of the moment. That he never had any impulses but such as were common to most ordinary young men was a sad fact which he meant to most carefully conceal from Winifred. He had made up his mind that she believed his mask to be his face. She had, therefore, married the mask. To divorce her violently from it might be fatal to their happiness. If he showed the countenance G.o.d had given him, she might cry: "I don't know you.

You are a stranger. You are like all the other men I didn't choose to marry." His blood ran cold at the thought. No, he must keep it up. She loved his fantasies because she believed them natural to him. She must never suspect that they were not natural. So, as they travelled, he planned the campaign of married life, as doubtless others, strange in their new bondage, have planned. He gazed at Winifred, and thought, "What is her notion of the ideal husband, I wonder?" She gazed at him, and mused on his affection and his whimsicality, and what the two would lead to in connection with her fate. And the old, scarlet-faced guard smiled fatuously at them both through the window on which glared a prominent "Engaged" as he had smiled on many another pair of fools--so he silently dubbed them. Then they entered Bluebeard's Chamber and closed the door behind them.

Brighton was their destination. They meant to lose themselves in a marine crowd.

They stayed there for a fortnight, and then returned to town, Eustace more in love than ever.

But Winifred?

One afternoon she sat in the drawing-room of the pretty little house they had taken in Deanery Street, Park Lane. She was thinking, very definitely. The silent processes of even an ordinary woman's mind--what great male writer would not give two years of his life to sit with them and watch them, as the poet watches the flight of a swallow, or the astronomer the processions of the sky? A curious gale was raging through the town, touzling its thatch of chimney-pots, doing violence to the demureness of its respectable streets. Night was falling, and in Piccadilly those strange, gay hats that greet the darkness were coming out like eager, vulgar comets in a dim and muttering firmament. It was just the moment when the outside mood of the huge city begins to undergo a change, to glide from its comparative simplicity of afternoon into its leering complexity of evening. Each twenty-four hours London has its moment of emanc.i.p.ation, its moment in which the wicked begin to breathe and the good to wonder, when "How?" and "Why?" are on the lips of the opposing factions, and only the philosophers who know--or think they know--their human nature hold themselves still, and feel that man is at the least ceaselessly interesting.

Winifred sat by the fire and held a council. She called her thoughts together and gave audience to her suspicions, and her brown eyes were wide and rather mournful as her counsellors uttered each a word of hope or of warning.

Eustace was out. He had gone to a concert, and had not returned.

She was holding a council to decide something in reference to him.

The honeymoon weeks had brought her just as far as the question, "Do I know my husband at all, or is he, so far, a total stranger?"

Some people seem to draw near to you as you look at them steadily, others to recede until they reach the verge of invisibility. Which was Eustace doing? Did his outline become clearer or more blurred? Was he daily more definite or more phantasmal? And the members of her council drew near and whispered their opinions in Winifred's attentive ears.

They were not all in accord at the first. Pros fought with cons, elbowed them, were hustled in return. Sometimes there was almost a row, and she had to stretch forth her hands and hush the tumult. For she desired a calm conclave, although she was a woman.

And the final decision--if, indeed, it could be arrived at that evening--was important. Love seemed to hang upon it, and all the sweets of life; and the little wings of Love fluttered anxiously, as the little wings of a bird flutter when you hold it in the cage of your hands, prisoning it from its wayward career through the blue shadows of the summer.

For love is not always and for ever instinctive--not even the finest love. While many women love because they must, whether the thing to be loved or not loved be carrion or crystal, a child of the G.o.ds or an imp of the devil, others love decisively because they see--perhaps can even a.n.a.lyze--a beauty that is there in the thing before them. One woman loves a man simply because he kisses her. Another loves him because he has won the Victoria Cross.

Winifred was not of the women who love because they are kissed.

She had accepted Eustace rather impulsively, but she had not married him quite uncritically. There was something new, different from other men, about him which attracted her, as well as his good looks--that prettiness which had peeped out from the white wig in the scarlet nook at the ball. His oddities at that time she had grown thoroughly to believe in, and, believing in them, she felt she liked them. She supposed them to spring, rather like amazing spotted orchids, from the earth of a quaint nature. Now, after a honeymoon spent among the orchids, she held this council while the wind blew London into a mood of evening irritation.

What was Eustace?

How the wind sang over Park Lane! Yet the stars were coming out.

What was he? A genius or a clown? A creature to spread a b.u.t.tered slide or a man to climb to heaven? A fine, free child of Nature, who did, freshly, what he would, regardless of the strained discretion of others, or a futile, scheming hypocrite, screaming after forced puerilities, without even a finger on the skirts of originality?

It was a problem for lonely woman's debate. Winifred strove to weigh it well. In Bluebeard's Chamber Eustace had cut many capers. This activity she had expected--had even wished for. And at first she had been amused and entertained by the antics, as one a.s.sisting at a good burlesque, through which, moreover, a piquant love theme runs. But by degrees she began to feel a certain stiffness in the capers, a self-consciousness in the antics, or fancied she began to feel it, and instead of being always amused she became often thoughtful.

Whimsicality she loved. Buffoonery she possibly, even probably, could learn to hate.

Of Eustace's love for her she had no doubt. She was certain of his affection. But was it worth having? That depended, surely, on the nature of the man in whom it sprang, from whom it flowed. She wanted to be sure of that nature; but she acknowledged to herself, as she sat by the fire, that she was perplexed. Perhaps even that perplexity was merciful. Yet she wished to sweep it away. She knit her brows moodily, and longed for a secret divining-rod that would twist to reveal truth in another.

For truth, she thought, is better than hidden water-springs, and a sincerity--even of stupidity--more lovely than the fountain that gives flowers to the desert, wild red roses to the weary gold of sands.

The wind roared again, howling to poor, shuddering Mayfair, and there came a step outside. Eustace sprang in upon Winifred's council, looking like a gay schoolboy, his cheeks flushed, his lips open to speak.

"Dreaming?" he said.

She smiled.

"Perhaps."

"That concert paralyzed me. Too much Beethoven. I wanted Wagner.

Beethoven insists on exalting you, but Wagner lets you revel and feel naughty. Winnie, d'you hear the wind?"

"Could I help it?" she asked.

"Does it suggest something to you?"

He looked at her, and made his expression mischievous, or meant to make it. She looked up at him, too.

"Yes, many things," she said--"many, many things."

"To me it suggests kites."

"Kites?"

"Yes. I'm going to fly one now in the Park. The stars are out. Put on your hat and come with me."

He seemed all impulse, sparkling to the novelty of the idea.