Black Oxen Part 46

"Marie! Glance inward. Do you see nothing that causes you to feel ashamed and foolish? Do you--_you_--fail to recognize the indecency of a woman of your mental age permitting herself to fancy that she is experiencing the authentic pa.s.sions of youth? Are you capable of creating life? Can you love with unsullied memory? Have you the ideals of youth, the plasticity, the hopes, the illusions? Have you still even that power of desperate mental pa.s.sion, so often subordinating the merely physical, of the mature woman who seeks for the last time to find in love what love has not? The final delusion.

No, Marie. Your revivified glands have restored to you the appearance and the strength of youth, but, although you have played with a role that appealed to your vanity, to your histrionic powers--with yourself as chief audience--your natural desire to see if you could not be--to yourself, again--as young as you appear, you have no more illusion in your soul than when you were a withered old woman in Vienna."

She looked at him with hostile but agonized eyes.

"Your calculated brutality does not affect me in the least. And you are merely one more victim of convention--like those old women in New York. It never has been, therefore it never can be. Many women are not able to bear children, even in youth."

"It is your turn to quibble. Tell me: until you were attracted to this young man--attracted, no doubt, because he was so unlike the European of your long experience--had you deviated from the conclusion, arrived at many years before, that you had had enough of love--of s.e.x--to satisfy any woman? You implied as much to me a few moments since. I know the mental part of you so well that I am positive the mere thought would have disgusted you. If you had been starved all your life it would be understandable, but you had experimented and deluded yourself again and again--and you were burnt out when you came to Vienna to live--burnt out, not only physically but spiritually. Your imagination was as arid as a desert without an oasis. If any man had made love to you then, you would merely have turned on him your weary disillusioned eyes, or laughed cynically at him and yourself. Your keen aesthetic sense would have been shocked. You were playing then an important and ambitious role, you had the greatest political salon in Vienna--in Europe--and you went away to rest that you might continue to play it, not that you might feel fresh enough once more to have _liaisons_ like other foolish old women... . But the part you played then was a bagatelle to the one awaiting you now. With your splendid mental gifts, your political genius, your acquired statecraft, your wealth, and your restored beauty, you could become the most powerful woman in Europe. But only as my wife. Even you are not strong enough to play the part alone. There is too much prejudice against women to permit you to pull more than hidden strings. Masculine jealousy of women is far more irritable in a democracy than in a monarchy, where women of rank are expected to play a decorative--and tactful part in politics.

But if they step down and come into conflict with ambitious men of the people, cla.s.s jealousy aggravates s.e.x jealousy. You might have a salon again and become a power somewhat in the old fas.h.i.+on, but you never would be permitted to play a great public role. But as the consort (I think the word will pa.s.s) of the President--or Chancellor--you could wield almost sensational power."

"I should probably be quite overshadowed by you," she murmured; but she was hardly conscious of speaking. Her brain was whirling.

"Your position would be too eminent for that, even if I wished it, which I a.s.suredly should not. I value you too highly. Perhaps I am one of the few men in Europe who admit--and believe--that a woman may have as powerful and accomplished an intellect as any man. I did not appreciate your mind as you deserved when I loved you, but I did during those subsequent years in Vienna."

"You did not ask me to marry you then--when you appreciated me so highly. You never seemed to know whether you were talking to a man or a woman when you were with me. And yet I was, possibly, more interesting psychologically than I had ever been."

"No man is interested in an old woman's psychology. I am not interested in your psychology today. And I did not ask you to marry me then for a great many reasons. I was too handicapped to play a great role myself, you will remember. Nor could you have been of the same service to me. Even if your fatigued mind had been refreshed, by your stay in Hungary, you had lost the beauty and the energy, the power of ardent interest in the affairs of state, which have now been restored to you. With your rare gifts and your renewed youth, I repeat you have it in your power to be the most famous woman in Europe, and perhaps the most useful. But not with a young alien husband. Not only would you automatically revert to the status of an American, but the dignity which, unlike so many women of your age who had been _dames galantes_, you took care to impress on the world, would be hopelessly sacrificed.

Incredible. To spend yourself on a love affair, wantonly to throw away an historic career, merely because a young man has hypnotized you into the delusion that you may once more enjoy the pa.s.sions of youth----"

"Stop! You shall not!" She had sprung to her feet. Her face was drawn and pinched but her eyes were blazing. "Every word you say is for a purpose. If that were all I should have hated him. As much as I hate you. My mind never dwelt on that--not for a moment--I--I never faced it. You don't know what you're talking about."

"Ah, but I do." He had risen also, and he put his hands on her shoulders. They were long thin hands but very powerful, and it seemed to her that they sank slowly through her flesh, until, however painlessly, they gripped the skeleton underneath. "Look at me, Marie.

Your Mary Ogden died many, many years ago. She died, I should say, at the first touch of Otto Zattiany. There was nothing in your new life to revive her, a.s.suredly not your first lover. Certainly you were Marie Zattiany, the most subtle, complex, and fascinating woman in Europe when I met you--but abominably disillusioned even then. I revived your youth for a time, but never your girlhood. You have been able to deceive yourself here in the country of that girlhood, for a time, with this interesting young gentleman in love with you, and, no doubt, extremely ardent."

"Oh!" Her head sank. But she could not turn away, for his hands still gripped her shoulders. The roar of the stream sounded to her horrified ears like the crash of falling ruins.

"Listen, Marie," he said more gently. "If I have been brutal, it was merely because there was no other way to fling you head first out of your fool's paradise. If I had not known the common sense that forms the solid lower stratum of your mind, I should not have come here to say anything at all. You would not have been worth it. But remember, Marie, that under this new miracle of science, the body may go back but never the mind. You, your ego, your mind, your _self_, are no younger than your fifty-eight hard-lived years. And what object in being young again for any of us if we are to make the same old mistakes? Remember, that when you were as young as you look now you had no such opportunity offered you as in this terrible period of European history. Nor could you have taken advantage of it if you had, for mere mental brilliancy and ambition cannot take the place of political experience and an intellect educated by the world. It may be that we shall both be destroyed, that our efforts will avail nothing, and we shall all be swallowed up in chaos. But at least we shall have done what we could.

And I know you well enough to believe that such an implacable end would give you greater satisfaction than dallying in the arms of a handsome young husband."

He pushed her back into her chair, and resumed his own. "Would you like to smoke?" he asked.

"Yes." She looked at him with bitter eyes, but she had recaptured her threatened composure. He regarded her with admiration but they smoked in silence for several moments. Then he spoke again.

"You remember Elka Zsaky, I suppose? She was several years older than you and one of the _dames galantes_ of her day. She has taken the treatment and looks many years younger, at least, than when she was a painted old hag with a red wig. She is still forced to employ artifice, but she has lovers again, and that is all she did it for.

Vienna is highly amused. No doubt all women of her sort will take it for no other purpose. But many of the intellectual women of Europe are taking it, too--and with the sole purpose of reinvigorating their mental faculties and recapturing the physical endurance necessary to their work. I happen to know of a woman scientist, Frau Bloch, who is now working sixteen hours a day, and she had had a bitter struggle with her enfeebled forces to work at all. Lorenz is no more remarkable. He seems to be the only disciple besides yourself that this country has heard of, but I could name a hundred men, out of my own knowledge, who are once more working with all the vigor of youth----"

"Yes," she interrupted sarcastically. "And without a thought of women, of course."

"Probably not." He waved his hand negligently. "But incidentally.

That is where men have the supreme advantage of women. The woman is an incident in their lives, even when sincerely in love. And if these men indulge occasionally in the pleasures of youth, or even marry young wives, the world will not be interested. But with women, who renew their youth and return to its follies, it will be quite another matter.

If they are not made the theme of obscene lampoons they may count themselves fortunate. There will certainly be verbal lampoons in private."

"Orthodoxy! Orthodoxy!"

"Possibly. But orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them. How it may be some years hence, when this cure for senescence has become a commonplace, I do not pretend to say. But so it is today. Personally, no doubt, you would be indifferent, for you have a contemptuously independent mind. But your career and your usefulness would be at an end."

"And suppose I am quite indifferent to that?"

"Ah, but you are not. I will not say that I have killed Mary Ogden during this painful hour, for it is impossible to kill the dead, but I have exorcised her ghost. She will not come again. If you marry this young man it will be out of defiance, or possibly out of a mistaken consideration for him--although he will be an object for sympathy later on. And you will marry him as Marie Zattiany, without an illusion left in that clear brain of yours--from which the mists have been blown by the cold wind of truth. And in a year--if you can stand self-contempt and ineffable ennui so long--you will leave him, resume your present name--the name by which Europe knows you--and return to us. But it may be too late. Vienna would still be laughing. The Viennese are a light-hearted race, and a lax, but when they laugh they cease to take seriously the subject of that good-natured amus.e.m.e.nt... . It is not aesthetic, you know, it is not aesthetic. Are you really quite indifferent, Marie?"

She shrugged and rose. "It must be time for luncheon," she said. "It will no doubt be horrible, but at least we can have it in here. The public dining-room would be impossible. I will find Mr. Dinwiddie and ask him to order it."

LVI

When the men returned from their fis.h.i.+ng trip at six o'clock they saw several of the women on the lake, but there was no one in the living-room. Clavering tapped at Mr. Dinwiddie's door, but as there was no answer, concluded that he and Mary had not yet returned from Huntersville. He was too desirous of a bath and clean clothes, however, to feel more than a fleeting disappointment, and it was not until his return to his room that he saw a letter lying on the table.

It was addressed in Mary's handwriting, and he stared at it in astonishment for a second, then tore it open. It was dated "Huntersvilie, Monday afternoon," and it read:

"Dear Lee:

"Mr. Dinwiddie will tell you that unforeseen circ.u.mstances have arisen which compel me to go to New York for a few days. It is excessively annoying, but unavoidable, and I do not ask you to follow me as I should hardly be able to see anything of you. If there is a prospect of being detained it will not be worth while to return and I'll let you know at once--on Thursday night by telephone; and then I hope you will not wait for the others, but join me here. Indeed, dear Lee, I wish this need not have happened, but at least we had three days.----M."

Clavering read this letter twice, hardly comprehending its purport.

She made no mention of Judge Trent. The whole thing was ambiguous, curt. A full explanation was his right; moreover, it was the reverse of a love letter. Even its phrases of regret were formal. Something was wrong.

He put on his clothes hurriedly in order to go in search of Dinwiddie, but before he had finished he heard a sound in the next room and opened the connecting door unceremoniously.

Mr. Dinwiddie braced himself as he saw Clavering's set face.

"Too bad," he muttered, but Clavering cut him short.

"I want the truth. What took Mary to New York?"

"Surely she explained in her letter."

"She explained nothing. There's some mystery here and I want it cleared up at once."

"By G.o.d! I'll tell you!" Mr. Dinwiddie burst out. "Mary exacted no promise--I suppose she took for granted I'd not tell you, for she told me what she had written. But if she had I'd tell you anyhow. I'd rather break a promise to a woman than lie to a friend. Believe men should stand by one another. She went down there this morning to meet Hohenhauer."

"Hohenhauer!" Clavering's face turned almost black.

"Yes. Trent telegraphed me yesterday that Hohenhauer was arriving at Huntersville last night and would come up here in the morning to see Mary. He said the matter was most important. I went to Mary's room after you came in from the lake and showed her the message. She was extremely annoyed and said at first that she wouldn't see him. But I pointed out that she couldn't possibly avoid it. Then she said he shouldn't come up here, and she was very emphatic about it. The only thing to do was to take her down. Of course you will be reasonable and see there was nothing else to be done."

"What did that infernal blackguard want of her? And why did she go off with him?"

"She didn't go off with him. She hired a car directly after lunch intending to drive as far as Saratoga and take a train from there. She left Hohenhauer to cool his heels until it was time to take the local for the Adirondack Express. She could easily have taken him along, but I think she was meting out punishment."

"Punishment?"

"Yes. They had a private conference for nearly two hours, and, whatever happened, it put her in an infernally bad humor. She scarcely opened her mouth during luncheon, and as Mary is a woman of the world, used to concealing her feelings, I thought it highly significant. She looked as if she were in a secret frozen rage. Hohenhauer, however, was quite himself, and the meal--corned beef and cabbage!--went off very well."

"What did he want of her?"

"Of that I haven't the vaguest idea. Something momentous, beyond a doubt. If I may hazard a guess, it has something to do with this special mission of his, and it is quite possible that he has asked her to go to Was.h.i.+ngton--insisted upon it--appealing to her love of Austria. I confess I don't see what she can accomplish there, for she never did have any Was.h.i.+ngton connections--of course she could get letters from Trent and trust to her personal power and prestige. But let me tell you that she didn't do it to please him. She looked as if she hated him."