Black Oxen Part 8

"How often have you loved, yourself?"

"That question I could answer specifically, but I shall not."

He calculated rapidly. "Four years of war. a.s.suming that you are thirty-two, although sometimes you look older and sometimes younger, and that you married at seventeen, that would leave you--well, eleven years before the war began. I suppose you didn't fall in love once a year?"

"Oh, no, I am a faithful soul. Say three years and a third to each attack."

"You talk at times singularly like an American for one who left here at the age of two."

"Remember that my family went with me. Moreover, Mary and I always talked English together--American if you like. She was intensely proud of being an American. We read all the American novels, as I told you.

They are an education in the idiom, permanent and pa.s.sing. Moreover, I was always meeting Americans."

"Were you? Well, the greater number of them must be in New York at the present moment. No doubt they would be glad to relieve your loneliness."

"I am not in the least lonely and I have not the least desire to see any of them. Only one thing would induce me--if I thought it would be possible to raise a large amount of money for the women and children of Austria."

"Ah! You would take the risk, then?"

"Risk? They were the most casual acquaintances. They probably have forgotten me long since. I had not left Hungary for a year before the war, and one rarely meets an American in Pesth Society--two or three other American women had married Hungarians, but they preferred Vienna and I preferred Europeans. I knew them only slightly... . Moreover, there are many Zattianys. It is an immense connection."

"You mean you believe you would be safe," he caught her up.

"_Mon dieu_! You make me feel as if I were on the stand. But yes, quite safe."

"And you really believe that any one could ever forget you?"

"I am not as vain as you seem to think."

"You have every right to be. Suppose--suppose that something should occur to rouse the suspicions of the Countess Zattiany's old friends and they should start investigations in Vienna?"

"They would not see her--nor their emissaries. Dr. Steinach's sanitarium is inviolate."

"Steinach--Steinach--where have I heard that name lately?"

Her eyes flew open, but she lowered the lids immediately. Her voice shook slightly as she replied: "He is a very great doctor. He will keep poor Mary's secret as long as she lives and n.o.body in Vienna would doubt his word. Investigations would be useless."

"She is there then? I suppose you mean that she is dying of an incurable disease or has lost her mind. But do not imagine that I care to pry further into that. I never had the least idea that you had---- Oh, I don't know what to believe! ... Won't you ever tell me?"

"I wonder! No, I think not! No! No!"

"There is something then?"

"Do you know why you still harp on that absurd idea that I am what I am and still am not? Do you not know what it is--the simple explanation?"

"No, I do not."

"It is merely that European women, the women who have been raised in the intrigues of courts and the artificialities of what we call 'the World,' who learn the technique of gallantry as soon as they are _lancee_, where men make a definite cult of women and women of men, where sincerity in such an atmosphere is more baffling than subtlety and guile--that is the reason your American girl is never understood by foreign men--where naturalness is despised as gauche and art commands homage, where, in short, the game is everything--that most aristocratic and enthralling of all games--the game of chess, with men and women as kings, queens, p.a.w.ns... . There you have the whole explanation of my apparent riddle. You have never met any one like me before."

"There are a good many women of your cla.s.s here now."

"Yes, with avowed objects, is it not? And they do not happen to possess the combination of qualities that commands your interest."

"That is true enough. Perhaps your explanation is the real one. There is certainly something in it. Well, I'll go now. I have kept you up long enough."

He was about to raise her hand to his lips when she surprised him by shaking his warmly.

"I must get over that habit. It is rather absurd in this country where you have not the custom. But you will come again?"

"Oh, yes, I'll come again."

XII

Madame Zattiany adjusted the chain on the front door and returned very slowly to the library. That broad placid brow, not the least of her physical charms, was drawn in a puzzled frown. Instead of turning out the lights she sat down and stared into the dying fire. Suddenly she began to laugh, a laugh of intense and ironic amus.e.m.e.nt; but it stopped in mid-course and her eyes expanded with an expression of consternation, almost of panic.

She was not alarmed for the peace of mind of the man who was more in love with her than he had so far admitted to himself. She had been loved by too many men and had regarded their heartaches and balked desires with too profound an indifference to worry over the possible harm she might be inflicting upon the brilliant and ambitious young man who had precipitated himself into her life. That might come later, but not at this moment when she was shaken and appalled.

She had dismissed from her mind long ago the hope or the desire that she could ever again feel anything but a keen mental response to the most provocative of men. No woman had ever lived who was more completely disillusioned, more satiated, more scornful of that age-old dream of human happiness, which, stripped to its bones, was merely the blind instinct of the race to survive. Civilization had heaped its fictions over the bare fact of nature's original purpose, imagination las.h.i.+ng generic s.e.xual impulse to impossible demands for the consummate union of mind and soul and body. Mutuality! When man was essentially polygamous and woman essentially the vehicle of the race. When the individual soul had been decreed by the embittered G.o.ds eternally to dwell alone and never yet had been tricked beyond the moment of nervous exaltation into the belief that it had fused into its mate. Life itself was futile enough, but that dream of the perfect love between two beings immemorially paired was the most futile and ravaging of all the dreams civilization had imposed upon mankind. The curse of imagination. Only the savages and the ignorant ma.s.ses understood "love" for the transitory functional thing it was and were undisturbed by spiritual unrest ... by dreams ... mad longings... .

No one had ever surrendered to the illusion more completely than she.

No one had ever hunted with a more pa.s.sionate determination for that correlative soul that would submerge, exalt, and complete her own aspiring soul. And what had she found? Men. Merely men. Satiety or disaster. Weariness and disgust. She had not an illusion left. She had put all that behind her long since.

It seemed to her as she sat there staring into the last flickerings of the charred log that it had been countless years since any man had had the power to send a thrill along her nerves, to stir even the ghost of those old fierce desires. No woman had ever had more cause to feel immune. Too contemptuous of life and the spurious illusions man had created for himself, while destroying the even balance between matter and mind, even to be rebellious, she had felt a profound grat.i.tude for her complete freedom from the thrall of s.e.x when she had realized that with her gifts of mind and fortune she still had a work to do in the world that would resign her to the supreme boredom of living. During the war man had been but a broken thing to be mended or eased out of life; and she knew that there was no better nurse in Europe; it had always been her pride to do nothing by halves; and before that she had come to look upon men with a certain pa.s.sive toleration when their minds were responsive to her own. Whatever s.e.x charm they possessed might better have been wasted on the Venus in the Louvre.

And tonight she had realized that this young man, so unlike any she had ever known in her European experience, had been more or less in her thoughts since the night he had followed her out of the theatre and stood covertly observing her as she waited for her car. She had been conscious during subsequent nights at the play of his powerful gaze as he sat watching for a turn of the head that would give him a glimpse of something more than the back of her neck; or as she had pa.s.sed him on her way to her seat. She had been even more acutely conscious of him as he left his own seat while the lights were still down and followed her up the aisle. But she had felt merely amus.e.m.e.nt at the time, possibly a thrill of gratified vanity, accustomed as she was to admiration and homage.

But on the night when he had hastened up to her in the deserted street and offered his a.s.sistance, standing with his hat in his hand and looking at her with a boyish and diffident gallantry in amusing contrast with his stern and cynical countenance, and she had realized that he had impulsively followed her, something had stirred within her that she had attributed to a superficial recrudescence of her old love of adventure, of her keen desire for novelty at any cost. Amused at both herself and him, she had suddenly decided, while he was effecting an entrance to her house, to invite him into the library and take advantage of this break in the monotonous life she had decreed should be her portion while she remained in New York.

She had found him more personally attractive than she had expected.

Judge Trent, whom she had deftly drawn out, had told her that he was a young man of whom, according to Dinwiddie, great things were expected in the literary world; his newspaper career, brilliant as it was, being regarded merely as a phase in his progress; he had not yet "found himself." After that she had read his column attentively.

But she had not been prepared for a powerful and sympathetic personality, that curious mixture of navete and hard sophistication, and she had ascribed her interest in him to curiosity in exploring what to her was a completely foreign type. In her own navete it had never occurred to her that men outside her cla.s.s were gentlemen as she understood the term, and she still supposed Clavering to be exceptional owing to his birth and breeding. It had given her a distinct satisfaction, the night of the dinner, to observe that he lost nothing by contact with men who were indubitably of her own world. There was no sn.o.bbery in her att.i.tude. She had always been too secure in her own exalted state for sn.o.bbery, too protected from climbers to conceive the "I will maintain" impulse, and she had escaped at birth that overpowering sense of superiority that carks the souls of high and low alike. But it was the first time she had ever had the opportunity to judge by any standards but those in which she had been born and pa.s.sed her life. As for Clavering, he was a gentleman, and that was the end of that phase of the matter as far as she was concerned.

It was only tonight that she had been conscious of a certain youthful eagerness as she paced up and down the hall waiting to hear him run up the steps. She had paused once and laughed at herself as she realized that she was acting like a girl expecting her lover, when she was merely a coldly--no longer even bitterly--disillusioned woman, bored with this enforced inaction in New York, welcoming a little adventure to distract her mind from its brooding on the misery she had left behind her in Europe, and on the future to which she had committed herself. And a midnight adventure! She had shrugged her shoulders and laughed again as she had admitted him.

But she felt no disposition to laugh as she sat alone in the chilling room. She was both angry and appalled to remember that she had felt a quivering, almost a distension of her nerves as she had sat there with him in the silence and solitude of the night. That she had felt a warm pleasure in the interest that betrayed him into positive impertinence, and that a sick terror had shaken her when she saw that he was making up his mind not to see her again. She had not betrayed herself for a moment, she was too old a hand in the game of men and women for that, and she had let him go without a sign, secure in the confidence that he was at her beck; but she knew now, and her hands clenched and her face distorted as she admitted it, that if he had suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed her in his arms she would have flamed into pa.s.sion and felt herself the incarnation of youth and love.

Incredible. Unthinkable. She!

What should she do? Flee? She had come to New York for one purpose only, to settle her financial affairs in the briefest possible time and return to the country where her work lay. But she had been detained beyond expectation, for the slow reorganization of one of the companies in which a large portion of her fortune was invested would not be complete without her final signature. There were other important transfers to be made, and moreover Judge Trent had insisted that she become thoroughly acquainted with her business affairs and able to maintain an intelligent correspondence with her trustees when he himself had retired. She had shown a remarkable apt.i.tude for finance and he was merciless in his insistence, demanding an hour of her time every day.

Business. She hated the word. What did it matter---- But she knew that it did matter, and supremely. She might have the beauty, the brains, and the s.e.x domination to win men to her way of thinking when she launched herself into the maelstrom of politics, but she was well aware that her large fortune would be half the battle. It furnished the halo and the sinews, and it gave her the power to buy men who could not be persuaded. She had vowed that Austria should be saved at any cost.

No, she could not go now. She must remain for another month--two months, possibly. She was no longer in that undisciplined stage of youth when flight from danger seems the only solution. To wreck the lives of others in order to secure her own peace of mind would make her both ridiculous and contemptible in her own eyes, and she had yet to despise herself. She would "stick it out," "see it through," to quote the vernacular of these curious American novels she had been reading; trusting that she had merely been suffering from a flurry of the senses ... not so remarkable perhaps... .

But her mind drifted back to the past month. Senses? And if it were not that alone, but merely the inevitable accompaniment of far stranger processes ... if it were what she had once so long sought and with such disastrous results ... She had believed for so many years that it existed somewhere, in some man ... that it was every woman's right ... even if it could not last for ever... . But while it lasted! After all, imagination had its uses. It helped to prolong as well as create... . She sank back and closed her eyes, succ.u.mbing to an ineffable languor.