The Devourers Part 40

"My lovers! You ask me who they are and why I have them. I have them because they make me look pretty. I look pretty when I laugh. A woman's beauty depends entirely upon how much she is loved. Did you not know that? The best 'fard pour la beaute des dames' is other people's adoration.

"My lovers therefore have their use, but they are not entertaining. They are uniformly sad or angry. Yet I am good to my lovers. I let them trot in and out of their tempers like nice tame animals that n.o.body need mind. I do not require them to perform in public; I sit and watch their innocent tricks with kind and wondering eyes.

"Et vous, mon Prince Charmant? What of you? Who are you making to look prettier? Whose cheeks are you tinting? Whose eyes are you brightening?

Whose heart are you making to flutter by the hurry of yours? Who smiles and dimples and blushes for your sake? I suppose you are falling in love with your fair countrywomen--tall, tennis-playing English girls, with cool, unkissed mouths and white, inexperienced hands. Ah, Prince Charming, whom do you love?

"EVE."

He replied: "You have spoken. Whom do I love? Eve."

She was glad. She lived a life of fevered joy. She was not Nancy. She was the Girl in the Letters; and the Girl in the Letters was a wild, unfettered, happy creature. Nothing seemed sweeter to her than this subtle _amor di lontano_--this love across the distance. Ah, how modern and piquant and recherche! And, again, how thirteenth-century! Was it not Jaufre Rudel, the Poet-Prince, who had loved the unseen Countess Melisenda for so many years?

"Amore di terra lontana, Per voi tutto il core mi duol,"

and who at last, coming to her, had died at her feet? Could they not also love each other across the distance, wildly and blindly, without the aid of any one of their senses? Surely that was the highest, the divinest, the most perfect way of love!

So Nancy lived her dream, and tossed the tender little love-letters across the ocean with light hands.

"CHER INCONNU,

"I write to you because it is raining and the sky is of grey flannel.

You will say that I wrote to you yesterday because the weather was fine and the sky was of blue silk.

"Ah, dear Unknown! It is true. You have grown into my life, like some strange, startling modern flower, out of place, out of season, yet sweet to my unwondering eyes. You are a black and white flower of words, growing through your brief wild letters into the garden of my heart.

"What a garden, mon ami! What a growth of weeds! what a burst of roses!

what a burgeoning of cabbages! An unnatural, degenerate garden, where the trees carry _marrons glaces_ and the flowers are scented with patchouli.

"Into this luxuriance of perversity, this decadent brilliance of vegetation, you have blossomed up, strange and new, for the delight of my soul. That you should say you love me, you who have never seen me, is sweeter perfume to my sated senses than the incense of all the thousand seraph-flowers that bow and swing at my feet.

"Good-bye. My name is Nancy."

To this letter he replied by cable: "Nancy, come here at once."

"'Come here at once!' The arrogant words go with a shock of pleasure to my heart. I am unused to the imperative; n.o.body has ever bullied me or told me to do this and that. I think I like it. I like being meek and frightened, and having to obey.

"'Come here at once!' I find myself timidly looking round for my hat and gloves, and wondering whether I shall wear my blue or my grey dress on the journey. I am nice on journeys. I am good-tempered, and wear mousie-coloured clothes that fit well, and I have a small waist. All this is very important in travelling, and makes people overlook and forgive the many, many small packages I carry into the compartment, and the hatboxes I lose, and the umbrellas I forget. When I am tired I can put my head down anywhere and go to sleep; I sleep nicely and quietly and purrily, like a cat.

"I am really very nice on journeys. Also I am very popular with useful people, like conductors and porters and guards. They take care of me and give me advice, and open and shut my windows, and lock my compartments even when it does not matter; and they bring me things to eat, and run after all the satchels and parcels I leave about.

"Your last letter says you are going to Switzerland. How nice! I should like to be with you, throbbing away on excitable little Channel steamers, puffing along in smoky, deliberate Continental trains, driving the bell-shaking horses slowly up the wide white roads that coil like wind-blown ribbons round the swelling b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the Alps; table-d'hoting at St. Moritz; tennis-playing at Maloya; clattering and rumbling over the covered bridges near Splugen; wandering through the moonlike suns.h.i.+ne of Sufer's pine-forest, where beady-eyed squirrels stop and look, and then scuttle, tail flouris.h.i.+ng, up the trees. I am friends with every one of those squirrels. Greet them from me.

"NANCY."

NEW YORK.

"AMOR MIO DI LONTANO,

"I am in the city again the horrible, glaring, screaming city, all loud and harsh in the uncompromising July sun. How I long to-day for the shade of the closed Italian houses, the friendly, indrawn shutters, the sleeping silence of the empty streets, and, far-off, the cerulean sweep of the Mediterranean!

"And a new lover at my side! A brand-new lover, whose voice would sound strange to my ears, whose eyes I had not fathomed, whose feelings I did not understand, whose thoughts I could only vaguely and wrongly guess at, whose nerves would respond strangely, like an unknown instrument, to the shy touch of my hand.

"Your letter is brought to me. Written at the Hotel Bellevue, Andermatt.

_Andermatt!_ How cool and buoyant and scintillant it sounds. It falls on my heart like a snowflake in the humid heat of this town.

"I have opened the letter. What? Only three words!

"Again: 'Come at once.' Again the words, with their brief, irresistible imperiousness, thrill my lazy soul.

"If you write it a third time ... by all that is sweet and unlikely, I shall come!

"Will you be glad? Will you kiss my white hands gratefully? Shall we be simple and absurd and happy? Or shall we fence and be brilliant, antagonistic, keen-witted? No matter! No matter! The fever of my heart will be stilled. My eyes will see you and be satisfied."

A cablegram to Andermatt. Reply paid. (Money borrowed from Fraulein Muller.)

"Dreamt that you had long black beard. Tell me that not true.--NANCY."

Reply from Andermatt:

"Not true. Come at once."

Nancy did not go at once. She had no money to go with; and, of course, she never intended to go at all.

He wrote: "Will you meet me in Lucerne?" and she replied: "Impossible."

He: "I shall expect you in Interlaken."

She: "Out of the question."

He: "I shall be in London in October. After that I am off to Peru."

So in September she wrote to him again.

"I lay awake last night dreaming of our first meeting. It will be framed in the conventional luxury of a little sitting-room in a Grand Hotel. It will be late in the afternoon--late enough to have the pretty pink-shaded lights lit, like s.h.i.+ning fairy-tale flowers, all over the room. Then a knock at the door. And you will come into my life. What then, what then, dear Unknown? My hands will lie in yours like prisoned b.u.t.terflies; my wilfulness and my courage, my flippancy and effrontery will throb away, foolishly, weakly, before your eyes. What then? Will Convention guide the steed of our Destiny gently back into the well-kept stables of the common-place? or shall we take the reins into our own hands, and lash it rearing and foaming over the precipice of the Forbidden, down into the flaming depths of pa.s.sionate happiness?

"Good-bye. Of course I shall not come."

XIII