“Indeed!” He smiled gravely. “I want nothing of that kind.”
“In addition to everything else, you are completely healthy, and I believe you are a stranger to the dentist; your hair is not getting prematurely thin. Really, Leonard, I do not think that there can be in the whole country any other young man so fortunate.”
“Yet you refuse to join your future with mine.”
“Perhaps, if there were any misfortunes or drawbacks one might not refuse. Family scandals, now – Many noble houses have whole cupboards filled with skeletons: your cupboards are only filled with blue china. One or two scandals might make you more human.”
“Unfortunately, from your point of view, my people have no scandals.”
“Poor relations again! Many people are much pestered with poor relations. They get into scrapes, and they have to be pulled out at great cost. I have a cousin, for instance, who turns up occasionally. He is very expensive and most disreputable. But you? Oh, fortunate young man!”
“We have had early deaths; but there are no disreputable cousins.”
“That is what I complain of. You are too fortunate. You should throw a ring into the sea – like the too fortunate king, the only person who could be compared with you.”
“I dare say gout or something will come along in time.”
“It isn’t good for you,” she went on, half in earnest. “It makes life too pleasant for you, Leonard. You expect the whole of life to be one long triumphal march. Why, you are so fortunate that you are altogether outside humanity. You are out of sympathy with men and women. They have to fight for everything. You have everything tossed into your lap. You have nothing in common with the working world – no humiliations – no disgraces – no shames and no defeats.”
“I hardly understand – ” he began, disconcerted at this unexpected array of charges and crimes.
“I mean that you are placed above the actual world, in which men tumble about and are knocked down and are picked up – mostly by the women. You have never been knocked down. You say that I do not understand Love. Perhaps not. Certainly you do not. Love means support on both sides. You and I do not want any kind of support. You are clad in mail armour. You do not – you cannot – even wish to know what Love means.”
He made no reply. This turning of the table was unexpected. She had been confessing that she felt no need of Love, and now she accused him – the wooer – of a like defect.
“Leonard, if fortune would only provide you with family scandals, some poor relations who would make you feel ashamed, something to make you like other people, vulnerable, you would learn that Love might mean – and then, in that impossible case – I don’t know – perhaps – ” She left the sentence unfinished and ran out of the room.
Leonard looked after her, his face expressing some pain. “What does she mean? Humiliation? Degraded relations? Ridiculous!”
Then, for the second time after many years, he heard the voices of his mother and his grandmother. They spoke of misfortunes falling upon one and another of their family, beginning with the old man of the country house and the terrace. Oh! oh! It was absurd. He sprang to his feet. It was absurd. Humiliations! Disgrace! Family misfortunes! Absurd! Well, Constance had refused him. Perhaps she would come round. Meanwhile his eyes fell upon the table and his papers. He sat down: he took up the pen. Love, who had been looking on sorrowfully from a lofty perch on a bookshelf, vanished with a sigh of despair. The lover heard neither the sigh nor the fluttering of Love’s wings. He bent over his papers. A moment, and he was again absorbed – entirely absorbed in the work before him.
In her own room the girl sat before her table and took up her pen. But she threw it down again. “No,” she said, “I could not. He is altogether absorbed in himself. He knows nothing and understands nothing – and the world is so full of miseries; and he is all happiness, and men and women suffer – how they suffer! – for their sins and for other people’s sins. And he knows nothing. He understands nothing. Oh, if he could be made human by something – by humiliation, by defeat! If he could be made human, like the rest, why, then – then – ” She threw away her pen, pushed back the chair, put on her hat and jacket, and went out into the streets among the men and women.
CHAPTER III
SOMETHING TO COME
IF you have the rare power of being able to work at any time, and after any event to concentrate your thoughts on work, this is certainly a good way of receiving disappointments and averting chagrin. Two hours passed. Leonard continued at his table absorbed in his train of argument, and for the moment wholly forgetful of what had passed. Presently his pen began to move more slowly; he threw it down: he had advanced his position by another earthwork. He sat up; he numbered his pages; he put them together. And he found himself, after the change of mind necessary for his work, able to consider the late conversation without passion, though with a certain surprise. Some men – the weaker brethren – are indignant, humiliated, by such a rejection. That is because their vanity is built upon the sands. Leonard was not the kind of man to be humiliated by any answer to any proposal, even that which concerns the wedding-ring. He had too many excellent and solid foundations for the good opinion which he entertained of himself. It was impossible for any woman to refuse him, considering the standards by which women consider and estimate men. Constance had indeed acknowledged that in all things fortune had favoured him, yet owing to some feminine caprice or unexpected perversity he had not been able to touch her heart. Such a man as Leonard cannot be humiliated by anything that may be said or done to him: he is humiliated by his own acts, perhaps, and his own blunders and mistakes, of which most men’s lives are so full.
He was able to put aside, as an incident which would perhaps be disavowed in the immediate future, the refusal of that thrice fortunate hand of his. Besides, the refusal was conveyed in words so gracious and so kindly.
But there was this strange attack upon him. He found himself repeating in his own mind her words. Nature, Constance said, makes no man perfectly happy. He himself, she went on, presented the appearance of the one exception to the rule. He was well born, wealthy enough, strong and tall, sound of wind and limb, sufficiently well favoured, with proved abilities, already successful, and without any discoverable drawback. Was there any other man in the whole world like unto him? It would be better for him, this disturbing girl – this oracle – had gone on to prophesy, if something of the common lot – the dash of bitterness – had been thrown in with all these great and glorious gifts of fortune; something would certainly happen: something was coming; there would be disaster: then he would be more human; he would understand the world. As soon as he had shared the sorrows and sufferings, the shames and the humiliations, of the world, he would become more in harmony with men and women. For the note of the common life is suffering.
At this point there came back to him again out of the misty glades of childhood the memory of those two women who sat together, widows both, in the garb of mourning, and wept together.
“My dear,” said the elder lady – the words came back to him, and the scene, as plainly as on that day when he watched the old man sleeping in his chair – “my dear, we are a family of misfortune.”
“But why – why – why?” asked the other. “What have we done?”
“Things,” said the elder lady, “are done which are never suspected. Nobody knows; nobody finds out: the arm of the Lord is stretched out, and vengeance falls, if not upon the guilty, then upon his children and – ”
Leonard drove the memory back – the lawn and the garden: the two women sitting in the veranda: the child playing on the grass: the words – all vanished. Leonard returned to the present. “Ghosts!” he said. “Ghosts! Were these superstitious fears ever anything but ghosts?” He refused to think of these things: he put aside the oracle of the wise woman, the admonition that he was too fortunate a youth.
You have seen how he opened the first of a small heap of letters. His eye fell upon the others: he took up the first and opened it: the address was that of a fashionable West-End hotel: