Lancelot had stuttered horribly during the latter part of this most heterodox outburst, for he had begun to think about himself, and try to say a fine thing, suspecting all the while that it might not be true. But Argemone did not remark the stammering: the new thoughts startled and pained her; but there was a daring grace about them. She tried, as women will, to answer him with arguments, and failed, as women will fail. She was accustomed to lay down the law à la Madame de Staël, to savants and non-savants and be heard with reverence, as a woman should be. But poor truth-seeking Lancelot did not see what sex had to do with logic; he flew at her as if she had been a very barrister, and hunted her mercilessly up and down through all sorts of charming sophisms, as she begged the question, and shifted her ground, as thoroughly right in her conclusion as she was wrong in her reasoning, till she grew quite confused and pettish.—And then Lancelot suddenly shrank into his shell, claws and all, like an affrighted soldier-crab, hung down his head, and stammered out some incoherencies—‘N-n-not accustomed to talk to women—ladies, I mean. F-forgot myself.—Pray forgive me!’ And he looked up, and her eyes, half-amused, met his, and she saw that they were filled with tears.
‘What have I to forgive?’ she said, more gently, wondering on what sort of strange sportsman she had fallen. ‘You treat me like an equal; you will deign to argue with me. But men in general—oh, they hide their contempt for us, if not their own ignorance, under that mask of chivalrous deference!’ and then in the nasal fine ladies’ key, which was her shell, as bitter brusquerie was his, she added, with an Amazon queen’s toss of the head—‘You must come and see us often. We shall suit each other, I see, better than most whom we see here.’
A sneer and a blush passed together over Lancelot’s ugliness.
‘What, better than the glib Colonel Bracebridge yonder?’
‘Oh, he is witty enough, but he lives on the surface of everything! He is altogether shallow and blasé. His good-nature is the fruit of want of feeling; between his gracefulness and his sneering persiflage he is a perfect Mephistopheles-Apollo.’
What a snare a decently-good nickname is! Out it must come, though it carry a lie on its back. But the truth was, Argemone thought herself infinitely superior to the colonel, for which simple reason she could not in the least understand him.
[By the bye, how subtly Mr. Tennyson has embodied all this in The Princess. How he shows us the woman, when she takes her stand on the false masculine ground of intellect, working out her own moral punishment, by destroying in herself the tender heart of flesh, which is either woman’s highest blessing or her bitterest curse; how she loses all feminine sensibility to the under-current of feeling in us poor world-worn, case-hardened men, and falls from pride to sternness, from sternness to sheer inhumanity. I should have honoured myself by pleading guilty to stealing much of Argemone’s character from The Princess, had not the idea been conceived, and fairly worked out, long before the appearance of that noble poem.]
They said no more to each other that evening. Argemone was called to the piano; and Lancelot took up the Sporting Magazine, and read himself to sleep till the party separated for the night.
Argemone went up thoughtfully to her own room. The shower had fallen, and the moon was shining bright, while every budding leaf and knot of mould steamed up cool perfume, borrowed from the treasures of the thundercloud. All around was working the infinite mystery of birth and growth, of giving and taking, of beauty and use. All things were harmonious—all things reciprocal without. Argemone felt herself needless, lonely, and out of tune with herself and nature.
She sat in the window, and listlessly read over to herself a fragment of her own poetry:—
SAPPHO
She lay among the myrtles on the cliff;
Above her glared the moon; beneath, the sea.
Upon the white horizon Athos’ peak
Weltered in burning haze; all airs were dead;
The sicale slept among the tamarisk’s hair;
The birds sat dumb and drooping. Far below
The lazy sea-weed glistened in the sun:
The lazy sea-fowl dried their steaming wings;
The lazy swell crept whispering up the ledge,
And sank again. Great Pan was laid to rest;
And mother Earth watched by him as he slept,
And hushed her myriad children for awhile.
She lay among the myrtles on the cliff;
And sighed for sleep, for sleep that would not hear,
But left her tossing still: for night and day
A mighty hunger yearned within her heart,
Till all her veins ran fever, and her cheek,
Her long thin hands, and ivory-channell’d feet,
Were wasted with the wasting of her soul.
Then peevishly she flung her on her face,
And hid her eyeballs from the blinding glare,
And fingered at the grass, and tried to cool
Her crisp hot lips against the crisp hot sward:
And then she raised her head, and upward cast
Wild looks from homeless eyes, whose liquid light
Gleamed out between deep folds of blue-black hair,
As gleam twin lakes between the purple peaks
Of deep Parnassus, at the mournful moon.
Beside her lay a lyre. She snatched the shell,
And waked wild music from its silver strings;
Then tossed it sadly by—‘Ah, hush!’ she cries,
‘Dead offspring of the tortoise and the mine!
Why mock my discords with thine harmonies?
‘Although a thrice-Olympian lot be thine,
Only to echo back in every tone,
The moods of nobler natures than thine own.’
‘No!’ she said. ‘That soft and rounded rhyme suits ill with Sappho’s fitful and wayward agonies. She should burst out at once into wild passionate life-weariness, and disgust at that universe, with whose beauty she has filled her eyes in vain, to find it always a dead picture, unsatisfying, unloving—as I have found it.’
Sweet self-deceiver! had you no other reason for choosing as your heroine Sappho, the victim of the idolatry of intellect—trying in vain to fill her heart with the friendship of her own sex, and then sinking into mere passion for a handsome boy, and so down into self-contempt and suicide?
She was conscious, I do believe, of no other reason than that she gave; but consciousness is a dim candle—over a deep mine.
‘After all,’ she said pettishly, ‘people will call it a mere imitation of Shelley’s Alastor. And what harm if it is? Is there to be no female Alastor? Has not the woman as good a right as the man to long after ideal beauty—to pine and die if she cannot find it; and regenerate herself in its light?’
‘Yo-hoo-oo-oo! Youp, youp! Oh-hooo!’ arose doleful through the echoing shrubbery.
Argemone started and looked out. It was not a banshee, but a forgotten fox-hound puppy, sitting mournfully on the gravel-walk beneath, staring at the clear ghastly moon.
She laughed and blushed—there was a rebuke in it. She turned to go to rest; and as she knelt and prayed at her velvet