The Relentless City

After dinner, bridge and normality followed, and it was natural that Bertie should find a corner as quiet as possible to have a talk with Amelie. They had wandered together round the cages, had tried to make themselves heard at the lion's end, but that monarch of the forest roared so continuously that it was impossible to catch a word anyone else was saying unless he shouted. And as their conversation was not naturally adapted to shouting, they sought the comparative quiet of the end which harboured the meaner insects.

Amelie had looked at the last case of all, and turned to Bertie.

'It's very complete,' she said.

'Very,' said he, and their eyes met, and both laughed.

'Now, tell me exactly what you think of it,' she went on, turning her back on the fleas and sitting down. 'I really want to know what you think of it, Bertie.'

Bertie looked round to see that they were alone.

'It appears to me absolutely idiotic,' he said.

She did not reply at once.

'Mamma – ah, you like me to say mother – mother was one of the hosts,' she observed.

'I know. But you asked me what I thought.'

'Reggie's very rich,' she said. 'It doesn't make any difference to him. I suppose a beggar would think me idiotic to wear jewels, which might be converted into cash. At least, I suppose it is that you mean – the senseless expenditure.'

'No; one can't say any expenditure is senseless,' said he, 'since it is a matter of degree, a matter of how much you have to spend. If a man spent all his capital on such an entertainment, or indeed on any, it would be senseless, but, as you say, Armstrong is very rich.'

'What do you mean, then?'

'I mean that it is idiotic, because it doesn't give one any real pleasure. It gives one real pleasure to see those pearls lying on your neck.'

'Oh, but it does give pleasure, though perhaps not to you,' she said. 'Lots of people here think it's just exquisite. I suppose that means they are idiots.'

She paused a moment.

'You've been very frank,' she said; 'I will be, too. When I see you here, when I see that darling Ginger here, I think it is idiotic. But I don't otherwise. You see, I've been brought up in it all. You have been brought up differently. All my life I have been in the middle of this – this senseless expenditure. You have been in gray old houses, and big green parks, and quiet places, among people with low voices.'

He made a gesture to stop her. It was no use saying these things.

'No, I want to say this,' she said; 'I have meant to say it often, and I haven't been able. I have chosen, you see – I have chosen you. And I have seen often that we have grated on you; I have seen you thinking how senseless this all is. But, Bertie, I can't give up my friends, and I don't suppose I can change my nature. I can't promise to become English. I can't promise even to try. But I love you.'

She looked up at him with those great gray eyes, and for a moment something rose in his breast, till he almost thought that the intolerable joy of a passion he had once felt was about to burn again within him. But it rose, stayed short of the point, and sank again.

'I don't ask you to, Amelie,' he said. 'I am not so unreasonable or unfair as to ask you to change. And you left to say last what was best of all.'

Suddenly he felt an impulse almost overwhelming to tell her all, to tell her that, tender and strong as was his affection for her, he had known once a love that was different in kind from this, a love which he thought a man can only feel once, and when he felt it, it was not for her. Yet how could he do it? How define a moonbeam? And what good would it be when done? It might perhaps vaguely distress and disquiet her, but it could serve no other purpose, except that it would satisfy a certain demand for honesty felt by himself. The impulse, he dimly felt, was of a momentous nature; it involved principle which lies behind expediency, but though for a space it was very strong, it soon passed, and the want of practical purpose in telling her took its place. To minimize pain and to multiply pleasure was one of Bertie's maxims; suffering of any sort was repugnant to him, whether he or another was the sufferer. Such a desire is part always of a kindly nature, but when, as in his case, it is a dominant factor, one of the dominant lords of conduct, it is the sign of a nature not only kindly, but emphatically lazy – one which will always drift as long as possible, one which in a moral sense will never go to the dentist before its teeth ache, and will then not try to have them saved, but take gas and part with them.

His last words to Amelie made the girl's cheek glow and her eye brighten. She loved her lover's lack of effusiveness, for to her it indicated the depth of still waters. In everything she found him as she would have him, and when he said 'you left till last the best of all,' she felt that no torrent of words, no battery of impassioned looks, could have been so convincingly genuine as the dry simplicity of his words. Like every other woman or man who has ever loved, she had imagined for herself the ideal lover, and enshrined it in some human tabernacle. To her Bertie was the one and only tabernacle wherein her love could dwell. He had told her with a limpid directness in the early days of their engagement that when he came a-wooing he had come, of set purpose, to a wealthy house, and this declaration, which would in a nature less sweet and generous than hers have prompted, in case of a lover's quarrel, the stifled whisper 'you wished to marry me for my money,' had not the most shadowy existence in her. She knew otherwise; the fortunate accident of her wealth had been no more, so she believed, than the mere master of the ceremonies who had introduced them.

The completeness of his reply so satisfied her that, after a short pause, she spoke at once of other things.

'Father has settled Molesworth on me,' she said. 'He has made it my own.'

'Will you ask me there sometimes?' said Bertie.

'Yes, perhaps. Are you very fond of it?'

'Yes, somehow right inside me I am. I think one gets a very strong, though not at all a violent, feeling for a place where one has been brought up. One's father was brought up there, too, you see, and one's grandfather. The feeling isn't worth much; we have tried to sell it for years, and whistled for a buyer in vain.'

She sighed.

'We Americans have no sense of home at all,' she said. 'Really, we all live in hotels for preference. I don't suppose I shall ever get it, or even understand it. Is it – is it worth having, that sense of home?'

'I don't know that it is. It is a comfortable feeling, that is all. "My own fireside"; it is a domestic sort of joy, which rather reminds one of Cowper's poems.'

'I shall read them,' remarked Amelie with decision. Bertie laughed.

'You will certainly go to sleep over them,' he said.

'That will be domestic too. Come, Bertie, I'm going to jabber like the others.'

'Jabber to me.'

'I can't jabber to you. You are not jabberable. Look at me once; that must be our good-night.'

Mr. Palmer had arrived in New York some week or so before, and had occupied himself for a whole day over the matter of settlements. Molesworth he had given to Amelie, had settled a million pounds sterling on her, and on Bertie two hundred and thirty-seven thousand, the curious exactitude of this sum being due to the fact that he had intended to settle a quarter of a million on him, of which he had already received thirteen thousand. He also recommended him a few suitable investments for it, while Mrs. Palmer, after getting rid of the first high pressure of satisfaction by sending to Amelie a perfect packing-case of diamonds, directed a torrent of different objects, chiefly mounted in gold, at both of them.

Bertie went home that night in a more settled and buoyant frame of mind than had been his since his arrival in America. Never before had he felt so certain of a happy and harmonious future. What Amelie's feeling for him was he dimly guessed from his knowledge of what once had been his for another, while for his part he gave her all he had to give – admiration, affection, desire. Only – and this, as far as he knew, was no longer among the capabilities of his nature – he did not give her their fusion into one white flame; he only offered, as it were, packets of the separate ingredients. But, as Sybil Massington had said, there are many ways of love; he took the best he knew. The knowledge of this, and the straight and honest acceptation of it by himself, was tranquillizing, and possibly a sedative to his conscience, for his thoughts as he strolled down Fifth Avenue on that night, strangely warm for the earliness of the month, strayed slowly, like his footsteps, to past years, and it would have surprised anyone who looked on his extraordinarily youthful and untroubled face to know how very old he was feeling as his mind drifted with the quiet strength of some ocean-tide back, via wedding-presents, to Dorothy. How absolutely she had dominated his every thought and feeling, how completely for those months he had ceased to have any independent will of his own, being absorbed and melted into her. He remembered one June in particular; they had both been in London, and day after day he had gone to see her in her house in Curzon Street. The weather was very hot, and she had a craze for living in nearly empty rooms; all her carpets had been taken up, and all her floors polished – everything not essential to comfort had been stacked in garrets, and the rooms were empty except for flowers. Lilacs had been magnificent that year – they were her favourite flowers – and the smell of lilac to him now meant that he lived once again, in the flash of a moment, that month of beautiful days when he had been so exquisitely unhappy with the unsatisfied yearning of his first passion. All that month she had kept him in a sort of rapturous agony of suspense, which kept ever growing nearer to certainty. Then, at the end, to bring matters to a crisis, he had written her that letter, and not gone near her for two days. Then, having no answer, he went, and she laughed at him and sent him away. Well, he had paid dearly for that letter, both in the desolating inability to care for anything in the months that followed, and also in other ways. What it cost him in hard cash did not trouble him. After all, he was infinitely her debtor; it was she who had let him see (though she had plucked the vision away again) to what height of ecstasy his own average human nature could rise.

What must a woman of that kind be made of? he wondered to himself. Was she so grossly stupid that she never had a glimpse of what she meant to him, or was she so utterly hard that, having seen that, she had not the decency anyhow to go into mourning, as it were, for him just for a little? Stupidity he could not accuse her of; there was no one of such lightning-like power of intuition to divine the mood of a man. No; she must have seen it and known it, and brushed it from her, as one brushes a fly off one's coat. For not a month after that she had left London with Bilton, whom she never professed to care for. But he was rich, and certainly he had done a great deal for her, for he had taken her from her position of 'pretty woman' actress, seen her capability of dramatic impersonation, and got her play after play where she had to behave like herself, till now, in a certain sort of rôle, there was no woman who touched her. Also, he had somehow made her the fashion; he had gauged his age correctly, and given it what it wanted. He had seen the trend of society both in England and America – seen its hardness, its heartlessness, its imperative need of being amused, its passion for money, and for its stage he had given it Mrs. Emsworth, an incarnation of itself.

Yes; she was hard, hard, hard as her own diamonds, and as brilliant, as many-faceted. Sometimes out of her, as out of them, a divinely soft light would shine, but if you tried to warm yourself in that mellow blaze there was no heat there; if in the excellent splendour and softness of the light you would think for a moment that there was a heart there, you would find only the cold, clear-cut edges. Had she not proved it – she who, not satisfied with leading him on, with letting him fall passionately in love with her, only to divert herself a little in watching that storm of passion which she observed from behind her shut window, only to draw the blind down when she had looked enough, had even used the letter he wrote her to make money out of it? How well she knew him, his weakness, his ineradicable instinct to save trouble, avoid disturbances, so that, when she wrote, or caused to be written, the letter of blackmail, she did it probably without the least fear that she was putting herself in a dangerous position. Nor was she – secure in the knowledge of Bertie's engagement, she was certain to get her money. And, as no doubt she also knew well, against her he could not have taken legal steps, for the memory of the love he once bore her. No; she was safe, quite safe.

He let himself into his flat with his latch-key, and saw several letters lying on the table. The English mail had come in, and Ginger, who had got home before him, was busy with his own correspondence, and only looked up and nodded at Bertie as he entered. For Bertie himself there were several English letters, chiefly congratulatory, a parcel from Tiffany's, 'by order of Mrs. Palmer,' containing a gold sapphire-starred cigarette-case, and two or three letters from America, one of which was type-written. For some reason, which he hardly formulated to himself, he took it up, and examined on front and back before opening it. Then he laid it down again, mixed a whisky and soda, and, returning to it, tore it open. It contained one square sheet, and ran as follows:

'DEAR SIR,

'Hearing that you are about to be married to Miss Amelie Palmer, it may interest you to learn that we are in possession of an autograph letter of yours to Mrs. Emsworth. The following phrases may recall it to your mind:

'"I loved you more than ever last night, though I thought I could not have loved you more than I really did."

'"Lilac, lilac; it reminds me of you more than any picture of you could."

'"You know my devotion to you. For me there is no other in the world."'

(Then, as before, followed a space.)

'Should you care to possess yourself of this, we will let you have it for £5,000. The money should be sent to Mr. Harold Bilton at his business office, 1,324a, Broadway, for Mrs. Emsworth's account, by to-morrow (Tuesday) evening. In the event of its not being to hand, we shall presume that you do not wish to have the letter, which we shall thereupon forward by special messenger that evening to Mr. Lewis S. Palmer.

'Mr. Bilton, who has lately arrived in New York, is authorized to receive the above-mentioned sum from you, should you settle to adopt this course, but to permit no discussion of any kind referring to the matter in hand.

'We are, dear Sir,'Your faithful, obedient servants,'A. B. C.'

Bertie read it through, folded it neatly up, replaced it in its envelope, and walked across to where Ginger was sitting absorbed in a letter.

'Any news?' he asked.

'Yes, a good deal.'

Ginger finished the sheet he was reading, got up briskly, and helped himself to whisky.

'Noah's Ark,' he observed. 'Great and merciful God!'

'You seemed to be enjoying yourself,' said his brother.

'I was, enormously. But it's great and merciful, all the same. That's all. Oh no, one thing more. Bertie, I think your girl is worth the rest of this continent. News? Yes, news from Davos. Charlie is better, ever so much better, and his nurse throughout has been Sybil. In fact, there is going to be love in a cottage, I think. Charlie writes. He seems to like the idea of a cottage.'

'She's going to marry him?' asked Bertie.

Ginger smiled.

'Now I come to think of it, he doesn't mention the word,' he observed.

'You're rather coarse,' remarked Bertie.

'I am. I thought it might cheer you up. You look rather down. Anything wrong?'

'Nothing whatever.'

Ginger strolled back to his chair, put his whisky on one arm, a little heap of cigarettes on the other, and curled himself up between them.

'The young folk are all growing up and being married,' he said. 'It makes me feel extremely old, and it is a little uncomfortable. I've done nothing – but that might happen to anybody – and I've felt nothing. What is it like to feel things, Bertie?'

'Depends what they are.'

'No, I mean independently of what they are. I don't know what strong emotion is. I don't know what it is to be carried off one's feet. I am much interested in many things, but impersonally. Now, you – you have adored, and you have been adored. I have sat and looked on. Does it leave you duller, do you think, to feel a thing, and then cease to feel it, than you would have been if you never felt it at all?'

Bertie considered this a moment.

'You never cease to feel things,' he said. 'A thing that has been exquisitely sweet becomes bitter, and continues bitter. You taste the jam first, and the powder afterwards.'

He turned to the mantelpiece, took up a cigarette, and then, with a sudden trembling hand, threw it into the grate.

'And you pay for it all,' he said – ' you pay over and over again. Good-night, Ginger.'

CHAPTER XV

It was a glorious blue and golden morning in early June, and the soft brilliant sunshine of English summer weather flooded the glades of the park at Molesworth, where Amelie, intent on the finishing of a water-colour sketch, sat on a fallen tree-trunk, and Bertie lay on the grass by her side reading at intervals to her from a volume of Tennyson he had brought out with him. She was almost too busy with her painting to follow very clearly what he read, but the sound of his voice thrilled her with a big, quiet happiness, and when he was silent, the consciousness of his presence by her was hardly less vivid. All the same, she was attending very closely to what she was doing, and her brush industriously recorded what the upward sweep of her gray eyes had noted before she bent them again with bowed head on her sketch.

Indeed, that which lay before her was very well worth her attention. In front of them lay a sward of fine-woven turf, and from under the shade of the huge oak which spread its living canopies of green above them they looked through aisles of noble trees into the open, heathery ground of the far distance. The cool greenness, dim and subaqueous in tone, stretched to right and left of them in all shades of colour; here underneath the oak it was dark and almost sombre; there, where a clean-limbed, slender beech foamed up in the freshness of its pale foliage into the blue cup of heaven, the colour was enchantingly vivid and delicate, as if to match, even as the rose-colour of youthful cheeks matches the slender litheness of the frame, the girlish grace of the tree itself. Flecks of sunlight lay like spangles on the grass below the trees, and in spaces between them the blue blaze of the June day poured down on to the flower-decked grass. The last of the bluebells still lingered in shady places, as if pieces of sky had fallen there; tall fox-gloves rose in spires of blossoms through thickets of bramble; buttercups made a sunlight of their own, and in the shelter of scattered coppices the pale wind-flowers still dreamed in whiteness.

Not far in front of them, the centre point of Amelie's sketch, rose a huge thorn, covered with clusters of crimson blossom, standing in full sunlight, so throbbing and bursting with colour that she almost fancied she could see on the pale green of the slender-fingered birches that grew near some red reflection of that glorious blaze. To the right of it one could see through the tree-trunks the gray palings of an enclosed cover, where the ground tumbled upwards under pines, and the velvet of the turf was riddled and sandy with rabbit-holes. A fringe of elders, with the white umbrella of their flowers, grew there, and tawny honeysuckle added one more note to the great symphony of delicate woodland smell.

And even more entrancing than the woodland smell, more subtly mingled than that bouquet of coolness and greenness, of the aroma of pines, the drowsiness of the honeysuckle, the languor of the elders, was the symphony of woodland sound, the forest murmur that filled the ear even as the greenness filled and refreshed the eye. The hum of insects, of bees at their fragrant labour, was the bourdon note that pervaded everything; a light breeze stirred in the trees, calling out of each its own distinctive note – from the pines the sound of waves very far off, from the birches a thin, sibilant murmur, from the beech something a little lower in the scale, and from the tall grasses a whisper and a sigh. A late cuckoo chimed, still mellow-throated, doves moaned softly, thrushes fluted their repeated notes from bush to bush, calling to one another in the joy of the great vigorous life that filled these enchanted glades, and out in the open larks, black specks against the blue, hung over the nests of their mates, and towered in the triumph of their song. But best of all, pervasive even as the hum of bees, was the ripple and gurgle and chuckle and pouring of water, that one note more liquid than the nightingale's.

Right down the centre of the glade came the stream, brimmed with the rains of spring, and filling its bed from edge to edge. Here its course lay over gravel-beds, and the pebbles glanced and glimmered with the living light that the sun poured down through the pellucid transparency of the water. Then came a sharp elbow in its course, and it fretted its way, with sound of melodious outpouring, through the tangled roots of some tree that stood bare in the angle of the turning. Then for a space the ground was more clayey, and a carpet of green water-weeds were combed and waved by the woven ropes of water. Deeper pools lay here, and under the protection of the banks, where some promontory of rocky stuff made a breakwater, the broad fans of water-lilies and the golden crown of their blossoms found anchorage for their sappy stems. Dragon-flies, as if revisiting the scenes of their childhood, where they had nosed in the mud, or lain, blind, pupre, till the spring of their awakening, hovered iridescent and flashed like jewels flying through the air over the sunlit shallows; white-throated swallows skimmed up-stream, and companies of swifts chided together. Rushes waded knee-deep into the water, loose-strife stepped gingerly to the brink, and to all the stream prattled and sang and went on its sweet way.

Amelie laid down her brushes, and held out her sketch to Bertie.

'Criticise,' she said.

He looked at it a moment in silence.

'It's very good,' he said; 'but you still want the – the big softness of it all. It is still a little hard.'

She sighed.

'I knew you would say that,' she said, 'and it's perfectly true. Perhaps I shall get to be able to do it in time. It's all very well to say that a sketch is merely a matter of line and colour, but it isn't; there is a "feeling" which is beyond either.'

She took it back from him.

'Anyone could see it was painted by an American,' she observed.

Bertie laughed.

'That's where you are wrong,' he said; 'most Americans would say it was done by an Englishwoman.'

She smiled to herself with a secret pleasure, laid her sketch by her to dry, slid off the trunk where she had been sitting, and sat down on the grass by her husband.

'Read to me again,' she said. 'Read that song that ends:

'"The moan of doves in immemorial elms,And murmur of innumerable bees."'

She leaned her head on his shoulder, and sat with eyes half-closed, as in his low, gentle voice he read through the exquisite passage.

'It is English,' she said, when he had finished; 'and, oh, Bertie, that means a lot to me. Bertie, are you happy?'

He closed the book, and sat thinking a moment before he answered her. It was true that he had never supposed that he was capable of being so happy as he had been in these last three months. It was true also that his affection for his wife had grown with every day they had passed together, yet the question was a difficult one to answer. A few months ago, had she asked him in his present mood the same question, he would instantly have said 'Yes'; but with the growth of his capacity for happiness and for loving her had grown the demand for happiness and love which his nature made. Instead of acquiescing in the conclusion that he never again could possibly love as he had once loved, he had begun to want that again; he was no longer content with this limitation.