Part 40

She closed her fan, with which she had been more or less idly playing throughout their dialogue, and replaced it on the table. Among the books there--French books, for the most part, in yellow paper--Peter saw, with something of a flutter (he could never see it without something of a flutter), the grey-and-gold binding of “A Man of Words.”

The Duchessa caught his glance.

“Yes,” she said; “your friend's novel. I told you I had been re-reading it.”

“Yes,” said he.

“And--do you know--I 'm inclined to agree with your own enthusiastic estimate of it?” she went on. “I think it's extremely--but extremely--clever; and more--very charming, very beautiful. The fatal gift of beauty!”

And her smile reminded him that the application of the tag was his own.

“Yes,” said he.

“Its beauty, though,” she reflected, “is n't exactly of the obvious sort--is it? It does n't jump at you, for instance. It is rather in the texture of the work, than on the surface. One has to look, to see it.”

“One always has to look, to see beauty that is worth seeing,” he safely generalised. But then--he had put his foot in the stirrup--his hobby bolted with him. “It takes two to make a beautiful object. The eye of the beholder is every bit as indispensable as the hand of the artist. The artist does his work--the beholder must do his. They are collaborators. Each must be the other's equal; and they must also be like each other--with the likeness of opposites, of complements. Art, in short, is entirely a matter of reciprocity. The kind of beauty that jumps at you is the kind you end by getting heartily tired of--is the skin-deep kind; and therefore it is n't really beauty at all--it is only an approximation to beauty--it may be only a simulacrum of it.”

Her eyes were smiling, her face was glowing, softly, with interest, with friendliness and perhaps with the least suspicion of something else--perhaps with the faintest glimmer of suppressed amusement; but interest was easily predominant.

“Yes,” she assented.... But then she pursued her own train of ideas. “And--with you--I particularly like the woman--Pauline. I can't tell you how much I like her. I--it sounds extravagant, but it's true--I can think of no other woman in the whole of fiction whom I like so well--who makes so curiously personal an appeal to me. Her wit--her waywardness--her tenderness--her generosity--everything. How did your friend come by his conception of her? She's as real to me as any woman I have ever known she's more real to me than most of the women I know--she's absolutely real, she lives, she breathes. Yet I have never known a woman resembling her. Life would be a merrier business if one did know women resembling her. She seems to me all that a woman ought ideally to be. Does your friend know women like that--the lucky man? Or is Pauline, for all her convincingness, a pure creature of imagination?”

“Ah,” said Peter, laughing, “you touch the secret springs of my friend's inspiration. That is a story in itself. Felix Wildmay is a perfectly commonplace Englishman. How could a woman like Pauline be the creature of his imagination? No--she was a 'thing seen.' God made her. Wildmay was a mere copyist. He drew her, tant bien que mal, from the life from a woman who's actually alive on this dull globe to-day. But that's the story.”

The Duchessa's eyes were intent.

“The story-? Tell me the story,” she pronounced in a breath, with imperious eagerness.

And her eyes waited, intently.

“Oh,” said Peter, “it's one of those stories that can scarcely be told. There's hardly any thing to take hold of. It's without incident, without progression--it's all subjective--it's a drama in states of mind. Pauline was a 'thing seen,' indeed; but she wasn't a thing known: she was a thing divined. Wildmay never knew her--never even knew who she was--never knew her name--never even knew her nationality, though, as the book shows, he guessed her to be an Englishwoman, married to a Frenchman. He simply saw her, from a distance, half-a-dozen times perhaps. He saw her in Paris, once or twice, at the theatre, at the opera; and then later again, once or twice, in London; and then, once more, in Paris, in the Bois. That was all, but that was enough. Her appearance--her face, her eyes, her smile, her way of carrying herself, her way of carrying her head, her gestures, her movements, her way of dressing--he never so much as heard her voice--her mere appearance made an impression on him such as all the rest of womankind had totally failed to make. She was exceedingly lovely, of course, exceedingly distinguished, noble-looking; but she was infinitely more. Her face her whole person--had an expression! A spirit burned in her--a prismatic, aromatic fire. Other women seemed dust, seemed dead, beside her. She was a garden, inexhaustible, of promises, of suggestions. Wit, capriciousness, generosity, emotion--you have said it--they were all there. Race was there, nerve. Sex was there--all the mystery, magic, all the essential, elemental principles of the Feminine, were there: she was a woman. A wonderful, strenuous soul was there: Wildmay saw it, felt it. He did n't know her--he had no hope of ever knowing her--but he knew her better than he knew any one else in the world. She became the absorbing subject of his thoughts, the heroine of his dreams. She became, in fact, the supreme influence of his life.”

The Duchessa's eyes had not lost their intentness, while he was speaking. Now that he had finished, she looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, and mused for a moment in silence. At last she looked up again.

“It's as strange as anything I have ever heard,” she said, “it's furiously strange--and romantic--and interesting. But--but--” She frowned a little, hesitating between a choice of questions.

“Oh, it's a story all compact of 'buts,'” Peter threw out laughing.

She let the remark pass her--she had settled upon her question.

“But how could he endure such a situation?” she asked. “How could he sit still under it? Did n't he try in any way--did n't he make any effort at all--to--to find her out--to discover who she was--to get introduced to her? I should think he could never have rested--I should think he would have moved heaven and earth.”

“What could he do? Tell me a single thing he could have done,” said Peter. “Society has made no provision for a case like his. It 's absurd--but there it is. You see a woman somewhere; you long to make her acquaintance; and there's no natural bar to your doing so--you 're a presentable man she's what they call a lady--you're both, more or less, of the same monde. Yet there 's positively no way known by which you can contrive it--unless chance, mere fortuitous chance, just happens to drop a common acquaintance between you, at the right time and place. Chance, in Wildmay's case, happened to drop all the common acquaintances they may possibly have had at a deplorable distance. He was alone on each of the occasions when he saw her. There was no one he could ask to introduce him; there was no one he could apply to for information concerning her. He could n't very well follow her carriage through the streets--dog her to her lair, like a detective. Well--what then?”

The Duchessa was playing with her fan again.

“No,” she agreed; “I suppose it was hopeless. But it seems rather hard on the poor man--rather baffling and tantalising.”

“The poor man thought it so, to be sure,” said Peter; “he fretted and fumed a good deal, and kicked against the pricks. Here, there, now, anon, he would enjoy his brief little vision of her--then she would vanish into the deep inane. So, in the end--he had to take it out in something--he took it out in writing a book about her. He propped up a mental portrait of her on his desk before him, and translated it into the character of Pauline. In that way he was able to spend long delightful hours alone with her every day, in a kind of metaphysical intimacy. He had never heard her voice--but now he heard it as often as Pauline opened her lips. He owned her--he possessed her--she lived under his roof--she was always waiting for him in his study. She is real to you? She was inexpressibly, miraculously real to him. He saw her, knew her, felt her, realised her, in every detail of her mind, her soul, her person--down to the very intonations of her speech--down to the veins in her hands, the rings on her fingers--down to her very furs and laces, the frou-frou of her skirts, the scent upon her pocket-handkerchief. He had numbered the hairs of her head, almost.”

Again the Duchessa mused for a while in silence, opening and shutting her fan, and gazing into its opals.

“I am thinking of it from the woman's point of view,” she said, by and by. “To have played such a part in a man's life--and never to have dreamed it! Never even, very likely, to have dreamed that such a man existed--for it's entirely possible she didn't notice him, on those occasions when he saw her. And to have been the subject of such a novel--and never to have dreamed that, either! To have read the novel perhaps--without dreaming for an instant that there was any sort of connection between Pauline and herself! Or else--what would almost be stranger still--not to have read the novel, not to have heard of it! To have inspired such a book, such a beautiful book--yet to remain in sheer unconscious ignorance that there was such a book! Oh, I think it is even more extraordinary from the woman's point of view than from the man's. There is something almost terrifying about it. To have had such an influence on the destiny of someone you've never heard of! There's a kind of intangible sense of a responsibility.”

“There is also, perhaps,” laughed Peter, “a kind of intangible sense of a liberty taken. I'm bound to say I think Wildmay was decidedly at his ease. To appropriate in that cool fashion the personality of a total stranger! But artists are the most unprincipled folk unhung. Ils prennent leur bien la, ou ils le trouvent.”