“Bear!”
I returned with the box and placed it on the divan near her. She sat cross-legged, leaning back on her arms, in the blue shimmer of her embroidered robe and with the tawny halo of her unruly hair about her face which she raised to mine with an air of resignation.
“George, my friend,” she said, “we have no manners.”
“You would never have made a career at court, Doña Rita,” I observed. “You are too impulsive.”
“This is not bad manners, that’s sheer insolence. This has happened to you before. If it happens again, as I can’t be expected to wrestle with a savage and desperate smuggler single-handed, I will go upstairs and lock myself in my room till you leave the house. Why did you say this to me?”
“Oh, just for nothing, out of a full heart.”
“If your heart is full of things like that, then my dear friend, you had better take it out and give it to the crows. No! you said that for the pleasure of appearing terrible. And you see you are not terrible at all, you are rather amusing. Go on, continue to be amusing. Tell me something of what you heard from the lips of that aristocratic old lady who thinks that all men are equal and entitled to the pursuit of happiness.”
“I hardly remember now. I heard something about the unworthiness of certain white geese out of stuffy drawing-rooms. It sounds mad, but the lady knows exactly what she wants. I also heard your praises sung. I sat there like a fool not knowing what to say.”
“Why? You might have joined in the singing.”
“I didn’t feel in the humour, because, don’t you see, I had been incidentally given to understand that I was an insignificant and superfluous person who had better get out of the way of serious people.”
“Ah, par exemple!”
“In a sense, you know, it was flattering; but for the moment it made me feel as if I had been offered a pot of mustard to sniff.”
She nodded with an amused air of understanding and I could see that she was interested. “Anything more?” she asked, with a flash of radiant eagerness in all her person and bending slightly forward towards me.
“Oh, it’s hardly worth mentioning. It was a sort of threat wrapped up, I believe, in genuine anxiety as to what might happen to my youthful insignificance. If I hadn’t been rather on the alert just then I wouldn’t even have perceived the meaning. But really an allusion to ‘hot Southern blood’ I could have only one meaning. Of course I laughed at it, but only ‘pour l’honneur’ and to show I understood perfectly. In reality it left me completely indifferent.”
Doña Rita looked very serious for a minute.
“Indifferent to the whole conversation?”
I looked at her angrily.
“To the whole . . . You see I got up rather out of sorts this morning. Unrefreshed, you know. As if tired of life.”
The liquid blue in her eyes remained directed at me without any expression except that of its usual mysterious immobility, but all her face took on a sad and thoughtful cast. Then as if she had made up her mind under the pressure of necessity:
“Listen, amigo,” she said, “I have suffered domination and it didn’t crush me because I have been strong enough to live with it; I have known caprice, you may call it folly if you like, and it left me unharmed because I was great enough not to be captured by anything that wasn’t really worthy of me. My dear, it went down like a house of cards before my breath. There is something in me that will not be dazzled by any sort of prestige in this world, worthy or unworthy. I am telling you this because you are younger than myself.”
“If you want me to say that there is nothing petty or mean about you, Doña Rita, then I do say it.”
She nodded at me with an air of accepting the rendered justice and went on with the utmost simplicity.
“And what is it that is coming to me now with all the airs of virtue? All the lawful conventions are coming to me, all the glamours of respectability! And nobody can say that I have made as much as the slightest little sign to them. Not so much as lifting my little finger. I suppose you know that?”
“I don’t know. I do not doubt your sincerity in anything you say. I am ready to believe. You are not one of those who have to work.”
“Have to work—what do you mean?”
“It’s a phrase I have heard. What I meant was that it isn’t necessary for you to make any signs.”
She seemed to meditate over this for a while.
“Don’t be so sure of that,” she said, with a flash of mischief, which made her voice sound more melancholy than before. “I am not so sure myself,” she continued with a curious, vanishing, intonation of despair. “I don’t know the truth about myself because I never had an opportunity to compare myself to anything in the world. I have been offered mock adulation, treated with mock reserve or with mock devotion, I have been fawned upon with an appalling earnestness of purpose, I can tell you; but these later honours, my dear, came to me in the shape of a very loyal and very scrupulous gentleman. For he is all that. And as a matter of fact I was touched.”
“I know. Even to tears,” I said provokingly. But she wasn’t provoked, she only shook her head in negation (which was absurd) and pursued the trend of her spoken thoughts.
“That was yesterday,” she said. “And yesterday he was extremely correct and very full of extreme self-esteem which expressed itself in the exaggerated delicacy with which he talked. But I know him in all his moods. I have known him even playful. I didn’t listen to him. I was thinking of something else. Of things that were neither correct nor playful and that had to be looked at steadily with all the best that was in me. And that was why, in the end—I cried—yesterday.”
“I saw it yesterday and I had the weakness of being moved by those tears for a time.”
“If you want to make me cry again I warn you you won’t succeed.”
“No, I know. He has been here to-day and the dry season has set in.”
“Yes, he has been here. I assure you it was perfectly unexpected. Yesterday he was railing at the world at large, at me who certainly have not made it, at himself and even at his mother. All this rather in parrot language, in the words of tradition and morality as understood by the members of that exclusive club to which he belongs. And yet when I thought that all this, those poor hackneyed words, expressed a sincere passion I could have found in my heart to be sorry for him. But he ended by telling me that one couldn’t believe a single word I said, or something like that. You were here then, you heard it yourself.”
“And it cut you to the quick,” I said. “It made you depart from your dignity to the point of weeping on any shoulder that happened to be there. And considering that it was some more parrot talk after all (men have been saying that sort of thing to women from the beginning of the world) this sensibility seems to me childish.”
“What perspicacity,” she observed, with an indulgent, mocking smile, then changed her tone. “Therefore he wasn’t expected to-day when he turned up, whereas you, who were expected, remained subject to the charms of conversation in that studio. It never occurred to you . . . did it? No! What had become of your perspicacity?”
“I tell you I was weary of life,” I said in a passion.
She had another faint smile of a fugitive and unrelated kind as if she had been thinking of far-off things, then roused herself to grave animation.
“He came in full of smiling playfulness. How well I know that mood! Such self-command has its beauty; but it’s no great help for a man with such fateful eyes. I could see he was moved in his correct, restrained way, and in his own way, too, he tried to move me with something that would be very simple. He told me that ever since we became friends, we two, he had not an hour of continuous sleep, unless perhaps when coming back dead-tired from outpost duty, and that he longed to get back to it and yet hadn’t the courage to tear himself away from here. He was as simple as that. He’s a très galant homme of absolute probity, even with himself. I said to him: The trouble is, Don Juan, that it isn’t love but mistrust that keeps you in torment. I might have said jealousy, but I didn’t like to use that word. A parrot would have added that I had given him no right to be jealous. But I am no parrot. I recognized the rights of his passion which I could very well see. He is jealous. He is not jealous of my past or of the future; but he is jealously mistrustful of me, of what I am, of my very soul. He believes in a soul in the same way Therese does, as something that can be touched with grace or go to perdition; and he doesn’t want to be damned with me before his own judgment seat. He is a most noble and loyal gentleman, but I have my own Basque peasant soul and don’t want to think that every time he goes away from my feet—yes, mon cher, on this carpet, look for the marks of scorching—that he goes away feeling tempted to brush the dust off his moral sleeve. That! Never!”