Black Oxen Part 25

"Ah!" Clavering, staring at her, had forgotten his first shock, everything but her living presence; forgotten also that he had once apprehended something of the sort, then dismissed it from his mind. He spilt the whiskey over the arm of the chair, then sprang to his feet and began to pace the room once more.

She went on calmly: "Disappointment does not mean the end of seeking... . They gave me little that I wanted. They were clever and adroit enough in the prelude. They knew how to create the illusion that in them alone could be found the fulfillment of all aspiration and desire. No doubt they satisfied many women, but they could not satisfy me. They gave me little I did not find in the mere society of the many brilliant and accomplished men with whom I was surrounded. I had a rapacious mind, and there was ample satisfaction for it in the men who haunted my salon and were constantly to be met elsewhere. European men are _instruits_. They are interested in every vital subject, intellectual and political, despite the itch of amor, their deliberate cult of s.e.x. They like to talk. Conversation is an art. My mind was never uncompanioned. But that deeper spiritual rapacity, one offspring of pa.s.sion as it may be, they could not satisfy; for love with them is always too confused with animalism and is desiccated in the art of love-making. Fidelity is a virtue relegated to the bourgeois----"

"What about Englishmen?" demanded Clavering sarcastically. "I thought they were bad artists but real lovers."

"I know little of Englishmen. Zattiany was never appointed to St.

James's, and although, of course, I met many of them in the service on the continent, and even visited London several times, it must have happened that I was interested in some one else or in a state of profound reaction from love at the time--at least so I infer. It is a long while ago. I remember only the fact.

"Those whom I tried to love would soon have tired of me had I not played the game as adroitly as themselves, and if I had permitted them to feel sure of me. The last thing any of them wanted was depth of feeling, tragic pa.s.sion... . My most desperate affair was my last--after a long interval... . I was in my early forties. I had thought myself too utterly disillusioned ever to imagine myself in love again. Men are gross and ridiculous creatures in the main, and aside from my personal disappointments, I thought it was time for that chapter of my life to finish; I was amusing myself with diplomatic intrigue. I was in the Balkans at the time, that breeding ground of war microbes, and I was interested in a very delicate situation in which I played a certain part.

"The awakening was violent. He was an Austrian, with an important place in the Government; he came to Belgrade on a private mission. He was a very great person in many ways, and I think I really loved him, for he seemed to me entirely worthy of it. He certainly was mad enough about me for a time--for a year, to be exact. When he returned to Vienna it was not difficult for me to find an excuse to go also. Although Zattiany was a Hungarian, he never visited his Hungarian estates except for the boar hunting, and spent his time when on leave, or between appointments, in Vienna, where he had inherited a palace--I must tell you that the city residence of a n.o.bleman in the Dual Empire was always called a palace, however much it might look like a house.

"I shall always remember this man with a certain pleasure and respect, for he is the only man who ever made me suffer. A woman forgets the lovers she has dismissed as quickly as possible. Their memory is hateful to her, like the memory of all mistakes. But this man made me suffer horribly. (He married a young girl, out of duty to his House, and unexpectedly fell in love with her.) Therefore, although I recovered, and completely, still do I sometimes dwell with a certain cynical pleasure on the memory of him----"

"Have you never seen him since?" asked Clavering sharply. He had returned to his chair. "How long ago was that?"

"Quite sixteen years ago. I did not visit Vienna again for several years; in fact, not until after my husband's death, when I returned there to live. But by that time I had lost both youth and beauty. His wife had died, but left him an heir, and he showed no disposition to marry again; certainly he was as indifferent to me as I to him. We often met, and as he respected my mind and my knowledge of European affairs, we talked politics together, and he sometimes asked my advice.

"But to go back. After that was over I determined to put love definitely out of my life. I believed then and finally that I had not the gift of inspiring love; nor would I ever risk humiliation and suffering again. I played the great game of life and politics. I was still beautiful--for a few years--I had an increasingly great position, all the advantages, obvious and subtle, that money could procure. My maid was very clever.

My gowns, as time went on, were of a magnificent simplicity; all frou-frous were renounced. I had no mind to invite the valuation I heard applied to certain American women in Paris: 'elderly and dressy.'"

Clavering laughed for the first time. "I wonder you ever made a mistake of any sort. I also wonder if you are a type as well as an individual?

I have, I think, followed intelligently your psychological involutions and convolutions so far. I am only hoping you will not get beyond my depth. What was your att.i.tude toward your past mistakes--beyond what you have told me? Did you suffer remorse, as I am told women do when they either voluntarily renounce or are permitted to sin no more?"

"I neither regarded them as mistakes nor did I suffer remorse. Every human being makes what are called mistakes and those happened to be mine.

Therefore I dismissed them to the limbo of the inevitable... . As your world, I am told, looks upon you as the coming dramatist, it may appeal to your imagination to visualize that secret and vital and dramatic undercurrent of what was on the surface a proud and splendid life... .

Or, if there are regrets, it is for the weight of memories, the completeness of disillusion, the slaying of mental youth--which cannot survive brutal facts.

"I think that for women of my type--what may be called the intellectual siren--the lover phase is inevitable. We are goaded not only by the imperious demands of womanhood and the hope of the perfect companion, but by curiosity, love of adventure, ennui; possibly some more obscure complex--vengeance on the husband who has wrecked our first illusions--on Life itself. Bringing-up, family and social traditions, have nothing to do with it. Only opportunity counts. Moreover, we are not the product of our immediate forebears, but of a thousand thousand unknown ancestors... ."

"G.o.d! True enough!"

"Unfortunately, these women who have wasted so much time on love never realize the tragic futility until Time himself disposes of temptation, and then it is too late for anything but regrets of another sort. The war may have solved the problem for many a desperate spirit.

"My own case has a.s.sumed an entirely different complexion. With my youth restored I have the world at my feet once more, but safeguarded by the wisdom of experience--in so far as a mortal ever may be. The bare idea of that old game of prowling s.e.x fills me with ennui and disgust. The body may be young again, but my mind, reenergized though it is, is packed with memories, a very Book of Life. When I found that my beauty was restored I thought of nothing less than returning to the conquest of men in the old manner, although quite aware of its powerful aid in the work I have made up my mind to do in Austria. Of late, of course, I have thought of little else but what this recrudescence of my youth means to you and to myself. But--please do not interrupt--this I shall not discuss with you again until Monday--if then.

"But once more I wish to impress you with the fact that I indulge in nothing so futile as regrets for my 'past.' 'Sack-cloth and ashes'

provokes nothing but a smile from women of my type and cla.s.s. Moreover, I believe that my education would not be complete without that experience--_mine_, understand. I am not speaking for women of other temperaments, opportunities, of less intellect, of humbler character, weaker will... . And if I had persisted in virtue at that time I should probably make a fool of myself today, an even more complete fool than women do when they feel youth slipping but still are able with the aid of art and arts to fascinate younger men.

"That almost standardized chapter I renounced peremptorily. My pride was too great to permit me to be foolish even in the privacy of my mind over men half my age. Nor did I make any of the usual frantic attempts to keep looking young. I had seen too much of that, laughed at it too often. Nevertheless, I hated the approach of age, the decay of beauty, the death of magnetism, as bitterly as the silliest woman I had ever met.

"Some women merely fade: lose their complexions, the brightness of their eyes and hair. Others grow heavy, solid; stout or flabby; the muscles of the face and neck loosen and sag, the features alter. I seemed slowly to dry up--wither. There was no flesh to hang or loose skin to wrinkle, but it seemed to me that I had ten thousand lines. I thought it a horrid fate. I could not know that Nature, meaning to be cruel, had given me the best chance for the renewal of the appearance as well as the fact of youth.

"I suppose all this seems trivial to you--this mourning over lost youth----"

"Not at all. It must have been h.e.l.l to a woman like you. As for women in general--they may make more fuss about it, but I fancy they hate it less than men."

"Yes, men are vainer than women," said Madame Zattiany indifferently.

"But I have yet to waste any sympathy on men... .

"I suppose I only fully realized that my youth, my beauty, my magnetic charm, had gone when men ceased to make violent love to me. They still paid court, for I was a very important person, my great prestige was a sort of halo, and I had never neglected my mind. There was nothing of significance I had not read during all these years. I was as profoundly interested in the great political currents of Europe, seen and unseen, as any man--or as any intelligent woman of European society. Moreover, I had the art of life down to a fine point, and I had not forgotten that even in friends.h.i.+p men are drawn to the subtle woman who knows how to envelop herself in a certain mystery. And European men are always eager to talk with an accomplished woman, even if she has no longer the power to stir their facile pa.s.sions.

"When I realized that my s.e.x power had left me I adopted an entirely new set of tactics--never would I provoke a cynical smile on the faces I once had the power to distort! With no evidence of regret for my lost enchantment I remained merely the alert and always interested woman of the world, to whom men, if sufficiently entertaining, were welcome companions for the moment, nothing more. I cemented many friends.h.i.+ps, I cultivated a cynical philosophy--for my own private succor--and although, for a time, there were moments of bewildered groping and of intense rebellion, or a sudden and hideous sense of inferiority, I twisted the necks of those noxious weeds thrusting themselves upward into my consciousness and threatening to strangle it, and trampled them under the heel of my will. It was by no means the least happy interval of my life, for I was very healthy, I took a great deal of outdoor exercise, and there was a sense of freedom I never had experienced before. Love is slavery, and I was no longer a slave.

"After my husband's death, as I told you, I opened the Zattiany palace in Vienna once more (my nephew and his wife preferred Paris, and I leased it from them), expecting to follow the life I had mapped out, until I was too old for interests of any sort. I had a brilliant salon and I was something of a political power. Of course, I knew that the war was coming long before hatreds and ambitions reached their climax, and advised this man of whom I have spoken, Mathilde Loyos, and other friends, to invest large sums of money in the United States. Judge Trent arranged the trustees.h.i.+p in each case----"

"Where is this man?"

"I do not know. He went down with the old regime, of course, and would be a pauper but for these American investments and a small amount in Switzerland. He has occupied no position in the new Government, although he was a Liberal in politics. What he is doing I have no idea. I have not seen him for years."

"Well--go on."

"It was only when I became aware of a growing mental la.s.situde, a constant sense of effort in talking everlastingly on subjects that called for constant alertness and often reorientation, that I was really aghast and began to look toward the future not only with a sense of helplessness but of intolerable weariness. I used to feel an inclination to turn my head away with an actual physical gesture when concentration was imperative. I thought that my condition was psychological, that I had lived too much and too hard, that my memory was over-burdened and my sense of the futility and meaninglessness of life too overwhelming. But I know now that the condition was physical, the result of the degeneration of certain cells.

"I spent the summer alone on my estate in Hungary, and when it was over I determined to close the palace in Vienna and remain in the country. I could not go back to that restless high-pitched life, with its ceaseless gaiety on the one hand and its feverish politics and portentous rumblings on the other. My tired mind rebelled. And the long strain had told on my health.

"I lived an almost completely outdoor life, riding, walking, swimming in the lake, hunting, but careful not to overtax my returning strength. I was not in love with life, far from it! But I had no intention of adding invalidism to my other disintegrations. In the evening I played cards with my secretary or practised at the piano, with some revival of my old interest in music. I read little, even in the newspapers. I was become, save perhaps for my music, an automaton. But, although I did not improve in appearance, my health was completely restored, and when the war came I was in perfect condition for the arduous task I immediately undertook.

Moreover, my mind, torpid for a year, was free and refreshed for those practical details it must grapple with at once. I turned the Zattiany palace in Buda Pesth into a hospital. And then for four years I was again an automaton, but this time a necessary and useful one. When I thought about myself at all, it seemed to me that this selfless and strenuous interval was the final severance from my old life. If Society in Europe today were miraculously restored to its pre-war brilliancy--indifferent to little but excitement and pleasure--there would be nothing in it for me.

"Now I come to the miracle." And while she recapitulated what she had told the women at Mrs. Oglethorpe's luncheon, Clavering listened without chaos in his accompanying thoughts. "Certainly, man's span is too brief now," she concluded. "He withers and dies at an age when, if he has lived sanely--and when a man abuses his natural functions he generally dies before old age, anyhow--he is beginning to see life as a whole, with that detachment that comes when his personal hold on life and affairs is relaxing, when he has realized his mistakes, and has attained a mental and moral orientation which could be of inestimable service to his fellow men, and to civilization in general. What you call crankiness in old people, so trying to the younger generations, does not arise from natural hatefulness of disposition and a released congenital selfishness, but from atrophying glands, and, no doubt, a subtle rebellion against nature for consigning men to inept.i.tude when they should be entering upon their best period of usefulness, and philosophical as well as active enjoyment of life.

"Science has defeated nature at many points. The isolation of germs, the discovery of toxins and serums, the triumph over diseases that once wasted whole nations and brought about the fall of empires, the arrest of infant mortality, the marvels of vivisection and surgery--the list is endless. It is entirely logical, and no more marvellous, that science should be able to arrest senescence, put back the clock. The wonder is that it has not been done before."

She rose, still looking down at the fire, which Clavering had replenished twice. "I am going now. And I have no fear that you will not keep your promise! But remember this when thinking it over: I do not merely _look_ young again, _I am_ young. I am not the years I have pa.s.sed in this world, I am the age of the rejuvenated glands in my body. Some day we shall have the proverb: 'A man is as old as his endocrines.' Of course I cannot have children. The treatment is identical with that for sterilization. This consideration may influence you. I shall use no arguments nor seductions. You will have decided upon all that before we meet again. Good night." And she was gone.

x.x.x

It seemed to Clavering that he had run the gamut of the emotions while listening to that brief biography, so sterilely told, but there had also been times when he had felt as if suspended in a void even while visited by flashes of acute consciousness that he was being called upon to know himself for the first time in his life. And in such fas.h.i.+on as no man had ever been called upon to know himself before.

There was no precedent in life or in fiction to guide him, and he had realized with a sensation of panic even while she talked that it was doubtful if any one had ever understood himself since the dawn of time.

Man had certain standards, fixed beliefs, ideals, above all, habits--how often they scattered to the winds under some unheralded or teratogenic stress. He had seen it more than once, and not only in war. Every man had at least two personalities that he was aware of, and he dimly guessed at others. Some were frank enough to admit that they had not an idea what they would do in a totally unfamiliar situation. Clavering had sometimes emblemized man and his personalities with the old game of the ivory egg. A twist and the outer egg revealed an inner. Another and one beheld a third. And so on to the inner unmanipulatable sphere, which might stand for the always inscrutable soul. Like all intelligent men, he had a fair knowledge of these two outer layers of personality, and he had sometimes had a flas.h.i.+ng glimpse of others, too elusive to seize and put under the microscopic eye of the mind.

What did he know of himself? He asked the question again as he sat in his own deep chair in the early morning hours. The heat in the hotel had been turned off and he had lit the gas logs in the grate--symbol of the artificialities of civilization that had played their insidious role in man's outer and more familiar personality. Perhaps they struck deeper. Habit more often than not dominated original impulse.

His own room, where he was nearly always alone, with its warm red curtains and rug, the low bookcases built under his direction and filled with his favorite books, the refectory table and other pieces of dark old English oak that he had brought from home, and several family portraits on the wall, restored his equilibrium and his brain was abnormally clear. He wondered if he ever would sleep again. Better think it over now.

Mary Zattiany as she talked had never changed her expression. She might have been some ancient oracle reciting her credo, and she seemed to have narcotized that magnetic current that had always vibrated between them. Nevertheless, he had been fully aware that she felt like nothing less than an oracle or the marble bust she looked, and that her soul was racked and possibly fainting, but mastered by her formidable will.

Formidable. Did that word best express her? Was she one of the superwomen who could find no mate on earth and must look for her G.o.d on another star? He certainly was no superman himself to breathe on her plane and mate that incarnate will. Had she any human weakness? Even that subterranean s.e.x-life in her past had not been due to weakness.

She was far too arrogant for that. Life had been her foot-stool. She had kicked it about contemptuously. Even her readjustments had been the dictates of her imperious will. And her pride! She was a female Lucifer in pride.

No doubt the men she had dismissed had been secretly relieved; stung for the only time in their lives perhaps, with a sense of inferiority.

It must have been like receiving the casual favors of a queen on her throne. Well, she had got it in the neck once; there was some satisfaction in that. He wished he knew the man's name. He'd hunt him up and thank him in behalf of his s.e.x.

For an hour he excoriated her, hated her, feared her, dissociating her from the vast army of womanhood, but congratulating himself upon having known her. She was a unique if crucifying study.