A House-Party Part 33

Because almost all Englishmen have snub noses, Englishwomen always think there is something immoral and delusive about a good profile. At all events, you will admit that the latter is the more agreeable object of contemplation. It still rains,--rains dreadfully. The meadows are soaked and they can't get the hay in, and we can't get out of the house. Piero does smoke, and he does yawn. He has been looking in the library for a French novel, but there is nothing except Mrs. Craven's goody-goody books and a boy's tale by Jules Verne. I am afraid you and mamma are right. Coombe, in a wet June, is not the place for a Roman who knows his Paris by heart and doesn't like the country anywhere. We seem to do nothing but eat. I put on an ulster and high boots, and I don't mind the rain a bit; but he screams when he sees me in an ulster. "You have no more figure in that thing than if you were a Bologna sausage," he says to me; and certainly ulsters are very ugly. But I had a delicious fortnight with the d.u.c.h.ess in a driving-tour in West-meath. We only took our ulsters with us, and it poured all the time, and we stayed in bed in the little inns while our things dried, and it was immense fun: the duke drove us. But Piero would not like that sort of thing. He is like a cat about rain. He likes to shut the house up early, and have the gas lit, and forget that it is all slop and mist outside. He declares that we have made a mistake in the calendar, and that it is November, not June.

I change my gowns three times a day, just as if there were a large house-party; but I feel I look awfully monotonous to him. I am afraid I never was amusing. I always envy those women who are all _chic_ and "go," who can make men laugh so at rubbish. They seem to carry about with them a sort of exhilarating ether. I don't think they are the best sort of women; but they do so amuse the men. I would give twenty years of my life if I could amuse Piero. He adores me; but that is another thing. That does not prevent him shaking the barometer and yawning. He seems happiest when he is talking Italian with his servant, Toniello.

Toniello is allowed to play billiards with him sometimes. He is a very gay, merry, saucy, beautiful-eyed Roman. He has made all the maids in the house and all the farmers' daughters round Coombe in love with him, and I told you how he had scandalized one of the best tenants, Mr. John Best. The Bedford rustics all vow vengeance against him; but he tw.a.n.gs his mandoline, and sings away at the top of his voice, and doesn't care a straw that the butler loathes him, the house-steward abhors him, the grooms would horsewhip him if they dared, and the young farmers audibly threaten to duck him in the pond. Toniello is very fond of his master, but he does not extend his allegiance to me. Do you remember Mrs.

Stevens, Aunt Caroline's model housekeeper? You should see her face when she chances to hear Piero laughing and talking with Toniello. I think she believes that the end of the world has come. Piero calls Toniello "_figliolo mio_" and "_caro mio_," just as if they were cousins or brothers. It appears this is the Italian way. They are very proud in their own fas.h.i.+on, but it isn't our fas.h.i.+on. However, I am glad the man is there when I hear the click of the billiard-b.a.l.l.s, and the splash of the rain-drops on the window-panes. We have been here just three weeks.

"_Dio!_ it seems three years," Piero said, when I reminded him of it, this morning. For me, I don't know whether it is like a single day's dream or a whole eternity. You know what I mean. But I wish--I wish--it seemed either the day's dream or the eternity of Paradise to him! I dare say it is all my fault in coming to these quiet, bay-windowed, Queen-Anne rooms, and the old-fas.h.i.+oned servants, and the dreary lookout over the soaking hay-fields. But the sun does come out sometimes, and then the wet roses smell so sweet, and the wet lime-blossoms glisten in the light, and the larks sing overhead, and the woods are so green and so fresh. Still, I don't think he likes it even then: it is all too moist, too windy, too dim, for him. When I put a rose in his b.u.t.ton-hole this morning, it shook the drops over him, and he said, "_Mais quel pays!--meme une fleur c'est une douche d'eau froide!_" Last month, if I had put a dandelion in his coat, he would have sworn it had the odor of the magnolia and the beauty of the orchid. It is just twenty-two days ago since we came here, and the first four or five days he never cared whether it rained or not: he only cared to lie at my feet, really, literally. We were all in all to each other, just like Cupid and Psyche.

And now--he will play billiards with Toniello to pa.s.s the time, and he is longing for his _pet.i.ts theatres_. Is it my fault? I torment myself with a thousand self-accusations. Is it possible I can have been tiresome, dull, over-exacting? Is it possible he can be disappointed in me?

_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg, to the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset._

No, it isn't your fault, you dear little donkey: it is only the natural sequence of things. Men are always like that when the woman loves them: when she don't, they behave much better. My dear, this is just what is so annoying about love: the man's is always going slower and slower towards a dead stop, as the woman's is "coaling" and getting steam up. I borrow papa's admirably accurate metaphor: nothing can be truer. It is a great pity, but I suppose the fault is Nature's. _Entre nous_, I don't think Nature ever contemplated marriage, any more than she did crinolettes, pearl powder, or the electric light. There is no doubt that Nature intended to adjust the thing on the b.u.t.terfly and b.u.t.tercup system,--on the _je reste, tu t'en vas_ principle. And nothing would be easier or nicer, only there are children and property. So the b.u.t.terfly has to be pinned down by the b.u.t.tercup. That is why the Communists and Anarchists always abolish Property and Marriage together. The one is evolved out of the other, just as the dear scientists say the horse was evolved out of a bird, which I never can see makes the matter any easier of comprehension; but, still--what was I saying? Oh, I meant to say this: you are only lamenting, as a special defalcation and disloyalty in San Zenone, what is merely his unconscious and involuntary and perfectly natural alteration from a lover into a husband. The b.u.t.terfly is beginning to feel the pin which has been run through him to stick him down. It is not your fault, my sweet little girl; it is the fault, if at all, of the world, which has decreed that the b.u.t.terfly, to flirt legitimately with the b.u.t.tercup, must suffer the corking-pin. Now, take my advice: the pin is in, don't worry if he writhe on it a little bit!

It is only what the beloved scientists again call automatic action. And do try and beat into your little head the fact that a man may love you very dearly, and yet yawn a little for the _pet.i.ts theatres_ in the silent recesses of his manly breast. Of course I know this sort of rough awakening from delightful dreams is harder for you than it is for most, because you began at such tremendous alt.i.tudes. You had your Ruy Blas and Petrarca and the mandoline and the moonlight and the love-philtres all mixed up in an intoxicating draught. You have naturally a great deal more disillusion to go through than if you had married a country squire or a Scotch laird, who would never have suggested any romantic delights.

One cannot go near heaven without coming down with a crash, like the poor men in the balloons. You have been up in your balloon, and you are now coming down. Ah, my dear, everything depends on _how_ you come down!

You will think me a monster for saying so, but it will rest so much in your own hands. You won't believe it, but it will. If you come down with tact and good humor, it will all be right afterwards; but if you show temper, as men say of their horses, why, then the balloon will lie p.r.o.ne, a torn, empty, useless bag, that will never again get off the ground. To speak plainly, dear, if you will receive with resignation and sweetness the unpleasant discovery that San Zenone is mortal, you won't be unhappy, and you will soon get used to it; but if you perpetually fret about it you won't alter him, and you will both be miserable; or, if not miserable, you will do something worse; you will each find your amus.e.m.e.nt in somebody else. I know you so well, my poor, pretty Gladys; you want such an immense quant.i.ty of sympathy and affection; but you won't get it, my dear child. I quite understand that the prince looks like a picture, and he has made life an erotic poem for you for a month, and the inevitable reaction which follows seems dull as ditch-water, you would even say as cruel as the grave. But it is _nothing new_. Do try and get that well in your mind. Try, too, and be as light-hearted as you can. Men hate an unamusable woman. Make believe to laugh at the _pet.i.ts theatres_ if you can't really do it: if you don't, dear, he will go to somebody else who will. Why do those _demi-monde_ women get such preference over us? Only because they don't bore their men. A man would sooner we flung a champagne-gla.s.s at his head than cried for five minutes. We can't fling champagne-gla.s.ses: the prejudices of our education are against it. It is an immense loss to us; we must make up for it as much as we can by being as agreeable as we know how to be. We shall always be a dozen lengths behind those others. By the way, you said in one of your earliest notes that you wondered why our mother ever married. I am not sufficiently _au courant_ with pre-historic times to be able to tell you why, but I can see what she has done since she did marry. She has always effaced herself in the very wisest and most prudent manner. She has never begrudged papa his Norway fis.h.i.+ng or his August yachting, though she knew he could ill afford them. She has never bored him _with_ herself, or _about_ us. She has constantly urged him to go away and enjoy himself, and when he is down with her in the country she always takes care that all the women he admires and all the men who best amuse him shall be invited in relays, to prevent his being dull or feeling teased for a moment. I am quite sure she has never cared the least about her own wishes, but has only studied his. This is what I call being a clever woman and a good woman. But I fear such women are as rare as blue roses. Try and be like her, my dear. She was quite as young as you are now when she married. But, unfortunately, in truth, you are a terrible little egotist. You want to shut up this poor young man all alone with you in a kind of att.i.tude of perpetual adoration--of yourself. That is what women call affection: you are not alone in your ideas. Some men submit to this sort of demand, and go about forever held tight in a leash, like unslipped pointers. The majority--well, the majority bolt. And I am sure I should if I were one of them. I do not think you could complain if your beautiful Romeo did. I can see you so exactly, with your pretty little grave face, and your eyes that have such a fatal apt.i.tude for tears, and your solemn little views about matrimony and its responsibilities, making yourself quite odious to this mirthful Apollo of yours, and innocently believing all the while that you are pleasing Heaven and saving your own dignity by being so remarkably unpleasant! Are you _very_ angry with me? I am afraid so.

Myself, I would much sooner have an unfaithful man than a dull one: the one may be bored _by_ you, but the other bores _you_, which is immeasurably worse.

_From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg._

DEAR GWEN,--

How can you _possibly_ tell what mamma did when she was young? I dare say she fretted dreadfully. Now, of course, she has got used to it,--like all other miserable women. If people marry only to long to be with other people, what is the use of being married at all? I said so to Piero, and he answered, very insolently, "_Il n'y a point! Si on le savait._" He sent for some more dreadful French books, Gyp's, and Richepin's, and Gui de Maupa.s.sant's, and he lies about reading them all day long when he isn't asleep. He is very often asleep in the daytime.

He apologizes when he is found out, but he yawns as he does so. You say I should amuse him; but I _can't_ amuse him. He doesn't care for any English news, and he is beginning to get irritable because I cannot talk to him in Italian, and he declares my French detestable, and there is always something dreadful happening. There has been such a terrible scene in the village. Four of the Coombe-Bysset men, two blacksmiths, a carpenter, and a laborer, have ducked Toniello in the village pond on account of his attention to their women-kind; and Toniello, when he staggered out of the weeds and the slime, drew his knife on them and stabbed two very badly. Of course he has been taken up by the constables, and the men he hurt moved to the county hospital. The magistrates are furious and scandalized; and Piero!--Piero has n.o.body to play billiards with him. When the magistrates interrogated him about Toniello, as, of course, they were obliged to do, he got into a dreadful pa.s.sion because one of them said that it was just like a cowardly Italian to carry a knife and make use of it. Piero absolutely _hissed_ at the solemn old gentleman who mumbled this. "And your people," he cried, "are they so very courageous? Is it better to beat a man into a jelly, or kick a woman with nailed boots, as your English mob does?

Where is there anything cowardly? He was one against four. In my country there is not a night that goes without a _rissa_ of that sort; but n.o.body takes any notice. The jealous persons are left to fight it out as best they may. After all, it is the women's fault." And then he said some things that really I cannot repeat; and it was a mercy that, as he spoke in the most rapid and furious French, the old gentleman did not, I think, understand a syllable. But they saw he was in a pa.s.sion, and that scandalized them, because, you know, English people always think that you should keep your bad temper for your own people at home. Meantime, of course, Toniello is in prison, and I am afraid they won't let us take him out on bail, because he has hurt one of the blacksmiths dreadfully.

Aunt Carry's solicitors are doing what they can for him, to please me; but I can see they consider it all _peines perdues_ for a rogue who ought to be hanged. "And to think," cries Toniello, "that in my own country I should have all the _populo_ with me! The very carabineers themselves would have been with me! _Accidente a tutti quei grulli!_"

which means, "May apoplexy seize these fools!" "They were only the women's husbands," he adds, with scorn: "they are well worth making a fuss about, certainly!" Then Piero consoles him, and gives him cigarettes, and is obliged to leave him sobbing and tearing his hair, and lying face downward on his bed of sacking. I thought Piero would not leave the poor fellow alone in prison, and so I supposed he would give up all idea of going from here; and so I began to say to myself, "_A quelque chose malheur est bon._" But to-day, at luncheon, Piero said, "_Sai, carina!_ It was bad enough with Toniello, but without him, I tell you frankly, I cannot stand any more of it. With Toniello, one could laugh and forget a little. But now--_anima mia_, if you do not wish me to kill somebody, and be lodged beside Toniello by your worthy law-givers, you must really let me go to Trouville." "Alone!" I said; and I believe it is what he did mean, only the horror in my voice frightened him from confessing it. He sighed and got up. "I suppose I shall never be alone any more," he said, impatiently. "If only men knew what they do when they marry, _on ne nous prendrait jamais_. No, no. Of course I meant that you must consent to come away with me somewhere out of this intolerable place, which is made up of fog and green leaves. Let us go to Paris, to begin with: there is not a soul there, and the theatres are _en relache_; but it is always delightful, and then, in a week or so, we will go down to Trouville: all the world is there." I couldn't answer him for crying. Perhaps that was best, for I am sure I should have said something wicked, which might have divided us forever.

And then what would people have thought?

_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg, to the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset._

MY POOR LITTLE DEAR,--

Are you already beginning to be miserable about what people will think?

Then, indeed, your days of joy are numbered. If I were to write to you fifty times, I could only repeat what I have always written. You are not wise, and you are doing everything you ought not to do. _Of two people who are married, there is always one who has the delusion that he or she is necessary and delightful to the life of the other. The other generally thinks just the contrary._ The result is not peace. This gay, charming, handsome son of Rome has become your entire world; but don't suppose for a moment, my child, that you will ever be his. It is not in reason, not in nature, that you should be. _If_ you have the intelligence, the tact, and the forbearance required, you _may_ become his friend and counsellor; but I fear you never will have these. You fret, you weep, and you understand nothing of the masculine temperament.

"I see snakes," as the Americans observe; and you will not have either the coolness or the wisdom required to scotch a snake, much less to kill it. Once for all, my poor pet, go cheerfully to Paris, Trouville, and all the pleasure-places in the world. Affect enjoyment if you feel it not, and try to remember, beyond everything, that affection is not to be retained or revived by either coercion or lamentation. Once dead, it is not to be awakened by all the "crooning" of its mourner. It is a corpse for ever and aye. Myself, I fail to see how you could expect a young Italian, who has all the habits of the great world and the memories of his _vie de garcon_, to be cheerful or contented in a wet June in an isolated English country house, with n.o.body to look at but yourself.

Believe me, my dear child, it is the inordinate vanity of a woman which makes her imagine that she can be sufficient for her husband. Nothing but vanity. The cleverer a woman is, the more fully she recognizes her own insufficiency for the amus.e.m.e.nt of a man, and the more carefully (if she be wise) does she take care that this deficiency in her shall never be forced upon his observation. Now, if you shut a man up with you in a country house, with the rain raining every day, as in Longfellow's poem, you do force it upon him most conspicuously. If you were not his wife, I dare say he would not tire of you, and he might even prefer a gray sky to a blue one. But as his wife!--oh, my dear, why, why don't you try and understand what a terrible penalty-weight you carry in the race? Write and tell me all about it. I shall be anxious. I am so afraid, my sweet little sister, that you think love is all moonlight and kisses, and forget that there are clouds in the sky and quarrels on earth. May heaven save you from both! P.S.--Do remember that this same love requires just as delicate handling as a cobweb does: if a rough touch break the cobweb, all the artists in the world can't mend it. There is a truth for you. If you prevent his going to Paris now, he will go in six months' time, and perhaps he will go without you. Perhaps he would be happier at Lanciano than at Coombe, and he would have all his own people; but he would want the _pet.i.ts theatres_ all the same. You are not wise, my poor pet; you should make him feel that you are one with his pleasures, not, that you and his pleasures are enemies. But it is no use to instil wisdom into you: you are very young, and very much in love. You look on all the natural distractions which he inclines to as so many rivals. So they may be; but _we don't beat our rivals by abusing them_. The really wise way is to tacitly show that we can be more attractive than they: if we cannot be so, we may sulk or sigh as we will, we shall be vanquished by them. You will think me very preachy-preachy, and perhaps you will throw me in the fire unread; but I must say just this much more. Dear, you are in love with Love, but underneath Love there is a real man, and real men are far from ideal creatures. Now, it is the real man that you want to consider, to humor, to study. If the real man be pleased, Love will take care of himself; whereas, if you bore the real man, Love will fly away. If you had been wise, my poor pet, I repeat, you would have found nothing so delightful as Judic and Chaumont, and you would have declared that the asphalt excelled all the Alps in the world. He does not love you the less because he wants to be _dans le mouvement_, to hear what other men are saying, and to smoke his cigar among his fellow-creatures.

_From, the d.u.c.h.essa dell'Aquila Fulva, Hotel des Roches Noires, Trouville, France, to the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, Luton, Bedfords.h.i.+re, England._

Poor flower, in your box of wet moss, what has become of you? Are you dead, and dried in your wife's _hortus siccus_? She would be quite sure of you _then_, and I dare say much happier than if you were set forth in anybody else's bouquet. I try in vain to imagine you in that "perfectly proper" _milieu_ (is not that correct English, "perfectly proper"?).

Will you be dreadfully changed when one sees you again? There is a French proverb which says that "the years of joy count double." The days of _ennui_ certainly count for years, and give us gray hairs before we are five-and-twenty. But you know I cannot pity you. You _would_ marry an English girl because she looked pretty sipping her tea. I told you beforehand that you would be miserable with her, once shut up in the country. The episode of Toniello is enchanting. What people!--to put him in prison for a little bit of _chia.s.so_ like that! You should never have taken his bright eyes and his mandoline to that doleful and damp land of precisians. What will they do with him? And what can you do without him?

The weather here is admirable. There are numbers of people one knows. It is really very amusing. I go and dance every night, and then we play,--usually "bac," or roulette. Everybody is very merry. We all talk often of you, and say the _De Profundis_ over you, my poor Piero. Why did your cruel destiny make you see a _Sainte-Nitouche_ drinking tea under a lime-tree? I suppose _Sainte-Nitouche_ would not permit it, else why not exchange the humid greenness of your matrimonial prison for the Rue des Planches and the Casino?

_From the Prince di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the d.u.c.h.essa dell'Aquila Fulva, Trouville._

_Carissima mia_,--

I have set light to the fuse! I have frankly declared that if I do not go out of this watery atmosphere and verdant Bastile I shall perish of sheer inanition and exhaustion. The effect of the declaration was for the moment such that I hoped, actually hoped, that she was going to get into a pa.s.sion. It would have been so refres.h.i.+ng! After twenty-six days of dumb acquiescence and silent tears, it would have been positively delightful to have had a storm. But no! For an instant she looked at me with unspeakable reproach; the next her dove's eyes filled, she sighed, she left the room! Do they not say that feather beds offer an admirable defence against bullets? I feel like the bullet which has been fired into the feather bed. The feather bed is victorious. I see the Rue des Planches through the perspective of the watery atmosphere; the Casino seems to smile at me from the end of the interminable lime-tree avenue, which is one of the chief beauties of this house; but, alas! they are both as far off as if Trouville were in the moon. What could they do to me if I came alone? Do you know what they could do? I have not the remotest idea, but I imagine something frightful. They shut up their public-houses by force, and their dancing-places. Perhaps they would shut up me. In England they have a great belief in creating virtue by Act of Parliament. In myself this enforced virtue creates such a revolt that I shall _tirer sur le mors_, and fly before very long. The admired excellence of this beautiful estate is that it lies in a ring-fence. I feel that I shall take a leap over that ring-fence. Do not mistake me, _cara mia Teresina_, I am exceedingly fond of my wife. I think her quite lovely, simple, saintly, and truly woman-like. She is exquisitely pretty, and entirely without vanity, and I am certain she is immeasurably my superior morally, and possibly mentally too. But--there is always such a long and melancholy "but" attached to marriage--she does not amuse me in the least. She is always the same. She is shocked at nearly everything that is natural or diverting. She thinks me unmanly because I dislike rain. She b.u.t.tons about her a hideous, straight, water-proof garment, and walks out in a deluge. She blushes if I try to make her laugh at "Figaro," and she goes out of the room when I mention Trouville. What am I to do with a woman like this? It is an admirable type, no doubt. Possibly, if she had not shut me up in a country house in a wet June, with the thermometer at 10 R., and the barometer fixedly at the word _Rainy_, I might have been always charmed with this St.

Dorothea-like att.i.tude and never have found out the monotony of it. But, as it is, I yawn till I dislocate my neck. She thinks me a heathen already. I am convinced that very soon she will think me a brute. And I am neither. I only want to get out, like the bird in the cage. It is a worn simile, but it is such a true one.

_From the d.u.c.h.essa dell'Aquila Fulva, Roches Noires, Trouville, to the Prince di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset._

_Piero mio_,--

In marriage, the male bird is always wanting to get out when the female bird does not want him to get out; also, she is forever tightening the wires over his head, and declaring that nothing can be more delightful than the perch which she sits on herself. Come to us here. There are any quant.i.ties of birds here who ought to be in their cages, but are not, and manage to enjoy themselves _quand meme_. If only you had married Nicoletta! She might have torn your hair occasionally, but she would never have bored you. There is only one supreme art necessary for a woman: it is to thoroughly understand that she must never be a _seccatura_. A woman may be beautiful, admirable, a paragon of virtue, a marvel of intellect; but if she be a _seccatura--addio_! Whereas, she may be plain, small, nothing to look at in any way, and a very monster of sins, big and little; but if she know how to amuse your dull s.e.x, she is mistress of you all. It is evident that this great art is not studied at Coombe-Bysset.

_From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg._

OH, MY DEAR GWEN,--

It is too dreadful, and I am so utterly wretched! I cannot tell you what I feel. He is quite determined to go to Trouville by Paris at once, and just now it is such exquisite weather. It has only rained three times this week, and the whole place is literally a bower of roses of every kind. He has been very restless the last few days, and at last, yesterday, after dinner, he said straight out that he had had enough of Coombe, and he thought we might be seen at Homburg or Trouville next week. And he pretended to want every kind of thing that is to be bought at Paris and nowhere else. Paris!--when we have been together just twenty-nine days to-day! Paris!--I don't know why, but I feel as if it would be the end of everything. Paris!--we shall dine at restaurants; we shall stay at the Windsor; we shall go to theatres; he will be at his club, he belongs to the Pet.i.t Cercle and the Mirliton; we shall be just like anybody else,--just like all the million-and-one married people who are always in a crowd. To take one's new-born happiness to an hotel! It is as profane as it would be to say your prayers on the top of a drag.

To me, it is quite horrible. And it will be put in "Galignani" directly, of course, that the "Prince and Princess San Zenone have arrived at the Hotel Bristol." And then all the pretty women who tried to flirt with him before will laugh and say, "There, you see, she has bored him already!" Everybody will say so, for they all know I wished to spend the whole summer at Coombe. If he would only go to his own country, I would not say a word. I am really longing to see his people, and his palaces, and the wonderful gardens, with their statues and their ilex woods, and the temples that are as old as the days of Augustus, and the fire-flies, and the magnolia-groves, and the peasants who are always singing; but he won't go there. He says it is a _seccatura_. Everything is a _seccatura_. He only likes places where he can meet all the world.

"Paris will be a solitude too, never fear," he said, very petulantly; "for there will be all the _pet.i.ts theatres_, and the open-air concerts, and we can dine in the Bois and down the river, and we can run to Trouville. It will be better than rain, rain, rain, and nothing to look at except your amiable aunt's big horses and big trees. I adore horses, and trees are not bad if they are planted away from the house, but, viewed as eternal companions, one may have too much of them." And I am his eternal companion; but it seems already I don't count! I have not said anything. I know one oughtn't. But Piero saw how it vexed me, and it made him cross. "_Cara mia_," he said, "why did you not tell me before we married that you intended me to be buried forever in a box under wet leaves, like a rose that is being sent to the market? I should have known what to expect; and I do not like wet leaves." I could not help reminding him that he had been ever, ever so anxious to come to Coombe. Then he laughed; but he was very cross, too. "Could I tell, _anima mia_," he cried, "that Coombe was situated in a succession of lagoons, contains not one single French novel, is fifteen miles asunder from its own railway-station, and is blessed with a population of day-laborers? What man have I seen since I have been here, except your parish priest, who mumbles, wears spectacles, and tries to give me a tract against the Holy Father? In this country you do not know what it is to be warm. You do not know what suns.h.i.+ne is like. You take an umbrella when you go in the garden. You put on a water-proof to go and hear one little, s.h.i.+vering nightingale sing in a wet elder-bush. I tell you I am tired of your country, absolutely tired. You are an angel; no doubt you are an angel; but you cannot console me for the intolerable emptiness of this intolerable life, where there is nothing on earth to do but to eat, drink, and sleep, and drive in a dog-cart." All this he said in one breath, in a flash of forked lightning, as it were. Now that I write it down, it does not seem so very dreadful; but as he, with the most fiery scorn, the most contemptuous pa.s.sion, said it, I a.s.sure you it was terrible. It revealed, just as the flash of lightning would show a gravel-pit, how fearfully bored he has been all the time I thought he was happy.

_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg, to the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset._

Men are very easily bored, my dear, if they have any brains. It is only the dull ones who are not.

_From the Princess di San Zenone to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester._

If I believed what your cynical letter says, I should leave him to-morrow. I would never live through a succession of disillusions and of insults.

_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester to the Princess di San Zenone._

Where are your principles? Where are your duties? My dear little girl, you have married him; you must submit to him as he is. Marriages wouldn't last two days if just because the man yawned the woman ran away. Men always yawn. Hitherto, all San Zenone's faults appear to consist in the very pardonable fact that, being an Italian, he is not alive to the charms of bucolic England in rainy weather, and that, being a young man, he wants to see his Paris again. Neither of these seem to me irreparable crimes. Go to Paris and try to enjoy yourself. After all, if his profile be so beautiful, you ought to be sufficiently happy in gazing at it from the back of a _baignoir_. I grant that it is not the highest amatory ideal,--to rush about the boulevards in a daument, and eat delicious little dinners in the cafes, and laugh at Judic or Chaumont afterwards; but _l'amour peut se nicher_ anywhere. And Love won't be any the worse for having his digestion studied by good cooks, and his possible _ennui_ exorcised by good players. You see for yourself that the great pa.s.sion yawns after a time. Turn back to what you call my cynical letter, and re-read my remarks upon Nature. By the way, I entirely deny that they are cynical. On the contrary, I inculcate on you patience, sweetness of temper, and adaptability to circ.u.mstances,--three most amiable qualities. If I were a cynic, I should say to you that Marriage is a Mistake, and two capital letters could hardly emphasize this melancholy truth sufficiently. But, as there are men and women, and, as I before observed, property, in the world, nothing better for the consolidation of rents and freeholds has, as yet, been discovered. I dare say Krapotkine in his prison could devise something better; but they are afraid of him. So we all jog on in the old routine, vaguely conscious that we are all blunderers, but indisposed for such a drastic remedy as would alone cure us. Just you remark to any lawyer that marriage is a mistake, as I have said before, and see what answer you will get. He will certainly reply to you that there is no other way of securing the transmission of property safely. I confess that this view of wealth makes me, for one, a most desperate Radical. Only think, if there were no property, we should all be frisking about in our happy valleys as free and as merry as little kids. I shouldn't now be obliged to put on all my war-paint and beads, like a savage, and go out to a dreadful court dinner, four hours long, because George has a "career"

and thinks my suffering advances it. Oh, you happy child, to have nothing worse to do than to rattle down the Bois in a _milord_, and sup off a _matelote_ by the lake with your Romeo!

_From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg._