The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Romantic Lady, by Michael Arlen This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Romantic Lady Author: Michael Arlen Release Date: July 7, 2014 [EBook #46217] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANTIC LADY *** Produced by Clarity, Eleni Christofaki and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) Transcriber's Note. A list of the changes made can be found at the end of the book. cover The Romantic Lady MICHAEL ARLEN By MICHAEL ARLEN These Charming People The Green Hat "Piracy" The London Venture The Romantic Lady The Romantic Lady by Michael Arlen decoration NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY Copyright, 1921, By George H. Doran Company logo THE ROMANTIC LADY — B — PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA To WALTER PAYNE, Esq. "A VERY ABLE MAN" CONTENTS PAGE I:THE ROMANTIC LADY 11 II:FAY RICHMOND 51 III:CONSUELO 111 IV:THE ROMANCE OF IRIS POOLE 141 I: THE ROMANTIC LADY N THE ROMANTIC LADY I: THE ROMANTIC LADY OËL ANSON and I had been great friends in our first youthful days, but our lives and ambitions had led us so contrarily that we had not seen each other for more than six years when, on the night two weeks ago, we happened to meet at the Club. We had both, of course, so much to say that, as often happens, we babbled on quite inartistically, spoiling many a good story in the gay, breathless exchange of reminiscence and experience; from all of which, however, clearly loomed out these great cardinal facts of our lives, that we had both married; my wife, who was a perfect woman, I explained, I had had to leave behind in New Zealand to take care of her old father; while his wife, who was also a perfect woman, he chivalrously insisted, had thought fit to divorce poor Noël some six months before. But there was one story, anyway, which Noël Anson did not hurriedly spoil. He kept it long inside him—until that hour after ten when our corner of the smoking-room was entirely our own, and until he safely knew that I had talked enough to be able now to remain comfortably silent and attentive. Dear Noël, he dearly loved to tell a story! "You are the very first person to hear this," he began untruthfully; and the calm grey eyes of my friend Noël Anson merged into the luxurious stare with which the raconteur hypnotically fixes his prey all the world over. Even thus must the gentle Marlow have transfixed his hearers as he led them inexorably through the labyrinth of Lord Jim's career, and through many another such intricacy of Conradian imagination. "It's old, older than the stuff that hills and Armenians are made of," he said. "The ageless tale of the inevitable lady sitting alone in the inevitable box of the inevitable theatre to which our inevitable young man has gone to wile away a tiresome evening. History supplies the formula, it is only the details for which I'm personally responsible. "There I sat, one night years ago, alone in a stall at the old Imperial; grimly smoking, and watching the footlight favourites 'getting-off' with a stage-boxful of rowdy young men who hadn't the grace even to try to imitate the few gentlemen who might at one time have been good enough to know 'em—until, on a moment, my eyes circled round the upper boxes and fixed on a marvellous lady in white, amazing and alone and unashamed.... "One has grown into the habit of using phrases trivially, but when I say that I caught my breath at the sight of that figure through the smoke, I mean that I actually did. There she suddenly was, a wonderful fact in a dreary place! A candle lighting even the dimmest recesses of that mausoleum! She, in contrast to all around, was real, exquisite life.... "And, of course, there was to her beauty the added attraction of the curious, as you can well understand. For there simply was not the slightest trace of the demi-monde about her, nothing at all to suggest that she might at any moment be the mistress of a great shopkeeper—as, the deuce take it, there well might be about any woman who had the effrontery to sit so shamelessly alone and—and soignée in front of a box at the Imperial! I mean, it was not the sort of thing one's sister could do and look dignified about—in fact, it is some very special and subtle quality which will prevent a well-dressed woman looking like a courtesan under certain circumstances. French women say English women haven't got it, and English women say French women have got nothing else. But this dark- haired, immobile, alien woman had just that quality—well, of utter 'rightness'; she was impeccable, you understand. It was more than an impertinence not to take for granted that she herself had walked into Cartier's and bought that rope of pearls around her throat.... For although she was in one of the upper boxes, I could see her quite clearly. "But 'desirable'—that's the word for the particular creak in the hinge of one's mind as it enfolds the beauty of such a person—desirable! You wanted to stretch out a long graceful arm above the heads of all the stuffy people around you and catch her up, not by force, for she must yield; and then, as you brought her close to you, what happened would depend entirely on the sort of woman she was and the sort of man you were.... "Of course one couldn't let this sort of thing go on without, anyway, trying to see about it. In the first entr'acte I made a dash for that ginger-haired old boy by the box-office and got him to send a page-boy with a note. It naturally wasn't all done in a breath, for the note had obviously to be a note of the finer sort, it had to convey a very particular impertinence which wasn't an impertinence simply because it was so particular. You must 11 12 13 14 15 know what I mean.... Oh, it had to be just right! You must be neither too casual nor too ingratiating. You must not write it either in clogs or in carpet slippers, but in a happy mean, in the most exquisite pumps that were ever contrived by Lobb. You may think I'm exaggerating, but really I sweated blood over those few lines—how, how did one know that one might not miss the best thing of a lifetime by a gauche word! "I sent it off at last—the central idea of it being that I greatly desired the honour of her presence at supper, while apologising for my monstrous cheek in asking for her presence at same, and that I was sitting in the third seat from the end of the third row of the stalls.... Which, by the way, reminds me! It always pays to take a stall, for imagine writing to a marvellous woman who may have spent her maid's quarterly wages on a box and saying that you are sitting in the dress-circle—the dress-circle, mind you! It sounds so odd— anyway, I breathe again when I think that I might have missed a perfect thing by sitting in the dress-circle. One isn't being a snob, but an opportunist. "I received my answer in the second interval ... amazed, excited. Yes, she was a foreigner by her writing; just a couple of cold lines saying that I could call at her box at the end of the revue. "Preliminaries are of course always tiresome, but these were perhaps less so than most, simply because one was so in the air about her, and so much readier than usual to be appreciative.... And, mind you, rightly, as it proved. She spoke English charmingly well, but just incorrectly enough to be recognisable as a 'distinguished foreigner.' "Almost on my entrance she began to apologise for her 'rudeness' at neither accepting nor declining my invitation to supper in her note. "'But let's be amazingly candid,' I suggested, on her note. 'You wished, of course, to have a look at your host, before—' "'But no, I wished to have a look at my guest,' she said, quickly. And by the slightest flutter in her voice I guessed for the first time that she was frightfully shy. Personally, I never felt so unattractive in my life, all prickly hot and affected—as one gets, you know. "'You must understand that I have a charming house,' she explained. 'And if you will not think me too insincere, I will say that I should be very flattered if you will take supper with me....' "I was still standing. She had turned towards me in her chair, and was looking up at me. She smiled up at me, with a pretty pretence at pathos, and very lightly her fingers just touched my arm.... "'Please, will you not mind my depriving you of the pleasure of showing me how charming a host you can be? And anyway, it is so much more important for me to show you my qualities as a hostess. I have something of a reputation for that, I must warn you.' "That quickly found note of intimacy, how fascinating it is! This woman could turn a drawing-room into an adventure, and an adventure into a drawing-room, all by a particular quality of—what is it? eye, voice, manner, ancestry? God knows! But all, all a snare and a delusion.... "Her electric brougham took us away from the deserted theatre. I was of course too interested in my companion to notice where we were going. I had a vague idea of Piccadilly, that's all.... She was very amusing. We had stepped off the ice too quickly, if indeed we had ever been on it, to get back to it in any way, and the twenty minutes or so of that gliding motion passed in one pleasant moment. "'But perhaps you would prefer me to be haughty,' she said suddenly, 'or how do you say it—county? It would perhaps be more becoming in a woman who does not yet know the name of her guest?' "'You drive me into a fatuous corner,' I said. 'For what on earth can I answer but that you can well afford not to be county or any stuff of that kind?' "She turned her eyes quickly on mine; suddenly, she was very serious. She brooded on me for a swift, palpable second. "'You really, really mean that you do not think me—ah, it is very delicate!—well, you don't think me "cheap" for letting this happen, like this? But,' she laughed as suddenly, 'but forgive me,' she said. 'I was not trusting my own judgment.... And besides you have just said that your father is a Bishop!' "It was as she was about to step out of the brougham that she said: 'It has a charm, our adventure. You are so delightful a partner, you "play up." It is most unusual in men.... And perhaps, too, you are good at forgetting?' 16 17 18 19 "'Am I being threatened?' I had to ask. "'But no, you are being trusted!' she said, very gently.... "I followed her into the house a little shamefacedly; taken, as it were, out of my stride. There seemed, don't you see, to be no tattered edges about this woman, there was a finesse about her every emotion and movement, it was as though every mood and motive had been polished to perfection before it became articulate in word or gesture. She was deplorably civilized. "The house was of the sort that one would have expected of her, though I can't specify what that was; and exactly where it was, as I've said, I didn't realize, though it couldn't have been a hundred miles away from Hyde Park Corner. "I am not much of a hand at describing rooms, so I can't tell you much more of the room into which I followed her than that it was large and seemed just right. What I mean is that I wasn't taking much interest in antique furniture at that moment, but if anything had been wrong or jarring in the room I would have been on it at once,—so it must have been a perfect room. Simplicity stunt on Howard de Walden lines, you know, with Whistler and Meryon etchings scattered here and there about the pale walls, and a certain suggestion of black and gold lacquer somewhere, which I can't now exactly place, unless it was a tall boy or something of the kind. "As we entered the room, and she was putting her cloak, white stuff and ermine, and other things on a chair, I saw particularly the glitter on the table which meant supper—and as she turned I suppose that I must too obviously have shown a hint of gauche surprise; and indeed I was surprised, for the table was laid for two! She had caught me out, and rather unfairly, and for a second the divine person watched me quite severely—a severity that amazingly broke into the most absolute and whole-hearted laugh that I've ever had the misfortune and fortune to see on any face. Its abandon and gaiety were quite delightful, but I don't ever wish repeated the prickly discomfort of being so utterly laughed at, as she laughed at me so helplessly standing there. "But she mended it, a quick simple gesture towards me changed her from a possible enemy into a—well—comrade. "'Fool man!' she said. 'Did you really think that it was you who had, how d'you say it? "picked me up"? Don't you know that it was decided this morning that you should come to supper with me, decided quite, quite, early? Or some one like you, perhaps not so charming—but then I have been so lucky.... Are you very angry with me?' "She was very close to me, smiling, intimate. Pure coquetry, of course,—but what perfect technique! You knew that she was playing, but that did not prevent the blood rushing to your head; and she was so clean, so much 'one of us'! Perhaps she expected me to kiss her at that moment, in fact, I could scarcely resist, for I always try to be a little gentleman and do what is expected of me; but I didn't kiss her then, for I felt it was the wrong moment, it would have to come about differently. Besides, I don't like your scrappy kisses.... But she was waiting. "'Anger isn't exactly one of my emotions at the moment,' I said, stupidly enough. 'But will you please be very gentle with me, because never, never have I met any one like you?' "'I will make a note of that and refer to it when you make a fool of yourself. Ah, but I know you very well, you are a cautious person who will make a fool of himself only when it would be folly to be wise.' "She was close to me, it was dangerous, and I can only bear a certain amount of that kind of thing, for my sort of restraint is due entirely to a desire for, well, greater efficiency.... But why will women do that, why will they step in where men fear to tread? I only speak from my own paltry experience, of course, but the only two real affairs I've had would have gone sadly awry if the women had had their way, if it hadn't been for my mania for organisation.... But I couldn't stand there another second, holding my breath over that face, that scent. She was wearing an orchid, too, and an orchid takes its scent from a woman's body, you can't really smell it except when it is entangled in a woman's breath. It was an exquisite, damnable addition. I had to break loose. "'Encouraged as I am being to enter for the correspondent stakes,' I said impertinently, 'I am being most awfully neglected as a guest.' "The darling, how she laughed! She had the kind of large soft mouth that's made for laughter—until one day you find it's made for tragedy. "Not then, nor later, did I see any servant about. But the table was admirably arranged. I 20 21 22 23 am a commonplace enough person, I think of food in terms of cantaloup and caviare and damn the labour question; one would be a charming person if one had ten thousand a year. And so, though I would have been surprised if the supper had not been good, I was surprised that it was so good; for women, as you know, are rather bewildering in their choice of food, generally I don't trust 'em, but she—how well she had plumbed the particular male beastliness which I, anyway, affect! Oh, her age? About that of Mary Stuart when Bothwell and Swinburne fell in love with her.... "It was as we sat down to supper that I really looked round the room for the first time, and noticed a full length portrait in oils on a wall by the door; of a very distinguished- looking person indeed, in the toy uniform of some foreign cavalry—Italian, I imagined. But, gorgeously decorated and hilted as he was, his chest emblazoned with the ribbons of orders (merited as much by his birth as by any action, one thought), there was a great air of distinction about the man which discounted as well as harmonised with his ridiculous trappings. The slim, perhaps too waisted, figure bore a thin hawk-like face, which with its perfectly poised mixture of ferocity and courtesy would have carried its fortunate owner as easily into the heart of any schoolboy as into the boudoir of the most unattainable lady; and sweeping moustachios somehow added prominence to the long, delicate, very arched nose—surely the nose of a Roman person, I ventured to myself at the end of my long glance. And as I turned to my hostess, she explained quickly that the decoration was her husband. "'A very charming and considerate person,' she said, 'who apologises for being neglected by me.' "Over supper I began at last to lose my shyness, for I had been very nervous, you know. As one only too rarely is.... She had the quality of making one talk, of making one feel that one was on the top of one's form. Oh, that insinuating art of unuttered flattery which makes one weak and sincere and terribly reckless. "'You are very terrible, you make me almost articulate,' I simply had to say, as we rose from the table. 'You see the only really nice things about me are my admirations, and I admire you so unreservedly....' "Perhaps it was just at that moment that I first kissed her. Yes, it must have been then, for she had a way of accepting those shameless remarks with such an air of pretty surprise that I couldn't have resisted the impulse—and anyway, I didn't want to, the thing could go its own divine way without any more officious restraint on my part. "I found then that she had that rarest of generous gifts, the power of graceful admission.... You, old man, who have loved beautiful things, must know how rare that is, how often one is jarred by that meanest sort of pride which denies, refuses to admit, the influence of another. Oh, the insaneness of generous people, the indecencies of decent people! Am I phrasing a sensation too absurdly if I say that I was comfortable with this woman whom I had known for less than two hours? And when I had kissed her, and kissed her again, for hers was not the riddle to be solved by one touch of the lips, the thing did not take on the air of a liaison, it was not a surprising and stolen pleasure, it was just natural. "Slowly she unpinned her orchid and threw it among the elegant debris of the table. "'You crush orchids,' she said. She didn't smile. She looked up at me very thoughtfully. "'But you must know that this is all wrong,' she said. 'It should not have been like this at all. When I decided this morning that you must come to supper with me it was on the distinct understanding that you should not touch more than the tips of my fingers—and they were manicured so well this afternoon, too! Look.... Oh, no no! It is too late, now that you have crushed my orchid it is too late to be so deferential. And anyway, I did not intend that you should kiss even my hand until you were going away—and I imagined you going away very disappointed and full of quite pleasant regrets that I was a cold woman in spite, oh, in spite of everything! Come, Noël Anson, defend yourself. Give me reasons why you should not be disappointed. I am very serious.' And I realised that she was indeed serious. "'But why d'you say that?' I asked quickly. 'Must the thing be exactly as you planned, can't anything be altered—oh, I know that sounds fatuous, but when you look like that one feels helpless! I was right. You are very terrible.' "'I know, that's all.' she said. And she slowly raised her arms and put her hands on my shoulders. 'Do not be a fool, Noël Anson,' she said gently. 'Life is not so easy. There is no romance without reality. I am warning you, because I am afraid.' "'And will you tell me when a warning has prevented a fool from being foolish? And 24 25 26 27 besides, I like being a fool. And I am not afraid. I'm not even afraid of your answer if I ask whether you love me.' "She laughed, but so lightly that she didn't break the tension—you know that infernal laugh? "'But that is a leading question!' she protested. "'And that is a dangerous way of answering it,' I had to say, though anything else would have done equally well, for I hadn't mind for words. She had lost her laugh and her eyes held mine. We stood there looking at each other.... As men and women will, when they know everything and nothing of each other. She was close to me, amazingly kissable! But I didn't, instead I picked her up in my arms and carried her to the door, and out into the strange hall, and up the strange wide staircase of this unknown house, up.... "But if my impulse was to carry her, hers was certainly to let me. Do you understand that, or am I cheapening her to you? Oh, but one was so uncertain yet certain about her, it was so good to be with a woman with whom one could lose one's head and be sure that she wouldn't lose her dignity—until that moment when she, like every one else, must become self-conscious. And that moment came, on the landing upstairs, when her fingers suddenly tightened around my arm. I let her stand, gently, and she whispered something, just two words, into my ear, but I didn't catch them, they are lost words.... She opened a door. "In there she suddenly turned on me, and shook my arm. And a sudden, queer darkness about her face made me wonder if she was angry. "'Oh, you are so inevitable, aren't you!' she cried, but the exclamation ended so surprisingly in the air, somehow so high up in the air, that I've never yet been able to bring it definitely down to earth and discover its meaning; unless it was that—I don't know.... She was so strange, so different from the other women who had filled and emptied one's life, and it was difficult to tell her moods from her emotions. But there was nothing spurious nor counterfeit about her, she was not unreal, she wasn't even the closely-knit but far away dream that beautiful women sometimes become in those terrifying, intimate moments. She was the most essentially feminine woman that I've ever met, she was so real.... That white oval face with the large, so large and so articulate eyes, set in a mass of soft black Southern hair which I myself had unpinned and let fall over her shoulders despite a shy murmur from her—why, desire is a cheap word to express the passion to possess that, the living symbol of the loveliest woman of all time! Yes, yes, I was supremely ridiculous. I still am.... "A second or a century later, at the end of a long, long silence, for me an infinity of happiness, she moved her head away from me and asked me to light her a cigarette. I gave it to her, and waited. I knew so well, you see, what was coming. I had been watching her, I had made a feast of all the movements of that amazing face. It was a sad face, wonderfully alive, but sad; and its sadness became fixed, her eyes were large and held no curiosity at all. I noticed the lack of curiosity in them, because one is so used to meeting it in women—they want to find out! But she, perhaps, in her splendid conceit, had found out, she knew, and she was sad—had she not said downstairs that she knew? I didn't care then whether she knew or not, for then life was before me, the present and the future were in exquisite certainty; but now, as I waited and watched her draw her cigarette, I looked back on that future, and was really terrified of the present. There are moments of ice-clear sanity in all of us—you must know those moments?—when you realise with helpless vividness what you can and what you cannot do, what you simply cannot alter. And so with this moment and this woman; she was inexorable, I could not alter her, I could do nothing but wait—for the epilogue to that prelude played long ago downstairs, when she had put her hands on my shoulders and told me that she was warning me.... "'But perhaps you will think me very vain?' she asked at last, very quietly. "'Because you are thinking you will make me wretched by what you are going to say?' "'Oh, you are too quick!' she murmured. And she raised her head on her elbow and looked at me. "'Dear Noël Anson,' she said, 'our lives go different ways. To-day we had never met, and to-morrow it must be as though we had never met. For life is not a romance, it is a reality, and it is much stronger than our—inclinations? And even if I loved you it would be the same, I should be saying what I am saying now, because in me there is something much stronger than love, much more inevitable.... Please, you must believe me, it will hurt me if you do not believe me. I am not playing any more. I do not play with memories of crushed orchids, because it is only fools who think there is no pleasure in being serious ... 28 29 30 31