Zuleika Dobson · Chapter 7 (1/3)

VII

The Duke did not try to break the stony silence in which Zuleika walked. Her displeasure was a luxury to him, for it was so soon to be dispelled. A little while, and she would be hating herself for her pettiness. Here was he, going to die for her; and here was she, blaming him for a breach of manners. Decidedly, the slave had the whip-hand. He stole a sidelong look at her, and could not repress a smile. His features quickly composed themselves. The Triumph of Death must not be handled as a cheap score. He wanted to die because he would thereby so poignantly consummate his love, express it so completely, once and for all⁠ ⁠… And she⁠—who could say that she, knowing what he had done, might not, illogically, come to love him? Perhaps she would devote her life to mourning him. He saw her bending over his tomb, in beautiful humble curves, under a starless sky, watering the violets with her tears.

Shades of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel and other despicable maunderers! He brushed them aside. He would be practical. The point was, when and how to die? Time: the sooner the better. Manner:⁠ ⁠… less easy to determine. He must not die horribly, nor without dignity. The manner of the Roman philosophers? But the only kind of bath which an undergraduate can command is a hip-bath. Stay! there was the river. Drowning (he had often heard) was a rather pleasant sensation. And to the river he was even now on his way.

It troubled him that he could swim. Twice, indeed, from his yacht, he had swum the Hellespont. And how about the animal instinct of self-preservation, strong even in despair? No matter! His soul’s set purpose would subdue that. The law of gravitation that brings one to the surface? There his very skill in swimming would help him. He would swim under water, along the riverbed, swim till he found weeds to cling to, weird strong weeds that he would coil round him, exulting faintly⁠ ⁠…

As they turned into Radcliffe Square, the Duke’s ear caught the sound of a far-distant gun. He started, and looked up at the clock of St. Mary’s. Half-past four! The boats had started.

He had heard that whenever a woman was to blame for a disappointment, the best way to avoid a scene was to inculpate oneself. He did not wish Zuleika to store up yet more material for penitence. And so, “I am sorry,” he said. “That gun⁠—did you hear it? It was the signal for the race. I shall never forgive myself.”

“Then we shan’t see the race at all?” cried Zuleika.

“It will be over, alas, before we are near the river. All the people will be coming back through the meadows.”

“Let us meet them.”

“Meet a torrent? Let us have tea in my rooms and go down quietly for the other Division.”

“Let us go straight on.”

Through the square, across the High, down Grove Street, they passed. The Duke looked up at the tower of Merton, ώϛ οὔποτ αὖθιϛ ἁλλά νϋν παύνστατον. Strange that tonight it would still be standing here, in all its sober and solid beauty⁠—still be gazing, over the roofs and chimneys, at the tower of Magdalen, its rightful bride. Through untold centuries of the future it would stand thus, gaze thus. He winced. Oxford walls have a way of belittling us; and the Duke was loth to regard his doom as trivial.

Aye, by all minerals we are mocked. Vegetables, yearly deciduous, are far more sympathetic. The lilac and laburnum, making lovely now the railed pathway to Christ Church meadow, were all a-swaying and a-nodding to the Duke as he passed by. “Adieu, adieu, your Grace,” they were whispering. “We are very sorry for you⁠—very sorry indeed. We never dared suppose you would predecease us. We think your death a very great tragedy. Adieu! Perhaps we shall meet in another world⁠—that is, if the members of the animal kingdom have immortal souls, as we have.”

The Duke was little versed in their language; yet, as he passed between these gently garrulous blooms, he caught at least the drift of their salutation, and smiled a vague but courteous acknowledgment, to the right and the left alternately, creating a very favourable impression.

No doubt, the young elms lining the straight way to the barges had seen him coming; but any whispers of their leaves were lost in the murmur of the crowd returning from the race. Here, at length, came the torrent of which the Duke had spoken; and Zuleika’s heart rose at it. Here was Oxford! From side to side the avenue was filled with a dense procession of youths⁠—youths interspersed with maidens whose parasols were as flotsam and jetsam on a seething current of straw hats. Zuleika neither quickened nor slackened her advance. But brightlier and brightlier shone her eyes.

The vanguard of the procession was pausing now, swaying, breaking at sight of her. She passed, imperial, through the way cloven for her. All a-down the avenue, the throng parted as though some great invisible comb were being drawn through it. The few youths who had already seen Zuleika, and by whom her beauty had been bruited throughout the University, were lost in a new wonder, so incomparably fairer was she than the remembered vision. And the rest hardly recognised her from the descriptions, so incomparably fairer was the reality than the hope.

She passed among them. None questioned the worthiness of her escort. Could I give you better proof the awe in which our Duke was held? Any man is glad to be seen escorting a very pretty woman. He thinks it adds to his prestige. Whereas, in point of fact, his fellow-men are saying merely, “Who’s that appalling fellow with her?” or, “Why does she go about with that ass So-and-So?” Such cavil may in part be envy. But it is a fact that no man, howsoever graced, can shine in juxtaposition to a very pretty woman. The Duke himself cut a poor figure beside Zuleika. Yet not one of all the undergraduates felt she could have made a wiser choice.

She swept among them. Her own intrinsic radiance was not all that flashed from her. She was a moving reflector and refractor of all the rays of all the eyes that mankind had turned on her. Her mien told the story of her days. Bright eyes, light feet⁠—she trod erect from a vista whose glare was dazzling to all beholders. She swept among them, a miracle, overwhelming, breath-bereaving. Nothing at all like her had ever been seen in Oxford.

Mainly architectural, the beauties of Oxford. True, the place is no longer one-sexed. There are the virguncules of Somerville and Lady Margaret’s Hall; but beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied. There are the innumerable wives and daughters around the Parks, running in and out of their little redbrick villas; but the indignant shade of celibacy seems to have called down on the dons a Nemesis which precludes them from either marrying beauty or begetting it. (From the Warden’s son, that unhappy curate, Zuleika inherited no tittle of her charm. Some of it, there is no doubt, she did inherit from the circus-rider who was her mother.)

But the casual feminine visitors? Well, the sisters and cousins of an undergraduate seldom seem more passable to his comrades than to himself. Altogether, the instinct of sex is not pandered to in Oxford. It is not, however, as it may once have been, dormant. The modern importation of samples of femininity serves to keep it alert, though not to gratify it. A like result is achieved by another modern development⁠—photography. The undergraduate may, and usually does, surround himself with photographs of pretty ladies known to the public. A phantom harem! Yet the houris have an effect on their sultan. Surrounded both by plain women of flesh and blood and by beauteous women on pasteboard, the undergraduate is the easiest victim of living loveliness⁠—is as a fire ever well and truly laid, amenable to a spark. And if the spark be such a flaring torch as Zuleika?⁠—marvel not, reader, at the conflagration.

Not only was the whole throng of youths drawing asunder before her: much of it, as she passed, was forming up in her wake. Thus, with the confluence of two masses⁠—one coming away from the river, the other returning to it⁠—chaos seethed around her and the Duke before they were halfway along the avenue. Behind them, and on either side of them, the people were crushed inextricably together, swaying and surging this way and that. “Help!” cried many a shrill feminine voice. “Don’t push!” “Let me out!” “You brute!” “Save me, save me!” Many ladies fainted, whilst their escorts, supporting them and protecting them as best they could, peered over the heads of their fellows for one glimpse of the divine Miss Dobson. Yet for her and the Duke, in the midst of the terrific compress, there was space enough. In front of them, as by a miracle of deference, a way still cleared itself. They reached the end of the avenue without a pause in their measured progress. Nor even when they turned to the left, along the rather narrow path beside the barges, was there any obstacle to their advance. Passing evenly forward, they alone were cool, unhustled, undishevelled.

The Duke was so rapt in his private thoughts that he was hardly conscious of the strange scene. And as for Zuleika, she, as well she might be, was in the very best of good humours.

“What a lot of houseboats!” she exclaimed. “Are you going to take me on to one of them?”

The Duke started. Already they were alongside the Judas barge. “Here,” he said, “is our goal.”

He stepped through the gate of the railings, out upon the plank, and offered her his hand.

She looked back. The young men in the vanguard were crushing their shoulders against the row behind them, to stay the oncoming host. She had half a mind to go back through the midst of them; but she really did want her tea, and she followed the Duke on to the barge, and under his auspices climbed the steps to the roof.

It looked very cool and gay, this roof, under its awning of red and white stripes. Nests of red and white flowers depended along either side of it. Zuleika moved to the side which commanded a view of the bank. She leaned her arms on the balustrade, and gazed down.

The crowd stretched as far as she could see⁠—a vista of faces upturned to her. Suddenly it hove forward. Its vanguard was swept irresistibly past the barge⁠—swept by the desire of the rest to see her at closer quarters. Such was the impetus that the vision for each man was but a lightning-flash: he was whirled past, struggling, almost before his brain took the message of his eyes.

Those who were Judas men made frantic efforts to board the barge, trying to hurl themselves through the gate in the railings; but they were swept vainly on.

Presently the torrent began to slacken, became a mere river, a mere procession of youths staring up rather shyly.

Before the last stragglers had marched by, Zuleika moved away to the other side of the roof, and, after a glance at the sunlit river, sank into one of the wicker chairs, and asked the Duke to look less disagreeable and to give her some tea.

Among others hovering near the little buffet were the two youths whose parley with the Duke I have recorded.

Zuleika was aware of the special persistence of their gaze. When the Duke came back with her cup, she asked him who they were. He replied, truthfully enough, that their names were unknown to him.

“Then,” she said, “ask them their names, and introduce them to me.”

“No,” said the Duke, sinking into the chair beside her. “That I shall not do. I am your victim: not your pander. Those two men stand on the threshold of a possibly useful and agreeable career. I am not going to trip them up for you.”

“I am not sure,” said Zuleika, “that you are very polite. Certainly you are foolish. It is natural for boys to fall in love. If these two are in love with me, why not let them talk to me? It were an experience on which they would always look back with romantic pleasure. They may never see me again. Why grudge them this little thing?” She sipped her tea. “As for tripping them up on a threshold⁠—that is all nonsense. What harm has unrequited love ever done to anybody?” She laughed. “Look at me! When I came to your rooms this morning, thinking I loved in vain, did I seem one jot the worse for it? Did I look different?”

“You looked, I am bound to say, nobler, more spiritual.”

“More spiritual?” she exclaimed. “Do you mean I looked tired or ill?”

“No, you seemed quite fresh. But then, you are singular. You are no criterion.”

“You mean you can’t judge those two young men by me? Well, I am only a woman, of course. I have heard of women, no longer young, wasting away because no man loved them. I have often heard of a young woman fretting because some particular young man didn’t love her. But I never heard of her wasting away. Certainly a young man doesn’t waste away for love of some particular young woman. He very soon makes love to some other one. If his be an ardent nature, the quicker his transition. All the most ardent of my past adorers have married. Will you put my cup down, please?”

“Past?” echoed the Duke, as he placed her cup on the floor. “Have any of your lovers ceased to love you?”

“Ah no, no; not in retrospect. I remain their ideal, and all that, of course. They cherish the thought of me. They see the world in terms of me. But I am an inspiration, not an obsession; a glow, not a blight.”

“You don’t believe in the love that corrodes, the love that ruins?”

“No,” laughed Zuleika.

“You have never dipped into the Greek pastoral poets, nor sampled the Elizabethan sonneteers?”

“No, never. You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself.”

“Yet often you talk as though you had read rather much. Your way of speech has what is called ‘the literary flavour.’ ”

“Ah, that is an unfortunate trick which I caught from a writer, a Mr. Beerbohm, who once sat next to me at dinner somewhere. I can’t break myself of it. I assure you I hardly ever open a book. Of life, though, my experience has been very wide. Brief? But I suppose the soul of man during the past two or three years has been much as it was in the reign of Queen Elizabeth and of⁠—whoever it was that reigned over the Greek pastures. And I daresay the modern poets are making the same old silly distortions. But forgive me,” she added gently, “perhaps you yourself are a poet?”

“Only since yesterday,” answered the Duke (not less unfairly to himself than to Roger Newdigate and Thomas Gaisford). And he felt he was especially a dramatic poet. All the while that she had been sitting by him here, talking so glibly, looking so straight into his eyes, flashing at him so many pretty gestures, it was the sense of tragic irony that prevailed in him⁠—that sense which had stirred in him, and been repressed, on the way from Judas. He knew that she was making her effect consciously for the other young men by whom the roof of the barge was now thronged. Him alone she seemed to observe. By her manner, she might have seemed to be making love to him. He envied the men she was so deliberately making envious⁠—the men whom, in her undertone to him, she was really addressing. But he did take comfort in the irony. Though she used him as a stalking-horse, he, after all, was playing with her as a cat plays with a mouse. While she chattered on, without an inkling that he was no ordinary lover, and coaxing him to present two quite ordinary young men to her, he held over her the revelation that he for love of her was about to die.