I approach this episode in my life, which presents itself to my memory thus entitled, with dislike, mingled with fascination. I hate the whole subject, but I can’t leave it alone. Those accursed three weeks, spent under the same roof with Vanora Haydon, seem to have deprived me of myself, unhinged me, destroyed the balance of my character. I feel as if I might, perhaps, throw off this absurd spell by calmly smoothing out the ruffled memories and studying them scientifically.
Vanora’s aunt, Miss Clementina Thorne, was a nice appreciative old maiden lady, who thought me the most estimable and charming of men. I had long regarded her with warm affection, tempered only by a mild resentment at her perpetual attempts to get me married. In her pressing invitation to come once more to Fairfield, where the fresh air would be so good for me after my dusty and dingy office, I read at sight that another matrimonial scheme was fermenting in that most hymeneal brain. I knew that this time she had destined me for one of her nieces, as she mentioned that they had no visitors at present, and that Vanora would be at home. Though I had hovered about Clara with vague admiration for over a year, I had never yet seen Vanora. Her aunt mentioned, in her much underlined epistle, that her brother-in-law, since his dear wife’s death, had let the girls have too much of their own way, and that Vanora (who had received permission to decorate and furnish the drawing room at Fairfield exactly as she pleased), had unworthily employed her liberty by producing a room of brilliant yellow.
I had a prejudice against Vanora, and this last freak made me think none the better of her. Evidently she was rather a headstrong and probably affected young person; everyone said that she liked to make herself conspicuous, and that you never knew what she was going to do next. I hate that sort of girl. The true woman is retiring, unobtrusive, indistinguishable even until you come to know her well, and then she is very much like what every other true woman would be under the same conditions. I had pronounced views in these matters.
As for the yellow drawing room –!
I was anxious to see just how far Vanora’s mania to be out of the common had carried her in this instance.
Arrived at Fairfield, I was at once shown into the notorious drawing room. It was yellow! The colour had been washed out of the very daffodils, which looked green with jealousy; the sunshine was confronted in a spirit of respectful independence, brotherhood being acknowledged, but the principle of equality uncompromisingly asserted.
Miss Thorne sadly shook her head.
‘We want my brother-in-law to have the room done over again, Mr St Vincent, but he won’t hear of it. We did all we could with Vanora – we told her that nobody used such a brilliant colour, but she only said that she found Nobody, when you came to talk to him seriously, was a person quite open to reason. Dear Vanora is so quaint.’
‘Her taste seems to be rather quaint,’ I said.
Several visitors were passionately admiring the prospect, the pictures, the chairs and tables, anything to protect themselves against a threatening summons to say something about the general colouring. Miss Thorne seemed to be piteously endeavouring, by her manners, her attire, her sentiments, to atone for that unpardonable drawing room. The sisters also, Mary and Clara, were doing their best in the same direction. But hopeless was their protest. The room was in a glow of golden light; no ladylike antidote, however strong, could lead one to ignore it. It was radiant, bold, unapologetic, unabashed. It was not the room that my ideal woman would have created. My ideal woman would unfailingly choose a nice tone of grey-blue. Certain suspicions which I had harboured that Clara Haydon was my ideal woman grew stronger as I watched her quiet English face bent over the tea-tray. I liked the straightforward look of the girl, her blue eyes and fair complexion. If I was to give up my liberty, the reins should be handed over to a kind, sensible young woman like Clara, who would hate to make herself remarkable, or her drawing room yellow.
I think the hot afternoon sun, and the unceasing sound of Aunt Clementina’s voice, must have made me drowsy, for I was thinking mistily what a wonderfully and conspicuously clean girl Clara Haydon was, when the door opened, and I found myself floundering (I cannot do more than describe these dreamy impressions) in an ocean of laughter.
In my efforts to keep my head above water, I discovered rather sharply that I had upset my tea, which Clara’s exceedingly clean fingers had just poured out for me. This brought me to my senses.
‘I appear to be graduating for an idiot,’ I exclaimed, furious at my clumsiness and stupidity.
Vanora laughed in a friendly manner. ‘We have all been yearning to get rid of this cup,’ she said, ‘and we really feel grateful to you for your opportune assistance.’
In the few bewildering moments of apology and reassurance, I found myself presented emphatically to Vanora, and lightly indicated to a dark and lank young man who followed her into the room. Vanora herself was simply radiant. She had a mass of glistening, golden hair, a colour full, varying, emotional, eyes like the sea (I lose my temper when people ask me to describe their colour). In figure she was robust, erect, pliant, firmly knit. Though her movements were so swift, there was nothing restless about her. A ground-tone of repose sounded up through the surface scintillations. She was vital, not galvanic. That was the revealing word: vital. In the human colour-spectrum, she took the place of the yellow ray.
This was all out of keeping. According to my doctrines it was even impossible. Women ought to take the place of the blue or violet rays. In my scheme of the universe they always did so, except in the case of a distinctly unwomanly woman. But this – in spite of offending against every canon I had ever set up – Vanora certainly was not. She was supremely, overpoweringly womanly. The womanhood of her sisters paled before the exuberant feminine quality which I could not but acknowledge in Vanora. Everything was wrong and contradictory. I seemed to be taking part in some comedy of errors, wherein Vanora played Columbine,1 and I – the part of fool, I began grimly to suspect. For already (I shrugged my shoulders at myself in contemptuous despair) I found that I hated the lank young man who had been introduced as Mr George Inglis, simply because and solely because I saw that he was head over ears in love with Vanora, and that she treated him with a sort of indescribable good-fellowship, mingled with a peculiar tenderness when she was moved that way.
‘I hear, Miss Vanora,’ I said, ‘that the credit of this room is entirely yours.’
The lank admirer looked round. Vanora glanced at me alertly.
‘You have every reason to be proud,’ I continued, determined not to spare her; ‘you must have surprised more people than you could easily count – though I have no wish to impugn your arithmetic. They will all be grateful to you for a new sensation.’
‘Forgive me for disagreeing with you,’ she said. ‘It is so easy to surprise people; they are so amiable; they keep themselves always prepared for astonishment; they are like a sensitized plate which is ready at a moment’s notice to be surprised into a photograph. You come with your dogma or your self-evident fact, or simply your pot of yellow paint, and, behold, forth spring the various amazements. Oh, no! (thanking you all the same) I am not proud!’
I raised my eyebrows witheringly. My ideal woman would consider it almost indelicate to play with words in this fantastic fashion. I glanced at my grey-blue goddess. How comfortably certain one felt with her of enjoying conversational repose! Dear Clara! With what admirable good taste she carried out one’s cherished ideas; she fitted them like a glove. I completely, ardently, approved of Clara. To her I rather ostentatiously devoted myself for the rest of the afternoon, but I was furtively watching her sister.
And now I come to the disagreeable and inexplicable part of my broken and absurd episode. I know not to this day why or wherefore, but Vanora began to exercise over me an extraordinary fascination. If there were any other word I would use it, but I cannot find one. I fell into the strangest and most contradictory state of mind. Vanora’s personality seemed to enwrap me as a garment; she was like some great radiating centre of light and warmth; I was penetrated with the glowing atmosphere. I never approved of the girl; I don’t believe that I then liked her. I know that I often hated her, and yet I felt miserable out of her sight. She became a necessity to me.
A feeling of misery, which I cannot describe, assailed me in her absence; a sick feeling of senseless despair. I used to pace the terrace among the peacocks (the boys impertinently insisted that they were unable on such occasions to distinguish me from those conceited birds), and as I thus worked off some of my restlessness, I tried to understand what had happened to me.
One morning, before breakfast, Vanora came out on to the terrace. She walked straight up to me and said, ‘Good morning; I think you want to talk to me, don’t you?’
I looked at her in despair. If she lived and improved for a thousand years she would never be an ideal woman!
‘You disapprove of me,’ Vanora continued calmly. ‘I wish you would tell me why.’
‘You really wish me to be frank?’ I said, stopping and facing her.
‘I really do,’ she replied, offering crumbs of bread to a haughty peacock, who eyed them superciliously.
‘Well, then, Miss Haydon, your blood be upon your own head (beautiful was that golden head in the morning light). You seem to have many qualities and ideas that are not suited to your sex. No doubt, I am old-fashioned about these things, but I confess that I cannot rejoice when I see our beautiful ideas of womanhood set scornfully at naught.’
‘No?’ said Vanora. ‘Do go on.’
‘I scarcely know how to approach a subject of which you do not seem to understand the rudiments,’ I said severely.
‘This interests me,’ cried Vanora. ‘I particularly desire to be awakened on this drowsy side of me; I can’t bear to be blind and stupid. I want very much to be shown at least the gates of realms that are forbidden to me.’
‘The sacred realms where woman is queen will soon be forbidden to you if you consistently continue to think and act in disharmony with the feminine nature and genius.’
‘That is what Aunt Clementina and Mr Barnes so often tell me (Mr Barnes is our clergyman). But at present the threat of being excluded from the realms you mention does not terrify me. I rather prefer the realms where woman is not queen.’
‘A mistake, a mistake!’ I exclaimed.
‘Yes, so I am told. But often people don’t know what is good for them. I have heard of persons of mature judgement who had a chance of going straight off to Heaven to play on golden harps and wear a halo, hanging back and sending for the doctor in a strongly ill-advised manner. Of course we shall all have to go to the realms where woman is queen, but for myself I confess to a weak inclination to postpone, or let us say, not to anticipate, my royalty. The suspicion is clearly blameable, but what if I should happen to get tired of the everlasting harping?’
Vanora’s face was perfectly serious.
‘Miss Haydon,’ I said, gravely and sadly, ‘you may have a brilliant career in the future, but the more brilliant, the more complete will be your failure, the more I shall mourn the loss of a real woman from the spheres where she was intended to create and to maintain those sacred ties and sentiments, without which this world would be a howling wilderness.’
Vanora tossed another crumb to the supercilious peacock.
‘Do go on,’ she repeated.
‘If women only realized where their true power lay, and how mighty was that power, they would never seek to snatch it in directions where they are inevitably weak, and – if I must say it – inevitably ridiculous.’
‘I was born to be ridiculous,’ said Vanora. ‘My father never sought to arrange a “sphere” for me, and in my case instinct seems at fault. At one time I used to make a creditable number of antimacassars and sofa-cushions, and to this day my sisters do all that can possibly be required of a well-conducted family, – and what is especially satisfactory from a popular point of view, – they think a baby far more interesting than a grown-up creature with a soul, or even than a child who can think and feel. They are keeping up the feminine traditions admirably. Don’t you think it would be a little monotonous if I were to go over exactly the same ground? It seems to me that that ground is getting rather trodden in.’
‘I am sorry to hear you sneer at your good and charming sisters, and at the true instincts of your sex.’
Vanora burst out laughing.
‘Oh! Mr St Vincent, you really are a little stupid sometimes,’ she said. She turned, and I saw a change come into her face as George Inglis appeared from the wood at the far end of the terrace, and walked towards us. That filled me with unaccountable fury. My critical mood, which I had maintained with no little difficulty, fell off me, and I was swaying as a wind-tossed reed with strange, uncontrollable emotion.
‘You don’t know what it has cost me to speak to you thus,’ I said, catching her hand. ‘You interest me, you – yes, I must say it, you fascinate me, and it distresses me, maddens me to feel myself led away by qualities which ought to repel me – the attraction is morbid – unwholesome. I am angry with myself for even feeling it. Vanora, you must release me.’
‘Release you,’ she repeated; ‘what do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ I replied crazily, ‘that you must learn to love me and to be a woman in the old sweet sense, for my sake.’
‘You are very naif,’ she said, smiling; ‘you seem just now to me like a nice, egotistical child.’ I knew that George Inglis joined her, and that they walked down the terrace together. I suppose I must have been in love with her, yet all the time I seemed to hate her. I longed to make her yield to me; to love me with a lowly up-looking love. I had a burning desire to subdue her. She seemed to evade me and my theories as if she were a creature from another sphere. I cannot describe the irritation of mind which all this caused me. I set about my wooing as if I had been going to fight a duel.
Shortly after this, to my intense disgust, I found that George Inglis had discovered my accursed secret. I chanced to overhear him saying to Miss Thorne: ‘The context is a typical one; if one could imagine the Eighteenth Century as a lover wooing the Nineteenth Century, this is the sort of angular labyrinthine courtship we should have!’ I wondered what the chattering fool meant by it!
‘She shall love me, and she shall learn, through love, the sweet lesson of womanly submission,’ I said to myself, all the dominating instincts of my manhood roused into activity by this hateful experience. I felt that she was utterly wrong, that she had mistaken her own powers and her own noblest impulses. It was for me, through the might of an overwhelming affection, to set alight the true womanly flame within her heart. I would make her proud of her subordination; I would turn the splendid stream of her powers and affection into the true channel.
After a day or two of lover-like devotion, I began to slacken in my pursuit, and to transfer my attentions to Clara. Clara became a new creature. Her expression softened, her eyes brightened, but I was too absorbed in my own little drama to consider what part Clara might be likely to play in it. I watched Vanora secretly. She seemed depressed and restless. My heart bounded. Vanora was jealous; a woman after the old eternal pattern! – therefore to be won! Dear, erratic, foolish, brilliant Vanora, you shall be brought back safe and sound to your true destiny!
I followed her to the garden, whither I knew she had gone to gather flowers. Very lovely she looked in her white dress, with a bunch of daffodils in her belt.
I plunged headlong. ‘Vanora, I love you; I want to know my fate.’
‘Me,’ she said, with a gasp of astonishment, ‘I thought it was Clara!’
I clasped her hands; I protested; I told her how my love for her had overwhelmed and shattered me.
‘And Clara?’ she repeated in dismay.
Did she not understand? It was out of pique, to make her jealous –.
‘When I become jealous of my sisters,’ said Vanora, with a quiet and scornful aloofness, ‘you can come and preach me your doctrines. I shall understand them then.’
‘Vanora!’
‘At present they seem to me like soap-bubbles; full of emptiness.’
‘But you don’t understand –’
‘True,’ she returned, ‘they have never before assailed me in this stiff-backed fashion. I offend against them unconsciously. My father never constrained me to move in any particular direction because of my sex. He has perhaps spoiled me. I have hitherto had only a joyous sense of drawing in what was outside, and radiating out what was within me. When you describe your doctrines I seem to see the doors of a dark prison opening out of the sunshine; and, strange to say, I feel no divine, unerring instinct prompting me to walk in.’
‘I offer you no prison but a home,’ I cried excitedly.
‘You would turn all homes into prisons,’ she returned.
‘Prisons whose bars are the golden bars of love and duty.’
‘Yes, you take a woman’s love and duty, and fashion out of them her prison bars. Is that generous? I fancy not, but it is most ingenious. It is Loyalaesque. But I don’t like even golden bars, Mr St Vincent.’
‘You have evidently not a spark of love for me,’ I cried distractedly.
Her face suddenly changed. ‘Ah! That is the horrible absurdity of it!’ she exclaimed, colouring painfully. ‘You enthral one part of me and leave the other scornful and indifferent. We have scarcely a thought in common, but I am miserable when you are absent – stop, don’t misunderstand. Your Gods and Goddesses are to me creatures of pasteboard; your world of belief seems to me like a realm fashioned out of tissue paper.’ She spoke with breathless rapidity and she was quivering from head to foot. ‘To live with you would be like living in a tomb; I lack the sense of fresh air. And there is no sunshine within miles of you! Yet when I am not with you there is a sort of ache; your personality seems to fascinate me – I wish to heaven you had never come here. You have disturbed my happiness, destroyed my delight in life, left me miserably dependent on you; yet to the end of time I should continue to shock and irritate you, and you would stifle, depress and perhaps utterly unhinge me. I wish you would go – today, now.’
She looked white and distraught. I pleaded like a lunatic, argued, urged; for one supreme moment my arms were round her, and I thought that she would yield. But whether or not a triumph was in store for me I shall never know, for suddenly we both started in dismay. Before us, pausing abruptly as she came round the bend of the laurel shrubberies, stood Clara. I shall never forget the look on her face at that moment. It was like that of some gentle animal mortally and wantonly wounded. Without a word Clara turned away, and Vanora and I stood in silence.
At last, slowly moving away, Vanora spoke. ‘I can forgive you the injury you have done to me – that you could not help, and the fault, after all, is my own – but I can never forgive what you have done to Clara.’
She passed out of sight, and I stood spellbound. I never saw Vanora again. I left Fairfield immediately, and I heard that she and her sister had gone abroad. I could not find out where they were, nor had I the temerity to think of following them. I knew that Fate had no reprieve for me.
The episode remains in my mind as a haunting, incomprehensible dream. Ponder as I may, I cannot understand what impulses of our nature Vanora and I had power mutually to set at variance; what irresistible attraction we had for one another, combined with what inevitable antipathy. We could never have lived together; I see that now. Yet, when the memory of those ten days returns to torment me, I feel that neither can we live apart. I have never been the same man since I met Vanora. I am neither my former self, complete and comfortable, nor am I thoroughly a new being. I am a sort of abortive creature, striding between two centuries. The spirit of a coming age has brushed me with his wing, but I resent and resist that which brings havoc into the citadel of my dearest beliefs; and I angrily pluck off the tiny feather which he dropped from those great ploughing pinions of his, that shadow – the firmament of the Future.