VII

Hermione was Helen’s child, but Menelaus was her father. She had his dark hair, his black eyes, and his kind of regal bearing. She had the manner of knowing who she was. Helen was queenly by birth, Hermione by inheritance. She was not beautiful herself, but she called beauty to mind, and she had an admirable character. The world, she thought, might be set straight by intelligence and resolution. She was disposed to do her part. She stood before Helen now, tall and slender, much at ease, wondering why her mother had sent for her.

“Hermione, I find certain scandalous rumours circulating about me here in Sparta. Perhaps you can explain them.”

“Which do you refer to, mother?”

“So you have heard of them. I must know their source, if possible, in order to stop them. Scandal is always annoying, and usually it is unnecessary.”

“At times, mother, it is inevitable.”

“Never,” said Helen. “I’ve met people who thought so, but I don’t share their view. In any case, the question hardly concerns us. I wish to get at the bottom of these stories in which I figure rather discreditably. When did they first come to your attention?”

“I’d rather forget than talk about them, mother.”

“We’ll dispose of them first and forget them afterwards,” said Helen. “Since there are several of these stories, which did you hear of first, and when?”

“There’s the legend,” said Hermione, “that you deserted your husband and ran away with Paris to Troy. I first heard of it immediately after you went.”

“But that’s not scandal,” said Helen, “that’s the truth.”

“If that’s not scandal, I don’t know what it is.”

“I see you don’t,” said her mother. “In scandal there’s always some falsehood, something malicious and defamatory. Scandal, to my mind, is such a story as I heard yesterday afternoon from Charitas. She says I never was at Troy at all. Paris carried me off, against my will, and some valuable furniture, too. The winds blew us to Egypt—you know the absurd tale? Well, that’s what I call scandal. What should I be doing in Egypt? And should I have gone off with Paris if he had been a thief?”

“The furniture was missing,” said Hermione, “and you must admit, mother, Paris was the natural one to blame, since he—well, he did—what he did.”

“What did he do?” asked Helen. “You were an infant at the time; I’d like to hear your account of the episode. Perhaps you supplied the malicious part of the scandal. Paris didn’t steal me, as you were about to say, I was quite willing. But if he had stolen me, I’d prefer to think he would have had no margin of interest left for the furniture.”

Hermione said nothing.

“Well?” said Helen.

“Mother, this is a terrible subject—I’d rather avoid it,” said Hermione. “It isn’t a subject for a girl to be talking to her mother about.”

“What isn’t?” said Helen.

“The character of the man who—who seduced you,” said Hermione.

“Nobody seduced me, and I have not desired your opinion of Paris. You were a year old when he saw you last. What I want to know is something you may be able to tell me—how did these scandals begin?”

“If you insist on our coming to an understanding,” said Hermione, “I think you oughtn’t to turn the discussion from its natural path. I didn’t want to say anything, but if we talk of it at all, it is a question of Paris. Of course, when he left I had no opinion of him, but I have one now. I don’t think highly of him. He’s dead—and all that, but his conduct has seemed to me, still seems, shocking.”

“My impression is that he couldn’t help it,” said Helen. “You’ll admit I was in a better position to understand him. But that’s not the point. How did such a story begin? Do you know?”

“Since you are determined to find out,” said Hermione, “I made up all the stories myself.”

“That’s what I gathered from Charitas,” said Helen. “I’m glad you have the frankness to own it. Oh, Hermione, how could you tell those lies? You needn’t answer; it’s the result of my leaving you—you had no bringing up.”

“You hurt me,” cried Hermione, “you hurt me with the hard things you say and the cool way you say them! I try to be dutiful, I call you mother, but we don’t belong to each other. If you were human you’d know why I did what I could to save your name, to keep even a wild chance it might be a mistake, to support at least a little good opinion for you to return to—if you came back. Don’t look at me so—you’ve no right to! If I had a daughter telling me such truth as I’m telling you, I’d feel shame—I couldn’t be so shining and serene!”

Helen continued radiant and serene. “Respectability based on falsehood,” she said. “That’s what your love for me suggested. I’ve seen it tried before, Hermione, you’re very like your father. Like my sister, too, I’m sorry to see. By the way, have you seen Orestes in my absence?”

“From time to time,” said Hermione—“that is, not very often.”

“What if you had?” asked Helen. “It wouldn’t be a crime, would it?”

Hermione said nothing.

“You needn’t blush,” said Helen, “it’s not your daughter speaks to you as yet; it’s only your mother, who embarrasses you with her liking for sincerity. As a matter of fact, I’ve no doubt you’ve seen your cousin frequently.”

Hermione said nothing.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of, if you have,” her mother went on; “we once planned that you should marry him, and I dare say he likes you. I raised the question merely to examine your character a bit further. You lacked courage about me, but I could excuse that—you’re young, and mine is an unusual case. But you ought to have enough courage to tell the truth about your own blameless life. You thought my reputation would be improved by those extraordinary tales; will you tell me what your reputation can gain by lack of frankness?”

“Orestes has been here often, I suppose,” said Hermione, “but it doesn’t seem often. Perhaps that’s because I’m in love with him, as he is with me. I should have told you before, but I thought you didn’t care for him.”

“I don’t care for him,” said Helen, “but then I don’t intend to marry him. Do you? You see the dilemma you’ve placed yourself in. If you wished to marry him, yet gave him up because I disapproved, I’d know you valued my opinion—and I’d know you weren’t altogether in love. But if you are to marry him anyway, and defer to my opinion only by concealing your intentions, then I’m not flattered, and I foresee no happiness in your marriage. In marriage, if anywhere, you need the courage of your convictions, at least at the beginning.”

“You hurt me so,” cried Hermione, “I’m tempted to speak plainly enough to satisfy even you! I don’t know whether it’s the courage of my convictions, or just that I’m angry, but I don’t admire your kind of courage, nor the kind of man you ran away with, nor your ideas about scandal! I still have some impulse—I don’t know why I have it—to spare you the things you don’t like but which can’t be helped. I’m not so old as you, but I don’t feel very young. I’ve grown up watching what you call your unusual career, and I realise without the slightest shame that I’m more old-fashioned than you are; I like the respectability you seem to dread, I want a lover I can settle down with and be true to, I’m going to have an orderly home. I’m sorry I tried to save your reputation for you, since you prefer it the other way, but no great harm was done—none of your friends really believed me. What I did was out of duty, I have no reason to love you, I owe you gratitude for nothing. You never made me happy, you never made anyone happy, not even those who loved you—not my father nor Paris, nor any of them. Paris must have seen—he was a fool to take you.”

Hermione was a bit amazed, and on the whole gratified, at her own indignation and spirit. She felt it was a big moment. Helen, too, strange to say, seemed pleased.

“Now you are telling the truth,” she said. “Thank heaven you are beginning, though it’s at the bottom, where we so often begin—with unpleasant things about others. But I’d rather hear this than those silly fabrications of yours. Correct at every point; you have no reason to love me, and none to be grateful. As for Paris, I’ve often wondered why he loved me. For the same reason, I suspect, that your father didn’t kill me, that night in Troy. I told Paris precisely what you have said—that I had made no one happy. I also told him that no man had made me happy—that what promised to be immortal ecstasy would prove but a moment, brief and elusive, that our passion would bring misery after it, that for him it would probably bring death. With his eyes open, and I can’t say he was a fool, he chose our love. Or perhaps there was no choice. But surely your father knew the worst when he came to find me, sword in hand and murder in his heart. He had every right to kill me, and I thought he would. Or perhaps I didn’t think so.”

Hermione was put out that her mother wasn’t angry. It seemed her turn to speak, but she couldn’t get her wits together; she felt unexpectedly exhausted. She had been standing for some time; now she sat down on the couch beside her mother.

“Your facts are correct,” Helen went on, “but some aspects of them you are too young to understand. I ought to have made you happy—one’s child ought to be happy. But not one’s lover; I deny any obligation there. If we only knew beforehand, and accepted the implications, that happiness is the last thing to ask of love! A divine realisation of life, yes, an awakening to the world outside and to the soul within—but not happiness. Hermione, I wish I could teach you now that a man or a woman loved is simply the occasion of a dream. The stronger the love, as we say, the clearer and more lifelike seems the vision. To make your lover altogether happy would be a contradiction of terms; if he’s really your lover he will see in you far more than you are, but if you prove less than he sees, he will be unhappy.”

“Don’t you think you’re a peculiar case?” said Hermione. “To you love may be this uncertain kind of trouble, but to other people, as far as I’ve observed them about here, it’s a fairly normal, reliable happiness. At least they don’t talk as you do, they look comfortable, and they congratulate the young who have agreed to marry.”

“My dear child,” said Helen, “I am a peculiar case—everyone is who has known love. But there’s some general wisdom about the matter which I’d share with you if I could. It’s useless to try. You’ll have to learn for yourself when you fall in love.”

“I am in love,” said Hermione—“with Orestes.”

“Yes, child, in love—but not deeply. I dare say he has never disappointed you, as yet.”

“Never!”

“The early stage,” said Helen. “We have to build up the illusion before we can be disappointed.”

“I’ve a new light on scandal,” said Hermione, “and I’ll do my best to grasp your idea of love. May I ask you a personal question? I suppose this theory ought to apply to you as well as to the men who loved you. Has love for you, too, always been a mistake?”

“Never a mistake,” said Helen, “always an illusion.”

“So when you ran off with Paris, it wasn’t really Paris you loved—as you found out later?”

“You might say that—it wasn’t the real Paris.”

“But you’ll admit you hadn’t the excuse you give me, of inexperience,” said Hermione. “You had already loved my father, and I suppose had found out that he, too, wasn’t what you wanted. You shouldn’t have been deceived a second time.”

“I married your father,” said Helen; “I never said I loved him. But not to shock you and not to misrepresent myself, let me say I’ve always been fond of Menelaus, and he’s an impeccable husband. Yet your argument would miss the point, even if I had been passionate over him. I should then have to confess the same disillusion in my love for Menelaus as in my love for Paris, but perhaps I preferred my illusion for Paris. It’s the illusion you fall in love with. And no matter how often it occurs, no matter how wise you are as to what the end will be, one more illusion is welcome—for only while it lasts do we catch a vision of our best selves. In that sense, as I understand it, love is a disease, and incurable.”

“Well, then,” said Hermione, “when once a person has occasioned in you this divine vision of yourself, you might keep the happiness if you never saw the person again?”

“That’s a profound insight,” said Helen, “but to be so wise would be inhuman.”

“One other question, mother—does father think as you do?”

“I doubt it, but you never can tell,” said Helen. “Your father hasn’t spoken to me at any length about his ideas of love—not for a long time.”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t agree with you,” said Hermione, “and neither do I. Your praise of truth gives me courage to say I don’t think all the people I know, except you, are wrong, nor that what seems their happiness is an illusion. For myself I want the kind of happiness I believe they really have. I shall never understand how you, so beautiful and so clever, with a husband you had chosen yourself from so many splendid suitors, could throw yourself away on that person from Asia. I’ve tried to imagine just what was your state of mind when you ran off with him, but I can’t.”

“No, in that direction,” said Helen, “you failed rather notably. I come back to the scandal you spread. You told Charitas I went away because I couldn’t help myself—Paris took me by force.”

“It seemed the kindest version.”

“Oh—was there a choice of versions? What have I escaped—which were the others?”

“Oh, what’s the use, mother?” said Hermione. “I’ve owned up about the stories, and since you don’t like them, I’m sorry. You only make me angry by the way you examine me. I tried to do right, but you make me feel cheap.”

“If you were trying to do right, you have no cause to feel cheap,” said Helen. “But I suspect you were uncomfortable even at the time; I credit you with too much intelligence to think you knew what you were talking about.”

“I knew what I was about—I was telling a lie, for your sake, and also for the sake of the rest of us. I could have told more than one lie; I tried to choose the best. The first I thought of wouldn’t do—I had it out of old-fashioned poetry—that situation you get so often where the gods deceive the lover by a spell, and he doesn’t know who it is he takes in his arms, but afterward his eyes are cleared and he knows he’s been tricked. I was so desperate at first, I thought of saying Aphrodite enchanted you, so you thought it was Menelaus, but it turned out to be Paris. Don’t smile—I didn’t waste much time on that threadbare poetry. Then I could have said you went with Paris willingly, but that was so obviously disreputable, and I couldn’t explain it away. Besides, it was just what people were thinking. I saw it must be Paris taking you by force.”

“Very strange, considering what I was telling you only a moment ago about love,” said Helen, “but that first idea isn’t threadbare poetry, and if you had told it I should never have called it scandal, for it’s the truth. Paris couldn’t have stolen me against my will. In a sense I went of my own accord. But in the deepest sense the story would have been true—it was the spell.”

“Now really, mother, that’s too much—not that—not at this late date!”

“Truth, Hermione, profound truth! You always think it’s Menelaus you’re embracing, and it turns out to be Paris.”

“I give you my word, mother, never in my life have I heard a remark more cynical!”

“On the contrary,” said Helen, “it’s one of the most optimistic remarks you will ever hear, especially coming from me. You don’t understand yet, and many who ought to know seem reluctant to tell, but in love there’s always a natural enchantment of passion to draw us on, and when the enchantment dies as it must, there remains behind it either a disillusion, or a beautiful reality, a friendship, a comradeship, a harmony. This wonder behind the passing spell I’ve never yet found, but I have always sought it, and I persist in believing it may be there.”

“If we all lived on your plan,” said Hermione, “I don’t see what would become of people. We haven’t the right to lead our own lives—”

“If we don’t lead our own life,” said Helen, “we are in danger of trying to lead someone else’s.”

“I mean, we’re not alone in the world,” said Hermione. “You can talk me down, but I wonder you don’t realise how queer your sense of proportion looks. You take me to task because I spread a story about you—false, I’ll admit, but in the circumstances remarkably generous and favourable. Yet you have been preaching ideas here, with your quiet voice and those innocent eyes of yours, ideas which would make us all wicked if we followed them. Telling a little falsehood for a kind purpose doesn’t seem to me so bad as destroying homes and bringing on war and taking men to their death.”

“It wouldn’t seem so bad,” said Helen, “unless you asked what started the destroying of homes, the war and death. You might find that the remote cause was a little falsehood for a kind purpose. If we all lived on my plan, you said. I have no plan, except to be as sincere as possible. We certainly are not alone in the world, and the first condition of living satisfactorily with the others, I think, is to be entirely truthful with them. How can anything be kind that is partly a lie? And you don’t see what would become of people! Well, what’s becoming of them now? Ever since I returned I’ve noticed how the kind ways of our fathers, the manners wise men agreed on for each other’s happiness, can be turned to very mean uses. Charitas came over to see me at once. What could be kinder than to welcome an old friend home? Had she any honest business in my house if she didn’t come as a friend? I’ve returned the call, and I know her through and through. She told me the legends you tried to circulate; of course she hoped they weren’t true. She hoped for the worst. What she wanted when she rushed over here was the first bloom of the gossip, news of my most intimate experiences, to discuss my wickedness more specifically with the neighbours. And then, poor woman, she’s never had any adventures herself. I disappointed her. She got no news, and made it clear that I am an entirely moral woman.”

“Mother! How could you?” said Hermione.

“I won’t go into the argument now,” said Helen—“I’m growing tired of myself as a theme for conversation, and it’s you I wanted to talk about. But I might leave this suggestion with you—that of all those who went to Troy on my account, I’m the only one who returned with an unimpaired sense of morality. If this talk has opened your eyes in the least degree, you may watch the people around you, and watch yourself, and you’ll see what I mean. We have the right to lead our own lives—you’ve the right even to marry Orestes, though I still hope you won’t. But that right implies another—to suffer the consequences. If I’d been home to train you properly, I shouldn’t be telling you now that for intelligent people the time for repentance is in advance. Do your best, and if it’s a mistake, hide nothing and be glad to suffer for it. That’s morality. I don’t observe much of it in this neighbourhood.”

“It’s only fair to remember,” said Hermione, “that Charitas has been a good friend to me in your absence. She’d be astonished if she knew what you think of her.”

“She knows now, and she is astonished,” said Helen. “I consider her a dangerous woman. Mark my words, she’ll do a lot of harm. What sort of boy is that son of hers?”

“Damastor? Oh, he’s all right,” said Hermione. “He hasn’t his mother’s steadiness of character, but he’s harmless. He’s devoted to Charitas.”

“What do you mean by harmless?” asked Helen.

“Oh, he’s well-behaved, sheltered and quiet, a bit young even for his years.”

“You must admire his type,” said Helen.

“What, Damastor?” cried Hermione.

“His mother says he’s devoted to you.”

“To me? I scarcely know him! Oh, I’ve seen him at his mother’s, but not often. He’s shown no signs of devotion, thank heaven! I’ve thought of him as a mere child.”

“Then he hasn’t been calling on you lately?”

“Never—who told you that?”

“Charitas. She says he told her. I thought myself it wasn’t so. They’re a very respectable family. No more than the normal amount of lying, I dare say. You might do worse.”