Delia Blanchflower by Mrs. Humphry Ward (top 10 most read books in the world TXT) 📖

Chapter I

"Not a Britisher to be seen--or scarcely! Well, I can do without 'em for a bit!"

And the Englishman whose mind shaped these words continued his leisurely survey of the crowded salon of a Tyrolese hotel, into which a dining-room like a college hall had just emptied itself after the mid-day meal. Meanwhile a German, sitting near, seeing that his tall neighbour had been searching his pockets in vain for matches, offered some. The Englishman's quick smile in response modified the German's general opinion of English manners, and the two exchanged some remarks on the weather--a thunder shower was splashing outside--remarks which bore witness at least to the Englishman's courage in using such knowledge of the German tongue as he possessed. Then, smoking contentedly, he leant against the wall behind him, still looking on.

He saw a large room, some seventy feet long, filled with a miscellaneous foreign crowd--South Germans, Austrians, Russians, Italians--seated in groups round small tables, smoking, playing cards or dominoes, reading the day's newspapers which the funicular had just brought up, or lazily listening to the moderately good band which was playing some Rheingold selection at the farther end.

To his left was a large family circle--Russians, according to information derived from the headwaiter--and among them, a girl, apparently about eighteen, sitting on the edge of the party and absorbed in a novel of which she was eagerly turning the pages. From her face and figure the half savage, or Asiatic note, present in the physiognomy and complexion of her brothers and sisters, was entirely absent. Her beautiful head with its luxuriant mass of black hair, worn low upon the cheek, and coiled in thick plaits behind, reminded the Englishman of a Greek fragment he had admired, not many days before, in the Louvre; her form too was of a classical lightness and perfection. The Englishman noticed indeed that her temper was apparently not equal to her looks. When her small brothers interrupted her, she repelled them with a pettish word or gesture; the English governess addressed her, and got no answer beyond a haughty look; even her mother was scarcely better treated.

Close by, at another table, was another young girl, rather younger than the first, and equally pretty. She too was dark haired, with a delicate oval face and velvet black eyes, but without any of the passionate distinction, the fire and flame of the other. She was German, evidently. She wore a plain white dress with a red sash, and her little feet in white shoes were lightly crossed in front of her. The face and eyes were all alive, it seemed to him, with happiness, with the mere pleasure of life. She could not keep herself still for a moment. Either she was sending laughing signals to an elderly man near her, presumably her father, or chattering at top speed with another girl of her own age, or gathering her whole graceful body into a gesture of delight as the familiar Rheingold music passed from one lovely _motif_ to another.

"You dear little thing!" thought the Englishman, with an impulse of tenderness, which passed into foreboding amusement as he compared the pretty creature with some of the matrons sitting near her, with one in particular, a lady of enormous girth, whose achievements in eating and drinking at meals had seemed to him amazing. Almost all the middle-aged women in the hotel were too fat, and had lost their youth thereby, prematurely. Must the fairy herself--Euphrosyne--come to such a muddy vesture in the end? Twenty years hence?--alack!

"Beauty that must die." The hackneyed words came suddenly to mind, and haunted him, as his eyes wandered round the room. Amid many coarse or commonplace types, he yet perceived an unusual number of agreeable or handsome faces; as is indeed generally the case in any Austrian hotel. Faces, some of them, among the very young girls especially, of a rose-tinted fairness, and subtly expressive, the dark brows arching on white foreheads, the features straight and clean, the heads well carried, as though conscious of ancestry and tradition; faces, also, of the _bourgeoisie_, of a simpler, Gretchen-like beauty; faces--a few--of "intellectuals," as he fancied,--including the girl with the novel?--not always handsome, but arresting, and sometimes noble. He felt himself in a border land of races, where the Teutonic and Latin strains had each improved the other; and the pretty young girls and women seemed to him like flowers sprung from an old and rich soil. He found his pleasure in watching them--the pleasure of the Ancient Mariner when he blessed the water-snakes. Sex had little to say to it; and personal desire nothing. Was he not just over forty?--a very busy Englishman, snatching a hard-earned holiday--a bachelor, moreover, whose own story lay far behind him.

"_Beauty that must die_" The words reverberated and would not be dismissed. Was it because he had just been reading an article in a new number of the _Quarterly_, on "Contemporary Feminism," with mingled amazement and revolt, roused by some of the strange facts collected by the writer? So women everywhere--many women at any rate--were turning indiscriminately against the old bonds, the old yokes, affections, servitudes, demanding "self-realisation," freedom for the individuality and the personal will; rebelling against motherhood, and life-long marriage; clamouring for easy divorce, and denouncing their own fathers, brothers and husbands, as either tyrants or fools; casting away the old props and veils; determined, apparently, to know everything, however ugly, and to say everything, however outrageous? He himself was a countryman, an English provincial, with English public school and university traditions of the best kind behind him, a mind steeped in history, and a natural taste for all that was ancient and deep-rooted. The sketch of an emerging generation of women, given in the _Quarterly_ article, had made a deep impression upon him. It seemed to him frankly horrible. He was of course well acquainted, though mainly through the newspapers, with English suffragism, moderate and extreme. His own country district and circle were not, however, much concerned with it. And certainly he knew personally no such types as the _Quarterly_ article described. Among them, no doubt, were the women who set fire to houses, and violently interrupted or assaulted Cabinet ministers, who wrote and maintained newspapers that decent people would rather not read, who grasped at martyrdom and had turned evasion of penalty into a science, the continental type, though not as yet involved like their English sisters in a hand-to-hand, or fist-to-fist struggle with law and order, were, it seemed, even more revolutionary in principle, and to some extent in action. The life and opinions of a Sonia Kovalevski left him bewildered. For no man was less omniscient than he. Like the Cabinet minister of recent fame, in the presence of such _femmes fortes_, he might have honestly pleaded, _mutatis mutandis_, "In these things I am a child."

Were these light-limbed, dark-eyed maidens under his eyes touched with this new anarchy? They or their elders must know something about it. There had been a Feminist congress lately at Trient--on the very site, and among the ghosts of the great Council. Well, what could it bring them? Was there anything so brief, so passing, if she did but know it, as a woman's time for happiness? "_Beauty that must die_."

As the words recurred, some old anguish lying curled at his heart raised its head and struck. He heard a voice--tremulously sweet--"Mark!--dear Mark!--I'm not good enough--but I'll be to you all a woman can."

_She_ had not played with life--or scorned it--or missed it. It was not _her_ fault that she must put it from her.

In the midst of the crowd about him, he was no longer aware of it. Still smoking mechanically, his eyelids had fallen over his eyes, as his head rested against the wall.

He was interrupted by a voice which said in excellent though foreign English--

"I beg your pardon, sir--I wonder if I might have that paper you are standing on?"

He looked down astonished, and saw that he was trampling on the day's _New York Herald_, which had fallen from a table near. With many apologies he lifted it, smoothed it out, and presented it to the elderly lady who had asked for it.

She looked at him through her spectacles with a pleasant smile.

"You don't find many English newspapers in these Tyrolese hotels?"

"No; but I provide myself. I get my _Times_ from home."

"Then, as an Englishman, you have all you want. But you seem to be without it to-night?"

"It hasn't arrived. So I am reduced, as you see, to listening to the music."

"You are not musical?"

"Well, I don't like this band anyway. It makes too much noise. Don't you think it rather a nuisance?"

"No. It helps these people to talk," she said, in a crisp, cheerful voice, looking round the room.

"But they don't want any help. Most of them talk by nature as fast as the human tongue can go!"

"About nothing!" She shrugged her shoulders.

Winnington observed her more closely. She was, he guessed, somewhere near fifty; her scanty hair was already grey, and her round, plain face was wrinkled and scored like a dried apple. But her eyes, which were dark and singularly bright, expressed both energy and wit; and her mouth, of which the upper lip was caught up a little at one corner, seemed as though quivering with unspoken and, as he thought, sarcastic speech. Was she, perchance, the Swedish _Schriftstellerin_ of whom he had heard the porter talking to some of the hotel guests? She looked a lonely-ish, independent sort of body.

"They seem nice, kindly people," he said, glancing round the salon. "And how they enjoy life!"

"You call it life?"

He laughed out.

"You are hard upon them, madame. Now I--being a mere man--am lost in admiration of their good looks. We in England pride ourselves on our women, But upon my word, it would be difficult to match this show in an English hotel. Look at some of the faces!"

She followed his eyes--indifferently.

"Yes--they've plenty of beauty. And what'll it do for them? Lead them into some wretched marriage or other--and in a couple of years there will be neither beauty nor health, nor self-respect, nor any interest in anything, but money, clothes, and outwitting their husbands."

"You forget the children!"

"Ah--the children"--she said in a dubious tone, shrugging her shoulders again.

The Englishman--whose name was Mark Winnington--suddenly saw light upon her.

A Swedish writer, a woman travelling alone? He remembered the sketch of "feminism" in Sweden which he had just read. The names of certain woman-writers flitted through his mind. He felt a curiosity mixed with distaste. But curiosity prevailed.

He bent forward. And as he came thereby into stronger light from a window on his left, the thought crossed the mind of his neighbour that although so fully aware of other people's good looks, the tall Englishman seemed to be quite unconscious of his own. Yet in truth he appeared both to her, and to the hotel guests in general, a kind of heroic creature. In height he towered beside the young or middle-aged men from Munich, Buda-Pesth, or the north Italian towns, who filled the _salon_. He had all that athlete could desire in the way of shoulders, and lean length of body; a finely-carried head, on which the brown hair was wearing a little thin at the crown, while still irrepressibly strong and curly round the brow and