For some time I kissed her before she gave any sign of emotion. Then suddenly she called me, 'Frank'; and when I lifted myself to answer, she drew me into her arms. 'How could you, how could you? You dear, naughty boy! How could you leave me? When I love you more than all the world,' and she broke into a flood of tears.
'Why didn't you say so?' I replied. 'If you had, I should have been faithful.'
'I never felt you cared,' she answered, drying her tears, 'I even feared you loved your wife till I saw her the other day, then I laughed and wrote to you; I was sure you couldn't love her as you had loved me. Oh, Frank, what hours we have had!'
'The Gods hate human happiness,' I said, 'that is why I have lost you. But now let us begin again. Come to me on our three holy days-Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday; tell me what you want frankly and I shall try to meet all your desires.'
'They have been pressing me to marry some one,' she said; 'father has lost money again, but I have refused. If you could help me, it would make it easier.'
'I am glad to do it, so glad! I shall give you more than before. Life is going to change and we shall come together yet.'
'I love you,' she replied, 'and only you. I ought to have made that clear, but when we give ourselves, we women, we are apt to think that the man must know we are his and belong to him absolutely, and we are a little ashamed of it.'
'You dear,' I answered. 'I ought to have guessed it; but let us begin again and bring love to a higher perfection.'
I had never felt such passionate admiration for any other woman: the beauty of her figure appealed to me intensely, and the mere touch of her firm flesh thrilled me as no one else had ever done. I cannot explain the magnetism, the intensity of the attraction and the passion she inspired in me. Life would have reached its highest through my connection with her if it hadn't been for one thing.
I don't know why, but I was never sure of Laura's love; and that caused in me a curious reflex action: I never tried to give her the greatest sum of pleasure that I possibly could. I often stopped embracing just when she was most passionate, out of a sort of revenge that sprang from hurt vanity. This passion of vanity is the most cruel master of mankind-a very God. Who that has read them can ever forget Blake's lines:
Nought loves another as itself
Nor venerates another so
Nor is it given unto thought
A greater than itself to know.
Why did I doubt Laura's love? I remember once an article appearing in a London paper, putting me among the first writers of the time and declaring that I was a better talker even than Oscar Wilde. It was by Francis Adams, I think. I paid no attention to it, but Laura brought it to me one day in huge excitement wanting to know: 'Had I seen it? Who was the writer? Was it true? Had I written a story called Mantes the Matador- 'one of the great stories of the world,' this critic says?'
Her astonishment was so unfeigned that I realized she didn't know me at all. I recalled the fact that at the beginning of our acquaintance, when I told her I would make money within a year or so, she didn't believe me, but went off and grew to care for some one else because she thought I should always be hard up as I was when we first met.
I remember, too, her astonishment when she saw my first articles on Shakespeare. 'But how can you be sure,' she said, 'that he grew as you have depicted him?'
She had not the remotest conception of my intelligence or what I could do in literature; and love is, above everything, I said to myself, divination. One loves because one feels the utmost power of mind, of character, of soul in the beloved. Always I was sure that Laura did not love me, had never loved me; and I punished her for it by my restraints. Yet now and then she reached greatness.
It was after this first reconciliation, just when she had dressed and was standing before the glass, that she found a great word. We had resolved to meet on the next Tuesday. I had given her the latch key to the front door: she suddenly turned and kissed me. 'Ah, you bad boy, you have taught me everything, Frank; but not how to do without you.'
What could I do but kiss her while tears burnt my eyes. This was the beginning of love's renewal. From that day on we met three times a week for the next three years till my wife sold my bachelor house without my consent and forced us to meet elsewhere.
Even before this, Laura had told me of a rich man who wanted to marry her: he was an invalid, she said, and only wished to secure her in possession of his fortune before he died. I found out later it was partly true: but a certain coolness between us had come again, chiefly through her jealousy. I had a servant who happened to be very pretty: I had never made up to her: devoted to Laura, I scarcely looked at any one else; but one day I was late and found Laura furious.
'Your maid was rude to me,' she declared; 'you must get rid of her or I won't come again!'
I bowed my head and assured her that next time she should not be bothered.
When she went away, I called the maid, and for the first time noticed that she was well made and pretty. 'Why were you rude?' I asked. 'I wasn't rude first,' she answered; 'but when she was rude, I answered back; do you mind very much?' she went on, coming towards me, with challenging eyes.
'I don't like rudeness,' I answered.
What devil is it in a man to make him desire at all times the Unknown, the new? It has never been explained, and never can be explained rationally. It is the primary urge, the keenest desire of the male; and the individual is not responsible for it in the smallest degree. He was fashioned in the far past of time, a creature of unregulated, impassioned desires.
Desires now surged over me in a hot wave, and I took her into my arms and kissed her. Ten minutes later I had stripped her, reveling in the beauty of a slight girlish figure and extraordinary courage. In a quarter of an hour I realized that she was a seductive mistress, endowed with a passion that matched mine, and little cunning ways and turns of speech that pleased me by their cockney originality: she was really, as the French say, 'some one!'
'Oh, oh,' she cried the first time. 'I won't ask you again for more kisses: my heart's in my mouth and flutters there-no, no more-I'm near hysterics! Kiss and part friends! I hope there's nothing to fear?'
'Nothing,' I replied; 'you can trust me!'
'Then,' she cried cheekily as she began to dress, 'Kensington Gore is quite a good place to live in.'
I recall another scene later. For days she had been thoughtful and gone about heavy-eyed. Suddenly one morning she was her old gay self again; she came laughing into my bedroom with my tea, and when I asked her what had chased away the clouds, she struck an attitude. 'You can't guess?' I shook my head.
'I always say,' she went on, smiling cheekily, 'all's well that end's unwell!'
I couldn't but laugh.
For some time she attended to all my wants and desires with great cleverness, leaving the older housemaid to take her place whenever Laura visited me.
She entertained me with frank stories of her early life. She had been naughty as a girl, she said, especially with one boy, and had given herself at fourteen to her first master, a married solicitor. She loved love, she confessed, and couldn't live without it; but she took everything lightly, and as soon as my passion was satisfied and I knew all her past, I lost interest in her: there was nothing extraordinary in her, either in face or figure or mind, and so I quickly grew to indifference.
At first I found myself putting Laura off more than once to enjoy Sadi- I could not call her 'Sarah,' though that was her name. But when she saw that I preferred Laura and was really devoted to her, Sadi suddenly left me with a letter, saying that she knew I preferred my 'American, though she doesn't love you and will cheat you yet.'
Strange creatures, women, to whom love lends a certain intuition!
Early in this year Laura spoke of the Passion Play as given by the peasants at Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps. I had seen it in 1880 and had greatly admired the way Plunger played the Christ and Lechner the Judas. It would be a great holiday, I thought, so I proposed to take her and her mother for the opening performance in May.
Early in the month we all three went to Munich and stayed at my old hotel, the Vier Jahreszeiten. I was still remembered there and accordingly we were well received, and a couple of days later in the bright sunshine we took
