The Arrow of Gold

unharmed because I was great enough not to be captured by anything that wasn’t really worthy of me.  My dear, it went down like a house of cards before my breath.  There is something in me that will not be dazzled by any sort of prestige in this world, worthy or unworthy.  I am telling you this because you are younger than myself.”

“If you want me to say that there is nothing petty or mean about you, Dona Rita, then I do say it.”

She nodded at me with an air of accepting the rendered justice and went on with the utmost simplicity.

“And what is it that is coming to me now with all the airs of virtue?  All the lawful conventions are coming to me, all the glamours of respectability!  And nobody can say that I have made as much as the slightest little sign to them.  Not so much as lifting my little finger.  I suppose you know that?”

“I don’t know.  I do not doubt your sincerity in anything you say.  I am ready to believe.  You are not one of those who have to work.”

“Have to work—what do you mean?”

“It’s a phrase I have heard.  What I meant was that it isn’t necessary for you to make any signs.”

She seemed to meditate over this for a while.

“Don’t be so sure of that,” she said, with a flash of mischief, which made her voice sound more melancholy than before.  “I am not so sure myself,” she continued with a curious, vanishing, intonation of despair.  “I don’t know the truth about myself because I never had an opportunity to compare myself to anything in the world.  I have been offered mock adulation, treated with mock reserve or with mock devotion, I have been fawned upon with an appalling earnestness of purpose, I can tell you; but these later honours, my dear, came to me in the shape of a very loyal and very scrupulous gentleman.  For he is all that.  And as a matter of fact I was touched.”

“I know.  Even to tears,” I said provokingly.  But she wasn’t provoked, she only shook her head in negation (which was absurd) and pursued the trend of her spoken thoughts.

“That was yesterday,” she said.  “And yesterday he was extremely correct and very full of extreme self-esteem which expressed itself in the exaggerated delicacy with which he talked.  But I know him in all his moods.  I have known him even playful.  I didn’t listen to him.  I was thinking of something else.  Of things that were neither correct nor playful and that had to be looked at steadily with all the best that was in me.  And that was why, in the end—I cried—yesterday.”

“I saw it yesterday and I had the weakness of being moved by those tears for a time.”

“If you want to make me cry again I warn you you won’t succeed.”

“No, I know.  He has been here to-day and the dry season has set in.”

“Yes, he has been here.  I assure you it was perfectly unexpected.  Yesterday he was railing at the world at large, at me who certainly have not made it, at himself and even at his mother.  All this rather in parrot language, in the words of tradition and morality as understood by the members of that exclusive club to which he belongs.  And yet when I thought that all this, those poor hackneyed words, expressed a sincere passion I could have found in my heart to be sorry for him.  But he ended by telling me that one couldn’t believe a single word I said, or something like that.  You were here then, you heard it yourself.”

“And it cut you to the quick,” I said.  “It made you depart from your dignity to the point of weeping on any shoulder that happened to be there.  And considering that it was some more parrot talk after all (men have been saying that sort of thing to women from the beginning of the world) this sensibility seems to me childish.”

“What perspicacity,” she observed, with an indulgent, mocking smile, then changed her tone.  “Therefore he wasn’t expected to-day when he turned up, whereas you, who were expected, remained subject to the charms of conversation in that studio.  It never occurred to you . . . did it?  No!  What had become of your perspicacity?”

“I tell you I was weary of life,” I said in a passion.

She had another faint smile of a fugitive and unrelated kind as if she had been thinking of far-off things, then roused herself to grave animation.

“He came in full of smiling playfulness.  How well I know that mood!  Such self-command has its beauty; but it’s no great help for a man with such fateful eyes.  I could see he was moved in his correct, restrained way, and in his own way, too, he tried to move me with something that would be very simple.  He told me that ever since we became friends, we two, he had not an hour of continuous sleep, unless perhaps when coming back dead-tired from outpost duty, and that he longed to get back to it and yet hadn’t the courage to tear himself away from here.  He was as simple as that.  He’s a tres galant homme of absolute probity, even with himself.  I said to him: The trouble is, Don Juan, that it isn’t love but mistrust that keeps you in torment.  I might have said jealousy, but I didn’t like to use that word.  A parrot would have added that I had given him no right to be jealous.  But I am no parrot.  I recognized the rights of his passion which I could very well see.  He is jealous.  He is not jealous of my past or of the future; but he is jealously mistrustful of me, of what I am, of my very soul.  He believes in a soul in the same way Therese does, as something that can be touched with grace or go to perdition; and he doesn’t want to be damned with me before his own judgment seat.  He is a most noble and loyal gentleman, but I have my own Basque peasant soul and don’t want to think that every time he goes away from my feet—yes, mon cher, on this carpet, look for the marks of scorching—that he goes away feeling tempted to brush the dust off his moral sleeve.  That!  Never!”

With brusque movements she took a cigarette out of the box, held it in her fingers for a moment, then dropped it unconsciously.

“And then, I don’t love him,” she uttered slowly as if speaking to herself and at the same time watching the very quality of that thought.  “I never did.  At first he fascinated me with his fatal aspect and his cold society smiles.  But I have looked into those eyes too often.  There are too many disdains in this aristocratic republican without a home.  His fate may be cruel, but it will always be commonplace.  While he sat there trying in a worldly tone to explain to me the problems, the scruples, of his suffering honour, I could see right into his heart and I was sorry for him.  I was sorry enough for him to feel that if he had suddenly taken me by the throat and strangled me slowly, avec delices, I could forgive him while I choked.  How correct he was!  But bitterness against me peeped out of every second phrase.  At last I raised my hand and said to him, ‘Enough.’  I believe he was shocked by my plebeian abruptness but he was too polite to show it.  His conventions will always stand in the way of his nature.  I told him that everything that had been said and done during the last seven or eight months was inexplicable unless on the assumption that he was in love with me,—and yet in everything there was an implication that he couldn’t forgive me my very existence.  I did ask him whether he didn’t think that it was absurd on his part . . . ”

“Didn’t you say that it was exquisitely absurd?” I asked.

“Exquisitely! . . . ” Dona Rita was surprised at my question.  “No.  Why should I say that?”