Part 11 (1/2)
Unusually tall and athletic, rather boyish in appearance, and of the thin, greyhound type, she had excelled in games and held her own in sports. She had shot in an era when comparatively few women shot, and in the hunting-field she had shown a reckless courage which had fascinated the hard-riding men who frequented her father's house. As she grew older her beauty had rapidly developed, and with it an insatiable love of admiration. Early she had realized that she was going to be a beauty, and had privately thanked the G.o.ds for her luck. She could scarcely have borne not to be a beauty; but, mercifully, it was all right. Woman's greatest gift was to be hers. When she looked into the gla.s.s and knew that, when she looked into men's eyes and knew it even more definitely, she felt merciless and eternal. In the dawn no end was in sight; in the dawn no end seemed possible.
From the age of sixteen onwards hers was the intimate joy, certainly one of the greatest, if not the greatest of all the joys of women, of knowing that all men looked at her with pleasure, that many men looked at her with longing, that she was incessantly desired.
From the time when she was sixteen she lived perpetually in that atmosphere which men throw round a daring and beautiful woman without even conscious intention, creating it irresistibly merely by their natural desire. And that atmosphere was the breath of life to her. Soon she could not imagine finding any real value in life without it. She often considered plain girls, dull girls, middle-aged women who had never had any beauty, any saving grace but that of freshness, and wondered how they managed to get along at all. What was the use of life to them? n.o.body bothered about them, except, perhaps, a few relations, or what are called ”old friends”--that is, people who, having always been accustomed to you, put up with you comfortably, and wear their carpet slippers in your presence without troubling whether you like slippers or would prefer them in high-heeled shoes.
As to old women, those from whom almost the last vestiges of what they once had been physically had fallen away, she was always charming to them; but she always wondered why they still seemed to cling on to life.
They were done with. It was long ago all over for them. They did not matter any more, even if once they had mattered. Why did they still keep a hold on life with their skinny hands? Was it from fear of death, or what? Once she expressed her wonder about this to a man.
”Of course,” she said. ”I know they can't go just because they want to.
But why do they _want_ to stay?”
”Oh,” he said, ”I think lots of old ladies enjoy themselves immensely in their own way.”
”Well, I can't understand it!” she said.
And she spoke the truth.
She flirted, of course. Her youthful years were complicated by a maze of flirtations, through which she wandered with apparently the greatest a.s.surance, gaining knowledge of men.
Finally she married. She made what is called ”a great match,” the sort of match in every way suitable to such an aristocratic, beautiful and daring girl.
Then began her real reign.
Although such a keen sportswoman, she was also a woman who had a good brain, a quick understanding, and a genuine love of the intellectual and artistic side of life, for its own sake, not for any reason of fas.h.i.+on.
She was of the type that rather makes fas.h.i.+ons than follows them. As a married woman she was not only Diana in the open country, she was Egeria elsewhere. She liked and she wanted all types of men; the hard-bitten, keen-eyed, lean-flanked men who could give her a lead or take a lead from her over difficult country, and the softer breed of men, whose more rounded bodies were informed by sharp spirits, who, many of them, could not have sat a horse over the easiest fence, or perhaps even have brought down a stag at twenty paces, but who would dominate thousands from their desks, or from the stages of opera houses, or from adjustable seats in front of pianos, or from studios hung with embroideries and strewn with carpets of the East.
These knew how to admire and long for a beautiful woman quite as well as the men of the moors and the hunting field, and they were often more subtle in their ways of showing their feelings.
Lady Sellingworth had horses named after her and books dedicated to her.
She moved in all sets which were penetrated by the violent zest for the life of the big world, and in all sets she more than held her own. She was as much at home in Chelsea as she was at Newmarket. Her beautifully disguised search for admiration extended far and wide, and she found what she wanted sometimes in unexpected places, in sombre Oxford libraries, in time-worn deaneries, in East-End settlements, through which she flashed now and then like a bird of Paradise, darting across the murk of a strange black country on its way to golden regions, as well as in Mayfair, in the s.h.i.+res, in foreign capitals, and on the moors of Scotland.
Her husband was no obstacle in her way. She completely dominated him, even though she gave him no child. He knew she was, as he expressed it, ”worth fifty” of him. Emphatically he was the husband of his wife, and five years after their marriage he died still adoring her.
She was sorry; she was even very sorry. And she withdrew from the great world in which she had been a moving spirit now for over ten years for the period of mourning, a year. But she was not overwhelmed by sorrow.
It is so very difficult for the woman who lives by, and for, her beauty and her charm for men to be overwhelmed. One man has gone and she mourns him; but there are so many men left, all of them with eyes in which lamps may be set and with hearts to be broken.
It was at this time that she became very familiar with Paris.
She wanted to be away from London, so she took an apartment in Paris, and began to live there very quietly. Friends, of course, came to see her, and she began to study Paris thoroughly, not the gay, social Paris, but a very interesting Paris. Presently her freedom from the ordinary social ties began to amuse her. She had now so much time for all sorts of things which women very much in society miss more often than not. Never going to parties, she was able to go elsewhere. She went elsewhere. Always there had dwelt caged in her a certain wildness which did not come from her English blood. There was a foreign strain in her from the borders of Asia mingled with a strong Celtic strain. This wildness which in her girlhood she had let loose happily in games and sports, in violent flirtations, and in much daring skating over thin ice, which in her married life had spent itself in the whirl of society, and in the energies necessary to the attainment of an unchallenged position at the top of things, in her widowhood began to seek an outlet in Bohemia.
Paris can be a very kind or a very cruel city, in its gaiety hiding velvet or the claws of a tiger. To Lady Sellingworth--then Lady Manham--it was kind. It gave her its velvet. She knew a fresh type of life there, with much for the intellect, with not a little for the senses, even with something for the heart. It was there that she visited out-of-the-way cafes, where clever men met and talked over every subject on earth. A place like the Cafe Royal in London had no attraction for the Lady Sellingworth over sixty. That sort of thing, raised to the _nth_ degree, had been familiar to her years and years ago, before Beryl Van Tuyn and Enid Blunt had been in their cradles.
And the freedom of her widowhood, with no tie at all, had become gradually very dear to her. She had felt free enough in her marriage.
But this manner of life had more breathing s.p.a.ce in it. There is no doubt that in that Paris year, especially in the second half of it, she allowed the wild strain in her to play as it had never played before, like a reckless child out of sight of parents and all relations.
When the mourning was over and she returned to London she was a woman who had progressed, but whether upon an upward or a downward path who shall decide? She had certainly become more fascinating. Her beauty was at its height. The year in Paris, lived almost wholly among clever and very unprejudiced French people, had given her a peculiar polish--one Frenchman who knew English slang called it ”a s.h.i.+ne”--which made her stand out among her English contemporaries. Many of them when girls had received a ”finish” in Paris. But girls cannot go about as she had gone about. They had learnt French; she had learnt Paris. From that time onward she was probably the most truly cosmopolitan of all the aristocratic Englishwomen of her day. Distinguished foreigners who visited London generally paid their first private call on her. Her house was European rather than English. She kept, too, her apartment in Paris, and lived there almost as much as she lived in London. And, perhaps, her secret wildness was more at home there.
Scandal, of course, could not leave her untouched. But her position in society was never challenged. People said dreadful things about her, but everyone who did not know her wanted to know her, and no one who knew her wished not to know her. She ”stood out” from all the other women in England of her day, not merely because of her beauty--she was not more beautiful than several of her contemporaries--but because of her gay distinction, a daring which was never, which could not be, ill bred, her extraordinary lack of all affectation, and a peculiar and delightful bonhomie which made her at home with everyone and everyone at home with her. Servants and dependents loved her. Everyone about her was fond of her. And yet she was certainly selfish. Invariably almost she was kind to people, but herself came first with her. She made few sacrifices, and many sacrificed themselves to her. There was seldom a moment when incense was not rising up before her altar, and the burnt offerings to her were innumerable.
And all through these years she was sinking more deeply into slavery, while she was ruling others. Her slavery was to herself. She was the captive of her own vanity. Her love of admiration had developed into an insatiable pa.s.sion. She was ceaselessly in her tower spying out for fresh lovers. From afar off she perceived them, and when they drew near to her castle she stopped them on their way. She did not love them and cast them to death like Tamara of the Caucasus. No; but she required of them the pause on their travels, which was a tribute to her power. No one must pa.s.s her by as if she were an ordinary woman.