Victorian Short Stories by Various

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The voice is shaking.

'I am not legally bound to anyone, at least; but why do you ask?' she
looks me square in the face as she speaks, with a touch of haughtiness
I never saw in her before.

Perhaps the great relief I feel, the sense of joy at knowing she is
free, speaks out of my face, for hers flushes and she drops her eyes,
her lips tremble. I don't look at her again, but I can see her all the
same. After a while she says--

'I half intended to tell you something about myself this evening, now I
_must_. Let us go in. I shall come down to the sitting-room after your
supper.' She takes a long look at the river and the inn, as if fixing
the place in her memory; it strikes me with a chill that there is a
goodbye in her gaze. Her eyes rest on me a moment as they come back,
there is a sad look in their grey clearness. She swings her little grey
gloves in her hand as we walk back. I can hear her walking up and down
overhead; how tired she will be, and how slowly the time goes. I am
standing at one side of the window when she enters; she stands at the
other, leaning her head against the shutter with her hands clasped
before her. I can hear my own heart beating, and, I fancy, hers through
the stillness. The suspense is fearful. At length she says--

'You have been a long time out of England; you don't read the papers?'

'No.' A pause. I believe my heart is beating inside my head.

'You asked me if I was a free woman. I don't pretend to misunderstand
why you asked me. I am not a beautiful woman, I never was. But there
must be something about me, there is in some women, "essential
femininity" perhaps, that appeals to all men. What I read in your eyes
I have seen in many men's before, but before God I never tried to rouse
it. Today (with a sob), I can say I am free, yesterday morning I could
not. Yesterday my husband gained his case and divorced me!' she closes
her eyes and draws in her under-lip to stop its quivering. I want to
take her in my arms, but I am afraid to.

'I did not ask you any more than if you were free!'

'No, but I am afraid you don't quite take in the meaning. I did not
divorce my husband, he divorced _me_, he got a decree _nisi_; do you
understand now? (she is speaking with difficulty), do you know what that
implies?'

I can't stand her face any longer. I take her hands, they are icy cold,
and hold them tightly.

'Yes, I know what it implies, that is, I know the legal and social
conclusion to be drawn from it--if that is what you mean. But I never
asked you for that information. I have nothing to do with your past. You
did not exist for me before the day we met on the river. I take you from
that day and I ask you to marry me.'

I feel her tremble and her hands get suddenly warm. She turns her head
and looks at me long and searchingly, then she says--

'Sit down, I want to say something!'

I obey, and she comes and stands next the chair. I can't help it, I
reach up my arm, but she puts it gently down.

'No, you must listen without touching me, I shall go back to the
window. I don't want to influence you a bit by any personal magnetism
I possess. I want you to listen--I have told you he divorced me, the
co-respondent was an old friend, a friend of my childhood, of my
girlhood. He died just after the first application was made, luckily for
me. He would have considered my honour before my happiness. _I_ did not
defend the case, it wasn't likely--ah, if you knew all? He proved his
case; given clever counsel, willing witnesses to whom you make it worth
while, and no defence, divorce is always attainable even in England. But
remember: I figure as an adulteress in every English-speaking paper. If
you buy last week's evening papers--do you remember the day I was in
town?'--I nod--'you will see a sketch of me in that day's; someone,
perhaps he, must have given it; it was from an old photograph. I bought
one at Victoria as I came out; it is funny (with an hysterical laugh) to
buy a caricature of one's own poor face at a news-stall. Yet in spite of
that I have felt glad. The point for you is that I made no defence to
the world, and (with a lifting of her head) I will make no apology, no
explanation, no denial to you, now nor ever. I am very desolate and your
attention came very warm to me, but I don't love you. Perhaps I could
learn to (with a rush of colour), for what you have said tonight, and it
is because of that I tell you to weigh what this means. Later, when your
care for me will grow into habit, you may chafe at my past. It is from
that I would save you.'

I hold out my hands and she comes and puts them aside and takes me by
the beard and turns up my face and scans it earnestly. She must have
been deceived a good deal. I let her do as she pleases, it is the wisest
way with women, and it is good to have her touch me in that way. She
seems satisfied. She stands leaning against the arm of the chair and
says--

'I must learn first to think of myself as a free woman again, it almost
seems wrong today to talk like this; can you understand that feeling?'

I nod assent.

'Next time I must be sure, and you must be sure,' she lays her fingers
on my mouth as I am about to protest, 'S-sh! You shall have a year to
think. If you repeat then what you have said today, I shall give you
your answer. You must not try to find me. I have money. If I am living,
I will come here to you. If I am dead, you will be told of it. In the
year between I shall look upon myself as belonging to you, and render an
account if you wish of every hour. You will not be influenced by me in
any way, and you will be able to reason it out calmly. If you think
better of it, don't come.'

I feel there would be no use trying to move her, I simply kiss her hands
and say:

'As you will, dear woman, I shall be here.'

We don't say any more; she sits down on a footstool with her head
against my knee, and I just smooth it. When the clocks strike ten
through the house, she rises and I stand up. I see that she has been
crying quietly, poor lonely little soul. I lift her off her feet and
kiss her, and stammer out my sorrow at losing her, and she is gone. Next
morning the little maid brought me an envelope from the lady, who left
by the first train. It held a little grey glove; that is why I carry it
always, and why I haunt the inn and never leave it for longer than a
week; why I sit and dream in the old chair that has a ghost of her
presence always; dream of the spring to come with the May-fly on the
wing, and the young summer when midges dance, and the trout are growing
fastidious; when she will come to me across the meadow grass, through
the silver haze, as she did before; come with her grey eyes shining to
exchange herself for her little grey glove.

THE WOMAN BEATER

By Israel Zangwill

(_The Grey Wig/Stories and Novelettes_, New York: The Macmillan Company,
1903)

I

She came 'to meet John Lefolle', but John Lefolle did not know he was
to meet Winifred Glamorys. He did not even know he was himself the
meeting-point of all the brilliant and beautiful persons, assembled in
the publisher's Saturday Salon, for although a youthful minor poet, he
was modest and lovable. Perhaps his Oxford tutorship was sobering. At
any rate his head remained unturned by his precocious fame, and to meet
these other young men and women--his reverend seniors on the slopes of
Parnassus--gave him more pleasure than the receipt of 'royalties'. Not
that his publisher afforded him much opportunity of contrasting the two
pleasures. The profits of the Muse went to provide this room of old
furniture and roses, this beautiful garden a-twinkle with Japanese
lanterns, like gorgeous fire-flowers blossoming under the white
crescent-moon of early June.

Winifred Glamorys was not literary herself. She was better than a
poetess, she was a poem. The publisher always threw in a few realities,
and some beautiful brainless creature would generally be found the
nucleus of a crowd, while Clio in spectacles languished in a corner.
Winifred Glamorys, however, was reputed to have a tongue that matched
her eye; paralleling with whimsies and epigrams its freakish fires and
witcheries, and, assuredly, flitting in her white gown through the dark
balmy garden, she seemed the very spirit of moonlight, the subtle
incarnation of night and roses.

When John Lefolle met her, Cecilia was with her, and the first
conversation was triangular. Cecilia fired most of the shots; she was
a bouncing, rattling beauty, chockful of confidence and high spirits,
except when asked to do the one thing she could do--sing! Then she
became--quite genuinely--a nervous, hesitant, pale little thing.
However, the suppliant hostess bore her off, and presently her rich
contralto notes passed through the garden, adding to its passion and
mystery, and through the open French windows, John could see her
standing against the wall near the piano, her head thrown back, her eyes
half-closed, her creamy throat swelling in the very abandonment of
artistic ecstasy.

'What a charming creature!' he exclaimed involuntarily.

'That is what everybody thinks, except her husband,' Winifred laughed.

'Is he blind then?' asked John with his cloistral _naivete_.

'Blind? No, love is blind. Marriage is never blind.'

The bitterness in her tone pierced John. He felt vaguely the passing of
some icy current from unknown seas of experience. Cecilia's voice soared
out enchantingly.

'Then, marriage must be deaf,' he said, 'or such music as that would
charm it.'

She smiled sadly. Her smile was the tricksy play of moonlight among
clouds of faery.

'You have never been married,' she said simply.

'Do you mean that you, too, are neglected?' something impelled him to
exclaim.

'Worse,' she murmured.

'It is incredible!' he cried. 'You!'

'Hush! My husband will hear you.'

Her warning whisper brought him into a delicious conspiracy with her.
'Which is your husband?' he whispered back.

'There! Near the casement, standing gazing open-mouthed at Cecilia. He
always opens his mouth when she sings. It is like two toys moved by the
same wire.'

He looked at the tall, stalwart, ruddy-haired Anglo-Saxon. 'Do you mean
to say he--?'

'I mean to say nothing.'

'But you said--'

'I said "worse".'

'Why, what can be worse?'

She put her hand over her face. 'I am ashamed to tell you.' How adorable
was that half-divined blush!

'But you must tell me everything.' He scarcely knew how he had leapt
into this role of confessor. He only felt they were 'moved by the same
wire'.

Her head drooped on her breast. 'He--beats--me.'

'What!' John forgot to whisper. It was the greatest shock his recluse
life had known, compact as it was of horror at the revelation, shamed
confusion at her candour, and delicious pleasure in her confidence.

This fragile, exquisite creature under the rod of a brutal bully!

Once he had gone to a wedding reception, and among the serious presents
some grinning Philistine drew his attention to an uncouth club--'a
wife-beater' he called it. The flippancy had jarred upon John terribly:
this intrusive reminder of the customs of the slums. It grated like
Billingsgate in a boudoir. Now that savage weapon recurred to him--for a
lurid instant he saw Winifred's husband wielding it. Oh, abomination of
his sex! And did he stand there, in his immaculate evening dress, posing
as an English gentleman? Even so might some gentleman burglar bear
through a salon his imperturbable swallow-tail.

Beat a woman! Beat that essence of charm and purity, God's best gift to
man, redeeming him from his own grossness! Could such things be? John
Lefolle would as soon have credited the French legend that English wives
are sold in Smithfield. No! it could not be real that this flower-like
figure was thrashed.

'Do you mean to say--?' he cried. The rapidity of her confidence alone
made him feel it all of a dreamlike unreality.

'Hush! Cecilia's singing!' she admonished him with an unexpected smile,
as her fingers fell from her face.

'Oh, you have been making fun of me.' He was vastly relieved. 'He beats
you--at chess--or at lawn-tennis?'

'Does one wear a high-necked dress to conceal the traces of chess, or
lawn-tennis?'

He had not noticed her dress before, save for its spiritual whiteness.
Susceptible though he was to beautiful shoulders, Winifred's enchanting
face had been sufficiently distracting. Now the thought of physical
bruises gave him a second spasm of righteous horror. That delicate
rose-leaf flesh abraded and lacerated!

'The ruffian! Does he use a stick or a fist?'

'Both! But as a rule he just takes me by the arms and shakes me like a
terrier a rat. I'm all black and blue now.'

'Poor butterfly!' he murmured poetically.

'Why did I tell you?' she murmured back with subtler poetry.

The poet thrilled in every vein. 'Love at first sight', of which he had
often read and often written, was then a reality! It could be as mutual,
too, as Romeo's and Juliet's. But how awkward that Juliet should be
married and her husband a Bill Sykes in broad-cloth!

II

Mrs. Glamorys herself gave 'At Homes', every Sunday afternoon, and so, on
the morrow, after a sleepless night mitigated by perpended sonnets, the
love-sick young tutor presented himself by invitation at the beautiful
old house in Hampstead. He was enchanted to find his heart's mistress
set in an eighteenth-century frame of small-paned windows and of high
oak-panelling, and at once began to image her dancing minuets and
playing on virginals. Her husband was absent, but a broad band of velvet
round Winifred's neck was a painful reminder of his possibilities.
Winifred, however, said it was only a touch of sore throat caught in the
garden. Her eyes added that there was nothing in the pathological
dictionary which she would not willingly have caught for the sake of
those divine, if draughty moments; but that, alas! it was more than a
mere bodily ailment she had caught there.

There were a great many visitors in the two delightfully quaint rooms,
among whom he wandered disconsolate and admired, jealous of her
scattered smiles, but presently he found himself seated by her side on
a 'cosy corner' near the open folding-doors, with all the other guests
huddled round a violinist in the inner room. How Winifred had managed it
he did not know but she sat plausibly in the outer room, awaiting
newcomers, and this particular niche was invisible, save to a determined
eye. He took her unresisting hand--that dear, warm hand, with its
begemmed artistic fingers, and held it in uneasy beatitude. How
wonderful! She--the beautiful and adored hostess, of whose sweetness and
charm he heard even her own guests murmur to one another--it was her
actual flesh-and-blood hand that lay in his--thrillingly tangible. Oh,
adventure beyond all merit, beyond all hoping!

But every now and then, the outer door facing them would open on some
newcomer, and John had hastily to release her soft magnetic fingers and
sit demure, and jealously overhear her effusive welcome to those
innocent intruders, nor did his brow clear till she had shepherded them
within the inner fold. Fortunately, the refreshments were in this
section, so that once therein, few of the sheep strayed back, and the
jiggling wail of the violin was succeeded by a shrill babble of tongues
and the clatter of cups and spoons. 'Get me an ice, please--strawberry,'
she ordered John during one of these forced intervals in manual
flirtation; and when he had steered laboriously to and fro, he found a
young actor beside her in his cosy corner, and his jealous fancy almost
saw _their_ hands dispart. He stood over them with a sickly smile, while
Winifred ate her ice. When he returned from depositing the empty saucer,
the player-fellow was gone, and in remorse for his mad suspicion he
stooped and reverently lifted her fragrant finger-tips to his lips. The
door behind his back opened abruptly.

'Goodbye,' she said, rising in a flash. The words had the calm
conventional cadence, and instantly extorted from him--amid all his
dazedness--the corresponding 'Goodbye'. When he turned and saw it was Mr.
Glamorys who had come in, his heart leapt wildly at the nearness of his
escape. As he passed this masked ruffian, he nodded perfunctorily and
received a cordial smile. Yes, he was handsome and fascinating enough
externally, this blonde savage.

'A man may smile and smile and be a villain,' John thought. 'I wonder
how he'd feel, if he knew I knew he beats women.'

Already John had generalized the charge. 'I hope Cecilia will keep him
at arm's length,' he had said to Winifred, 'if only that she may not
smart for it some day.'

He lingered purposely in the hall to get an impression of the brute, who
had begun talking loudly to a friend with irritating bursts of laughter,
speciously frank-ringing. Golf, fishing, comic operas--ah, the Boeotian!
These were the men who monopolized the ethereal divinities.

But this brusque separation from his particular divinity was
disconcerting. How to see her again? He must go up to Oxford in the
morning, he wrote her that night, but if she could possibly let him
call during the week he would manage to run down again.

* * * * *

'Oh, my dear, dreaming poet,' she wrote to Oxford, 'how could you
possibly send me a letter to be laid on the breakfast-table beside _The
Times_! With a poem in it, too. Fortunately my husband was in a hurry to
get down to the City, and he neglected to read my correspondence. (The
unchivalrous blackguard,' John commented. 'But what can be expected of a
woman beater?') Never, never write to me again at the house. A letter,
care of Mrs. Best, 8A Foley Street, W.C., will always find me. She is my
maid's mother. And you must not come here either, my dear handsome
head-in-the-clouds, except to my 'At Homes', and then only at judicious
intervals. I shall be walking round the pond in Kensington Gardens at
four next Wednesday, unless Mrs. Best brings me a letter to the contrary.
And now thank you for your delicious poem; I do not recognize my humble
self in the dainty lines, but I shall always be proud to think I
inspired them. Will it be in the new volume? I have never been in print
before; it will be a novel sensation. I cannot pay you song for song,
only feeling for feeling. Oh, John Lefolle, why did we not meet when I
had still my girlish dreams? Now, I have grown to distrust all men--to
fear the brute beneath the cavalier....'

* * * * *

Mrs. Best did bring her a letter, but it was not to cancel the
appointment, only to say he was not surprised at her horror of the male
sex, but that she must beware of false generalizations. Life was still a
wonderful and beautiful thing--_vide_ poem enclosed. He was counting the
minutes till Wednesday afternoon. It was surely a popular mistake that
only sixty went to the hour.

This chronometrical reflection recurred to him even more poignantly in
the hour that he circumambulated the pond in Kensington Gardens. Had she
forgotten--had her husband locked her up? What could have happened? It
seemed six hundred minutes, ere, at ten past five she came tripping
daintily towards him. His brain had been reduced to insanely devising
problems for his pupils--if a man walks two strides of one and a half
feet a second round a lake fifty acres in area, in how many turns will
he overtake a lady who walks half as fast and isn't there?--but the
moment her pink parasol loomed on the horizon, all his long misery
vanished in an ineffable peace and uplifting. He hurried, bare-headed,
to clasp her little gloved hand. He had forgotten her unpunctuality, nor
did she remind him of it.

'How sweet of you to come all that way,' was all she said, and it was a
sufficient reward for the hours in the train and the six hundred minutes
among the nursemaids and perambulators. The elms were in their glory,
the birds were singing briskly, the water sparkled, the sunlit sward
stretched fresh and green--it was the loveliest, coolest moment of the
afternoon. John instinctively turned down a leafy avenue. Nature and
Love! What more could poet ask?

'No, we can't have tea by the Kiosk,' Mrs. Glamorys protested. 'Of course
I love anything that savours of Paris, but it's become so fashionable.
There will be heaps of people who know me. I suppose you've forgotten
it's the height of the season. I know a quiet little place in the High
Street.' She led him, unresisting but bemused, towards the gate, and
into a confectioner's. Conversation languished on the way.

'Tea,' he was about to instruct the pretty attendant.

'Strawberry ices,' Mrs. Glamorys remarked gently. 'And some of those nice
French cakes.'

The ice restored his spirits, it was really delicious, and he had got so
hot and tired, pacing round the pond. Decidedly Winifred was a practical
person and he was a dreamer. The pastry he dared not touch--being a
genius--but he was charmed at the gaiety with which Winifred crammed
cake after cake into her rosebud of a mouth. What an enchanting
creature! how bravely she covered up her life's tragedy!

The thought made him glance at her velvet band--it was broader than
ever.

'He has beaten you again!' he murmured furiously. Her joyous eyes
saddened, she hung her head, and her fingers crumbled the cake. 'What is
his pretext?' he asked, his blood burning.

'Jealousy,' she whispered.

His blood lost its glow, ran cold. He felt the bully's blows on his own
skin, his romance turning suddenly sordid. But he recovered his
courage. He, too, had muscles. 'But I thought he just missed seeing me
kiss your hand.'

She opened her eyes wide. 'It wasn't you, you darling old dreamer.'

He was relieved and disturbed in one.

'Somebody else?' he murmured. Somehow the vision of the player-fellow
came up.

She nodded. 'Isn't it lucky he has himself drawn a red-herring across
the track? I didn't mind his blows--_you_ were safe!' Then, with one of
her adorable transitions, 'I am dreaming of another ice,' she cried with
roguish wistfulness.

'I was afraid to confess my own greediness,' he said, laughing. He
beckoned the waitress. 'Two more.'

'We haven't got any more strawberries,' was her unexpected reply.
'There's been such a run on them today.'

Winifred's face grew overcast. 'Oh, nonsense!' she pouted. To John the
moment seemed tragic.

'Won't you have another kind?' he queried. He himself liked any kind,
but he could scarcely eat a second ice without her.

Winifred meditated. 'Coffee?' she queried.

The waitress went away and returned with a face as gloomy as Winifred's.
'It's been such a hot day,' she said deprecatingly. 'There is only one
ice in the place and that's Neapolitan.'

'Well, bring two Neapolitans,' John ventured.

'I mean there is only one Neapolitan ice left.'

'Well, bring that. I don't really want one.'

He watched Mrs. Glamorys daintily devouring the solitary ice, and felt a
certain pathos about the parti-coloured oblong, a something of the
haunting sadness of 'The Last Rose of Summer'. It would make a graceful,
serio-comic triolet, he was thinking. But at the last spoonful, his
beautiful companion dislocated his rhymes by her sudden upspringing.

'Goodness gracious,' she cried, 'how late it is!'

'Oh, you're not leaving me yet!' he said. A world of things sprang to
his brain, things that he was going to say--to arrange. They had said
nothing--not a word of their love even; nothing but cakes and ices.

'Poet!' she laughed. 'Have you forgotten I live at Hampstead?' She
picked up her parasol.

'Put me into a hansom, or my husband will be raving at his lonely
dinner-table.'

He was so dazed as to be surprised when the waitress blocked his
departure with a bill. When Winifred was spirited away, he remembered
she might, without much risk, have given him a lift to Paddington. He
hailed another hansom and caught the next train to Oxford. But he was
too late for his own dinner in Hall.

III

He was kept very busy for the next few days, and could only exchange a
passionate letter or two with her. For some time the examination fever
had been raging, and in every college poor patients sat with wet towels
round their heads. Some, who had neglected their tutor all the term, now
strove to absorb his omniscience in a sitting.

On the Monday, John Lefolle was good-naturedly giving a special audience
to a muscular dunce, trying to explain to him the political effects of
the Crusades, when there was a knock at the sitting-room door, and the
scout ushered in Mrs. Glamorys. She was bewitchingly dressed in white,
and stood in the open doorway, smiling--an embodiment of the summer he
was neglecting. He rose, but his tongue was paralysed. The dunce became
suddenly important--a symbol of the decorum he had been outraging. His
soul, torn so abruptly from history to romance, could not get up the
right emotion. Why this imprudence of Winifred's? She had been so
careful heretofore.

'What a lot of boots there are on your staircase!' she said gaily.

He laughed. The spell was broken. 'Yes, the heap to be cleaned is rather
obtrusive,' he said, 'but I suppose it is a sort of tradition.'

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