Zuleika Dobson

by Max Beerbohm

  “And the fine young gentlemen,” said Zuleika, “did she fall in love with any of them?”

  “You forget,” said the Duke coldly, “she was married to a member of my family.”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon. But tell me: did they all adore her?”

  “Yes. Every one of them, wildly, madly.”

  “Ah,” murmured Zuleika, with a smile of understanding. A shadow crossed her face, “Even so,” she said, with some pique, “I don’t suppose she had so very many adorers. She never went out into the world.”

  “Tankerton,” said the Duke drily, “is a large house, and my great-great-grandfather was the most hospitable of men. However,” he added, marvelling that she had again missed the point so utterly, “my purpose was not to confront you with a past rival in conquest, but to set at rest a fear which I had, I think, roused in you by my somewhat full description of the high majestic life to which you, as my bride, would be translated.”

  “A fear? What sort of a fear?”

  “That you would not breathe freely—that you would starve (if I may use a somewhat fantastic figure) among those strawberry-leaves. And so I told you the story of Meg Speedwell, and how she lived happily ever after. Nay, hear me out! The blood of Meg Speedwell’s lord flows in my veins. I think I may boast that I have inherited something of his sagacity. In any case, I can profit by his example. Do not fear that I, if you were to wed me, should demand a metamorphosis of your present self. I should take you as you are, gladly. I should encourage you to be always exactly as you are—a radiant, irresistible member of the upper middle-class, with a certain freedom of manner acquired through a life of peculiar liberty. Can you guess what would be my principal wedding-gift to you? Meg Speedwell had her dairy. For you, would be built another outhouse—a neat hall wherein you would perform your conjuring-tricks, every evening except Sunday, before me and my tenants and my servants, and before such of my neighbours as might care to come. None would respect you the less, seeing that I approved. Thus in you would the pleasant history of Meg Speedwell repeat itself. You, practising for your pleasure—nay, hear me out!—that sweet and lowly handicraft which—”

  “I won’t listen to another word!” cried Zuleika. “You are the most insolent person I have ever met. I happen to come of a particularly good family. I move in the best society. My manners are absolutely perfect. If I found myself in the shoes of twenty Duchesses simultaneously, I should know quite well how to behave. As for the one pair you can offer me, I kick them away—so. I kick them back at you. I tell you—”

  “Hush,” said the Duke, “hush! You are over-excited. There will be a crowd under my window. There, there! I am sorry. I thought—”

  “Oh, I know what you thought,” said Zuleika, in a quieter tone. “I am sure you meant well. I am sorry I lost my temper. Only, you might have given me credit for meaning what I said: that I would not marry you, because I did not love you. I daresay there would be great advantages in being your Duchess. But the fact is, I have no worldly wisdom. To me, marriage is a sacrament. I could no more marry a man about whom I could not make a fool of myself than I could marry one who made a fool of himself about me. Else had I long ceased to be a spinster. Oh my friend, do not imagine that I have not rejected, in my day, a score of suitors quite as eligible as you.”

  “As eligible? Who were they?” frowned the Duke.

  “Oh, Archduke this, and Grand Duke that, and His Serene Highness the other. I have a wretched memory for names.”

  “And my name, too, will soon escape you, perhaps?”

  “No. Oh, no. I shall always remember yours. You see, I was in love with you. You deceived me into loving you …” She sighed. “Oh, had you but been as strong as I thought you … Still, a swain the more. That is something.” She leaned forward, smiling archly. “Those studs—show me them again.”

  The Duke displayed them in the hollow of his hand. She touched them lightly, reverently, as a tourist touches a sacred relic in a church.

  At length, “Do give me them,” she said. “I will keep them in a little secret partition of my jewel-case.” The Duke had closed his fist. “Do!” she pleaded. “My other jewels—they have no separate meanings for me. I never remember who gave me this one or that. These would be quite different. I should always remember their history … Do!”

  “Ask me for anything else,” said the Duke. “These are the one thing I could not part with—even to you, for whose sake they are hallowed.”

  Zuleika pouted. On the verge of persisting, she changed her mind, and was silent.

  “Well!” she said abruptly, “how about these races? Are you going to take me to see them?”

  “Races? What races?” murmured the Duke. “Oh yes. I had forgotten. Do you really mean that you want to see them?”

  “Why, of course! They are great fun, aren’t they?”

  “And you are in a mood for great fun? Well, there is plenty of time. The Second Division is not rowed till half-past four.”

  “The Second Division? Why not take me to the First?”

  “That is not rowed till six.”

  “Isn’t this rather an odd arrangement?”

  “No doubt. But Oxford never pretended to be strong in mathematics.”

  “Why, it’s not yet three!” cried Zuleika, with a woebegone stare at the clock. “What is to be done in the meantime?”

  “Am not I sufficiently diverting?” asked the Duke bitterly.

  “Quite candidly, no. Have you any friend lodging with you here?”

  “One, overhead. A man named Noaks.”

  “A small man, with spectacles?”

  “Very small, with very large spectacles.”

  “He was pointed out to me yesterday, as I was driving from the Station … No, I don’t think I want to meet him. What can you have in common with him?”

  “One frailty, at least: he, too, Miss Dobson, loves you.”

  “But of course he does. He saw me drive past. Very few of the others,” she said, rising and shaking herself, “have set eyes on me. Do let us go out and look at the Colleges. I do need change of scene. If you were a doctor, you would have prescribed that long ago. It is very bad for me to be here, a kind of Cinderella, moping over the ashes of my love for you. Where is your hat?”

  Looking round, she caught sight of herself in the glass. “Oh,” she cried, “what a fright I do look! I must never be seen like this!”

  “You look very beautiful.”

  “I don’t. That is a lover’s illusion. You yourself told me that this tartan was perfectly hideous. There was no need to tell me that. I came thus because I was coming to see you. I chose this frock in the deliberate fear that you, if I made myself presentable, might succumb at second sight of me. I would have sent out for a sack and dressed myself in that, I would have blacked my face all over with burnt cork, only I was afraid of being mobbed on the way to you.”

  “Even so, you would but have been mobbed for your incorrigible beauty.”

  “My beauty! How I hate it!” sighed Zuleika. “Still, here it is, and I must needs make the best of it. Come! Take me to Judas. I will change my things. Then I shall be fit for the races.”

  As these two emerged, side by side, into the street, the Emperors exchanged stony sidelong glances. For they saw the more than normal pallor of the Duke’s face, and something very like desperation in his eyes. They saw the tragedy progressing to its foreseen close. Unable to stay its course, they were grimly fascinated now.

  * Pronounced as tacton.

  † Pronounced as tavvle-tacton.

  VI

  “THE EVIL THAT MEN DO LIVES AFTER THEM; THE good is oft interred with their bones.” At any rate, the sinner has a better chance than the saint of being hereafter remembered. We, in whom original sin preponderates, find him easier to understand. He is near to us, clear to us. The saint is remote, dim. A very great saint may, of course, be remembered through some sheer force of originality in him; and then the very mystery that involves him fo
r us makes him the harder to forget: he haunts us the more surely because we shall never understand him. But the ordinary saints grow faint to posterity; whilst quite ordinary sinners pass vividly down the ages.

  Of the disciples of Jesus, which is he that is most often remembered and cited by us? Not the disciple whom Jesus loved; neither of the Boanerges, nor any other of them who so steadfastly followed Him and served Him; but the disciple who betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver. Judas Iscariot it is who outstands, overshadowing those other fishermen. And perhaps it was by reason of this precedence that Christopher Whitrid, Knight, in the reign of Henry VI, gave the name of Judas to the College which he had founded. Or perhaps it was because he felt that in a Christian community not even the meanest and basest of men should be accounted beneath contempt, beyond redemption.

  At any rate, thus he named his foundation. And, though for Oxford men the savour of the name itself has long evaporated through its local connexion, many things show that for the Founder himself it was no empty vocable. In a niche above the gate stands a rudely carved statue of Judas, holding a money-bag in his right hand. Among the original statutes of the College is one by which the Bursar is enjoined to distribute in Passion Week thirty pieces of silver among the needier scholars “for saike of atonynge.” The meadow adjoining the back of the College has been called from time immemorial “the Potter’s Field.” And the name of Salt Cellar is not less ancient and significant.

  Salt Cellar, that grey and green quadrangle visible from the room assigned to Zuleika, is very beautiful, as I have said. So tranquil is it as to seem remote not merely from the world, but even from Oxford, so deeply is it hidden away in the core of Oxford’s heart. So tranquil is it, one would guess that nothing had ever happened in it. For five centuries these walls have stood, and during that time have beheld, one would say, no sight less seemly than the good work of weeding, mowing, rolling, that has made, at length, so exemplary the lawn. These cloisters that grace the south and east sides—five centuries have passed through them, leaving in them no echo, leaving on them no sign, of all that the outer world, for good or evil, has been doing so fiercely, so raucously.

  And yet, if you are versed in the antiquities of Oxford, you know that this small, still quadrangle has played its part in the rough-and-tumble of history, and has been the background of high passions and strange fates. The sun-dial in its midst has told the hours to more than one bygone King. Charles I lay for twelve nights in Judas; and it was here, in this very quadrangle, that he heard from the lips of a breathless and blood-stained messenger the news of Chalgrove Field. Sixty years later, James, his son, came hither, black with threats, and from one of the hind-windows of the Warden’s house—maybe, from the very room where now Zuleika was changing her frock—addressed the Fellows, and presented to them the Papist by him chosen to be their Warden, instead of the Protestant whom they had elected. They were not of so stern a stuff as the Fellows of Magdalen, who, despite His Majesty’s menaces, had just rejected Bishop Farmer. The Papist was elected, there and then, al fresco, without dissent. Cannot one see them, these Fellows of Judas, huddled together round the sun-dial, like so many sheep in a storm? The King’s wrath, according to a contemporary record, was so appeased by their pliancy that he deigned to lie for two nights in Judas, and at a grand refection in Hall “was gracious and merrie.” Perhaps it was in lingering gratitude for such patronage that Judas remained so pious to his memory even after smug Herrenhausen had been dumped down on us for ever. Certainly, of all the Colleges none was more ardent than Judas for James Stuart. Thither it was that young Sir Harry Esson led, under cover of night, three-score recruits whom he had enlisted in the surrounding villages. The cloisters of Salt Cellar were piled with arms and stores; and on its grass—its sacred grass!—the squad was incessantly drilled, against the good day when Ormond should land his men in Devon. For a whole month Salt Cellar was a secret camp. But somehow, at length—woe to “lost causes and impossible loyalties”—Herrenhausen had wind of it; and one night, when the soldiers of the white cockade lay snoring beneath the stars, stealthily the white-faced Warden unbarred his postern—that very postern through which now Zuleika had passed on the way to her bedroom—and stealthily through it, one by one on tip-toe, came the King’s foot-guards. Not many shots rang out, nor many swords clashed, in the night air, before the trick was won for law and order. Most of the rebels were overpowered in their sleep; and those who had time to snatch arms were too dazed to make good resistance. Sir Harry Esson himself was the only one who did not live to be hanged. He had sprung up alert, sword in hand, at the first alarm, setting his back to the cloisters. There he fought calmly, ferociously, till a bullet went through his chest. “By God, this College is well-named!” were the words he uttered as he fell forward and died.

  Comparatively tame was the scene now being enacted in this place. The Duke, with bowed head, was pacing the path between the lawn and the cloisters. Two other undergraduates stood watching him, whispering to each other, under the archway that leads to the Front Quadrangle. Presently, in a sheepish way, they approached him. He halted and looked up.

  “I say,” stammered the spokesman.

  “Well?” asked the Duke. Both youths were slightly acquainted with him; but he was not used to being spoken to by those whom he had not first addressed. Moreover, he was loth to be thus disturbed in his sombre reverie. His manner was not encouraging.