Zuleika Dobson

by Max Beerbohm

  “And you are sure they really meant it?” she asked in a voice that trembled.

  “I fear so. But they were over-excited. They will recant their folly. I shall force them to.”

  “They are not children. You yourself have just been calling them ‘men.’ Why should they obey you?”

  She turned at sound of a footstep, and saw a young man approaching. He wore a coat like the Duke’s, and in his hand he dangled a handkerchief. He bowed awkwardly, and, holding out the handkerchief, said to her “I beg your pardon, but I think you dropped this. I have just picked it up.”

  Zuleika looked at the handkerchief, which was obviously a man’s, and smilingly shook her head.

  “I don’t think you know The MacQuern,” said the Duke, with sulky grace. “This,” he said to the intruder, “is Miss Dobson.”

  “And is it really true,” asked Zuleika, retaining The MacQuern’s hand, “that you want to die for me?”

  Well, the Scots are a self-seeking and a resolute, but a shy, race; swift to act, when swiftness is needed, but seldom knowing quite what to say. The MacQuern, with native reluctance to give something for nothing, had determined to have the pleasure of knowing the young lady for whom he was to lay down his life; and this purpose he had, by the simple stratagem of his own handkerchief, achieved. Nevertheless, in answer to Zuleika’s question, and with the pressure of her hand to inspire him, the only word that rose to his lips was “Ay” (which may be roughly translated as “Yes”).

  “You will do nothing of the sort,” interposed the Duke.

  “There,” said Zuleika, still retaining The MacQuern’s hand, “you see, it is forbidden. You must not defy our dear little Duke. He is not used to it. It is not done.”

  “I don’t know,” said The MacQuern, with a stony glance at the Duke, “that he has anything to do with the matter.”

  “He is older and wiser than you. More a man of the world. Regard him as your tutor.”

  “Do you want me not to die for you?” asked the young man.

  “Ah, I should not dare to impose my wishes on you,” said she, dropping his hand. “Even,” she added, “if I knew what my wishes were. And I don’t. I know only that I think it is very, very beautiful of you to think of dying for me.”

  “Then that settles it,” said The MacQuern.

  “No, no! You must not let yourself be influenced by me. Besides, I am not in a mood to influence anybody. I am overwhelmed. Tell me,” she said, heedless of the Duke, who stood tapping his heel on the ground, with every manifestation of disapproval and impatience, “tell me, is it true that some of the other men love me too, and—feel as you do?”

  The MacQuern said cautiously that he could answer for no one but himself. “But,” he allowed, “I saw a good many men whom I know, outside the Hall here, just now, and they seemed to have made up their minds.”

  “To die for me? To-morrow?”

  “To-morrow. After the Eights, I suppose; at the same time as the Duke. It wouldn’t do to leave the races undecided.”

  “Of course not. But the poor dears! It is too touching! I have done nothing, nothing to deserve it.”

  “Nothing whatsoever,” said the Duke drily.

  “Oh he,” said Zuleika, “thinks me an unredeemed brute; just because I don’t love him. You, dear Mr. MacQuern—does one call you ‘Mr.’? ‘The’ would sound so odd in the vocative. And I can’t very well call you ‘MacQuern’—you don’t think me unkind, do you? I simply can’t bear to think of all these young lives cut short without my having done a thing to brighten them. What can I do?—what can I do to show my gratitude?”

  An idea struck her. She looked up to the lit window of her room. “Melisande!” she called.

  A figure appeared at the window. “Mademoiselle desire?”

  “My tricks, Melisande! Bring down the box, quick!” She turned excitedly to the two young men. “It is all I can do in return, you see. If I could dance for them, I would. If I could sing, I would sing to them. I do what I can. You,” she said to the Duke, “must go on to the platform and announce it.”

  “Announce what?”

  “Why, that I am going to do my tricks! All you need say is ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have the pleasure to—’ What is the matter now?”

  “You make me feel slightly unwell,” said the Duke.

  “And you are the most d-dis-disobliging and the unkindest and the b-beastliest person I ever met,” Zuleika sobbed at him through her hands. The MacQuern glared reproaches at him. So did Melisande, who had just appeared through the postern, holding in her arms the great casket of malachite. A painful scene; and the Duke gave in. He said he would do anything—anything. Peace was restored.

  The MacQuern had relieved Melisande of her burden; and to him was the privilege of bearing it, in procession with his adored and her quelled mentor, towards the Hall.

  Zuleika babbled like a child going to a juvenile party. This was the great night, as yet, in her life. Illustrious enough already it had seemed to her, as eve of that ultimate flattery vowed her by the Duke. So fine a thing had his doom seemed to her—his doom alone—that it had sufficed to flood her pink pearl with the right hue. And now not on him alone need she ponder. Now he was but the centre of a group—a group that might grow and grow—a group that might with a little encouragement be a multitude … With such hopes dimly whirling in the recesses of her soul, her beautiful red lips babbled.

  X

  SOUNDS OF A VIOLIN, DRIFTING OUT THROUGH the open windows of the Hall, suggested that the second part of the concert had begun. All the undergraduates, however, except the few who figured in the programme, had waited outside till their mistress should re-appear. The sisters and cousins of the Judas men had been escorted back to their places and hurriedly left there.

  It was a hushed, tense crowd.

  “The poor darlings!” murmured Zuleika, pausing to survey them. “And oh,” she exclaimed, “there won’t be room for all of them in there!”

  “You might give an ‘overflow’ performance out here afterwards,” suggested the Duke, grimly.

  This idea flashed on her a better. Why not give her performance here and now?—now, so eager was she for contact, as it were, with this crowd; here, by moonlight, in the pretty glow of these paper lanterns. Yes, she said, let it be here and now; and she bade the Duke make the announcement.

  “What shall I say?” he asked. “ ‘Gentlemen, I have the pleasure to announce that Miss Zuleika Dobson, the world-renowned She-Wizard, will now oblige’? Or shall I call them ‘Gents,’ tout court?”

  She could afford to laugh at his ill-humour. She had his promise of obedience. She told him to say something graceful and simple.

  The noise of the violin had ceased. There was not a breath of wind. The crowd in the quadrangle was as still and as silent as the night itself. Nowhere a tremour. And it was borne in on Zuleika that this crowd had one mind as well as one heart—a common resolve, calm and clear, as well as a common passion. No need for her to strengthen the spell now. No waverers here. And thus it came true that gratitude was the sole motive for her display.

  She stood with eyes downcast and hands folded behind her, moonlit in the glow of lanterns, modest to the point of pathos, while the Duke gracefully and simply introduced her to the multitude. He was, he said, empowered by the lady who stood beside him to say that she would be pleased to give them an exhibition of her skill in the art to which she had devoted her life—an art which, more potently perhaps than any other, touched in mankind the sense of mystery and stirred the faculty of wonder; the most truly romantic of all the arts: he referred to the art of conjuring. It was not too much to say that by her mastery of this art, in which hitherto, it must be confessed, women had made no very great mark, Miss Zuleika Dobson (for such was the name of the lady who stood beside him) had earned the esteem of the whole civilised world. And here in Oxford, and in this College especially, she had a peculiar claim to—might he say?—their affectionate regard, inasmuch as she
was the grand-daughter of their venerable and venerated Warden.

  As the Duke ceased, there came from his hearers a sound like the rustling of leaves. In return for it, Zuleika performed that graceful act of subsidence to the verge of collapse which is usually kept for the delectation of some royal person. And indeed, in the presence of this doomed congress, she did experience humility; for she was not altogether without imagination. But, as she arose from her “bob,” she was her own bold self again, bright mistress of the situation.

  It was impossible for her to give her entertainment in full. Some of her tricks (notably the Secret Aquarium, and the Blazing Ball of Worsted) needed special preparation, and a table fitted with a “servante” or secret tray. The table for tonight’s performance was an ordinary one, brought out from the porter’s lodge. The MacQuern deposited on it the great casket. Zuleika, retaining him as her assistant, picked nimbly out from their places and put in array the curious appurtenances of her art—the Magic Canister, the Demon Egg-Cup, and the sundry other vessels which, lost property of young Edward Gibbs, had been by a Romanoff transmuted from wood to gold, and were now by the moon reduced temporarily to silver.

  In a great dense semicircle the young men disposed themselves around her. Those who were in front squatted down on the gravel; those who were behind knelt; the rest stood. Young Oxford! Here, in this mass of boyish faces, all fused and obliterated, was the realisation of that phrase. Two or three thousands of human bodies, human souls? Yet the effect of them in the moonlight was as of one great passive monster.

  So was it seen by the Duke, as he stood leaning against the wall, behind Zuleika’s table. He saw it as a monster couchant and enchanted, a monster that was to die; and its death was in part his own doing. But remorse in him gave place to hostility. Zuleika had begun her performance. She was producing the Barber’s Pole from her mouth. And it was to her that the Duke’s heart went suddenly out in tenderness and pity. He forgot her levity and vanity—her wickedness, as he had inwardly called it. He thrilled with that intense anxiety which comes to a man when he sees his beloved offering to the public an exhibition of her skill, be it in singing, acting, dancing, or any other art. Would she acquit herself well? The lover’s trepidation is painful enough when the beloved has genius—how should these clods appreciate her? and who set them in judgment over her? It must be worse when the beloved has mediocrity. And Zuleika, in conjuring, had rather less than that. Though indeed she took herself quite seriously as a conjurer, she brought to her art neither conscience nor ambition, in any true sense of those words. Since her debut, she had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The stale and narrow repertory which she had acquired from Edward Gibbs was all she had to offer; and this, and her marked lack of skill, she eked out with the self-same “patter” that had sufficed that impossible young man. It was especially her jokes that now sent shudders up the spine of her lover, and brought tears to his eyes, and kept him in a state of terror as to what she would say next. “You see,” she had exclaimed lightly after the production of the Barber’s Pole, “how easy it is to set up business as a hairdresser.” Over the Demon Egg-Cup she said that the egg was “as good as fresh.” And her constantly reiterated catch-phrase—“Well, this is rather queer!”—was the most distressing thing of all.

  The Duke blushed to think what these men thought of her. Would love were blind! These her lovers were doubtless judging her. They forgave her—confound their impudence!—because of her beauty. The banality of her performance was an added grace. It made her piteous. Damn them, they were sorry for her. Little Noaks was squatting in the front row, peering up at her through his spectacles. Noaks was as sorry for her as the rest of them. Why didn’t the earth yawn and swallow them all up?

  Our hero’s unreasoning rage was fed by a not unreasonable jealousy. It was clear to him that Zuleika had forgotten his existence. To-day, as soon as he had killed her love, she had shown him how much less to her was his love than the crowd’s. And now again it was only the crowd she cared for. He followed with his eyes her long slender figure as she threaded her way in and out of the crowd, sinuously, confidingly, producing a penny from one lad’s elbow, a threepenny-bit from between another’s neck and collar, half a crown from another’s hair, and always repeating in that flute-like voice of hers “Well, this is rather queer!” Hither and thither she fared, her neck and arms gleaming white from the luminous blackness of her dress, in the luminous blueness of the night. At a distance, she might have been a wraith; or a breeze made visible; a vagrom breeze, warm and delicate, and in league with death.

  Yes, that is how she might have seemed to a casual observer. But to the Duke there was nothing weird about her: she was radiantly a woman; a goddess; and his first and last love. Bitter his heart was, but only against the mob she wooed, not against her for wooing it. She was cruel? All goddesses are that. She was demeaning herself? His soul welled up anew in pity, in passion.

  Yonder, in the Hall, the concert ran its course, making a feeble incidental music to the dark emotions of the quadrangle. It ended somewhat before the close of Zuleika’s rival show; and then the steps from the Hall were thronged by ladies, who, with a sprinkling of dons, stood in attitudes of refined displeasure and vulgar curiosity. The Warden was just awake enough to notice the sea of undergraduates. Suspecting some breach of College discipline, he retired hastily to his own quarters, for fear his dignity might be somehow compromised.

  Was there ever, I wonder, an historian so pure as not to have wished just once to fob off on his readers just one bright fable for effect? I find myself sorely tempted to tell you that on Zuleika, as her entertainment drew to a close, the spirit of the higher thaumaturgy descended like a flame and found in her a worthy agent. Specious Apollyon whispers to me “Where would be the harm? Tell your readers that she cast a seed on the ground, and that therefrom presently arose a tamarind-tree which blossomed and bore fruit and, withering, vanished. Or say she conjured from an empty basket of osier a hissing and bridling snake. Why not? Your readers would be excited, gratified. And you would never be found out.” But the grave eyes of Clio are bent on me, her servant. Oh pardon, madam: I did but waver for an instant. It is not too late to tell my readers that the climax of Zuleika’s entertainment was only that dismal affair, the Magic Canister.

  It she took from the table, and, holding it aloft, cried “Now, before I say good night, I want to see if I have your confidence. But you mustn’t think this is the confidence trick!” She handed the vessel to The MacQuern, who, looking like an overgrown acolyte, bore it after her as she went again among the audience. Pausing before a man in the front row, she asked him if he would trust her with his watch. He held it out to her. “Thank you,” she said, letting her fingers touch his for a moment before she dropped it into the Magic Canister. From another man she borrowed a cigarette-case, from another a neck-tie, from another a pair of sleeve-links, from Noaks a ring—one of those iron rings which are supposed, rightly or wrongly, to alleviate rheumatism. And when she had made an ample selection, she began her return-journey to the table.

  On her way she saw in the shadow of the wall the figure of her forgotten Duke. She saw him, the one man she had ever loved, also the first man who had wished definitely to die for her; and she was touched by remorse. She had said she would remember him to her dying day; and already … But had he not refused her the wherewithal to remember him—the pearls she needed as the clou of her dear collection, the great relic among relics?

  “Would you trust me with your studs?” she asked him, in a voice that could be heard throughout the quadrangle, with a smile that was for him alone.

  There was no help for it. He quickly extricated from his shirt-front the black pearl and the pink. Her thanks had a special emphasis.

  The MacQuern placed the Magic Canister before her on the table. She pressed the outer sheath down on it. Then she inverted it so that the contents fell into the false lid; then she opened it, looked into it, and, exclaiming “Well, this is
rather queer!” held it up so that the audience whose intelligence she was insulting might see there was nothing in it.

  “Accidents,” she said, “will happen in the best-regulated canisters! But I think there is just a chance that I shall be able to restore your property. Excuse me for a moment.” She then shut the canister, released the false lid, made several passes over it, opened it, looked into it and said with a flourish “Now I can clear my character!” Again she went among the crowd, attended by The MacQuern; and the loans—priceless now because she had touched them—were in due course severally restored. When she took the canister from her acolyte, only the two studs remained in it.

  Not since the night of her flitting from the Gibbs’ humble home had Zuleika thieved. Was she a back-slider? Would she rob the Duke, and his heir-presumptive, and Tanville-Tankertons yet unborn? Alas, yes. But what she now did was proof that she had qualms. And her way of doing it showed that for legerdemain she had after all a natural aptitude which, properly trained, might have won for her an honourable place in at least the second rank of contemporary prestidigitators. With a gesture of her disengaged hand, so swift as to be scarcely visible, she unhooked her ear-rings and “passed” them into the canister. This she did as she turned away from the crowd, on her way to the Duke. At the same moment, in a manner technically not less good, though morally deplorable, she withdrew the studs and “vanished” them into her bosom.

  Was it triumph, or shame, or of both a little that so flushed her cheeks as she stood before the man she had robbed? Or was it the excitement of giving a present to the man she had loved? Certain it is that the nakedness of her ears gave a new look to her face—a primitive look, open and sweetly wild. The Duke saw the difference, without noticing the cause. She was more adorable than ever. He blenched and swayed as in proximity to a loveliness beyond endurance. His heart cried out within him. A sudden mist came over his eyes.