Zuleika Dobson

by Max Beerbohm

  Oover wrung the Duke’s hand, and was passing on. “Stay!” he was adjured.

  “Sorry, unable. It’s just turning eleven o’clock, and I’ve a lecture. While life lasts, I’m bound to respect Rhodes’ intentions.” The conscientious Scholar hurried away.

  The Duke wandered down the High, taking counsel with himself. He was ashamed of having so utterly forgotten the mischief he had wrought at large. At dawn he had vowed to undo it. Undo it he must. But the task was not a simple one now. If he could say “Behold, I take back my word. I spurn Miss Dobson, and embrace life,” it was possible that his example would suffice. But now that he could only say “Behold, I spurn Miss Dobson, and will not die for her, but I am going to commit suicide, all the same,” it was clear that his words would carry very little force. Also, he saw with pain that they placed him in a somewhat ludicrous position. His end, as designed yesterday, had a large and simple grandeur. So had his recantation of it. But this new compromise between the two things had a fumbled, a feeble, an ignoble look. It seemed to combine all the disadvantages of both courses. It stained his honour without prolonging his life. Surely, this was a high price to pay for snubbing Zuleika … Yes, he must revert without more ado to his first scheme. He must die in the manner that he had blazoned forth. And he must do it with a good grace, none knowing he was not glad; else the action lost all dignity. True, this was no way to be a saviour. But only by not dying at all could he have set a really potent example … He remembered the look that had come into Oover’s eyes just now at the notion of his unfaith. Perhaps he would have been the mock, not the saviour, of Oxford. Better dishonour than death, maybe. But, since die he must, he must die not belittling or tarnishing the name of Tanville-Tankerton.

  Within these bounds, however, he must put forth his full might to avert the general catastrophe—and to punish Zuleika nearly well enough, after all, by intercepting that vast nosegay from her outstretched hands and her distended nostrils. There was no time to be lost, then. But he wondered, as he paced the grand curve between St. Mary’s and Magdalen Bridge, just how was he to begin?

  Down the flight of steps from Queen’s came lounging an average undergraduate.

  “Mr. Smith,” said the Duke, “a word with you.”

  “But my name is not Smith,” said the young man.

  “Generically it is,” replied the Duke. “You are Smith to all intents and purposes. That, indeed, is why I address you. In making your acquaintance, I make a thousand acquaintances. You are a short-cut to knowledge. Tell me, do you seriously think of drowning yourself this afternoon?”

  “Rather,” said the undergraduate.

  “A meiosis in common use, equivalent to ‘Yes, assuredly,’ ” murmured the Duke. “And why,” he then asked, “do you mean to do this?”

  “Why? How can you ask? Why are you going to do it?”

  “The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play. Please answer my question, to the best of your ability.”

  “Well, because I can’t live without her. Because I want to prove my love for her. Because—”

  “One reason at a time please,” said the Duke, holding up his hand. “You can’t live without her? Then I am to assume that you look forward to dying?”

  “Rather.”

  “You are truly happy in that prospect?”

  “Yes. Rather.”

  “Now, suppose I showed you two pieces of equally fine amber—a big one and a little one. Which of these would you rather possess?”

  “The big one, I suppose.”

  “And this because it is better to have more than to have less of a good thing?”

  “Just so.”

  “Do you consider happiness a good thing or a bad one?”

  “A good one.”

  “So that a man would rather have more than less of happiness?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “Then does it not seem to you that you would do well to postpone your suicide indefinitely?”

  “But I have just said I can’t live without her.”

  “You have still more recently declared yourself truly happy.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Now, be careful, Mr. Smith. Remember, this is a matter of life and death. Try to do yourself justice. I have asked you—”

  But the undergraduate was walking away, not without a certain dignity.

  The Duke felt that he had not handled his man skilfully. He remembered that even Socrates, for all the popular charm of his mock-modesty and his true geniality, had ceased after a while to be tolerable. Without such a manner to grace his method, Socrates would have had a very brief time indeed. The Duke recoiled from what he took to be another pitfall. He almost smelt hemlock.

  A party of four undergraduates abreast was approaching. How should he address them? His choice wavered between the evangelic wistfulness of “Are you saved?” and the breeziness of the recruiting sergeant’s “Come, you’re fine upstanding young fellows. Isn’t it a pity,” etc. Meanwhile, the quartet had passed by.

  Two other undergraduates approached. The Duke asked them simply as a personal favour to himself not to throw away their lives. They said they were very sorry, but in this particular matter they must please themselves. In vain he pled. They admitted that but for his example they would never have thought of dying. They wished they could show him their gratitude in any way but the one which would rob them of it.

  The Duke drifted further down the High, bespeaking every undergraduate he met, leaving untried no argument, no inducement. For one man, whose name he happened to know, he invented an urgent personal message from Miss Dobson imploring him not to die on her account. On another man he offered to settle by hasty codicil a sum of money sufficient to yield an annual income of two thousand pounds—three thousand—any sum within reason. With another he offered to walk, arm in arm, to Carfax and back again. All to no avail.

  He found himself in the precincts of Magdalen, preaching from the little open-air pulpit there an impassioned sermon on the sacredness of human life, and referring to Zuleika in terms which John Knox would have hesitated to utter. As he piled up the invective, he noticed an ominous restiveness in the congregation—murmurs, clenching of hands, dark looks. He saw the pulpit as yet another trap laid for him by the gods. He had walked straight into it: another moment, and he might be dragged down, overwhelmed by numbers, torn limb from limb. All that was in him of quelling power he put hastily into his eyes, and manoeuvred his tongue to gentler discourse, deprecating his right to judge “this lady,” and merely pointing the marvel, the awful though noble folly, of his resolve. He ended on a note of quiet pathos. “To-night I shall be among the shades. There be not you, my brothers.”

  Good though the sermon was in style and sentiment, the flaw in its reasoning was too patent for any converts to be made. As he walked out of the quadrangle, the Duke felt the hopelessness of his cause. Still he battled bravely for it up the High, waylaying, cajoling, commanding, offering vast bribes. He carried his crusade into the Loder, and thence into Vincent’s, and out into the street again, eager, untiring, unavailing: everywhere he found his precept checkmated by his example.

  The sight of The MacQuern coming out top-speed from the Market, with a large but inexpensive bunch of flowers, reminded him of the luncheon that was to be. Never to throw over an engagement was for him, as we have seen, a point of honour. But this particular engagement—hateful, when he accepted it, by reason of his love—was now impossible for the reason which had made him take so ignominiously to his heels this morning. He curtly told the Scot not to expect him.

  “Is she not coming?” gasped the Scot, with quick suspicion.

  “Oh,” said the Duke, turning on his heel, “she doesn’t know that I shan’t be there. You may count on her.” This he took to be the very truth, and he was glad to have made of it a thrust at the man who had so uncouthly asserted himself last night. He could not help smiling, though, at this little resentment erect after the cataclysm that had s
wept away all else. Then he smiled to think how uneasy Zuleika would be at his absence. What agonies of suspense she must have had all this morning! He imagined her silent at the luncheon, with a vacant gaze at the door, eating nothing at all. And he became aware that he was rather hungry. He had done all he could to save young Oxford. Now for some sandwiches! He went into the Junta.

  As he rang the dining-room bell, his eyes rested on the miniature of Nellie O’Mora. And the eyes of Nellie O’Mora seemed to meet his in reproach. Just as she may have gazed at Greddon when he cast her off, so now did she gaze at him who a few hours ago had refused to honour her memory.

  Yes, and many other eyes than hers rebuked him. It was around the walls of this room that hung those presentments of the Junta as focussed, year after year, in a certain corner of Tom Quad, by Messrs. Hills and Saunders. All around, the members of the little hierarchy, a hierarchy ever changing in all but youth and a certain sternness of aspect that comes at the moment of being immortalised, were gazing forth now with a sternness beyond their wont. Not one of them but had in his day handed on loyally the praise of Nellie O’Mora, in the form their Founder had ordained. And the Duke’s revolt last night had so incensed them that they would, if they could, have come down from their frames and walked straight out of the club, in chronological order—first, the men of the ‘sixties, almost as near in time to Greddon as to the Duke, all so gloriously be-whiskered and cravated, but how faded now, alas, by exposure; and last of all in the procession and angrier perhaps than any of them, the Duke himself—the Duke of a year ago, President and sole Member.

  But, as he gazed into the eyes of Nellie O’Mora now, Dorset needed not for penitence the reproaches of his past self or of his fore-runners. “Sweet girl,” he murmured, “forgive me. I was mad. I was under the sway of a deplorable infatuation. It is past. See,” he murmured with a delicacy of feeling that justified the untruth, “I am come here for the express purpose of undoing my impiety.” And, turning to the club-waiter who at this moment answered the bell, he said “Bring me a glass of port, please, Barrett.” Of sandwiches he said nothing.

  At the word “See” he had stretched one hand towards Nellie; the other he had laid on his heart, where it seemed to encounter some sort of hard obstruction. This he vaguely fingered, wondering what it might be, while he gave his order to Barrett. With a sudden cry he dipped his hand into his breast-pocket and drew forth the bottle he had borne away from Mr. Druce’s. He snatched out his watch: one o’clock!—fifteen minutes overdue. Wildly he called the waiter back. “A tea-spoon, quick! No port. A wine-glass and a tea-spoon. And—for I don’t mind telling you, Barrett, that your mission is of an urgency beyond conjecture—take lightning for your model. Go!”

  Agitation mastered him. He tried vainly to feel his pulse, well knowing that if he found it he could deduce nothing from its action. He saw himself haggard in the looking-glass. Would Barrett never come? “Every two hours”—the directions were explicit. Had he delivered himself into the gods’ hands? The eyes of Nellie O’Mora were on him compassionately; and all the eyes of his fore-runners were on him in austere scorn: “See,” they seemed to be saying, “the chastisement of last night’s blasphemy.” Violently, insistently, he rang the bell.

  In rushed Barrett at last. From the tea-spoon into the wine-glass the Duke poured the draught of salvation, and then, raising it aloft, he looked around at his fore-runners and in a firm voice cried “Gentlemen, I give you Nellie O’Mora, the fairest witch that ever was or will be.” He drained his glass, heaved the deep sigh of a double satisfaction, dismissed with a glance the wondering Barrett, and sat down.

  He was glad to be able to face Nellie with a clear conscience. Her eyes were not less sad now, but it seemed to him that their sadness came of a knowledge that she would never see him again. She seemed to be saying to him “Had you lived in my day, it is you that I would have loved, not Greddon.” And he made silent answer, “Had you lived in my day, I should have been Dobson-proof.” He realised, however, that to Zuleika he owed the tenderness he now felt for Miss O’Mora. It was Zuleika that had cured him of his aseity. She it was that had made his heart a warm and negotiable thing. Yes, and that was the final cruelty. To love and be loved—this, he had come to know, was all that mattered. Yesterday, to love and die had seemed felicity enough. Now he knew that the secret, the open secret, of happiness was in mutual love—a state that needed not the fillip of death. And he had to die without having ever lived. Admiration, homage, fear, he had sown broadcast. The one woman who had loved him had turned to stone because he loved her. Death would lose much of its sting for him if there were somewhere in the world just one woman, however lowly, whose heart would be broken by his dying. What a pity Nellie O’Mora was not really extant!

  Suddenly he recalled certain words lightly spoken yesterday by Zuleika. She had told him he was loved by the girl who waited on him—the daughter of his land-lady. Was this so? He had seen no sign of it, had received no token of it. But, after all, how should he have seen a sign of anything in one whom he had never consciously visualised? That she had never thrust herself on his notice might mean merely that she had been well brought up. What likelier than that the daughter of Mrs. Batch, that worthy soul, had been well brought up?

  Here, at any rate, was the chance of a new element in his life, or rather in his death. Here, possibly, was a maiden to mourn him. He would lunch in his rooms.

  With a farewell look at Nellie’s miniature, he took the medicine-bottle from the table, and went quickly out. The heavens had grown steadily darker and darker, the air more sulphurous and baleful. And the High had a strangely woebegone look, being all forsaken by youth, in this hour of luncheon. Even so would its look be all to-morrow, thought the Duke, and for many morrows. Well he had done what he could. He was free now to brighten a little his own last hours. He hastened on, eager to see the land-lady’s daughter. He wondered what she was like, and whether she really loved him.

  As he threw open the door of his sitting-room, he was aware of a rustle, a rush, a cry. In another instant, he was aware of Zuleika Dobson at his feet, at his knees, clasping him to her, sobbing, laughing, sobbing.

  XVI

  FOR WHAT HAPPENED A FEW MOMENTS LATER YOU must not blame him. Some measure of force was the only way out of an impossible situation. It was in vain that he commanded the young lady to let go: she did but cling the closer. It was in vain that he tried to disentangle himself of her by standing first on one foot, then on the other, and veering sharply on his heel: she did but sway as though hinged to him. He had no choice but to grasp her by the wrists, cast her aside, and step clear of her into the room.

  Her hat, gauzily basking with a pair of long white gloves on one of his arm-chairs, proclaimed that she had come to stay.

  Nor did she rise. Propped on one elbow, with heaving bosom and parted lips, she seemed to be trying to realise what had been done to her. Through her undried tears her eyes shone up to him.

  He asked: “To what am I indebted for this visit?”

  “Ah, say that again!” she murmured. “Your voice is music.”

  He repeated his question.

  “Music!” she said dreamily; and such is the force of habit that “I don’t,” she added, “know anything about music, really. But I know what I like.”

  “Had you not better get up from the floor?” he said. “The door is open, and any one who passed might see you.”

  Softly she stroked the carpet with the palms of her hands. “Happy carpet!” she crooned. “Aye, happy the very women that wove the threads that are trod by the feet of my beloved master. But hark! he bids his slave rise and stand before him!”

  Just after she had risen, a figure appeared in the doorway.

  “I beg pardon, your Grace; Mother wants to know, will you be lunching in?”

  “Yes,” said the Duke. “I will ring when I am ready.” And it dawned on him that this girl, who perhaps loved him, was, according to all known standards, extraordinar
ily pretty.

  “Will—” she hesitated, “will Miss Dobson be—”

  “No,” he said. “I shall be alone.” And there was in the girl’s parting half-glance at Zuleika that which told him he was truly loved, and made him the more impatient of his offensive and accursed visitor.

  “You want to be rid of me?” asked Zuleika, when the girl was gone.

  “I have no wish to be rude; but—since you force me to say it—yes.”

  “Then take me,” she cried, throwing back her arms, “and throw me out of the window.”

  He smiled coldly.

  “You think I don’t mean it? You think I would struggle? Try me.” She let herself droop side-ways, in an attitude limp and portable. “Try me,” she repeated.

  “All this is very well conceived, no doubt,” said he, “and well executed. But it happens to be otiose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you may set your mind at rest. I am not going to back out of my promise.”

  Zuleika flushed. “You are cruel. I would give the world and all not to have written you that hateful letter. Forget it, forget it, for pity’s sake!”

  The Duke looked searchingly at her. “You mean that you now wish to release me from my promise?”

  “Release you? As if you were ever bound! Don’t torture me!”

  He wondered what deep game she was playing. Very real, though, her anguish seemed; and, if real it was, then—he stared, he gasped—there could be but one explanation. He put it to her. “You love me?”

  “With all my soul.”

  His heart leapt. If she spoke truth, then indeed vengeance was his! But “What proof have I?” he asked her.

  “Proof? Have men absolutely no intuition? If you need proof, produce it. Where are my ear-rings?”

  “Your ear-rings? Why?”

  Impatiently she pointed to two white pearls that fastened the front of her blouse. “These are your studs. It was from them I had the great first hint this morning.”

  “Black and pink, were they not, when you took them?”