The Call of the Blood

R >> Robert Smythe Hichens >> The Call of the Blood

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Miss Townly sighed. She was emaciated, dark, and always dressed to look
mysterious.

"Maurice Delarey is scarcely my idea of a mystery," said Mrs. Creswick,
taking joyously a marron glace. "In my opinion he's an ordinarily
intelligent but an extraordinarily handsome man. Hermione is exactly the
reverse, extraordinarily intelligent and almost ugly."

"Oh no, not ugly!" said Miss Townly, with unexpected warmth.

Though of a tepid personality, she was a worshipper at Hermione's shrine.

"Her eyes are beautiful," she added.

"Good eyes don't make a beauty," said Mrs. Creswick again, looking at her
three-quarters face in the glass. "Hermione is too large, and her face is
too square, and--but as I said before, it doesn't matter the least.
Hermione's got a temperament that carries all before it."

"I do wish I had a temperament," said Miss Townly. "I try to cultivate
one."

"You might as well try to cultivate a mustache," Mrs. Creswick rather
brutally rejoined. "If it's there, it's there, but if it isn't one prays
in vain."

"I used to think Hermione would do something," continued Miss Townly,
finishing her second cup of tea with thirsty languor.

"Do something?"

"Something important, great, something that would make her famous, but of
course now"--she paused--"now it's too late," she concluded. "Marriage
destroys, not creates talent. Some celebrated man--I forget which--has
said something like that."

"Perhaps he'd destroyed his wife's. I think Hermione might be a great
mother."

Miss Townly blushed faintly. She did nearly everything faintly. That was
partly why she admired Hermione.

"And a great mother is rare," continued Mrs. Creswick. "Good mothers are,
thank God, quite common even in London, whatever those foolish people who
rail at the society they can't get into may say. But great mothers are
seldom met with. I don't know one."

"What do you mean by a great mother?" inquired Miss Townly.

"A mother who makes seeds grow. Hermione has a genius for friendship and
a special gift for inspiring others. If she ever has a child, I can
imagine that she will make of that child something wonderful."

"Do you mean an infant prodigy?" asked Miss Townly, innocently.

"No, dear, I don't!" said Mrs. Creswick; "I mean nothing of the sort.
Never mind!"

When Mrs. Creswick said "Never mind!" Miss Townly usually got up to go.
She got up to go now, and went forth into Sloane Street meditating, as
she would have expressed it, "profoundly."

Meanwhile Artois went back to the Hans Crescent Hotel on foot. He walked
slowly along the greasy pavement through the yellow November fog, trying
to combat a sensation of dreariness which had floated round his spirit,
as the fog floated round his body, directly he stepped into the street.
He often felt depressed without a special cause, but this afternoon
there was a special cause for his melancholy. Hermione was going to be
married.

She often came to Paris, where she had many friends, and some years ago
they had met at a dinner given by a brilliant Jewess, who delighted in
clever people, not because she was stupid, but for the opposite reason.
Artois was already famous, though not loved, as a novelist. He had
published two books; works of art, cruel, piercing, brutal, true.
Hermione had read them. Her intellect had revelled in them, but they had
set ice about her heart, and when Madame Enthoven told her who was going
to take her in to dinner, she very nearly begged to be given another
partner. She felt that her nature must be in opposition to this man's.

Artois was not eager for the honor of her company. He was a careful
dissecter of women, and, therefore, understood how mysterious women are;
but in his intimate life they counted for little. He regarded them there
rather as the European traveller regards the Mousmes of Japan, as
playthings, and insisted on one thing only--that they must be pretty. A
Frenchman, despite his unusual intellectual power, he was not wholly
emancipated from the la petite femme tradition, which will never be
outmoded in Paris while Paris hums with life, and, therefore, when he was
informed that he was to take in to dinner the tall, solidly built,
big-waisted, rugged-faced woman, whom he had been observing from a
distance ever since he came into the drawing-room, he felt that he was
being badly treated by his hostess.

Yet he had been observing this woman closely.

Something unusual, something vital in her had drawn his attention, fixed
it, held it. He knew that, but said to himself that it was the attention
of the novelist that had been grasped by an uncommon human specimen, and
that the man of the world, the diner-out, did not want to eat in company
with a specimen, but to throw off professional cares with a gay little
chatterbox of the Mousme type. Therefore he came over to be presented to
Hermione with rather a bad grace.

And that introduction was the beginning of the great friendship which was
now troubling him in the fog.

By the end of that evening Hermione and he had entirely rid themselves of
their preconceived notions of each other. She had ceased from imagining
him a walking intellect devoid of sympathies, he from considering her a
possibly interesting specimen, but not the type of woman who could be
agreeable in a man's life. Her naturalness amounted almost to genius. She
was generally unable to be anything but natural, unable not to speak as
she was feeling, unable to feel unsympathetic. She always showed keen
interest when she felt it, and, with transparent sincerity, she at once
began to show to Artois how much interested she was in him. By doing so
she captivated him at once. He would not, perhaps, have been captivated
by the heart without the brains, but the two in combination took
possession of him with an ease which, when the evening was over, but only
then, caused him some astonishment.

Hermione had a divining-rod to discover the heart in another, and she
found out at once that Artois had a big heart as well as a fine
intellect. He was deceptive because he was always ready to show the
latter, and almost always determined to conceal the former. Even to
himself he was not quite frank about his heart, but often strove to
minimize its influence upon him, if not to ignore totally its promptings
and its utterances. Why this was so he could not perhaps have explained
even to himself. It was one of the mysteries of his temperament. From the
first moment of their intercourse Hermione showed to him her conviction
that he had a warm heart, and that it could be relied upon without
hesitation. This piqued but presently delighted, and also soothed
Artois, who was accustomed to be misunderstood, and had often thought he
liked to be misunderstood, but who now found out how pleasant a brilliant
woman's intuition may be, even at a Parisian dinner. Before the evening
was over they knew that they were friends; and friends they had remained
ever since.

Artois was a reserved man, but, like many reserved people, if once he
showed himself as he really was, he could continue to be singularly
frank. He was singularly frank with Hermione. She became his confidante,
often at a distance. He scarcely ever came to London, which he disliked
exceedingly, but from Paris or from the many lands in which he
wandered--he was no pavement lounger, although he loved Paris rather as a
man may love a very chic cocotte--he wrote to Hermione long letters, into
which he put his mind and heart, his aspirations, struggles, failures,
triumphs. They were human documents, and contained much of his secret
history.

It was of this history that he was now thinking, and of Hermione's
comments upon it, tied up with a ribbon in Paris. The news of her
approaching marriage with a man whom he had never seen had given him a
rude shock, had awakened in him a strange feeling of jealousy. He had
grown accustomed to the thought that Hermione was in a certain sense his
property. He realized thoroughly the egotism, the dog-in-the-manger
spirit which was alive in him, and hated but could not banish it. As a
friend he certainly loved Hermione. She knew that. But he did not love
her as a man loves the woman he wishes to make his wife. She must know
that, too. He loved her but was not in love with her, and she loved but
was not in love with him. Why, then, should this marriage make a
difference in their friendship? She said that it would not, but he felt
that it must. He thought of her as a wife, then as a mother. The latter
thought made his egotism shudder. She would be involved in the happy
turmoil of a family existence, while he would remain without in that
loneliness which is the artist's breath of life and martyrdom. Yes, his
egotism shuddered, and he was angry at the weakness. He chastised the
frailties of others, but must be the victim of his own. A feeling of
helplessness came to him, of being governed, lashed, driven. How unworthy
was his sensation of hostility against Delarey, his sensation that
Hermione was wronging him by entering into this alliance, and how
powerless he was to rid himself of either sensation! There was good cause
for his melancholy--his own folly. He must try to conquer it, and, if
that were impossible, to rein it in before the evening.

When he reached the hotel he went into his sitting-room and worked for an
hour and a half, producing a short paragraph, which did not please him.
Then he took a hansom and drove to Peathill Street.

Hermione was already there, sitting at a small table in a corner with her
back to him, opposite to one of the handsomest men he had ever seen. As
Artois came in, he fixed his eyes on this man with a scrutiny that was
passionate, trying to determine at a glance whether he had any right to
the success he had achieved, any fitness for the companionship that was
to be his, companionship of an unusual intellect and a still more unusual
spirit.

He saw a man obviously much younger than Hermione, not tall, athletic in
build but also graceful, with the grace that is shed through a frame by
perfectly developed, not over-developed muscles and accurately trained
limbs, a man of the Mercury rather than of the Hercules type, with thick,
low-growing black hair, vivid, enthusiastic black eyes, set rather wide
apart under curved brows, and very perfectly proportioned, small,
straight features, which were not undecided, yet which suggested the
features of a boy. In the complexion there was a tinge of brown that
denoted health and an out-door life--an out-door life in the south,
Artois thought.

As Artois, standing quite still, unconsciously, in the doorway of the
restaurant, looked at this man, he felt for a moment as if he himself
were a splendid specimen of a cart-horse faced by a splendid specimen of
a race-horse. The comparison he was making was only one of physical
endowments, but it pained him. Thinking with an extraordinary rapidity,
he asked himself why it was that this man struck him at once as very much
handsomer than other men with equally good features and figures whom he
had seen, and he found at once the answer to his question. It was the
look of Mercury in him that made him beautiful, a look of radiant
readiness for swift movement that suggested the happy messenger poised
for flight to the gods, his mission accomplished, the expression of an
intensely vivid activity that could be exquisitely obedient. There was an
extraordinary fascination in it. Artois realized that, for he was
fascinated even in this bitter moment that he told himself ought not to
be bitter. While he gazed at Delarey he was conscious of a feeling that
had sometimes come upon him when he had watched Sicilian peasant boys
dancing the tarantella under the stars by the Ionian sea, a feeling that
one thing in creation ought to be immortal on earth, the passionate,
leaping flame of joyous youth, physically careless, physically rapturous,
unconscious of death and of decay. Delarey seemed to him like a
tarantella in repose, if such a thing could be.

Suddenly Hermione turned round, as if conscious that he was there. When
she did so he understood in the very depths of him why such a man as
Delarey attracted, must attract, such a woman as Hermione. That which she
had in the soul Delarey seemed to express in the body--sympathy,
enthusiasm, swiftness, courage. He was like a statue of her feelings, but
a statue endowed with life. And the fact that her physique was a sort of
contradiction of her inner self must make more powerful the charm of a
Delarey for her. As Hermione looked round at him, turning her tall figure
rather slowly in the chair, Artois made up his mind that she had been
captured by the physique of this man. He could not be surprised, but he
still felt angry.

Hermione introduced Delarey to him eagerly, not attempting to hide her
anxiety for the two men to make friends at once. Her desire was so
transparent and so warm that for a moment Artois felt touched, and
inclined to trample upon his evil mood and leave no trace of it. He was
also secretly too human to remain wholly unmoved by Delarey's reception
of him. Delarey had a rare charm of manner whose source was a happy, but
not foolishly shy, modesty, which made him eager to please, and convinced
that in order to do so he must bestir himself and make an effort. But in
this effort there was no labor. It was like the spurt of a willing horse,
a fine racing pace of the nature that woke pleasure and admiration in
those who watched it.

Artois felt at once that Delarey had no hostility towards him, but was
ready to admire and rejoice in him as Hermione's greatest friend. He was
met more than half-way. Yet when he was beside Delarey, almost touching
him, the stubborn sensation of furtive dislike within Artois increased,
and he consciously determined not to yield to the charm of this younger
man who was going to interfere in his life. Artois did not speak much
English, but fortunately Delarey talked French fairly well, not with
great fluency like Hermione, but enough to take a modest share in
conversation, which was apparently all the share that he desired. Artois
believed that he was no great talker. His eyes were more eager than was
his tongue, and seemed to betoken a vivacity of spirit which he could
not, perhaps, show forth in words. The conversation at first was mainly
between Hermione and Artois, with an occasional word from
Delarey--generally interrogative--and was confined to generalities. But
this could not continue long. Hermione was an enthusiastic talker and
seldom discussed banalities. From every circle where she found herself
the inane was speedily banished; pale topics--the spectres that haunt the
dull and are cherished by them--were whipped away to limbo, and some
subject full-blooded, alive with either serious or comical possibilities,
was very soon upon the carpet. By chance Artois happened to speak of two
people in Paris, common friends of his and of Hermione's, who had been
very intimate, but who had now quarrelled, and every one said,
irrevocably. The question arose whose fault was it. Artois, who knew the
facts of the case, and whose judgment was usually cool and well-balanced,
said it was the woman's.

"Madame Lagrande," he said, "has a fine nature, but in this instance it
has failed her, it has been warped by jealousy; not the jealousy that
often accompanies passion, for she and Robert Meunier were only great
friends, linked together by similar sympathies, but by a much more subtle
form of that mental disease. You know, Hermione, that both of them are
brilliant critics of literature?"

"Yes, yes."

"They carried on a sort of happy, but keen rivalry in this walk of
letters, each striving to be more unerring than the other in dividing the
sheep from the goats. I am the guilty person who made discord where there
had been harmony."

"You, Emile! How was that?"

"One day I said, in a bitter mood, 'It is so easy to be a critic, so
difficult to be a creator. You two, now would you even dare to try to
create?' They were nettled by my tone, and showed it. I said, 'I have a
magnificent subject for a conte, no work de longue haleine, a conte. If
you like I will give it you, and leave you to create--separately, not
together--what you have so often written about, the perfect conte.' They
accepted my challenge. I gave them my subject and a month to work it out.
At the end of that time the two contes were to be submitted to a jury of
competent literary men, friends of ours. It was all a sort of joke, but
created great interest in our circle--you know it, Hermione, that dines
at Reneau's on Thursday nights?"

"Yes. Well, what happened?"

"Madame Lagrande made a failure of hers, but Robert Meunier astonished us
all. He produced certainly one of the best contes that was ever written
in the French language."

"And Madame Lagrande?"

"It is not too much to say that from that moment she has almost hated
Robert."

"And you dare to say she has a noble nature?"

"Yes, a noble nature from which, under some apparently irresistible
impulse, she has lapsed."

"Maurice," said Hermione, leaning her long arms on the table and leaning
forward to her fiance, "you're not in literature any more than I am,
you're an outsider--bless you! What d'you say to that?"

Delarey hesitated and looked modestly at Artois.

"No, no," cried Hermione, "none of that, Maurice! You may be a better
judge in this than Emile is with all his knowledge of the human heart.
You're the man in the street, and sometimes I'd give a hundred pounds for
his opinion and not twopence for the big man's who's in the profession.
Would--could a noble nature yield to such an impulse?"

"I should hardly have thought so," said Delarey.

"Nor I," said Hermione. "I simply don't believe it's possible. For a
moment, yes, perhaps. But you say, Emile, that there's an actual breach
between them."

"There is certainly. Have you ever made any study of jealousy in its
various forms?"

"Never. I don't know what jealousy is. I can't understand it."

"Yet you must be capable of it."

"You think every one is?"

"Very few who are really alive in the spirit are not. And you, I am
certain, are."

Hermione laughed, an honest, gay laugh, that rang out wholesomely in the
narrow room.

"I doubt it, Emile. Perhaps I'm too conceited. For instance, if I cared
for some one and was cared for--"

"And the caring of the other ceased, because he had only a certain,
limited faculty of affection and transferred his affection
elsewhere--what then?"

"I've so much pride, proper or improper, that I believe my affection
would die. My love subsists on sympathy--take that food from it and it
would starve and cease to live. I give, but when giving I always ask. If
I were to be refused I couldn't give any more. And without the love there
could be no jealousy. But that isn't the point, Emile."

He smiled.

"What is?"

"The point is--can a noble nature lapse like that from its nobility?"

"Yes, it can."

"Then it changes, it ceases to be noble. You would not say that a brave
man can show cowardice and remain a brave man."

"I would say that a man whose real nature was brave, might, under certain
circumstances, show fear, without being what is called a coward. Human
nature is full of extraordinary possibilities, good and evil, of
extraordinary contradictions. But this point I will concede you, that it
is like the boomerang, which flies forward, circles, and returns to the
point from which it started. The inherently noble nature will, because it
must, return eventually to its nobility. Then comes the really tragic
moment with the passion of remorse."

He spoke quietly, almost coldly. Hermione looked at him with shining
eyes. She had quite forgotten Madame Lagrande and Robert Meunier, had
lost the sense of the special in her love of the general.

"That's a grand theory," she said. "That we must come back to the good
that is in us in the end, that we must be true to that somehow, almost
whether we will or no. I shall try to think of that when I am sinning."

"You--sinning!" exclaimed Delarey.

"Maurice, dear, you think too well of me."

Delarey flushed like a boy, and glanced quickly at Artois, who did not
return his gaze.

"But if that's true, Emile," Hermione continued, "Madame Lagrande and
Robert Meunier will be friends again."

"Some day I know she will hold out the olive-branch, but what if he
refuses it?"

"You literary people are dreadfully difficile."

"True. Our jealousies are ferocious, but so are the jealousies of
thousands who can neither read nor write."

"Jealousy," she said, forgetting to eat in her keen interest in the
subject. "I told you I didn't believe myself capable of it, but I don't
know. The jealousy that is born of passion I might understand and suffer,
perhaps, but jealousy of a talent greater than my own, or of one that I
didn't possess--that seems to me inexplicable. I could never be jealous
of a talent."

"You mean that you could never hate a person for a talent in them?"

"Yes."

"Suppose that some one, by means of a talent which you had not, won from
you a love which you had? Talent is a weapon, you know."

"You think it is a weapon to conquer the affections! Ah, Emile, after all
you don't know us!"

"You go too fast. I did not say a weapon to conquer the affection of a
woman."

"You're speaking of men?"

"I know," Delarey said, suddenly, forgetting to be modest for once, "you
mean that a man might be won away from one woman by a talent in another.
Isn't that it?"

"Ah," said Hermione, "a man--I see."

She sat for a moment considering deeply, with her luminous eyes fixed on
the food in her plate, food which she did not see.

"What horrible ideas you sometimes have, Emile," she said, at last.

"You mean what horrible truths exist," he answered, quietly.

"Could a man be won so? Yes, I suppose he might be if there were a
combination."

"Exactly," said Artois.

"I see now. Suppose a man had two strains in him, say: the adoration of
beauty, of the physical; and the adoration of talent, of the mental. He
might fall in love with a merely beautiful woman and transfer his
affections if he came across an equally beautiful woman who had some
great talent."

"Or he might fall in love with a plain, talented woman, and be taken from
her by one in whom talent was allied with beauty. But in either case are
you sure that the woman deserted could never be jealous, bitterly
jealous, of the talent possessed by the other woman? I think talent often
creates jealousy in your sex."

"But beauty much oftener, oh, much! Every woman, I feel sure, could more
easily be jealous of physical beauty in another woman than of mental
gifts. There's something so personal in beauty."

"And is genius not equally personal?"

"I suppose it is, but I doubt if it seems so."

"I think you leave out of account the advance of civilization, which is
greatly changing men and women in our day. The tragedies of the mind are
increasing."

"And the tragedies of the heart--are they diminishing in consequence? Oh,
Emile!" And she laughed.

"Hermione--your food! You are not eating anything!" said Delarey, gently,
pointing to her plate. "And it's all getting cold."

"Thank you, Maurice."

She began to eat at once with an air of happy submission, which made
Artois understand a good deal about her feeling for Delarey.

"The heart will always rule the head, I dare say, in this world where the
majority will always be thoughtless," said Artois. "But the greatest
jealousy, the jealousy which is most difficult to resist and to govern,
is that in which both heart and brain are concerned. That is, indeed, a
full-fledged monster."

Artois generally spoke with a good deal of authority, often without
meaning to do so. He thought so clearly, knew so exactly what he was
thinking and what he meant, that he felt very safe in conversation, and
from this sense of safety sprang his air of masterfulness. It was an air
that was always impressive, but to-night it specially struck Hermione.
Now she laid down her knife and fork once more, to Delarey's half-amused
despair, and exclaimed:

"I shall never forget the way you said that. Even if it were nonsense one
would have to believe it for the moment, and of course it's dreadfully
true. Intellect and heart suffering in combination must be far more
terrible than the one suffering without the other. No, Maurice, I've
really finished. I don't want any more. Let's have our coffee."

"The Turkish coffee," said Artois, with a smile. "Do you like Turkish
coffee, Monsieur Delarey?"

"Yes, monsieur. Hermione has taught me to."

"Ah!"

"At first it seemed to me too full of grounds," he explained.

"Perhaps a taste for it must be an acquired one among Europeans. Do we
have it here?"

"No, no," said Hermione, "Caminiti has taken my advice, and now there's a
charming smoke-room behind this. Come along."

She got up and led the way out. The two men followed her, Artois coming
last. He noticed now more definitely the very great contrast between
Hermione and her future husband. Delarey, when in movement, looked more
than ever like a Mercury. His footstep was light and elastic, and his
whole body seemed to breathe out a gay activity, a fulness of the joy of
life. Again Artois thought of Sicilian boys dancing the tarantella, and
when they were in the small smoke-room, which Caminiti had fitted up in
what he believed to be Oriental style, and which, though scarcely
accurate, was quite cosey, he was moved to inquire:

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