“Ay ay, sir.”
“Miss Battiloro says she is ready to make this noble and beautiful sacrifice. And Mr. William Demarest — is Mr. William Demarest present? Mr. Demarest, please?”
“Oh yes, he’s here, all right!”
“Very well, then, we will proceed … Shipboy, the first bell, if you will be so kind!”
It was painfully true, every word of it. The bell note fell down from aloft, a golden ingot of sound, and Cynthia was standing under the tall tree as announced; like a charade for purity and resignation; clad in white samite; and clasping a tall lily with unimaginable delicacy. Wasn’t it perhaps, however, more Burne-Jones than Rossetti? It was a little dark, and therefore difficult to see; but Demarest thought so. Yes. And at the second bell note — three minutes have elapsed, silent save for the hushing sound of the waves — Cynthia lifted her meltingly beautiful eyes, and the five blue seraphim, treading the night air above her, began softly, sighingly, to sing. This was very affecting. In spite of the warning, it was difficult to refrain from tears. Smith, in fact, gave an audible sob, like a hiccough. At the words “resting-place,” the five seraphs disbanded, two deploying to starboard, two to port, and the fifth catapulting straight up toward the zenith. At this moment, Demarest experienced acutely a remarkable temptation. He desired to rush forward, kneel, bury his face passionately in the white samite, and cry out—γύναι, ἴδε ό ὑιόϛ σου! Before he could do more than visualize this action, however, the third stroke of the bell was given. The whole night had become a Cathedral. And above Demarest, faintly luminous in the cold starlight that came from beyond, was a tall Gothic window, where motionless, in frozen sentimentalites of pink, white, and blue, Cynthia was turned to glass.
VII
To his Lady, his Mother, his Wife, his Sister: her Servant, her Child, her Lover, her Brother, and to express all that is humble, respectful, and loving, to his Cynthia, W. D. writes this.
ONE
You are not ill-educated, Cynthia — if for the first and last time you will permit me so to address you — and you will therefore recognize this clumsy paraphrase of the salutation with which Heloise began the first of her letters to Peter Abelard. It is not by accident that I choose this method of opening what will no doubt be the last letter I address to you. For what, under the peculiar circumstances — I refer to the fact that, for reasons into which I forbear to inquire, your mother and yourself have decided to drop me from your acquaintance — what could be more likely than this beautiful exordium to persuade your eye to read further? And that, for me, is all-important. The reasons for this you will readily understand. Suppose this letter is delivered to you by your stewardess. I shall be careful to address the envelope in a style which you will not recognize, so that you will at least not destroy it unopened; but having opened it, is there not a great likelihood that you will then tear it to pieces as soon as you see from whom it comes? Yes. And for that reason I have — let me confess at once my iniquity, calculated iniquity! — employed this striking method of greeting you. It will perhaps — that frail pontoon “perhaps,” on which so many desperate armies have crossed — amuse you, perhaps even a little excite your curiosity. You might retort, derisively, that it is odd of me to model my salutation on that of Heloise rather than on that of Abelard? But unfortunately, Abelard is altogether too blunt for my purpose. He plunges in with a directness quite disconcertingly up-to-date; beginning with a mere “could I have known that a letter not addressed to you would fall into your hands.” Would this be more likely to tempt you on, Cynthia? Or could I have the heart to begin, as Abelard began his fourth epistle, “Write no more to me, Heloise, write no more”?… This would be both melancholy and absurd.
And the impulse to write to you, by way of leave-taking, is imperious. It seems to me that I have an infinitude of things that I must say to you. You know how one feels on a dock, when one sees one’s friend sail away, perhaps forever? the regret, almost the agony, with which one remembers a few of the things one has forgotten to say, or hadn’t the courage to say? One never, after all, told him how much one loved him. Not even a hint. One never, after all, showed one’s simple joy in the fact that one, at least partially, possessed him. One never so much as breathed the suggestion that one would feel his absence. And then, there is all the good advice that one has forgotten to give, all the solicitude for his future that one has somehow failed to express! You are going to a tropical climate? Do not forget your cork helmet and your parasol! Remember, when you get up in the morning, to empty the scorpions out of your boots!.. You are going to the North Pole? Be sure, then, to take a thermos flask filled with hot rum and coffee, and plenty of almond chocolate, and your goloshes, and your heaviest woolens!.. Nor do I mean this facetiously. The advice is usually just as stupid as this, just as useless. But it serves its purpose: no matter how clumsily administered, it serves to express the aching concern with which one sees the departure; and its expression is at once accepted as just that and nothing else. And so it is with me, Cynthia. I have never told you in so many words that I love you — partly because there was no time for it, our acquaintance being so brief and so scattered; and partly for psychological reasons: my profound sense of inferiority, my sense of filthiness, and my fear of all decisive action, all being partially responsible. And now it is too late, for I find you (again in mid-Atlantic! surely one of the most remarkable coincidences that ever befell two human creatures!) engaged to be married; and no sooner am I informed of this fact than I am “dropped” by you — given, in fact, the “cut direct” by your mother. Well! This has one saving grace, this magnificent disaster — for I can now say, once and for all, that I love you.
Having said this much, however, I find myself oddly at a loss as to how to continue. The truth is, my imagination has dealt with you so continuously, and so strenuously, and so richly, that I have no longer any definite sense as to where, exactly, between us, the psychological boundary lies. Two nights ago, for example, after our encounter on the deck (where, of course, as I am in the second cabin, I had no right to be) I lay awake all night, re-enacting every scrap of our little history, and improvising a good deal besides. In this you were — as indeed you are in all my reflections—“Cynthia”; and you were admitted to an intimacy with me (this may surprise you!) which I have vouchsafed to no one else. As I look back on that long orgy of self-communion, which had you as its chief but not as its only theme, I find in it naïveté a good deal that amuses me. It is a curious and instructive fact, for example, that in that moment of Sturm und Drang I should have experienced so powerfully a desire to talk to you about my childhood. I found myself constantly reverting to that — babbling to you my absurd infantine confidences and secrets, as if you were — ah! — my mother. Exactly! And isn’t that the secret of your quite extraordinary influence upon me? For some reason which I cannot possibly analyze, you strike to more numerous and deeper responses in me than any other woman has done. It must be that you correspond, in ways that only my unconscious memory identifies, to my mother, who died when I was very small. Can it be that?… Anyway, there it is; and as I sit here in my beloved smoking room, waited on by Malvolio, (do you remember how, on the nice old Silurian, you reproached me for sitting in the smoking room so much? do you remember how, one evening, we listened, standing just outside the door, on the dark deck, to the men singing there?) — well, as I sit here, hearing the slap of rubber quoits on the deck above, it is again a desire to talk to you of my childhood that comes uppermost. Strange! It really seems to me that there is something exquisitely appropriate in this: it seems to me that in this there might be some hope of really touching you. I do not mean that I harbor any hope that you will break off your engagement and engage yourself to me. (For one thing, I am not at all sure that I would want to marry.) Nor do I mean anything quite so obvious as that you should be touched sentimentally. No. What do I mean, then? Well, I mean that this would be the most direct, simple, and really effective mode of establishing the right communion between us. I don’t think this is merely a circumlocution or clumsy evasion. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that to talk to you of my childhood — to tell you of some one particular episode — would be for us what the good advice regarding goloshes was for the departing traveler: a profound symbol of intimacy. Even that is not the whole story. For also — and here, I admit, I do plunge recklessly into the treacherous underworld of effects — I feel with a divine confidence that is tantamount to clairvoyance that to tell you of some such episode would be to do you an exquisite violence. Why? Because I am perfectly certain that whatever is true — I mean idiosyncratically true — of me, is also deeply true of you; and my confession would therefore be your — accusation! An impeachment which you would be the first (but with a delighted shock) to admit.