“Do you mean she has large feet and hands, like a Greek statue?”
“Exactly.”
“Hm. And her character?”
“Very modern.”
“That is to say, of easy virtue?”
“Not exactly. She is sachlich. Neue Sachlichkeit. Bauhaus. Nacktkultur. The chauffeur type. Love is a psycho-physical fact. Nothing romantic or complicated about love.”
“And this is what you call ‘modern’?”
“Well, according to the international conventions drawn up by journalists and women-novelists, this objectivity is what characterises modern love.”
“On the other hand, one should remember that even in our grandmothers’ time women did not limit their concerns to embroidery and fainting. They were much more active and controlling than they are today; they just did it more gracefully. Mme de Pompadour and Queen Victoria may not have smoked pipes, but they ruled the roost. It really makes me angry when I hear this myth of the modern woman. There is no modern woman. Or modern love. There have always been people so emotionally impoverished they were incapable of investing love with anything higher than ‘objectivity’, to use your term. It’s just that, in the old days, you couldn’t get away with propagating this debased form of love. There was too much intellectual rigour. Anyway, it was something a well-bred author just didn’t write about.
“The true artists and champions of love,” he went on, “have never been ‘objective’. For Casanova, every woman he encountered in the street was a goddess, and every one more beautiful than all her predecessors. That was his secret. ‘Objectivity’ … it’s man’s ability to see more in things than meets the eye that distinguishes him from the animals. ‘Objectivity’ … is there any such thing? Every one of us constructs a private universe out of his personal obsessions, and then tries to communicate with other people with hopeless little flashes of light. But enough of this … So, like St Anthony in the desert, you underwent temptation. Satan appeared at the Café Royal and promised you a journal. I just wonder what Morvin would have done if you’d taken up his offers. Where would he have got the money?”
“Well, from Mrs Roscoe’s fortune … ”
It had slipped from my tongue. I was furious with myself. I’m sure that for years no one had dared mention her name in his presence. He must have felt like a man who had been stabbed. He clutched his collar and went deathly pale.
“What’s that? … Where do you get that from?”
And now I saw that he had turned pale with anger; it was fury that was choking him. But it was too late to turn back.
“It’s what Morvin said. He used the royal ‘we’. ‘We’ll buy you a yacht … we’ll be much obliged to you’ … ”
The Earl stared at me. The expression on his face was horrifying. Then he lowered his head, rang for the waiter and ordered whisky.
After a long, long silence, he said, very calmly:
“St Anthony, you were tempted by the Devil. But never forget that the Devil is the father of lies. Every word Morvin utters is a lie. That’s his real crime, not the murder. To protect himself … to protect himself from me, he manages to make it all look as if Eileen St Claire is his partner in crime. He’s taken everyone in. Even Seton, the canniest Scot on the planet. But not me. I … I know her too well.”
I thought of what he had said earlier: “Each of us constructs a private universe out of his personal obsessions … ” The Earl had erected a myth about Eileen St Claire and remained attached to that myth, even though estranged from the woman herself. But I did not say this.
After another pause, he continued:
“Eileen St Claire … Mrs Roscoe … has an unfortunate nature, in several respects. There is something in her of the automaton, something not quite human, something … as if she were permanently locked in some sort of hypnotic trance. To say she is susceptible to influence doesn’t go far enough. She has never done what, according to her own standards, she should: she’s always surrendered to the will of others. And if anyone ever tried to snap her out of her somnambulism, she immediately hated them. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this … I never speak about these things … Perhaps because you’re a foreigner, here today, gone tomorrow … Like writing in sand … Anyway, it’s an easy game for Morvin to turn appearances against her.”
“My Lord, those appearances could have a strong basis in fact.”
“In what way?” he demanded, somewhat irritably.
“In what way? You, My Lord, are not a great friend of Morvin. Surely, with the evidence you have against him, you would have handed him over to the police, unless you felt that perhaps Mrs Roscoe herself … ”
“That isn’t true!” he yelled, finally losing control. “How dare you speak of things you know nothing about? How can you possibly think you understand the motives behind what I do …?”
At that moment, in that spontaneous outburst of unguarded arrogance, I suddenly understood him. Just minutes before, he had said that what distinguished man from the animals was the capacity to see beyond appearances. The animal sees his mate as simply another animal, but man views his as more than human.
And for a proud man no error can be more painful than to admit that in this regard he has blundered: that the woman he has chosen is not what he thought her. For a truly proud man the worst horror of disappointment in love is not the slight he has received: far, far worse is the failure of judgement that led him to construct a myth with no basis in reality. And a man as supremely proud as the Earl of Gwynedd has thereafter to maintain the illusion, in the face of every contradictory circumstance, lest he be forced to admit to himself that he has blundered.
That was why, for all his self-control, he gave way to superhuman rage when anyone attacked the Eileen myth. Had I revealed at that moment that she had been my mistress he would either have refused to believe me, or he would have found some proof that she had been unable to help it: that she had been hypnotised, that it was all Morvin’s fault …
“I beg your pardon, My Lord,” I said. “It was quite wrong of me to raise the subject.”
“No, it is I who must apologise for my loss of self-control,” he replied, his old calm self again. “You must bear with me; I’m not fully in command of myself these days. While you were away there were more ‘happenings’.”
“What? Another attempt …?”
“No, something quite different. Something altogether more horrible … ”
“For God’s sake, My Lord …?”
“Doctor, Goethe’s Zauberlehrling … Die ich rief, die Geister … ‘I had a jewel in my hand/I dropped it on a snowy slope/It rolled and rolled and grew and grew/And soon became an avalanche’. But it’s quite another story, and not one you could possibly understand. Do please forgive my little outburst. You aren’t offended, I hope. So many people attack Eileen St Claire — it isn’t just you — and appearances certainly are against her. I can’t bear to hear them glibly passing judgement on an innocent person. It isn’t actions that speak, Bátky, not actions. Actions fall away from us like shorn hair. You have to see human beings independently of their actions, as God sees us … But perhaps we should be on our way?”
It was dark by the time we reached the car and got in. The wind searched impatiently among the trees in the woods beside the road, and every so often the bloodshot face of the full moon lit up the clouds, as they chased each other eastwards in a wild, silent ecstasy.
The Earl bore his tragic inner conflict like a rock. His silence was that of a man who intended to say nothing for months on end. The road twisted and swayed before us like a living thing.