I HAVE, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes. And, when one discusses an affair--a long, sad affair--one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real.
At any rate, I think I have brought my story up to the date of Maisie Maidan's death. I mean that I have explained everything that went before it from the several points of view that were necessary--from Leonora's, from Edward's and, to some extent, from my own. You have the facts for the trouble of finding them;you have the points of view as far as I could ascertain or put them.
Let me imagine myself back, then, at the day of Maisie's death--or rather at the moment of Florence's dissertation on the Protest, up in the old Castle of the town of M----. Let us consider Leonora's point of view with regard to Florence; Edward's, of course, Icannot give you, for Edward naturally never spoke of his affair with my wife. (I may, in what follows, be a little hard on Florence;but you must remember that I have been writing away at this story now for six months and reflecting longer and longer upon these affairs.) And the longer I think about them the more certain Ibecome that Florence was a contaminating influence--she depressed and deteriorated poor Edward; she deteriorated, hopelessly, the miserable Leonora. There is no doubt that she caused Leonora's character to deteriorate. If there was a fine point about Leonora it was that she was proud and that she was silent.
But that pride and that silence broke when she made that extraordinary outburst, in the shadowy room that contained the Protest, and in the little terrace looking over the river. I don't mean to say that she was doing a wrong thing. She was certainly doing right in trying to warn me that Florence was making eyes at her husband. But, if she did the right thing, she was doing it in the wrong way. Perhaps she should have reflected longer; she should have spoken, if she wanted to speak, only after reflection. Or it would have been better if she had acted--if, for instance, she had so chaperoned Florence that private communication between her and Edward became impossible. She should have gone eavesdropping; she should have watched outside bedroom doors.
It is odious; but that is the way the job is done. She should have taken Edward away the moment Maisie was dead. No, she acted wrongly. . . . And yet, poor thing, is it for me to condemn her--and what did it matter in the end? If it had not been Florence, it would have been some other . . . Still, it might have been a better woman than my wife. For Florence was vulgar; Florence was a common flirt who would not, at the last, lacher prise; and Florence was an unstoppable talker. You could not stop her; nothing would stop her. Edward and Leonora were at least proud and reserved people.
Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go. And Leonora let them. go. She let them go before poor Edward did even. Consider her position when she burst out over the Luther-Protest. . . .
Consider her agonies. . . .
You are to remember that the main passion of her life was to get Edward back; she had never, till that moment, despaired of getting him back. That may seem ignoble; but you have also to remember that her getting him back represented to her not only a victory for herself. It would, as it appeared to her, have been a victory for all wives and a victory for her Church. That was how it presented itself to her. These things are a little inscrutable. I don't know why the getting back of Edward should have represented to her a victory for all wives, for Society and for her Church. Or, maybe, Ihave a glimmering of it. She saw life as a perpetual sex-baffle between husbands who desire to be unfaithful to their wives, and wives who desire to recapture their husbands in the end. That was her sad and modest view of matrimony. Man, for her, was a sort of brute who must have his divagations, his moments of excess, his nights out, his, let us say, rutting seasons. She had read few novels, so that the idea of a pure and constant love succeeding the sound of wedding bells had never been very much presented to her. She went, numbed and terrified, to the Mother Superior of her childhood's convent with the tale of Edward's infidelities with the Spanish dancer, and all that the old nun, who appeared to her to be infinitely wise, mystic and reverend, had done had been to shake her head sadly and to say:
"Men are like that. By the blessing of God it will all come right in the end."That was what was put before her by her spiritual advisers as her programme in life. Or, at any rate, that was how their teachings came through to her--that was the lesson she told me she had learned of them. I don't know exactly what they taught her. The lot of women was patience and patience and again patience--ad majorem Dei gloriam--until upon the appointed day, if God saw fit, she should have her reward. If then, in the end, she should have succeeded in getting Edward back she would have kept her man within the limits that are all that wifehood has to expect. She was even taught that such excesses in men are natural, excusable--as if they had been children.
