by Ouida
“You must say what you choose,” he muttered. “It is waste of words. You cannot say to me what I have not merited. I have taken a life that was beside mine own as Christ’s is beside a Satyr’s — my God!—”
His face had a strange convulsion on it; the blood seemed to burn on his brow and leave his lips an ashen white; he put his hand to his throat, as though some other hand were there and choking him.
“Go and forget,” I said to him. “It has been your boast, — you have no memories, you do not choose to have; you have mocked at poor illiterate fools who spoke of regret or conscience. Go; write a poem on it: you have often said the poet should use the sufferings of others for his lamp, as southward, they kill fireflies to read with: that is all.”
“You are cruel,” he said, simply, and with his old cold accent; but he stood patiently. Even in my loathing of him some shame of myself stirred in me: I had struck a wounded man, and one who was at my mercy.
“Go! why will you not go?” I cried to him furiously. “Why come here to insult their graves? Is the world not wide enough, that you must drag your crimes to Rome? Rome loved him, leave him alone to her. Go, I say. You are soilless enough, as the world sees, your world; nay, you will seduce women all the easier for that blood upon your hand. Most women are but beasts of prey, and love the smell of carnage. I am cruel?
“How many have cried that out against you, and when have you ever hearkened? What was your pity, ever? What was a dead love to you? You cast your porca præsentanea after it, and buried it, and thought no more, — except to smile. Why cannot you smile now? Be true to yourself. Nothing matters. You can make the world weep, and you are laughing all the while. Ay, you are right. His life was to yours as Christ’s to a Satyr’s: one day of his brought forth a harvest that all your barren years can never show. He blessed the nations: you have cursed them. He loved: you betrayed. He lived for all mankind: you for the narrow kingdom of your senses. And you have killed him, you. But in a twelvemonth you will have forgotten — why will you stand there? You will have forgotten: you will tell the world the story in sonorous verse, — and then forget. Go, before I do worse to you; I am old, and would not offend heaven.”
He stood quite silent, silent and patient, and with the discolored paleness as of bruised marble on his face. Then suddenly he put out his hands with a pathetic gesture, almost like a timid child’s, and a great sob heaved his breast.
“Have some mercy. Do you not see? — I suffer!”
There was silence between us.
I understood that he did suffer, passing all power of man to make him suffer more.
A compassion that I could no longer combat stole into me. Ah, if Maryx, lying in his grave, could have seen into my soul, he would not have been angered: he would have pitied his murderer too.
There was stillness between us.
He leaned one hand on the pedestal of the Dionysos, and stood with his head and shoulders bowed so that I could not see his face. The day was declining; the shadows were growing dark: they began to veil the bronze of the Ariadne.
“Where is she?” he said, suddenly.
“What matter to you?” I said to him.
“Can you not understand?” he said, and his labored breath seemed to choke him as he spoke. “If she do not shrink from me, — if I do not appall her, — what atonement I can make I will. I never loved her, — no. He did: as no other man could have done. I never loved her; but her message in the marble, — that I understood. She loves me: no other woman could ever love like that. If she do not shrink from me, what I can do I will. What honor, what peace, what amends I can render her I will give. Beside her innocence, her holiness, I am vile indeed; but, since she loves me thus, I shall have power to console.”
I made him no answer.
It seemed to me as if all the devils of hell swarmed in the beautiful marble chamber, and jibed and laughed and mocked around us, crying, “All things come too late!”
I looked up at him. The day was at an end; the dull red glow of a clouded sunset shone through the iron bars of the casement, and bathed the feet of the white sculptures as in a sea of blood.
“You would do this?”
He answered, —
“By his life and by his death I swear it; yes.”
I turned my face to the sunset, and I said to him, “Come.”
I went out of the halls and through the glades of the wood. He walked beside me. The bells of the city were tolling the last hour of light. Around us were grayness and darkness.
Away in the great west that fronted us as we passed down into Rome was the glow of the sun that had sunk; behind the dark trees of the Vatican there were long low lines of tremulous luminance, and a vast field of pale, soft blue, and above it a deep flush like the awful rose of dawn.
He closed his eyes as all its beauty met them. Never more could he look with calm gaze at all the lovely mysteries of the air, or watch with peace the glories of the sky.
We passed without a word through the entangled streets of the city.
At last we reached her threshold, and climbed the winding stair.
It was almost dark; they had lit one lamp. There was the cry of the owls in the dusk.
I opened her door. She lay quite still as I had left her; the dim gold of her curls fell over the broad low brow that was the brow of Ariadne; her lips were slightly parted; her eyes gazed at the western sky: where she looked, there was still a pale radiance and a flush left by the dead day.
I signed to him to enter.
He entered, and looked.
“She is dying!” he called aloud, with a cry that rang through all the lonely house.
She heard his voice, and sprang up on her narrow bed, and stretched her arms to him.
He sank on his knees beside her.
“You can forgive?” he cried to her.
In answer her white and wasted arms stole about his throat, and her lips sought his.
“Live, oh, my God, live!” he moaned, as he knelt. “ Live for me: I love you!”
And for the first time he told no lie.
She made him no answer, but her arms rested about his throat, and her cheek was against his own. For a few moments she lay thus; then with a little sigh she moved a little, and lifted her tender weary eyes to his.
“Forgive me; I missed the way!” she murmured, faintly, while her sight grew blind. Then her lips sought his once more, and on his own they trembled one moment longer, then grew cold and still.
He loved her, and she was dead.
Moths
First published in 1880 by Chatto and Windus, Moths is regarded by some as Ouida’s greatest work. The title is a metaphor for the idle female upper classes and society in general; they are divided into two types, the moths who fly at the flame of high society and are consumed by it; and the moths that eat into the fabric of society and destroy it, offering nothing in return. Undaunted by the shocked reaction of society’s moralisers, who thought the book immoral and a bad influence, the public’s reaction was enthusiastic and it sold in very large numbers. The Morning Post described the novel as marking “a new epoch in fiction”. To capitalise on the popularity of the novel there were numerous unauthorised stage adaptations – much to the chagrin of Ouida, who made her feelings known repeatedly in the press; despite her opposition, she was unable to prevent the productions going ahead, the first of which debuted at the Globe Theatre on 25 March, 1882. It was still being advertised as a popular provincial production in the late 1920’s.
Vere Herbert is a beautiful teenage girl, the daughter of Lady Dolly Vanderdecken; since the death of her father when she was just a baby, she has been in the care of her aunt and grandmother. At the age of sixteen is sent to live with Lady Dolly, who is appalled by the girl’s plain clothes “thrown on anyhow”, serious demeanour and lack of any worldliness. Lady Dolly, still only thirty-four years old herself, lives a feckless and pleasure-oriented life and does not want to be a mother; in fact, she comes across as being
a Femme Galante, as described by Ouida in her story In a Winter City, with a rich husband who is preoccupied with his business affairs and leaves Dolly to her lover, Lord Jura and her social life. She is anxious to have the girl off her hands by finding her a suitable husband, but Vere resists – she wishes only to live quietly in the country, with her tutor and her books and has no time for her mother’s social circles and for being “perpetually exhibited”. However, following a chance meeting on the beach, Vere’s natural charm and sincerity have captivated the opera singer, Raphael de Correze, who wishes to marry her. Lady Dolly has other ideas – she has set her sights on the aloof European aristocrat, Prince Zouroff of Russia, “seduced” by the aristocrat’s wealth and status and oblivious to warnings about his unpleasant, even cruel temperament. Even her lover, Lord Jura, despises Zouroff, condemning him as a “blackguard” and leaves his lover in disgust, as she prepares for her daughter’s marriage. Could it be that his feelings for Dolly’s daughter are more than sympathy? Vera continues to resist, until her mother reveals something to her that compels her, in great distress and with the heaviest of hearts, to marry Zouroff.
After the wedding, Vere – now Vera – falls into a deep depression. Her husband is at best dismissive, at worst, abusive; only a week after the nuptials, he tells her “I am your master and I can be a bad master.” Later on, he reminds Vera that he bought her and he can do as he likes with her. Her son dies a few hours after he is born; she tries her best to care, about the baby, about her life as a woman of privilege - but is now too emotionally repressed to care. As her marriage continues in a downward spiral, can anything help Vera out of this morass of despair?
This is a genuinely powerful story and brave too, dealing with the darkest aspects of patriarchy in high class circles – domestic abuse, social restrictions, “arranged” marriages. The women in the story – from Vere, to her mother and their female associates, are sharply drawn and honest in their depiction of their flaws and virtues. Vere is saved from being unbelievably virtuous by her dark thoughts and emotional repression; her mother and Dolly’s friend, Lady Stoat, are calculating and selfish. In their individual ways, they are all victims. The male characters are somewhat more stereotypical, in particular Zouroff, but serve an important purpose in highlighting the darker aspects of the subjugation of women in marriages at that time; it is the married adulterers that have the autonomy and no virtuous married women come out of this lightly. Indeed, Vere actually envies prostitutes their freedom and sense of sisterhood. It is clear in this novel to recognise Ouida at her height as a novelist, with a surer style and confident delivery of difficult issues, putting behind her the earlier fudging and verbose narrative. Definitely one of the “must read” novels in this collection.
The first edition’s title page
CONTENTS
VOLUME I.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
VOLUME II.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
VOLUME III.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
“Like moths fretting a garment.” (PSALM)
Le monde aime le vice et hait l’amour; le vice est un bon enfant, un viveur, un drôle, un gourmet; il tient bonne table, et vous invite souvent; l’amour, au contraire, est un pédant, un solitaire, un misanthrope, un va-nu-pieds; il ne vous amuse pas; vous criez vite, “à la lanterne! RIVAREZ.
TO
MY OLD FRIEND ALGERNON BORTHWICK IN MEMORY OF THE DAYS OF “PUCK”
AND AS A SLIGHT TOKEN OF AN UNCHANGED REGARD AND ESTEEM
VOLUME I.
CHAPTER I.
Lady Dolly ought to have been perfectly happy She had everything that can constitute the joys of a woman of her epoch.
She was at Trouville. She had won heaps of money at play She had made a correct book on the races. She had seen her chief rival looking bilious in an unbecoming gown. She had had a letter from her husband to say he was going away to Java or Jupiter or somewhere indefinitely. She wore a costume which had cost a great tailor twenty hours of anxious and continuous reflection. Nothing but baptiste indeed! but baptiste sublimised and apotheosised by niello buttons, old lace, and genius. She had her adorers and slaves grouped about her. She had found her dearest friend out in cheating at cards. She had dined the night before at the Maison Persanne and would dine this night at the Maison Normande. She had been told a state secret by a minister which she knew it was shameful of him to have been coaxed and chaffed into revealing. She had had a new comedy read to her in manuscript-form three months before it would be given in Paris, and had screamed at all its indecencies in the choice company of a Serene Princess and two ambassadresses as they all took their chocolate in their dressing-gowns. Above all, she was at Trouville, having left half a million of debts behind her strewn about in all directions, and standing free as air in gossamer garments on the planks in the summer sunshine. There was a charming blue sea beside her; a balmy fluttering breeze around her, a crowd of the most fashionable sunshades of Europe before her, like a bed of full-blown anemones. She had floated and bobbed and swum and splashed semi-nude, with all the other mermaids à la mode, and had shown that she must still be a pretty woman, pretty even in daylight, or the men would not have looked at her so: and yet with all this she was not enjoying herself.
It was very hard.
The yachts came and went, the sands glittered, the music sounded, men and women in bright-coloured stripes took headers into the tide or pulled themselves about in little canoes; the snowy canvas of the tent shone like a huge white mushroom, and the faces of all the houses were lively with green shutters and awnings brightly striped like the bathers; people, the gayest and best-born people in Europe, laughed and chattered, and made love, and Lady Dolly with them, pacing the deal planks with her pretty high-heeled shoes; but for all that she was wretched.
She was thinking to herself, “What on earth shall I do with her?”
It ruined her morning. It clouded the sunshine. It spoiled her cigarette. It made the waltzes sound like dirges. It made her chief rival look almost good-looking to her. It made a gown combined of parrots’ breasts and passion-flowers that she was going to wear in the afternoon feel green, and yellow, and bilious in her anticipation of it, though it was quite new and a wonder. It made her remember her debts. It made her feel that she had not digested those écrevissses at supper. It made her fancy that her husband might not really go to Java or Jupiter. It was so sudden, so appalling, so bewildering, so endless a question; and Lady Dolly only asked questions, she never answered them or waited for their answers.
After all, what could she do with her? She, a pretty woman and a wonderful flirt, who liked to dance to the very end of the cotillon, and had as many lovers as she had pairs of shoes. What could she do with a daughter just sixteen years old?
“It makes one look so old!” she had said to herself wretchedly, as she had bobbed and danced in the waves. Lady Dolly was not old; she was not quite thirty-four, and she was as pretty as if she were seventeen, perhaps prettier; even when she was not “done up,” and she did not need to do herself up very much just yet, really not much, considering, — well, considering so many things, that she never went to bed till daylight, that she never ate anything digestible, and never drank anything wholesom
e, that she made her waist fifteen inches round, and destroyed her nerves with gambling, chloral, and many other things; considering these, and so many other reasons, besides the one supreme reason that everybody does it, and that you always look a fright if you don’t do it.
The thought of her daughter’s impending arrival made Lady Dolly miserable. Telegrams were such horrible things. Before she had had time to realise the force of the impending catastrophe the electric wires had brought her tidings that the girl was actually on her way across the sea, not to be stayed by any kind of means, and would be there by nightfall. Nightfall at Trouville! When Lady Dolly in the deftest of summer-evening toilettes would be just opening her pretty mouth for her first morsel of salmon and drop of Chablis, with the windows open and the moon rising on the sea, and the card-tables ready set, and the band playing within earshot, and the courtiers all around and at her orders, whether she liked to go out and dance, or stay at home for poker or chemin de fer.
“What in the world shall I do with her, Jack?” she sighed to her chief counsellor.
The chief counsellor opened his lips, answered “Marry her!” then closed them on a big cigar.
“Of course! One always marries girls; how stupid you are,” said Lady Dolly peevishly.
The counsellor smiled grimly, “And then you will be a grandmother,” he said with a cruel relish: he had just paid a bill at a bric-à-brac shop for her and it had left him unamiable.
“I suppose you think that witty,” said Lady Dolly with delicate contempt. “Well, Hélène there is a great-grandmother, and look at her!”
Hélène was a Prussian princess, married to a Russian minister: she was arrayed in white with a tender blending about it of all the blues in creation, from that of a summer sky to that of a lapis lazuli ring; she had a quantity of fair curls, a broad hat wreathed with white lilac and convolvulus, a complexion of cream, teeth of pearl, a luminous and innocent smile; she was talking at the top of her voice and munching chocolate; she had a circle of young men round her; she looked, perhaps, if you wished to be ill-natured, eight-and-twenty. Yet a greatgrandmother she was, and the “Almanach de Gotha,” said so, and alas! said her age.