he cared immensely. but not to come behind her in generosity and comprehension he owned that he had no right to complain because this remarkable woman [pg 357] loved the world better than one man, even if that man happened to be himself; in fact, while his heart revolted against it, his pure intellect admired her attitude, for the world is a greater thing that any man in it.
now and again letters reached him across seas and continents, letters with strange, outlandish postmarks, wonderful, graphic, triumphant letters, which showed him plainly, though unintentionally, that frida tancred was still on the winning side, that she could do without him. across seas and continents he watched her career with a sad and cynical sympathy, as a man naturally watches a woman who triumphs where he has failed.
meanwhile he lived on her letters, long and expansive, or short and to the point. they proved a stimulating diet; they had so much of her full-blooded personality in them. his own grew shorter and shorter and more and more to the point, till at last he wrote: "delightful. only tell me when you've had enough of it."
the answer to that came bounding, as it were, from the other side of the atlantic. "not yet. i shall never have enough of it. i've only been 'seeing the world,' only traveling from point to point along an infinite surface, and there's no satisfaction in that. i'm not tired—not tired, maurice, remember. i don't want to stop. i want to strike down—deeper. it doesn't matter what point you take, so long as you strike down. just at present i'm off for india."
her postscript said: "if you ever hear of me doing queer things, remember they were all in the day's pleasure or the day's work."
he remembered—that frida was only thirty-five; which was young for frida. and he said to himself, [pg 358] "it is all very well now, but what will she be in another three years? i will give her another three years. by that time she will be tired of the world, or the world will be tired of her, which comes to the same thing, and her heart (for she has a heart) will find her out. with frida you never know. i will wait and see."
he waited. the three years passed; he saw nothing and he had ceased to hear. he concluded that frida still loved the world.
as if in a passionate resentment against the rival that had fascinated and won her, he had left off wandering and had buried himself in an obscure cornish village, where he gave himself up to his work. he was not quite so successful as he had been; on the other hand, he cared less than ever about success. it was the end of the century, a century that had been forced by the contemplation of such realities as plague and famine, and war and rumors of war, to forego and forget the melancholy art of its decadence. and from other causes durant had fallen into a state of extreme dissatisfaction with himself. five years ago he had found himself, as they said; found himself out, he said, when at the age of thirty-three he condemned himself and his art as more decadent than the decadents. frida tancred had shown insight when she reproached him with his inability to see anything that he could not paint, or to paint anything that he could not see. she had shown him the vanity of the sensuous aspect, she had forced him to love the intangible, the unseen, till he had almost come to believe that it was all he loved. the woman lived for him in her divine form, as his imagination had first seen her, as an idea, an eternal dream. it was as if he could see nothing and paint nothing else. and when a clever versatile artist of durant's type flings himself away in a mad struggle to [pg 359] give form and color to the invisible it is not to be wondered at if the world is puzzled and fights shy of him.
meanwhile the critic who had a right to his opinion said of him: "now that he has thrown the reins on the back of his imagination it will carry him far. ten years hence the world will realize that maurice durant is a great painter. but in those ten years he must work hard."
as if to show how little he cared he left off working hard and bestirred himself for news of frida tancred.
it came at last—from poona of all places. frida wrote in high spirits and at length. "i like writing to you," she said, "because i can say what i like, because you always know—you've been there. where? oh, everywhere where i've been, except whithorn-in-arden. and, now i come to think of it, you were there, too—for a fortnight" ("three weeks—three long weeks—and for your sake, frida!"). "no, i'm not 'coming home.' why must i 'stop somewhere'? i can't stop, didn't i tell you? i can only strike down where it's deepest.
"it seems to be pretty deep here. if i could only understand these people—but what european can? they mean something we don't mean.... you should see my munshi, a terrifically high-caste fellow with a diminutive figure and unfathomable eyes. i am trying to learn sanscrit. he is trying to teach me. we sit opposite each other at a bamboo table with an immense sanscrit dictionary between us. he smiles in his sleeve at my attempt to bridge the gulf between europe and asia with a sanscrit dictionary. he is always smiling at me in his sleeve. i know it, and he knows that i know it, which endears me to him very much.
"my munshi is a bottomless well of western wisdom. [pg 360] he takes anything that europe can give him—art, literature, science, metaphysics. he absorbs it all, and heaven only knows what he is going to do with it, or it with him. he swallows it as a juggler swallows fire, and with about as much serious intention of assimilating it. that smile of his intimates that the things that matter to us do not matter to him; that nothing matters—neither will nor conscience, nor pain nor passion, nor man nor woman, nor life nor death. there's an attitude for you!
"that attitude is my munshi, and my munshi is asia."
he smiled. he had seen frida in many attitudes, frida in love with nothing, frida in love with a person, frida in love with a thing. here was frida in love with an idea. it was just like her. she was seeing asia from the asiatic point of view.
"meanwhile," she went on, "there's a greater gulf fixed between my munshi and my 'rickshaw coolie than there is between me and my 'rickshaw coolie, or my munshi and me."
he wondered if she meant to remind him that there was a still greater gulf between him and her.
"to-morrow i and two coolies are going up to gujerat where the famine is. i inclose a snapshot of the party. my effacement by the coolie is merely a photographic freak—his grin is the broadest part of him, poor fellow. in the autumn i go down to bombay. i am deep in bacteriology, which reminds me of father and the first time i met you, and your bad puns."
the snapshot was an unflattering likeness of frida in a 'rickshaw. the foreground was filled by the figure of the grinning coolie. behind him frida's face showed dim and small and far-off; she was smiling with the sun in her eyes. [pg 361]
such as it was he treasured it as his dearest possession. he had been painting pictures all his life, but he had none of frida.
silence again. "in the autumn," she had said, "i go down to bombay." but the autumn passed and there was no news of her. durant provided himself with an indian outfit. he was going out to look for her; he was ready to go to the ends of the world to find her. "the day after to-morrow," he said, "i shall start for bombay."
that night he dreamed of her; or, rather, not of her, but of a coolie who stood before the door of a wayside bungalow, and held in his hands shafts that were not the shafts of a 'rickshaw. and the coolie's face was all one broad grin.
two days later—the day he was to have sailed for india—hurriedly skimming a column of the times he came upon the news he was looking for.
"it is with much regret that we record the death from bubonic plague of miss frida tancred. it was quite recently that this lady gave up a large part of her fortune to founding the bacteriological laboratory in bombay, more recently still that she distinguished herself by her services to the famine-stricken population of gujerat. miss tancred has added to the immense debt our indian empire owes her by this final example of heroic self-sacrifice. it is said that she contracted plague while nursing one of her coolies, who has since recovered."
he bowed his head.
it was not grief he felt, but a savage exultant joy. the world could have no more of her. she was his, in some inviolable, irrevocable way. he knew. he understood her now, clearly and completely.
his joy deepened to a passionless spiritual content; [pg 362] as if in the fulness of his knowledge he had embraced the immortal part of her.
why had he not understood her long ago? she had never changed. as he had first seen her, playing cards with her father in the drawing-room at coton manor, as he had last seen her, pacing the deck of the windward, intoxicated with her freedom, as he saw her now, bending her head over the plague-poisoned body of the coolie, she was the same tender, resolute, passionate frida, who ruined her life and glorified it, laid it down and took it up again at her will. and as he saw—would always see her, in this new light of her death, she was smiling, as if she defied him to see anything pathetic in it.
she had loved the world, the mystic maddening beauty of it, the divine darkness and glory of it. she had taken to her heart the rapture and the pain of it. she had stretched out her hands to the unexplored, to the unchanged and changing, the many-faced, incomprehensible, finite, infinite whole.
and she had flung it all up; for what?
for a 'rickshaw coolie's life?—or for something—yet—beyond?
