Lena Wrace
By MAY SINCLAIR
(From The Dial)
1921, 1922
She arranged herself there, on that divan, and I knew she'd come to tell me all about it. It was wonderful, how, at forty-seven, she could still give that effect of triumph and excess, of something rich and ruinous and beautiful spread out on the brocades. The attitude showed me that her affair with Norman Hippisley was prospering; otherwise she couldn't have afforded the extravagance of it.
"I know what you want," I said. "You want me to congratulate you."
"Yes. I do."
"I congratulate you on your courage."
"Oh, you don't like him," she said placably.
"No, I don't like him at all."
"He likes you," she said. "He thinks no end of your painting."
"I'm not denying he's a judge of painting. I'm not even denying he can paint a little himself."
"Better than you, Roly."
"If you allow for the singular, obscene ugliness of his imagination, yes."
"It's beautiful enough when he gets it into paint," she said. "He makes beauty. His own beauty."
"Oh, very much his own."
"Well, you just go on imitating other people's--God's or somebody's."
She continued with her air of perfect reasonableness. "I know he isn't good-looking. Not half so good-looking as you are. But I like him. I like his slender little body and his clever, faded face. There's a quality about him, a distinction. And look at his eyes. Your mind doesn't come rushing and blazing out of your eyes, my dear."
"No. No. I'm afraid it doesn't rush. And for all the blaze--"
"Well, that's what I'm in love with, the rush, Roly, and the blaze. And I'm in love, for the first time" (she underlined it) "with a man."
"Come," I said, "come."
"Oh, I know. I know you're thinking of Lawson Young and Dickey Harper."
I was.
"Well, but they don't count. I wasn't in love with Lawson. It was his career. If he hadn't been a Cabinet Minister; if he hadn't been so desperately gone on me; if he hadn't said it all depended on me--"
"Yes," I said. "I can see how it would go to your head."
"It didn't. It went to my heart." She was quite serious and solemn. "I held him in my hands, Roly. And he held England. I couldn't let him drop, could I? I had to think of England."
It was wonderful--Lena Wrace thinking that she thought of England.
I said "Of course. But for your political foresight and your virtuous action we should never have had Tariff Reform."
"We should never have had anything," she said. "And look at him now. Look how he's crumpled up since he left me. It's pitiful."
"It is. I'm afraid Mrs. Withers doesn't care about Tariff Reform."
"Poor thing. No. Don't imagine I'm jealous of her, Roly. She hasn't got him. I mean she hasn't got what I had."
"All the same he left you. And you weren't ecstatically happy with him the last year or two."
"I daresay I'd have done better to have married you, if that's what you mean."
It wasn't what I meant. But she'd always entertained the illusion that she could marry me any minute if she wanted to; and I hadn't the heart to take it from her since it seemed to console her for the way, the really very infamous way, he had left her.
So I said, "Much better."
"It would have been so nice, so safe," she said. "But I never played for safety." Then she made one of her quick turns.
"Frances Archdale ought to marry you. Why doesn't she?"
"How should I know? Frances's reasons would be exquisite. I suppose I didn't appeal to her sense of fitness."
"Sense of fiddlesticks. She just hasn't got any temperament, that girl."
"Any temperament for me, you mean."
"I mean pure cussedness," said Lena.
"Perhaps. But, you see, if I were unfortunate enough she probably would marry me. If I lost my eyesight or a leg or an arm, if I couldn't sell any more pictures--"
"If you can understand Frances, you can understand me. That's how I felt about Dickey. I wasn't in love with him. I was sorry for him. I knew he'd go to pieces if I wasn't there to keep him together. Perhaps it's the maternal instinct."
"Perhaps," I said. Lena's reasons for her behaviour amused me; they were never exquisite, like Frances's, but she was anxious that you should think they were.
"So you see," she said, "they don't count, and Norry really is the first."
I reflected that he would be also, probably, the last. She had, no doubt, to make the most of him. But it was preposterous that she should waste so much good passion; preposterous that she should imagine for one moment she could keep the fellow. I had to warn her.
"Of course, if you care to take the risk of him--" I said. "He won't stick to you, Lena." "Why shouldn't he?"
I couldn't tell her. I couldn't say, "Because you're thirteen ears older than he is." That would have been cruel. And it would have been absurd, too, when she could so easily look not a year older than his desiccated thirty-four.
It only took a little success like this, her actual triumph in securing him.
So I said, "Because it isn't in him. He's a bounder and a rotter." Which was true.
"Not a bounder, Roly dear. His father's Sir Gilbert Hippisley. Hippisleys of Leicestershire."
"A moral bounder, Lena. A slimy eel. Slips and wriggles out of things. You'll never hold him. You're not his first affair, you know."
"I don't care," she said, "as long as I'm his last."
I could only stand and stare at that; her monstrous assumption of his fidelity. Why, he couldn't even be faithful to one art. He wrote as well as he painted, and he acted as well as he wrote, and he was never really happy with a talent till he had debauched it.
"The others," she said, "don't bother me a bit. He's slipped and wriggled out of their clutches, if you like.... Yet there was something about all of them. Distinguished. That's it. He's so awfully fine and fastidious about the women he takes up with. It flatters you, makes you feel so sure of yourself. You know he wouldn't take up with you if you weren't fine and fastidious, too--one of his great ladies.... You think I'm a snob, Roly?"
"I think you don't mind coming after Lady Willersey."
"Well," she said, "if you have to come after somebody--"
"True." I asked her if she was giving me her reasons.
"Yes, if you want them. I don't. I'm content to love out of all reason."
And she did. She loved extravagantly, unintelligibly, out of all reason; yet irrefutably. To the end. There's a sort of reason in that, isn't there? She had the sad logic of her passions.
She got up and gathered herself together in her sombre, violent beauty and in its glittering sheath, her red fox skins, all her savage splendour, leaving a scent of crushed orris root in the warmth of her lair.
Well, she managed to hold him, tight, for a year, fairly intact. I can't for the life of me imagine how she could have cared for the fellow, with his face all dried and frayed with make-up. There was something lithe and sinuous about him that may, of course,