Zuleika Dobson: An Oxford Love Story

I said that I was Clio’s servant.  And I felt, when I said it, that you looked at me dubiously, and murmured among yourselves.

Not that you doubted I was somewhat connected with Clio’s household.  The lady after whom I have named this book is alive, and well known to some of you personally, to all of you by repute.  Nor had you finished my first page before you guessed my theme to be that episode in her life which caused so great a sensation among the newspaper-reading public a few years ago. (It all seems but yesterday, does it not?  They are still vivid to us, those head-lines.  We have hardly yet ceased to be edified by the morals pointed in those leading articles.) And yet very soon you found me behaving just like any novelist—­reporting the exact words that passed between the protagonists at private interviews —­aye, and the exact thoughts and emotions that were in their breasts.  Little wonder that you wondered!  Let me make things clear to you.

I have my mistress’ leave to do this.  At first (for reasons which you will presently understand) she demurred.  But I pointed out to her that I had been placed in a false position, and that until this were rectified neither she nor I could reap the credit due to us.

Know, then, that for a long time Clio had been thoroughly discontented.  She was happy enough, she says, when first she left the home of Pierus, her father, to become a Muse.  On those humble beginnings she looks back with affection.  She kept only one servant, Herodotus.  The romantic element in him appealed to her.  He died, and she had about her a large staff of able and faithful servants, whose way of doing their work irritated and depressed her.  To them, apparently, life consisted of nothing but politics and military operations—­things to which she, being a woman, was somewhat indifferent.  She was jealous of Melpomene.  It seemed to her that her own servants worked from without at a mass of dry details which might as well be forgotten.  Melpomene’s worked on material that was eternally interesting—­the souls of men and women; and not from without, either; but rather casting themselves into those souls and showing to us the essence of them.  She was particularly struck by a remark of Aristotle’s, that tragedy was “more philosophic” than history, inasmuch as it concerned itself with what might be, while history was concerned with merely what had been.  This summed up for her what she had often felt, but could not have exactly formulated.  She saw that the department over which she presided was at best an inferior one.  She saw that just what she had liked—­and rightly liked —­in poor dear Herodotus was just what prevented him from being a good historian.  It was wrong to mix up facts and fancies.  But why should her present servants deal with only one little special set of the variegated facts of life?  It was not in her power to interfere.  The Nine, by the terms of the charter that Zeus had granted to them, were bound to leave their servants an absolutely free hand.  But Clio could at least refrain from reading the works which, by a legal fiction, she was supposed to inspire.  Once or twice in the course of a century, she would glance into this or that new history book, only to lay it down with a shrug of her shoulders.  Some of the mediaeval chronicles she rather liked.  But when, one day, Pallas asked her what she thought of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” her only answer was “ostis toia echei en edone echei en edone toia” (For people who like that kind of thing, that is the kind of thing they like).  This she did let slip.  Generally, throughout all the centuries, she kept up a pretence of thinking history the greatest of all the arts.  She always held her head high among her Sisters.  It was only on the sly that she was an omnivorous reader of dramatic and lyric poetry.  She watched with keen interest the earliest developments of the prose romance in southern Europe; and after the publication of “Clarissa Harlowe” she spent practically all her time in reading novels.  It was not until the Spring of the year 1863 that an entirely new element forced itself into her peaceful life.  Zeus fell in love with her.

To us, for whom so quickly “time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,” there is something strange, even a trifle ludicrous, in the thought that Zeus, after all these years, is still at the beck and call of his passions.  And it seems anyhow lamentable that he has not yet gained self-confidence enough to appear in his own person to the lady of his choice, and is still at pains to transform himself into whatever object he deems likeliest to please her.  To Clio, suddenly from Olympus, he flashed down in the semblance of Kinglake’s “Invasion of the Crimea” (four vols., large 8vo, half-calf).  She saw through his disguise immediately, and, with great courage and independence, bade him begone.  Rebuffed, he was not deflected.  Indeed it would seem that Clio’s high spirit did but sharpen his desire.  Hardly a day passed but he appeared in what he hoped would be the irresistible form—­a recently discovered fragment of Polybius, an advance copy of the forthcoming issue of “The Historical Review,” the note-book of Professor Carl Voertschlaffen . . .  One day, all-prying Hermes told him of Clio’s secret addiction to novel-reading.  Thenceforth, year in, year out, it was in the form of fiction that Zeus wooed her.  The sole result was that she grew sick of the sight of novels, and found a perverse pleasure in reading history.  These dry details of what had actually happened were a relief, she told herself, from all that make-believe.

One Sunday afternoon—­the day before that very Monday on which this narrative opens—­it occurred to her how fine a thing history might be if the historian had the novelist’s privileges.  Suppose he could be present at every scene which he was going to describe, a presence invisible and inevitable, and equipped with power to see into the breasts of all the persons whose actions he set himself to watch . . .

While the Muse was thus musing, Zeus (disguised as Miss Annie S. Swan’s latest work) paid his usual visit.  She let her eyes rest on him.  Hither and thither she divided her swift mind, and addressed him in winged words.  “Zeus, father of gods and men, cloud-compeller, what wouldst thou of me?  But first will I say what I would of thee”; and she besought him to extend to the writers of history such privileges as are granted to novelists.  His whole manner had changed.  He listened to her with the massive gravity of a ruler who never yet has allowed private influence to obscure his judgment.  He was silent for some time after her appeal.  Then, in a voice of thunder, which made quake the slopes of Parnassus, he gave his answer.  He admitted the disabilities under which historians laboured.  But the novelists—­were they not equally handicapped?  They had to treat of persons who never existed, events which never were.  Only by the privilege of being in the thick of those events, and in the very bowels of those persons, could they hope to hold the reader’s attention.  If similar privileges were granted to the historian, the demand for novels would cease forthwith, and many thousand of hard-working, deserving men and women would be thrown out of employment.  In fact, Clio had asked him an impossible favour.  But he might—­he said he conceivably might—­be induced to let her have her way just once.  In that event, all she would have to do was to keep her eye on the world’s surface, and then, so soon as she had reason to think that somewhere was impending something of great import, to choose an historian.  On him, straightway, Zeus would confer invisibility, inevitability, and psychic penetration, with a flawless memory thrown in.

On the following afternoon, Clio’s roving eye saw Zuleika stepping from the Paddington platform into the Oxford train.  A few moments later I found myself suddenly on Parnassus.  In hurried words Clio told me how I came there, and what I had to do.  She said she had selected me because she knew me to be honest, sober, and capable, and no stranger to Oxford.  Another moment, and I was at the throne of Zeus.  With a majesty of gesture which I shall never forget, he stretched his hand over me, and I was indued with the promised gifts.  And then, lo!  I was on the platform of Oxford station.  The train was not due for another hour.  But the time passed pleasantly enough.

It was fun to float all unseen, to float all unhampered by any corporeal nonsense, up and down the platform.  It was fun to watch the inmost thoughts of the station-master, of the porters, of the young person at the buffet.  But of course I did not let the holiday-mood master me.  I realised the seriousness of my mission.  I must concentrate myself on the matter in hand:  Miss Dobson’s visit.  What was going to happen?  Prescience was no part of my outfit.  From what I knew about Miss Dobson, I deduced that she would be a great success.  That was all.  Had I had the instinct that was given to those Emperors in stone, and even to the dog Corker, I should have begged Clio to send in my stead some man of stronger nerve.  She had charged me to be calmly vigilant, scrupulously fair.  I could have been neither, had I from the outset foreseen all.  Only because the immediate future was broken to me by degrees, first as a set of possibilities, then as a set of probabilities that yet might not come off, was I able to fulfil the trust imposed in me.  Even so, it was hard.  I had always accepted the doctrine that to understand all is to forgive all.  Thanks to Zeus, I understood all about Miss Dobson, and yet there were moments when she repelled me—­moments when I wished to see her neither from without nor from within.  So soon as the Duke of Dorset met her on the Monday night, I felt I was in duty bound to keep him under constant surveillance.  Yet there were moments when I was so sorry for him that I deemed myself a brute for shadowing him.

Ever since I can remember, I have been beset by a recurring doubt as to whether I be or be not quite a gentleman.  I have never attempted to define that term:  I have but feverishly wondered whether in its usual acceptation (whatever that is) it be strictly applicable to myself.  Many people hold that the qualities connoted by it are primarily moral—­a kind heart, honourable conduct, and so forth.  On Clio’s mission, I found honour and kindness tugging me in precisely opposite directions.  In so far as honour tugged the harder, was I the more or the less gentlemanly?  But the test is not a fair one.  Curiosity tugged on the side of honour.  This goes to prove me a cad?  Oh, set against it the fact that I did at one point betray Clio’s trust.  When Miss Dobson had done the deed recorded at the close of the foregoing chapter, I gave the Duke of Dorset an hour’s grace.

I could have done no less.  In the lives of most of us is some one thing that we would not after the lapse of how many years soever confess to our most understanding friend; the thing that does not bear thinking of; the one thing to be forgotten; the unforgettable thing.  Not the commission of some great crime:  this can be atoned for by great penances; and the very enormity of it has a dark grandeur.  Maybe, some little deadly act of meanness, some hole-and-corner treachery?  But what a man has once willed to do, his will helps him to forget.  The unforgettable thing in his life is usually not a thing he has done or left undone, but a thing done to him—­some insolence or cruelty for which he could not, or did not, avenge himself.  This it is that often comes back to him, years after, in his dreams, and thrusts itself suddenly into his waking thoughts, so that he clenches his hands, and shakes his head, and hums a tune loudly—­anything to beat it off.  In the very hour when first befell him that odious humiliation, would you have spied on him?  I gave the Duke of Dorset an hour’s grace.

What were his thoughts in that interval, what words, if any, he uttered to the night, never will be known.  For this, Clio has abused me in language less befitting a Muse than a fishwife.  I do not care.  I would rather be chidden by Clio than by my own sense of delicacy, any day.