Too Old for Dolls. Anthony M. Ludovici
sad. If occasionally she was moved by a little bitterness about her brief existence, it was rather because the kind of things with which her outstretched hand had been filled were so dismally unsatisfying. She counted the men she had been compelled to refuse. They numbered only two, but there were at least three others whom she had never allowed to get as far as a proposal.
Again for the hundredth time she passed them in review. Had she acted wisely? Were they so utterly impossible? Now, at the age of twenty-five, her worldly wisdom answered, "Nay," but deep down in her breast a less cultivated and more vigorous impulse answered most emphatically "Yea."
From early girlhood onwards Cleopatra had cherished very definite ideas about the man of her taste. In this she was by no means exceptional. But perhaps the circumstances that she had abided more steadfastly than most by the pattern her imagination had originally limned distinguished her from her more fickle sisters. The fault she found with the modern world was that it did not offer you man whole or complete, but only in fragments. To be quite plain, it offered you, from the athlete to the poet, a series of isolated manly characteristics, but it did not give you all the manly characteristics in one being at once, which constituted the all-round man of her dreams.
Whether it was that man had specialised too much of recent years, or what the reason might be, Cleopatra could not tell. But whenever she passed the men of her acquaintance in review, she always arrived at the same conclusion, that each represented only a fragment of what the whole man of her ideal was, and doubtless of what man himself had once been. It was as if she had been deposited among the ruins of a once beautiful cathedral. Fine pieces of screen architecture, exquisite portions of the capitals, delightful gargoyles, lay in profusion all around: but the whole building could be reconstructed in all its majesty, only by an effort of the imagination. This effort of the imagination she had made as a girl of seventeen.
To-day it seemed to her, you might choose the cleanly-bred, healthy, upright, jaunty athlete, and sigh in vain for a companion who could either sob or rejoice with you over the glory of a sonnet, a picture, or a statue; or else you might choose the slightly effete and partly neurotic poet or artist, and languish unconsoled, away from the joys of the fine, clean, stubbornly healthy body. The kind of fire that led to elopements, to wild and clandestine love-making, could now, with too few exceptions, be found only among ne'er-do-wells, foreign adventurers, cut-throats or knaves; while the stability that promised security for the future and for the family, seemed generally to present itself with a sort of tiresome starchiness of body and jejuneness of mind, that thought it childish to abandon itself to any emotion.
She was deep enough, primitively female enough to demand and expect a certain savour of wickedness in him who wooed her. But she was more accustomed to perceive the outward signs of this coveted quality in the waiters at the Carlton, or the Savoy, and among dust-men, coal-heavers and butcher-boys, than in the men of her mother's circle.
Had man been tamed out of all recognition? Or was her instinct wrong, and was it perverse to sigh for fire, wickedness, stability, cultivation, and healthy athleticism—all in the same man? She had read of Alcibiades, of men who were not fragmentary. Could such a man be born nowadays, and if born could he survive? Certainly the men she had refused had not been of this stamp.
It was miserably disappointing, and with it all there was her mother's untiring insistence upon the urgency of getting married. It was more than disappointing: it was a genuine grievance, but a grievance of a kind which most young women nowadays bury unredressed, and the former existence of which in their lives they reveal only by a tired, wasted look in their faces, which leads their husbands to consider them—"delicate."
With all her fastidiousness in regard to the man of her desire, however, Cleopatra was not to be confused with the romantic idealist who craves for that which never has been and never can be possible on earth. To have misunderstood her to this extent would have been a gross injustice. She had built up her picture of her mate, not with the help of feverish and morbid fancy, but guided only by the hints of an exceptionally healthy body. Modest to a degree to which only great reserves of passion can attain, it was to her a dire need that her mate should have fire, because half-consciously she divined that only fire purified and sanctified the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Half-heartedness here, or the lack of a great passionate momentum, that carried everything before it, spelt to her something distinctly discomfiting, not to say indecent. And in this, far from being a romantic idealist, she was entirely right and realistic. This explains why her taste inclined more resolutely to the adventurous idea of love, to the impromptu element, to the wild ardour of first embraces that must perforce flee from the sight of fellow creatures, than to the kind of graduated passion which begins with conversation, proceeds to a public engagement with staring people all about you, and ends with the still more measured tempo of a Church wedding. All the waiting, all the temporising, all the toadlike deliberation that these various slow steps involved, ran counter to her deepest feeling, that her love must be a matter of touch and go, a sudden kindling of two fires, the burning not of green wood but of a volcano.
But where, these days, could she find the partner who was prepared, and above all equipped, to play his part to hers? This was her grievance. And again in justice to her it must be acknowledged that it was a genuine one.
The young man whom her mother was at present "running" for her, was a creature at whom, as a girl of eighteen, she would not have looked a second time. But how much more modest in its demands had her taste not become as she had advanced in years! How much more docile and unassuming! She saw other girls marrying men not unlike Denis Malster; so why couldn't she? She concluded that it must evidently be the fate of modern women to accept the third-rate, the third-best—in fact disillusionment as a law of their beings; and having no one to support her in her soundest instincts, she began rather to doubt the validity of their claim, than to turn resolutely away from marriage altogether.
And now there was to be a complication in her trouble. Leonetta was returning home for good—Leonetta, the child eight years her junior, Leonetta was now as fresh, as attractive, and as blooming, as she herself had been when she was just seventeen, and whom, from habit, she still called "Baby."
Quietly she had waited and waited for the man of her heart, and been able to do this without the additional annoyance of competition to disturb or excite her. Peacefully these seven years she had lain like a watcher on the shore, scanning the horizon with her glass, without even a nudge of the elbow from her younger sister. And now she was no longer to be alone. A distracting, possibly an utterly defeating element was going to be introduced into her peaceful though anxious existence, and she shuddered unmistakably at the thought.
As yet she had harboured no conscious hostility towards her junior, merely a desire to keep her as long as possible at a distance, in order that the one relationship of which she had the deepest dread—that of competitors in the same field—might be warded off indefinitely, or, better still, never experienced between them.
She did not yet fear Baby. The disparity in their ages seemed too great and too obvious for that: but in recollecting certain incidents in their childhood, and one or two things about Baby's appearance and behaviour during the last two years, Cleopatra could not entirely free herself from a perfectly definite feeling of vexation in regard to her sister. Baby had not troubled her at all as an infant. It was as a child of eight, when Cleopatra was just sixteen, that her sister had first revealed disquieting proclivities. She had, for instance, a command of blandishments which to her elder were a closed book. By means of wiles and cajoleries utterly inimitable, she could extract money and presents from adults from whom the haughty Cleopatra would not even have solicited a kiss. In five years Baby had received more boxes of chocolates and more dolls than her sister had received during her whole lifetime. This was not, however, because the younger child was in any respect more beautiful than the elder, but rather owing to the younger's extraordinary gift for securing what she wanted by any means that might come to hand.
For a long while Cleopatra had looked on, wistfully it is true, but not enviously at her sister's astonishingly successful career: for was not Baby only a child after all? And, from the age of eleven to fourteen, Leonetta had been so outrageously gawky and unattractive, no matter how beautifully she happened to be clad, that Cleopatra's feelings of uneasiness about her sister were