The Red Book Magazine/Volume 44/Number 5/The Legend of Isolda

By

KNEW Isolda when she was very little; we used to play together as children, and now it is somehow funny to think that we are both in the middle years of life and have children who are men and mothers. I don’t know why I say “funny,” for it is not at all funny really; but in this English language one gets into the slipshod habit of using inexact words. I would like to say it was tragic, but that is a heavy word to say, although an easy word to think. But tragic was the word that came into my mind the other day while my daughter and Isolda’s boy were being married.

I suppose it was wrong of me not to be glad, not to be rejoicing; for never was there such a clean, handsome pair of young people to light a father’s eyes; but all through the wedding-ceremony I kept seeing the shadow of Isolda’s youth being wedded to the shadow of my youth; I heard the vain hopes of my life whispering like an invisible choir in the hush of the church, and there was a moment when I could scarcely support the burden of my regret. It was selfish of me, but for pity’s sake, let us be truthful now and then; let us admit that we are all selfish in our hearts, we who want things frightfully. Of course, there are people who do not want things frightfully; but they do not matter; but we others—our hearts are pirates, let our faces be never so gentle and meek. What I am trying to say is that once upon a time I was mad with love for Isolda, but she would not marry me because she did not love me. That is the history of my life.

This is Isolda’s tale, but I must squeeze myself into it in just a small way, an intrusion you will pardon in one who has been so utterly kept outside her life. It was I, after all, who first called her Isolda. Her name, if you please, was Maud—imagine it, “Maud,” a name that is somehow as red as a pillar-box!—and I can remember exactly how it was that I came to call her Isolda, and, after me, the world. I must have been a precocious sort of boy, I suppose, though I can’t remember what good precocity ever did me, for I was not more than seven or eight years old when I was reading in a tattered book the ancient tale of Tristan and Isolda, and the tale fired my little mind like a flame, maybe in the same way that Shelley’s poetry once fired the boy George Moore in County Mayo, so that when my playmate came running into our garden with her golden hair as mad as a golden wind, I cried out, “Isolda, Isolda!” That is how she came to be called Isolda, and now to think that a lovesick boy gave the name to a legend of loveliness so rare that mayhap it will endure for centuries!

For we are a faithful race, we English, faithful to the memory of our clowns, our conquerors, our courtesans, our queens. Of course one can never tell what will or will not endure in this world—I have no patience with people who lay down the law about such things; but who will dare risk a vow that the fame of Isolda’s beauty will not outlast the stone monuments of the kings and captains that prance with idiotic dignity about the streets and squares of London? Yes, yes, of course, I am talking nonsense; but really those statues are very terrible and must surely be pulled down by the first generation that has any taste.

It has always seemed to me that there is a latent genius for admiration and adoration in human beings that needs but a complete moment of revelation to be called out of them and to last so long as they live. Their imaginations are somehow ravished, and they became slaves to liking some one. Naturally that happens very seldom, maybe once in a generation or two, but when it has happened, you cannot reason with it. It happened to Isolda

She was eighteen years old when she first went on the stage in a play at the Haymarket Theater; and at this moment, twenty-five years later, I can hear the hush that was on us all as the curtain went down. It was not a great play, or even a good play; and Isolda’s part was one of those spuriously tragic fey parts that any accomplished dramatist can put together for a beautiful girl. But it was, you see, just a case of falling in love. The only explanation I can give for the way people went raving mad about her that night, was that they, as representatives of the world, felt it to be a privilege to fall in love with the girl Isolda. I went round to her dressing-room afterward, and I found her crying, and I cried too. It was so great and real, Isolda’s success, and with it went the thrill of the way people fell in love with her and stayed in love with her.

People were never mean about Isolda, as people often are mean about very beautiful women. For instance, there will always be some one who says about a lovely woman: “But she is so cold!” or “She is lovely, but she has no sex attraction whatsoever!” or “Of course she is wonderful to look at, but she simply hasn’t a word to say.” I am quite bewildered at the way people go on about the few really lovely women we have, and I dare swear that by the way they talk, anyone would think that a woman must be on the plain side before she can be called attractive, just as there is a superstition in intellectual circles that a well-dressed man cannot really be worth anything mentally. There is nowadays a great deal too much fuss made about plain women and grubby men—that is what it is; and oh, how plainness bores me, let it cover never so large a heart of gold! There must be a great many people who think with me in that sinful thought, but it is true that cowardice covers a multitude of sins.

The legend of Isolda began from that night at the Haymarket Theater, and it grew with the years, and it became a part of England. Whether or not she was a great actress I do not know—I am not sure, and I will not argue about it; for again we come to the ungenerous thought in people, the almost unconsciously ungenerous thought which makes it more difficult for them to accept a lovely woman than a plainish woman, as a great actress. At the present time I hear the trumpets of the critics proclaiming two women to be great actresses, and this for no other reason I can see than that they are both ugly. But Isolda did good to people with her art—that is how it was. She gave, gave, gave—and people sighed, “Isn’t she beautiful!” whereas they should have said, “Isn’t she generous!”

And all the time, she did not like the stage; she detested the stage, the life in public, for she was always a quiet, private woman. When she was a child, she preferred her old dolls, and as she grew up, she preferred her old friends; she did not at all enjoy the din of new acquaintances. But she was poor, and when she was nineteen, she married a poor man, and she had two sons, David and James, and the care of her two sons became Isolda’s life. It is David and James who are the masters of this tale, for they were the masters of their mother’s life. Her husband, of course, was Rupert Waterlow the playwright, whose death at the age of five-and-twenty came as such a shock to people, for young Waterlow might have done great things; that is what intelligent people said, and Heaven knows, we can do with a little new greatness on the writing side of the English theater; we cannot forever go on reviving Shaw and Barrie and “Diplomacy.” Isolda was twenty-three when Waterlow died. And one day a few months later as she sat on the nursery floor playing with David and James, she suddenly looked at me and said: “I loved Rupert, but I love David and James more. I loved Rupert very much, but I love David and James completely. David and James are all I want. I know that quite certainly. I do not need anyone or anything else. .... Of course, one must have money.”

I said: “I know. But why are you telling me all this now?”

She made a tower of bricks for David, and James knocked it down, and there was a sensation. Presently she said: “Because, dear, I cannot bear you to go on hoping. You must go away and make your own life; I have nothing to give you but an old friendship. You can’t live on that, can you? Dear, you must go away and make your own life. You must have children too. This will always be my life, as you see me now—David and James and me. I am so proud in these children; that is how it is; and I was obviously born to be a matron. I am so happy, you see, so complete, somehow. To be so happy is a sin, I am sure; but I can’t help it.”

“Isolda,” I said, “you are only twenty-three. You will love again.”

“What, me!” she cried.

“Of course,” I said.

“You are threatening me,” she smiled, “with a term to my happiness?”

I repeated: “You will love again, Isolda. I am quite certain of that.”

And I remember how she said in a voice very remote: “Oh, dear, I hope not. I do hope not. I shall try not to, if that does any good.”

“It doesn’t,” I said.

“But we are different, you and I,” she smiled; but I was in a serious vein, and I said: “We are all of us different, yet we are all of us the same, in some ways; for we are governed by the same laws of the mind and body.”

“Oh, pouf to your laws of mind and body! What is all this mind and body talk nowadays! David and James, will you promise me that when you grow up, you will not talk such nonsense as this godfather of yours?” And she said: “Charles, don’t forget that I am very strong, very sensible, very practical. Surely you know me well enough not to judge of my character by my face, not to be beguiled by my face?”

“But I am in love with you!”

“A truce to love for this afternoon! Bother love! Oh, dear! Let us, instead, go on talking about my face. My face is beautiful.”

“Copy-cat! That is my remark.”

“Boy, do be serious! Listen! It is absurd of my face to be beautiful; it is absurd of me to have this particular sort of face, this perfect nose, these soft great eyes, these coral lips, this samite-clear complexion. My figure, of course, could be better, but it could also be worse, considering that. I am an Englishwoman; and even so, it is too good for me—it does not reflect me at all. Charles, why must you look so stupid when I am being clever? Don’t you realize that I should have a good homely face that reflects my character, one which is rather stern when no one is looking,—for there is always so much to do,—but one which is always quite pleasantly gay in daily speech, for what is there to moon about when there is so much to do? That is how I should look, really—like an English housewife. Of course, I am glad to be beautiful, for I have a kind heart and like to give people pleasure, but I sha’n’t be glad of my beauty if David and James, as they grow up, don’t fall helplessly in love with me.”

“Oh, they will!” I said; and they did. They were like a pair of young lovers, were David and James, and no girl ever had a chance with them against their mother, so that I never was so surprised in my life as the other day when David came to me and asked me in his growling way if he might marry my girl. ... But this will not do at all; I have gone much too far ahead in the tale of Isolda and her children and her lover.

Isolda has been retired from the stage these eight years or more. She always said she would retire when she was thirty-five and had made so much money that David and James would simply have to love her and come to see her frequently no matter how much married they might be. Nor did she love them so selfishly that she wouldn’t have them marry quickly, and that was because of the hunger she always had for children; “And grandchildren,” she would say to David and James, “will do very well, please.”

Now while David and James were young, and Isolda was still on the stage, going from triumph to triumph, there never were children so much in the public eye, not even royal children, poor little wretches. Quite frankly—I mean, she was quite frank about it to me—Isolda used David and James for her own ends, which were also their ends. She definitely wanted, you see, to be left to herself and with her children, and that was a pretty tall ambition for the most beautiful and beloved woman on the English stage. But she achieved it, did clever Isolda, and without hurting anyone’s feelings, just by “using” David and James. They loved it, naturally. The ages from five to fifteen are perhaps the only ones during which one really enjoys staring at one’s face in the Tatler and the Sketch. What Isolda, in her pursuit of peace and quiet and that sanctity of the home which the violence of modern journalism and the vulgar curiosity of the middle-classes denies to notable people, was out to do was to proclaim—that is the exact word—her character of mother alongside her fame as a beauty and an actress; and to build her home—her lovely homes in London and the country—in the privacy assured to her behind the screen of her advertised motherhood.

What a vogue those photographs of Isolda, with David and James, had! It was quite new, somehow; it struck a quite new note, a photograph of an actress with her two children. Now, of course, there are lots of them, but it was Isolda who began it. And the idea was good in so far as it made people look on the stage in a new light, in a more conventional, but not less romantic, light; it made them think less of the so-called glamour of the stage, less of footlight favorites with bare legs, and more of the stage proper, as a decent profession for decent people. How reasonably, after all, people look on the stage now as compared with the frantic disapproval of their fathers and mothers! And Isolda, I suppose, has been in a great measure the cause of that change—Isolda and David and James. But I am not sure I am entirely glad of the change; I am wondering if it has done the stage any good. Never until recently was the stage a part of what is called good society, and now that it is, I can’t help fancying that stage people are becoming as illiterate as society people. But I hope I am wrong.

AVID was ten, James eight and Isolda thirty when she met Sebastian Prest. You must remember that she had never been in love. She has said to me: “My passion for the children was the only great passion I had ever felt. Before Rupert died, I had decided that I was not a passionate woman. Of course, I would say to myself that I was emotionally very deep, and therefore could only be aroused by the ultimate man; but every more or less cold woman will humbug herself with that thought.”

I am not saying that she fell in love with young Sebastian Prest, but merely that she had never fallen in love with anyone else, that she was a very clean page for love to write its ciphers on. But she went farther, right at the beginning, with young Prest than ever she had before with any man; she acknowledged to herself that he loved her. You who did not know Isolda in her youth, cannot imagine what an enormous concession that was for her to make about any man.

It was Isolda herself who told me of Sebastian Prest the other day, else how would I know so much about it? Of course, I had long since guessed something of it, for one used to see Isolda and Prest about together; and then one night twelve years ago he was found dead in the snow within five miles of Moreton Taylor, Isolda’s place in Surrey. It looked as though he had just gone quite comfortably off to sleep in the snow, and one thought: “How tired he must have been!” The papers of the time were full of the curious romance of such a death in England; it was a death that somehow fixed Sebastian Prest more vividly than ever in people’s minds, for he was already very notable as one of the first of the young men of the air. Nowadays, I suppose, he would be what is called an “ace,” but I am telling now of things that happened before the war, when Gustav Hamel and Grahame White and Sebastian Prest were the beaux sabreurs of the air, when the air was the fashion, and aëronauts as rare as archangels.

I liked Prest very well, what little I knew of him. His assault on heaven hadn’t made him any the more daring in conversation; he was shy and quiet and nice, and he carried his good looks and his fame with that pleasant, unobtrusive self-deprecation which warms the hearts of people who neither look nor are anything in particular. A tall, dark, lean young man he was, and no one who saw him and Isolda together could help remarking what a wonderfully handsome pair they made. Sebastian and Isolda! Poor Sebastian, poor Isolda!

He didn’t, from the beginning, try to hide from her that he was in love. Every night that he was in London, he would call at her theater after the play, and they would do what Isolda had never before done with any man but Rupert Waterlow and me—go to supper to some quiet place, or maybe she would take him back to her house in Audley Square, where a cold supper was always laid ready for her. What Isolda could have been thinking of all that time she cannot imagine; for of course she must have known whither she and Prest were heading, and she must have known that she must either stop or go on and on. Yet she says that she simply did not think about it; she was just glad to be with him, and in a sensuous way very strange to her, she was glad of his love; and she left it at that. Isolda’s motherhood, you see, had become so important—no, not important, but inevitable—that it had quite obscured her womanhood in her own mind, and now she was surprised and delighted to find that she was a woman after all, and she felt rather naughty about it, as though she had found something unusually flippant in herself. Or maybe it is that a woman naturally becomes more liable to passion at thirty or so, but—it is absurd to generalize about these things.

I could have told her at the time that Prest was not the sort of young man with whom one could safely be—well, indefinite; but of course I knew nothing about it. Sebastian Prest, that quiet, dark young man, was so obviously a dangerous lover; I mean it would so obviously be dangerous for him to be loved too little, and dangerous for a woman to love him too much. A difficult young man, but there are men like that, and a woman can manage them pretty well by being clever. But Isolda wasn’t a bit clever with young Prest.

Of course he asked her to marry him. That was right at the beginning, and of course she said no. He-didn’t ask her again, but she knew the question was there between them all the time, and her answer was always no. But one day she gave her love to him.

HAT terrified her. She was lost to Sebastian Prest from that day. There is no man so lost to a woman as the love of one day. He was a very sensitive man, and he knew when he saw her the next day that she had brought herself to see him merely because in her fine way she had thought it would be vulgar and cruel not to see him. They were civilized people, were Sebastian and Isolda. But that was a cold, unfriendly hour they spent together that day. Prest said, as he went away: “I am not going to leave your life quite. I love you so, Isolda. But you were right about yourself, and I was wrong.” She was silent, and he said: “I mean, you do not need a man in your life. Your generosity and service and passion are for your children. There is nothing left for a man. But I shall come back, because I love you so.”

But the truth of it was that he had been completely right about her, and she completely wrong about herself. That was the truth of it; there was the truth of her terror after her moments of love’s delight. It had come about suddenly; he hadn’t at that moment been wooing her—it had just come about, the sudden dark beautiful meeting between two people. That, afterward, was what terrified her, the way she had given her love, suddenly, passionately, completely. The giving had come from herself; that was the truth. Isolda was very innocent in pleasure; she was “good” like the lady in the story-book; she was a very conventional woman; she liked to think that women never yielded to men until they were begged ever so prettily.

And now she who had before doubted whether she had any passions at all, went to the other extreme and wondered if any other woman was as passionate as she. She doubted that. It is amazing the way any woman will generalize about men’s passions while thinking her own are quite individual to her among her sex. And it seemed to Isolda that her passionate nature was wrong and ridiculous, quite ridiculous, and not to be encouraged. So she didn’t encourage it. Bravo, bravo, Isolda! It didn’t occur to her to be fair to young Prest, but that is a way honorable women have.

Of course David and James were the source and fount of her terror. One can understand that. She saw, she thought she saw, how completely absorbed she might become in Prest. She saw that David and James would become less significant; they would cease to be her whole care, her whole life. Isolda was a proud mother, a complete mother. She could not and would not surrender one tittle of her absorption in David and James for any man. Isolda, like many really good women, was born with a faint antagonism toward men. She did not know it, of course, and that is what made her so dangerous to men. That faint antagonism toward men in good women—for we are not speaking of silly, bitter women—is called by many names: sometimes it is called “fidelity to one man,” who is as a rule dead and forgotten; sometimes it is called “motherhood.” The world will not be a clean place to live in until good people cease to be faintly antagonistic to each other.

URING the next few months she followed Sebastian Prest’s flying career with an anxious heart. She could not bear him to be killed—in the air, alone. He was a very lonely man, that Prest; loneliness was the first and last impression you had of him; and she found herself thinking of him always as alone, a solitary man in life and in the air. She thought of him as fine and good and solitary. And one day toward Christmas, when he had not been to see her for many weeks, she wrote to him saying she would like him to come and spend Christmas with her and the children down in the country. “It will be a simple, baby Christmas,” she wrote, “and you must come; I want you to come. You must not be alone this Christmas, Sebastian. Do you know that you are somehow cowing me with your loneliness? I will expect you, then, at Moreton Taylor on Christmas Eve.”

She should not have written to him that he was cowing her with his loneliness. He came down to the country hoping, whereas she had put him out of her mind as lover or husband. She had put her foot down on all that nonsense. Prest arrived at Moreton Taylor on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. She had never before seen him in the mood he wore that day. He was gay, but he did not look happy. His dark eyes smiled into hers now and then in a tender, mocking way he had, but he did not say much; he was a quiet man.

There was no party, only a nice funny little woman called Edith Brown—“Brownie,” who always lived with Isolda as secretary, friend, butt, nurse and mother. Of course, David and James were much in evidence that day. And of course Isolda, Prest and Brownie did what it is inevitable for grown-ups to do; they grew so absorbed in teaching David and James how to play with their toys that David and James had to run away and amuse themselves by sliding down the banisters. The weather was very old-fashioned too. It was quite cold for the time of the year, and toward tea-time a snowstorm leaped down from the frozen sky and danced on a white carpet in the valley, for Moreton Taylor stands at the head of a valley looking toward Ashdown Forest.

T was very difficult to get David and James to go to bed on a story-book Christmas Eve, and they were allowed to stay up for dinner; and then, when Brownie had taken them up to bed, Isolda and Sebastian Prest were alone. They were very shy. Isolda was not, by ordinary, a shy nature: what was there to be shy about? But he was shy, and communicated it to her. There were two French windows in that long oak room where Tudor gentlemen must have toasted many a Christmas in, and Isolda drew the heavy curtains from one and stood staring into the night. He came beside her; she could feel him beside her. She felt oppressed; she said: “Let us open the window.”

The night outside was dark and furious with the snow, and the snow fluttered like little frozen butterflies into the room, and Isolda shivered, and he kisssed [sic] her throat. She pretended not to have noticed; she merely said: “Close it now. It is cold.”

But somehow she was not cold with the snow; she was cold with anger; she was raging with anger against him. She did not ask herself why she was angry; she just let herself sink into anger as though it was the bosom of a friend who hated Sebastian Prest. She hoped he would not talk, but he said: “You are angry. I am sorry.”

She stared at him, but did not then say anything more. His eyes were suddenly hard—dark and hard; he stood looking at her with dark, hard eyes, and she resented his significance in her life. Obviously he thought he was significant in her life, to look at her like that, to meet her eyes in that hard way. She did not realize how hard she must have looked, how her eyes must have shocked him. He said suddenly:

“You are an ungenerous woman, Isolda.”

She said calmly: “Let us not talk any more tonight.”

He was proud, and like all proud men, he had his rare silly moments. He laughed. It made her cold with distaste, his laugh. It was as though she had been married to him for years and was sickened of him. His laugh humiliated her. She stared at him, wondering if he had intended that it should. But the laugh had passed and left no trace on his face. She rose and said: “Good night, Sebastian.”

He should have mocked and smacked and wooed her. But he was proud and serious. He said: “Don’t go yet. I want to talk to you.”

She said: “I think you have talked enough for tonight. I don’t think I like you tonight, Sebastian. We will talk tomorrow, if there is anything to talk about.”

“There wont be a tomorrow,” he said. “I am going away tonight. I will not stay in the house of some one I despise.”

HEY were standing, face to face. Isolda was tall, but she did not reach above his shoulder. She did not look at his face. She stared at his shoulders; she found herself admiring his taut, lean body. He must be very strong, she thought; and all the while she was trying not to think of the dreadful word he had spoken, the word she could not understand.

“Despise?” she said at last. But she did not look at his face. “Sebastian, what do you mean?”

Then he talked for a long time. Isolda does not remember all he said. He seemed to be talking for a very long time in a calm, cold voice, and she standing over against him and never once looking at his face. He was saying bitter, beastly things, but the funny part of it was that now she wasn't angry; in fact, she wanted to catch him by the lapel of his jacket and tell him not to be a silly goose, and that nothing was as serious as it seemed; but she did not dare to, for he was so calm in his anger.

And as he talked, she began to realize why he was such a lonely man, for at the root of his being was contempt for men and women and the world. In those few moments in which Isolda and he stood over against each other, it was as though he managed to force his way through the veil of quietness and humility which the world knew as Sebastian Prest and found so attractive—for what is more attractive than the humility of a daring man? But now he became himself, arrogant and dark and contemptuous. Cleanness was the god of Sebastian Prest, and that is why, with all his wealth and looks and youth and daring, he was such a lonely man, for there is no cleanness in the world, and that is why he had chosen the lonely career of a pioneer in the air, for the air above the clouds is wholly clean, and he who dies in the air dies like a falling angel with a curving trail of flame.

Then he said something—Isolda cannot remember what—which made the anger fall on her again, and she said: “You have no right to talk like this. Captain Prest no man has the right to talk like this to a woman who does not love him. And I do not love you.”

That is what Isolda said, and he told her calmly that she lied. He said: “You love me, but you love your puny little pride more. You talk to me of living for your children. They will not thank you if ever they realize that you sacrificed your love and my love to an illusion of maternity. They will not thank you when they realize that you have kept yourself in a prison for them.”

She cried: “God, these men, these men! You take one for a friend, and he must talk of love. One cannot meet a man and make a friend without the pain of rejecting a lover! Haven't you any pity, Sebastian? I am lonely too.”

“Because you are ungenerous. I know nothing of women, nothing of love, and therefore I can judge you. It is the soiled fools who have played with many women who have not the right to judge a woman, for their eyes are unclean with false experiences. You will not give yourself, Isolda, because you are overproud, overconceited. You shield yourself behind your children, but we are all of us children, and we all of us need love. But you will not surrender yourself to love because you do not think love is good enough for you. I do not want you now. I do not want anything now but the clean snow against my face. Good-by, Isolda.”

She cried: “But you can’t go now!”

E was by the window; he was smiling as though an invisible person had just whispered a fancy into his ear. At that moment she wanted to run to him and hold him and turn his strength to weakness in her arms; she wanted to lay herself against him and melt his bones to rushing water that would wash them both into the warm, soft dungeons of love. But she could not move; it was as though he and she were figures in a nightmare in which she could not move or speak. She wanted him not to go; she wanted to tell him she loved him; but as he opened the French window, she could not speak; and as the snow pounced gayly on him, it was as though she was in chains and could not move.

Then she cried: “How can you be so silly, Sebastian! You can’t go in the snow!” She was by the open window now, and the snow was sweet and cold against her throat and shoulders, but it was like a curtain of white darkness; she could see nothing in the night but the darkness of the snow. Then she saw his face; far away it seemed, and she sighed with relief. But he said: “I am going for a walk. I love the snow. Don't worry about me, Isolda. Don’t worry about me if I don’t come back. I shall not need an overcoat, for the snow is as warm as ermine.”

“Yes, it’s lovely!” she cried. “Wait, and I'll come with you.”

She could not see his face now, but his voice said: “I don’t want you, Isolda. I am very tired. I am very tired of arguing with Life. You don't know how tired I am. I seem to have been alive a million years, and the only thing that is worth knowing seems always to have evaded me. But this is what I like—to walk alone in the snow.”

She cried, “Sebastian—Sebastian!” but he must have passed through the gate into the fields. She cried out his name again and again, but he did not come back, and the next morning her servant told her that Captain Prest had been found dead in a snowdrift four miles away. He must have been dead for hours—the way they found him; and he must have died as he slept, for when they found him, he was lying in the snow in his shirt-sleeves with his jacket rolled up as a pillow under his head.