Margaret Pedler

“ He had never doubted his love for his wife. Quite honestly he had believed her the one woman in the world when he married her. Yet now he was beginning to find every hour a blank that did not bring him sight or sound of this other woman—this woman with her slender limbs and skin like a stephanotis petal, and her long Eastern eyes with the subtle lure which seemed to lie in their depths. Beside her June’s young peach-bloom prettiness faded into something colourless and insignificant.
“It must be nice to be you”—Magda nodded at him. ”

“ Michael, I’m not really hard—and selfish, as they say. I’ve been foolish and thoughtless, perhaps. But I’ve never done any harm. Not real harm. I’ve never”—she laughed a little brokenly—“I’ve never turned men into swine, Michael. . . . I’ve hurt people, sometimes, by letting them love me. But, I didn’t know, then! Now—now I know what love is, I shall be different. Quite different. Saint Michel, I know now—love is self-surrender.”
The tremulous sweetness of her, the humble submissiveness of her appeal, could not but win their way. Michael’s lingering disbelief wavered and broke. ”

“ Magda’s faint responsive smile was touched with that bitter knowledge which is the heritage of the woman who has been much loved for her beauty.
“You’re a woman, Gillyflower,” she said. “And Michael is not only a man—but an artist. Men don’t want you when the bloom has been brushed off. And you know how Michael worships beauty! He’s bound to—being an artist.”
“I think you’re morbidly self-conscious,” declared Gillian firmly. “I suppose it’s the result of being out of the world for so long. You’ve lost all sense of proportion. You’re quite lovely enough, now, to satisfy most people. ”

“ Gillian made no answer. She was too wise—with that intuitive wisdom of woman—to force the pace. If Dan were beginning to relent ever so little towards Magda—why, then, her two best friends might yet come together in comradeship and learn to forget the bitter past. The gentle hand of Time would be laid on old wounds and its touch would surely bring healing. But Gillian would no more have thought of trying to hasten matters than she would have tried to force open the close-curled petals of a flower in bud. ”

“ Michael trusted her now! Nothing could really hurt her while he believed in her. She could afford to laugh at Antoine’s threat.
“And now,” she said quietly, “will you please release me?”
Slowly, reluctantly Davilof’s hands dropped from her arms, revealing red weals where the grip of his fingers had crushed the soft, white flesh. He uttered a stifled exclamation as his eyes fell on the angry-looking marks.
“Mon dieu! I’ve hurt you—”
“No!” Magda faced him with a defiance that was rather splendid. “No! You can’t hurt me, Davilof. Only the man I love can do that.” ”

“ It was as though he had erected a high wall between them which Magda found no effort of hers could break down, and she was beginning to ask herself whether he could ever really have cared for her at all. Surely no man who had once cared could be so hard—so implacably hard!
And now, alone with him in the big room which had been converted into a temporary studio, she found herself overwhelmed by a feeling of intense self-consciousness. She felt it would be impossible to bear the coolly neutral gaze of those grey eyes for hours at a time. ”

“ Lady Arabella looked up sharply. Cynicism was usually far enough away from Magda. She was too full of the joy of life and of the genuine delight an artist finds in his art to have place for it. Egoist she might be, with the unthinking egotism of youth, irresponsible in her gay acceptance of the love and admiration showered on her, but there was nothing bitter or sour in her composition. Lady Arabella, seeking an explanation for the unwonted, cast her mind back on the events of the last few weeks—and smiled to herself. ”

“ His eyes blazing with a sudden fury of passion and resentment, he caught her by the shoulders, forcing her to face him.
“God!” he muttered thickly. “What are you made of? You make men go through hell for you! Even here—here in this little country place—you do it! Storran’s wife—one can see her heart breaks, and it is you who are breaking it. Yet nothing touches you! You’ve no conscience like other women—no heart—”
Magda pulled herself out of his grasp.
“Oh, do forget that I’m a woman, Davilof! I’m a dancer. Nothing else matters. I don’t want to be troubled with a heart. ”

“ Gillian clasped her hands.
“Oh!” she said in a low, vehement voice. “I don’t think we women want to be ‘looked up to.’ It sets us so far away. We’re not goddesses. We’re only women, Michael, with all our little weaknesses just the same as men. And we want the men who love us to be comrades—not worshippers. Good pals, who’ll forgive us and help us up when we tumble down, just as we’d be ready to forgive them and help them up. Can’t you—can’t you do that for Magda?” ”

“ Magda arraigned him with passionate scorn.
“I do,” he returned grimly. “If you hurt people enough you can stop them from committing sin. That is the meaning of remedial punishment.”
“I don’t believe it!” she stormed at him. “You might hurt me till I died of hurting, but you couldn’t make me good—not if I hated your hurting me all the time! Because it isn’t good to hate,” she added out of the depths of some instinctive wisdom.
“Then you’d better learn to like being punished—if that will make you good,” retorted Hugh.
Magda sped out into the woods. ”

“ If you flinch from punishment it is not submission, but rebellion.”
Magda gripped her hands together and pressed her knees into the hard stone floor, her muscles taut with anticipation as she heard the soft whistle of the thongs cleaving the air.
This time she bore the pang of anguish motionless, but the vision of Michael went out suddenly in a throbbing darkness of swift agony. Her shoulders felt red-hot. The pain shot up into her brain like fingers of flame. It clasped her whole body in a torment, and the ecstasy of self-surrender was lost in a sick groping after sheer endurance. ”

“ A moment later Gillian found herself standing in front of a tall, gaunt figure of a man, whose coat hung loosely from his shoulders and whose face was worn and haggard with something more than la grippe alone.
“Oh, Michael!”
A little, stricken cry broke from her lips. What men and women make each other suffer! She realised it as she met the stark, bitter misery of the grey eyes that burned at her out of the thin face and remembered the look on Magda’s own face when she had last seen her. ”

“ The big crowd, drawn from all classes, sat tense and silent, sensitive to every movement, every exquisite, appealing gesture of the Swan-Maiden. And when at last she had lain, limp in death, in her lover’s embrace, and the music had quivered into silence, there followed a vibrant pause—almost it seemed as though a sigh of mingled ecstasy and regret went up—before the thunderous applause roared through the auditorium.
The insatiable few were still clapping and stamping assiduously when Magda, after taking innumerable calls, at last came off the stage. ”

“ And now that the strain was over and she found herself once more in her brougham, driving homeward with the familiar clip-clop of the fat old carriage-horse’s hoofs in her ears, she shrank back against the cushions marvelling at the temerity which had swept her into the Wielitzska’s presence and endowed her with words that cut like a two-edged sword.
Like a two-edged sword in very truth! Lady Raynham’s final thrust, stabbing at her with its stern denunciation, brought back vividly to Magda Michael Quarrington’s bitter speech—“I’ve no place for your kind of woman.” ”

“ What have I to give Michael now? Have you forgotten that he’s an artist and that beauty means everything to him?”
“Well?”
“‘Well!’” Magda held out her hands. “Can’t you see that I’m changed? . . . Michael wouldn’t want me to pose for him as Circe now!”
“He wanted you for a wife—not a model, my dear. You can buy models at so much the hour.”
“Oh, Marraine! You won’t understand——”
Lady Arabella took the slender, work-roughened hands in hers.
“Perhaps I understand better than you think,” she said quietly. “There are other ways of assessing life than merely in terms of beauty. ”

“ Outside, the fog hung like a thick pall over London—thick enough to curtain the windows of the car with a blank, grey veil and to make progress through the streets a difficult and somewhat dangerous process. Magda snuggled into her furs and leant back against the padded cushions. All sight of the outside world was cut off from her, except for the blurred gleam of an occasional street-lamp or the menacing shape of a motor-bus looming suddenly alongside, and she yielded herself to the train of thought provoked by her talk with Lady Arabella. ”

“ Almost! . . . Yet in the beginning the thought of Michael sustained her triumphantly.
It was a curious sensation—that first stroke of the flagellum.
As Magda, unversed in physical suffering, felt the cords shock against her flesh, she was conscious of a strange uplifting of spirit. This, then, this smarting, blinding thing called pain, was the force that would drive the will to do evil out of her soul.
She waited expectantly—almost exultantly—for the second fall of the thongs. The interval between seemed endless. Sister Agnetia was very deliberate, pausing between each stroke. ”

“ Behind all these one sensed the glamour of a long-past romance, the unquenched spark of a faith that, as Lady Arabella had herself once put it in a rare moment of self-revelation, “love is the best thing this queer old world of ours has to offer.” The portrait on the easel was that of a woman who had visioned the miracle of love only to be robbed of its fulfilment.
Magda stood silently in front of the picture, marvelling at its keen perceptive powers. ”

“ But she was gradually becoming apprehensive that disturbing consequences might accrue from Magda’s stay at Stockleigh Farm. A woman of her elusive charm, equipped with all the subtle lore that her environment had taught her, must almost inevitably hold for a man of Storran’s primitive way of life the fascination of something new and rather wonderful. To contrast his wife with her was to contrast a field-flower with some rare, exotic bloom, and Gillian was conscious of a sudden rush of sympathy for June’s unarmoured youth and inexperience. ”

“ For is not a woman—a good woman—always ready to sacrifice herself for those she loves?”
Magda almost jumped. It was as though she were listening to an echo of Quarrington’s own words.
“And you sacrificed yourself,” continued Davilof. “Sacrificed your pride—crushed it down for the sake of Mrs. Grey and little Coppertop. Mademoiselle”—he bowed gravely—“I kiss your hands. And see, I too, I can be generous. I release you from your promise. I do not claim that dance.” ”

“ Then the entrance of Vladimir Ravinski, the lovelorn youth of the legend, riveted his attention on the stage.
The dance which followed was exquisite. The Russian was a beautiful youth, like a sun-god with his flying yellow locks and glorious symmetry of body, and the pas de deux between him and Magda was a thing to marvel at—sweeping through the whole gamut of love’s emotion, from the first shy, delicate hesitancy of worshipping boy and girl to the rapturous abandon of mated lovers. ”

“ Things must take their course—drive on to whatever end, bitter or sweet, lay hidden in the womb of fate.
She had tried to stem the current of affairs, but she had proved as powerless to deflect it as a dried stick tossed on to a river in spate. And now, whether the end were ultimate happiness or hopeless, irretrievable disaster, Michael and Magda must still fight their way towards it, each alone, by the dim light of that “blind Understanding” which is all that Destiny vouchsafes. ”

“ They idolised a woman just because she was beautiful—for her lips and eyes and hair and the nameless charm that was in her—and set her up on an altar at which they could kneel becomingly. Then, when they found she was merely an ordinary human being like themselves, with her bundle of faults and failings, hereditary and acquired, the prig in them was appropriately shocked—and they went away!
An unhappy woman is very often a bitter one. And Magda had been slowly learning the meaning of unhappiness for the first time in her life—a life that had been hitherto roses and laurel all the way. ”

“ And at Stockleigh she had found Dan Storran.
The homage that had leaped into his eyes the first moment they had rested on her, and which had slowly deepened as the days slipped by, had somehow soothed her, restoring her feminine poise which Michael’s sudden defection had shaken.
She knew—as every woman always does know when a man is attracted by her—that she had the power to stir this big, primitive countryman, whose way of life had never before brought him into contact with her type of woman, just as she had stirred other men. ”

“ For a time even her immense prestige as a dancer suffered some eclipse, but this, with a performer of her supreme artistry, was bound to be only a passing phase.
The world will always condone where it wants to be amused. And—now that the gloom of young Raynham’s supposed suicide was lifted from the affair—there was a definite aroma of romance about it which was not without its appeal to the younger generation.
So that gradually the pendulum swung back and Magda’s audiences were once again as big and enthusiastic as ever. ”

“ Lady Arabella paused in her knitting and spoke petulantly, but a secret gleam of admiration in her sharp old eyes as they rested upon her god-daughter belied the irritation of her tones.
Magda leaned back negligently against the big black velvet cushions in her chair and lit a cigarette.
“I want everyone to talk about me,” she returned composedly. Her voice was oddly attractive—low-pitched and with a faint blur of huskiness about it that caught the ear with a distinctive charm. “It increases the box-office receipts. And there’s no reason in the world for you to ‘explain’ me to people.” ”

“ But she was not in the least prepared for the man as he appeared when Virginie ushered him into the dressing-room and retired, discreetly closing the door behind her. Magda, her hand outstretched to greet him, paused in sheer dismay, her arm falling slowly to her side.
She had never seen so great a change in any man. His face was grey—grey and lined like the face of a man who has had no sleep for days. ”

“ With a quick movement he stepped in front of her.
“I’m a man—as well as an accompanist,” he said hoarsely. “One day you’ll have to reckon with the man, Magda!”
There was a new, unaccustomed quality in his voice. Hitherto she had not taken his ardour very seriously. He was a Pole and a musician, with all the temperament that might be expected from such a combination, and she had let it go at that, pushing his love aside with the careless hand of a woman to whom the incense of men’s devotion has been so freely offered as to have become commonplace. ”