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The Woman With The Fan

R >> Robert Hichens >> The Woman With The Fan




"It's grotesque! A woman who is disfigured, and a man who is, or at any
rate was, a drunkard! Really it's the most disgusting thing I ever heard
of!"

Lady Cardington happened to be in the room and she suddenly flushed.

"I don't think we know very much about it," she said, and her voice was
rather louder than usual.

"But Lord Holme is going to--" began the lady who had been speaking.

"He may be, and he may succeed. But my sympathies are not with him. He
left his wife when she needed him."

"But what could he have done for her?"

"He could have loved her," said Lady Cardington.

The flush glowed hotter in the face that was generally as white as ivory.

There was a moment of silence in the room. Then Lady Cardington, getting
up to go, added:

"Whatever happens, I shall admire Mr. Carey as long as I live, and I wish
there were many more men like him in the world."

She went out, leaving a tense astonishment behind her.

Her romantic heart, still young and ardent, though often aching with
sorrow, and always yearning for the ideal love that it had never found,
had divined the truth these chattering women had not imagination enough
to conceive of, soul enough to appreciate if they had conceived of it.

In that Italian winter, far away from London, a very beautiful drama of
human life was being enacted, not the less but the more beautiful because
the man and woman who took part in it had been scourged by fate, had
suffered cruel losses, were in the eyes of many who had known them well
pariahs--Rupert Carey through his fault, Lady Holme through her
misfortune.

Long ago, at the Arkell House ball, Lady Holme had said to Robin Pierce
that if Rupert Carey had the chance she could imagine him doing something
great. The chance was given him now of doing one of the greatest things a
human being can do--of winning a soul that is in despair back to hope, of
winning a heart that is sceptical of love back to belief in love. It was
a great thing to do, and Carey set about doing it in a strange way. He
cast himself down in his degradation at the feet of this woman whom he
was resolved to help, and he said, "Help me!" He came to this woman who
was on the brink of self-destruction and he said, "Teach me to live!"

It was a strange way he took, but perhaps he was right--perhaps it was
the only way. The words he spoke at midnight on the lake were as nothing.
His eyes, his acts in sunlight the next day, and day after day, were
everything. He forced Viola to realise that she was indeed the only woman
who could save him from the vice he had become the slave of, lift him up
out of that pit in which he could not see the stars. At first she could
not believe it, or could believe it only in moments of exaltation. Lord
Holme and Robin Pierce had rendered her terrified of life and of herself
in life. She was inclined to cringe before all humanity like a beaten
dog. There were moments, many moments at first, when she cringed before
Rupert Carey. But his eyes always told her the same story. They never saw
the marred face, but always the white angel. The soul in them clung to
that, asked to be protected by that. And so, at last, the white
angel--one hides somewhere surely in every woman--was released.

There were sad, horrible moments in this drama of the Italian winter. The
lonely house in the woods was a witness to painful, even tragic, scenes.
Viola's love for Rupert Carey was reluctant in its dawning and he could
not rise at once, or easily, out of the pit into the full starlight to
which he aspired. After the death of Sir Donald, when the winter set in,
he asked her to let him live in the house on the opposite side of the
piazza from the house in which she dwelt. They were people of the world,
and knew what the world might say, but they were also human beings in
distress, and they felt as if they had passed into a region in which the
meaning of the world's voices was lost, as the cry of an angry child is
lost in the vastness of the desert. She agreed to his request, and they
lived thus, innocently, till the winter was over and the spring came to
bring to Italy its radiance once more.

Even the spring was not an idyll. Rupert Carey had struggled upward, but
Viola, too, had much to forget and very much to learn. The egoist, spoken
of by Carey himself one night in Half Moon Street, was slow to fade in
the growing radiance that played about the angel's feet. But it knew, and
Carey knew also, that it was no longer fine enough in its brilliant
selfishness to stand quite alone. With the death of the physical beauty
there came a modesty of heart. With the understanding, bitter and
terrible as it was, that the great, conquering outward thing was
destroyed, came the desire, the imperious need, to find and to develop if
possible the inner things which, perhaps, conquer less easily, but which
retain their conquests to the end. There was growth in Casa Felice, slow
but stubborn, growth in the secret places of the soul, till there came a
time when not merely the white angel, but the whole woman, angel and that
which had perhaps been devil too, was able to accept the yoke laid upon
her with patience, was able to say, "I can endure it bravely."

Lord Holme presently took his case to the Courts. It was undefended and
he won it. Not long ago Viola Holme became Viola Carey.

When Robin Pierce heard of it in Rome he sat for a long time in deep
thought. Even now, even after all that had passed, he felt a thrill of
pain that was like the pain of jealousy. He wished for the impossible, he
wished that he had been born with his friend's nature; that, instead of
the man who could only talk of being, he were the man who could be. And
yet, in the past, he had sometimes surely defended Viola against Carey's
seeming condemnation! He had defended and not loved--but Carey had judged
and loved.

Carey had judged and loved, yet Carey had said he did not believe in a
God. Robin wondered if he believed now.

Robin was in Rome, and could not hear the words of a man and a woman who
were sitting one night, after the marriage, upon a piazza above the Lake
of Como.

The man said:

"Do you remember Robin's '/Danseuse de Tunisie/'?"

"The woman with the fan?"

"Yes. I see her now without the fan. With it she was a siren, perhaps,
but without it she is--"

"What is she without it?"

"Eternal woman. Ah, how much better than the siren!"

There was a silence filled only by the voice of the waterfall between the
cypresses. Then the woman spoke, rather softly.

"You taught her what she could be without the fan. You have done the
great thing."

"And do you know what you have done?"

"I?"

"Yes. You have taught me to see the stars and to feel the soul beyond the
stars."

"No, it was not I."

Again there was a silence. Then the man said:

"No, thank God--it was not you."

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