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Vernon Lee >> A Phantom Lover
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A PHANTOM LOVER
By
VERNON LEE
1890
To COUNT PETER BOUTOURLINE,
_AT TAGANTCHA_,
GOVERNMENT OF KIEW, RUSSIA.
MY DEAR BOUTOURLINE,
Do you remember my telling you, one afternoon that you sat upon the
hearthstool at Florence, the story of Mrs. Oke of Okehurst?
You thought it a fantastic tale, you lover of fantastic things, and urged
me to write it out at once, although I protested that, in such matters, to
write is to exorcise, to dispel the charm; and that printers' ink chases
away the ghosts that may pleasantly haunt us, as efficaciously as gallons
of holy water.
But if, as I suspect, you will now put down any charm that story may
have possessed to the way in which we had been working ourselves up,
that firelight evening, with all manner of fantastic stuff--if, as I
fear, the story of Mrs. Oke of Okehurst will strike you as stale and
unprofitable--the sight of this little book will serve at least to remind
you, in the middle of your Russian summer, that there is such a season
as winter, such a place as Florence, and such a person as your friend,
VERNON LEE
Kensington, _July_ 1886.
1
That sketch up there with the boy's cap? Yes; that's the same woman. I
wonder whether you could guess who she was. A singular being, is she not?
The most marvellous creature, quite, that I have ever met: a wonderful
elegance, exotic, far-fetched, poignant; an artificial perverse sort of
grace and research in every outline and movement and arrangement of head
and neck, and hands and fingers. Here are a lot of pencil sketches I made
while I was preparing to paint her portrait. Yes; there's nothing but her
in the whole sketchbook. Mere scratches, but they may give some idea of her
marvellous, fantastic kind of grace. Here she is leaning over the
staircase, and here sitting in the swing. Here she is walking quickly out
of the room. That's her head. You see she isn't really handsome; her
forehead is too big, and her nose too short. This gives no idea of her. It
was altogether a question of movement. Look at the strange cheeks, hollow
and rather flat; well, when she smiled she had the most marvellous dimples
here. There was something exquisite and uncanny about it. Yes; I began the
picture, but it was never finished. I did the husband first. I wonder who
has his likeness now? Help me to move these pictures away from the wall.
Thanks. This is her portrait; a huge wreck. I don't suppose you can make
much of it; it is merely blocked in, and seems quite mad. You see my idea
was to make her leaning against a wall--there was one hung with yellow that
seemed almost brown--so as to bring out the silhouette.
It was very singular I should have chosen that particular wall. It does
look rather insane in this condition, but I like it; it has something of
her. I would frame it and hang it up, only people would ask questions. Yes;
you have guessed quite right--it is Mrs. Oke of Okehurst. I forgot you had
relations in that part of the country; besides, I suppose the newspapers
were full of it at the time. You didn't know that it all took place under
my eyes? I can scarcely believe now that it did: it all seems so distant,
vivid but unreal, like a thing of my own invention. It really was much
stranger than any one guessed. People could no more understand it than they
could understand her. I doubt whether any one ever understood Alice Oke
besides myself. You mustn't think me unfeeling. She was a marvellous,
weird, exquisite creature, but one couldn't feel sorry for her. I felt much
sorrier for the wretched creature of a husband. It seemed such an
appropriate end for her; I fancy she would have liked it could she have
known. Ah! I shall never have another chance of painting such a portrait as
I wanted. She seemed sent me from heaven or the other place. You have never
heard the story in detail? Well, I don't usually mention it, because people
are so brutally stupid or sentimental; but I'll tell it you. Let me see.
It's too dark to paint any more today, so I can tell it you now. Wait; I
must turn her face to the wall. Ah, she was a marvellous creature!
2
You remember, three years ago, my telling you I had let myself in for
painting a couple of Kentish squireen? I really could not understand what
had possessed me to say yes to that man. A friend of mine had brought him
one day to my studio--Mr. Oke of Okehurst, that was the name on his card.
He was a very tall, very well-made, very good-looking young man, with a
beautiful fair complexion, beautiful fair moustache, and beautifully
fitting clothes; absolutely like a hundred other young men you can see any
day in the Park, and absolutely uninteresting from the crown of his head to
the tip of his boots. Mr. Oke, who had been a lieutenant in the Blues
before his marriage, was evidently extremely uncomfortable on finding
himself in a studio. He felt misgivings about a man who could wear a velvet
coat in town, but at the same time he was nervously anxious not to treat me
in the very least like a tradesman. He walked round my place, looked at
everything with the most scrupulous attention, stammered out a few
complimentary phrases, and then, looking at his friend for assistance,
tried to come to the point, but failed. The point, which the friend kindly
explained, was that Mr. Oke was desirous to know whether my engagements
would allow of my painting him and his wife, and what my terms would be.
The poor man blushed perfectly crimson during this explanation, as if he
had come with the most improper proposal; and I noticed--the only
interesting thing about him--a very odd nervous frown between his eyebrows,
a perfect double gash,--a thing which usually means something abnormal: a
mad-doctor of my acquaintance calls it the maniac-frown. When I had
answered, he suddenly burst out into rather confused explanations: his
wife--Mrs. Oke--had seen some of my--pictures--paintings--portraits--at
the--the--what d'you call it?--Academy. She had--in short, they had made a
very great impression upon her. Mrs. Oke had a great taste for art; she
was, in short, extremely desirous of having her portrait and his painted by
me, _etcetera_.
"My wife," he suddenly added, "is a remarkable woman. I don't know whether
you will think her handsome,--she isn't exactly, you know. But she's
awfully strange," and Mr. Oke of Okehurst gave a little sigh and frowned
that curious frown, as if so long a speech and so decided an expression of
opinion had cost him a great deal.
It was a rather unfortunate moment in my career. A very influential sitter
of mine--you remember the fat lady with the crimson curtain behind
her?--had come to the conclusion or been persuaded that I had painted her
old and vulgar, which, in fact, she was. Her whole clique had turned
against me, the newspapers had taken up the matter, and for the moment I
was considered as a painter to whose brushes no woman would trust her
reputation. Things were going badly. So I snapped but too gladly at Mr.
Oke's offer, and settled to go down to Okehurst at the end of a fortnight.
But the door had scarcely closed upon my future sitter when I began to
regret my rashness; and my disgust at the thought of wasting a whole summer
upon the portrait of a totally uninteresting Kentish squire, and his
doubtless equally uninteresting wife, grew greater and greater as the time
for execution approached. I remember so well the frightful temper in which
I got into the train for Kent, and the even more frightful temper in which
I got out of it at the little station nearest to Okehurst. It was pouring
floods. I felt a comfortable fury at the thought that my canvases would get
nicely wetted before Mr. Oke's coachman had packed them on the top of the
waggonette. It was just what served me right for coming to this confounded
place to paint these confounded people. We drove off in the steady
downpour. The roads were a mass of yellow mud; the endless flat
grazing-grounds under the oak-trees, after having been burnt to cinders in
a long drought, were turned into a hideous brown sop; the country seemed
intolerably monotonous.
My spirits sank lower and lower. I began to meditate upon the modern Gothic
country-house, with the usual amount of Morris furniture, Liberty rugs, and
Mudie novels, to which I was doubtless being taken. My fancy pictured very
vividly the five or six little Okes--that man certainly must have at least
five children--the aunts, and sisters-in-law, and cousins; the eternal
routine of afternoon tea and lawn-tennis; above all, it pictured Mrs. Oke,
the bouncing, well-informed, model housekeeper, electioneering,
charity-organising young lady, whom such an individual as Mr. Oke would
regard in the light of a remarkable woman. And my spirit sank within me,
and I cursed my avarice in accepting the commission, my spiritlessness in
not throwing it over while yet there was time. We had meanwhile driven into
a large park, or rather a long succession of grazing-grounds, dotted about
with large oaks, under which the sheep were huddled together for shelter
from the rain. In the distance, blurred by the sheets of rain, was a line
of low hills, with a jagged fringe of bluish firs and a solitary windmill.
It must be a good mile and a half since we had passed a house, and there
was none to be seen in the distance--nothing but the undulation of sere
grass, sopped brown beneath the huge blackish oak-trees, and whence arose,
from all sides, a vague disconsolate bleating. At last the road made a
sudden bend, and disclosed what was evidently the home of my sitter. It
was not what I had expected. In a dip in the ground a large red-brick
house, with the rounded gables and high chimney-stacks of the time of
James I.,--a forlorn, vast place, set in the midst of the pasture-land,
with no trace of garden before it, and only a few large trees indicating
the possibility of one to the back; no lawn either, but on the other side
of the sandy dip, which suggested a filled-up moat, a huge oak, short,
hollow, with wreathing, blasted, black branches, upon which only a handful
of leaves shook in the rain. It was not at all what I had pictured to
myself the home of Mr. Oke of Okehurst.
My host received me in the hall, a large place, panelled and carved, hung
round with portraits up to its curious ceiling--vaulted and ribbed like the
inside of a ship's hull. He looked even more blond and pink and white, more
absolutely mediocre in his tweed suit; and also, I thought, even more
good-natured and duller. He took me into his study, a room hung round with
whips and fishing-tackle in place of books, while my things were being
carried upstairs. It was very damp, and a fire was smouldering. He gave the
embers a nervous kick with his foot, and said, as he offered me a cigar--
"You must excuse my not introducing you at once to Mrs. Oke. My wife--in
short, I believe my wife is asleep."
"Is Mrs. Oke unwell?" I asked, a sudden hope flashing across me that I
might be off the whole matter.
"Oh no! Alice is quite well; at least, quite as well as she usually is. My
wife," he added, after a minute, and in a very decided tone, "does not
enjoy very good health--a nervous constitution. Oh no! not at all ill,
nothing at all serious, you know. Only nervous, the doctors say; mustn't be
worried or excited, the doctors say; requires lots of repose,--that sort
of thing."
There was a dead pause. This man depressed me, I knew not why. He had a
listless, puzzled look, very much out of keeping with his evident admirable
health and strength.
"I suppose you are a great sportsman?" I asked from sheer despair, nodding
in the direction of the whips and guns and fishing-rods.
"Oh no! not now. I was once. I have given up all that," he answered,
standing with his back to the fire, and staring at the polar bear beneath
his feet. "I--I have no time for all that now," he added, as if an
explanation were due. "A married man--you know. Would you like to come up
to your rooms?" he suddenly interrupted himself. "I have had one arranged
for you to paint in. My wife said you would prefer a north light. If that
one doesn't suit, you can have your choice of any other."
I followed him out of the study, through the vast entrance-hall. In less
than a minute I was no longer thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Oke and the boredom
of doing their likeness; I was simply overcome by the beauty of this house,
which I had pictured modern and philistine. It was, without exception, the
most perfect example of an old English manor-house that I had ever seen;
the most magnificent intrinsically, and the most admirably preserved. Out
of the huge hall, with its immense fireplace of delicately carved and
inlaid grey and black stone, and its rows of family portraits, reaching
from the wainscoting to the oaken ceiling, vaulted and ribbed like a ship's
hull, opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet surmounted at
intervals by heraldic monsters, the wall covered with oak carvings of
coats-of-arms, leafage, and little mythological scenes, painted a faded red
and blue, and picked out with tarnished gold, which harmonised with the
tarnished blue and gold of the stamped leather that reached to the oak
cornice, again delicately tinted and gilded. The beautifully damascened
suits of court armour looked, without being at all rusty, as if no modern
hand had ever touched them; the very rugs under foot were of
sixteenth-century Persian make; the only things of to-day were the big
bunches of flowers and ferns, arranged in majolica dishes upon the
landings. Everything was perfectly silent; only from below came the chimes,
silvery like an Italian palace fountain, of an old-fashioned clock.
It seemed to me that I was being led through the palace of the Sleeping
Beauty.
"What a magnificent house!" I exclaimed as I followed my host through a
long corridor, also hung with leather, wainscoted with carvings, and
furnished with big wedding coffers, and chairs that looked as if they came
out of some Vandyck portrait. In my mind was the strong impression that all
this was natural, spontaneous--that it had about it nothing of the
picturesqueness which swell studios have taught to rich and aesthetic
houses. Mr. Oke misunderstood me.
"It is a nice old place," he said, "but it's too large for us. You see, my
wife's health does not allow of our having many guests; and there are no
children."
I thought I noticed a vague complaint in his voice; and he evidently was
afraid there might have seemed something of the kind, for he added
immediately--
"I don't care for children one jackstraw, you know, myself; can't
understand how any one can, for my part."
If ever a man went out of his way to tell a lie, I said to myself, Mr. Oke
of Okehurst was doing so at the present moment.
When he had left me in one of the two enormous rooms that were allotted to
me, I threw myself into an arm-chair and tried to focus the extraordinary
imaginative impression which this house had given me.
I am very susceptible to such impressions; and besides the sort of spasm of
imaginative interest sometimes given to me by certain rare and eccentric
personalities, I know nothing more subduing than the charm, quieter and
less analytic, of any sort of complete and out-of-the-common-run sort of
house. To sit in a room like the one I was sitting in, with the figures of
the tapestry glimmering grey and lilac and purple in the twilight, the
great bed, columned and curtained, looming in the middle, and the embers
reddening beneath the overhanging mantelpiece of inlaid Italian stonework,
a vague scent of rose-leaves and spices, put into the china bowls by the
hands of ladies long since dead, while the clock downstairs sent up, every
now and then, its faint silvery tune of forgotten days, filled the
room;--to do this is a special kind of voluptuousness, peculiar and complex
and indescribable, like the half-drunkenness of opium or haschisch, and
which, to be conveyed to others in any sense as I feel it, would require a
genius, subtle and heady, like that of Baudelaire.
After I had dressed for dinner I resumed my place in the arm-chair, and
resumed also my reverie, letting all these impressions of the past--which
seemed faded like the figures in the arras, but still warm like the embers
in the fireplace, still sweet and subtle like the perfume of the dead
rose-leaves and broken spices in the china bowls--permeate me and go to my
head. Of Oke and Oke's wife I did not think; I seemed quite alone, isolated
from the world, separated from it in this exotic enjoyment.
Gradually the embers grew paler; the figures in the tapestry more shadowy;
the columned and curtained bed loomed out vaguer; the room seemed to fill
with greyness; and my eyes wandered to the mullioned bow-window, beyond
whose panes, between whose heavy stonework, stretched a greyish-brown
expanse of sore and sodden park grass, dotted with big oaks; while far off,
behind a jagged fringe of dark Scotch firs, the wet sky was suffused with
the blood-red of the sunset. Between the falling of the raindrops from the
ivy outside, there came, fainter or sharper, the recurring bleating of the
lambs separated from their mothers, a forlorn, quavering, eerie little cry.
I started up at a sudden rap at my door.
"Haven't you heard the gong for dinner?" asked Mr. Oke's voice.
I had completely forgotten his existence.
3
I feel that I cannot possibly reconstruct my earliest impressions of Mrs.
Oke. My recollection of them would be entirely coloured by my subsequent
knowledge of her; whence I conclude that I could not at first have
experienced the strange interest and admiration which that extraordinary
woman very soon excited in me. Interest and admiration, be it well
understood, of a very unusual kind, as she was herself a very unusual kind
of woman; and I, if you choose, am a rather unusual kind of man. But I can
explain that better anon.
This much is certain, that I must have been immeasurably surprised at
finding my hostess and future sitter so completely unlike everything I had
anticipated. Or no--now I come to think of it, I scarcely felt surprised at
all; or if I did, that shock of surprise could have lasted but an
infinitesimal part of a minute. The fact is, that, having once seen Alice
Oke in the reality, it was quite impossible to remember that one could have
fancied her at all different: there was something so complete, so
completely unlike every one else, in her personality, that she seemed
always to have been present in one's consciousness, although present,
perhaps, as an enigma.
Let me try and give you some notion of her: not that first impression,
whatever it may have been, but the absolute reality of her as I gradually
learned to see it. To begin with, I must repeat and reiterate over and over
again, that she was, beyond all comparison, the most graceful and exquisite
woman I have ever seen, but with a grace and an exquisiteness that had
nothing to do with any preconceived notion or previous experience of what
goes by these names: grace and exquisiteness recognised at once as perfect,
but which were seen in her for the first, and probably, I do believe, for
the last time. It is conceivable, is it not, that once in a thousand years
there may arise a combination of lines, a system of movements, an outline,
a gesture, which is new, unprecedented, and yet hits off exactly our
desires for beauty and rareness? She was very tall; and I suppose people
would have called her thin. I don't know, for I never thought about her as
a body--bones, flesh, that sort of thing; but merely as a wonderful series
of lines, and a wonderful strangeness of personality. Tall and slender,
certainly, and with not one item of what makes up our notion of a
well-built woman. She was as straight--I mean she had as little of what
people call figure--as a bamboo; her shoulders were a trifle high, and she
had a decided stoop; her arms and her shoulders she never once wore
uncovered. But this bamboo figure of hers had a suppleness and a
stateliness, a play of outline with every step she took, that I can't
compare to anything else; there was in it something of the peacock and
something also of the stag; but, above all, it was her own. I wish I could
describe her. I wish, alas!--I wish, I wish, I have wished a hundred
thousand times--I could paint her, as I see her now, if I shut my
eyes--even if it were only a silhouette. There! I see her so plainly,
walking slowly up and down a room, the slight highness of her shoulders;
just completing the exquisite arrangement of lines made by the straight
supple back, the long exquisite neck, the head, with the hair cropped in
short pale curls, always drooping a little, except when she would suddenly
throw it back, and smile, not at me, nor at any one, nor at anything that
had been said, but as if she alone had suddenly seen or heard something,
with the strange dimple in her thin, pale cheeks, and the strange whiteness
in her full, wide-opened eyes: the moment when she had something of the
stag in her movement. But where is the use of talking about her? I don't
believe, you know, that even the greatest painter can show what is the real
beauty of a very beautiful woman in the ordinary sense: Titian's and
Tintoretto's women must have been miles handsomer than they have made them.
Something--and that the very essence--always escapes, perhaps because real
beauty is as much a thing in time--a thing like music, a succession, a
series--as in space. Mind you, I am speaking of a woman beautiful in the
conventional sense. Imagine, then, how much more so in the case of a woman
like Alice Oke; and if the pencil and brush, imitating each line and tint,
can't succeed, how is it possible to give even the vaguest notion with mere
wretched words--words possessing only a wretched abstract meaning, an
impotent conventional association? To make a long story short, Mrs. Oke of
Okehurst was, in my opinion, to the highest degree exquisite and
strange,--an exotic creature, whose charm you can no more describe than you
could bring home the perfume of some newly discovered tropical flower by
comparing it with the scent of a cabbage-rose or a lily.
That first dinner was gloomy enough. Mr. Oke--Oke of Okehurst, as the
people down there called him--was horribly shy, consumed with a fear of
making a fool of himself before me and his wife, I then thought. But that
sort of shyness did not wear off; and I soon discovered that, although it
was doubtless increased by the presence of a total stranger, it was
inspired in Oke, not by me, but by his wife. He would look every now and
then as if he were going to make a remark, and then evidently restrain
himself, and remain silent. It was very curious to see this big, handsome,
manly young fellow, who ought to have had any amount of success with women,
suddenly stammer and grow crimson in the presence of his own wife. Nor was
it the consciousness of stupidity; for when you got him alone, Oke,
although always slow and timid, had a certain amount of ideas, and very
defined political and social views, and a certain childlike earnestness and
desire to attain certainty and truth which was rather touching. On the
other hand, Oke's singular shyness was not, so far as I could see, the
result of any kind of bullying on his wife's part. You can always detect,
if you have any observation, the husband or the wife who is accustomed to
be snubbed, to be corrected, by his or her better-half: there is a
self-consciousness in both parties, a habit of watching and fault-finding,
of being watched and found fault with. This was clearly not the case at
Okehurst. Mrs. Oke evidently did not trouble herself about her husband in
the very least; he might say or do any amount of silly things without
rebuke or even notice; and he might have done so, had he chosen, ever since
his wedding-day. You felt that at once. Mrs. Oke simply passed over his
existence. I cannot say she paid much attention to any one's, even to mine.
At first I thought it an affectation on her part--for there was something
far-fetched in her whole appearance, something suggesting study, which
might lead one to tax her with affectation at first; she was dressed in a
strange way, not according to any established aesthetic eccentricity, but
individually, strangely, as if in the clothes of an ancestress of the
seventeenth century. Well, at first I thought it a kind of pose on her
part, this mixture of extreme graciousness and utter indifference which she
manifested towards me. She always seemed to be thinking of something else;
and although she talked quite sufficiently, and with every sign of superior
intelligence, she left the impression of having been as taciturn as her
husband.
In the beginning, in the first few days of my stay at Okehurst, I imagined
that Mrs. Oke was a highly superior sort of flirt; and that her absent
manner, her look, while speaking to you, into an invisible distance, her
curious irrelevant smile, were so many means of attracting and baffling
adoration. I mistook it for the somewhat similar manners of certain foreign
women--it is beyond English ones--which mean, to those who can understand,
"pay court to me." But I soon found I was mistaken. Mrs. Oke had not the
faintest desire that I should pay court to her; indeed she did not honour
me with sufficient thought for that; and I, on my part, began to be too
much interested in her from another point of view to dream of such a thing.
I became aware, not merely that I had before me the most marvellously rare
and exquisite and baffling subject for a portrait, but also one of the most
peculiar and enigmatic of characters. Now that I look back upon it, I am
tempted to think that the psychological peculiarity of that woman might be
summed up in an exorbitant and absorbing interest in herself--a Narcissus
attitude--curiously complicated with a fantastic imagination, a sort of
morbid day-dreaming, all turned inwards, and with no outer characteristic
save a certain restlessness, a perverse desire to surprise and shock, to
surprise and shock more particularly her husband, and thus be revenged for
the intense boredom which his want of appreciation inflicted upon her.