The Eaten Cake

Is there any land for lost and lovely things: sunsets and jeweled nights and emotions that have been perfectly beautiful, and that just are n’t alive any more? If there is n’t, there ought to be; some Heaven where they could go on living and forever fulfilling their loveliness. This is not a personal sorrow, and yet I ache with it. As I sit here in my old maid’s corner I am as tranquil as if I had realized matrimony; I am busy and happy and just as much alive as most of my married friends. Of course they pity me; they feel as if Life had passed me by, and, in a way, it has; but I am infinitely sorrier for them, for they have lost something that I never had, and most of them don’t even know that they have lost it. That’s the real tragedy of it. Does n’t anything ever last? Or were Francesca and Juliet eternally happy because they could die — and keep their dreams? I wonder!

Now, there is Natalie. She is married, she has three children, and she must weigh at least a hundred and eighty both in body and mind. She is placid and tranquilly content. Yet I remember her a thin slip of a thing, all big eyes and emotion, restless as the wind, and consumed with a wild passion for her lover. She haunted the postoffice daily for letters and more letters; she glowed with feeling, and she was happy, torrentially happy, as she has never been since.

‘How does it feel to be in love?’ I once asked her curiously.

‘Oh, until you are sure He loves you, it’s fearful,’ she replied earnestly. ‘ It’s as if you were all raw around the heart.’

If I should remind her of it now she would probably die of mortified modesty—if she had n’t altogether forgotten about it.

Why are people so ashamed of having once been terribly alive? They are, you know. I suppose that’s the worst of it; you can’t eat your cake and want it, too.

And Annice and James, friends of my youth, what about them? It was all most romantic, I remember. He fell madly in love with her picture; he met her and his madness increased. He dogged her footsteps; his jealousy was epic, primeval. He used to say, ‘I wish to Heaven I could carry you off to a desert island and never let another man look at you!’ We girls used to thrill with a sort of sex-triumph when we brushed our hair after ‘ parties ’ and talked it all over. It had happened to a girl we knew, this great adventure of tremendous love. Would men ever want us like that? Well, instead of carrying her off to a desert island, James bore his bride away to a suburban street, and there, a little bald, a little fat, and very prosperous, he lives snugly to this day. The strange thing is that Annice is much lovelier than she was; the years have rounded all her angles, mental and physical, and given her a kind of radiant softness. You ’d think he would be far madder about her now than when she was a thin, rather awkward, wholly willful girl; but he is n’t at all. His passion has settled itself into a sane, robust, and steady affection, but the magic has vanished. She is ‘a gentle wife but fairy none.’

Now they say, the wise people who discuss all these things, that every good woman’s love for a man is fundamentally maternal. We have Madame Maeterlinck’s word for it. If this is so, then ours is the more blessed sex, for, after all, life is what we feel; we gain proportionately as we give ourselves, and a mother can be generous forever. But I have never by any chance heard it said that a man feels fundamentally paternal toward the woman he marries; so what does he get out of it? What are his emotional resources when the glow is gone?

Perhaps it does n’t matter. I’m only an outsider; how can I tell? If the marvel had ever come to me, the Love that cried at dawn, ‘Awake, Pendennis, I am here!’ spurring him relentlessly to the Fotheringay’s door; the flaming feeling that makes you the slave of the telephone’s ringing and the postman’s knock, — why, I’d have taken my chances. But Life never promised me anything more than the comfortable companionship of similar natures. And I always felt that there should be something else, at least at first, even if it had to go. Maybe it was not meant to stay, this tempestuous guest, and Robert Louis Stevenson said that you cannot expect to make a domestic pet of a roaring lion. But what becomes of all the enchantment — the pink lights and the band playing and the desertisland feeling! Where does it all go, anyhow ?