Three Weeks.

by Elinor Glyn.

INTRODUCTION TO MY AMERICAN READERS

I feel now, when my "Three Weeks" is to be launched in a new land, where I have many sympathetic friends, that, owing to the misunderstanding and misrepresentation it received from nearly the entire press and a section of the public in England, I would like to state my view of its meaning. (As I wrote it, I suppose it could be believed I know something about that!) For me "the Lady" was a deep study, the a.n.a.lysis of a strange Slav nature, who, from circ.u.mstances and education and her general view of life, was beyond the ordinary laws of morality. If I were making the study of a Tiger, I would not give it the attributes of a spaniel, because the public, and I myself, might prefer a spaniel! I would still seek to portray accurately every minute instinct of that Tiger, to make a living picture. Thus, as you read, I want you to think of her as such a study. A great splendid nature, full of the pa.s.sionate realisation of primitive instincts, immensely cultivated, polished, blase. You must see her at Lucerne, obsessed with the knowledge of her horrible life with her brutal, vicious husband, to whom she had been sacrificed for political reasons when almost a child. She suddenly sees this young Englishman, who comes as an echo of something straight and true in manhood which, in outward appearance at all events, she has met in her youth in the person of his Uncle Hubert. She perceives in him at once the Soul sleeping there; and it produces in her a strong emotion. Then I want you to understand the effect of Love on them both. In her it rose from caprice to intense devotion, until the day at the Farm when it reached the highest point--a desire to reproduce his likeness. How, with the most pa.s.sionate physical emotion, her mental influence upon Paul was ever to raise him to vast aims and n.o.ble desires for future greatness. In him love opened the windows of his Soul, so that he saw the fine in everything.

The immense rush of pa.s.sion in Venice came from her knowledge that they soon must part. Notice the effect of the two griefs on Paul. The first, with its undefined hope, making him do well in all things--even his prowess as a hunter--to raise himself to be more worthy in her eyes; the second and paralysing one of death, turning him into adamant until his soul awakens again with the returning spring of her spirit in his heart, and the consolation of the living essence of their love in the child.

The minds of some human beings are as moles, grubbing in the earth for worms. They have no eyes to see G.o.d's sky with the stars in it. To such "Three Weeks" will be but a sensual record of pa.s.sion. But those who do look up beyond the material will understand the deep pure love, and the Soul in it all, and they will realise that to such a nature as "the Lady's," pa.s.sion would never have run riot until it was sated--she would have daily grown n.o.bler in her desire to make her Loved One's son a splendid man.

And to all who read, I say--at least be just! and do not skip. No line is written without its having a bearing upon the next, and in its small scope helping to make the presentment of these two human beings vivid and clear.

The verdict I must leave to the Public, but now, at all events, you know, kind Reader, that _to me_, the "Imperatorskoye" appears a n.o.ble woman, because she was absolutely faithful to the man she had selected as her mate, through the one motive which makes a union moral in ethics--Love.--ELINOR GLYN.

THREE WEEKS

CHAPTER I

Now this is an episode in a young man's life, and has no real beginning or ending. And you who are old and have forgotten the pa.s.sions of youth may condemn it. But there are others who are neither old nor young who, perhaps, will understand and find some interest in the study of a strange woman who made the illumination of a brief s.p.a.ce.

Paul Verdayne was young and fresh and foolish when his episode began. He believed in himself--he believed in his mother, and in a number of other worthy things. Life was full of certainties for him. He was certain he liked hunting better than anything else in the world--for instance. He was certain he knew his own mind, and therefore perfectly certain his pa.s.sion for Isabella Waring would last for ever! Ready to swear eternal devotion with that delightful inconsequence of youth in its unreason, thinking to control an emotion as Canute's flatterers would have had him do the waves.

And the Creator of waves--and emotions--no doubt smiled to Himself--if He is not tired by now of smiling at the follies of the moles called human beings, who for the most part inhabit His earth!

Paul was young, as I said, and fair and strong. He had been in the eleven at Eton and left Oxford with a record for all that should turn a beautiful Englishman into a perfect athlete. Books had not worried him much! The fit of a hunting-coat, the pace of a horse, were things of more importance, but he sc.r.a.ped through his "Smalls" and his "Mods," and was considered by his friends to be anything but a fool. As for his mother--the Lady Henrietta Verdayne--she thought him a G.o.d among men!

Paul went to London like others of his time, and attended the theatres, where perfectly virtuous young ladies display nightly their innocent charms in hilarious choruses, arrayed in the latest _modes_. He supped, too, with these houris--and felt himself a man of the world.

He had stayed about in country houses for perhaps a year, and had danced through the whole of a season with all the prettiest _debutantes_. And one or two of the young married women of forty had already marked him out for their prey.

By all this you can see just the kind of creature Paul was. There are hundreds of others like him, and perhaps they, too, have the latent qualities which he developed during his episode--only they remain as he was in the beginning--sound asleep.

That fall out hunting in March, and being laid up with a sprained ankle and a broken collar-bone, proved the commencement of the Isabella Waring affair.

She was the parson's daughter--and is still for the matter of that!--and often in those days between her games of golf and hockey, or a good run on her feet with the hounds, she came up to Verdayne Place to write Lady Henrietta's letters for her. Isabella was most amiable and delighted to make herself useful.

And if her hands were big and red, she wrote clearly and well. The Lady Henrietta, who herself was of the delicate Later Victorian Dresden China type, could not imagine a state of things which contained the fact that her G.o.d-like son might stoop to this daughter of the earthy earth!

Yet so it fell about. Isabella read aloud the sporting papers to him--Isabella played piquet with him in the dull late afternoons of his convalescence--Isabella herself washed his dog Pike--that king of rough terriers! And one terrible day Paul unfortunately kissed the large pink lips of Isabella as his mother entered the room.

I will draw a veil over this part of his life.

The Lady Henrietta, being a great lady, chanced to behave as such on the occasion referred to--but she was also a woman, and not a particularly clever one. Thus Paul was soon irritated by opposition into thinking himself seriously in love with this daughter of the middle cla.s.ses, so far beneath his n.o.ble station.

"Let the boy have his fling," said Sir Charles Verdayne, who was a coa.r.s.e person. "d.a.m.n it all! a man is not obliged to marry every woman he kisses!"

"A gentlemen does not deliberately kiss an unmarried girl unless he intends to make her his wife!" retorted Lady Henrietta. "I fear the worst!"

Sir Charles snorted and chuckled, two unpleasant and annoying habits his lady wife had never been able to break him of. So the affair grew and grew! Until towards the middle of April Paul was advised to travel for his health.

"Your father and I can sanction no engagement, Paul, before you return," said Lady Henrietta. "If, in July, on your twenty-third birthday, you still wish to break your mother's heart--I suppose you must do so. But I ask of you the unfettered reflection of three months first."

This seemed reasonable enough, and Paul consented to start upon a tour round Europe--not having spoken the final fatal and binding words to Isabella Waring. They made their adieux in the pouring rain under a dripping oak in the lane by the Vicarage gate.

Paul was six foot two, and Isabella quite six foot, and broad in proportion. They were dressed almost alike, and at a little distance, but for the lady's scanty petticoat, it would have been difficult to distinguish her s.e.x.

"Good-bye, old chap," she said, "We have been real pals, and I'll not forget you!"

But Paul, who was feeling sentimental, put it differently.

"Good-bye, darling," he whispered with a suspicion of tremble in his charming voice. "I shall never love any woman but you--never, never in my life."

Cuckoo! screamed the bird in the tree.

And now we are getting nearer the episode. Paris bored Paul--he did not know its joys and was in no mood to learn them. He mooned about and went to the races. His French was too indifferent to make theatres a pleasure, and the attractive ladies who smiled at his blue eyes were for him _defendues_. A man so recently parted from the only woman he could ever love had no right to look at such things, he thought. How young and chivalrous and honest he was--poor Paul!

So he took to visiting Versailles and Fontainebleau and Compiegne with a guide-book, and came to the conclusion it was all "beastly rot."

So he turned his back upon France and fled to Switzerland.

Do you know Switzerland?--you who read. Do you know it at the beginning of May? A feast of blue lakes, and snow-peaks, and the divinest green of young beeches, and the sombre shadow of dark firs, and the exhilaration of the air.

If you do, I need not tell you about it. Only in any case now, you must see it through the eyes of Paul. That is if you intend to read another page of this bad book.

It was pouring with rain when he drove from the station to the hotel. His temper was at its worst. Pilatus hid his head in mist, the Burgenstock was invisible--it was chilly, too, and the fire smoked in the sitting-room when Paul had it lighted.

His heart yearned for his own snug room at Verdayne Place, and the jolly voice of Isabella Waring counting point, quint and quatorze.

What nonsense to send him abroad. As if such treatment could be effectual as a cure for a love like his. He almost laughed at his mother's folly. How he longed to sit down and write to his darling. Write and tell how he hated it all, and was only getting through the time until he saw her six feet of buxom charms again--only Paul did not put it like that--indeed, he never thought about her charms at all--or want of them. He a.n.a.lysed nothing. He was sound asleep, you see, to _nuances_ as yet; he was just a splendid English young animal of the best cla.s.s.

He had promised not to write to Isabella--or, if he _must_, at least not to write a love-letter.

"Dear boy," the Lady Henrietta had said when giving him her fond parting kiss, "if you are very unhappy and feel you greatly wish to write to Miss Waring, I suppose you must do so, but let your letter be about the scenery and the impressions of travel, in no way to be interpreted into a declaration of affection or a promise of future union--I have your word, Paul, for that?"

And Paul had given his word.

"All right, mother--I promise--for three months."

And now on this wet evening the "must" had come, so he pulled out some hotel paper and began.

"MY DEAR ISABELLA: