THE BEAU GESTE

The Beau geste is rare enough but not unknown in English life. Certainly there is no English paraphrase. “Beautiful gesture” bespeaks the orator or actor without conveying a certain brilliance, a sense of the unique and sometimes the sheer spirituality which is inherent in the Beau geste. “Noble act” sounds like a subscription to a hospital. The schoolboy who thought that Beau geste was another French way of saying Bon mot could not have been further astray. The Beau geste must be heroically conceived and, what is harder, artistically expressed!

The Saints have often shown themselves capable of the Beau geste, which carried to a sublime degree in supernatural matters can often be advanced as a reason for canonisation. An ordinary soul may cherish the sense of the Beau geste through a lifetime without finding the occasion. Expression does require an occasion, a crisis or a crash. Nothing became King Charles so well in his life as leaving it. Charles on the scaffold, Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen and Byron at Missolonghi, knew how to make the Beau geste to posterity. There is no life however spoilt or degraded that cannot be irradiated if not redeemed by the Beau geste at its close. There is the Beau geste of the sinner as well as the Beau geste of the righteous. The Good Samaritan was of the latter and many a pardoning husband since. The Beau geste of the profligate is rarer, but neither disgrace nor degradation can tarnish the Beau geste when it is made. The American clergyman, who was executed for poisoning an unfortunate sweetheart when he saw the chance of marrying a richer, seemed beyond the pale. There was possibly nothing he could do to redeem himself, but with a supreme effort he succeeded in blinding himself in prison. “If thine eye offend thee pluck it out.” Well, he did so, and went not unjustified to the gruesome chair. Again, the Dutch dancer, whose career of spycraft was brought to book by the punctuation of a French firing squad, rose to that occasion. Dressing herself for execution in a superb opera cloak she only asked leave to give the signal unblindfolded. This was granted by the officer on duty. She gave the signal by lifting her arms and revealing her person to the bullets. “C’était beau” quoth the Gallic centurion in charge.

Men and women are both capable of the Beau geste, but it takes a woman to appreciate it sometimes, to accept its shining significance or to bow to its grim subtlety. A woman’s Beau geste is often lost on a man’s intelligence but a man’s is never lost on a woman’s. Even in connubial life the Beau geste occurs and in the hour of greatest disaster. Couples are too often coupled like railway carriages on well worn lines by certificated couplers. They are expected to roll placidly from Junction to Junction with occasional rests in the siding. Everything is done to avoid accidents, but accidents will occur on the best regulated lines and the collapse, like the start, of married life can be relieved by a Beau geste embalming even what may be a broken memory for both. In any case a Beau geste is never lost on a woman. Let me think of two instances, one at the commencement, and the other at the end of a married career.

I remember a young Italian Prince, the future head of a family, whose veins ran with patrician and papal blood. At one moment of his life he insisted on entering a mésalliance by marrying a very beautiful courtesan, whom many of his friends had known under attached but detachable circumstances. They were naturally very distressed when he insisted on crowning his deep love with marriage. It seemed unnecessary and suicidal and caused his family the utmost apprehension. As a matter of fact courtesans who have made their career and their fortunes may yet make admirable wives. Everything however was done in this case to avert the catastrophe. Even the lady, who loved him with equal nobility of passion, refused to allow him to sacrifice himself. But her unselfishness made him more desperate and more determined to wreck his prospects at her feet. His friends were equally determined, and in a last effort to avert the marriage confronted him with legal proofs that his intended bride had been confined of an illegitimate child. Of her lovers he was aware, but this was new to him, and for a moment he was staggered. Recovering himself, he said, with one superb gesture of contempt, “Then it was by an immaculate conception!” and married her the next day. It was the Beau geste of a great lover and of a Catholic nobleman. A Protestant bourgeois would have virtuously slunk out of the affair and left her to the streets.

But John Betterman, whose marriage story supplies me with the second of my instances, was just a well-meaning and wealthy English public-school man, two generations away from Trade and, if truth be told, three generations off a butler. There was no glowing blood in his descent and no noble obligations held sway in his composition, but when his wife left him he behaved with real magnanimity. And in his case the Beau geste repaid him a hundredfold. Like most of us, he had to pass through the experience of feminine desertion.

John Betterman was no lover, and, much as he loved the affectionate woman who married him for his well-furnished house in Belgravia, his choice cook, butler and housekeeper, he could never inspire her with more than a deep appreciation. Affectionate appreciation lasted until his wife fell in love with one of those American officers who caused such havoc in the Allied ranks. Cornelius Murphy stood about six foot four and looked a cross between George Washington and Adonis. He danced like an Archangel on the tight-rope, and Broadway had taught him to be a real lover. He was fatal, like all his type, to the unsophisticated women of Europe. John Betterman’s wife had dreamed of such a find before she met him. Once she had found her dream, she never stopped meeting him. Captain Murphy received a standing invitation for lunch, dinner and tea and a sitting invitation for most moments between. It came under the Hospitality to Allies scheme. After the Armistice they danced together for six weeks. The Armistice was not made applicable to the war of sexes, which raged all the fiercer after the suspension of masculine hostilities. Man’s earthly warfare was not intended to be against his own sex. He must eternally meet the approaches and desertions of the beloved enemy, whose adorable artillery has always included all the refinements of poisoned breath, scraps of paper and submarine poignarding. The question was how would John Betterman take it. Quiet, inoffensive and obedient husbands can be far more dangerous than the blustering Pasha.

Cornelius Murphy and Mrs. Betterman withdrew to a Railway Hotel, from which she telephoned the first news of her flight to her husband. He took the parting like a hero. He would cause the necessary reasons for her to divorce him, and he only asked her to come and fetch her things the next day and promised that she would not find him in the house. He added his word of honour. With a sudden sigh she hung up the receiver, but grateful that she was spared pursuit or scenes. “I will go round to-morrow and fetch my clothes and all I need travelling abroad,” she said to Murphy. “It is such a relief that he takes it so kindly. English gentleman, you know.”

“No, you don’t,” shot Murphy, alert and suspicious, “No such thing as an English gentleman when it comes to that. It’s bound to be a trap. You’ll find lawyers and detectives waiting for you.”

Immediately she felt stung with a faint pity for her husband and insisted on obeying his last unselfish request. “No,” she said firmly, “I know John Betterman. He would cut off his hand rather than set a dirty trap. I shall go to-morrow alone.”

“For God’s sake, you shall not!” shouted Murphy. She drew herself up and said, “It is the price of my remaining with you to-night.” He bowed his head ashamed. “I was afraid some harm might come to you, darling. If I were your husband and could trap you I would kill you.”

The next morning he motored her to her husband’s house and waited while she collected her luggage. A letter was waiting for her on the hall table in his handwriting. She opened and read. A cheque for ten thousand pounds fell to the floor. There was no mention of it in the letter, which ran simply:

Dear Julia,

I have been a good husband but not good enough for you. You have been a perfect wife and to you I assign no fault. If there is something lacking in your life you must complete yourself elsewhere. When I come to the end of my life, I shall be as glad as I am now unhappy that I did not hinder you mounting a flame, which would bring any other woman unto earth and ashes but upon which I know you will rise to the highest heaven. When your life is complete, perfect and finished, let my love still lie like a wreath of immortelles at your feet.

John.

She cried a little when she read it. A new kind of feeling rose in her heart which possibly she could not explain. It has been said that every man kills the thing he loves. Perhaps it is sometimes true that a woman loves the thing she kills. It was her soul’s response to his Beau geste, the tiniest seed of a love he had never awakened in their whole married life.

Cornelius Murphy was relieved when he saw her emerge, but he spied her tears in a second. “Is he there? Did he frighten you?” and he pulled out his army pistol and dragged her across the threshold. She did not like his roughness and deliberately backed into the house. Murphy followed. “Of course he’s not here. I only felt a little sorry going away, that is all,” she explained. “I guess he had better not follow us,” said the other and, by way of a visible hint, he loaded his pistol and left it in the tray of visitors’ cards. Then they both went to America.

When John Betterman returned to his house that evening it looked as empty as the shell without the pearl. He gave one glance at the pistol in the hall, read the name, “Capt. Cornelius Murphy, 105 U.S. Cavalry,” and gave orders that it was never to be touched. In the morning he stood staring at that implement of ruffianism and feeling ironical amusement. But the impetus of his Beau geste was unabated and he consulted his lawyers on his wife’s behalf. They showed the same sleek sympathy which coffin-makers always extend to their clients and gave him the necessary instructions how to enable his wife to divorce him with least expense and most credit to herself. It was necessary that he should find a lady who was willing to share the same room (nothing more, but to be legal hardly less) at an hotel and to forward the written testimony to the proper quarters.

That evening, accordingly, John Betterman walked round and round the purlieus of Victoria Station until he was accosted by a cheery lady with a head of red tow, who suggested drinks in Victoria Station. To this proposition he agreed, and under these amical surroundings she confided to him that she was locally known as “Pink Tart” and that she was ready to pass the evening with bachelors for the sum of ten shillings sterling. John Betterman offered her five pounds on condition that she spent the night sitting on one chair, while he sat reading in another, and that she made no sign of her existence until the morning. Her name was Susan Honeyman, and she decidedly wished there were more wealthy lunatics and less impoverished rakes in the vicinity of Victoria Station.

Evidence of this extraordinary evening was duly furnished to the lawyers of Mrs. Betterman, who brought proceedings for divorce in the most respectable fashion, and received a good deal of broadcasted sympathy from readers of the best read column in the Daily Press, especially when the flagrant details of Mr. Betterman’s infidelities were exposed and even the nickname of Miss Susan Honeyman was set down in stark print and read eagerly by those who would never have allowed it to soil their lips.

John Betterman felt these shameful and painful details intensely, but he had come to take a strange and fantastic pleasure in his own sufferings. His suffering and his shame were for the sake of the woman he loved. He could ask no more.

Every night washed he his pillow with his tears and imagined deeper sufferings and further humiliations for himself. Toward his wife he felt no resentment in the least, not even a little. It had all turned and curdled into a bitter resentment against himself, bitterer than death. The months passed and his wife’s divorce was made absolute. He had borne up his heart while in the twilight stage of “decree nisi,” but dark finality bowed him to the ground. All that night he sat wishing to make an end of himself. At last he felt that death and suicide were too good for him. He must make himself suffer even more than he had suffered all those weeks, but how? He felt that no scourging could have hurt him as much as that undefended divorce trial, the crushing allusions of the paid lawyers, the scornful comment of the Judge, and, what cut him like vinegar poured into a slit spleen, the nickname of the woman with whom he was proved to have passed the stipulated time of lust. If it had been a “Green Goddess” or a “Black Beauty” it would not have looked so ridiculous in the evening papers, but the fatal synonym of Miss Susan Honeyman lost him all sympathy even from himself. He could not help hating himself like Hell.

The next night the house became more than he could endure, and he strode into the lamp-speckled dark. This way and that, like an unimaginative madman longing by some astounding stroke to trouble the mocking world, he sought some action that would help her and hurt himself, even if it were criminal. He would have gladly gone to prison to explain this sin of hers. No! by the sweet bones of Christ! she was sinless and immaculate! But he would willingly have gone to prison to serve some long sentence incurred by Murphy so that she might live happily with him. He would out-Enoch Enoch Arden in that way. How could he sufficiently lower and degrade himself to justify her desertion of home and husband in the face of the world?

A familiar figure reeled against him near Victoria Station. “Got any more fivers for sitting up to watch you read all night?” quoth a coarse but kindly voice. Why, of course he had, and he laughed a skeleton laugh as he recognised his old friend, who had often told her friends the story of her midnight escapade with a madman and was often reminiscent of the divorce proceedings in which her name and style had been taken by hired lawyers in vain. “Out for a lark?” she asked, but John Betterman was in dead earnest, when he asked her to go even further than on their former meeting and consent to marry him at a registry office the next day. Miss Honeyman would have been really surprised had she not taken his proposal for a joke. “Why, won’t one night at the hotel do you again? What do yer want marrying me at the end of me life?” And she roared with laughter. Only once before had she been asked in marriage, and that was by her original seducer, who had subsequently thrown her on the streets. However, John Betterman not only treated her to supper but gave her twenty pounds to pay her arrears of rent and buy a decent dress to make a proper appearance the next morning. No wonder that she went her way rejoicing, astounded at her luck in falling in again with so profitable a madman. It was in hopes of another windfall and not of the matrimonial position that she made her way to the registry the following day. To her amazement and perhaps a little to his own, John Betterman awaited her, prim and punctual, but with a look of insane pride in his face. He took a perverted pride in the depth of degradation and misery he found it possible to inflict upon his own soul. Before noon they were united legally by the law of England, and by three o’clock Mrs. John Betterman the second was lying quite drunk under his dining-room table. It was years since she had tasted champagne. She had that excuse. She lay there while John Betterman wrote to his first wife. He wished to put her into a position from which she could for ever more look down upon him. He took no further notice of his second wife. Had an angel from Heaven picked her up and made her drunk with the wine of celestial grapes she could not have been enjoying greater bliss. In fact at each interval of sick gratitude she constantly expressed her opinion that such was the actual case.

He looked up when he had finished writing and at the same moment heard the bell ring. His housekeeper entered. It was a cable from America sent by his first wife and it read with tragic simplicity:

“All I have done has been a horrible mistake. I am on the returning boat. Please meet me on Saturday at Liverpool and forgive your adoring wife.”

He looked up and remained watching Mrs. Betterman the second slowly drag herself into a chair and fumble with a cigarette. He twisted the cable into a spill, touched a red coal and lit her fag. Then he left her in charge of his housekeeper and went to bed. All his other servants had given notice and left long ago. On the whole he decided that it was wisest to keep her under liquor until Saturday. It was still Tuesday. When his first wife reached Liverpool a special messenger awaited her with a sealed letter from John Betterman announcing his legal marriage with his second wife and asking her, his first, to accept the remainder of the fortune at his disposal. He himself remained in the gutter.

It was her turn to receive a shock. She sat stunned in her cabin, unable to go ashore, thinking over the year. It had been a bitter experience and this was the knife. Murphy had taken her money and, after dancing her almost to death in the lowest haunts of New York, had left her for a professional dancer and disappeared. It was the British Consul who had advanced the money for her return, and this was her return. In her misery stood forth the miraculous white flower of sea-engendered love for her husband. It seemed inconceivable to her that she had not loved him before. She only knew that she had loved him ever since she had hesitated for one fatal second on his empty threshold. The thought of his Beau geste, infinitely divisible and intangibly volatile, had caught in some secret recess of her heart and flowered during the dismays and miseries of her American trip. But love, real love, is cheap at any price. It was a wonderful experience for her to feel as she did. Though fate had driven her down a blind alley and the cup she had snatched had been broken across her bleeding lips, yet here was a cup more tempting and a more perfect delight. Lust had carried her across the Atlantic. Love had accompanied her home. She felt how marvellous it was to feel as she felt even in her intense suffering. She had never dreamed it was possible. What tinsel all dream is to one thread of reality!

That night John Betterman gave a holiday to his housekeeper and opened his own door every time the bell rang. His instinct was right, for the second ring that he answered was hers. When he opened she knelt, and he lifted her gently past the threshold that was once theirs. They looked at each other and he perceived what certainly he had never seen in her eyes before. She whispered, asking forgiveness, and then with the lover’s practical outlook, whether the coast was clear? Where was the other woman? He shuddered and pointed upstairs. She insisted on meeting her successor. He told her that after nine o’clock she was generally insensible to the world of visitors and motioned her towards her former room. Feeling it was part of her penance, she followed and beheld lying across the bed a rather jovial-looking drab breathing liquor heavily from the gills. It was an awful moment for her and John Betterman. Their two faces of agony met and she discerned from his the reflection of her own great love. And there lay this wretched creature between them. It was maddening that they should suddenly love each other as greatly as they did; maddening, too, that they had taken the trouble to marry and divorce in the past. Yet it was maddening in a delicious way that they had found each other at last. If they had never divorced they might never have fallen in love with each other. But they did not try to think. He picked her up in his arms and the great flash of immortal love made them one as they stood gazing at each other in trance. She slipped to his knees.

There she only petitioned that, as she had forsaken him as wife, he would not spurn her as mistress. The connubial chamber was filled but she understood now why he had filled it with the filth of the street rather than seek a presentable second hand rosebud. It was his love for her. She understood the self-torture he had inflicted upon himself, his refusal to try and find happiness. She had the woman’s instinct to realise that this snoring slut symbolised as great a compliment to herself as though her adoring lover had committed suicide on his deserted doorstep. Poor John Betterman had committed worse than suicide. He had assumed a mental torture that no Inquisition would have imposed. He had clad his soul in the most ghastly of public San Benitos and made the most piteous auto-da-fé that a despairing man could make. It all rushed upon her and she only begged to share in his humiliation. She only asked to lower herself with him into the gutter. She had forfeited the position of wife but she prayed to be allowed to live as his hireling in the mews round the corner. She was content to live in shame. She would go on the streets if he would be her lover. She promised she would never intrude into his house. He would find her whenever he wished, humbly waiting upon the hour of his divine visit. He plucked her from his knees and kissed her ecstatically. There came an unconscious grunt from their nuptial bed and its temporary incubus took the occasion to snort.

They could not help laughing. They were lovers and everything turned to amazing happiness or screaming humour. There could happen nothing disgusting or distressing to them. The unconscious second wife was only delightfully ridiculous. The poor thing on the bed had no soul really, no meaning. She was just a frightful phantom. The next day John Betterman took rooms over the mews for his first wife and their strange ménage took root and continued, John Betterman keeping this horrible but harmless creature under his roof, allowing her five shillings a day for drink, and leaving her entirely to his housekeeper to prevent scenes in public. Though she was his legal wife, he had never dreamed of living with her. She was merely allowed to infest his house like a tame elemental, smelling as unpleasantly as they say elementals smell, but far less uncanny. Instead of casting or buying her out, he simply allowed her to sink brandy-logged in harbour. He was very kind to her and she could not last very much longer. After dinner every evening he retired to the mews, neighbours said to escape the horrors of married life. On Saturday nights the phantom struggled into the purlieus of Victoria Station, where she returned happily to her old life except that she treated any men she could induce to come with her. If John Betterman’s brandy hadn’t been so good she would have sunk underseas long before. She really was living quite a happy animal life, without care or worry, comfortably found in bed and board and drink. The police knew her circumstances and let her alone. She was cheerfully hail-fellow-well-met with half the boosers and all the broken men and women of the locality. Sometimes they bamboozled her of her money, but she was never blackmailed. The wretched company she kept contained sinners but not beasts. She was believed to have a store in her stocking and found to be very generous. She always drank to her last penny. And some outcast was always ready to see her safely home. A year passed....

She met the beast-type one night, a ruffianly swashbuckler, who spent his time frightening prostitutes by pretending to be a detective and squeezing their hard-earned gains. He had heard of Mrs. Betterman’s reputed savings and when her red, frouzled hair was thrust into his shirt one Saturday night he devised unto himself prompt and easy plunder. He swore at her foully and she rather liked him for it. When he had drunk her last penny, he wanted to take her to her lodging. She brought him staggering home. John Betterman’s house was empty and she used her key to open the door. Without turning on the light, she dragged him upstairs, with the promise of a case of whisky under her bed, which was true enough, though she forgot that the whisky had been drunk weeks before. When he found there was no drink, he demanded money, made avaricious and surprised by the comfort and richness of her room. He would not take “no” for an answer, but she was used to dealing with pugnacious gentlemen, and though it was a long time since she had had to push one downstairs, she was able to master her carousing companion. He fell heavily through the darkness. She judged by his swearing that he was not seriously hurt. It was a nuisance. She would have to follow and let him out of the door. She switched on the lights in the hall. He was picking himself up. A long, cadaverous looking fellow with a big nose, who might have been a cashiered cashier or a Mormon elder in better days, and a hatchet-shaped cheek, was reeling towards her. She shoved him against the door, where he stood at bay begging and then threatening. He refused to leave the house until she paid him and began twisting her wrist until the rotten bones cracked. Furious with pain, she cut his mouth with the wedding-ring on her free hand, cut him again and again, till he spluttered blood. It stung him to singular fury and he looked round for a weapon. By a chance, that was not so curious, his eye fell on the hall table, and a clean revolver lying amid the grey visitors’ cards. His hand closed familiarly upon it and without hesitation he discharged it into the drunken red halo beside him. With a heart-rending cry the second Mrs. Betterman fell into a shrivelled heap, but the dirty blood which trickled from her mouth and gaping temple was not as red as her hair. Her slayer stood looking at her sullenly. Then he realised that it was a good chance to go, and blew the second cartridge through his throat.

The police were quickly summoned by the hysterical housekeeper and spent an hour taking down wholly unnecessary information, for the ends of Justice had already been served. There was no thought of suspecting a third person in the crime as the name on the revolver corresponded with cards and envelopes addressed in the dead man’s pocket. Early next morning, John Betterman came home and was surprised to find waiting for him a letter from the Coroner.