Linda Condon | Page 6

certainly, the French windows open on dipping candle flames. You'd wear white, with your hair low and the midnight bang as it is now."
"That would be awfully nice," Linda replied vaguely. She sighed.
"But a very light drawing-room!" he cried. "White panels and arches and Canton-blue rugs--the brothers Adam. A fluted mantel, McIntires, and a brass hod. Curiously enough, I always see you in the evening ... at the piano. I'm not so bored, now." Little flames of red burned in either thin cheek. "What nonsense!" Suddenly he was tired. "This is a practical and earnest world," his voice grew thin and hurt her. "Yet beauty is relentless. You'll have your garden, but I shouldn't be surprised at difficulties first."
"It won't be so hard to get," she declared confidently. "I mean to choose the right man. Mother says that's the answer. Women, she says, won't use their senses."
"Ah."
Linda began to think this was a most unpleasant monosyllable.
"So that's the lay! Has she succeeded?"
"She has a splendid time. She's out tonight with Mr. Jasper in a rolling chair, and he has loads and loads of money. It makes all the other women cross."
"Here you are, then, till she gets back?"
"There's no one else."
"But, as a parent, infinitely preferable to the righteous," he murmured. "And you--"
"I think mother's perfect," she answered simply.
He shook his head. "You won't succeed at it, though. Your mother, for example, isn't dark."
"The loveliest gold hair," she said ecstatically. "She's much much prettier than I'll ever be."
"Prettier, yes. The trouble is, you are lovely, magical. You will stay for a lifetime in the memory. The merest touch of you will be more potent than any duty or fidelity. A man's only salvation will be his blindness."
Although she didn't understand a word of this, Linda liked to hear him; he was talking as though she were grown up, and in response to the flattery she was magnetic and eager.
"One time," he said, "very long ago, beauty was worshiped. Men, you see, know better now. They want their dollar's worth. The world was absolutely different then--there were deep adventurous forests with holy chapels in the green combe for an orison, and hermits rising to Paradise on the Te Deum Laudamus of the angels and archangels. There were black castles and, in the broad meadows, silk tents with ivory pegs and poles of gold."
The enchantments were as thick as shadows under the trees: perhaps the loveliest of women riding a snow-white mule, with a saddle cloth of red samite, or, wrapped in her shining hair, on a leopard with yellow eyes, lured you to a pavilion, scattered with rushes and flowers and magical herbs, and a shameful end. Or a silver doe would weep, begging you to pierce her with your sword, and, when you did, there knelt the daughter of the King of Wales.
"But I started to tell you about the worship of beauty. Plato started it although Cardinal Pietro Bembo was responsible for the creed. He lived in Italy, in an age like a lily. It developed mostly at Florence in the Platonic Academy of Cosomo and Pico della Mirandola. Love was the supreme force, and its greatest expression a desire beyond the body."
He gazed at Linda with a quizzical light in his eyes deep in shadow.
"Love," he said again, and then paused. "One set of words will do as well as another. You will understand, or not, with something far different from intellectual comprehension. The endless service of beauty. Of course, a woman--but never the animal; the spirit always. Born in the spirit, served in the spirit, ending in the spirit. A direct contradiction, you see, to nature and common sense, frugality and the sacred symbol of the dollar.
"It wouldn't please your Mr. Jasper, with his heaps and heaps of money. Mr. Jasper would consider himself sold. But Novalis, not so very long ago, understood.... A dead girl more real than all earth. You mustn't suppose it to be mere mysticism."
Linda said, "Very well, I won't."
He nodded. "No one could call Michelangelo hysterical. Sometime in the history of man, of a salt solution, this divinity has touched them. Touched them hopefully, and perhaps gone--banished by the other destination. Or I can comprehend nature killing it relentlessly, since it didn't lead to propagation. Then, too, as much as was useful was turned into a dogma for politics and priests.
"You saw in the rushlight a woman against the arras; there was a humming of viola d'amore from the musicians' balcony; she smiled at you, lingering, and then vanished with a whisper of brocade de Lyons on a sanded floor. Nothing else but a soft white glove, eternally fragrant, in your habergeon, an eternally fragrant memory; the dim vision in stone street and coppice; a word, a message, it might be, sent