The Return of the Soul | Page 6

and then I ceased to hear from him. He
died out of my life. His affection for me had evidently declined from
the day when he took it into his head that I was only a money-grubber,
like the rest of the world, and that the Jew instinct had developed in me
at an abnormally early age. I let him go. What did it matter? But I was
always glad that I had been cruel on the day my grandmother died. I
never repented of what I did--never. If I had, I might be happier now.
I went back to school. I studied, played, got into mischief and out of it
again, like other boys; but in my life there seemed to be an eternal
coldness, that I alone, perhaps, was conscious of. My deed of cruelty,
of brutal revenge on the thing that had never done me injury, had
seared my soul. I was not sorry, but t could not forget; and sometimes I

thought--how ridiculous it looks written down!--that there was a power
hidden somewhere which could not forget either, and that a penalty
might have to be paid. Because a creature is dumb, must its soul die
when it dies? Is not the soul, perhaps--as he said--a wanderer through
many bodies?
But if I did not kill a soul, as I killed a body, the day my grandmother
died, where is that soul now? That is what I want to arrive at, that is
what I must arrive at, if I am to be happy.
I went back to school, and I passed to Oxford. I tasted the strange,
unique life of a university, narrow, yet pulsating, where the youth, that
is so green and springing, tries to arm itself for the battle with the
weapons forged by the dead and sharpened by the more elderly among
the living. I did well there, and I passed on into the world. And then at
last I began to understand the value of my inheritance; for all that had
been my grandmother's was now mine. My people wished me to marry,
but I had no desire to fetter myself. So I took the sponge in my strong,
young hands, and tried to squeeze it dry. And I did not know that I was
sad--I did not know it until, at the age of thirty-three, just seventeen
years after my grandmother died, I understood the sort of thing
happiness is. Of course, it was love that brought to me understanding. I
need not explain that. I had often played on love; now love began to
play on me. I trembled at the harmonies his hands evoked.
I met a young girl, very young, just on the verge of life and of
womanhood. She was seventeen when I first saw her, and she was
valsing at a big ball in London--her first ball. She passed me in the
crowd of dancers, and I noticed her. As she was a debutante her dress
was naturally snow-white. There was no touch of colour about it--not a
flower, not a jewel. Her hair was the palest yellow I had almost ever
seen--the colour of an early primrose. Naturally fluffy, it nearly
concealed the white riband that ran through it, and clustered in tendrils
and tiny natural curls upon her neck. Her skin was whiter than ivory--a
clear, luminous white. Her eyes were very large and china-blue in
colour.
This young girl dancing passed and repassed me, and my glance rested

on her idly, even cynically. For she seemed so happy, and at that time
happiness won my languid wonder, if ingenuously exhibited. To be
happy seemed almost to be mindless. But by degrees I found myself
watching this girl, and more closely. Another dance began. She joined
it with another partner. But she seemed just as pleased with him as with
her former one. She would not let him pause to rest; she kept him
dancing all the time, her youth and freshness spoken in that gentle
compelling. I grew interested in her, even acutely so. She seemed to me
like the spirit of youth dancing over the body of Time. I resolved to
know her. I felt weary; I thought she might revive me. The dance drew
to an end, and I approached my hostess, pointed the girl out, and asked
for an introduction. Her name was Margot Magendie, I found, and she
was an heiress as well as a beauty.
I did not care. It was her humanity that drew me, nothing else.
But; strange to say, when the moment for the introduction arrived, and I
stood face to face with Miss Magendie, I felt an extraordinary shrinking
from her. I have never been able to understand it, but my blood ran cold,
and