Three Weeks

Elinor Glyn

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• Publié par: nachir
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 38
• Langue: English

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Title: Three WeeksAuthor: Elinor Glyn
Release Date: September, 2005 [EBook #8899]
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Edition: 10
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG
EBOOK THREE WEEKS ***
Produced by Distributed ProofreadersTHREE WEEKS
BY ELINOR GLYN
1907
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 analysis
of a strange Slav nature, who, from circumstances
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 passionate realisation of
primitive instincts, immensely cultivated, polished,blasé. 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 passionate
physical emotion, her mental influence upon Paul
was ever to raise him to vast aims and noble
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 passion 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 noeyes to see God's sky with the stars in it. To such
"Three Weeks" will be but a sensual record of
passion. 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," passion would never have
run riot until it was sated—she would have daily
grown nobler 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 noble 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 passions 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 space.
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 passion 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 scraped 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 god
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 débutantes. 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 Waringaffair.
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 god-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 classes, so far
beneath his noble station."Let the boy have his fling," said Sir Charles
Verdayne, who was a coarse person. "Damn it all!
a man is not obliged to marry every woman he
kisses!"
"A gentlemen does not deliberately