8. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, pp. 284-358

XIX-XXIV

_____

Splendidly arrayed, the Duke makes his way toward the boat race, attracting the attention of the sister and the aunt accompanying an undergraduate named Harold, who is embarrassed by their gawking. Jessie and Aunt Mabel "were destined to remember that Harold had been 'very peculiar' all day." The Duke doffs his plumed hat and says to them, "Neither of you can have been warned by your escort that you were on the way to see him die, of his own accord, in company with many hundreds of other lads, myself included.... Go back, both of you, to the place whence you came."

He continues on his way with the throngs of young men and the women they are escorting. The men, seeing his regalia, felt "that he made them all partakers in his own glory, casting his great mantle over all commorients." The women "calculated not only that the velvet of the Duke's mantle could not have cost less than four guineas a yard, but also that there must be quite twenty-five yards of it." Some of the women "who had heard the rumour that he was in love with that frightfully flashy-looking creature, Zuleika Dobson, were more than ever sure there wasn't a word of truth in it."

Now Zuleika herself appears, accompanied by The MacQuern "and a little bodyguard of other blest acquaintances." She breaks with that entourage to join the Duke, proclaiming them dull: "As soon as I grew used to the thought that they were going to die for me, I simply couldn't stand them. Poor boys! it was as much as I could do not to tell them I wished them dead already."

They reach the barge, where the Duke insists they separate: He is going onto the raft where women aren't allowed, and she must watch from the roof where they stood yesterday. They bid each other goodbye, and Zuleika reminds him, "Don't forget to call my name in a loud voice." He agrees, and she adds:

"I have loved but twice in my life; and none but you have I loved. This, too: if you hadn't forced me to kill my love, I would have died with you. And you know it is true."
"Yes." It was true enough.

As they wait for the boats to appear, there is thunder and "A sudden white vertical streak slid down the sky." It begins to rain. Realizing that his fine regalia was about to be ruined, the Duke decides not to wait for the boats to pass: "'Zuleika!' he cried in a loud voice. Then he took a deep breath, and, burying his face in his mantle, plunged." The other undergraduates in his vicinity follow suit, as some of the older men cheer what they suppose to be attempts to rescue the Duke.

The narrator explains that the gods had misread the Duke's intentions: Not taking seriously his plan to wait until after the race was settled, they assumed that he had signaled his intent to jump when he took his position on the raft, "and not until it seemed that he stood ready to make an end of himself had the signal been given by Zeus for the rain to fall."

So the Duke is still alive, swimming downstream, though losing consciousness, when he surfaces near the Magdalen boat, disrupting its stroke and giving the race to Judas. "And the conquered crew, and the conquering, both now had seen the face of the Duke. A white smiling face, anon it was gone. Dorset was gone down to his last sleep."

The crews join him, as do all the remaining undergraduates, as the storm reaches its peak. A man with a gray beard jumps in to try to rescue some of them, but finally gives up and pulls himself onto the shore: "He whimpered as he sought foot-hold in the slime. It was ill to be down in that abominable sink of death." Except that the suicides don't regard it as abominable: "Any face that rose was smiling."

As "the patient river bore its awful burden towards Iffley," the storm drives away the survivors on the shore.

Yet on one roof one woman still was. A strange, drenched figure, she stood bright-eyed in the dimness; alone, as it was well she should be in her great hour; draining the lees of such homage as had come to no woman in history recorded. 

It is Clarence Batch who brings the news to his mother and Katie: "The Duke, he's drowned himself." Katie faints, and when she recovers she insists that the Duke didn't do it because of Zuleika, pointing out the earrings and proclaiming, "He kissed me.... No other man shall ever do that." Even Clarence's report that he cried out "Zuleika!" as he jumped in the river won't convince her otherwise.

Mrs. Batch begins to consider what has to be done: The Duke's room must be seen to in anticipation of the arrival of his family. Then Clarence remembers to tell them that "hundred and hundreds" of students had follow the Duke's lead, and Mrs. Batch realizes that Mr. Noaks must have been among them. She goes up to his room to confirm it. Meanwhile, Katie, whose task has always been to sweep and then scrub down the doorstep, has gone out and painted it black. "She had expressed her mourning, as best she culd, there where she had been wont to express her love."

Zuleika is lying face-up on the surface of the water, her hair spread out around her. "Not Ophelia in the brook could have seemed more at peace." She's in a bathtub, of course, not the river, having returned from the scene of the suicides soaked by the rain. She goes downstairs to see her grandfather, expecting to talk about the day's events, but finds him strangely unaffected by them. He asks if the college won the race, and she stammers, "I -- I don't know grand-papa. There was so much happening. It -- I will tell you all about it at dinner."

But he tells her that tonight is the "bump-supper" and he has to preside in the college's dining hall. "Zuleika had forgotten there was to be a bump-supper, and, though she was not very sure what a bump-supper was, she felt it would be a mockery to-night." He tells her that she can look down at the supper from the gallery. "There is apt to be some measure of noise and racket, but all of it good-humoured and -- boys will be boys -- pardonable." When he leaves, "she hardly knew whether to laugh or cry."

In the quad the Warden is joined the Fellows, some of whom have heard the news but are skeptical about its truth. Even "the three or four dons who had been down at the river were now half ready to believe that there must, after all, be some mistake, and that in this world of illusions they had to-night been especially tricked." When the Warden asks "how did our boat acquit itself?" the Fellows decide to leave breaking the news up to the Sub-Warden. "'Well, really, Warden,' he said, 'we -- we hardly know,' and he ended with what can only be described as a giggle. He fell low in the esteem of his fellows."

They enter the Hall, where the three long tables are set and "ranged along either wall, was the usual array of scouts, motionless, with napkins across their arms." But there are no students present. "It became clear to the Warden that some organised prank or protest was afoot. Dignity required that he should take no heed whatsoever." And so the meal proceeds as if the Hall were full, except that in the absence of the Senior Scholar who is supposed to read the grace, it falls to Mr. Pedby, the Junior Fellow, to do so. He is a mathematician, not a Latinist, so his reading of the words is so comical that "the story of Pedby's grace would be told always. Here was a tradition that generations of dons yet unborn would cherish and chuckle over."

As the meal progresses, the food and the wine "helped to quicken in these men of thought the power to grapple with a reality," but when the Sub-Warden makes another effort to tell the Warden what has happened, the Warden has been so perplexed by his earlier behavior that "the Warden's eye met his with a suspicion so cruelly pointed that he again floundered and gave in."

Zuleika looks down on the scene from the gallery.

But there was no spark of triumph now in her eyes; only a deep melancholy; and in her mouth a taste of dust and ashes. She thought of last night, and of all the buoyant life that this Hall had held. Of the Duke she thought, and of the whole vivid and eager throng of his fellows in love. Her will, their will, had been done. But there rose to her lips the old, old question that withers victory -- "To what end?" ... She was utterly alone to-night in the midst of a vast indifference.

The Duke's body lies alongside others pulled from the river. "And bending over him, looking down at him with much love and pity in her eyes, was the shade of Nellie O'Mora, that 'fairest witch,' to whose memory he had to-day atoned."

I pause here to salute Beerbohm as a master ironist. If there are identifiable human characters in his tale, they are Zuleika and the Duke, to whom he here gives something approaching (but perhaps not reaching) a genuine pathos. But he sets Zuleika's state of mind and the Duke's death (not to mention the deaths of the lemming-like undergraduates) against the stuff of farce and parody -- the comic withholding of the truth from the Warden enabled by the ivory-tower detachment from reality of the dons. Does he undercut the pathos by doing so? Or does he, as I rather think, heighten it?

We return to the lodging-house, where Katie is sullenly tidying up the Duke's room. "She had not ceased to mourn the Duke; but it was even more anger than grief that she felt at his dying." The anger is largely directed at Zuleika, whom she tries to imitate by posing in front of the mirror in some of Zuleika's attitudes. But she gives up, realizing that "she hadn't just that something which somehow Miss Dobson had. She put away from her the hasty dream she had had of a whole future generation of undergraduates drowning themselves, every one, in honour of her. She went wearily on with her work."

Then she goes upstairs to see to Noaks's room and discovers him hiding behind the curtain. She's delighted: "here was the one man who had scorned to die for Miss Dobson." Noaks had been planning to run away to Australia in shame at his cowardice, but here is Katie hailing him as a hero, singing "his praises with a so infectious fervour that Noaks did begin to feel he had done a fine thing in not dying." And when she says she loves him, he gives her the iron ring that he wears because it's supposed to ward off rheumatism. He explains that he won't be able to afford to marry her until he's forty, however.

Then he notices that she's wearing Zuleika's earrings. When she says the Duke gave them to her, he is miffed and insists that they should be turned over to the executors of the Duke's estate. But on second thought he realizes their value. "Why flinch from her unsought dowry?" But, he warns her, they will still have to wait, and that he still has to study to get his degree, so she leaves him with his books and goes up to her room in the attic. She looks out of the window and sees, below her, Noaks's head, also looking out of the window.

Noaks hears a voice in the street and sees Zuleika approaching. She has been walking around Oxford, hoping to find an undergraduate who hasn't sacrificed himself for her. "Let me hear from your own lips that you love me," she pleads. But Noaks lies and says that the reason he is alive is that he sprained his ankle on the way to the river. Furious, Katie flings down his ring and tells Zuleika the truth about Noaks's cowardice.

Zuleika tells Katie, "We have both been deceived in this man, and are, in some sort, sisters." But Katie rejects the idea of sisterhood with the likes of Zuleika. She points out the earrings that the Duke gave her and tells her that he kissed her goodbye, a fact confirmed by her mother, who is standing at the street door. Noaks once again pleads his love for Zuleika.

"You!" flashed Zuleika. "As for you, little Sir Lily Liver, leaning out there, and, I frankly tell you, looking like nothing so much as a gargoyle hewn by a drunken stone-mason for the adornment of a Methodist Chapel in one of the vilest suburbs of Leeds or Wigan, I do but felicitate the river-god and his nymphs that their water was saved to-day by your cowardice from the contamination of your plunge." 

A crowd that includes some of Mrs. Batch's friends and Clarence joins in the denunciation of Noaks, who climbs out onto the window-ledge and jumps. And so, "the last of the undergraduates lay dead; and fleet-footed Zuleika, with her fingers still pressed to her ears, had taken full toll now."

Chastened, Zuleika decides that her only recourse is to become a nun. She tells Mélisande to start packing and goes to tell her grandfather, whom she's surprised to find still unaware of what has happened today.

"The reason why there were no undergraduates in your Hall to-night is that they were all dead."
"Dead?" he gasped. "Dead? It is disgraceful that I was not told. What did they die of?"
"Of me." 

When she explains the full extent of the suicides, and that as a consequence she has decided to become a nun, he observes, "That ... is rather a revulsion than a vocation." She asks what he would have done if "all the young ladies of that period had drowned themselves for love of you?" And he observes that he was "greatly admired.... In those days it was the fashion for young ladies to embroider slippers for such men in holy orders as best pleased their fancy. I received hundreds -- thousands -- of such slippers." But he married the one woman who never embroidered a pair for him. He concluded that she didn't love him, and that "interested me greatly. It fired me."

Zuleika realizes that "it's a case of sheer heredity." But the Warden scoffs, "You and I, my dear, may in some respects be very queer people, but in the matter of the affections we are ordinary enough." He had hoarded the slippers -- "Thousands of slippers, did I say? Tens of thousands." -- and made a bonfire of them when he became engaged and "danced round it all night." Recognizing their kinship, Zuleika says to him, "I do believe you're a little proud of me." And he replies, "Heaven forgive me, I believe I am." She tells him she's going away, but not to a convent, and he invites her to come stay with him again. "'Not in term-time, though,' he added. 'No,' she echoed. 'not in term-time.'"

So she goes back to her room and tells Mélisande to go to the train station and order a special train tomorrow at 10 for Cambridge.

6. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, pp. 185-246

XI-XV

_____

Now comes a shift in narrative. Up to now, the narrator has pretty much stayed out of it, but in Chapter XI he decides to tell his own story, and to talk about his omniscience: why he is privy to so much "that passed between the protagonists at private interviews -- aye, and the exact thoughts and emotions that were in their breasts." This is Beerbohm in a little metafictional joke, of course: jostling the novel-reader's complacent acceptance of the conventions of the genre, which he has already tweaked with his hints as to the outcome of the plot.

Zuleika ("The lady after whom I have named this book") is still alive, the narrator informs us, "and well known to some of you personally, to all of you by repute." The assumption, then, is that his readers already know about "that episode in her life which caused so great a sensation among the newspaper-reading public a few years ago." Beerbohm is, in short, pretending that his novel is really a history and that he is a servant of history's muse: Clio.

Clio, it seems, has grown bored and frustrated with history. "She was particularly struck by a remark of Aristotle's, that tragedy was more philosophic than history, inasmuch as it concerned itself with what might be, while history was concerned with merely what had been." When the novel was invented, she became a devoted reader, "and after the publication of 'Clarissa Harlowe' she spent practically all her time in reading novels." When Hermes told Zeus about "Clio's secret addiction to novel-reading," he decided to use it to woo her. And then "it occurred to her how fine a thing history might be if the historian had the novelist's privileges." She asked Zeus to bring this about. He argued that letting historians have the power of access to the intimate thoughts and actions of historic figures would put too many novelists out of work, but he agreed to let her try it just once.

So when Clio spotted Zuleika boarding the train for Oxford, she whisked the author to Parnassus, where Zeus "stretched his hand over me, and I was indued with the promised gifts. And then, lo! I was on the platform of Oxford station." So throughout the incidents he has been recording in this book he has been able "to float all unseen, to float all unhampered by any corporeal nonsense" through the events he has recorded. Except that after Zuleika dumped the pitcher of water on the Duke, he betrayed Clio's trust and "gave the Duke of Dorset an hour's grace. What were his thoughts in that interval, what words, if any, he uttered in the night, never will be known. For this, Clio has abused me in language less befitting a Muse than a fishwife. I do not care. I would rather be chidden by Clio than by my own sense of delicacy, any day."

Instead of keeping watch on either the Duke or Zuleika, he floats out to his old college to observe its residents, and watches one of them making out his will, leaving everything to Zuleika, another writing a suicide note to his father. And he reflects on the peculiar character of "the Oxford spirit":

Oxford, that lotus-land, saps the will-power, the power of action. But, in doing so, it clarifies the mind, makes larger the vision, gives, above all, that playful and caressing suavity of manner which comes of a conviction that nothing matters, except ideas, and that not even ideas are worth dying for, inasmuch as the ghosts of them slain seem worthy of yet more piously elaborate homage than can be given to them in their heyday.

The spirit of Oxford is "mysterious, inenubilable." (It means "incapable of being cleared of clouds; inexplicable.") As a consequence, the mass suicide being contemplated by its undergraduates is no threat to it: "Not Oxford was menaced. Come what might, not a stone of Oxford's walls would be loosened, nor a wreath of her vapours would be undone, nor lost a breath of her sacred spirit."

So the narrator floats back to Judas College where, before looking in on the Duke, he visits Noaks's room and finds him lamenting that he's too young to die. "It did not seem to strike him that quite half of the undergraduates who contemplated death -- and contemplated it in a fearless, wholesome, many fashion -- were his juniors." Finally, the narrator sinks through the floor to the Duke's room below and discovers that the Duke has caught a cold. And that he's furious with Zuleika, whom "he must hate with a fathomless hatred." Moreover, the idea of dying for her is odious: "Of all deaths, the bitterest that can befall a man is that he lay down his life to flatter the woman he deems vilest of her sex."

He tries to write in his diary -- amid bouts of sneezing -- but the words fail to come. Suddenly he decides that he won't die after all. That would be the best revenge:

She, she, the hyena woman, would be the fool. No one would have thought of dying for her, had he not set the example. Every one would follow his new example. Yes, he would save Oxford yet. That was his duty. Duty and darling vengeance! And life -- life! 

And he leans out of his window and laughs "outright into the morning; insomuch that the birds in the trees of Trinity, and still more the Emperors over the way, marvelled greatly."

At eight o'clock in the morning, Katie, the landlady's daughter, is sweeping the steps when Zuleika's maid, Mélisande, arrives with a letter for the Duke. Katie, who takes an instant dislike to Mélisande, refuses to take it up to him -- "His Grace is no called before nine o'clock" -- but offers to put it on his breakfast tray, though she closes the door in Mélisande's face. Undeterred, Mélisande drops the letter through the mail slot.

When the Duke reads the letter he finds an apology from Zuleika and a plea for him to come around before lunch with The MacQuern. She has added a P.S. -- "Please burn this." The Duke laughs: "Why there was nothing, not one phrase, to compromise her in the eyes of a coroner's jury!" Then he ponders how to reply: "how to administer her punishment the most poignantly." He considers writing a letter in which he will return the two pearl earrings she has given him, but concludes it would be more fun to watch her expression when he returns them. "Yesterday he had been her puppet, her Jumping-Jack; to-day it was as avenging angel that he would appear before her.

As he leaves he meets on the doorstep a telegraph boy. The message says, "Deeply regret inform your grace last night two black owls came and perched on battlements." Though he had been resolved not to die, the omen changes his mind. He sends a reply: "Prepare vault for funeral Monday."

He could not, he told himself, face Zuleika now. As artist, he saw that there was irony enough left over to make the meeting a fine one. As theologian, he did not hold her responsible for his destiny. But as a man, after what she had done to him last night, and before what he had to do for her to-day, he would not go out of his way to meet her.

He considers going straight to the river and taking care of what had to be done. "No, that would be like running away." But then he sees "a female figure coming quickly round the corner." He takes it to be Zuleika, and walks away rapidly. When she quickens her pace, he begins to run, until he slips on a piece of orange peel -- the gods had placed it there to trip up the Master of Balliol -- and falls. The woman, who catches up with him, turns out to be Mélisande with another letter from Zuleika. He tears it up unread and sends Mélisande away.

He goes into a chemist shop where his wounds are tended to. He speculates "that the gods had intended the accident to be fatal, and that only by his own skill and lightness in falling had he escaped the ignominy of dying in full flight from a lady's-maid." And then he becomes aware that he has a cold, and wonders, "had he escaped a violent death only to succumb to 'natural causes'?" The chemist mixes up a cold remedy and tells him he should take a teaspoonful every two hours. It makes him feel so much better that he asks if it would be more effective if he took two teaspoonfuls every hour. The chemist cautions him not to do so. "The Duke yielded. He fancied, indeed, that the gods had meant him to die of an overdose." Then he has another brush with death: a speeding butcher's cart, and "smiled a sardonic smile" at this delivery from his fate.

On the street he encounters Oover and "remembered the awful resolve of Oover, and of all young Oxford." He begins to think of it as his mission to dissuade these others from killing themselves, but when he tries to persuade Oover of "the loss that your death would be to America and to Oxford," the Rhodes Scholar is having none of it.

"America can turn out millions just like me, and Oxford can have as many of them as she can hold. On the other hand, how many of you can be turned out, as per sample, in England? Yet you choose to destroy yourself.... And you're right, Sir. Love transcends all." 

He suggests to Oover that he might have changed his mind about killing himself, but Oover says it would prove that "all those yarns I used to hear about the British aristocracy were true, after all. I should aver that you were not a white man." When challenged, the Duke is forced to admit that he is planning to die today, but Oover doesn't have time for further details: "It's just turning eleven o'clock, and I've a lecture. While life lasts, I'm bound to respect Rhodes' intentions." And he hurries off.

The Duke ponders the irony of his situation.

If he could say "Behold, I take back my word. I spurn Miss Dobson, and embrace life," it was possible that his example would suffice. But now that he could only say "Behold, I spurn Miss Dobson, and will not die for her, but I am going to commit suicide, all the same," it was clear that his words would carry very little force.... He must die in the manner that he had blazoned forth. And he must do it with a good grace, none knowing h was not glad; else the action lost all dignity. 

He encounters "an average undergraduate," whom because of his averageness he addresses as Smith, even though the young man says it's not his name. "'Generically it is,' replied the Duke. 'You are Smith to all intents and purposes." And he tries to engage "Smith" in a Socratic dialogue about suicide, until the young man finally just walks away. The Duke "remembered that even Socrates, for all the popular charm of his mock-modesty and his true geniality, had ceased after a while to be tolerable.... The Duke recoiled from what he took to be another pitfall. He almost smelt hemlock."

After more attempts to persuade, even to bribe, undergraduates into not killing themselves, "He found himself in the precincts of Magdalen, preaching from the little open-air pulpit there an impassioned sermon on the sacredness of human life, and referring to Zuleika in terms which John Knox would have hesitated to utter." But the crowd seems so hostile to his sermon that he worries that this is "yet another trap laid for him by the gods" and that "he might be dragged down, overwhelmed by number, torn limb from limb."

He meets The MacQuern, "with a large but inexpensive bunch of flowers," and tells him he won't be joining him for lunch, but that as far as he knew Zuleika still planned to be there. Then he realizes that he's hungry and goes to the Junta to order some sandwiches. Then, seeing the portrait of Nellie O'Mora, he decides to order a glass of port instead, forgetting about the sandwiches. But he feels the medicine bottle in his pocket, realizes that he is fifteen minutes overdue for his dosage, and calls for a wineglass and a teaspoon, fearing that his failure to take his medicine promptly might prove fatal: "'Every two hours' -- the directions were explicit. Had he delivered himself into the gods' hands?" He measures the medicine into the wineglass and toasts Nellie O'Mora, making amends for his previous lapse from tradition.

He realized, however, that to Zuleika he owed the tenderness he now felt for Miss O'Mora. It was Zuleika that had cured him of his aseity. [i.e., independent existence, like God's]  She it was that had made his heart a warm and negotiable thing.... Now he knew that the secret, the open secret, of happiness was in mutual love -- a state that needed not the fillip of death. And he had to die without having ever lived.... Death would lose much of its sting for him if there were somewhere in the world just one woman, however lowly, whose heart would be broken by his dying. 

And then he remembers that Zuleika had told him his landlady's daughter was in love with him. "Here, possibly, was a maiden to mourn him." So he decides to take his lunch in his room. But there he is met by "Zuleika Dobson at his feet, at his knees, clasping him to her, sobbing, laughing, sobbing."

5. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, pp. 147-184

IX-X

_____

The Duke and his followers' mad dash seems to have been unnecessary: Zuleika hasn't yet arrived. The Warden explains that she had decided to change dresses. The Duke regards the Warden in a new light:

Here was a man who -- for had he not married and begotten a child? -- must have known, in some degree, the emotion of love. How, after that, could he have gone on thus, year by year, rusting among his books, asking no favour of life, waiting for death without a sign of impatience? Why had he not killed himself long ago? Why cumbered he the earth? 

Meanwhile, an undergraduate is on stage singing a song about a lover who "predicted that only when he were 'laid within the church-yard cold and grey' would his lady begin to pity him." For the Duke, "This fictitious love-affair was less nugatory than the actual humdrum for which Dr. Dobson had sold his soul to the devil."

And then Zuleika arrives, "brilliant in black." She leads the audience in an ovation for the singer, who has had to start over because of the sensation caused by her arrival. And then she turns to the Duke to point out the reason for her decision to change her dress: The pearls in her earrings have turned black. It is a sign, she tells him, that she has gone "quite unconsciously into mourning for him." She is so thrilled with the idea of his dying for love of her that she asks, "Will you, please, at the last moment to-morrow, call out my name in a loud voice, so that every one around can hear?" He agrees to do so.

Meanwhile, news of the Duke's plan to take his life has buzzed through the audience, spread by those who had been at the Junta. Everyone is eagerly awaiting his performance on the piano, and although he hadn't decided beforehand what to play, as he sits at the keyboard it comes to him: Chopin's Funeral March. The performance even summons the ghosts of Frédéric Chopin and George Sand. Despite the nature of the music, "he smiled brilliantly through" the performance. "And Zuleika returned his gaze with a smile not less gay. She was not sure what he was playing. But she assumed that it was for her, and that the music had some reference to his impending death." Chopin's ghost is thrilled with the performance, but George Sand warns him that he'll have a headache if they don't leave. Besides, she tells him, he'll be joining them tomorrow.

When they leave the hall, the Duke and Zuleika are greeted by a throng of undergraduates, now convinced that they too must die for love of her.

If any one of the undergraduates had met Miss Dobson in the desert of Sahara, he would have fallen in love with her; but not one in a thousand of them would have wished to die because she did not love him. The Duke's was a peculiar case.... These other, these quite ordinary, young men were the victims less of Zuleika than of the Duke's example, and of one another. A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.... To die for Miss Dobson was "the thing to do." The Duke was going to do it. The Junta was going to do it. It is a hateful fact, but we must face the fact that snobbishness was one of the springs to the tragedy here chronicled. 

Zuleika, meanwhile, still has her mind set on retrieving the transformed studs from the Duke's shirtfront as "a keepsake of the tragedy that was to be." But she's startled when she learns that the magnitude of the tragedy now threatens to increase, that the men at the Junta had vowed to follow his example. He assures her, "They will recant their folly. I shall force them to."

The MacQuern approaches them with a handkerchief that he claims Zuleika dropped, though it "was obviously a man's" handkerchief. It's a pretext for an introduction to which the Duke accedes "with sulky grace." The MacQuern -- whom Zuleika decides to call Mr. MacQuern because "'The' would sound so odd in the vocative" -- confirms that they are all determined to die tomorrow, "After the Eights, I suppose; at the same time as the Duke. It wouldn't do to leave the races undecided." Whereupon Zuleika decides that she must do something to "show [her] gratitude" for their devotion. She calls on her maid, Mélisande, to bring the malachite casket in which she keeps her magic tricks.

The second part of the concert is still going on, but the only ones in the hall are the performers, a few dons, and the sisters and cousins of the men who had brought them but had abandoned them to gaze at Zuleika. So Zuleika decides to put on her magic show there in the quad. "She stood with eyes downcast and hands folded behind her, moonlit in the glow of lanterns, modest to the point of pathos, while the Duke gracefully and simply introduced her to the multitude."

Two or three thousands of human bodies, human souls? Yet the effect of them in the moonlight was as of one great passive monster. So it was seen by the Duke, as he stood leaning against the wall, behind Zuleika's table. He saw it as a monster couchant and enchanted, a monster that was to die; and its death was in part his own doing.

Zuleika begins her performance, the one that has thrilled audiences on two continents. And we learn that it is cheesy and amateurish, a "stale and narrow repertory" that demonstrates "her marked lack of skill." The truth even dawns on the Duke, "who blushed to think what these men thought of her.... They forgave her -- confound their impudence! -- because of her beauty. The banality of her performance was an added grace. It made her piteous. Damn them, they were sorry for her."

Her final trick is the Magic Canister, into which she asks men in the audience to deposit a watch, a cigarette-case, a necktie and the like. And she asks the Duke for his studs. "There was no help for it. He quickly extricated from his shirt-front the black pearl and the pink." All of the items in the canister then disappear into its hidden compartment. She shows the audience the "empty" canister, then makes them reappear -- all but the two studs. "Would she rob the Duke, and his heir-presumptive, and the Tanville-Tankertons yet unborn? Alas, yes. But what she now did was proof that she had qualms.... With a gesture of her disengaged hand, so swift as to be scarcely visible, she unhooked her earrings and 'passed' them into the canister." It is these she returns to the Duke, keeping his studs. Realizing that he has been tricked, he tells her to keep them.

She acknowledges the applause of the crowd "in the manner of a prima donna -- chin up, eyelids down, all teeth manifest, and hands from the bosom flung ecstatically wide asunder." As the crowd breaks up, the forsaken ladies from the concert inside having "moved down into the quadrangle, spreading their resentment like a miasma," The MacQuern approaches to invite her to lunch with him the next day. She agrees, asking him to bring his friends, which is not what he had planned. "'I had hoped --' he began. 'Vainly,' she cut him short." So he agrees to invite the Duke.

Naturally, the Duke is miffed: "Had it not been arranged that he and she should spend his last day together? Did it mean nothing that she had given him her ear-rings?" He and The MacQuern almost come to blows now over which will walk Zuleika home. "Men had fought for Zuleika, but never in her presence. Her eyes dilated." She wonders if she should "be holding aloft a candelabra of lit tapers; no, that was only done indoors, and in the eighteenth century." But it turns out that "The Duke and The MacQuern would never have come to blows in the presence of a lady. Their conflict was necessarily spiritual. And it was the Scotsman, Scots though he was, who had to yield."

As they walk, she wonders if the black owls are sitting on the battlements of Tankerton. When they reach the door, the Duke seizes her hands, but she angrily twists out of his grip.

He laughed. "You are afraid of me. You are afraid to let me kiss you, because you are afraid of loving me. This afternoon -- here -- I all but kissed you. I mistook you for Death. I was enamoured of Death. I was a fool. That is what you are, you incomparable darling: you are a fool. You are afraid of life. I am not. I love life. I am going to live for you, you hear?" 

Is he going back on his promise? she asks. He insists that she will release him from it because she really loves him. She calls him a coward and goes indoors. "No man had ever dared to lay hands on her," she reflects, noticing the red marks on her wrists. "With a sense of contamination, she proceeded to wash her hands thoroughly with soap and water." As she goes on in this melodramatic manner, it starts to rain, which pleases her because he told her he would wait under her window.

He had told her she was afraid of life. Life! -- to have herself caressed by him; humbly to devote herself to being humbly doted on; to be the slave of a slave; to swim in a private pond of treacle -- ugh! If the thought weren't so cloying and degrading, it would be laughable.

She thinks of leaving Oxford by the first train in the morning, "But this could not be done without slighting all those hundred of other men." So instead she takes the water jug and empties its contents out the window onto the Duke.

1. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, pp. i-30

"Introduction," by Francis Hackett; I-II

_____

Zuleika Dobson, says Francis Hackett in the introduction to the 1938 Modern Library edition I'm reading, "is many sorts of a novel, but first and foremost it is the emanation of a most subtle and deadly caricaturist, a 'shrewd and knavish sprite' among mortal men.... Only one thing Zuleika Dobson lacks that a regular novel has, and that is dullness. It is a long story taken at the pace of a sprint, its wit relentlessly sustained." Tastes have almost certainly changed in the seventy-some years since that was written, and there are probably a lot of readers now who find the novel not only dull in spots, but also arch and antique. But I think they would find it hard to quibble with Hackett's assertion that Beerbohm demonstrates "a solicitude for words."

To most writers words are public characters, to be handled as the public is handled  by thick-skinned officials, a mob to be regimented and shoved on. For Max Beerbohm words are persons with their own physiognomies, with their own frailties and proclivities, to be humored and made much of.

We get a sense of that early on in the novel, when Zuleika arrives at the Oxford train station and immediately attracts the attention of the students waiting for relatives there: "Parents, sisters, cousins, ran unclaimed about the platform." That's perfect: "unclaimed" suggests "unclaimed luggage," which is what the relatives become; "ran ... about the platform" brings up an image of small, jittery animals, which suits the nervous puzzlement of the neglected relatives.

Zuleika, "in a white travelling dress, in a toque a-twinkle with fine diamonds," is "a lithe and radiant creature." She is met there by her grandfather, "the Warden of Judas." Warden is the title given to the heads of some colleges at Oxford, but there is, of course, no Judas College at the university, and I find Beerbohm's satiric inversion a little heavy-handed. (There is a Jesus College at Oxford, but Beerbohm's own college was Merton.)

On their way to the college they encounter "a very splendid youth" on a polo pony. The Warden identifies the young man as the Duke of Dorset and informs her that he is dining at his table that evening. But Zuleika is startled that the duke "had not reined in and was not even glancing back at her over his shoulder." The Warden is also greeted by another student, Noaks, who is "almost a dwarf" and "as plain as his gait was undistinguished." Unlike the Duke, he seems quite dazzled by Zuleika, but when she asks if he is dining with them, "'Certainly not,' said the Warden. 'Most decidedly not.'"

As they drive along the Broad, Zuleika is uninterested in its architectural splendors -- "The inanimate had little charm for her" -- but they seem interested in her, especially "the high grim busts of the Roman Emperors" that adorn the Sheldonian, "great beads of perspiration glistening on the brows of those Emperors." A don notices the effect, but is unable to persuade others of what he had seen. But the Emperors -- who "are by American visitors frequently mistaken for the Twelve Apostles" -- had foreseen "the peril that was overhanging Oxford, and they gave such warning as they could" of "the evil that was to befall the city of their penance."

Zuleika arrives at her rooms and her maid, Mélisande, unpacks the finery in her trunks: "All the colours of the rainbow, materialised by modistes, were there." And now we learn how Zuleika came by such finery. Like Scarlett O'Hara (did Margaret Mitchell read Zuleika Dobson?), "Zuleika was not strictly beautiful. Her eyes were a trifle large, and their lashes longer than they need have been.... Her hands and feet were of very mean proportions. She had no waist to speak of at all." Nevertheless, she "was the toast of two hemispheres." After the death of her parents, she had been forced in her late teens to find work as a governess because her grandfather had disapproved of her parents' marriage. (Beerbohm doesn't say why, or even which of her parents was his child. He knows it's only a plot device.) So he "had refused her appeal for a home or an allowance, on the ground that he would not be burdened with the upshot of a marriage which he had once forbidden and not yet forgiven." But now, "prompted by curiosity or remorse," he has invited her to stay with him for "a week or so."

She hated being a governess until she went to work for a family whose eldest son was an amateur magician. He fell hard for her, taught her his tricks, and proposed marriage by giving her all of his magic paraphernalia. She sneaked off in the dead of night with it and launched her own career as a magician, creating a sensation. In Paris, "all the little dandies were mad for 'la Zuleika.' The jewelers of the Rue de la Paix soon had nothing left to put in their windows -- everything had been bought for 'la Zuleika.'" She became the toast of the continent.

On the Sunday before she left Madrid, a great bull-fight was held in her honour. Fifteen bulls received the coup-de-grâce, and Alvarez, the matador of matadors, died in the arena with her name on his lips. He had tried to kill the last bull without taking his eyes off la divina señorita. A prettier compliment had never been paid her, and she was immensely pleased with it.

She went on to conquer America, and now, in Oxford she sits "not reviewing the pageant of her past. She was a young person whose reveries were never in retrospect.... All memories were for her but as the motes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of her future."

But she was also "a woman of really passionate fibre.... Though Zuleika had never given her heart, strong in her were the desire and the need that it should be given." The problem was that she wanted to adore someone, not just be adored. "And before her all youths always did fall prone." Which brings her thoughts to the Duke of Dorset, "That young equestrian who had not turned to look at her; whom she was to meet at dinner to-night ... was it he?"