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.

7. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, pp. 247-283

XVI-XVIII

_____

The Duke is trying to figure out what to do about Zuleika's appearance in his room when Katie appears at the door to ask if he's planning to be there for lunch. "And it dawned on him that this girl, who perhaps loved him, was, according to all known standards, extraordinarily pretty." He says he will and, when she asks about "Miss Dobson," that he'll be dining alone. After Katie leaves, Zuleika says that if he wants her to leave he should throw her out the window.

He realizes that she loves him again, but asks her for proof that she does. She points to the pearls that fasten her blouse: They're his studs, she tells him, and when they turned white this morning she realized that he had stopped loving her, giving her leave to love him again. When she discovered the change, Mélisande had returned from delivering the first letter, whereupon she wrote the second one that the Duke tore up, unread. The Duke removes her earrings from his pocket: They, too, have turned white. When he tells her to take them, she refuses. "'I could never forget that once they were both black.' She flung them into the fender."

"I am not going back on my promise," he tells her, and shows her the telegram his steward had sent him about the ominous owls. "With a stern joy he watched her reading it. Wild-eyed, she looked up from it to him, tried to speak, and swerved down senseless." The Duke responds to her faint with a panicky attempt to rouse her by splashing water on her face until he "caught the horrible analogy." When she regains consciousness, "She, too, it seemed, had caught the analogy; for with a wan smile she said 'We are quits now, John, aren't we?'" Then she remembers why she fainted:

"Oh," she cried, staggering to her feet, "the owls, the owls!"
Vengeance was his, and "Yes, there," he said, "is the ineluctable hard fact you wake to. The owls have hooted. The gods have spoken. This day your wish is to be fulfilled." 

He reminds her of her lunch with The MacQuern: "After all, he is going to die for you, like the rest of us. I am but one of a number, you know. Use your sense of proportion." He gives her three minutes to prepare herself to leave. After she readies herself, she turns to him:

"You saw me putting on my hat; you did not see love taking on the crown of pity, and me bonneting her with it, tripping her up and trampling the life out of her. Oh, a most cold-blooded business, John! Had to be done, though. No other way out. So I just used my sense of proportion, as you rashly bade me, and then hardened my heart at sight of you as you are. One of a number? Yes, and a quite unlovable unit. So I am all right again." 

He follows her to the door, and realizes that she has won. He thinks that he should have taunted her back, should have proclaimed, "Never was man by maiden loved more ardently than I by you, my poor girl, at this moment." But then he wonders if she had been pretending to have fallen out of love with him. "She had already twitted him with his lack of intuition. He had not seen that she loved him when she certainly did love him."

Needing certainty, he looks for the pearls. They have become their original colors: one pink, the other black. He hears Katie arriving with the lunch tray. "She was coming, the girl who loved him, the girl whose heart would be broken when he died." He orders an enormous lunch: cold salmon, pigeon pie, custard pudding, a bottle of champagne, a bottle of port. "His was a head that had always hitherto defied the grape." He finishes the meal and the champagne. "Poor Zuleika! He was glad for her that she had contrived to master her infatuation. ... Enough for him that he was loved by this exquisite meek girl who had served him at the feast." He drinks a second glass of port and pours a third, thinking about Katie: "Would that he loved her in return!"

He decides to give Katie the earrings as a "small token of his gratitude -- some trinket by which to remember him." He rings for her and asks her if it's true that she loves him. Embarrassed, she admits that she does. He asks her name, and she tells him. He gets her to admit that she never dared to expect him to love her in return. But when he gives her the pearls and admits that they were Zuleika's, she throws them on the floor: "'I'll have nothing to do with them. I hate her.' 'So do I,' said the Duke, in a burst of confidence. 'No, I don't,' he added hastily. 'Please forget that I said that.'" But Katie realizes that accepting the pearls would be a way of getting back at Zuleika, so she picks them up again.

Then Katie begins to argue her case: She's educated, she's "read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books," she collects ferns and plays the piano. But the Duke is astonished to realize that she now thinks he's in love with her, and when he disabuses her of the notion, she flings the earrings in his face -- but misses. She calls him a coward and bursts into tears. The Duke picks up the pearls, apologizes for his awkwardness and explains, "I was unhappy and lonely, and I saw in you a means of comfort." Giving her the pearls again, he asks her to "Wear them always in memory of me. For you will never see me again." She's bewildered by this, but allows him to put the earrings into her ears, and afterward, "'You may kiss my hand,' he murmured, extending it toward her."

The news that the Duke is leaving brings Katie's mother, Mrs. Batch, to his room. He assures her that he will not only pay what he owes, but will also "give her a cheque for the full term's rent" as well as whatever board he might have had. He also writes her "testimonial to the excellence of her rooms and of her cooking," which he does so in the form of a sonnet in Oxfordshire dialect, which the narrator observes is "one of his least happily inspired works" but that "to Mrs. Batch the MS., framed and glazed in her hall, is an asset beyond price (witness her recent refusal of Mr. Pierpont Morgan's sensational bid for it)."

When he gives Mrs. Batch the check for the room and board, he remembers "with a melancholy smile, that to-morrow the cheque would not be negotiable" so "he bade her cash it before the bank closed." This makes him notice that it's a quarter to four and that there are only two and a quarter hours before the race. It is a gray and gloomy day, which makes him reflect, "What a climate! Why did any sane person live in England? He felt positively suicidal."

He has "nothing to do but sit and think," and drink more of the port. He consoles himself that he has already achieved perfection, and "Future years could but stale, if not actually mar, that perfection." After all, what would Byron have been like as "a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to 'The Times' about the Repeal of the Corn Laws"? Byron particularly appeals to him because of his dandyism.

Perhaps, had Byron not been a dandy -- but ah, had he not been in his soul a dandy there would have been no Byron worth mentioning. And it was because he guarded not his dandyism against this and that irrelevant passion, sexual or political, that he cut so annoyingly incomplete a figure. He was absurd in his politics, vulgar in his loves. Only in himself, at the times when he stood haughtily aloof, was he impressive. 

And the Duke realizes that "it was as a Knight of the Garter that he had set the perfect seal on his dandyism."  So he decides that wearing the splendid robes and accouterments of the Order of the Garter to his suicide is the fitting thing to do. "Crimson-doubleted, blue ribanded, white-trunk-hosed, he stooped to understrap his left knee with that strap of velvet round which sparkles the proud gay motto of the Order." (The narrator observes that John Singer Sargent's portrait of the Duke in his regalia is nothing to the real thing.) 

A dandy he had lived. In the full pomp and radiance of his dandyism he would die. His soul rose from calm to triumph. A smile lit his face, and he held his head higher than ever. He had brought nothing into this world and could take nothing out of it? Well, what he loved best he could carry with him to the very end; and in death they would not be divided. 

He sweeps downstairs where "Mrs. Batch and Katie, who had hurried out into the hall, were turned to some kind of stone at the sight of the descending apparition." And as he leaves, he kisses Katie, "very lightly, it is true, and on the upmost confines of the brow, but quite perceptibly."

[Illustration: Leopold of Belgium in the regalia of the Order of the Garter]

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.

4. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, pp. 97-146

VII-VIII

_____

The Duke is beginning to take pleasure in the thought of his impending death: "Perhaps she would devote her life to mourning him." And he settles on the means of his demise: "Drowning (he had often heard) was a rather pleasant sensation." But when he realizes that it's half past four and the first race will be over, he proposes that they go back to his rooms and have tea before the next one. He explains that they will be meeting a crowd of people on the way back from the race.

This, however, makes Zuleika the more determined to go on: "Let us meet them." And so they confront "a dense procession of youths -- youths interspersed with maidens whose parasols were as flotsam and jetsam on a seething current of straw hats. Zuleika neither quickened nor slackened her advance. But brightlier and brightlier shone her eyes."

Of course, it's a triumph for Zuleika: "Nothing at all like her had ever been seen in Oxford." There were girls at the university now, "but beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied." And as for the wives and daughters of dons, "the indignant shade of shade of celibacy seems to have called down on the dons a Nemesis which precludes them from either marrying beauty or begetting it." And here we have the explanation for the Warden's animosity toward Zuleika's parents: His son, "that unhappy curate," had married a circus-rider from whom Zuleika had inherited her beauty.

The result of fronting the crowd of returnees from the race is that "Not only was the whole throng of youths drawing asunder before her: much of it, as she passed, was forming up in her wake." So they are followed but not touched by the eddy they create in the crowd. They arrive at and board the Judas College barge where they take tea. Among the Judas men who have also made it onto the barge are the two with whom the Duke had talked earlier. "Zuleika was aware of the special persistence of their gaze," so she asks to have them introduced to her. The Duke refuses: "That I shall not do. I am your victim: not your pander. Those two men stand on the threshold of a possibly useful and agreeable career. I am not going to trip them up for you."

Zuleika scoffs at his reluctance. She doesn't believe that her charms can be fatal: "Certainly a young man doesn't waste away for love of some particular young woman. He very soon makes love to some other one.... All the most ardent my past adorers have married." The Duke is astonished that she hasn't learned of "the love that corrodes, the love that ruins" from "the Greek pastoral poets" or "the Elizabethan sonneteers." She replies, "You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself." When he protests that her "way of speech has what is called 'the literary flavor,'" she explains that it's "an unfortunate trick which I caught from a writer, a Mr. Beerbohm, who once sat next to me at dinner somewhere."

The Duke begins to savor the irony of his still-secret plan: "While she chattered on, without an inkling that he was no ordinary lover, and coaxing him to present two quite ordinary young men to her, he held over her the revelation that he for love of her was about to die." He proclaims, "So long as I live, ... you will address no one but me." She replies that his last moment must be at hand, and when he vows that it is, she begins to suspect what he's up to. He contemplates the river in which he plans to drown, and believes that his death will serve as a deterrent to other young men's infatuation with her. "He was glad that his death would be a public service to the University."

When he asks if she will mourn him, her suspicions grow stronger, but she continues to reply that she can't love him. "The black pearl and the pink, quivering, gave stress to her ultimatum. But the violet of her eyes was all but hidden by the dilation of her pupils." She protests that she would never forgive herself for his death and would mourn him, and pleads with him to reconsider. "She only didn't say she could love him. She never hinted that."

As he prepares to take the plunge, the sound of the starting gun for the next race causes her to grab at his arm. He tries to get her to loosen her grip, telling her that perhaps as the boats pass over his head, he "shall be able to gurgle a cheer for Judas." She has had men say they would die for her, but none of them had. "But she knew that now he must not die -- not yet!" She urges him, "to-morrow, if you will. Not yet!" And he gives in to her wish as the boats pass the barge.

"So be it!" he cried into Zuleika's ear -- cried loudly, for it seemed as though all the Wagnerian orchestras of Europe, with the Straussian ones thrown in, were here to clash in unison the full volume of right music for the glory of the reprieve. 

As for Zuleika, "It was as if she stood alone with her lover on some silent pinnacle of the world. It was as if she were a little girl with a brand-new and very expensive doll which had banished all the little other old toys from her mind." But the sight of her standing there holding tightly to the Duke puzzles the crowd. "For already the news that the Duke loved Zuleika, and that she loved him not, and would stoop to no man who loved her, had spread like wild-fire among the undergraduates."

She invites him to dine with her and her grandfather, but he tells her that he has to dine at his club, the Junta, to which he can't take a woman, "not even if, as she suggested, she dressed herself up as a man." Anyway, he has invited a guest, and when she protests that he didn't think about his guest when he was about to kill himself, he replies that he did: "Death cancels all engagements." When they part, she makes him promise that he will spend all of tomorrow with her.

Wearing "a mulberry-coloured coat, with brass buttons" and a black pearl and a pink on in his shirtfront, the Duke goes to his dinner with the Junta. The club has only two other members, but each is allowed to bring a guest. When the Duke was elected to it at the end of his second term, there were four other members, but they left at the end of the summer term, leaving him the sole member of the club. And because he blackballed the two members he had both proposed and seconded, the next year he had been the sole member. He lowered his standards for the third year and "elected The MacQuern, of Balliol, and Sir John Marraby, of Brasenose." Tonight The MacQuern has brought Mr. Trent-Garby, of Christ Church, and Sir John's guest is Lord Sayes, of Magdalen. When "A Herculean figure filled the doorway," the Duke's guest has arrived. He is Mr. Abimelech V. Oover, of Trinity, an American Rhodes Scholar.

The Duke's courtesy to Rhodes Scholars is a matter of noblesse oblige.

He found these Scholars, good fellows though they were, rather oppressive. They had not -- how could they have? -- the undergraduate's virtue of taking Oxford as a matter of course. The Germans loved it too little, the Colonials too much. The Americans were, to a sensitive observer, the most troublesome -- as being the most troubled -- of the whole lot.... They were so awfully afraid of having their strenuous native characters undermined by their delight in the place. They held that the future was theirs, a glorious asset, far more glorious than the past.

They also had a "constant fear that they are being corrupted."

A gathering of the Junta is, of course, a matter of following antique rituals, and also of "drinking rather more champagne than was good for [them]. Maybe, these youths sowed in themselves, on this night, the seeds of lifetime intemperance. We cannot tell. They did not live long enough for us to know."

Watching over the six men is a ghost, Humphrey Greddon, "founder and first president of the club." His portrait hangs in the room along with a miniature of Nellie O'Mora, who "drowned herself in a millpond" when Humphrey broke her heart. The Junta always toasted her memory after dinner: "Here's to Nellie O'Mora, the fairest witch that ever was or will be!" But when Mr. Oover hears her story, he denounces Humphrey Greddon as "an unmitigated scoundrel. I say he was not a white man." The enraged ghost of Humphrey Greddon seizes his sword and runs Mr. Oover through, but then "remembered he was only a ghost impalpable, impotent, of no account. 'But I shall meet you in Hell to-morrow,' he hissed in Oover's face. And there he was wrong. It is quite certain that Oover went to Heaven."

The ghost departs "With a volley of the most appalling eighteenth-century oaths" before the Junta joins the first of the night's tradition toasts, "Gentlemen, I give you Church and State." All honor the toast, "none with a richer reverence than ... Oover, despite his passionate mental reservation in favour of Pittsburg-Anabaptism and the Republican Ideal." But then the Duke shocks the company by refusing to propose the toast to Nellie O'Mora, which is his duty as the club's president. He thereby resigns his position and announces that The MacQuern is president and should propose the toast. The MacQuern, too, declines, leaving it to Marraby, who, having proclaimed that he won't lie, violates tradition and cries, "I give you Zuleika Dobson, the fairest witch that ever was or will be!" All join in the toast.

Fortunately, there is also a rule that "a member of the Junta can do no wrong," so the grave offense to tradition goes unpunished. But they all feel rather guilty about it, even Oover:

All the antiquarian in him deplored the sudden rupture of a fine old Oxford tradition. All the chivalrous American in him resented the slight on that fair victim of the feudal system, Miss O'Mora. And at the same time, all the Abimelech V. in him rejoiced at having honoured by word and act the one woman in the world.

Realizing that here were five other men "deeply under the spell of Zuleika," the Duke knows he must do something to save them. He tries to convince them of the hopelessness of their situation, but he is unsuccessful. They vow that they will love her nonetheless, Oover proclaiming, "We love her, and -- shall, and -- will, Sir, with -- our latest breath." The Duke observes that "the noise you have just made around this table was very like to the noise made on the verge of the Boer War." But what if, "on the verge of the aforesaid war, some orator had said to the British people 'It is going to be a walk-over for our enemy in the field.'... [I]s it possible that Britannia would have thrown her helmet in the air, shrieking 'Slavery for ever'?" He has been enslaved by Zuleika, he tells them. "Your fetters have not galled you yet. My wrists, my ankles, are excoriated.... The sun mocks me. The moon titters in my face. I can stand it no longer. I will no more of it. To-morrow I die."

He assures them that he is serious and that Zuleika knows of his intent. "Take warning by me. Muster all your will-power, and forget Miss Dobson. ... Put all Oxford on its guard against this woman who can love no lover." But they reject his counsel, and all five vow that they will die, too.

Then the Duke realizes that it's time for the concert in which he is performing and at which he will see Zuleika. in his hurry, he jumps out of the window. "(The façade of the house is called, to this day, Dorset's Leap.)" Oover follows suit, demolishing a window-box in his leap, and the others crowd around the window -- except for The MacQuern, who, blocked by the crowd, runs downstairs. Marraby, who twists his ankle in the leap, is followed by Lord Sayes and then by Trent-Garby, "who, catching his foot in the ruined flower-box, fell headlong, and was, I regret to say, killed." The survivors race to the concert.

3. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, pp. 63-96

V-VI

_____

Zuleika and the lovesick Duke have lunch, at which he tries to persuade her of the material benefits of becoming his wife: "I offer you, Miss Dobson, a refuge more glorious and more augustly gilded than you, in your airiest flights of fancy, can ever have hoped for or imagined." He even enumerates the ghosts on his estate: "There are five ghosts permanently residing in the right wing of the house, two in the left, and eleven in the park. But all are quite noiseless and quite harmless." And he ends by declaring, "I am young. I am handsome. My temper is sweet, and my character without blemish. In fine, Miss Dobson, I am a most desirable parti."

But after reiterating the fact that she doesn't love him, she adds, "My reply is that I think you are an awful snob." He is wounded by the word, and after telling her about the dairymaid his great-great-grandfather married, for whom he built an elegant dairy of her own, he offers to build for her "a neat hall wherein you would perform your conjuring tricks." Zuleika responds by calling him "the most insolent person I have ever met," and telling him that she has rejected "a score of suitors quite as eligible as you."

At an impasse, they decide to go to the boat races on the Thames together. She pleads the necessity of changing clothes: "You yourself told me that this tartan was perfectly hideous. There was no need to tell me that.... I chose this frock in the deliberate fear that you, if I made myself presentable, might succumb at second sight of me."

In the interim, Beerbohm explains that Judas College had been given its name by its founder, "Christopher Whitrid, Knight, in the reign of Henry VI ... because he felt that in a Christian community not even the meanest and basest of men should be accounted beneath contempt, beyond redemption." And among the statutes of the college is that the bursar should "distribute in Passion Week thirty pieces of silver among the neediest scholars 'for saike of atonynge.'"

As the Duke is pacing, waiting for Zuleika to change her clothes, he meets two other undergraduates who are also in love with her, having met her at breakfast at the Warden's. She took no notice of them -- she was then under the impression that the Duke didn't love her, so she was still infatuated with him. But he tells them that they have no chance with her, because if she doesn't love him, "What chance would there be for you?" And then the Duke meditates on his quandary: "There seemed to be two courses. One was to pine slowly and painfully away. The other.... Academically, the Duke had often reasoned that a man for whom life holds no chance of happiness cannot too quickly shake life off. Now, of a sudden, there was for that theory a vivid application.... Death was the one true bridal." So when Zuleika appears, "a vision in vaporous white," he runs to her joyfully, mistaking her for death: "To him, wildly expressing in his movement the thought within him, she appeared as his awful bride." He explains to her that he had mistaken her for someone else, which only makes her angry.

Then, as they leave the college, Zuleika, although she dislikes dogs, stoops to pet the porter's bulldog because "coquetry" had taught "her to caress any dog in the presence of a man enslaved to her." But the dog "covered away from her, horrifically grimacing.... Seldom is even a fierce bulldog heard to growl. Yet Corker growled at Zuleika."

2. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, pp. 31-62

III-IV

_____

Zuleika is late coming down to dinner, where besides the Duke, the guests include "an Oriel don and his wife." While they are waiting, the Warden explains that his granddaughter has "devoted her life entirely to good works." When the Duke asks if she's a nurse, the Warden replies that "Zuleika's appointed task is to induce delightful wonder rather than to alleviate pain. She performs conjuring-tricks." The Duke is startled to learn that the Warden's granddaughter is the famous Zuleika Dobson.

"The Duke had an intense horror of unmarried girls," the result of having to elude so many of them. But when she enters, clad in "flamingo silk, and ... liberally festooned with emeralds," he falls for her "Instantly, utterly."  Zuleika is wearing a back pearl in her right ear and a pink pearl in her left, "and their difference gave an odd, bewildering witchery to the little face between." But the Duke maintains his cold composure: "Throughout dinner, none guessed that his shirtfront was but the screen of a fierce warfare waged between pride and passion."

The effect of the Duke's apparent indifference sends Zuleika into "a trance of sheer happiness. At last, she thought, her hope was fulfilled -- that hope which, although she had seldom remembered it in the joy of her constant triumphs, had always been lurking in her." She is so stunned that all she can do is gaze at the Duke while responding to the conversation of the don with "'Yes,' and 'No,' and 'Oh really?'" long after the don has given up and "was not listening silently to the Duke and the Warden."

The Duke is conscious that her attention is focused on him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw "the contour of the face, and the black pearl and the pink; could not blind himself, try as he would. And he knew that he was in love." He had always been "too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring anyone else.... At Eton he had been called 'Peacock,' and this nick-name had followed him up to Oxford." Yet he had always excelled academically. "There is no doubt that but for his untimely death he would have taken a particularly brilliant First in that school also." Thus, as with the sweating stone emperors, Beerbohm slips a little dark foreboding into the lightness of the narrative.

So stunning have the Duke's achievements been that, after he makes his maiden speech in the House of Lords, leading to the defeat of a "measure more than usually socialist" that had been passed in the House of Commons, he has been named to the Order of the Garter, "the only undergraduate on whom this Order had ever been conferred." He continued to tend to "that perfection of aspect which the gods had given him."

He knew well, however, that women care little for a man's appearance, and that what they seek in a man is strength of character, and rank, and wealth. These three gifts the Duke had in a high degree, and he was by women much courted because of them.... It was imperative that he should banish her from his mind, quickly. He must not surrender to any passion his dandihood. The dandy must be celibate, cloistral; is, indeed, but a monk with a mirror for beads and breviary -- an anchorite, mortifying his soul that his body may be perfect.

He therefore continues to resist Zuleika. When the Warden mentions that the Duke is to play something at the Judas concert, she eagerly offers to turn the pages for him. He replies that he always plays from memory, a snub that thrills Zuleika. She rises and leaves the room with the don's wife. When she has gone, the Duke looks down and discovers that the two white pearls in his shirtfront have been replaced with a black pear and a pink pearl. "Just for a moment, absurdly over-estimating poor Zuleika's skill, he supposed himself a victim of legerdemain. Another moment, and the import of the studs revealed itself." He says that he's feeling faint and quickly leaves. As he reaches his rooming-house, "The high grim busts of the Emperors stared down at him, their faces more than ever tragically cavernous and distorted. ... For were they not privy to the doom that the morrow, or the morrow's morrow, held for him -- held not indeed for him alone, yet for him especially, as it were, and for him most lamentably?"

The next morning, in his rooms, he yields to the realization that he is in love. "There, on the dressing-table, lay the two studs, visible symbols of his love. Dear to him, now, the colours of them!" He ignores the boxes that "contained his robes of the Garter," which he was to wear on the day after tomorrow at Windsor for the investiture of a visiting foreign king. The bells sound noon, and he hears the footsteps of Noaks on the stairs. "It was the Duke's whim to condescend further in the direction of Noaks than of any other.... Noaks, for his part, regarded the Duke with feelings mingled of idolatry and disapproval." The Duke calls Noaks in to his rooms and asks if he has ever been in love. Noaks confesses his love for the woman he saw with the Warden the day before, and the Duke tells him, "She's the Warden's niece [sic] ... I dined at the Warden's last night." Noaks is stirred to resentment "of the Duke's great elegance and average stature, his high lineage and incomputable wealth.... 'And of course she's in love with you?' he snarled."

Noaks's question makes the Duke realize that he hadn't even considered whether Zuleika might return his affection. She had shown every sign of it but he had snubbed her. "To the nethermost corner of his soul, he cursed himself for what he had done, and for all he had left undone." At that moment, the landlady's daughter announces that Zuleika is there to see him. He sends Noaks away. Zuleika enters, and there are some moments of awkwardness between them. He observes, "Something had given to her a graver, nobler beauty.... Suddenly she turned to him, and he understood. No longer the black pearl and the pink, but two white pearls!"

He declares his love, but "Zuleika, listening to him, had grown gradually paler and paler. She had raised her hands and cowered, as though he were about to strike her." And he realizes with horror that she doesn't love him anymore. He has her look at her pearls in the mirror.

"They were white when you came to me," he sighed. "They were white because you loved me. From them it was that I knew you loved me even as I loved you. But their old colours have come back to them. That is how I know that your love for me is dead."

He shows her the studs that he had worn that night and explains that he had noticed their change when she left the dining room. She says that she noticed the change in hers when she went into the drawing room, and asks why he behaved so coldly if he was in love with her all the time.

"Because I was a pedant. I tried to ignore you, as pedants always do try to ignore any fact they cannot fit into their pet system. The basis of my pet system was celibacy. I don't mean the mere state of being a bachelor. I mean celibacy of the soul -- egoism, in fact. You ahve converted me from that. I am now a confirmed tuist." 

(A "tuist" seems to be a practitioner of "tuism," a word that was apparently coined by Coleridge, given that his is the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary, as an opposite to "egoism." It means devotion to another.)

Zuleika explains that she did love him, but she can't do so any longer. "You were so different from any man I had ever seen except in my dreams. You did not make a fool of yourself.... And now, ... it is all over. The idol has come sliding down its pedestal to fawn and grovel with all the other infatuates in the dust about my feet." She admits that she likes being admired, but "what a little miserable pleasure that is in comparison with the rapture I have forfeited!" She wanted him to dally with her and break her heart, "I desired nothing better than that." She noticed that the landlord's daughter was in love with him. "'I have never looked at her,' said the Duke. 'No wonder, then, that she loves you,' sighed Zuleika." She even considered bribing the girl with her jewels to let her serve him, "to black your boots, carry up your coals, scrub your doorstep." Now, she swears, she wouldn't offer the girl a single garnet for the opportunity.

He vows that he will make her love him, but she scoffs, "Is it likely that I shall begin to love you again because you can't leave off loving me?" As the sound of the landlord's daughter bringing his luncheon plates is heard, "A smile flickered across Zuleika's lips; and 'Not one garnet!' she murmured."

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?"