The Elixir of Love

“I am married to a woman who is not my wife.”

It was on a liner, after dinner. The big ship had lurched. Into the smoking-room where I sat Lord Silverbridge had lurched with it. He had dropped into a seat beside me. I had asked how he did. It was in answer to that question that he made this curious remark.

As he spoke he looked down and away and ran his long, thin fingers through his bright, thick hair.

“What!” I exclaimed.

“And she is one of your compatriots, too.”

Lady Silverbridge⁠—formerly Miss Fanny Bunker⁠—was a Bostonian. Of that I was perfectly aware. At her wedding I had sent with my felicitations a fish-knife. I had not been previously honored with her acquaintance. But Silverbridge I had known through a series of tolerably orgiac semesters at Heidelberg, where his name was merely Jones.

Through what miracles of Death such processions of relatives were mown that from nobody he had become peer, it is idle to burden this narrative. Yet the fact that we had worn identical student caps and fought identical student duels had eluded time; it had eluded, too, transitions and still survived. It was to this survival that I attributed the rather intimate confidence of his curious remark.

Of the purport of it I had not so much as an idea. The day previous I had embarked at Cherbourg for New York and found Silverbridge on board. It was then early in August. His marriage had taken place in London late in May. At the time I was on the Continent. It was the fish-knife that represented me. Subsequently the press supplied me with accounts of the wedding, of the bride’s beauty as well. I never believe a word I read in the papers. But of the girl’s beauty I knew by repute. In her picture I had seen that she embodied the ideal, filled the heart, and stirred it, too⁠—just as Austin Dobson said of Autonoë⁠—with pulse of Spring.

These things take long in the telling. But when Silverbridge made his curious remark, memory promptly ladled them out. I throw them in here to get rid of them.

“What!” I repeated.

Silverbridge looked up. “Yes,” he presently resumed, “it is beastly to boast, but I am up a bigger tree than any one you ever heard of. My wife is not my wife, and, though I am married to her, I am not her husband.”

At this, of course, possibilities of anterior entanglements suggested themselves. It occurred to me that when Silverbridge was Jones, he might, in some unhallowed moment, have gone and done it.

“You are not beating about the bush to tell me that there is another of them, are you?” I asked.

He turned to me quickly. “How did you hit on it? Is it common⁠—in the States, I mean?”

“Common! Common!” I murmured. “I don’t know that I should quite call it that. It seems to me devilish awkward. I haven’t the Penal Code on the end of my fingers, but I fancy it must be ten years. How much do they give you in England?”

“For what?” he threw at me.

“Why, for bigamy,” I threw back.

He turned to me anew. “I am not talking about bigamy.”

“Then what in thunder are you talking about?”

“Something worse.”

Smoke is a sedative. I hailed a steward, got a cigar, and proceeded to light it. Before the process was completed he was at me again.

“I have only one wife. That is to say, I have been married but once. But where my wife is I do not know.”

On the table before me was a passenger list. Already I had looked it over. Now I examined it once more. Among the S’s was the following entry: “Silverbridge, Graf und Gräfin mit Dienerschaft.”

“Isn’t she on board?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then, without indiscretion,” I continued, handing him the list as I spoke, “who is the lady mentioned here?”

At this he nodded to me, ran his fingers again through his hair, and made answer: “There’s the point. I do not know.”

“But,” I gasped, “doesn’t she know?”

“Yes, she knows.”

“Well, then, who does she say she is?”

“Miss Fanny Bunker.”

“But, confound it,” I cried, “Miss Fanny Bunker is the girl you married.”

“Precisely,” he replied, and nodded again as though it ought now to be all perfectly clear. “But then you see the Fanny Bunker whom I married and the Fanny Bunker who is on board are not the same.”

“Of course not,” I exclaimed. “How could she be since she is now Lady Silverbridge. Previously she was a young girl. Now she is a married woman. That is difference enough.”

“The difference is wider than that,” he rejoined. “Much wider. They are not the same person.”

I pitched my cigar away. “Then will you please tell me how things got so damnably mixed?”

“Candidly, I can’t.”

At that, in mounting irritation, I would have left him. It seemed to me that he was cracked. I was about to say as much. But something in the melancholy of his eyes prevented.

“No,” he added, “I do not know how. But perhaps you can tell me. By the way, what was that stuff you used to stow at Heidelberg?”

“Psychology?”

“Yes, that’s it. I thought of it when I saw you getting aboard. I thought, too, that because of it I might ask your advice. I am not boring you, am I?”

“Boring me! Give me the gist of this thing or you will drive me to drink.”

Silverbridge, however, was not to be hurried. He got a letter from his pocket, consulted it, consulted the ceiling, then, leaning forward, he made this extraordinary statement: “There are two of her.”

I looked at him, but said nothing. After all, what was there to say? Yet, in my silence, there must have been the encouragement which he sought, for he ran on at once, quite volubly.

“It was in April we met. I cannot be sure, but I think between us it was love at first sight. I am sure, though, that I adored her at once. She exhaled all that is fetching in woman; simplicity, sympathy, sweetness, and strength. There was about her, too, an alertness, a vivacity, which I had never known. She went to my head. I think, too, I must have impressed her, for when I asked it was given. Our marriage was immediate. Somebody or other, a Frenchman I think, said that there are plenty of delightful marriages, but none that are delicious. The beggar was wrong. Ours was. But so appallingly brief! Four weeks, that is all. Yes, in four weeks she left me. One morning I awoke, aroused by a cry. At the other end of the room she was crouching and calling, ‘Where am I? Where am I?’ And when I sprang up to go to her, she crouched yet further away, screaming, ‘Who are you? Who are you?’ ”

“The devil!” I muttered.

“You will understand in a moment what I did not. I assumed, of course⁠—and it was horrible to assume it⁠—that she had gone suddenly mad. But no, she was entirely rational, except in this, she denied any knowledge of or acquaintance with me. She denied that she was my wife. At first it was difficult to get her to believe even that she was in England. When I convinced her of that she accepted the fact, but not the marriage. She said she had had no part in it. Meanwhile, it was obvious that she herself was totally different. Her speech and manner had altered. In no way was she the same. I got Simpson in. Simpson you know is⁠—”

“Physician-in-ordinary,” I interjected.

“Yes, and he asked me concerning her antecedents. I could tell him but little. She had come to London for the season with some friends, and so soon after I met her as I could manage it we were married by special license. I told you it was love at first sight. I told him so, too. He advised me to write to her people.”

“Well?”

“I did. Here is a letter from her father. In it he says that had he had the time, had our marriage not been so precipitate, he would have told me⁠—what do you suppose? That within her are two souls. Is such a thing possible?”

“Goethe said it was. ‘Within me,’ he declared, ‘two souls reside.’ ”

“But did they alternate? Her father says⁠—”

“That hers is a case of dual personality.”

“Yes, those are his very words. But is there such a thing?”

“No,” I answered, after a moment. “It is a term serviceable merely for lack of a better one. You know, however, that the mind is dual. Ordinarily the two hemispheres of the brain work together. Now and again there is discord. The result is insanity. Less frequently while one of them is awake the other falls asleep, and vice versa. That, I suppose, is the case with Lady Silverbridge. What do you propose to do?”

“I have no choice. At her insistence and at her father’s request I am taking her to Boston.”

“As Lady Silverbridge?”

“She won’t admit that she is that. She declares that she is Miss Bunker.”

“Permit me. What is her attitude toward you?”

“H’m. Civil, but chilly. I think she hates me.”

“And you want my advice?”

To this question Silverbridge nodded hopelessly.

“Then,” I added, “take her back as you took her from church.”

With the same hopeless look Silverbridge nodded again. “Yes, it is easy to say, but nowadays there is no elixir of love.”

“Indeed there is,” I retorted. “Given tact, opportunity, propinquity, and the desire and any man⁠—who is a man⁠—can change frigidity into affection; hate into love. But the ingredients must be fused. They constitute the elixir.”

To this Silverbridge assented. “That’s of course. But, for the elixir to work, the girl must be normal. Fanny isn’t. She is abnormal.”

“I am not so sure,” I replied. “And yet, if you come to that, are any of us normal? How often it happens that we do or say things that we had no intention of doing or saying, things which afterward we are unable to account for. In the course of every life there are such changes of personality that, could each phase of our existence be incarnated into distinct individuals and those individuals got together, so dissimilar and antipathetic would they be, that it is only a question of time when they would come to blows.

“No,” I presently resumed. “We all change. It is a law of nature. But we change so gradually that the change is unperceived. Lady Silverbridge has changed, too, only the change in her instead of being gradual has been abrupt. But she is not, therefore, abnormal. For that matter nobody is. Every being, however constituted, has his or her raison d’être.”

“Yes,” said Silverbridge, after a moment. “That is probably true. Yet, even so, I don’t see how it helps me.”

“Why, very greatly,” I replied. “The moment you recognize that the condition of your wife is normal you may proceed to administer the elixir. Your wife is a young and sensitive woman. Barring a violin there is nothing more impressionable than a woman who is young and sensitive. Take, by the way, the violin for analogy. In the hands of an artist it is vibrant with harmony. In the hands of an artisan it is discordant. Of course, there are violins so wretched that no artist could draw from them quavers other than cracked and thin. But, given a virtuoso and a Cremona, and what duos, what trios even, the conjunction will produce! A young and sensitive woman is a Cremona in flesh and blood. The harmonies, the duos and trios of which she is capable depend on the maestria of the man by whom she is approached. Now you, I will assume, are a virtuoso and your wife a violin. If you wish her to go with you to Boston as she went with you from church, treat her as an artist should.”

Silverbridge beckoned a steward and ordered beer.

“That is all very fine,” he remarked, when I stopped to draw breath. “Very fine in theory, but in practice⁠—”

“In practice,” I interrupted, “it is finer still. You know the ingredients of the elixir. These ingredients you have. You have but to compound them, feed her with them, and once more she is yours.”

The steward approached with the beer. Silverbridge swallowed it, student fashion, at a gulp.

“Were not Lady Silverbridge already your wife,” I resumed, “the process which I am about to indicate would be perhaps inconvenient, certainly unconventional, but not impractical. As it is, it will appeal to you as being entirely proper, poetic to boot, and psychologic as well.”

Silverbridge looked at his empty glass and then inquiringly at me. But, though there was an inquiry in his eye, the melancholy and hopelessness in them abided.

“Go to her stateroom tonight,” I continued. “Go there when she is asleep. Go there when she is in her first sleep. Then whisper your name in her ear, whisper it again. Then again. Whisper to her that she loves you. But be careful not to awake her. In an hour return and whisper anew. Then leave her. The breathing of your name and the suggestion in her ear will make her dream of you, and in that dream it may be that the two hemispheres of her brain will begin to work in unison, or it may be that the one that knew you will be aroused and the other submerged. But in any event, whichever Fanny Bunker awakes tomorrow that Fanny Bunker will be yours. Then it will depend but on you to renew the harmonies you created.”

I stood up to go. For a moment yet he detained me. His face, previously drear, now was flushed. From his eyes the melancholy and hopelessness were departing.

“Is⁠—is this receipt one of your own manufacture or⁠—or⁠—”

“You will not find it in the pharmacopoeia,” I answered. “But you will find it sovereign.”

“It has been tried?”

“Again and again.”

“Successfully?”

“Always.”

At this Silverbridge got also from his seat. “Thank you,” he said very gravely. “Thank you. I, too, will try it.”

With that for the night we parted. The next day I looked for him. He did not seem to be about. On the morrow, on the promenade deck, I ran into him. At his side was a beauty.

“Let me introduce you,” he said.

As he spoke, he smiled. The beauty smiled also. That smile of his and of hers supplied me with obvious deductions.

An exchange of the usual platitudes ensued. But the deductions I was in haste to examine. I made them into a bundle which presently, after more platitudes, I took with me to the smoking-room. There, later, Silverbridge joined me.

“The prescription worked all right, did it not?” I asked.

“Like an essence of bonbons,” he answered. “I am married now to a woman who is my wife.”

“But to which of them?”

“To both,” he luxuriously replied.

“Lady Silverbridge is certainly a host in herself,” I ventured to remark. “But then, so too is every Cremona. So is every impressionable woman. Should she get away again⁠—”

“If she should,” Silverbridge, with hopeful and beautiful confidence, exclaimed, “if she should, have I not the psychologist’s stone in this lovely elixir!”

“You have something better than that,” I concluded. “You have love’s writ of habeas corpus.”