The fortnight's cruise was at an end, the _Torch_ had gone back to
her owners, without Durant, who had contrived to stay on board the
_Windward_ till the latest possible moment. The yacht was lying-to,
outside the same white-walled harbor where she had first found
Durant. She wheeled aimlessly about with slackened sails, swaying,
balancing, hovering like a bird on the wing, impervious and
restless, waiting for the return of the boat that was to take Durant
on shore. It had only just put off with the first load of
guests--the Manbys--under Georgie Chatterton's escort. As Durant
watched it diminishing and vanishing, he thought of how Georgie had
described their hostess's method of dealing with exacting friends.
She was dropping them, very gently, at the nearest port. Poor Manby!
And it would be his own turn next. And yet Georgie had said, "You
never know." He must and would know; at any rate, he would take his
chance. Meanwhile, he had a whole hour before him to find out in,
for the crew had commissions in the town. That hour was Frida's and
his own.
The two weeks had gone he knew not how; and yet he had taken
count of the procession of the days. Days of clouds, when, under a
drenching mist, the land was sodden into the likeness of the sea,
the sea stilled into a leaden image of the land; days of rain, when
the wet decks shone like amber, and the sea's face was smoothed out
and pitted by the showers; days of sun, when they went with every
sail spread, over a warm, quivering sea, whose ripples bore the
shivered reflections of the sky in so many blue flames that leaped
and danced with the _Windward_ in her course; days of wind, when
the Channel was a race of tumultuous waves, green-hearted,
silver-lipped, swelling and breaking and swelling, and flowering
into foam, days when the yacht careened over with steep decks, laid
between wind and water, flush with the foam, driven by the wind as
by her soul; days when Durant and Frida, who delighted in rough
weather, sat out together on deck alone. They knew every sound of
that marvelous world, sounds of the calm, of water lapping against
the yacht's side, the tender, half-audible caress of the sea;
sounds of the coming gale, more seen than heard, more felt than
seen, the deep, long-drawn shudder of the sea when the wind's path
is as the rain's path; and that sound, the song of her soul, the
keen, high, exultant song that the wind sings, playing on her
shrouds as on a many-stringed instrument. The boat, in her unrest,
rolling, tossing, wheeling and flying, was herself so alive, so one
with the moving wind and water, and withal so slight a shell for
the humanity within her, that she had brought them, the man and the
woman, nearer and nearer to the heart of being; they touched
through her the deep elemental forces of the world. The sea had
joined what the land had kept asunder. At this last hour of
Durant's last day they were drifting rather than sailing past a
sunken shore, a fringe of gray slate, battered by the tide and
broken into thin layers, with edges keen as knives; above it, low
woods of dwarf oaks stretched northward, gray and phantasmal as the
shore, stunted and tortured into writhing, unearthly shapes by the
violence of storms. For here and now the sea had its way; it had
taken on reality; and earth was the phantom, the vanishing, the
vague.
They had been pacing the deck together for some minutes, but at last
they stood still, looking landward.
Durant sighed heavily and then he spoke.
"Frida, you know what I am going to say----"
They turned and faced each other. In the man's eyes there was a
cloud, in the woman's a light, a light of wonder and of terror.
She smiled bravely through her fear. "Yes, I know what you are going
to say. But I don't know----"
"What _don't_ you know?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"You don't know what I mean?"
"I know you are going to say you love me, and you had better not.
For I don't know what that means. The thing you call love was left
out of my composition. Some women are born like that."
"I don't believe it. It's only your way of saying that you don't
care for _me_."
"I like you. I always have liked you. I'll go farther--if I ever
loved any man it would be you."
"The fact remains that it isn't?"
"It isn't, and it never will be. But you may be very certain that it
will never be anyone else."
"Tell me one thing--was there ever a time when it might have been?"
"That isn't fair. I can't answer that question."
"You can. Think--was there ever a time, no matter how short, the
fraction of a minute, when if I'd only had the sense, if I had only
known----"
"Are you sure you didn't know? I was afraid you did."
"Then you really mean it--that if I'd only asked you then----"
"Thank Heaven, you did not!"
"Why are you thanking Heaven?"
"Because--because--I can't be sure, but I might--I might have taken
you at your word."
"And why not?"
"I would have made a great mistake. The same mistake that you are
making now."
"Mistake?"
"You mistook the idea for the reality once, if you remember--and now
aren't you mistaking the reality for the idea?"
"Frida, you are too subtle; you are the most exasperating woman in
the world----"
"There, you see. That's the sort of thing we should always be saying
to each other if I let you have your way. But supposing you did have
it; if we were married we could not understand each other better
than we do; so we should not be one bit better off. By this time we
should have got beyond the phase we started with----"
"But we should have _had_ it----"
"Yes; and found ourselves precisely where we are now."
"Where we were yesterday, you mean."
"Yes. We were good enough friends yesterday."
"And what are we to-day? Enemies?"
She smiled sadly. "It looks like it. At any rate, we seem to have
some difficulty in understanding each other."
"Good God! how coolly you talk about it! Understanding! Do you never
feel? Has it never even occurred to you that I can feel? Have you
any notion what it is to be made of flesh and blood and nerves, and
to have to stay here, squeezed up in this confounded boat, where I
can't get away from you?"
"You can get away in three-quarters of an hour, and meanwhile, if
you like, you can go below."
"If I did go below I should still feel you walking over my head. I
should hear you breathe. And now to look at you and touch you, and
know all the time that something sticks between us----"
He stopped and looked before him. It was true that the sea had
brought them together. Amid the daemonic triumph and jubilation of
the power that claimed them for its own they, the man and the woman,
had been thrown on each other, they had looked into each other's
eyes, spirit to spirit, the divine thing struggling blind and
uncertain in nature's tangled mesh. But now, so near, on the verge
of the intangible, the divine, it came over Durant that after all it
was this their common nature, their flesh and blood, that was the
barrier; it merged them with the world on every side, but it hedged
them in and hid them from each other.
"As you know, we're the best friends in the world; there's only one
thing that sticks between us--the eternal difference in our points
of view."
"I was perfectly right. Why couldn't I trust my first impressions? I
thought you frigid and lucid and inhuman----"
"Inhuman?"
"Well, not a bit like a woman."
"My dear Maurice, you are very like a man."
"There's something about you----"
"Really? What is it, do you think?"
"Oh, nothing; a slight defect, that's all. It must be as you say,
and as I always thought, that you are incapable of feeling or
understanding feeling. I repeat, there's something about you----"
"Ah, Maurice, if you want the truth, there's something about _you_.
I always knew, I felt that it was in you, though I wouldn't own that
it was there. Now I am sure. You've been doing your best to make me
sure."
"What have I made you sure of?"
"Sure that you are incapable, not of loving perhaps, but of loving a
certain kind of woman the way she wants to be loved. You can't help
it. As I said before, it is the difference in the point of view. We
should get no nearer if we talked till doomsday."
"My point of view, as you call it, has entirely changed."
"No. It is I who have changed. Your point of view is, and always
will be, the same."
He tried hard to understand.
"Does it come to this--that if I had loved you then you would have
loved me now?"
"You couldn't have loved me then. You were not that sort."
He understood her meaning and it maddened him. "It wasn't my fault.
How the devil was I to see?"
"Exactly, how were you? There are some things which you can't see.
You can see everything you can paint, and, as you are a very clever
artist, I dare say you can paint most things you can see."
"What has that got to do with it?"
"Everything. It's your way all through. You love me because what you
see of me is changed. And yet all that time I was the same woman I
am now. I am the same woman I was then."
"But I am not the same man!"
"The very same. You have not changed at all."
She meant that he was deficient in that spiritual imagination which
was her special power; she meant that she had perceived the implicit
baseness of his earlier attitude as a man to her as a woman, a woman
who had had no power to touch his senses. It was, as she had said,
the difference in their points of view; hers had condemned him
forever to the sensual and the seen.
He stood ashamed before her.
Yet, as if she had divined his shame and measured the anguish of it
and repented her, she laid her hand on his arm.
"Maurice, it isn't entirely so. I have been horribly unjust."
"Not you! You are justice incarnate. If I had loved you then----"
"You couldn't have loved me then."
"So you have just told me."
"You had good cause. I was not and could not be then--whatever it is
that you love now."
"But I might have seen----"
"Seen? Seen? That's it. There was nothing to see."
Her eyes, in her pity for him, filled with tears, tears that in his
anger he could not understand.
"Why are you always reminding me of what I was five years ago? I
_have_ changed. Can't a man change if you give him five years to do
it in?"
"Perhaps. It's a long time."
"Time? It's an eternity. If I was a brute to you, do you suppose the
consciousness of my brutality isn't a far worse punishment than
anything I could have made you feel?"
She raised her eyebrows. "What? Have you been suffering all this
time--this eternity?"
"Yes. That is, I'm suffering enough now."
"Then perhaps you have some idea of what you made me feel."
"Again?"
"It's the first time I've reproached you with it, even in my
thoughts."
He looked at her with unbelieving eyes. And yet he knew that it was
true. Her sweetness, her lucidity, had been proof against the
supreme provocation. She had forgiven, if she had not forgotten, the
insult that no woman remembers and forgives.
As his eyes wandered the hand that had lain so lightly on his arm
gripped it to command his attention, and he trembled through all his
being. But she no longer shrank from him; she kept her hold, she
tightened it, insisting.
"Oh, Maurice! haven't I told you that I understood?"
He smiled. "Yes. Thank God I can always appeal to your
understanding, if I can't get at your heart. Supposing I didn't care
for you then? Supposing I was too stupid to see what you were? Is
five years, though it may be eternity, so long a time to learn to
know you in? You take a great deal of learning, Frida; you are very
difficult. There's so much more of you than any man can grasp. But
you are the only woman I ever cared to know. I believe you have a
thousand sides to you, and every one--every one I can see--appeals
to me. There's no end to the interest. Whatever I see or don't see,
I always find something more, and I never could be tired of
looking."
She sighed and was silent.
"And you blame me because I couldn't see all this at once? Because
it took me five years to love you? Remember, you were very cautious;
you wouldn't let me see more than a bit at a time. But I love every
bit of you--heart and soul, and body and brain; I love you as I
never could love any other woman in the world--the world, Frida," he
added, pointing the hackneyed phrase. "You _are_ the world."
They had never stopped pacing the deck together, as they talked,
turn after turn, alike and yet unlike in their eagerness and unrest.
Now they stood still. Far off they could see the returning boat, a
speck at the mouth of the harbor, and they knew that their time was
short.
"Maurice," she said, "before you go I have a confession to make. I
wasn't quite honest with you just now when I said I only liked you
five years ago. I know very well that I loved you. The world has
taught me so much."
The world! He frowned angrily as she said it. But through all his
anger he admired the reckless nobility of soul that had urged her to
that last admission, by way of softening the pangs and penalties she
dealt to him. Would any other woman have confessed as much to the
man who had once despised her, and now found himself in her power?
She went on. "I thought you might like to know it. I've gone far
enough, perhaps; but I'll go farther still. I believe I would give
the world to be able to love you now."
"Frida, if you can go as far as that----"
"I can go no farther. No, Maurice, not one step."
"You can. I believe, even now, I could make you love me."
"No. You see, women in my position, my unfortunate position, want to
be loved for themselves."
"I do love you for yourself. Do you doubt that, too?"
"I do not doubt it. I am quite sure of it. That's where it is. I
know you love me for myself, and so many men have loved me--not for
myself. Do you suppose that doesn't touch me? If anything could make
me love you that would. And since it doesn't----"
The inference was obvious.
"Is it because you can't give up your life?"
"It is--partly. And yet I might do that. I did it once."
"You did, indeed. I can't conceive how you, being you, lived the
life you did----"
"I owed it. It was the price of my freedom."
Her freedom! No wonder that she valued it, if she had paid that
price!
She went on dreamily, as if speaking more to herself than him. "To
have power over your life--to do what you like with it--take it up
or throw it down, to fling it away if that seems the best thing to
do. You're not fit to take up your life if you haven't the strength
to put it down, too."
"Frida, if you were my wife you wouldn't have to put it down. I'm
not asking you to give up the world for me; I'm not even asking you
to give up one day of your life. Your life would be exactly what it
is now--plus one thing. You'll say, 'What can I give you that you
haven't got?' I can give you what you've never had. You don't know
what a man's love is and can be; and you must own that without that
knowledge your experience, even as experience, is not quite as
complete as it might be."
The boat--the boat that was to take him to the shore--was getting
nearer. It was his last chance. And while he staked everything on
that chance, he thought of Frida as he had first seen her, as she
sat tragically at the whist table at Coton Manor, dealing out the
cards with deft and supple fingers.
Now she was dealing out his fate.
He remembered how she had said, "Mr. Durant wins because he doesn't
care about the game." Because he cared--cared so supremely--was he
going to lose?
There were so many things in Frida that he had not reckoned with.
She was an extraordinary mixture of impulse and reserve, and she had
astonished him more than once by her readiness to give herself away;
but beyond a certain point--the point of view in fact--her
self-possession was complete. Still, he left no argument untried,
for there was no knowing--no knowing what undiscovered spring he
might chance to touch in that rich and subtle nature.
Her self-possession was absolute. She parried his probe with a
thrust.
"It is your own fault if my experience isn't complete. You should
have told me these things five years ago. As you say, nobody else
has instructed me since."
"I dare say they've done their best. Of course, other men have loved
you----"
"They haven't----"
"But I believe my love would be worth more to you than theirs, for
the simple reason that I understand you too well to insist on it. I
should always know how much and how little you wanted. For we are
rather alike in some ways. I would leave you free."
"I know you would. I am sure. And I would--I would so gladly--but I
can't! You see, Maurice, I _have_ loved you."
"All the more reason----"
"All the less. I knew what you thought and felt about me, and it
made no difference; I loved you just the same, because I understood.
Then I had to fight it. It was hard work, but I did it very
thoroughly. It will never have to be done again. Do you see?"
Yes; he saw very plainly. If Frida could not love him there was
nobody but himself to blame. He also saw the advantage she had given
him. She had owned that she had loved him, and he had hardly
realized the full force of the pluperfect. What had been might be
again. She was a woman in whom the primordial passion, once
awakened, is eternal.
He pressed his advantage home.
"And why had you to fight so hard?"
"Because the thing was stronger than myself, and I wouldn't be
beaten. Because I hated myself for caring for you, as I hate myself
now for not caring."
In her blind pity she laid her fingers on his trembling hand. She
who used to drop his hand as if it had been flame, she should have
known better than to touch him now.
He looked at her with hot hungry eyes. His brain in its feverish
intensity took note of trifles--the tortuous pattern of the braid on
her gown, the gold sleeve-links at her wrists, the specks of brine
that glistened on her temples under the wind-woven strands of her
black hair; it recorded these things and remembered them afterward.
And all the time the boat came nearer, and the slow, steady stroke
of the oars measured his hour by minutes, till the sweat, sprung
from the labor and passion of his nerves, stood out in beads on his
forehead.
He looked at her; and her beauty, the beauty born of her freedom and
abounding life, the beauty he worshiped, was implacable; the
divinity in it remained untouched by his desire.
"You needn't care," he said desperately. "I'm not asking you to
care; I'm not asking you to give me your love, but only to take
mine."