"You have always taken things--taken what you wanted. But they haven't
satisfied you, convinced you that that is all of life."
"Do you mean--that we should renounce?" I faltered.
"I don't know what I mean. I am asking, Hugh, asking. Haven't you any
clew? Isn't there any voice in you, anywhere, deep down, that can tell
me? give me a hint? just a little one?"
I was wracked. My passion had not left me, it seemed to be heightened,
and I pressed her hands against her knees. It was incredible that my
hands should be there, in hers, feeling her. Her beauty seemed as fresh,
as un-wasted as the day, long since, when I despaired of her. And yet and
yet against the tumult and beating of this passion striving to throb down
thought, thought strove. Though I saw her as a woman, my senses and my
spirit commingled and swooned together.
"This is life," I murmured, scarcely knowing what I said.
"Oh, my dear!" she cried, and her voice pierced me with pain, "are we to
be lost, overpowered, engulfed, swept down its stream, to come up below
drifting--wreckage? Where, then, would be your power? I'm not speaking of
myself. Isn't life more than that? Isn't it in us, too,--in you? Think,
Hugh. Is there no god, anywhere, but this force we feel, restlessly
creating only to destroy? You must answer--you must find out."
I cannot describe the pleading passion in her voice, as though hell and
heaven were wrestling in it. The woman I saw, tortured yet uplifted, did
not seem to be Nancy, yet it was the woman I loved more than life itself
and always had loved.
"I can't think," I answered desperately, "I can only feel--and I can't
express what I feel. It's mixed, it's dim, and yet bright and
shining--it's you."
"No, it's you," she said vehemently. "You must interpret it." Her voice
sank: "Could it be God?" she asked.
"God!" I exclaimed sharply.
Her hands fell away from mine.... The silence was broken only by the
crackling of the wood fire as a log turned over and fell. Never before,
in all our intercourse that I could remember, had she spoken to me about
religion.... With that apparent snap in continuity incomprehensible to
the masculine mind-her feminine mood had changed. Elements I had never
suspected, in Nancy, awe, even a hint of despair, entered into it, and
when my hand found hers again, the very quality of its convulsive
pressure seemed to have changed. I knew then that it was her soul I loved
most; I had been swept all unwittingly to its very altar.
"I believe it is God," I said. But she continued to gaze at me, her lips
parted, her eyes questioning.
"Why is it," she demanded, "that after all these centuries of certainty
we should have to start out to find him again? Why is it when something
happens like--like this, that we should suddenly be torn with doubts
about him, when we have lived the best part of our lives without so much
as thinking of him?"
"Why should you have qualms?" I said. "Isn't this enough? and doesn't it
promise--all?"
"I don't know. They're not qualms--in the old sense." She smiled down at
me a little tearfully. "Hugh, do you remember when we used to go to
Sunday-school at Dr. Pound's church, and Mrs. Ewan taught us? I really
believed something then--that Moses brought down the ten commandments of
God from the mountain, all written out definitely for ever and ever. And
I used to think of marriage" (I felt a sharp twinge), "of marriage as
something sacred and inviolable,--something ordained by God himself. It
ought to be so--oughtn't it? That is the ideal."
"Yes--but aren't you confusing--?" I began.
"I am confusing and confused. I shouldn't be--I shouldn't care if there
weren't something in you, in me, in our--friendship, something I can't
explain, something that shines still through the fog and the smoke in
which we have lived our lives--something which, I think, we saw clearer
as children. We have lost it in our hasty groping. Oh, Hugh, I couldn't
bear to think that we should never find it! that it doesn't really exist!
Because I seem to feel it. But can we find it this way, my dear?" Her
hand tightened on mine.
"But if the force drawing us together, that has always drawn us together,
is God?" I objected.
"I asked you," she said. "The time must come when you must answer, Hugh.
It may be too late, but you must answer."
"I believe in taking life in my own hands," I said.
"It ought to be life," said Nancy. "It--it might have been life.... It is
only when a moment, a moment like this comes that the quality of what we
have lived seems so tarnished, that the atmosphere which we ourselves
have helped to make is so sordid. When I think of the intrigues, and
divorces, the self-indulgences,--when I think of my own marriage--" her
voice caught. "How are we going to better it, Hugh, this way? Am I to get
that part of you I love, and are you to get what you crave in me? Can we
just seize happiness? Will it not elude us just as much as though we
believed firmly in the ten commandments?"
"No," I declared obstinately.
She shook her head.
"What I'm afraid of is that the world isn't made that way--for you--for
me. We're permitted to seize those other things because they're just
baubles, we've both found out how worthless they are. And the worst of it
is they've made me a coward, Hugh. It isn't that I couldn't do without
them, I've come to depend on them in another way. It's because they give
me a certain protection,--do you see? they've come to stand in the place
of the real convictions we've lost. And--well, we've taken the baubles,
can we reach out our hands and take--this? Won't we be punished for it,
frightfully punished?"
"I don't care if we are," I said, and surprised myself.
"But I care. It's weak, it's cowardly, but it's so. And yet I want to
face the situation--I'm trying to get you to face it, to realize how
terrible it is."
"I only know that I want you above everything else in the world--I'll
take care of you--"