One evening after an exhausting talk we sat, inert, on the grass hummock
beside the stream. Heavy clouds had gathered in the sky, the light had
deepened to amethyst, the valley was still, swooning with expectancy,
louder and louder the thunder rolled from behind the distant hills, and
presently a veil descended to hide them from our view. Great drops began
to fall, unheeded.
"We must go in," said Nancy, at length.
I followed her across the field and through the orchard. From the porch
we stood gazing out at the whitening rain that blotted all save the
nearer landscape, and the smell of wet, midsummer grasses will always be
associated with the poignancy of that moment.... At dinner, between the
intervals of silence, our talk was of trivial things. We made a mere
pretence of eating, and I remember having my attention arrested by the
sight of a strange, pitying expression on the face of Mrs. Olsen, who
waited on us. Before that the woman had been to me a mere ministering
automaton. But she must have had ideas and opinions, this transported
Swedish peasant.... Presently, having cleared the table, she retired....
The twilight deepened to dusk, to darkness. The storm, having spent the
intensity of its passion in those first moments of heavy downpour and
wind, had relaxed to a gentle rain that pattered on the roof, and from
the stream came recurringly the dirge of the frogs. All I could see of
Nancy was the dim outline of her head and shoulders: she seemed
fantastically to be escaping me, to be fading, to be going; in sudden
desperation I dropped on my knees beside her, and I felt her hands
straying with a light yet agonized touch, over my head.
"Do you think I haven't suffered, too? that I don't suffer?" I heard her
ask.
Some betraying note for which I had hitherto waited in vain must have
pierced to my consciousness, yet the quiver of joy and the swift,
convulsive movement that followed it seemed one. Her strong, lithe body
was straining in my arms, her lips returning my kisses.... Clinging to
her hands, I strove to summon my faculties of realization; and I began to
speak in broken, endearing sentences.
"It's stronger than we are--stronger than anything else in the world,"
she said.
"But you're not sorry?" I asked.
"I don't want to think--I don't care," she replied. "I only know that I
love you. I wonder if you will ever know how much!"
The moments lengthened into hours, and she gently reminded me that it was
late. The lights in the little farmhouses near by had long been
extinguished. I pleaded to linger; I wanted her, more of her, all of her
with a fierce desire that drowned rational thought, and I feared that
something might still come between us, and cheat me of her.
"No, no," she cried, with fear in her voice. "We shall have to think it
out very carefully--what we must do. We can't afford to make any
mistakes."
"We'll talk it all over to-morrow," I said.
With a last, reluctant embrace I finally left her, walked blindly to
where the motor car was standing, and started the engine. I looked back.
Outlined in the light of the doorway I saw her figure in what seemed an
attitude of supplication....
I drove cityward through the rain, mechanically taking the familiar turns
in the road, barely missing a man in a buggy at a four-corners. He
shouted after me, but the world to which he belonged didn't exist. I
lived again those moments that had followed Nancy's surrender, seeking to
recall and fix in my mind every word that had escaped from her lips--the
trivial things that to lovers are so fraught with meaning. I lived it all
over again, as I say, but the reflection of it, though intensely
emotional, differed from the reality in that now I was somewhat able to
regard the thing, to regard myself, objectively; to define certain
feelings that had flitted in filmy fashion through my consciousness,
delicate shadows I recognized at the time as related to sadness. When she
had so amazingly yielded, the thought for which my mind had been vaguely
groping was that the woman who lay there in my arms, obscured by the
darkness, was not Nancy at all! It was as if this one precious woman I
had so desperately pursued had, in the capture, lost her identity, had
mysteriously become just woman, in all her significance, yes, and
helplessness. The particular had merged (inevitably, I might have known)
into the general: the temporary had become the lasting, with a chain of
consequences vaguely implied that even in my joy gave me pause. For the
first time in my life I had a glimpse of what marriage might
mean,--marriage in a greater sense than I had ever conceived it, a sort
of cosmic sense, implying obligations transcending promises and
contracts, calling for greatness of soul of a kind I had not hitherto
imagined. Was there in me a grain of doubt of my ability to respond to
such a high call? I began to perceive that such a union as we
contemplated involved more obligations than one not opposed to
traditional views of morality. I fortified myself, however,--if indeed I
really needed fortification in a mood prevailingly triumphant and
exalted,--with the thought that this love was different, the real thing,
the love of maturity steeped in the ideals of youth. Here was a love for
which I must be prepared to renounce other things on which I set a high
value; prepared, in case the world, for some reason, should not look upon
us with kindliness. It was curious that such reflections as these should
have been delayed until after the achievement of my absorbing desire,
more curious that they should have followed so closely on the heels of
it. The affair had shifted suddenly from a basis of adventure, of
uncertainty; to one of fact, of commitment; I am exaggerating my concern
in order to define it; I was able to persuade myself without much
difficulty that these little, cloudy currents in the stream of my joy
were due to a natural reaction from the tremendous strain of the past
weeks, mere morbid fancies.
When at length I reached my room at the Club I sat looking out at the
rain falling on the shining pavements under the arc-lights. Though waves
of heat caused by some sudden recollection or impatient longing still ran
through my body, a saner joy of anticipation was succeeding emotional
tumult, and I reflected that Nancy had been right in insisting that we
walk circumspectly in spite of passion. After all, I had outwitted
circumstance, I had gained the prize, I could afford to wait a little. We
should talk it over to-morrow,--no, to-day. The luminous face of the city
hall clock reminded me that midnight was long past....
I awoke with the consciousness of a new joy, suddenly to identify it with
Nancy. She was mine! I kept repeating it as I dressed; summoning her, not
as she had lain in my arms in the darkness--though the intoxicating
sweetness of that pervaded me--but as she had been before the
completeness of her surrender, dainty, surrounded by things expressing an
elusive, uniquely feminine personality. I could afford to smile at the
weather, at the obsidian sky, at the rain still falling persistently; and
yet, as I ate my breakfast, I felt a certain impatience to verify what I
knew was a certainty, and hurried to the telephone booth. I resented the
instrument, its possibilities of betrayal, her voice sounded so
matter-of-fact as she bade me good morning and deplored the rain.
"I'll be out as soon as I can get away," I said. "I have a meeting at
three, but it should be over at four." And then I added irresistibly:
"Nancy, you're not sorry? You--you still--?"
"Yes, don't be foolish," I heard her reply, and this time the telephone
did not completely disguise the note for which I strained. I said
something more, but the circuit was closed....
I shall not attempt to recount the details of our intercourse during the
week that followed. There were moments of stress and strain when it
seemed to me that we could not wait, moments that strengthened Nancy's
resolution to leave immediately for the East: there were other, calmer
periods when the wisdom of her going appealed to me, since our ultimate
union would be hastened thereby. We overcame by degrees the
distastefulness of the discussion of ways and means.... We spent an
unforgettable Sunday among the distant high hills, beside a little lake
of our own discovery, its glinting waters sapphire and chrysoprase. A
grassy wood road, at the inviting entrance to which we left the
automobile, led down through an undergrowth of laurel to a pebbly shore,
and there we lunched; there we lingered through the long summer
afternoon, Nancy with her back against a tree, I with my head in her lap
gazing up at filmy clouds drifting imperceptibly across the sky,
listening to the droning notes of the bees, notes that sometimes rose in
a sharp crescendo, and again were suddenly hushed. The smell of the
wood-mould mingled with the fainter scents of wild flowers. She had
brought along a volume by a modern poet: the verses, as Nancy read them,
moved me,--they were filled with a new faith to which my being responded,
the faith of the forth-farer; not the faith of the anchor, but of the
sail. I repeated some of the lines as indications of a creed to which I
had long been trying to convert her, though lacking the expression. She
had let the book fall on the grass. I remember how she smiled down at me
with the wisdom of the ages in her eyes, seeking my hand with a gesture
that was almost maternal.
"You and the poets," she said, "you never grow up. I suppose that's the
reason why we love you--and these wonderful visions of freedom you have.
Anyway, it's nice to dream, to recreate the world as one would like to
have it."
"But that's what you and I are doing," I insisted.
"We think we're doing it--or rather you think so," she replied. "And
sometimes, I admit that you almost persuade me to think so. Never quite.
What disturbs me," she continued, "is to find you and the poets founding
your new freedom on new justifications, discarding the old law only to
make a new one,--as though we could ever get away from necessities,
escape from disagreeable things, except in dreams. And then, this
delusion of believing that we are masters of our own destiny--" She
paused and pressed my fingers.
"There you go-back to predestination!" I exclaimed.
"I don't go back to anything, or forward to anything," she exclaimed.
"Women are elemental, but I don't expect you to understand it. Laws and
codes are foreign to us, philosophies and dreams may dazzle us for the
moment, but what we feel underneath and what we yield to are the primal
forces, the great necessities; when we refuse joys it's because we know
these forces by a sort of instinct, when we're overcome it's with a full
knowledge that there's a price. You've talked a great deal, Hugh, about
carving out our future. I listened to you, but I resisted you. It wasn't
the morality that was taught me as a child that made me resist, it was
something deeper than that, more fundamental, something I feel but can't
yet perceive, and yet shall perceive some day. It isn't that I'm clinging
to the hard and fast rules because I fail to see any others, it isn't
that I believe that all people should stick together whether they are
happily married or not, but--I must say it even now--I have a feeling I
can't define that divorce isn't for us. I'm not talking about right and
wrong in the ordinary sense--it's just what I feel. I've ceased to
think."
"Nancy!" I reproached her.
"I can't help it--I don't want to be morbid. Do you remember my asking
you about God?--the first day this began? and whether you had a god?
Well, that's the trouble with us all to-day, we haven't any God, we're
wanderers, drifters. And now it's just life that's got hold of us, my
dear, and swept us away together. That's our justification--if we needed
one--it's been too strong for us." She leaned back against the tree and
closed her eyes. "We're like chips in the torrent of it, Hugh."....
It was not until the shadow of the forest had crept far across the lake
and the darkening waters were still that we rose reluctantly to put the
dishes in the tea basket and start on our homeward journey. The tawny
fires of the sunset were dying down behind us, the mist stealing,
ghostlike, into the valleys below; in the sky a little moon curled like a
freshly cut silver shaving, that presently turned to gold, the white star
above it to fire.
Where the valleys widened we came to silent, decorous little towns and
villages where yellow-lit windows gleaming through the trees suggested
refuge and peace, while we were wanderers in the night. It was Nancy's
mood; and now, in the evening's chill, it recurred to me poignantly. In
one of these villages we passed a church, its doors flung open; the
congregation was singing a familiar hymn. I slowed down the car; I felt
her shoulder pressing against my own, and reached out my hand and found
hers.
"Are you warm enough?" I asked....
We spoke but little on that drive, we had learned the futility of words
to express the greater joys and sorrows, the love that is compounded of
these.
It was late when we turned in between the white dates and made our way up
the little driveway to the farmhouse. I bade her good night on the steps
of the porch.
"You do love me, don't you?" she whispered, clinging to me with a sudden,
straining passion. "You will love me, always no matter what happens?"
"Why, of course, Nancy," I answered.
"I want to hear you say it, 'I love you, I shall love you always.'"