II

On looking back the whole time seemed set in a clear, sunlit atmosphere

of its own as in a magic sphere where the present had always taken a

more than normal clearness of edge and the past and future ceased to be.

It struck her as curious that the prevailing note of those weeks should

have been a sense of utter peace; not realizing that, peace being the

thing his frayed nerves craved, she therefore supplied it, wrapping him

round with it, living so in him and for him that while with him she

received the impression of peace herself, only having sensations of her

own when they were apart. His need--that was the great thing, and though

she had not stopped to analyse what his need was, she had felt it was

for soothing and rest.

She was a writer, and on the money made by her first book she came to

Italy, and in Florence she met him, a painter of some note, of whom she

had vaguely heard in London. Although he was twenty years older than

she, their minds chimed from the first; one of them had only to half say

a thing for the other to understand it. At the beginning there was

nothing between them but friendship, tinged--though for her quite

unconsciously--with the element of sex. For him, he had since told her,

things were very different from the moment he met her; to the average

woman the term "physical attraction" is so meaningless that she stared

in uncomprehension when he told her how profoundly she had troubled him

from the first. For this girl, whose pulses had never been fluttered to

quickness, and who, though in imagination she could project herself into

passion, always shrank from any sign of it in actuality, was reserved

the doubtful compliment of stirring the passionate side of the man's

nature more violently than it had ever been before. He kept the ugly

thing well hidden, and she never guessed at it until her own pity and

trust and affection made her unwittingly tempt him beyond endurance.

Pity, allied to the intellectual pleasure they took in each other, moved

her first, for he was unhappy, and she, too, had the habit of pain. She

remembered the first whole day they had taken together; how they climbed

up to San Miniato and found a field in which they lay and talked, and

how he came back with her to the thirteenth-century palace beside the

Arno where she lodged. She had a little room with a painted ceiling,

and the infant Bacchus and adoring nymphs disporting themselves in

bas-relief on the mantelpiece, a room looking over the brown fluted

roofs of Florence; but the great loggia where he and she sat faced the

Arno, and they had coffee and cigarettes and watched the swift blue

night fall over Florence while the swarm of lights waked broken

reflections in the swirling water. On the loggia they exchanged a brief

mention of their troubles, both commonplace enough; hers a childhood

with parents who perpetually quarrelled, the mother a hard worldly woman

who eventually took to drugs, and a father who had at last left for

another woman the home which was so unbearable; while Sophia herself had

only shaken off the horrors of it and earned her own living, barely

enough at that, a few months earlier.

Richard's trouble was his wife, who seemed not unlike Sophia's mother.

He was both too kindly and too weak--for his was one of those

temperaments that shrink from any display of unpleasantness--to have

mastered her brutally and for good--and strong enough to go on living in

the same house with her because, although she made his life a weariness,

she was an intensely conventional woman to whom the position of a wife

separated from her husband before all the world would have been

intolerable. Between him and Sophia the fact that they both knew the

terror of not being able to slip out even to post a letter without

dreading what they might find on going back, made a bond of sympathy.

Sophia, ignorant as she was, could not be a young, and, for some people,

a beautiful woman, without having learned a few stray scraps of wisdom,

and one was that when a man began to confide his troubles to her it was

as well to see less of him. But Sophia let herself drift, because she

liked being with the man so much; and also the fact that he was from her

own place, that the relentless gods had brought him to Florence to meet

her, and would, in due course, send them both back to where, henceforth,

they would know each other, gave her a curious feeling of being

entrapped in some web too powerful to break. She never blamed him or let

him blame himself for what inevitably happened.

"Sophia, my sweet," he wrote her in one of the letters she now picked up

at random. "I didn't deliberately set to work to make love to you. I

knew your beauty inflamed me and your wit delighted me. But when we

first met I thought we should just see each other a few times and

quarrel and laugh, and I should revel in your looks and no harm done.

And now little Miss Jervis has turned into Sophia, and either I must

have Sophia for ever and ever mine, or I ought to have stuck to an

elderly uncle line and come away with no tears for her and no

self-loathing for me, and no need to lie and shuffle and make her share

in the lies and shuffles for the future."

"You'll never do that, dear," thought Sophia, laying the letter down.

"When I have to come back to London we'll meet honestly, or not at

all. For there's nothing on earth that's worth living in a sea of lies

for. . . ." She remembered how he had asked her if she would come and

see his wife, so that he and she might meet on an accepted footing,

and how the doubtful taste of the proposition had jarred her. He

argued that because they would be honestly "playing the game" by his

wife, Sophia need not mind the meeting; his knowledge of women was

curiously insensitive and blunt, and he had no conception of how

impossible it would be for Sophia to sit quietly and see another woman

doing the honours of his house. In this he was not entirely to blame,

for Sophia so contrived to hoodwink him that he never quite knew she

loved him, certainly never knew the force of her love. He thought of

her as a reckless, innocent child stung to lavish giving out of

affection and pity, and so, to begin with, she had been. The woman

Sophia kept up what had become a pose, not only from the pride of a

maiden, but also because some instinct told her that sooner or later

he would rather be able to think she had not given more.

For the first few days either of them would have declared that all was

well and there was no danger, yet each day marked a distinct step

further on, a definite phase passed through. Sometimes they wandered

about Florence, in the Boboli and the Cascine gardens, or upon the windy

heights of Fiesole; sometimes he hired a queer little carriage with

swift, bedecked horses, and they drove far out into the country, not

getting home till night. The day before the revelation came was one of

the most exquisite they spent together, one of which Sophia could still

hardly bear to think. Leaving the carriage at a little village, they

wandered on foot into a lovely valley, and laughed because he called it

"old mastery," pointing out the Turneresque effect of a ruined castle

set high amidst a mass of olives which were being blown pale against it.

Presently they came to a stream that stormed down the valley and fell

into seven successive pools; deep, still pools, as green as ice, with

sunlit bubbles sent driving through them by the impetus of the clear

arch of descending water. Beside the largest pool, on a smooth grey slab

of rock screened by the over-hanging cliff, they sat and ate their lunch

of bread and hard-boiled eggs and wine, and the sun shone on the glossy

red-brown hair so cunningly folded about Sophia's head, and shone in the

depths of her grey eyes and on her tanned skin. When they had finished

she lay a little below him, closing her eyes to feel the blown spray

drift against her lids, and she never knew till he told her that his

hand had been on her hair the whole time, and never knew till later

still that she had been loving him even then. The day passed in a

perfect harmony of speech and silences, and all the time Sophia was

giving--giving peace and mothering and delight, giving the sky and the

earth and the very air they breathed. Only some one who has ever made a

gift of a day knows the joy that it is--how each golden moment,

conscious of its own beauty, hangs poised like a held breath; how the

sun and wind and flowers and the upward curves of the supporting earth

are all parts of the gift, making the giver a god who pours out creation

for his friend.

The next day they took train to Pisa on a more sophisticated errand,

since he had undertaken to make a sketch of the tower for a friend who

was "sheeking" some Italian backgrounds. Sophia wandered happily about

the town while he did so, and then they met for lunch in the garden of

an old inn.

"I'm afraid of to-day," he told her, "because it can't be as perfect as

yesterday. Nothing could--that's the worst of a day like that."

"I'll _make_ it as perfect," Sophia replied, and she kept her word. She

still had no idea she loved him, she only knew that she wanted to shield

and protect him, that she was happy with him and felt the power to make

him happy, and that she trusted him utterly. Without realizing it, she

tempted him cruelly by her very trust, and that day her calm

recklessness of speech, her gaze that meeting his so straight and

untroubled, disturbed him so profoundly, were too much for him.

"Take off your glove," he said suddenly.

Sophia's notions of love had been culled from books, and she considered

it inseparable from what she termed "thrills." How was she to know that

a woman, especially what is called a "nice" woman, can love without the

promptings of the pulses? Because she felt no sensuous "thrill" as the

tone of command, it never occurred to her to think she could be in love,

wherein she was making another common literary mistake--that of thinking

that every woman enjoys being mastered. Sophia found her joy in ready

compliance with the demands of the beloved, not in arranging set scenes

of clashing wills and conciliations. Taking off her glove, she gave him

her hand.

"When I say that I want to kiss you now," he said, "it doesn't mean in

the way it would have, even a day or two ago. I told you then you

affected me . . . but now it would be because I love you."

Sophia's hand moved slightly in his.

"Yes," she said hesitatingly, "in a way--of course. I know you're very

fond of me--and all that."

"In _the_ way," he returned, "and I'm not fit to hold your hand. D'you

know what the life of an average man is like--especially of a man in my

circumstances?"

"You mean--women?"

"Yes--bought women," he said brutally. "Does it make a lot of difference

to you?"

Sophia, refusing to let her mind so much as dwell with any effort of

realization on his confession, closed her hand firmly over his.

"It doesn't make any difference. Nothing does. If I could look after

you--if you were free to be looked after--you wouldn't have to go to

other women any more. I care about you more than about any man I've ever

met."

"And I don't care about you more than any woman I've ever met. You're

unique and you're you, but I've been in love a good many times. And

there's always the big one I've told you about. I feel I've so little

left to give, and yet--by God, Sophia! I _could_ give to you, even

battered old I!"

"I'd be such a wife to you," said Sophia proudly, clenching her free

hand, "that I should fear no other woman on earth."

"And you wouldn't need to . . . Sophia!" he cried. "How you would give!"

"And we mustn't, either of us," said Sophia, and to soften the speech

she bent her head swiftly and kissed the hand she held.

"My dear . . . !" he said huskily, and Sophia led the way out of the

garden.

That night, after he had left her at her shabby old palace, he went back

to his hotel and sat up, smoking heavily, most of the night. Towards

morning, he wrote her a letter--the first in order of those beside her

on the seat. She took it up now and read it once again:

"Sophia, Sophia," it ran, "I'm in the depths of misery. What have I done

to you and what is going to come of it all? When this time is over? When

we're back in London and out of lotus land? You know--stolen interviews

and weeks without meeting, and that old and awful struggle between the

'game' at home and my inclinations abroad. And I've hardly written so

far when I'm feeling better. Dear, what does all that matter? I feel the

shadow of that coming gloom on me already, but how glorious the

sunshine's been for me! I'm not going to think or worry--yet. What will

happen when I'm back in London must happen, but if I had you by me now I

shouldn't care a damn for that. I feel stupid and stockish. There are

such millions of things I want to say to you, Sophia--and they're mostly

middle-aged things. That's the worst of it. Warnings I feel I ought to

give you about myself and my temper and my terrible ease in giving way

to adverse circumstances. I've told you I'm not big enough or strong

enough for you to care for me except as a useful old pal. You'll find me

out and hate me. All sorts of ghastly bogies are waiting to jump out at

me. They'll get me. But you, dear, you gracious, reckless woman-child,

whatever you think of me in the future you can't rob me of to-day and

yesterday and all those days, and especially to-day. Things like that

are too sacred to write about, almost to think of. And we're deadly

honest with each other, that's a great thing. The more I dream of you

the more I want you here, now. I simply can't write, I've been nearly as

high this afternoon as I shall ever get, perhaps quite--and one has to

pay for that. Oh, my dear; please God, you'll never pay for me! Sophia,

you're very dear to me. Richard. You poor child--you glorious woman!"

The next day both fell from their high altitude. They had driven to a

little half-deserted town, a white, dead, staring, crumbling place--a

place of blind windows and glaring silences. Both felt a sense of

tension, and leaving the carriage they wandered round the walls, and

climbing over a broken gap sat down on a grassy spur of the hillside,

with their backs to the terrible little town. As usual, by now, they

talked about themselves, chiefly of him, and he told her that though

several women had been fond of him as a friend and liked to "mother" him

even as she did, no one of them had cared for him in another way or

kissed him as a lover kisses. He slipped an arm round her shoulders as

he spoke. Sophia was as ignorant as an infant of what kissing like a

lover might be, and in a rush of pity and affection she turned her face

up towards him.

"Oh, it isn't as if we were going on afterwards like this," she said;

"this is just a bit cut out of life for me to give you. It's taking

nothing from her, she doesn't want to give you anything. And I want to

make this bit as splendid as I can for you."

He felt her shoulder touch his as she leant her warm young body towards

him, he saw the glory of her eager eyes and mouth, and he caught her to

him, crushing her fiercely. . . . Sophia wondered if this awful kiss were

ever going to stop; she had never known there was such a way of

kissing--a hard pressure, a sucking of her very soul--and she was filled

with horror under it. When he loosed her she turned and buried her face

against the wall. For a while they sat in silence, then she saw him

kissing her coat, her sleeve, then her head was pressed back against

the wall and his mouth came to hers again. She stayed passive, dazed. In

silence they went to the carriage and drove away, and almost silently

they parted. Sophia spent the night in a misery of shame, he spent it in

mingled excitement and remorse: fearful lest he had aroused in her a

passion which would need to be satisfied at the cost of social disaster.

Next day they talked of nothing in particular in a desultory way and did

not refer to what had happened until, wandering through one of the

wooded mountain slopes beyond Florence, they came on a tiny sportsman's

hut with a roof of red-fluted tiles and a huge chimney. Sophia peeped

and went in; he followed. Within, the hut was only about five feet

square; flame-coloured leaves had drifted in through the open doorway

and lay piled on the hearth; on the wall were some names rudely scrawled

in charcoal.

"How did you sleep?" he asked suddenly.

"I didn't. I was thinking what I should say to you to-day."

"What was it?"

"Never, never again be like you were yesterday. I didn't know it was

like that. It was dreadful. I can't bear it."

He took her hands and held them.

"Never, I promise you. I had an awful night. I didn't know what to think

or wish or do. Let's get out of this hut. It's too small."

The rest of the day they spent happily under the trees, and it seemed to

her that the sense of rest and peace was stronger than if it had never

been broken. Very soon came their last day together. They drove to a

deserted castle on a hill, called Castello di Luna, and as they went

Sophia turned to him.

"To-day's the last," she said, "and I'm going to make it the most

beautiful present of all to you. We'll pretend, like children. We'll

pretend there's only to-day in the world, that there are no obligations

beyond here and now, that we are happy people--we'll pretend."

He gathered her in his arms and kissed her again and again fiercely, but

not with the abandonment which had frightened her before, and her heart

turned heavy within her and she knew she loved him. They stayed till

evening in the neglected garden of the old castle, left discreetly alone

by Lucia and Amadea, the little peasant custodians who lived with a

beetle-browed mother and a score of younger children in the tower over

the gate. It was Lucia who ventured an opinion as to Sophia's baby, and

Sophia emptied her pocket-bottle of lavender water over the little

girls' blue-check handkerchiefs and told Richard to give them five

_lire_ apiece against the day when they should have babies of their own.

Then, in the quiet old garden, he and she sat and talked and were

silent, and, with her arms round him, she drew his head on to her

breast, and they played the dangerous game of saying what they would do

when they were married.

"Your baby would be sweet!" he quoted to her. "Would you dare even that

for me, Sophia?"

"Would I not?" she breathed.

"Oh, I can't give up hoping it may all become possible!" he cried at

last, but she shuddered a little. "Don't," she said, "it's building on a

grave."

But her heart ached at the sweetness of the vision. She never felt any

temptation to fling her cap over the windmill for him, partly because it

is very true that "_Les bonnes femmes n'ont pas ces tentations-la_,"

partly because of the much greater things she wanted to give--a hearth

that would always warm him, a pillow that would always rest him, and on

the hearth a cradle--and these were things that he could not come at

through a back door.

They said good-bye on the loggia in Florence, and that night he left for

Leghorn. He wrote to her in the train; and bringing her thoughts back to

the present by an effort, Sophia picked up the letter now.

"Sophia, Sophia," she read, "is it only you who pay? My sweet, I

hope you will never feel what I felt as I went home. The bare

truth is I am a coward and a cad, besides being a fool. I began

it, and if I didn't know where it was going to lead to I was a

fool to play with fire, and I was a cad to go on. Dear, I'd

rather go through years of anything you feel than ten minutes of

what I'm feeling. But I've got to stick it henceforth when I'm

not buoyed up with your presence. It's been so gorgeous, you've

been so heavenly, that I'd do it all again. But now besides the

awful want of you there's the clear vision of what I am, and

it's hideous. I haven't the pluck or the passion to carry you

right off before all the world whether you would or no, nor the

sense and the honesty and the decency to be just friends with

you. Oh, Sophia, I hate myself for it, and hate myself most for

being glad, deep down, that I _did_ get what you gave me. I

can't find anything solid or honest in me anywhere, except my

feeling for you and my joy in our time together, and I've no

right to that. This is cruelly unlike what I've preached to you

about possessing for ever past joys. I suppose I shall forget my

own wickedness and even come to regret that I didn't take

more--take _all_ by force or guile--for perhaps, after all, it's

better to be a downright brute than a half-and-halfer. If so,

shan't I be even more unworthy of all you've given me, you

sweet, foolish, lavish child? If you were here now, Sophia, I

shouldn't be feeling all this. You'd only have to smile at me

and I should get back my pride in having won what I have won.

But without you I seem to see more clearly what I am. My sweet,

wouldn't you be happier if you saw me so, too? All I feel now is

a desperate need of you, your hands and your hair and your eyes

and your mouth and your voice and your wit and your dear

mothering. And next month? Secret meetings and concerted lies,

and all the rest of the filthy game? And I drag you into it all

because I want you and because my affairs make it necessary to

do it or part for good. I'm trying to look at it clearly and see

all the worst--misunderstandings, preoccupation, work, moods,

fears, all the things that are going to prevent a wretched thing

like me from being where he wants to be and doing what he could

for you. I wish from the bottom of my soul the train would smash

up and kill me to-night. Oh, if there were only the past few

weeks to consider it would be simple enough. I've had such a

time as I've never had before, and you made it. You said you

would and you did. You've given me such a time as a woman never

gave a man in our circumstances before. But there's you and the

world and the future to consider. It's very small moral

satisfaction to me that I didn't deliberately set to work to

make love to you. It grew, as you showed me more and more how

adorable you were, how gracious and desirable and generous and

trusting, you dear nymph of the woods, virgin-mother, friend and

lover and comforter. It's no good going on like this, man's a

self-deceiving kind of brute, and perhaps before long all the

glory of the days of you, you, you, will fit in quite

comfortably and the poison of self-hatred cease to hurt. I stop

to-morrow night at the Grand Hotel, Livorno. Will you write to

me there, sweet? If I could really be sorry for it all I should

like myself better. But I can't. I can only hate myself for

glorying in what I got by such means. Write to me--I'm

frightened and alone.

"RICHARD."

"My sweet," the next letter began, "your letter has come. It's

what I knew it would be, so brave and sweet and good that I can

only wonder at you all the more. It soothes and heals and cheers

me, and once more I am drinking your life-blood and using your

youth and splendour to live on. Is there anything you wouldn't

do for my comfort? When I fell asleep this morning about dawn I

dreamt of you and woke all hot and frightened, because I thought

I heard you moaning, a horrible, strangled moan. Did I? Oh, my

dear, I hope not. I can't get at the truth all these miles away.

You see, that brave, wise letter of yours might have meant a

huge effort of the will and brain, and not be a direct outflow

from the you that gave me those days. Shall I ever see that you

again, I wonder? Your letter's like the touch of your lips on my

forehead--cooling, healing, bracing and most sweet. Dear, you're

not only all I've told you before that you are, but you're wise

as well. Oh! child, girl, most wonderfully woman-wise. My sweet,

what you could do for me if only we could belong to each other.

Sophia, I'm trying hard to knock it into my head that we can't,

but I can see now that the trouble's going to be, not remorse or

anxiety, but just the big, aching lack of you, and not of your

beauty so much as of your tenderness and wit and your weak,

clinging strength. Oh, Sophia, I'm writing a lot of rot, but it

isn't rot really. I mean, you understand. D'you remember the day

when you said you'd exactly fitted that long body of yours into

the ground? That's how I feel when I rest my mind on yours, only

it's the ground and not me that does the shaping."

The next letter was from Marseilles. The last page, which Sophia read

through twice, ran thus:

"So good-bye to it all, but not good-bye to Sophia. Dear, I

believe very strongly in spiritual converse (I can't find the

word I want for it). But don't you feel that my arms _are_ round

you? I can feel your head on my shoulder and your hair against

my cheek. I mean that it isn't just cheating oneself with vain

imaginations to meet like that. I mean to go on thinking of you

hard and the vision soothes, not aggravates, the longing, and I

will meet you like that at our Castello di Luna. But oh, my

dear, I wish it were really true _now_! There is so much I want

from you and must go on wanting. Come to me in thought, my

sweet, until we can see and touch and hear each other again. We

will always say to each other whatever is in our hearts and

minds. And so I'm just starting to go back--Sophia, I can't say

'home.' Home means what you are. Oh, I thought I should go back

gaily and take it all up, but it makes me sick with dread. I

ought never to have got out of harness. It's better to go on

till one drops than to taste freedom and have to give it up.

Sweet, your eyes and your mouth and your hair are with me

always. Don't call me a materialist, and say it's only your

body's beauty that I value. You're sweet to me through and

through. Oh, Sophia, come often to meet me in Monte Luna. And

there is Lucia to say sweet, impossible things to make us dream.

_Ti bacio gl'occhi._

"RICHARD."

Sophia opened the last sheet of paper. It enfolded three primroses, and

on it was written "_Primavere per la Primavera_." She looked at them a

moment, then wrapped them up again and put letters and flowers back in

the bag. Behind her the sun was near to setting, and the blaze of it lay

full on the towers, making them a bright tawny-grey against the sky of

deep steel-colour, and turning to tongues of flame the tufts of yellow

gillyflowers--Santa Beata's own plant--that sprang out here and there

from the sheer masonry. Some jackdaws flew out of the nearest belfry,

and circled round it, black amid the brightness. Sophia sprang up and

walked to and fro.

"I shall feel again, if I stay here. Unbearably. I wish I hadn't come.

I'll go away to-morrow. _Richard, Richard, Richard!_"

But on the morrow, instead of leaving Sant' Ambrogio, Sophia moved from

the inn to the little house in the walled garden. Not until she was

installed there did she discover that though the house was comparatively

modern, the garden was the very one where Santa Beata had seen her

visions and dreamed her dreams.