_June_
Michael Fane stayed on into June, and the fancy came to Pauline that he
knew of these meetings with Guy at night. It enraged her with jealousy
to think that he might have been taken into Guy's confidence so far and
the prejudice against him grew more violent every day. She already had
enough regrets for having given way to Guy's persuasion, and the memory
of that last return at dawn to her cool reproachful room haunted her
more bitterly when she thought of its no longer being a secret. The
knowledge that Guy was soon going to leave Plashers Mead was another
torment, for though in a way she was glad of his wanting to make the
determined effort, she could not help connecting the resolve with his
friend's visit, and in consequence of this her one desire was to upset
the plan. The sight of Richard and Margaret progressing equably toward
their marriage early in August also made her jealous, and she began
unreasonably to ascribe to her sister an attitude of superiority that
she allowed to gall her: and whenever Richard was praised by any of the
family she could never help feeling now that the praise covered or
implied a corresponding disparagement of Guy. With Monica she nearly
quarrelled over religion, for though in her heart it occupied the old
supreme place, her escapades at night, by the tacit leave they seemed to
give Guy to presume that religion no longer counted as her chief
resource, had led her for the first time to make herself appear
outwardly indifferent. In fact she now dreaded going to church, because
she felt that if she once surrendered to the holy influence she would
suffer again all the remorse of the winter that now by desperate
deferment she was able for a little while to avoid. On top of all this
vexation of soul she was angry with Guy because he seemed unable to
realize that they were both walking on the edge of an abyss, and that
all this abandonment of themselves to the joy of the fugitive season was
a vain attempt to cheat fate. At such an hour she was naturally jealous
that a friend's private affairs should occupy so much of Guy's
attention, when he himself was walking blindly toward the doom of their
love that now sometimes in flashes of horrible clarity she beheld at
hand. Guy, however, persisted in trying to force Michael upon her: the
jealousy such attempts fostered made her more passionate when she was
alone with him, and this, as all the while she dreadfully foresaw,
heaped up the reckoning that her conscience would presently have to pay.
One afternoon she and Margaret and Monica went to tea at Plashers Mead,
when to her sharp annoyance she found herself next to Guy's friend. She
made up her mind at the beginning of the conversation that he was
criticizing her and, feeling shy and awkward, she could only reply to
him in gasps and monosyllables and blushes. He seemed to her the coldest
person she had ever known: he seemed utterly without emotion or
sympathy: he must surely be the worst friend imaginable for Guy. He took
no interest in anything apparently; and then suddenly he definitely
revealed himself as the cause of Guy's ambition to conquer London.
"I think Guy ought to go away from here," he was saying. "I told him
when he first took this house that he would be apt to dream away all his
time here. You must make him give it up, Miss Grey. He's such an
extraordinarily brilliant person that it would be terrible if he let
himself do nothing in the end. Of course he's been lucky to meet you,
and that's kept him alive, but now he ought to go to London. He really
ought."
Pauline hated herself for the way in which she was gasping out her
monosyllabic agreement with all this; but she did not feel able to argue
with Michael Fane. He disconcerted her by his air of severe judgment,
and however hard she tried she could not contradict him. Then suddenly
in a rage with herself and with him she began to talk nonsense at the
top of her voice, rattling on until her sisters looked up at her in
surprize, while Michael evidently embarrassed scarcely answered. At last
the uncomfortable visit came to an end, and as she walked back with Guy,
while the others went in front, she began to inveigh against the friend
more fiercely than ever.
"My dear, I can't think why you have him to stay with you. He hates your
being engaged to me...."
"Oh, nonsense," Guy interrupted rather crossly.
"He does, he does; and he hates your staying down here. He says Plashers
Mead is ruining you and that you ought to go to London. Now, you see, I
know why you want to go there."
"Really, Pauline, you're talking nonsense. I'm going to London because
I'm positive that your father and mother both think I ought to go. And
I'm positive myself that I ought to go. I've been wrong to stay here all
this time. I've done nothing to help forward our marriage. Look how
nervous and ... how nervous and overwrought you've become. It's all my
fault."
"How I hate that friend of yours!"
Guy looked up in astonishment at the fervour of her tone.
"And how he hates me," she went on.
"Oh, really, my dear child, you are ridiculous," Guy exclaimed
petulantly. "Are you going to take up this attitude towards all my
friends? You're simply horridly jealous, that's the whole matter."
Pauline did not quarrel now, because she thought it might gratify
Michael Fane to see the discord he had created, but she treasured up
her anger and knew that, when later she and Guy were alone, she would
say whatever hard things now rested unsaid. Next morning Guy asked her
if she would be very cross to hear that he was going to town for a
night.
"With your friend?" she asked.
He nodded, and she turned away from him clouded blue eyes.
"It is unfair of you to hate Michael," he pleaded. "I told him you
thought he was cold, and he said at once, 'do tell her I'm not cold, and
say how lovely I think her.' He said you were very lovely and strange
... a fairy's child."
Still Pauline would not turn her head.
"I told him that you were indeed a fairy's child," Guy went on, "and I
told him how sometimes I felt I should go off my head with the
responsibility your happiness was to me. For indeed, Pauline, it is, it
is a responsibility."
She felt she must yield when Guy spoke like that, but then unfortunately
he began to talk about his friend again and sullen jealousy returned.
"Listen, Pauline. I'm going up to town because Michael wants me to see
this girl he is going to marry. He was rather pathetic about her. It
seems that ... well ... it's a sort of misalliance, and his people are
angry about it, and really I must be loyal and go up to town and help
him with ... well ... you see really all his friends have been
unsympathetic about her."
"I expect they've every right to be," said Pauline.
"I do think you're unreasonable. I'm only going away for a night."
"Oh, go, go, go," she cried, and pulling herself free of his caress, she
left him by the margin of the stream disconsolate and perplexed.
Pauline, when Guy had gone to London with his friend, began to fret
herself with the fear that he would not come back, and she was very
remorseful at the thought that if he did not she would be responsible.
She half expected to get a letter next day to tell her of his
determination to remain in town for good, and when no letter came she
exaggerated still more all her fears and longed to send him a telegram
to ask if he had arrived safely, railing at herself for having let him
leave her without knowing where he was going to stay. By the following
afternoon all the jealousy of Michael had been swallowed up in a
passionate desire for Guy's return, and when about three o'clock she saw
him coming through the wicket in the high grey wall her heart beat fast
with relief. She said not a word about Guy's journey, nor did she even
ask if his friend had come back with him. She cared for nothing but to
show by her tenderness how penitent she was for that yesterday which had
torn such a rent in the perfection of their love. Guy was visibly much
relieved to find that her jealous fit had passed away, and when she
asked for an account of his journey he gave it to her most eagerly.
"Yesterday was rather tragic," he said. "We went to see this Lily Haden
to whom Michael had engaged himself, and ... well ... it's impossible to
explain to you what happened, but it was all very horrible and rather
like a scene in a French play. Anyhow Michael is cured of that fancy,
and now he talks of going out of England and even of becoming a monk.
These extraordinary religious fads that succeed violent emotion of an
utterly different kind! Personally I don't think the monkish phase will
survive the disillusionment that's just as much bound to happen in
religion as it was bound to happen over that girl."
"What was she like?" Pauline asked, resolving to appear interested in
Michael.
"I never saw her," said Guy. "The tragedy took place 'off' in the
Aristotelian manner."
"Oh, Guy, don't use such long words."
"Dear little thing, I wish you wouldn't ask any more about this girl.
She is something quite outside your imagination; though I could make of
her behaviour such a splendid lesson for you, when you think _you_ have
behaved dreadfully in escaping from your room for an hour or two of
moonlight. Poor Michael! he's as scrupulous as you are, and it's rather
ironical that you and he shouldn't get on. Puritans, both of you! Now
there's another friend of mine, Maurice Avery, whom you'd probably like
very much, and yet he isn't worth Michael's little finger."
"Did you see him yesterday?"
"Yes, we went round to his studio in Grosvenor Road. Oh, my dear, such a
glorious room looking out over the river right into the face of the
young moon coming up over Lambeth. A jolly old Georgian house. And at
the back another long low window looking out over a sea of roofs to the
sunset behind the new Roman cathedral. There were lots of people there,
and a man was playing that Brahms sonata your mother likes so much.
Pauline, you and I simply must go and live in Chelsea or Westminster and
we can come back to Plashers Mead after the most amazing adventures. You
would be such a rose on a London window-sill, or would you then be a
tuft of London Pride, all blushes and bravery?"
"Bravery! Why I'm frightened to death by the idea of going to live in
London. Oh, Guy, I'm frightened of anything that will break into our
life here."
"But, dearest, we can't stay at Wychford for ever doing nothing. Read
The Statue and the Bust if you want to understand the dread that lies
cold on my heart sometimes. Think how already nearly twenty months have
gone by since we met, and still we are in the same position. We know
each other better and we are more in love than ever, but you have all
sorts of worries at the back of your mind and I have all sorts of
ambitions not yet fulfilled. Michael has at least managed to make a
complete ass of himself, but what have I done?"
"Your poems ... your poems," she murmured despairingly. "Are your poems
really no use? Oh, Guy, that seems such a cruel thing to believe."
Guy talked airily of what much more wonderful things he was going to
write, and when he asked Pauline to meet him this very midnight on the
river, she had to consent, because in the thought that he appeared to be
drifting out of reach of her love she felt half distraught and would
have sacrificed anything to keep him by her.
The June evening seemed of a sad uniform green, for the blossom of the
trees was departed and the borders were not yet marching in Midsummer
array. There was always a sadness about these evenings of early June, a
sadness, and sometimes a threat when the wind blew loudly among the
young foliage. Those gusty eves were almost preferable to this
protracted and luminous melancholy in which the sinking crescent of the
moon hung scarcely more bright than ivory. The pensive beauty was too
much for Pauline, who wished that she could shut out the obstinate day
and read by candlelight such a book as Alice in Wonderland until it was
time to go to bed. Her white fastness, rose-bloomed by sunset as she
dressed for dinner, reproached her intention of abandoning its shelter
to-night, and she determined that this should really be the last
escapade. There was no harm in what she had done of course, as Guy
assured her, and yet there was harm in behaving so traitorously toward
that narrow white bed, toward pious wide-eyed Saint Ursula and Tobit's
companionable angel.
The languor of the evening was heavy upon all the family: Monica was the
only one who had the energy to go to her instrument. She played Chopin,
and the austerity of her method made the ballades and the nocturnes more
dangerously sweet. Gradually the melodies lulled most of Pauline's
fears and charmed her to look forward eagerly to the velvet midnight
when she with Guy beside her would float deep into such caressing
glooms. After Monica had played them all into drowsiness, Pauline had to
wait until the last sound had died away in the house and the
illumination of the last window had faded from the bodeful night that
was stroking her window with invitation to come forth.
Twelve o'clock clanged from the belfry, and Pauline opened her bedroom
door to listen. She had put on her white frieze coat, for although the
night was warm the wearing of such outdoor garb gave a queer kind of
propriety to the whole business, and at the far end of the long corridor
she saw herself in the dim candlelight mirrored like a ghost in the
Venetian glass. From the heart of the house the cuckoo calling midnight
a minute or two late made her draw back in alarm, and not merely in
alarm, but also rather sentimentally, as if by her action she were going
to offend that innocent bird of childhood. She wondered why to-night she
felt so sensitive beforehand, since usually the regret had followed her
action; but promising herself that to-night should indeed be the last
time she would ever take this risk, she crept on tip-toe down the
stairs.
In the glimmering starshine Pauline could see Guy standing by the wicket
in the high grey wall, a remote and spectral form against the blackness
all around him where the invisible trees gathered and hoarded the gloom.
She sighed with relief to find that the arms with which so gently he
enfolded her were indeed warm with life. Her passage over the lawn had
been one long increasing fear that the shape, so indeterminate and
motionless that awaited her approach, might not be Guy in life, but a
wan image of what he had been, a demon lover, a shadow from the cave of
death.
"Guy, my darling, my darling, it is you! Oh, I was so frightened that
when I came close you wouldn't really be there."
She leaned half sobbing upon his shoulder.
"Pauline, don't talk so loud. I only did not come across the lawn to
meet you for fear of attracting attention."
"Let me go back now," she begged, "now that I've seen you."
But Guy soon persuaded her to come with him through the wicket and out
over the paddock where the grass whispered in their track, until at the
sight of the canoe's outline she lost her fears and did not care how
recklessly she explored the deeps of the night.
In silence they travelled upstream under the vaulted willows: under the
giant sycamore whose great roots came writhing out of the darkness above
the sheen of the water: under Wychford bridge whose cold breath dripped
down in icy beads upon the thick swirl beneath: and then out through
starshine across the mill-pool. Pauline held her breath while around
their course was a sound of water sucking at the vegetation, gurgling
and lapping and chuckling against the invisible banks.
"The Abbey stream?" murmured Guy.
She scarcely breathed her consent, and the canoe tore the growing sedge
like satin as it bumped against the slope of the bank. Pauline felt that
she was protesting with her real self against the part she was playing
in this dream: but the dream became too potent and she had to help Guy
to push the canoe up through the grass and down again into the quiet
water beyond. It was much blacker here on account of the overhanging
beeches, but continually Pauline strained through the darkness for a
sight of the deserted house the windows of which seemed to follow with
blank and bony gaze their progress.
"Guy, let's hurry for I can see the Abbey in the starlight," she
exclaimed.
"You have better eyes than mine if you can," he laughed. "My sweet, your
face from where I'm sitting is as filmy as a rose at dusk. And even if
you can see the Abbey, what does it matter? Do you think it's going to
run down the hill and swim after us?"
Pauline tried to laugh, but even that grotesque picture of his evoked a
new terror, and huddled among the cushions she sat with beating heart,
shuddering when the leaves of the great beech-trees fondled her hair.
She looked back to her own white fastness and began to wonder if she had
left the candle burning there: it seemed to her that she had and that
perhaps presently, perhaps even now, somebody was coming to see why it
was burning. And still Guy took her farther up the stream. How empty her
room would look and what a chill would fall upon the sister or mother
that peeped in.
"Oh, take me back," she cried.
But still the canoe cleft the darkness and now, emerging from the
cavernous trees, they glided once again into starshine infinitely
outspread, through which with the dim glister of a snake the stream
coiled and uncoiled itself.
Guy grasped at the reeds and drew the canoe close against the bank,
making it fast with two paddles plunged into the mud. Then he gathered
her to him so that her head rested upon his shoulder and her lips could
meet his. Thus enfolded for a long while she lay content. The candle in
her room burned itself out and nothing could disturb her absence, no one
could suppose that she was here on this starlit river. Scarcely indeed
was she here except as in the midway of deepest sleep, resting between a
dream and a dream. She might have stayed unvexed for ever if Guy had not
begun to talk, for although at first his voice came softly and
pleasantly out of the night and lulled her like a tune heard faintly in
some far-off corner of the mind, minute by minute his accents became
more real: suddenly, as her drowsed arm slid over the edge of the canoe
into the water, she woke and began herself to talk and, as she talked,
to shrink again from the vision of her whole life whether past or
present or to come.
In this malicious darkness she wanted to hear more about that girl who
had betrayed Michael Fane; she wanted to know things that before she had
not even known were hidden. She pressed Guy with questions, and when he
would not answer them she began to feel jealous even of unrevealed sin.
This girl was the link between all those girls at whose existence in his
own past Guy had once hinted. Michael Fane appeared like the tempter and
Guy like his easy prey. Distortions of the most ordinary, the most
trifling incidents piled themselves upon her imagination; and that visit
to London assumed a ghastly and impenetrable mysteriousness.
Guy vainly tried to laugh away her fancies: faster and still faster the
evil cohorts swept up against her, almost as tangible as bats flapping
into her face.
"Don't talk so loud," said Guy crossly. "Do remember where we are."
Then she reproached him with having brought her here. She felt that he
deserved to pay the penalty, and defiantly she was talking louder and
louder until Guy with feverish strokes urged the canoe downstream toward
home.
"For God's sake, keep quiet," he begged. "What has happened to you?"
That he should be frightened by her violence made her more angry. She
threw at him the wildest accusations, how that through him she had
ceased to believe in God, to care for her family, for her honour, for
him, for life itself.
"Pauline, will you keep quiet. Are you mad to behave like this?"
He drove the canoe into a thorn-bush, so that it should not upset, and
he seized her wrist so roughly that she thought she screamed. There was
something splendid in that scream being able to disquiet the night, and
in an elation of woe she screamed again.
"Do you know what you're doing?" he demanded.
She found herself asking Guy if she were screaming, and when she knew
that at last she could hurt him, she screamed more loudly.
"You used to laugh at me when I said I might go mad," she cried. "Now do
you like it? Do you like it?"
"Pauline, I beg you to keep quiet. Pauline, think of your people. Will
you promise to keep quiet, if I take you out of this thorn-bush?"
He began to laugh not very mirthfully, and that he could laugh
infuriated her so much that she was silent with rage, while Guy
disentangled the canoe from the thorn-bush and more swiftly than before
urged it toward home.
When they reached the grassy bank that divided the Abbey stream from the
mill-pool, she would not get out of the canoe to walk to the other side.
"I cannot cross that pool," she said. "Guy, don't ask me to. I've been
afraid of it always. If we cross it to-night, I shall drown myself."
He tried to argue with her. He pleaded with her, he railed at her and
finally he laughed at her, until she got out and watched him launch the
canoe on the farther side and beckon through the tremulous sheen to her.
Wildly she ran down the steep bank and flung herself into the water.
* * * * *
"Where am I? Guy, where am I?"
"Well, at present you're lying on the grass, but where you've been or
where I've been this last five minutes.... Pauline, are you yourself
again?"
"Guy, my dearest, my dearest, I don't know why...."
She burst into tears.
"My dearest, how wet you are," she sobbed, stroking his drenched sleeve.
"Well, naturally," he said with a short laugh. "Look here, it was all my
fault for bringing you out, so don't get into a state of mind about
yourself, but you can't go back in the canoe. My nerves are still too
shaky. I can lift you over the wall behind the mill, and we must go back
to the Rectory across the street. Come, my Pauline, you're wet, you
know. Oh, my own, my sweet, if I could only uncount the hours."
Pauline would never have reached home but for Guy's determination. It
was he who guided her past the dark entries, past the crafty windows of
Rectory Lane, past the menacing belfry, past the trees of the Rectory
drive. By the front door he asked her if she dared go upstairs alone.
"I will wait on the lawn until I see your candle alight," he promised.
She kissed him tragically and crept in. Her room was undisturbed, but in
the looking-glass she saw a dripping ghost, and when she held her candle
to the window, another ghost vanished slowly into the high grey wall. A
cock crowed in the distance, and through the leaves of the wistaria
there ran a flutter of waking sparrows.
_July_
When Guy looked back next morning at what had happened on the river, he
felt that the only thing to do was to leave Pauline for a while and give
her time and opportunity to recover from the shock. He wondered if it
would be wiser merely to write a note to announce his intention or if
she had now reached a point at which even a letter would be a disastrous
aggravation of her state of mind. He felt that he could not bear any
scene that might approximate to that horrible scene last night, and yet
to go away abruptly in such circumstances seemed too callous. Supposing
that he went across to the Rectory and that Pauline should have another
seizure of hatred for him (there was no other word that could express
what her attitude had been), how could their engagement possibly go on?
Mrs. Grey would be appalled by the emotional ravages it had made Pauline
endure: she would not be justified, whatever Pauline's point of view, in
allowing the engagement to last a day longer. It would be surely wiser
to write a letter and with all the love he felt explain that he thought
she would be happier not to see him for a short while. Yet such a course
might provoke her to declare the whole miserable business, and the false
deductions that might be made from her account were dreadful to
contemplate. He blamed himself entirely for what had happened, and yet
he could scarcely have foreseen such a violent change. Even now he could
not say what exactly had begun the outburst, and indeed the only
explanation of it was by a weight of emotion that had been accumulating
for months. Of course he should never have persuaded her to come out on
the river at night, but still that he had done so was only a technical
offence against convention. It was she who had magnified her
acquiescence beyond any importance he could have conceived. He must
thank religion for that, he must thank that poisonous fellow in the
confessional who had first started her upon this ruinous path of
introspection and self-torment. But, whatever the cause, it was the
remedy that demanded his attention, and he twisted the situation round
and round without being able to decide how to act. He realized how month
by month his sense of responsibility for Pauline had been growing, yet
now the problem of her happiness stared at him, brutally insoluble. What
was it Margaret had once said about his being unlikely to squander
Pauline for a young man's experience? Good God, had not just that been
the very thing he had nearly done; and then with a shudder remembering
last night, he wondered if he ought any longer to say 'nearly.' He must
see her. Of course he must see her this morning. He must somehow heal
the injury he had inflicted upon her youth.
Pauline was very gentle when they met. She had no reproaches except for
herself and the way she had frightened him.
"Oh, my Pauline, can't you forget it?" he begged. "Let me go away for a
month or more. Let me go away till Margaret and Richard are going to be
married."
She acquiesced half-listlessly, and then seeming to feel that she might
have been cold in her manner, she wished him a happy holiday from her
moods and jealousy and exacting love. He tried to pierce the true
significance of her attitude, because it held in its heart a premonition
for him that everything between them had been destroyed last night, and
that henceforth whatever he or she did or said they would meet in the
future only as ghosts may meet in shadowy converse and meaningless
communion.
"You will be glad to see me when I come back?" he asked.
"Why, my dearest, of course I shall be glad."
He kissed her good-bye, but her kiss was neither the kiss of lover nor
of sister, but such a kiss as ghosts may use, seeking to perpetuate the
mere form and outward semblance of life lost irrevocably.
When Guy was driving with Godbold along the Shipcot road, he had not
made up his mind where he would go, and it was on the spur of the
moment, as he stood in the booking-office, that he decided to go and see
his father, to whom latterly he had written scarcely at all and of whom
he suddenly thought with affection.
"I've settled to give up Plashers Mead," Guy told him that night, when
they were sitting in the library at Fox Hall.
"And try and get on the staff of a paper," he added to his father's
faint bow. "Or possibly I may go to Persia as Sir George Gascony's
secretary. My friend Comeragh got me the offer in March, but Sir George
was ill and did not start."
"That sounds much more sensible than journalism," said Mr. Hazlewood.
"Yes, perhaps it would be better," Guy agreed. "But then of course there
is the question of leaving Pauline for two years."
Yet even as he enunciated this so solemnly, he knew in his heart that he
would be rather glad to postpone for two years all the vexations of
love.
His father shrugged his shoulders.
"My poems are coming out this Autumn," Guy volunteered.
His father gave some answer of conventional approbation, and Guy without
the least bitterness recognized that to his father the offer of the
secretaryship had naturally presented itself as the more important
occasion.
"If you want any help with your outfit...."
"Oh, you mustn't count on Persia," interrupted Guy. "But I'll go up to
town to-morrow and ask Comeragh when Sir George is going."
Next day, however, when Guy was in the train, he began to consider his
Persian plan a grave disloyalty to Pauline. He wondered how last night
he had come to think of it again and fancied it might have been merely
an instinct to gratify his father after their coolness. Of course he
would not dream of going really, and yet it would have been jolly. Yes,
it would certainly have been jolly, and he was rather relieved to find
that Comeragh was out of town for a week, for his presence might have
been a temptation. Michael Fane was not in London either, so Guy went
round to Maurice Avery's studio in Grosvenor Road and in the pleasure of
the company he found there the Persian idea grew less insistent. Maurice
himself had just been invited to write a series of articles on the
English ballet for a critical weekly journal called The Point of View.
They went to a theatre together, and Guy as he listened to Maurice's
jargon felt for a while quite rustic and was once or twice definitely
taken in by it. Had he really been stagnating all this time at Wychford?
And then the old superiority which at Oxford he always felt over his
friend reasserted itself.
"You're still skating, Maurice," he drawled. "The superficial area of
your brain must be unparalleled."
"You frowsty old yokel!" his friend exclaimed laughing.
"I don't believe I shall get much out of breath, catching up with your
advanced ideas," Guy retorted. "Anyway this Autumn I shall come to town
for good."
"And about time you did," said Maurice. "I say, mind you send your poems
to The Point of View, and I'll give you a smashing fine notice the week
after publication."
Guy asked when Michael was coming back.
"He's made a glorious mess of things, hasn't he?" said Maurice.
"Oh, I don't know. Not necessarily."
"Well, I admit he found her out in time. But fancy wanting to marry a
girl like that. I told him what she was, and he merely got furious with
me. But he's an extraordinary chap altogether. By the way when are you
going to get married?"
"When I can afford it," said Guy.
"The question is whether an artist can ever afford to get married."
"What rot you talk."
"Wiser men than I have come to that conclusion," said Maurice. "Of
course I haven't met your lady-love; but it does seem to me that your
present mode of life is bound to be sterile of impressions."
"I don't go about self-consciously obtaining impressions," said Guy a
little angrily. "I would as soon search for local colour. Personally I
very much doubt if any impressions after eighteen or nineteen help the
artist. As it seems to me, all experience after that age is merely
valuable for maturing and putting into proportion the more vital
experiences of childhood. And I'm not at all sure that there isn't in
every artist a capacity for development which proceeds quite
independently of externals. I speculate sometimes as to what would be
the result upon a really creative temperament of being wrecked at
twenty-two on a desert island. I say twenty-two, because I do count as
valuable the academic influence that only begins to be effective after
eighteen."
"And what is your notion about this literary Crusoe?" asked Maurice.
"Well, I fancy that his work would not suffer at all, that it would
ripen, just as certain fruit ripens independently of sun, that he would
display in fact quite normally the characteristic growth of the artist."
"But where would he obtain his reaction?" Maurice asked.
"From himself. If that isn't possible for some people I don't see how
you're going to make a distinction between literature and journalism."
"Some journalism is literature."
"Only very bad journalism," Guy argued. "The journalistic mind
experiences a quick reaction, the creative writer a very slow one. The
journalist is affected by extremes: and he is continually aware of the
impression they are making at the moment: contrariwise the creative
artist is always unaware of the impression at the moment it is made; he
feels it from within first and it develops according to his own
characteristics. Let me give you an example. The journalist is like a
man who, seeing a mosquito in the act of biting him, claps his hand down
and kills it. The creative artist isn't aware of having been bitten
until he sees the swelling ... big or small according to his
constitution. It is his business to cure the swelling, not to bother
about the insect."
"Your theories may be all right for great creative artists," said
Maurice. "And I suppose you're willing to take the risk of stagnation?"
"I'm not a great creative artist," said Guy quickly. "At the same time
I'm damned if I'm a journalist. No, the effect of Plashers Mead on me
has been to make me long to be a man of action. So far it has been
stimulating, and without external help I've been able to reach the
conclusion that my poems were never worth writing.... I wrote because I
wanted to: I don't believe I ever had to."
"Then what are you going to do now?" asked Maurice.
"I'm probably going to work in London at journalism."
"Then, great Scott, why all this preliminary tirade against it?"
"Because I don't want to bluff myself into thinking that I'm going to do
anything but be a strictly professional writer," said Guy. "Or else
perhaps because I don't really want to come and live in London at all,
but go to Persia. Dash it all, for the first time in my life, Maurice, I
don't know what I do want, and it's a very humiliating state of affairs
for me."
When Guy left the studio that evening, he came away with that pleasant
warming of the cockles of the brain that empirical conversation always
gave. It was really very pleasant to be chattering away about aesthetic
theories, to be meeting new people and to be infused with this sense of
being joined up to the motive force of a city's life. At his lodgings in
Vincent Square a letter from Pauline awaited his return, and with a
shock he realized half way through its perusal that he was reading it
listlessly. He turned back and tried to bring to its contents that old
feverish absorption in magic pages, but something was wanting whether in
the letter or whether in himself he did not know. He came to the point
of asking himself if he loved her still as much, and almost with horror
at the question vowed he loved her more than ever and that of all things
on earth he only longed for their marriage. Yet in bed that night he
thought more of his argument in the studio than about Pauline, and when
he did think about her it was with a drowsy sense of relief. Vincent
Square under the bland city moon seemed very peaceful, and in retrospect
Wychford a place of endless storms.
Next morning when Guy sat down to answer Pauline's letter he found
himself writing with mechanical fluency without really thinking of her
at all. In fact for the moment she represented something that disturbed
the Summer calm in London, and he consciously did not want to think
about her until all this late troublous time had lost its actuality and
he could be sure of returning to the Pauline of their love's earlier
days.
These shuttlecock letters were tossed backward and forward between
Wychford and London throughout the rest of June and most of July, and
sometimes Guy thought they were as unreal as his own poetry. He spent
his time in looking up old friends, in second-hand book shops, in the
galleries of theatres. He did not see Michael Fane, who wrote to him
from Rome before Guy knew he had gone there. Comeragh however he saw
pretty often, and he enjoyed talking about politics nearly as much as
about art. He met Sir George Gascony, and Comeragh assured him afterward
that when Sir George went out to Persia in August or September he could
if he liked go with him. Guy put the notion at the back of his mind
whence he occasionally took it out and played with it. In the end,
however, when the definite offer came he refused it. This happened at
the end of his visit to London when his money was running out and when
he had to be going back to Wychford to live somehow on credit, until the
Michaelmas quarter replenished his overdrawn account. Before he left
town he paid a visit to Mr. Worrall and told him that he wanted his
poems to appear anonymously. In fact if it were not for hurting the
Rector's feelings he would have stopped their publication altogether.
At the end of a hot and dusty July and about a week before the Lammas
wedding of Margaret and Richard, Guy came back to Plashers Mead. The
immediate effect of seeing again the place which was now associated in
his mind with interminable difficulties was to make him resolute to
clarify the situation once and for all, to clarify it so completely that
there could never again be a repetition of that night in June. His
absence had been in the strictest sense an interlude, and all the
letters which marked to each the existence of the other had been but
conventional forms of love and comfortable postponements of reality.
When he met Pauline, Guy felt that he met her to all intents directly
after that dreadful night, with only this difference that owing to the
time they had had for repose he could now say things that six weeks ago
he could not have said. He had arrived at Wychford for lunch, and as a
matter of course they were to be together that afternoon. Ordinarily on
such a piping July day he would have proposed the river for their
converse, and it was a sign of how near at hand he felt their last time
on the river that he proposed a walk instead.
Guy was aware of wanting to take Pauline to some place that was neither
hallowed nor cursed by past hours, and avoiding familiar ways, they
reached a barren cup-shaped field shut off from the road by a spinney of
firs that offered such a dry and draughty shade as made the field even
in the hot sun of afternoon more tolerable. They sat down on the sour
stony land among the ragwort and teazles and feverfew. Summer had burnt
up this abandoned pasturage, and while they sat in silence Guy rattled
from the rank umbels of fools-parsley and hemlock the innumerable seeds
that would only profit the rankness of another year.
"Well?" he said at last.
Pauline looked at him questioningly, and he felt impatient to be sitting
here on this sour stony land and wondered how for merely this he could
have refused that offer of Persian adventure. Not until now had he
realized how much he had been resenting the performance of a duty.
"You've hardly told me anything about your time in London," said
Pauline.
He looked at her sharply in case this might be a prelude to jealous
interrogation.
"There's nothing much to tell. I settled that my poems should appear
anonymously. I'm afraid their publication may otherwise do me more harm
than good."
"All your poems?" she asked wistfully.
He nodded impelled by a strong desire for absolute honesty, though he
would have liked to except the poems about her, knowing how much she
must be wounded to hear even them called worthless.
"Then I've been no good to you at all?"
"Of course you have. Because these poems are no good, it doesn't follow
that what I write next won't be good. And yet I'm uncertain whether I
ought to go on merely writing. I'm beginning to wonder if I oughtn't to
have gone out to Persia with Gascony. I refused the job because I
thought it would upset you. And so, dearest Pauline, when next you feel
jealous, do remember that. Do remember that it is always you who come
first. Don't think I'm regretful about Persia. I'm only wondering on
_your_ account if I ought to have gone. It would have made our marriage
in three years a certainty, but still I hope by journalism to make it
certain in one year. Are you glad, my Pauline?"
"Yes, of course I'm glad," she answered without fervour.
"And you won't be jealous of my friends? Because it's impossible to be
in London without friends you know."
"I told you I should never be enough."
Guy tried not to be irritated by this.
"If you would only be reasonable! I realize now that for me at my age
it's foolish to withdraw from my contemporaries. I shall stagnate. These
two years have not been wasted...."
"Yes, they have," she interrupted, "if your poems are not worth your
name."
"Dearest, these two years may well be the foundation on which I build
all the rest of my life."
"May they?"
"Yes, of course. But a desire for the stimulus of other people isn't the
only reason for leaving Plashers Mead. I can't afford it here. My debts
are really getting impossible to manage, and unless I can show my
father that I'm ready to do anything to be a writer, as I can't go out
to Persia, well ... frankly I don't know what will happen. I gave
Burrows notice at Midsummer."
"You never told me," said Pauline.
"Well, no, I was afraid you'd be upset and I wanted you to have this
quiet time when I was away...."
"You don't trust me any more," she said.
"Oh, yes, I do, but I thought it would worry you. I know my money
affairs do worry you. But now I shall be all right. I'll come down here
often, you know, and, oh, really, dearest girl, it is better that I
should be in London. So don't be jealous, will you, and don't torment
yourself about my debts, will you, and don't think that you are anything
but everything to me."
"I expect you'll enjoy being in London," she said slowly shredding the
flowers from a spray of wild mignonette.
"I hope I shall be so busy that I won't have time to regret Wychford,"
said Guy.
He had by now broken off all the rank flowers in reach, and the sour
stony ground was littered with seeds and pungent heads of bloom and
ragged stalks.
"You'll never regret Wychford," she said. "Never. Because I've spoilt it
for you, my darling."
She touched his hand gently and drew close to him, but only timidly; and
as she made the movement a flight of goldfinches lighted upon the
swaying thistle-down in the hollow of the waste land.
"Pauline! Pauline!" he cried and would have kissed her passionately, but
she checked him:
"No, no, I just want to lean my head upon your shoulder for a little
while."
Above her murmur he heard the rustle of the goldfinches' song in parting
cadences upon the air, rising and falling: and looking down at Pauline
in the sunlight, he felt that she was a wounded bird he should be
cherishing.
_August_
The wedding of Richard and Margaret dreamed of for so long strung
Pauline to a pitch of excitement that made her seem never more
positively herself. She was conscious as she gazed in the mirror on that
Lammas morning that the tired look at the back of her eyes had gone and
that in her muslin dress sown with rosebuds she appeared exactly as she
ought to have appeared in any prefiguration of herself in bridesmaid's
attire. Feeling as she did in a way the principal architect of Richard
and Margaret's happiness, she was determined at whatever cost of
dejection afterward to bring to the completion of her design all the
enthusiasm she had brought to its conception.
"Do you like me as a bridesmaid?" she asked Guy.
And he with obviously eager welcome of the old Pauline could not find
enough words to say how much he liked her.
"Richard of course is wearing a tail-coat," she murmured.
"I shan't," he whispered, "when _we_ are married. I shall wear tweeds,
and you shall wear your white frieze coat ... the one in which I first
saw you. How little you've changed in these two years!"
"Have I? I think I've changed such a lot. Oh, Guy, such a tremendous
lot."
He shook his head.
"My rose, if all roses could stay like you, what a world of roses it
would be."
The wedding happened as perfectly as Pauline had imagined it would.
Margaret looked most beautiful with her slim white satin gown and her
weight of dusky hair, while Richard marched about stiff and awkward,
yet so radiant that almost more than anyone it was he who inspired the
ceremony with hymeneal triumph and carried it beyond the soilure of
unmeaning tears, he and Pauline whose laughter was the expression of the
joyous air, since Margaret was too deeply occupied with herself to cast
a single questioning look.
In the evening when the diminished family sat in the drawing-room
without going upstairs to music as a matter of course, Monica announced
abruptly that at the end of the month she was going to be a novice in
one of the large Anglican sisterhoods. It seemed as if she had most
deliberately taken advantage of the general reaction in order that
nobody might have the heart to combat her intention. Pauline and Mrs.
Grey gasped, but they had no arguments to bring forward against the
idea, and when Monica had outlined the plan in her most precise manner,
they simply acquiesced in the decision as immutable.
That night, as Pauline lay awake with the excitement of the wedding
still throbbing in her brain, the future from every side began to assail
her fancy. It seemed to her since Margaret's marriage and Monica's
decision to be a nun that she must be more than ever convinced of her
absolute necessity to Guy's existence. Unless she were assured of this
she had no right to leave her father and mother. No doubt at least a
year would pass before she and Guy could be married, but nevertheless
her decision must be made at once. He had not seemed to depend upon her
so much when he was in London: his letters had no longer contained those
intimate touches that formerly assured her of the intertwining of their
lives. But it was not merely a question of letters, this attitude of his
that latterly was continually being more sharply defined. Somewhere
their love had diverged, and whereas formerly she had always been able
to comfort herself with the certainty that between them love was
exactly equal, now instead she could not help fancying that she loved
him more than he loved her. It would of course be useless to ask him the
question directly, for he would evade an answer by declaring it was
prompted by unreasonable jealousy. Yet was her jealousy so very
unreasonable, and if it were unreasonable was not that another reason
against their marriage?
Pauline tried to search in the past of their love for the occasion of
the divergence. It must be her own fault. It was she who had often
behaved foolishly and impetuously, who had always supposed that her
mother and sisters knew nothing about love, who had been to Guy all
through their engagement utterly useless. It was she who had stopped his
becoming a schoolmaster to help his father, it was she who had
discouraged him from accepting that post in Persia. As Pauline looked
back upon these two years she saw herself at every cross-road in Guy's
career standing to persuade him toward the wrong direction.
Then, too, recurred the dreadful problem of religion. It was she who had
not resisted his inclination to laugh at what she knew was true. It was
she who had most easily and most weakly surrendered, so that it was
natural for him to treat her faith as something more conventional than
real.
The worries surged round her like waves in the darkness, and the one
anchor of hope she still possessed was dragging ominously. Oh, if she
could but be sure that she was essential to his happiness, she would be
able to conquer everything else. The loneliness of her father and
mother, Guy's debts, the religious difficulties, the self-reproach for
those moonlit nights upon the river, the jealousy of his friends, the
fear of his poems' failure, his absence in London, all these could be
overcome if only she were sure of being vital to Guy's felicity.
A dull summer wind sent a stir through the dry leaves of the creepers,
but the night grew hotter notwithstanding and sleep utterly refused to
approach her room.
Next day, when Guy came round to the Rectory, Pauline was so eager to
hear the answer to her question that she would take no account of the
jaded spirit of such a day as this after a wedding, and its natural
influence on Guy's point of view.
All the afternoon, however, they helped the Rector with his bulbs, and
no opportunity of intimate conversation occurred until after tea when
they were sitting in the nursery. The wind that last night had run with
slow tremors through the leaves was now blowing gustily, and banks of
clouds were gathering, great clouds that made the vegetation seem all
the more dry and stale, as they still deferred their drench of rain.
"Guy, I don't want to annoy you, but is it really necessary that your
poems should appear without your name?"
"Absolutely," he said firmly.
"You don't think any of them are good?"
"Oh, some are all right, but I don't believe in them as I used to
believe in them."
"Sometimes, my dearest, you frighten me with the sudden way in which you
dispose of things ... they were important to you once, weren't they?"
"Of course. But they have outlived their date. I must do better."
She got up and went over to the window-seat, and when she spoke next she
was looking at the wicket in the high grey wall.
"Guy, could I outlive my date?"
"Oh, dearest Pauline, I do beg you not to start problems this afternoon.
Of course not."
"Are you sure? Are you sure that when you are in London you won't find
other girls more interesting than I am?"
"Even if temporarily I were interested in another girl, you may be quite
sure that she would always be second to you."
"But you might be interested?" Pauline asked breathlessly.
"I must be free if I'm going to be an artist."
"Free?" she echoed slowly.
The cuckoo in the passage struck seven, and Mrs. Grey came into the
nursery to invite Guy to stay to dinner. All through the meal Pauline
kept saying to herself 'free,' 'free,' 'free,' and afterward when her
mother suggested a trio in the music-room, because they could no longer
have quartets and because soon they would not even have trios, Pauline
played upon her violin nothing but that word 'free,' 'free,' 'free.' In
the hall when she kissed Guy good-night, she had an impulse to cling to
him and pour out all her woes; but, remembering how often lately he had
been the victim of her overwrought nerves, she let him go without an
effort. For a little while she held the door ajar so that a thin shaft
of lamplight showed his tall shape walking quickly away under the trees.
Why was he walking so quickly away from her? Oh, it was raining fast,
and she shut the door. Upstairs in her room she wrote to him:
_Guy, you must forgive me, but I cannot bear the strain of this
long engagement any more. I will go away with Miss Verney somewhere
to-morrow so that you needn't hurry away from Plashers Mead before
you intended. I meant to write you a long letter full of
everything, but there isn't any more to say._
_Pauline._
Her mother found her sobbing over her desk that was full of childish
things, and asked what was the matter.
"I've broken off my engagement," and wearily she told her some of the
reasons, but never any reason that might have seemed to cast the least
blame on him. Next morning very early came a note for her mother from
Guy in which he said he was leaving Plashers Mead in a couple of hours
and begged that she would not let Pauline be the one to go away.