She knocked at his door with no less timidity than she had done the
first time, her hand clasping her beating heart. His voice called “Come
in!”; she slipped in; his dim room and the shining alembics were lovely
and mysterious, like a fairy-story, after the chill of the bare
linoleum-lined passage she had just followed. In a moment they were
close to one another, their fingers wove together without knowing how it
had so come about; the fact of being unexpectedly alone came like a
draught of water to the thirsty.
“I hate that passage leading to your room—it’s like a prison,” she
murmured, raising her hand to his bright hair; “it so cool and dim in
here; I wish, oh, how I wish I could work in here helping you.”
“It might be arranged ...” he began enviously.
“Oh no,” she said, shaking her head, “we mustn’t think of it.”
“We’re never really alone,” he said.
“No.”
They looked at each other gravely and pitifully.
“It does seem so hard,” her small voice took up again, “that you and I,
who have never done any harm, should be spied on and hunted, because
that’s what I feel: hunted. We haven’t done any harm, have we? only in
our thoughts, that is,” she amended, scrupulous, “and even then I don’t
think it’s terrible harm to wish we might sometimes be alone. I try not
to wish for more than that, Linnet; I do indeed. You mustn’t come so
close to me, please,” and she put out her hand to push him away a
little.
“Why mustn’t I?”
“You know quite well: I can’t bear your nearness.”
“Nan, you are the most provoking mixture of frankness and prudery....”
“I don’t mean to be. I came straight to you when I got into the room,
because I was happy and forgetful, but I am sorry; that wasn’t
encouraging you to behave as I want you to behave. You know what I tell
you: we can _talk_, no more.”
“But talk can lay up trouble too, you know, Nan.”
Her face took on a startled look, as a dismayed child’s.
“What! do you mean we ought to give that up too? Oh, no, Linnet, I
couldn’t bear that, indeed I couldn’t; you mustn’t suggest it.”
“Of course I don’t suggest it; is it likely? Only I think you trick
yourself into believing what you want to believe, and if your conscience
does prick you, you try to salve it—and I dare say succeed—by imposing
some quite hypocritical limitation.”
“Are you laughing at me or not? Or are you serious? do you mean that I
ought not to see you at all or talk to you? perhaps you are right....”
“Nan, you are too perverse! I only mean that if you allow yourself to
talk to me, and allow me to talk to you, and to make love to you, you
might consistently allow me to go further, to take your hand, for
instance, without pushing me away when I stand quite respectfully beside
you.”
“I see what you mean; I can’t argue, but I think, please, I would rather
go on in the same way as before.”
“Very well,” he said ruefully.
“And why do you say ‘make love’?” she harked back after a little. “As
though it were just a way of spending the time? Anyway, I think I would
rather you did not; we can talk quite well without that, and then you
need not think I am hypocritical.”
“You do keep me in order, Nan, don’t you?” he said.
“No, I am often very weak and cowardly.”
“You are only cowardly when you won’t face what is to become of us,” he
replied, with more seriousness.
Again she looked startled.
“Oh, please, Linnet, I don’t like talking about that.”
“Well, but, my dear,” he said, “you know quite well that we cannot go on
indefinitely as we are at present; you ought to be the first to realise
it, with your scrupulous mind always splitting hairs and dwelling on
niceties. If it were light come, light go, between us—there a kiss and
here an arm round you—it would be different. But you know it is not like
that. It is perhaps your very prudery that puts the whole thing on a
different footing. Anyway you know that it is a matter of all our
lives....”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” she said, with a contented sigh, and leaning up
against him.
“Nan, you distract me!” he exclaimed, “I say that it is for all our
lives, and you murmur with pleasure, as though the whole thing were
thereby settled. In the meantime I am neither one thing nor the other; I
am neither your friend, nor your husband, nor your lover.”
“Oh, but you are surely....”
“Well, what am I? I wish I knew!”
“My lover,” she said in a low voice.
“Nan, don’t hang your head so; for pity’s sake don’t; you are too
charming when you do it. No, I am not your lover ... worse luck....”
“But you do love me, don’t you?”
“Good God, do you doubt it?”
“Well, you never say so. You never said it. Silas had to say it for
you.”
“But I’ve said so since.”
“Oh ... _since!_” she said.
“But, my darling Nan, a little way back you forbade me to speak of love
to you.”
“Yes, you see,” she said with another sigh, less contented, this one, “I
want to have nothing on my conscience, nothing, nothing, nothing—except
my thoughts, and I can’t help those.”
“Won’t you tell them to me?”
“If I told them to you, they would be on my conscience, and that’s where
I don’t want them to be.”
“You are deplorably logical, when it is for my undoing,” he said,
sighing in his turn.
“If I had a laden conscience, I should become a coward. If I became a
coward, I should never have the courage to face Gregory,” she said,
checking the points off on her fingers. “No, stop: I know what you’re
about to say, ‘then you do mean some day to face Gregory.’ I can’t
answer that, and you must be patient to let these ten days go by; maybe
by the time we’re in the middle of them I will have got back my wits.
I’m too scared now to have any wits at all. What is going on in our
house now? you know no more than I do, and yet you know just as I do
that there is something strange. It’s something between Silas and
Gregory. Oh, it’s dreadful to think that there should be something
between them which they are working out for themselves, with all their
difficulties, because they can’t ask _our_ help, either yours or mine.
It frightens me so. Oh, my dear, it’s horrible to be afraid! Linnet, you
must take care of me.”
“You don’t give me much chance....”
“No, I know I don’t; I’m bad to you, I know. I seem to turn this way and
that for a way out, and things press upon me, and then I make you suffer
for it. Put it down that I scarcely know what I’m doing....”
“No, I know you don’t, my pretty, my poor pretty, only tell me about it,
if that’s any help, and don’t let things get magnified in your mind
bigger than they ought to be; hills look steeper than they are, you
know, before one starts going up them.”
“Oh,” she said, her eyes brimming, “you’re good and patient, indeed you
are. I hardly understand, yet, what’s come over us, that sometimes my
breath comes short and I shut my eyes and think I must faint away with
the longing to see you. I wish, sometimes I wish that something would
happen—something quite outside this life, I mean,—to relieve us; I don’t
know what I mean, rightly. But it’s the weight ... and the longing ... I
can’t keep still under it, at times; I have to get up and move about ...
the longing ... the burning.” She put her hand up to her throat as
though she were physically oppressed. “And I put questions to
myself—about you, I mean—and the answers come springing without my
having to think. They leap out, the answers do. Would I die for you? Oh,
so gladly! would I starve for you? yes, and never a word to let you
know. Would I die if you died? I’d pine if I lived an hour after you’d
gone. Would I give myself up to you? yes—to beat me if you chose; I’d
shut my eyes and let you.... That’s love, isn’t it? It’s like striking a
bell; it clangs back at once. And now—I can’t help saying it—for ten
days there’ll be times when we’re alone, and I’ll be less starved than I
am now; it seems I’ve just been keeping alive for this, and reach it all
spent and gasping. Oh, nothing, nothing more! only to talk to you, and
look at you; we’re strangers still. I want to _drink_ being with you.
Then I’ll be able to think, and we’ll sort everything out, and get it
clear. Only now I’m too parched for you, and too frightened of _them_.
You must decide everything for me, and tell me what to do, and then take
me away,—oh, take me away!”
She clung to him as she besought him, abandoning herself like a
frightened child, and putting her arms up round his neck exactly like a
child.
“My God, I didn’t know you could speak so, or feel so. _I_ felt so, but
I didn’t dare to tell you.”
“I didn’t know either ... one doesn’t know....” She had sunk so
unrestrainedly against him, that but for his support she would have
slipped down without resistance upon the floor. He felt that she would
lie there, like a shot bird, at his feet, making no effort to rise, and
letting her will glide away from her in a passive extinction of self; it
would be for her the most exquisite, and at the same time the most
spiritually voluptuous experience of her life. As it was, she had never
known anything like the wild, fainting rapture of this half-surrender.
“Linnet, Linnet,” she said, pushing him away, “where are we? it won’t
do; we’re being swept along; I’m afraid. Go right over there, to the
other side of the room; no, farther away than that.” She directed him
with an imperious urgent finger. “You mustn’t come any nearer. Promise.
Sit down on that chair. I’ll stop over here.” She leant her head back
against the wall.
“Now we couldn’t well be farther apart,” he said, having obeyed her.
They were both pale as they looked at one another across the width of
the room, and their breath came and went quickly between their parted
lips.
“It’s to be like this the whole time that Gregory is away. Then when he
comes back I can tell him everything. If we had been different, I should
tell him less easily.”
Morgan was just able to follow the ethics of this argument.
“Now I’m going away,” she continued; “you mustn’t move. If you moved, I
should run to you....”
“Oh, Nan!” he said, stretching out his hands to her across the room.
“No, no, no,” she cried, vigorously shaking her head from side to side,
the shake becoming more vigorous as her need for determination
increased. “Oh, my darling heart,” she cried, “I want so to come to
you,” and she fled from the room, leaving him unbalanced and perplexed,
and in half a dozen minds as to whether he ought to submit as he did to
her directions, or to take the law away from her by adopting a bolder
course.