"Never yourself to go."
"Not anywhere, you mean?"
Her pause had this time more visible thought. "Nowhere you most want.
Oh," she declared, "I know what you most want and what you've a thousand
reasons for wanting. I know just what your admirable life has been and
how, by so rare a chance, you've been held fast here and prevented. I
know you're at last free, and that--except, if you insist on it, your
idea about _me_--you've naturally now no other thought in your head but
to make up for lost time and repair your sacrifice. That's naturally
your necessity much more than the fancied necessity in obedience to
which you've spoken to me; and my conviction of this is what makes me
bold to speak to you as I do. I don't fear, you see"--she gathered
confidence, she gathered even a force of expression she had never known,
as she went--"that I shall have it on my conscience that I've succeeded
with you. I shall on the contrary simply have exposed myself; which I
shan't at all regret, however, if I've helped you to clear up your
feelings." To this service of charity in fact, and nothing more, she had
finally the air of lending herself, while Pendrel began to take it all
from her as if he too saw the truth. It was at the same time
characteristic of her that at the moment of indicating the sacrifice she
made, the exposure, as she called it, that she consented to, for his
ultimate peace, she drove well home the knife she had planted. "My
excuse would have been--if there _were_ any chance for me--that you
happened to be so perfect a case for what I call to myself salvation.
One doesn't easily find a man of your general condition who has not, as
we say, 'been'; and much less therefore a man of your particular one. By
your particular one," Aurora Coyne wonderfully proceeded, "I mean that
of knowing so much that might seem to have been to be got at only by
immense experience. You know everything, and yet you've learnt it all
over here; some miracle or other has worked for you or--it comes to the
same thing!--for my vision of you: I don't know, even with your happy
conditions, after all, what it can have been, but it makes you, doesn't
it? the single case of your kind. If you had been spoiled there would
have been no use--and of course as it is there's none. Only I can't help
having just put it to you thus," she wound up, "that you've not been
spoiled."
There was no doubt of the nature of the effort made by Pendrel to do
these remarks justice. "You do put it to me with the magnificence that
attends every breath of your being. I haven't been spoiled--I see quite
what you mean--I only _can_ be."
"You only _will_ be," she said almost tenderly. "You'll be beautifully
spoiled."
"For _you_, that is, of course," Ralph went on.
"For me--certainly. Isn't it only of myself after all that we're
talking?"
He answered nothing and the silence between them was for a little as if
she had suddenly given him a chance. This effect moreover grew from what
he finally said; which was after he had restlessly moved to the window,
looked out thence for some instants and then come back. "You would
definitely accept me if I did formally give up everything but
this?"--and he jerked his head at the outer world of which he had with
such intensity just renewed his impression.
"Ah," she disappointingly answered, "I don't absolutely say that."
Poor Pendrel again stared. "Then what do you say at all? Do you expect
me to renounce for nothing?"
"I don't expect you, as I've perfectly told you, in any degree to
renounce. Why should you?" she added. "No one will ever have an idea of
what you have lost."
"No one but myself," he said with his eyes on her.
"Oh I think you will least of all."
She had answered so straight that it had almost the sound of levity; by
the hint of which he was justly enough irritated. "It's too
portentous--what you ask!"
But she found for this her quickest reply. "I don't ask anything. It's
you who ask. I only answer. I decline the honour of your hand, and I
give my reasons. If I had given none I should have been doubtless less
absurd, and my reward is that I'm not really sure I should have been
even less cruel. I'm sure," she continued, "but of one thing--or rather
perhaps of two: that I'm as insane as you please, but that I'm also as
rigid. Don't think, at all events, that you need, or that you possibly
_can_, tell me how my attitude strikes you. Do me the simple justice to
believe that I know."
So she appeared quietly to conclude, and it was in her quietness indeed
that her perversity most showed; though this was in a manner an aid, if
a lame one, to her suitor, called upon at a moment's notice both to
measure its extent and to give up the hope of getting round it. "You
call me a 'case,' but it seems to me you're at least as extraordinary a
one."
"I didn't apply the term to you abusively," she made sufficient haste to
explain. And then as, however she applied it, he but sat, in his hard
dilemma, with his head in his hands: "Am I not the first to admit that I
can only appear unaccountably exalted--it's the word you must have in
your mind about me; and exalted on the subject on which it most seems to
people grotesque to be so?" She gave herself up, in fine, as
extravagant, maniacal, and then, further, to the moral of it, which was
that they lacked all ground for possibly meeting. They must accept their
preposterous difference, and she could herself do so the better that she
was sure of what he had intended to say to her. He had his plans made;
he "sailed," didn't he? next week, next month, next year even, if that
should be more convenient to her, and had come to propose that she
should sail with him. This was, as he saw, not so much as discussable;
but he must go on sailing as if nothing whatever had happened. He must
stay a long time, and it was indeed all but a certainty for her that
when once he should get well into it he would find himself staying
indefinitely. Yes, that was inevitably what must happen to him: he
offered the bright example of a man of thirty, with means, curiosity,
the highest culture, who had, for whatever reasons, never gone at all,
but he would show how people with that history infallibly made it up by
never coming back when once they did go. Why _should_ he come back? With
his tastes, his resources and opportunities, his intensified longing and
disciplined youth, he would have an admirable life.
Many things were before him while she talked, but most of all perhaps
the almost sinister strangeness of his having been condemned to this
ordeal. It was the last predicament he had ever dreamed of, the
prescription of further patience least on the cards for him, he would
have supposed, and least congruous with other realities. This in fact
made her spring of action, the unconfessed influence that had worked in
her, constantly less and less doubtful. The difficulty was that though
he had everything on his side he actually felt himself in a cleft stick.
"Don't you then," he appealed, "just simply and personally care for me
the least little bit? What you seem to me to have in your head," he went
on after waiting a while in vain for her reply, "is, however you express
it, a mere cold little theory, which is rather proud of itself, but
which has the peculiarity of being both sophisticated and stupid. I
don't quite see, you know, why I should be offered up on such an altar."
After which, as she was still silent, though only as if because she had
already said all: "Is it inconceivable," he demanded, "that I should in
the course of time go for a few months without you?"
She smiled in her implacable splendour at his touching want of grasp.
"Isn't the whole point that you can't _possibly_ go for a few months? It
would be a shame moreover if you did. I had quite as soon you went for a
lifetime as for three days. I want you perfect, and three hours would
prevent it. When I say 'I want' you," she handsomely developed, "I only
mean I should want you if I had a right. My insanity, I quite
understand, deprives me of all rights. But at the same time," she
insisted, "you don't in the least undermine it by calling it a cold
little theory. I don't pretend that it's anything else: my cold little
theory is exactly indeed that it would be interesting to catch
you--catch you young, as they say, since you _are_ young--and put you
through."
He followed her with his face of gloom. "For the amusement of seeing
what I should be at fifty?"
"There you are"--it had made her again quick; "and see what it is to be
really intelligent! Precisely for the amusement, if you prefer that
word--though I should use some other: save for the high idea, the
intense interest, the peculiar beauty. I should see," said Mrs. Coyne,
"what it makes of a man."
"You would indeed!" her visitor brooded.
She laughed out at his tone. "Ah but don't put it as a threat--as if
you'd be Nick o' the Woods, and, to punish me for what I should have
kept you from, wish to beat out my brains. You'd really be as pleased
with me, I feel sure, as I should with you, and we'd grow old together
in honour and patriotism." She became, however, the next moment braver;
which had the effect of showing her as kinder. "It's all, when one
considers, the fault of your peculiar situation--added, I mean, to the
turn of your mind. The result of the combination of your starved state
(which I call, you see, to oblige you, what you would call it) and your
natural passion for everything old is as calculable as to-morrow's
dawn," It was the sort of fact one could put in a nutshell. "The only
way for you not to remain is not to go."
"You'll see whether I remain," Ralph said as drily as he could.
"Oh but do! Do," she earnestly repeated. "The great thing is after all
not to spoil it--whichever way you take it; and isn't it also, when one
thinks, much better you should be perfect for yourself than for me?"
"How you must, fortunately, hate and loathe me!"--Ralph returned to that
with the same mastered misery. "Because if it weren't for that what a
question for us to separate on!"
This appeared just to strike her. "It wouldn't be such a base one as you
seem to suggest; but, to give you the benefit of the doubt, don't let us
admit for a moment that it is the one! By which I mean that we _don't_
separate, inasmuch as for people to do that they must first have come
together. For you to decline my condition I must first have imposed it.
I mentioned just now," she added for further lucidity, "the fact that
makes you such a catch for one's theory, but I didn't mention the other
fact, the way you're in spite of everything pledged and committed--which
spoils it all. The ideal subject of my experiment," she perfectly
allowed, "needn't certainly be that particular rare bird, a young New
Yorker who's an ardent student of history. It's over there," she
appeared magnanimously to muse, "that history _can_ best be studied!"
"How you laugh at me and lash me and rub it in!" Ralph grimly observed.
But she put the matter for him now as if in her achieved indulgence of
it no misjudgment could interrupt her. "You've earned your holiday, and
nothing can be more right and just than for it to be long and unclouded.
I know nothing of a finer grace than the way you've gone on year after
year doing without it for the charity nearest home; and I'm not so
stupid as not to have a notion of the disadvantage at which, in the
intellectual work you scraped time for, your limitations and privations
must often have placed you. You did it, bravely and patiently, as you
could, and I'm sure, ignorant as I am, that no one else could have in
the conditions done it half so well. Only the conditions were so wrong
that it's delightful they _can_ at last be right. I'll wait for another
day," she smiled, "to try my theory."
"What you'll wait for," he after a moment returned, "is evidently and
more especially another person."
She shook her head in general relinquishment. "Another person will never
turn up. There will always be a flaw. If he's worth one's idea he'll be
sure to have been over. If he hasn't been over he'll be sure not to be
worth one's idea. _You_"--oh she could indeed, as he said, rub it in!--
"would have been so perfectly worth it."
"Perhaps I might still try to be," he thoughtfully suggested, "if I
could by any chance come as near to it as really to understand. But I
assure you I don't so much as to take hold of it."
She struck him for a moment as on the point, in answer to this, of
breaking into impatience and declaring that his failure of comprehension
need't matter to him. He had a glimpse thus of what he believed--that
she truly would have wished him to take her conception on trust, and, as
it were, for the love of her; to oblige her by adopting it, by
accommodating himself blindly. Her courage, however, he made out, was
insufficient for this, and the next minute she only did for herself what
she could. "That's because I'm at the disadvantage, which I perfectly
recognise, of not having practised what I preach--because I naturally,
in my position, have everything against me." She smiled again for the
vanity of the regret, but she went on. "If I could have known how I was
now to feel I would never have gone."
Ralph tried to follow her as if something might come of it. "But it took
nothing less than your charming experience, I gather, to produce your
actual attitude. You would have had no attitude without it. You had to
qualify yourself for your remonstrance."
He spoke so gravely that it made, in effect, for irony, and that in turn
just visibly made her flinch. "Well, I do of course hold myself
qualified, and of course I'm glad to be, on any terms. I give it to you
at best as mere inevitable reaction, but the point I make is that as
reaction it's final. One must choose at last"--she couldn't, he saw, but
let herself go; "and I take up definitely with my own country. It's high
time; here, _en fin de compte_, one can at least do or be something,
show something, make something. To try and make something is at all
events what's wanted of us, and even if we make nothing it's at least as
good ta make it here on the spot as to go thousands of miles on as great
a fool's errand. I want in short to be an American as other people
are--well, whatever they are."
Ralph turned it all over. "Yes, it's the new cry, and what can be more
interesting than to hear it sounded more or less in French? It's
recommended--for the 'upper classes,' and perhaps even beginning a
little to be tried by them. It wouldn't take much," he continued, "to
make me say that the day only _could_ inevitably come when it would be
for its little hour the new pose."
"I dare say indeed it wouldn't take much to make you say it," she
returned; "and I've also seen the moment coming at which--_for_ the
moment--you inevitably would. But I dare say you hold that the hour you
speak of will pass: all the more reason therefore that I should make the
most of it while it lasts. It may be only a dream, but the thing
is--while one can--to keep dreaming."
He looked at her in silence longer than he had done yet. "What it comes
to then is that you'll never dream of me."
"By no means; because it's just in dreams----!" But she pulled herself
up. "I mean that their strangeness is their law. _They_, when they're
happy, arrange everything to perfection. With you or without you at any
rate," she pursued, "mine will go on. They'll be as fantastic as you
please--that is as much about the poor product." She held him for a
moment with this, then she broke out: "How shall we ever know his
possibility unless we give him a chance? What I'm dying to see is the
best we can turn out quite by ourselves."