In the two months of separation that ensued before Marjorie was
one-and-twenty, Trafford's mind went through some remarkable phases. At
first the excitement of his passion for Marjorie obscured everything
else, then with his return to London and his laboratory the immense
inertia of habit and slowly developed purposes, the complex yet
convergent system of ideas and problems to which so much of his life had
been given, began to reassert itself. His love was vivid and intense, a
light in his imagination, a fever in his blood; but it was a new thing;
it had not crept into the flesh and bones of his being, it was away
there in Surrey; the streets of London, his home, the white-walled
chamber with its skylight and high windows and charts of constants, in
which his apparatus was arranged, had no suggestion of her. She was
outside--an adventure--a perplexing incommensurable with all these
things.
He had left Buryhamstreet with Marjorie riotously in possession of his
mind. He could think of nothing but Marjorie in the train, and how she
had shone at him in the study, and how her voice had sounded when she
spoke, and how she stood and moved, and the shape and sensation of her
hands, and how it had felt to hold her for those brief moments in the
wood and press lips and body to his, and how her face had gleamed in the
laced shadows of the moonlight, soft and wonderful.
In fact, he thought of Marjorie.
He thought she was splendid, courageous, wise by instinct. He had no
doubt of her or that she was to be his--when the weeks of waiting had
passed by. She was his, and he was Marjorie's; that had been settled
from the beginning of the world. It didn't occur to him that anything
had happened to alter his life or any of his arrangements in any way,
except that they were altogether altered--as the world is altered
without displacement when the sun pours up in the east. He was
glorified--and everything was glorified.
He wondered how they would meet again, and dreamt a thousand impossible
and stirring dreams, but he dreamt them as dreams.
At first, to Durgan's infinite distress, he thought of her all day, and
then, as the old familiar interests grappled him again, he thought of
her in the morning and the evening and as he walked between his home and
the laboratory and at all sorts of incidental times--and even when the
close-locked riddles of his research held the foreground and focus of
his thoughts, he still seemed to be thinking of her as a radiant
background to ions and molecules and atoms and interwoven systems of
eddies and quivering oscillations deep down in the very heart of matter.
And always he thought of her as something of the summer. The rich decays
of autumn came, the Chelsea roads were littered with variegated leaves
that were presently wet and dirty and slippery, the twilight crept down
into the day towards five o'clock and four, but in his memory of her the
leaves were green, the evenings were long, the warm quiet of rural
Surrey in high August filled the air. So that it was with a kind of
amazement he found her in London and in November close at hand. He was
called to the college telephone one day from a conversation with a
proposed research student. It was a middle-aged woman bachelor anxious
for the D.Sc., who wished to occupy the further bench in the laboratory;
but she had no mental fire, and his mind was busy with excuses and
discouragements.
He had no thought of Marjorie when she answered, and for an instant he
did not recognize her voice.
"Yes, I'm Mr. Trafford."...
"Who is it?" he reiterated with a note of irascibility. "_Who?_"
The little voice laughed. "Why! I'm Marjorie!" it said.
Then she was back in his life like a lantern suddenly become visible in
a wood at midnight.
It was like meeting her as a china figure, neat and perfect and two
inches high. It was her voice, very clear and very bright, and quite
characteristic, as though he was hearing it through the wrong end of a
telescope. It was her voice, clear as a bell; confident without a
shadow.
"It's _me!_ Marjorie! I'm twenty-one to-day!"
It was like a little arrow of exquisite light shot into the very heart
of his life.