When in five minutes' time he came back into her room she was still upon
her hearthrug before the fire, with her necklace in her hand, the red
reflections of the flames glowing and winking in her jewels and in her
eyes. He came and sat again in her chair.
"I have been ranting," he said. "I feel I've been--eloquent. You make me
feel like an actor-manager, in a play by Capes.... You are the most
difficult person for me to talk to in all the world--because you mean so
much to me."
She moved impulsively and checked herself and crouched away from him. "I
mustn't touch your hand," she whispered.
"I want to explain."
"You've got to explain."
"I've got quite a definite plan.... But a sort of terror seized me. It
was like--shyness."
"I know. I knew you had a plan."
"You see.... I mean to go to Labrador."
He leant forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands extended,
explanatory. He wanted intensely that she should understand and agree
and his desire made him clumsy, now slow and awkward, now glibly and
unsatisfyingly eloquent. But she comprehended his quality better than he
knew. They were to go away to Labrador, this snowy desert of which she
had scarcely heard, to camp in the very heart of the wilderness, two
hundred miles or more from any human habitation----
"But how long?" she asked abruptly.
"The better part of a year."
"And we are to talk?"
"Yes," he said, "talk and think ourselves together--oh!--the old phrases
carry it all--find God...."
"It is what I dreamt of, Rag, years ago."
"Will you come," he cried, "out of all this?"
She leant across the hearthrug, and seized and kissed his hand....
Then, with one of those swift changes of hers, she was in revolt. "But,
Rag," she exclaimed, "this is dreaming. We are not free. There are the
children! Rag! We cannot leave the children!"
"We can," he said. "We must."
"But, my dear!--our duty!"
"_Is_ it a mother's duty always to keep with her children? They will be
looked after, their lives are organized, there is my mother close at
hand.... What is the good of having children at all--unless their world
is to be better than our world?... What are we doing to save them from
the same bathos as this--to which we have come? We give them food and
health and pictures and lessons, that's all very well while they are
just little children; but we've got no religion to give them, no aim, no
sense of a general purpose. What is the good of bread and health--and no
worship?... What can we say to them when they ask us why we brought them
into the world?--_We_ happened--_you_ happened. What are we to tell them
when they demand the purpose of all this training, all these lessons?
When they ask what we are preparing them for? Just that _you_, too, may
have children! Is that any answer? Marjorie, it's common-sense to try
this over--to make this last supreme effort--just as it will be
common-sense to separate if we can't get the puzzle solved together."
"Separate!"
"Separate. Why not? We can afford it. Of course, we shall separate."
"But Rag!--separate!"
He faced her protest squarely. "Life is not worth living," he said,
"unless it has more to hold it together than ours has now. If we cannot
escape together, then--_I will go alone_."...