That talk marked an epoch to Marjorie. From that day forth her
imagination began to shape a new, ordered and purposeful life for
Trafford and herself in London, a life not altogether divorced from
their former life, but with a faith sustaining it and aims controlling
it. She had always known of the breadth and power of his mind, but now
as he talked of what he might do, what interests might converge and give
results through him, it seemed she really knew him for the first time.
In his former researches, so technical and withdrawn, she had seen
little of his mind in action: now he was dealing in his own fashion with
things she could clearly understand. There were times when his talk
affected her like that joy of light one has in emerging into sunshine
from a long and tedious cave. He swept things together, flashed
unsuspected correlations upon her intelligence, smashed and scattered
absurd yet venerated conventions of thought, made undreamt-of courses of
action visible in a flare of luminous necessity. And she could follow
him and help him. Just as she had hampered him and crippled him, so now
she could release him--she fondled that word. She found a preposterous
image in her mind that she hid like a disgraceful secret, that she tried
to forget, and yet its stupendous, its dreamlike absurdity had something
in it that shaped her delight as nothing else could do; she was, she
told herself--hawking with an archangel!...
These were her moods of exaltation. And she was sure she had never loved
her man before, that this was indeed her beginning. It was as if she had
just found him....
Perhaps, she thought, true lovers keep on finding each other all through
their lives.
And he too had discovered her. All the host of Marjories he had known,
the shining, delightful, seductive, wilful, perplexing aspects that had
so filled her life, gave place altogether for a time to this steady-eyed
woman, lean and warm-wrapped with the valiant heart and the
frost-roughened skin. What a fine, strong, ruddy thing she was! How glad
he was for this wild adventure in the wilderness, if only because it had
made him lie among the rocks and think of her and wait for her and
despair of her life and God, and at last see her coming back to him,
flushed with effort and calling his name to him out of that whirlwind of
snow.... And there was at least one old memory mixed up with all these
new and overmastering impressions, the memory of her clear unhesitating
voice as it had stabbed into his life again long years ago, minute and
bright in the telephone: "_It's me, you know. It's Marjorie!_"
Perhaps after all she had not wasted a moment of his life, perhaps every
issue between them had been necessary, and it was good altogether to be
turned from the study of crystals to the study of men and women....
And now both their minds were Londonward, where all the tides and
driftage and currents of human thought still meet and swirl together.
They were full of what they would do when they got back. Marjorie
sketched that study to him--in general terms and without the
paper-weight--and began to shape the world she would have about it. She
meant to be his squaw and body-servant first of all, and then--a
mother. Children, she said, are none the worse for being kept a little
out of focus. And he was rapidly planning out his approach to the new
questions to which he was now to devote his life. "One wants something
to hold the work together," he said, and projected a book. "One cannot
struggle at large for plain statement and copious and free and
courageous statement, one needs a positive attack."
He designed a book, which he might write if only for the definition it
would give him and with no ultimate publication, which was to be called:
"The Limits of Language as a Means of Expression." ... It was to be a
pragmatist essay, a sustained attempt to undermine the confidence of all
that scholasticism and logic chopping which still lingers like the
_sequelae_ of a disease in our University philosophy. "Those duffers sit
in their studies and make a sort of tea of dry old words--and think
they're distilling the spirit of wisdom," he said.
He proliferated titles for a time, and settled at last on "From Realism
to Reality." He wanted to get at that at once; it fretted him to have to
hang in the air, day by day, for want of books to quote and opponents to
lance and confute. And he wanted to see pictures, too and plays, read
novels he had heard of and never read, in order to verify or correct the
ideas that were seething in his mind about the qualities of artistic
expression. His thought had come out to a conviction that the line to
wider human understandings lies through a huge criticism and cleaning up
of the existing methods of formulation, as a preliminary to the wider
and freer discussion of those religious and social issues our generation
still shrinks from. "It's grotesque," he said, "and utterly true that
the sanity and happiness of all the world lies in its habits of
generalization." There was not even paper for him to make notes or
provisional drafts of the new work. He hobbled about the camp fretting
at these deprivations.
"Marjorie," he said, "we've done our job. Why should we wait here on
this frosty shelf outside the world? My leg's getting sounder--if it
wasn't for that feeling of ice in it. Why shouldn't we make another
sledge from the other bunk and start down--"
"To Hammond?"
"Why not?"
"But the way?"
"The valley would guide us. We could do four hours a day before we had
to camp. I'm not sure we couldn't try the river. We could drag and carry
all our food...."
She looked down the wide stretches of the valley. There was the hill
they had christened Marjorie Ridge. At least it was familiar. Every
night before nightfall if they started there would be a fresh camping
place to seek among the snow-drifts, a great heap of wood to cut to last
the night. Suppose his leg gave out--when they were already some days
away, so that he could no longer go on or she drag him back to the
stores. Plainly there would be nothing for it then but to lie down and
die together....
And a sort of weariness had come to her as a consequence of two months
of half-starved days, not perhaps a failure so much as a reluctance of
spirit.
"Of course," she said, with a new aspect drifting before her mind,
"then--we _could_ eat. We _could_ feed up before we started. We could
feast almost!"