He went on board his schooner. She lay white, and as if suspended, in
the crepuscular atmosphere of sunset mingling with the ashy gleam of the
vast anchorage. He tried to keep his thoughts as sober, as reasonable,
as measured as his words had been, lest they should get away from him and
cause some sort of moral disaster. What he was afraid of in the coming
night was sleeplessness and the endless strain of that wearisome task.
It had to be faced however. He lay on his back, sighing profoundly in
the dark, and suddenly beheld his very own self, carrying a small bizarre
lamp, reflected in a long mirror inside a room in an empty and
unfurnished palace. In this startling image of himself he recognised
somebody he had to follow—the frightened guide of his dream. He
traversed endless galleries, no end of lofty halls, innumerable doors.
He lost himself utterly—he found his way again. Room succeeded room. At
last the lamp went out, and he stumbled against some object which, when
he stooped for it, he found to be very cold and heavy to lift. The
sickly white light of dawn showed him the head of a statue. Its marble
hair was done in the bold lines of a helmet, on its lips the chisel had
left a faint smile, and it resembled Miss Moorsom. While he was staring
at it fixedly, the head began to grow light in his fingers, to diminish
and crumble to pieces, and at last turned into a handful of dust, which
was blown away by a puff of wind so chilly that he woke up with a
desperate shiver and leaped headlong out of his bed-place. The day had
really come. He sat down by the cabin table, and taking his head between
his hands, did not stir for a very long time.
Very quiet, he set himself to review this dream. The lamp, of course, he
connected with the search for a man. But on closer examination he
perceived that the reflection of himself in the mirror was not really the
true Renouard, but somebody else whose face he could not remember. In
the deserted palace he recognised a sinister adaptation by his brain of
the long corridors with many doors, in the great building in which his
friend’s newspaper was lodged on the first floor. The marble head with
Miss Moorsom’s face! Well! What other face could he have dreamed of?
And her complexion was fairer than Parian marble, than the heads of
angels. The wind at the end was the morning breeze entering through the
open porthole and touching his face before the schooner could swing to
the chilly gust.
Yes! And all this rational explanation of the fantastic made it only
more mysterious and weird. There was something daemonic in that dream.
It was one of those experiences which throw a man out of conformity with
the established order of his kind and make him a creature of obscure
suggestions.
Henceforth, without ever trying to resist, he went every afternoon to the
house where she lived. He went there as passively as if in a dream. He
could never make out how he had attained the footing of intimacy in the
Dunster mansion above the bay—whether on the ground of personal merit or
as the pioneer of the vegetable silk industry. It must have been the
last, because he remembered distinctly, as distinctly as in a dream,
hearing old Dunster once telling him that his next public task would be a
careful survey of the Northern Districts to discover tracts suitable for
the cultivation of the silk plant. The old man wagged his beard at him
sagely. It was indeed as absurd as a dream.
Willie of course would be there in the evening. But he was more of a
figure out of a nightmare, hovering about the circle of chairs in his
dress-clothes like a gigantic, repulsive, and sentimental bat. “Do away
with the beastly cocoons all over the world,” he buzzed in his blurred,
water-logged voice. He affected a great horror of insects of all kinds.
One evening he appeared with a red flower in his button-hole. Nothing
could have been more disgustingly fantastic. And he would also say to
Renouard: “You may yet change the history of our country. For economic
conditions do shape the history of nations. Eh? What?” And he would
turn to Miss Moorsom for approval, lowering protectingly his spatulous
nose and looking up with feeling from under his absurd eyebrows, which
grew thin, in the manner of canebrakes, out of his spongy skin. For this
large, bilious creature was an economist and a sentimentalist, facile to
tears, and a member of the Cobden Club.
In order to see as little of him as possible Renouard began coming
earlier so as to get away before his arrival, without curtailing too much
the hours of secret contemplation for which he lived. He had given up
trying to deceive himself. His resignation was without bounds. He
accepted the immense misfortune of being in love with a woman who was in
search of another man only to throw herself into his arms. With such
desperate precision he defined in his thoughts the situation, the
consciousness of which traversed like a sharp arrow the sudden silences
of general conversation. The only thought before which he quailed was
the thought that this could not last; that it must come to an end. He
feared it instinctively as a sick man may fear death. For it seemed to
him that it must be the death of him followed by a lightless, bottomless
pit. But his resignation was not spared the torments of jealousy: the
cruel, insensate, poignant, and imbecile jealousy, when it seems that a
woman betrays us simply by this that she exists, that she breathes—and
when the deep movements of her nerves or her soul become a matter of
distracting suspicion, of killing doubt, of mortal anxiety.
In the peculiar condition of their sojourn Miss Moorsom went out very
little. She accepted this seclusion at the Dunsters’ mansion as in a
hermitage, and lived there, watched over by a group of old people, with
the lofty endurance of a condescending and strong-headed goddess. It was
impossible to say if she suffered from anything in the world, and whether
this was the insensibility of a great passion concentrated on itself, or
a perfect restraint of manner, or the indifference of superiority so
complete as to be sufficient to itself. But it was visible to Renouard
that she took some pleasure in talking to him at times. Was it because
he was the only person near her age? Was this, then, the secret of his
admission to the circle?
He admired her voice as well poised as her movements, as her attitudes.
He himself had always been a man of tranquil tones. But the power of
fascination had torn him out of his very nature so completely that to
preserve his habitual calmness from going to pieces had become a terrible
effort.
He used to go from her on board the schooner exhausted, broken, shaken
up, as though he had been put to the most exquisite torture. When he saw
her approaching he always had a moment of hallucination. She was a misty
and fair creature, fitted for invisible music, for the shadows of love,
for the murmurs of waters. After a time (he could not be always staring
at the ground) he would summon up all his resolution and look at her.
There was a sparkle in the clear obscurity of her eyes; and when she
turned them on him they seemed to give a new meaning to life. He would
say to himself that another man would have found long before the happy
release of madness, his wits burnt to cinders in that radiance. But no
such luck for him. His wits had come unscathed through the furnaces of
hot suns, of blazing deserts, of flaming angers against the weaknesses of
men and the obstinate cruelties of hostile nature.
Being sane he had to be constantly on his guard against falling into
adoring silences or breaking out into wild speeches. He had to keep
watch on his eyes, his limbs, on the muscles of his face. Their
conversations were such as they could be between these two people: she a
young lady fresh from the thick twilight of four million people and the
artificiality of several London seasons; he the man of definite
conquering tasks, the familiar of wide horizons, and in his very repose
holding aloof from these agglomerations of units in which one loses one’s
importance even to oneself. They had no common conversational small
change. They had to use the great pieces of general ideas, but they
exchanged them trivially. It was no serious commerce. Perhaps she had
not much of that coin. Nothing significant came from her. It could not
be said that she had received from the contacts of the external world
impressions of a personal kind, different from other women. What was
ravishing in her was her quietness and, in her grave attitudes, the
unfailing brilliance of her femininity. He did not know what there was
under that ivory forehead so splendidly shaped, so gloriously crowned.
He could not tell what were her thoughts, her feelings. Her replies were
reflective, always preceded by a short silence, while he hung on her lips
anxiously. He felt himself in the presence of a mysterious being in whom
spoke an unknown voice, like the voice of oracles, bringing everlasting
unrest to the heart.
He was thankful enough to sit in silence with secretly clenched teeth,
devoured by jealousy—and nobody could have guessed that his quiet
deferential bearing to all these grey-heads was the supreme effort of
stoicism, that the man was engaged in keeping a sinister watch on his
tortures lest his strength should fail him. As before, when grappling
with other forces of nature, he could find in himself all sorts of
courage except the courage to run away.
It was perhaps from the lack of subjects they could have in common that
Miss Moorsom made him so often speak of his own life. He did not shrink
from talking about himself, for he was free from that exacerbated, timid
vanity which seals so many vain-glorious lips. He talked to her in his
restrained voice, gazing at the tip of her shoe, and thinking that the
time was bound to come soon when her very inattention would get weary of
him. And indeed on stealing a glance he would see her dazzling and
perfect, her eyes vague, staring in mournful immobility, with a drooping
head that made him think of a tragic Venus arising before him, not from
the foam of the sea, but from a distant, still more formless, mysterious,
and potent immensity of mankind.