The next day Audrey's head was aching to some purpose. She had been
going through a course of Langley Wyndham. Yesterday he had brought her
his last book, "London Legends," and she had sat up half the night to
read it. She was to tell him what she thought of it, and her ideas were
in a whirl.
She stayed in bed for breakfast, excused herself from lunch, left word
with the footman that she was not at home that afternoon, and sent down
another message five minutes afterwards that, if by any chance Mr.
Wyndham were to call, he might be admitted. "Not that he's in the least
likely to come after being here yesterday," she said to herself; and
yet, as she sat alone in the drawing room, she listened for the ringing
of bells, the opening of doors, and the sound of footsteps on the
stairs. Every five minutes she looked at the clock, and her heart kept
time to its ticking. Half-past two. In any case he wouldn't come before
three; and yet--surely that was the front-door bell. No. Three o'clock,
four o'clock--he would be more likely to drop in about tea-time. Five
o'clock; tea came in on the stroke of it, and still no Wyndham.
Half-past five--he had once called later than that when he wanted to
find her alone. Something told her that he would come to-day. He would
be anxious to know what she thought of his book. She was in that state
of mind when people trust in intuitions, failing positive evidence.
Surely in some past state of existence she had sat in that chair,
surrounded by the same objects, thinking the same thoughts, and that
train of ideas had been completed by the arrival of Wyndham. Science
accounts for this sensation by supposing that one half of the brain,
more agile than another, jumps to its conclusion before its tardier
fellow can arrive. To Audrey it was a prophecy certain of fulfilment.
And all the time her head kept on aching. The poor little brain went on
wandering in a maze of its own making. How truly she had, in cousin
Bella's phrase, "entangled herself" with Hardy, with Ted, and possibly,
nay probably, with Wyndham. She saw no escape from the dreadful
situation. And as a dark background to her thoughts there hung the
shadow of Hardy's return. She only realised it in these moods of
reaction that followed the exaltation of the last three weeks. And to
make matters worse, for the first time in her life she was dissatisfied
with herself. Not that she was in the least aware of the deterioration
of her character. She took no count of the endless little meannesses and
falsehoods which she was driven into by her position. Simple
straightforward action was impossible. This much was evident to her,
that whatever course she took now, she must end by forfeiting some one's
good opinion: Hardy's first--well, she could get over that; but Ted's?
Katherine's? Wyndham's?--if he came to know everything? It was there, in
that last possibility, that she suffered most.
Half-past six. She had given up Wyndham and her belief in psychical
prophecy, and was trying to find relief from unpleasant reflections in a
book, when Wyndham actually appeared. He came in with the confident
smile of the friend sure of a welcome at all hours.
"Forgive my calling at this unholy time. I knew if I came earlier I
should find you surrounded by an admiring crowd. I wanted to see you
alone."
"Quite right. I am always at home to friends."
They dropped into one of those trivial dialogues which were Audrey's
despair in her intercourse with Wyndham.
Suddenly his tone changed. He took up "London Legends."
"As you've already guessed, my egregious vanity brings me here. I don't
know whether you've had time to look at the thing----"
"I sat up to finish it last night."
"Indeed. What did you think of it?"
"Don't ask me. I didn't criticise--sympathy comes first."
"Excuse me, it doesn't. Criticism comes first with all of us. Sympathy
comes last of all--when we know the whole of life, and understand it."
"What would my poor little opinion be worth?"
"Everything. A really unbiassed judgment is the rarest thing in the
world, and there's always a charm about naive criticism."
"I couldn't put the book down. Can I say more?"
"Yes, of course you can say more. You can tell me which legend you
disliked least; you can criticise my hero's conduct, and find fault with
my heroine's manners; you can object to my plot, pick holes in my style.
No, thank goodness, you can't do that; but you can take exception to my
morality."
She sat silent, waiting for her cue, and trying to collect her thoughts,
which were fluttering all abroad in generalities.
He went on with a touch of bitterness in his voice--
"I thought so. It's the old stumbling-block--my morality. If it hadn't
been for that, you would have told me, wouldn't you? that my figures
breathe and move, that every touch is true to life. But you daren't. You
are afraid of reality; facts are so immoral."
It would be impossible to describe the accent of scorn which Wyndham
threw into this last word.
"I thought your book very clever--in spite of the facts."
"Facts or no facts, you'd rather have your beliefs, wouldn't you?"
"No, no; I lost them all long ago!" cried Audrey, indignantly.
"I don't mean the old vulgar dogmas, of course, but the dear little
ideals that shed such a rosy light on things in general, you know. Ah!
that's what you want; and when an artist paints the real thing for you,
you say, 'Thank you; yes, it's very clever, I see; but I prefer the
pretty magic-lantern views, and the limelight of life.'"
"Not at all. I've much too great a regard for truth."
"I know. You're always looking for Truth, with a capital T; but, when it
comes to the point, you'd rather have two miserable little half-truths
than one honest whole truth about anything. That's why you disliked my
book."
"I didn't."
"Oh, yes, you did. What you disliked about it was this. It made you see
men and women, not as you imagined them, but as God made them. You saw,
that is, the naked human soul, stripped of the clumsy draperies that
Puritanism wraps round it. You saw below the surface--below the
top-dressing of education, below the solid layer of traditional
morality--deep down to the primitive passions, the fire of the clay
we're all made of. You saw love and hate, forces which are older than
all religions and all laws, older than man and woman, and which make
men and women what they are. And they seemed to you not commonplaces,
which they are--but something worse. You don't know that these _facts_
are the stuff of art, because they are the stuff of nature; that it
takes multitudes of such facts, not just one or two picked out because
of their 'moral beauty'--for you purists believe in the beauty of
morality as well as in the immorality of beauty--to make up a faithful
picture of life. And you shuddered, didn't you? as you laid down the
book you sat up half the night to read, and you said it was ugly,
revolting; you couldn't see any perfect characters in it--only character
in the making, only wretched men and women acting according to certain
disagreeable laws, which are none the less immutable because one half of
the world professes to ignore their existence. You said, 'Take away the
whole world of nature, take away logic and science and art, but leave
me--leave me my ideals!' Isn't that it?"
The torrent of his rhetoric swept her away, she knew not whither. But in
his last words she had caught her cue. If she was ever to be an
influence in Wyndham's life, encouraging, inspiring his best work, she
must not suffer him to speak lightly of "ideals." It seemed to her that
her methods with Ted were crude compared with her management of Wyndham.
"Oh, don't, don't! It's dreadful! But you are right. I can't live
without ideals. All the great artists had them. You have them yourself,
or at least you _had_ them. I don't know what to think about your
book--I can't think, I can only feel; and I read between the lines.
Surely you feel with me that there's nothing worth living for except
morality? Surely you believe in purity and goodness?"
Her face was flushed, her hands were clasped tightly together in her
intensity. So strong was the illusion her manner produced, that for one
second Wyndham could have been convinced of her absolute sincerity. Not
long--no, not long afterwards, her words were to come back to him with
irony.
"Morality? I've the greatest respect for it. But after all, its rules
only mark off one little corner from the plain of life. Out there, in
the open, are the fine landscapes and the great highroads of thought.
And if you are to travel at all, you must go by those ways. There's dust
on them, and there's mud--plenty of mud; but--there are no others."
"I would be very careful where I put my feet, though. I don't like muddy
boots."
"I daresay not; who does? But the traveller is not always thinking about
his boots."
"Don't let's talk about boots." She made a little movement with her
mouth, simulating disgust.
"Your own metaphor; but never mind. _A propos des bottes_, I should
like----" he broke off and added in a deep, hieratic voice, "To the pure
all things are pure, but to the Puritan most things are impure. I wish
I could make you see that; but it's a large subject. And besides, I want
to talk about you."
"Me?"
"Yes, you. With all your beliefs, there was a time, if I'm not much
mistaken, when you were pleased to doubt the existence of your charming
self?"
She looked up with a smile of pleasure and of perfect comprehension. He
could hardly have said anything more delicately caressing to her
self-love. It seemed, then, that every word she had uttered in his
hearing had been weighed and treasured up. She could hardly be supposed
to know that this power of noticing and preserving such little personal
details was one of the functions of the literary organism. If a woman
like Miss Fraser had been flattered by it, what must have been its
effect on the susceptible Audrey?
"So you remember that too?" she said, softly.
"Yes; it impressed me at the time. Now I know you better I don't wonder
at it. It's the fault of your very lovely and feminine idealism, but you
seem to me to have hardly any hold on the fact of existence, to be
unable to realise it. If I could only give you the sense of life--make
you feel the movement, the passion, the drama of it! My books have a
little of that; they've got the right atmosphere, the _smell_ of life.
But never mind my books. I don't want you to have another literary
craze--I beg your pardon, I mean phase; you seem to have had an artistic
one lately."
He rose to go.
"I've always cared for the great things of life," said she.
"Ah yes--the great things, stamped with other people's approval. I want
you to love life itself, so that you may be yourself, and feel yourself
being."
Her whole nature responded as the strings of the violin to the bow of
the master. "Life" was one of those words which specially stirred her
sensibility. As Wyndham had foreseen, it was a word to conjure with; and
now, as he had willed, the idea of it possessed her. She repeated
mechanically--
"Life--to love life for itself----"
"And first--you must know life in order to love it."
She sighed slightly, as if she had taken in a little more breath to say
good-bye. The ideal was flown. She had received the stamp of Wyndham's
spirit, as if it had been iron upon wax. It was her way of being herself
and feeling herself being.
The same evening she wrote a little note to Ted that ran thus:--
"DEAREST TED,--I have been thinking it all over, ever since
yesterday, and I am convinced that my only right course is to break
off our engagement. It has all been a mistake--mine and yours. Why
should we not recognise it, instead of each persisting in making the
other miserable? I release you from your promise to me, and will
always remain very affectionately yours, AUDREY CRAVEN."
She had just sent the note to the post, when a servant came in with a
telegram. It was from Hardy, announcing his arrival at Queenstown. And
she had trusted to her engagement to Ted for protection against
Vincent's claim.
If she had only waited!