When the poems were returned by three publishers within the first
fortnight of March, Guy was inclined to surrender his vocation and to
think about such regular work as would banish the reproach he began to
fancy was now perceptible at the back of everybody's eyes. The weather
was abominably cold, and even Plashers Mead itself was no longer the
embodiment of the old enthusiasm. Already in order to pay current
expenses he was drawing upon the next quarter, and the combination of
tradesmen's books with icy draughts curling through the house produced
an atmosphere of perpetual exasperation. It always seemed to be coldest
on Monday morning, and Miss Peasey _would_ breathe over his shoulder
while he was adding up the bills.
"We apparently live on butter," he grumbled.
"Oh no, it was really lamb you had yesterday," the housekeeper
maintained, irrelevantly.
"I said we apparently live on butter," Guy shouted.
Then, of course Miss Peasey _would_ poke her veiny nose right down into
the book, while the draught blew her hair about and unpleasantly tickled
his cheek.
"It's the best butter," she said, sorrowfully, at last.
"But my watch is quite all right."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I made an allusion to _Alice in Wonderland_," he shouted.
Miss Peasey retired from the room in dudgeon, and Guy wasted ten minutes
in examining various theories on what his housekeeper could have
thought he meant by his last remark. Finally he wrote off to a friend of
his, an ardent young Radical peer with whom he had shared rooms at
Oxford.
PLASHERS MEAD, WYCHFORD, OXON,
_March 15th_.
DEAR COM,--Why the dickens haven't you written to me for such
ages? I'm going to chuck this place. Haven't you got any scheme on
hand for teaching the democracy to find out the uselessness of
your order? Why not a new critical weekly with me as
bondslave-in-chief? Or doesn't one of your National Liberals want
a bright young fellow to dot his i's and pick up his h's? For L250
a year I'll serve any of them, write his speeches, interview his
constituents or even teach his cubs to prey on the body politic
like Father Lion himself. Seriously, though, if you hear of
anything, do think of me.
Yours ever,
G. H.
Comeragh wrote back at once:
420 BROOK STREET, W.,
_March 16th_.
DEAR OLD GUY,--If you will bury yourself like a misanthropic
badger, you can't expect to be written to by every post. Oddly
enough there has been some talk of starting a new paper; at least
it isn't really very odd because the subject is mooted three times
a day in the advanced political circles round which I revolve.
However, just at present the scheme is in abeyance. Never mind,
I'll fetch you out of your earth at the first excuse that offers
itself. Do you ever go in and see the Balliol people? My young
brother's up now, you know. Ask him over to lunch some day. He's a
shining light of Tory Democracy and is going to preserve, or I
suppose I ought to say conserve, the honor of our family. When are
your poems coming out? I heard from Tom Anstruther the other day.
He seems rather hurt that an attache at Madrid is not given an
opportunity of adjusting or upsetting the balance of power in
Europe. I'll try to get down for a week-end, but I'm betraying my
order by voting against an obscurantist majority whenever I can,
and plotting hard against the liberties of landowners when I'm
not voting. However, when the House flies away to search for
Summer I'll drop out of the flock and perch a while on your roof.
One thing I will promise, which is that when I'm Prime Minister
you shall be offered the Laurel at L200 a year.
Yours ever,
COM.
It was jolly to hear from Comeragh like this, and the letter opened for
Guy a prospect of something that, when he came to think about it,
appeared very much like a retreat. He realized abruptly that the strain
of the last two months had been playing upon his nerves to such an
extent that the notion of leaving Wychiford was no longer very
distasteful. The realization of his potential apostasy came with rather
a shock, and he felt that he ought somehow to atone to Pauline for the
disloyalty towards her his attitude seemed to involve. He began to go to
church again in a desperate endeavor to pursue the phantom that she
called faith, but this very endeavor only made more apparent the vital
difference in their relations with life. She always had for his attempts
to capture something worth while for himself in religion a kind of
questioning anxiety which was faintly irritating; and though he always
pushed the problem hastily out of sight, the fact that he could now be
irritated by her was dolefully significant.
All through this month of maddening east wind Guy felt that he stood
upon the verge of a catastrophe, and the despatch of the poems which at
first had done so much to help matters along was now only another source
of vexation. Formerly he had always possessed the refuge of work, but in
this perpetual uncertainty he could not settle down to anything fresh,
and the expectation every morning of his poems being once again rejected
was a handicap to the whole day. Partly to plunge himself into a
reaction and partly to avoid and even to crush their spiritual
divergence, Guy always made love passionately to Pauline during these
days. He was aware that she was terribly tried by this, but the
knowledge made him more selfishly passionate. A sort of brutality had
entered into their relation which Guy hated, but to which in these
circumstances that made him feverishly glad to wound her he allowed more
liberty every day. The merely physical side of this struggle between
them was, of course, accentuated by the gag placed upon discussion. He
would not give her the chance of saying why she feared his kisses, and
he took an unfair advantage of the conviction that Pauline would never
declare a reason until he demanded one. He was horribly conscious of
abusing her love for him, and the more he was aware of that the more
brutal he showed himself until sometimes he used to wonder in dismay if
at the back of his mind the impulse to destroy his love altogether had
not been born.
Easter was approaching, and Pauline went to Oxford for a week to get
Summer clothes. When she came back, Guy found her attitude changed. She
was remote, almost evasive, and at the back of her tenderest glance was
now a wistful appeal that perplexed his ardor.
"I feel you don't want me to kiss you," he said, reproachfully. "What
has happened? Why have you come back from Oxford so cold? What has
happened to you, Pauline?"
Her eyes took fire, melted into tenderness, flamed once more, and then
were quenched in rising tears.
The voice in which she answered him seemed to come from another world.
"Guy, I am not cold.... I'm not cold enough...."
She flung herself away from his gesture of endearment and buried her
cheeks in the cushion of the faded old settee. A wild calm had fallen
upon the room, as if like the atmosphere before a thunder-storm it could
register a warning of the emotional tempest at hand. The books, the
furniture, the very pattern of birds and daisies upon the wall stood
out sharply, almost luridly it seemed; the cuckoo from the passage
called the hour in notes of alarm, as if a storm-cock were sweeping up
to cover from dangerous open country.
"What do you mean?" Guy asked. He knew that he was carrying the
situation between Pauline and himself farther along than he had ever
taken it since the night they met. Yet nothing could have stopped his
course at this moment and, if the end should ruin his life, he would
persist.
"What do you mean?" he repeated.
"Don't ask me," she sobbed. "It's cruel to ask me."
"You mean your mother...." he began.
"No, no, it's myself, myself."
"My dearest, if it's only yourself, you need not be afraid. Why, you're
so adorable...."
Pauline seemed to cry out at the wound he had given her, and Guy started
back, afraid for an instant of what he was provoking.
"Don't treat me like a stupid little girl that petting can cure. I'm not
adorable, I'm bad.... I'm ... oh, Guy, I am so unhappy!"
"What do you mean by 'bad'?" he asked. "You talk as if we were....
Really, darling, you don't grasp life at all."
"Guy," she said, turning to him with fierce earnestness, "don't persuade
me I've done nothing. I have. I ought not. I've known that all the time.
If you don't want me to be miserable for the rest of my life, you
mustn't persuade me. I've been so weak...."
He was annoyed at the exaggeration in her words and perplexed by her
violence.
"Anybody would think, you know," he told her, "that we have behaved
terribly."
"We have. We have."
Her mouth was drawn with pain; her eyes were wild.
"But we've not," Guy contradicted, mustering desperately all the forces
of normality to allay Pauline's over-strained ideas. "We've not," he
repeated. "You don't understand, darling Pauline, that when you talk
like that you give the impression of something that is unimaginable of
you. It's dreadful to have to talk about this, but it's better that we
should discuss it than that you should torture yourself needlessly like
this."
"It's not what we've done so much," she said. "It's what you've made me
think about you."
Guy laughed rather miserably.
"That seems a very trifling reason for so much ... well, you know, it's
very nearly hysteria."
"To you, perhaps," she retorted, bitterly. "To me it's like madness."
"I can't understand these morbid fancies of yours. What have you been
doing in Oxford? Ah, I know," he shouted, in a rage of sudden
divination. "You've been talking to a priest.... Oh, if I could burn
every interfering scoundrel who...." The scene swept over him, choking
the words in his throat with indignant impotent jealousy. "You've been
to Confession. And what good have you got from it, but lies, lies?"
"I've always been to Confession," Pauline answered, coldly.
In a flash Guy visualized her religious life as one long creeping
towards a gloomy Confessional, where lurked a smooth-faced priest who
poured his poison into her ears.
"You shall go no more," he vowed. "What right have you to drag the
holiness of love in the mud of a priest's mind?"
"You don't know how stupidly you're talking," said Pauline. "You say I
exaggerate. You don't know how much you are exaggerating. You don't
understand."
"I thought you wanted me to have faith! How can I have faith when I hear
of priests degrading our love? What right had you to go to a priest?
What does he know of you or me? What has he suffered? What does he
understand? Why do you listen to him and pay no heed to me? What did you
say?"
Pauline looked at him in silence.
"What did you say?" he repeated, angrily. He was caring for nothing at
that moment but to tear from her the history of the scene that made a
furnace of his brain. "He must have tried to put the idea into your head
that you've been doing wrong. I say you have done nothing wrong. I
suppose you told him you came out at night with me on the river, and I
suppose he concluded from that.... Oh, Pauline, I cannot let you be a
prey to the mind of a priest. You don't realize what it means to me. You
don't realise the raging jealousy it rouses."
"Guy," she moaned, "love is too much for me. I can't bear the
uncertainty. Your debts ... the sending back of your poems ... the fear
that we shall never be married ... the doubts ... the thought that I've
deceived my family ... the misery I bring to you because I can't think
everything is right...."
"I don't want you always to agree with me. I've promised never to ask
you again to come out with me at night. I'll even promise never to kiss
you again until we are married. But you must promise me never again to
go to Confession."
"I can't give up what I believe is right," she said.
"Then I won't give up what I believe is right."
He strained her to him and kissed her lips so closely that they were
white instead of red. Then he went from her in an impulse to let her, if
she would, break off the engagement. If he had stayed he must have
blasphemed the religion which was soiling with its murk their love. He
must have hurt her so deeply that he would have compelled her to bid him
never come back. It was for her now, the responsibility of going on, and
she should find what religion would do for her when she was left alone
to battle with the infamous suggestions the fiction was giving to her
mind. She should find that beside his love religion was nothing, that
the folly would topple down and betray her at this very moment. When
next he saw her, she would have forgotten her priests and their mummery;
she would think only of him and live only for him.
"Blow, you damned wind," he shouted to the brilliant and tranquil March
day. "Blow, blow, can't you? You've blown all these days, and now when I
want you in my face you lie still."
But the weather stayed serene, and Guy had to run in order to tire the
fury in his mind. He did not stop until he realized by the scampering of
the March hares to right and left of his path how very absurd he must
appear even to the blind heavens.
"Why," he exclaimed, suddenly standing still and addressing a thorn-tree
on the green down. "Why, of course, now I realize the Reformation!"
This sudden apprehension of a tremendous historical fact was rather
disconcerting in the way it brought home to him the uselessness of all
the information that he had for years absorbed without any real response
of recognition. It brought home to him how much he would have to
discover for himself and appalled him with the mockery it made of his
confidence hitherto. How if all those poems he had written were merely
external emotion like his conception of religion until this moment? He
really hoped the manuscript would come back this evening from whatever
publisher had last eyed it disdainfully, so that in the light of this
revelation of his youthfulness he could judge his life's achievement
afresh. It was indeed frightening that in one moment all his comfortable
standards could be struck away from beneath his feet, for if an outburst
of jealousy on account of a priest's interference could suddenly reshape
his conception of history, what fundamental changes in his conception of
art might not be waiting for him a little way ahead?
The spectacle of Pauline's simple creed had hitherto pleasantly
affected his senses; and she had taken her place with the heroines of
romantic poets and painters. It had been pleasant to murmur:
Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars:
and to compare himself with the lover of The Blessed Damozel had been a
luxurious melancholy. Pauline and he had worshiped together in chapels
of Lyonesse, where, if he had knelt beside her with a rather tender
condescension towards her prayers, he had always been moved sincerely by
the decorative appeal they made to him. He had felt a sentimental awe of
her hushed approach to the altar, and he had derived a kind of
sentimental satisfaction from the perfection of her attitude, perhaps,
even more, he had placed upon it a sentimental reliance. Her faith had
been the decorative adjunct of a great deal of his verse, and he flushed
hotly to remember lines that now appeared as damnable insincerities with
which he had allowed his pen to play. All that piety of hers he had sung
so prettily was real and possessed an intrinsic power to injure him, so
that what he had patronized and encouraged could rise up and pit itself
deliberately against him. Pauline actually believed in her religion,
believed in it to the extent of dishonoring their love to appease the
mumbo-jumbo. That something so monstrously inexistent could have any
such power was barely comprehensible, and yet here he was faced with
what easily might prove to be a force powerful enough to annihilate
their love. He remembered how in reading of Christina Rossetti's
renunciation of a lover who did not believe as she believed, he had
thought of the incident as a poet's exaggeration. And it might well have
happened. Now, indeed, he could see why she was so much the greatest
poetess of them all; her faith had been real. Lines from that Sonnet of
sonnets came back to him, broken lines but full of dread:
I love ... God the most;
Would lose not Him but you, must one be lost:
And if Pauline should speak so to him, if Pauline should disown him at
the bidding of her phantom gods? How the thought swept into oblivion all
his pitiful achievement, all his fretful emotions set down in rhyme.
Either he must convince her that she was affrighted by vain fancies or
he must bow before this reality of belief and seek humbly the truth
where she discovered it. Yet if he took that course it held no pledge of
faith for him. Shamefacedly and scarcely able to bear even the
thorn-tree's presence, Guy knelt down and prayed that he might be given
Pauline's single heart. The song of the innumerable larks rose into the
crystalline, but all the prayers tumbled down from that stuffy pavilion
of sky. The moment that the first emotional aspiration was thus defeated
Guy was only conscious of his lapse into superstition, and, furious with
the surrender, he went walking over the downs in a determination to
shake Pauline's faith at whatever the cost temporarily to the beautiful
appearance of their love.
He wrote that evening in a fine frenzy of declamation against God,
affirming in his verse the rights of man; but on reading the lines
through next morning they seemed like the first vapors of adolescence;
and when he turned for consolation to Shelley he found that even a great
poet's rage on behalf of man against God was often turgid enough. It
was, however, a hopeful sign that he could still perceive what puddles
these aerial fountains of song often left behind them, and he was glad
to find that not all the value of critical experience had been destroyed
by the imperative need to readjust his values of reality.
Birdwood brought a note from Pauline just when Guy had burned his
effusion of the night before and come to the conclusion that as a
polemical and atheistic rhymester he was of the very poorest quality.
The gardener was inclined to be chatty, and when the weather and the
dowers in season had been discussed at length, he observed that Miss
Pauline was not looking so well as she ought to look.
"You'll have to speak to her about it, Mr. Hazlenut."
Birdwood had never learned to give Guy his proper name, and there had
been many jokes between him and Pauline about this, and many vows by Guy
that one day he would address the gardener as Birdseed. How far away
such foolish little jokes were seeming now.
"It's been a tiring Spring," said Guy. "The east wind...."
"Her cheeks isn't nothing like so rosy as they was," said the gardener.
"You'll excuse the liberty I'm taking in mentioning them, but having
known Miss Pauline since she couldn't walk.... Why I happen to mention
it is that there was a certain somebody up in the town who passed the
remark to me and, I having to give him a piece of my mind pretty sharp
on account of him talking so free, it sort of stuck in my memory and....
You don't think she's middling?"
"Oh no, I think she's quite well," said Guy.
"Well, as long as you aren't worrited, I don't suppose I've got any call
to be worrited; only any one can't help it a bit when they see witches'
cheeks on a young lady. She certainly does look middling, but maybe, as
you say, it is this unnatural east wind."
Birdwood touched his cap and retired, but his words had struck at Guy
remorsefully while he walked away to a corner of the orchard reading
Pauline's letter. The starlings were piping a sweet monotony of Spring,
and daffodils, that he and she had planted last Summer when they came
back from Ladingford, haunted his path.
MY DARLING,--Why haven't you been to see me this morning? Why
weren't you in the orchard? I stayed such a long while in the
churchyard, but you never came. If I said anything yesterday that
hurt your feelings, forgive me. You mustn't think that I was angry
with you because perhaps I spoke angrily. Darling, darling Guy, I
adore you so, and nothing else but you matters to my happiness. I
should not have spoken about religion-- I don't know how we came
to argue about it. It was unkind of me to be depressed and sad
when my dearest was sad. Truly, truly I am so anxious about your
poems only because I want you to be happy. Sometimes I must seem
selfish, but you know that before anything it is your work I think
of. I'm not really a bit worried about our being married. I have
these fits of depression which are really very wrong. I'm not
worried about anything really, only I had a dream about you last
month which frightened me. Oh, Guy, come this afternoon and tell
me you're not angry. I promise you that I won't make you miserable
with my stupid depression. Guy, if I could only tell you how I
love you. If you only knew how never, never for an instant do I
care for anything but your happiness. You don't really want me to
give up believing in anything, do you? It doesn't really make you
angry, does it? Come and tell me this afternoon that you've
forgiven
Your
PAULINE.