"Were you married in a church, Ursula?"
"We were not, brother: none but gorgios, cripples, and lubbenys
are ever married in a church: we took each other's words."
MEANWHILE his relations with Cathleen remained in abeyance. What she
had accepted in the excitement of events, she needed to reconcile with
her calmer thoughts. That was not so easy. She was brought to doubt of
herself. She had been more hurt than she had realized, and she feared
she was too weak for the suffering that filled her. For many weeks it
was a pain to her to see René, for she could not but remember the
destruction and misery he had brought into other lives. She had no
support, for her rupture with her family had made an end of the ideas
in which she had been instructed as a child, and she had no experience
to draw upon, and Lotta's theories, when it came to cold practice,
vanished into the air. She could not avoid jealousy of the past; and,
with that in her, she could not bring herself to take the plunge into
a life so different from any she had ever imagined. René was so
patient, and had flung himself with such ardor into his new work, that
she had begun to tell herself that he had no need of her, that she too
was in a sense his victim, since his meeting with her had enabled him
to break with the past only to thrust the weight of it upon her. The
superficiality of her conceptions was betrayed and made plain to her,
broken up by one fixed idea, the thought of Ann's child. How could he
have let that go? How could he thrust that back into the past? How
could his feeling for herself have broken clear of that? And Ann? How
could she set thousands of miles between herself and him? If she had
stayed, they could have wrestled with the reality. They could have
made provision in their lives for the inimical new life. But Ann, in
her desperation, had left them to deal only with an idea, a shadow, a
memory. René apparently could ignore it. He was full of enthusiasm and
happiness. He seemed to consider Ann's flight as a declaration of
independence and to acquiesce in it. Had he felt nothing at all? Could
a man come in contact with that mystery and remain unmoved? Must not
such defiance of Nature be fraught with appalling consequences, to end
in the worst state of all, indifference?
She hugged her difficulties to herself, and dared speak of them to no
one, for she was possessed by the shyness bred by a fixed idea. At
last Lotta caught her out in deliberate avoidance of René and asked
what had come to her. Little by little she dragged her trouble out of
her, and tried to reassure her and bring her to reason.
"You should ask him about it," she said. "He must have thought it out
He did not forget her. You must remember that. It was not a case of
his feeling for you wiping her out of his mind. My own view is that
Nature is entirely indifferent, and I don't believe parents and
children do naturally and inevitably have any feeling for each other.
Indeed, Nature is so indifferent that our thoughts about it are rather
impertinent. It is obvious that children do not always bind men and
women, and I imagine they must often have the contrary effect; always,
I should say, when they have for each other only the kind of selfish
affection which resents any intrusion. Surely that is why so many
women turn from their husbands to their children----"
The word "intrusion" brought Cathleen to the crux of her difficulty.
She saw, with some exaggeration, that this was her condition, and the
quality of her affection, that she had been hungering for possession
of her lover with no intrusion from the past.
"O Lotta," she said, "we are fools to set our faces against what
cannot be altered. I thought I had broken away from narrow
conventions, but I had only rid myself of the names of things, not of
the things themselves, the silly pretense that people wake for a
moment out of a sleep in which nothing can happen, love and go to
sleep again. We are stupid, trying to keep all our loves separate. We
can't do anything but stumble from one love to another, can we?"
"It is what all of us do, and Nature has to take her chance. It is
degrading to have one's folly and weakness, even one's mistakes, used
by Nature, but that is the way of the world, and I think a real love
can always get the better of it."
"I have tried so hard."
"You should see it from his point of view. Suppose it was you who had
been trapped by Nature's indifference. You would feel hardly used if
he let jealousy stand between you and him."
"But René couldn't."
"Perhaps. Why should _you?_ It really does hurt me to see you two
wasting time and youth, two absolutely free people in a world that
takes its greatest pride in its waste of opportunity. You are behaving
abominably. Really, if you let him be much longer he will settle down
with Mr. Casey, and discover that he can do at any rate comfortably
without you, and keep you as an ideal. That happened to me when I was
a girl. I let things slip by until I woke up one fine day to find that
I was nothing but an ideal and had no hope of ever becoming anything
else, even though I had married him. So I never did. Love changes,
like everything else. It grows in us and dies. Very short is the time
when it can be taken and built into our lives. If that time be let
slip away then love dies down. If that happens, then life can never be
anything more than amusing."
"If it should be too late?" said Cathleen, alarmed.
"It won't be," replied Lotta; "he has been to me and I said I would
send you down to him."
At the week-end Cathleen went to Rickham. She found René in overalls
taking down the back axle of a car. His face and hands and hair were
smeared with grease.
"Hullo!" he said.
And Cathleen answered:
"I hope I'm not in the way."
"All right. Only stand clear of the machine. There never was such
ubiquitous stuff as motor grease. I shan't be long. It's a broken
crown-wheel, I think-- Oh! here's Casey. Casey, take Miss Bentley
round the garden. Have tea in the parlor, and I'll join you when I've
cleaned up."
It was a couple of hours before René joined them. During that time
Cathleen had to listen to his praises, and to hear how the business,
after a slow beginning, had begun to pick up, until now they had
almost as much work as they could do with their present staff.
"I'm sorry," said René. "It's a new customer, and he wants the car for
to-morrow morning, and I couldn't take any of the men off their jobs.
It is good to see you. Have you seen the house?"
No. Casey had only shown her the garden.
After tea René took her over the house.
"It wants you," he said.
"I knew that. I sent in my resignation yesterday."
"When will you come?"
"In a month's time."
"Forever and ever?"
"It feels like that now."
"Yes. There doesn't seem to have been anything but you and I. You're a
little slip of a woman to fill the whole world." And he lifted her
clean off her feet. She lay back in his arms and her eyes closed, and
he could feel her whole body surrender to his strength, her whole
spirit come out to meet his in love.