He came next day and every day. They were favoured with the rarely given
gift of a perfect spring. They walked along the cliffs and headlands.
They sat and talked in the garden. He took her with Mrs. Talcott for
long drives to distant parts of the coast which he and Karen would
explore, while Mrs. Talcott in the car sat, with apparently interminable
patience, waiting for them.
Karen played to him in the morning-room; and this was a new revelation
of her. She was not a finished performer and her music was limited by
her incapacity; but she had the gift for imparting, with transparent
sincerity and unfailing sensitiveness, the very heart of what she
played. There were Arias from Schubert Sonatas, and Bach Preludes, and
loving little pieces of Schumann, that Gregory thought he had never
heard so beautifully played before. Everything they had to say was said,
though, it might be, said very softly. He told her that he cared more
for her music than for any he had listened to, and Karen laughed, not at
all taking him seriously. "But you do care for music, though you are no
musician," she said. "I like to play to you; and to someone who does not
care it is impossible."
Her acceptances of their bond might give ground for all hope or for
none. As for himself there had been, from the moment of seeing her
again, of knowing in her presence that fear and that delight, no further
doubt as to his own state and its finality. Yet his first perplexities
lingered and could at moments become painful.
He felt the beloved creature to be at once inappropriate and inevitable.
With all that was deepest and most instinctive in him her nature chimed;
the surfaces, the prejudices, the principles of his life she
contradicted and confused. She talked to him a great deal, in answer to
his questions, about her past life, and what she told him was often
disconcerting. The protective tenderness he had felt for her from the
first was troubled by his realisation of the books she had placidly
read--under Tante's guidance--the people whose queer relationships she
placidly took for granted as in no need of condonation. When he
intimated to her that he disapproved of such contacts and customs, she
looked at him, puzzled, and then said, with an air of kindly maturity at
once touching and vexatious: "But that is the morality of the
Philistines."
It was, of course, and Gregory considered it the very best of
moralities; but remembering her mother he could not emphasize to her how
decisively he held by it.
It was in no vulgar or vicious world that her life, as the child of the
unconventional sculptor, as the _protégée_ of the great pianist, had
been passed. But it was a world without religion, without institutions,
without order. Gregory, though his was not the religious temperament,
had his reasoned beliefs in the spiritual realities expressed in
institutions and he had his inherited instincts of reverence for the
rituals that embodied the spiritual life of his race. He was impatient
with dissent and with facile scepticisms. He did not expect a woman to
have reasoned beliefs, nor did he ask a credulous, uncritical orthodoxy;
but he did want the Christian colouring of mind, the Christian outlook;
he did want his wife to be a woman who would teach her children to say
their prayers at her knees. It was with something like dismay that he
gathered from Karen that her conception of life was as untouched by any
consciousness of creed as that of a noble young pagan. He was angry at
himself for feeling it and when he found himself applying his rules and
measures to her; for what had it been from the first but her spiritual
strength and loveliness that had drawn him to her? Yet he longed to make
her accept the implications of the formulated faiths that she lived by.
"Oh, no, you're not," he said to her when, turning unperturbed eyes upon
him, she assured him: "Oh yes, I am quite, quite a pagan." "I don't
think you know what you mean when you say you're a pagan," Gregory
continued.
"But, yes," she returned. "I have no creed. I was brought up to think of
beauty as the only religion. That is my guardian's religion. It is the
religion, she says, of all free souls. And my father thought so, too."
It was again the assurance of a wisdom, not her own, yet possessed by
her, a wisdom that she did not dream of anybody challenging. Was it not
Tante's?
"Well," he remarked, "beauty is a large term. Perhaps it includes more
than you think."
Karen looked at him with approbation. "That is what Tante says; that it
includes everything." And she went on, pleased to reveal to him still
more of Tante's treasure, since he had proved himself thus
understanding; "Tante, you know, belongs to the Catholic Church; it is
the only church of beauty, she says. But she is not _pratiquante_; not
_croyante_ in any sense. Art is her refuge."
"I see," said Gregory. "And what is your refuge?"
Karen, at this, kept silence for a moment, and then said: "It is not
that; not art. I do not feel, perhaps, that I need refuges. And I am
happier than my dear guardian. I believe in immortality; oh yes,
indeed." She looked round gravely at him--they were sitting on the turf
of a headland above the sea. "I believe, that is, in everything that is
beautiful and loving going on for ever."
He felt abashed before her. The most dependent and child-like of
creatures where her trust and love were engaged, she was, as well, the
most serenely independent. Even Tante, he felt, could not touch her
faiths.
"You mustn't say that you are a pagan, you see," he said.
"But Plato believed in immortality," Karen returned, smiling. "And you
will not tell me that Plato was _pratiquant_ or _croyant_."
He could not claim Plato as a member of the Church of England, though he
felt quite ready to demonstrate, before a competent body of listeners,
that, as a nineteenth century Englishman, Plato would have been. Karen
was not likely to follow such an argument. She would smile at his
seeming sophistries.
No; he must accept it, and as a very part of her lovableness, that she
could not be made to fit into the plan of his life as he had imagined
it. She would not carry on its traditions, for she would not understand
them. To win her would be, in a sense, to relinquish something of that
orderly progression as a professional and social creature that he had
mapped out for himself, though he knew himself to be, through his
experience of her, already a creature more human, a creature enriched.
Karen, if she came to love him, would be, through love, infinitely
malleable, but in the many adjustments that would lie before them it
would be his part to foresee complications and to do the adjusting.
Change in her would be a gradual growth, and never towards mere
conformity.
He felt it to be the first step towards adjustments when he motored
Karen and Mrs. Talcott to Guillian House to lunch with his friends the
Lavingtons. The occasion must mark for him the subtle altering of an old
tie. Karen and the Lavingtons could never be to each other what he and
the Lavingtons had been. It was part of her breadth that congeniality
could never for her be based on the half automatic affinities of caste
and occupation; and it was part of her narrowness, or, rather, of her
inexperience, that she could see people only as individuals and would
not recognize the real charm of the Lavingtons, which consisted in their
being, like their house and park, part of the landscape and of an
established order of things. Yet, once he had her there, he watched the
metamorphosis that her presence worked in his old associations with
pleasure rather than pain. It pleased him, intimately, that the
Lavingtons should see in him a lover as yet uncertain of his chances. It
pleased him that they should not find in Karen the type that they must
have expected the future Mrs. Jardine to be, the type of Constance
Armytage and the type of Evelyn Lavington, Colonel and Mrs. Lavington's
unmarried daughter, who, but for Karen, might well have become Mrs.
Jardine one day. He observed, with a lover's fond pride, that Karen, in
her shrunken white serge and white straw hat, Karen, with her pleasant
imperturbability, her mingled simplicity and sophistication, did, most
decisively, make the Lavingtons seem flavourless. Among them, while Mrs.
Lavington walked her round the garden and Evelyn elicited with kindly
concern that she played neither golf, hockey nor tennis, and had never
ridden to hounds, her demeanour was that of a little rustic princess
benignly doing her social duty. The only reason why she did not appear
like this to the Lavingtons was that, immutably unimaginative as they
were, they knew that she wasn't a princess, was, indeed, only the odd
appendage of an odd celebrity with whom their friend had chosen, oddly,
to fall in love. They weren't perplexed, because, since he had fallen in
love with her, she was placed. But they, in the complete contrast they
offered, had little recognition of individual values and judged a dish
by the platter it was served on. A princess was a princess, and an
appendage an appendage, and a future Mrs. Jardine a very recognizable
person; just as, had a subtle _charlotte russe_ been brought up to lunch
in company with the stewed rhubarb they would have eaten it without
comment and hardly been aware that it wasn't an everyday milk-pudding.
"Did you and Mrs. Lavington and Evelyn and Mrs. Haverfield find much to
talk of after lunch?" Gregory asked, as he motored Mrs. Talcott and
Karen back to Les Solitudes.
"Yes; we talked of a good many things," said Karen. "But I know about so
few of their things and they about so few of mine. Miss Lavington was
very much surprised to think that I had never been to a fox-hunt; and
I," Karen smiled, "was very much surprised to think that they had never
heard Tante play."
"They hardly ever get up to town, you see," said Gregory. "But surely
they knew about her?"
"Not much," said Karen. "Mrs. Lavington asked me about her--for
something pleasant to say--and they were such strange questions; as
though one should be asked whether Mr. Arthur Balfour were a Russian
nihilist or Metchnikoff an Italian poet." Karen spoke quite without
grievance or irony.
"And after your Sargent," said Gregory, "you must have been pained by
that portrait of Mrs. Haverfield in the drawing-room."
"Mrs. Lavington pointed it out to me specially," said Karen, laughing,
"and told me that it had been in the Academy. What a sad thing; with all
those eyelashes! And yet opposite to it hung the beautiful Gainsborough
of a great-grandmother. Mrs. Lavington saw no difference, I think."
"They haven't been trained to see differences," said Gregory, and he
summed up the Lavingtons in the aphorism to himself as well as to Karen;
"only to accept samenesses." He hoped indeed, by sacrificing the
æsthetic quality of the Lavingtons, to win some approbation of their
virtues; but Karen, though not inclined to proffer unasked criticism,
found, evidently, no occasion for commendation. Later on, when they were
back at Les Solitudes and walking in the garden, she returned to the
subject of his friends and said: "I was a little disturbed about Mrs.
Talcott; did you notice? no one talked to her at all, hardly. It was as
if they thought her my _dame de compagnie_. She isn't my _dame de
compagnie_; and if she were, I think that she should have been talked
to."
Gregory had observed this fact and had hoped that it might have escaped
Karen's notice. To the Lavingtons Mrs. Talcott's platter had been
unrecognizable and they had tended to let its contents alone.
"It's as I said, you know," he put forward a mitigation; "they've not
been trained to see differences; she is very different, isn't she?"
"Well, but so am I," said Karen, "and they talked to me. I don't mean to
complain of your friends; that would be very rude when they were so nice
and kind; and, besides, are your friends. But people's thoughtlessness
displeases me, not that I am not often very thoughtless myself."
Gregory was anxious to exonerate himself. "I hope she didn't feel left
out;" he said. "I did notice that she wasn't talking. I found her in the
garden, alone--she seemed to be enjoying that, too--and she and I went
about for quite a long time together."
"I know you did," said Karen. "You are not thoughtless. As for her, one
never knows what she feels. I don't think that she does feel things of
that sort at all; she has been used to it all her life, one may say; but
there's very little she doesn't notice and understand. She
understands--oh, perfectly well--that she is a queer old piece of
furniture standing in the background, and one has to remember not to
treat her like a piece of furniture. It's a part of grace and tact,
isn't it, not to take such obvious things for granted. You didn't take
them for granted with her, or with me," said Karen, smiling her
recognition at him. "For, of course, to most people I am furniture, too;
and if Tante is about, there is, of course, nothing to blame in that;
everybody becomes furniture when Tante is there."
"Oh no; I can't agree to that," said Gregory. "Not everybody."
"You know what I mean," Karen rejoined. "If you will not agree to it for
me, it is because from the first you felt me to be your friend; that is
different." They were walking in the flagged garden where the blue
campanulas were now safely established in their places and the low
afternoon sun slanted in among the trees. Karen still wore her hat and
motoring veil and the smoky grey substance flowed softly back about her
shoulders. Her face seemed to emerge from a cloud. It had always to
Gregory's eyes the air of steadfast advance; the way in which her hair
swept back and up from her brows gave it a wind-blown, lifted look. He
glanced at her now from time to time, while, in a meditative and
communicative mood, she continued to share her reflections with him.
Gregory was very happy.
"Even Tante doesn't always remember enough about Mrs. Talcott," she went
on. "That is of course because Mrs. Talcott is so much a part of her
life that she sometimes hardly sees her. She _is_, for her, the dear old
restful chair that she sinks back into and forgets about. Besides, some
people have a right not to see things. One doesn't ask from giants the
same sort of perception that one does from pygmies."
This was indeed hard on the Lavingtons; but Gregory was not thinking of
the Lavingtons, who could take care of themselves. He was wondering, as
he more and more wondered, about Madame von Marwitz, and what she saw
and what she permitted herself not to see.
"You aren't invisible to her sometimes?" he inquired.
Her innocence before his ironies made him ashamed always of having
spoken them. "It is just that that makes me feel sometimes so badly
about Mrs. Talcott," she answered now; "just because she is, in a sense,
sometimes invisible, and I'm not. Mrs. Talcott, of course, counts for a
great deal more in the way of comfort and confidence than I do; I don't
believe that Tante really is as intimate with anybody in the world as
with Mrs. Talcott; but she doesn't count as much as I do, I am nearly
sure, in the way of tenderness. I really think that in the way of
tenderness I am nearer than anybody."
They left the flagged garden now, and came down to a lower terrace. Here
the sun shone fully; they walked to and fro in the radiance. "Of
course," Karen continued to define and confide, "as far as interest goes
any one of her real friends counts for more than I do, and you mustn't
think that I mean to say that I believe myself the most loved; not at
all. But I am the tender, home thing in her life; the thing to pet and
care for and find waiting. It is that that is so beautiful for me and so
tragic for her."
"Why tragic?"
"Oh, but you do not feel it? A woman like that, such a heart, and such a
spirit--and no one nearer than I am? That she should have no husband and
no child? I am a makeshift for all that she has lost, or never had."
"And Mrs. Talcott?" said Gregory after a moment. "Is it Mrs. Talcott's
tragedy to have missed even a makeshift?"
Karen now turned her eyes on him, and her face, as she scrutinized him,
showed a slight severity. "Hardly that. She has Tante."
"Has her as the chair has her, you mean?" He couldn't for the life of
him control the question. It seemed indeed due to their friendship that
he should not conceal from her the fact that he found disproportionate
elements in her devotion. Yet it was not the right way in which to be
frank, and Karen showed him so in her reply. "I mean that Tante is
everything to her and that, in the nature of things, she cannot be so
much to Tante. You mustn't take quite literally what I said of the
chair, you know. It can hardly be a makeshift to have somebody like
Tante to love and care for. I don't quite know what you mean by speaking
like that," Karen said. Her gaze, in meeting his, had become almost
stern. She seemed to scan him from a distance.
Gregory, though he felt a pang of disquietude, felt no disposition to
retreat. He intended that she should be made to understand what he
meant. "I think that what it comes to is that it is you I am thinking
of, rather than of Mrs. Talcott," he said. "I don't know your guardian,
and I do know you, and it is what she gets rather than what she gives
that is most apparent to me."
"Gets? From me? What may that be?" Karen continued to return his gaze
almost with haughtiness.
"The most precious thing I can imagine," said Gregory. "Your love. I
hope that she is properly grateful for it."
She looked at him and the slow colour mounted to her cheeks; but it was
as if in unconscious response to his feeling; it hardly, even yet,
signified self-consciousness. She had stood still in asking her last
question and she still did not move as she said: "I do not like to hear
you speak so. It shows me that you understand nothing."
"Does it? I want to understand everything."
"You care for me," said Karen, standing still, her eyes on his, "and I
care for you; but what I most wish in such a friend is that he should
see and understand. May I tell you something? Will you wait while I
tell you about my life?"
"Please tell me."
"I want you to see and understand Tante," said Karen. "And how much I
love her; and why."
They walked on, from the terrace to the cliff-path. Karen stopped when
they had gone a little way and leaned her elbows on the stone wall
looking out at the sea. "She has been everything to me," she said.
"Everything."
He was aware, as he leaned beside her in the mellow evening light, of a
great uneasiness mingling with the beautiful gravity of the moment. She
was near him as she had never yet been near. She had almost recognized
his love. It was there between them, and it was as if, not turning from
it, she yet pointed to something beyond and above it, something that it
was his deep instinct to evade and hers to show him. He must not take a
step towards her, she seemed to tell him, until he had proved to her
that he had seen what she did. And nothing she could say would, he felt
sure of it, alter his fundamental distrust of Madame von Marwitz.
"I want to tell you about my life," said Karen, looking out at the sea
from between her hands. "You have heard my story, of course; people are
always told it; but you have never heard it from my side. You have heard
no doubt about my father and mother, and how she left the man she did
not love for him. My mother died when I was quite little; so, though I
remember her well she does not come into the part of my story that I
want to tell you. But I was thirteen years old when my father died, and
that begins the part that leads to Tante. It was in Rome, in winter when
he died; and I was alone with him; and there was no money, and I had
more to bear than a child's mind and heart should have. He died. And
then there were dreadful days. Cold, coarse people came and took me and
put me in a convent in Paris. That convent was like hell to me. I was so
miserable. And I had never known restraint or unkindness, and the French
girls, so sly and so small in their thoughts, were hateful to me. And I
did not like the nuns. I was punished and punished--rightly no doubt. I
was fierce and sullen, I remember, and would not obey. Then I heard, by
chance, from a girl whose family had been to her concert in Paris, that
Madame Okraska was with her husband at Fontainebleau. Of her I knew
nothing but the lovely face in the shop-windows. But her husband's name
brought back distant days to me. He had known my father; I remembered
him--the fair, large, kindly smiling, very sad man--in my father's
studio among the clay and marble. He bought once a little head my father
had done of me when I was a child. So I ran away from the convent--oh,
it was very bad; I knocked down a nun and escaped the portress, and hid
for a long time in the streets. And I made my way through Paris and
walked for a day and night to Fontainebleau; and there in the forest, in
the evening, I was lost, and almost dead with hunger and fatigue. And as
I stood by the road I saw the carriage approaching from very far away
and saw sitting in it, as it came nearer, the beautiful woman. Shall I
ever forget it? The dark forest and the evening sky above and her face
looking at me--looking, looking, full of pity and wonder. She has told
me that I was the most unhappy thing that she had ever seen. My father's
friend was with her; but though I saw him and knew that I was safe, I
had eyes only for her. Her face was like heaven opening. When the
carriage stopped and she leaned to me, I sprang to her and she put her
arms around me. They have been round me ever since," said Karen, joining
her fingers over her eyes and leaning her forehead upon them so that her
face was hidden; and for a moment she did not speak. "Ever since," she
went on presently, "she has been joy and splendour and beauty. What she
has given me is nothing. It is what she is herself that lifts the lives
of other people. Those who do not know her seem to me to have lives so
sad and colourless compared to mine. You cannot imagine it, anyone so
great, yet at the same time so little and so sweet. She is merry like no
one else, and witty, and full of cajoleries, like a child. One cannot be
dull with her, not for one moment. And there is through it all her
genius, the great flood of wonderful music; can you think what it is
like to live with that? And under-lying everything is the great
irremediable sorrow. I was with her when it came; the terrible thing. I
did not live with them while he was alive, you know, my Onkel Ernst; he
was so good and kind--always the kindest of friends to me; but he loved
her too deeply to be able to share their life, and how well one
understands that in her husband. He had me put at a school in Dresden. I
did not like that much, either. But, even if I were lonely, I knew that
my wonderful friends--my Tante and my Onkel--were there, like the sun
behind the grey day, and I tried to study and be dutiful to please them.
And in my holidays I was always with them, twice it was, at their
beautiful estate in Germany. And it was there that the horror came that
wrecked her life; her husband's death, his death that cannot be
explained or understood. He drowned himself. We never say it, but we
know it. That is the fear, the mystery. All his joy with her, his love
and happiness--to leave them;--it was madness; he had always been a sad
man; one saw that in his face; the doctors said it was madness. He
disappeared without a word one day. For three weeks--nothing. Tante was
like a creature crying out on the rack. And it was I who found him by
the lake-edge one morning. She was walking in the park, I knew; she used
to walk and walk fast, fast, quite silent; and with horrible fear I
thought: If I can keep her from seeing. I turned--and she was beside me.
I could not save her. Ah--poor woman!" Karen closed her hands over her
face.
They stood for a long time in silence, Gregory leaning beside her and
looking down at the sea. His thought was not with the stricken figure
she put before him; it dwelt on the girl facing horror, on the child
bearing more than a child should bear. Yet he was glad to feel, as a
background to his thoughts, that Madame von Marwitz was indeed very
pitiful.
"You understand," said Karen, straightening herself at last and laying
her hands on the wall. "You see how it is."
"Yes," said Gregory.
"It is kind of you, and beautiful, to feel me, as your friend, a person
of value," said Karen. "But it does not please me to have the great fact
of my life belittled."
"I haven't meant to do that, really. I see why it means so much, to you.
But I see you before I see the facts of your life; they interest me
because of you," said Gregory. "You come first to me. It's that I want
you to understand."
Karen had at last turned her eyes upon his and they met them in a long
encounter that recalled to Gregory their first. It was not the moment
for explicit recognitions or avowals; the shadow of the past lay too
darkly upon her. But that their relation had changed her deepened gaze
accepted. She took his hand, she had a fashion almost boyish of taking
his rather than giving her hand, and said: "We shall both understand
more and more; that is so, is it not? And some day you will know her.
Until you know her you cannot really understand."