"Mr. Melhuish is half asleep," she was saying. "And I haven't got his room
ready after all this time."
"He didn't get much sleep last night," Brenda replied. "We none of us did
for that matter. We were wandering round the Park and just missing each
other like the people in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_."
"Come and help me to get that room ready," Anne said. "Father and mother
may be home any minute. They ought to have been back before."
Brenda was on her feet in a moment. She appeared glad to have some excuse
for action. She was, no doubt, nervous and excited as to the probable
result of her lover's mission to the Hall, and wanted to be alone with
Anne in order that they might speculate upon those probabilities which
Banks's return would presently transform into certainties.
Anne turned to me before they left the room and indicated three shelves of
books half hidden behind the settle. "You might find something to read
there, unless you'd sooner have a nap," she said. "We shan't be having
supper until eight."
I preferred, however, to go out and make my own estimate of probabilities
in the serenity of the August evening. My mind was too full to read. I
wanted to examine my own ideas just then, not those of some other man or
woman.
"I'm going for a walk," I said to Anne. "I want to think." And I looked at
her with a greater boldness than I had dared hitherto. I claimed a further
recognition of that understanding she had, as I believed, so recently
admitted.
"To think out that play?" she returned lightly, but her expression did not
accord with her tone. She had paused at the door, and as she looked back
at me, there was a suggestion of sadness in her face, of regret, or it
might even have been of remorse. She looked, I thought, as though she were
sorry for me.
She was gone before I could speak again.
* * * * *
I found my way out by the back door through which Jervaise and I had
entered all those incalculable hours ago; and I looked up at the window
from which Anne's beautiful voice had hailed me out of the night. I wanted
to think about her, to recall how she had looked and spoken--at that
window; in the course of her talk with Frank Jervaise; in the recent scene
in the farm sitting-room when she had ambushed herself so persistently
behind the ear of the settle; and, most of all, I desired to weigh every
tone and expression I could remember in that last long conversation of
ours; every least gesture or attention that might give me a hope of having
won, in some degree, her regard or interest.
But the perplexing initiative of my intelligence would not, for some
reason, permit me to concentrate my thoughts on her at that moment. My
mind was bewilderingly full of Anne, but I could not think of her. When I
fell into the pose of gazing up at her window, the association suggested
not the memory I desired, but the picture of Frank Jervaise fumbling in
the darkness of the porch, and the excruciating anguish of Racquet's bark.
From that I fell to wondering why I had not seen Racquet on this occasion
of my second visit? I had not remembered him until then.
I pulled myself up with an effort, and finding the surroundings of the
yard so ineffectual as a stimulus, I wandered down the hill towards the
wood. I suggested to myself that I might meet Banks returning from the
Hall, but my chief hope was that I might revive the romance of the night.
The sun was setting clear and red, a different portent from the veiled
thing that had finally hidden itself in a huddle of purple and gray cloud
the night before. I had seen it from my bedroom at the Hall as I dressed
for dinner and had mildly regretted the threat of possible bad weather. I
had been a little bored by the anticipations I had formed of my week-end.
The Jervaises, from what I had seen of them, promised, I thought, to be
uncommonly dull. I had not seen Brenda before dinner.
I roused myself again and made an effort to shift the depression that was
settling upon me, but the mood was not to be exorcised by any deliberate
attempt to revive the glow of adventure that had warmed my earlier
excursions through the wood. The very stillness of the evening, the air of
preparation for repose, the first faint suggestions of the passage from
summer to autumn, all had some effect of pervading melancholy. I found
myself speculating on the promise of change that my talk with Anne had
foreshadowed; of the uprooting of Farmer Banks, of the family's
emigration, and the sadness of their farewells to this exquisitely
peaceful country of England.
And then the thought that I had unconsciously feared and repressed since I
had left the farm, broke through all these artificial abstractions and
forced itself upon my attention. I struggled against it vainly for a few
seconds and then braced myself to meet the realisation of my own failure.
For it was that shadow which had been stalking me since Anne had so
obliquely criticised my comedy. And it seemed to me now that her last
strange expression as she left the room, that look of pity and regret, had
all too surely indicated the certainty that she--I faced it with a kind of
bitter despair--that she despised me. I was "well-off." I belonged to the
Jervaises' class. She had flung those charges at me contemptuously before
she had finally dismissed my one futile claim to distinction by classing
me among the writers of that artificial English comedy which had not even
the redeeming virtue of wit.
Not once in that long conversation with her had she shown the sudden spark
of recognition that had so wonderfully lighted my parting with her in the
night. She had given me her confidence about her family affairs because
she counted me as a new ally, however ineffective, coming in unexpectedly
to fight against the Jervaises. She had acknowledged my worship of her
because she was too clear-sighted and too honest to shirk my inevitable
declaration. But I could not doubt that she rated me as unworthy of her
serious attention. Her whole attitude proclaimed that her one instant of
reaching out towards me had been a mistake; one of the many impulses that
continually blossomed and died in her close intercourse with the spirit of
life.
And I could not blame her for her contempt of me. I despised myself. I was
a man without a serious interest. I had escaped vice, but I had always
lived among surface activities. My highest ambition after I left Cambridge
had been to have one of my foolish plays mounted in a West-End theatre. I
had wanted to be talked about, to be a social success. And I had achieved
that ambition without much difficulty. I had had an independent
income--left me by my father who had died when I was in my second year at
Jesus--only three hundred a year, but enough for me to live upon without
working. I had gone often to the theatre in those days, and had scraped up
an acquaintance with a middle-aged actor, whose chief occupation had been
the stage-managing of new productions. With his help I had studied
stagecraft by attending rehearsals, the best possible school for a
would-be dramatist. And my first accepted play had been written in
collaboration with him. It had not been a great success, but I had gained
invaluable experience, and, after that, success had come to me rapidly and
easily. I found that I had the knack of writing pleasant little artificial
comedies. None of them had run for longer than eight months, and I had
only written five in all, but they had made me comparatively rich. At that
time my investments alone were bringing me in nearly two thousand a year.
I was thirty-two, now, and it seemed to me looking back, that I had never
had one worthy ambition in all those years. I had never even been
seriously in love. Most deplorable of all I had never looked forward to a
future that promised anything but repetitions of the same success.
What had I to live for? I saw before me a life of idleness with no decent
occupation, no objects, but the amassing of more money, the seeking of a
wider circle of acquaintances, dinner-parties at more select houses, an
increasing reputation as a deviser of workmanlike, tolerably amusing
plays. If I had had vices such as a promiscuous love of women, I might
have found the anticipation of such a future more tolerable. There might,
then, have been some incitement to new living, new experience. But I had
nothing.
Yet until that evening in the wood I had hardly paused to consider what
would presently become of me. The gradual increase in my scale of personal
luxury had brought sufficient diversion and satisfaction. I had lived in
the pleasures of the moment, and had only rarely been conscious that those
pleasures were growing stale; that the crust of life upon which I had so
diligently crawled, was everywhere and always the same.
Now it was as if that monotonous surface had amazingly split. My crawling
was paralysed and changed to a terrified stillness. I had paused,
horrified, at the mouth of a pit, and gazed down with a sick loathing at
the foundations of my life that had been so miraculously revealed. I did,
indeed, stand suddenly stock still in the wood, and staring down the
darkening vista of the path, saw not the entranced twilight that was
sinking the path in a pool of olive green shadows, but a kind of bioscopic
presentation of my own futile, monotonous existence.
If Anne would have nothing to do with me, what, I asked myself, did the
world hold that could conceivably make my life worth living?
I suppose most men and women have asked themselves the same question when
they have been unexpectedly stirred by a great love. The sense of
unworthiness comes with a shock of surprise that seems violently to tear
open the comfortable cloak of self-satisfaction. I had been content with
my life, even a little vain of my achievement, until that last
conversation with Anne; now I loathed the thought of my own inefficiency
and all my prospects of success appeared unendurably tame. I was in the
spiritual state of a religious convert, suddenly convinced of sin.
And yet somehow in the depths of my consciousness there was a sensible
stir of resentment. The artificial being I had created during my
thirty-two years of life had an existence of its own and protested against
this threat of instant annihilation. I wanted to defend myself, and I was
petulantly irritable because I could find no defence.
For the strange Fate that had planned this astounding revelation to me,
had apparently led up to it by the subtlest arrangement of properties and
events. My disgrace at the Jervaises' had prepared me for this moment. My
responses to humiliation had been, as it were, tested and strained by that
ordeal. And at the same time I had been powerfully influenced to despise
the life of the Jervaises and all that they stood for, socially and
ethically. Then, almost without a pause, a new ideal of life had been
presented to me; and the contrast had been so vivid as to awaken even my
dulled powers of apprehension. The Jervaise type was more or less familiar
to me; their acceptance of security as an established right, their lack of
anything like initiative, their general contentment with themselves, their
standards of judgment and their surroundings, represented the attitude
towards life with which I was most familiar. It had been my own attitude.
I had even dreamed of re-establishing the half-ruined home of the elder
branch of the Melhuish family in Derbyshire!
And the contrast afforded by the lives and ambitions of Anne and her
brother had been so startling that I believe I must have been stirred by
it to some kind of awakening even had I not fallen in love with Anne. I
had been given so perfect an opportunity to enter into their feelings and
views by my strange and intimate association with their antagonism to all
that was typified by the rule of the Hall. By reason of my sympathy with
the Banks I had been able to realise the virtue of struggle and the evils
of the almost unlimited and quite indiscriminating power wielded by such
landowners as old Jervaise. And in condemning him and his family, I must
condemn myself also. We were all of us so smug and self-satisfied. We had
blindly believed that it was our birthright to reap where we had not sown.
Nevertheless, though the truth was so plain to me in that moment, I
accepted it grudgingly. The voice of my artificial self clamoured for a
hearing. But these things were so, had always been so, it protested; what
could I do to change them? And probably, if it had not been for the force
of the thrilling passion of reverence and admiration for Anne that had
suddenly illuminated my whole being, the cultivated inertia of a life-time
would finally have conquered me. I should have thrust the problem away
from me and returned with a sensual satisfaction to the familiar way of
life I understood. I should have consoled myself with the reflection that
mine was not the temperament to face the ardours and disappointments of
struggle.
As it was, I longed so furiously to justify myself before Anne; to win, by
some heroic measure, her good opinion, that the incentive of my passion
bore me triumphantly over the first re-actions of inertia and protest. I
could never return to my old complacency, although the mechanical,
accustomed habit of my thought had for me, as yet, no suggestion other
than some change in the ideal and manner of my writing. I thought vaguely
of attempting some didactic drama to illustrate the tragic contrast
between gentle and simple that had been so glaringly illuminated for me by
recent experience. Yet, even as I played with that idea, I recognised it
as a device of my old self to allay my discontent. I caught myself
speculating on the promise of the play's success, on the hope of winning
new laurels as an earnest student of sociology. I thrust that temptation
from me with a sneer at my own inherent hypocrisy.
"But what else can you do?" argued my old self and my only reply was to
bluster. I bullied myself. I treated myself as a foolish child. The new
spirit in me waved its feeble arms and shouted wildly of its splendid
intentions. I could be immensely valiant in the presence of this single
listener, but the thought of Anne humiliated and subdued even this bright
new spirit that had so amazingly taken possession of me. I wondered if I
might not submit my problem to her ask her what she would have me to do.
Nevertheless, I knew that if I would win her esteem, I must act on my own
initiative.
My conflict and realisation of new desires had had, however, one salutary
effect. The depression of my earlier mood had fallen from me. When I
looked round at the widening pool of darkness that flowed and deepened
about the undergrowth, I found that it produced no longer any impression
of melancholy.