Anthony’s hardly won control snapped like a broken twig; he turned from
Kitty, and walked quickly out into the road. His mind was held in the
suspension of shock. He neither knew where he was going nor considered
what he meant to do. He stumbled as he walked with his head bowed and
pushed forward as if he were tied to something he could not get rid of.
There was a desperate urgency in his broken mind, like the urgency of
high fever; he knew there was something he mustn’t think about, some
dreadful image just beyond his conscious will which was prepared to leap
into his mind. Fear ran at his heels. It had neither face nor name, but
it pursued him like a shadow along the hot, white road.
Motors overtook and passed him, people watched him from their garden
gates, and wondered at his crouched, absorbed figure hurrying past them.
He never turned his head through the small, chattering villages or on
the open road. Max followed him, foot-sore and perplexed, but
one-indeaed as Ruth. He knew that there was something strangely wrong
with his master, and he was determined that whatever was wrong or
strange, he would share it.
Anthony had lost his self-consciousness; he ceased to be aware of his
own significance. Self-control and the governance of his mind dropped
away from him like unheeded, unessential things. He was a human being
hounded by an obscure emotion that he dared not face. Anthony ran from
it, but he was conscious as he ran that he could not escape it. There
would be a moment when exhaustion would catch him and force him to give
battle, and there was nothing left in him to fight with. His heart was
as empty as his mind.
They were passing the entrance to a small orchard that lay fronting an
old farm-house when Max felt that they had gone far enough. He whined
suddenly and ran in front of Anthony, lifting a dusty paw, and fixing
his burning topaz eyes on Anthony’s face. He would go on if Anthony went
on, but he had made his protest. Anthony paused uncertainly, looking
about him at the unfamiliar road, the distant red-brick farm, and the
space of white blooms vivid against the evening light. He turned
stumblingly, and sank on the bank under the apple-blossoms. Max crept
beside him, pushing his head against his master’s chest.
Dogs have only one way of showing sympathy with human beings; they offer
themselves up upon the altar of their master’s pain. Max pushed himself
relentlessly into Anthony’s suffering; he would not stay outside and be
safe. He would be a part of Anthony’s pain till the pain stopped.
Anthony felt the warmth reach his heart and was a little comforted.
A late lark was still singing above the orchard trees, very high and
shrill in the clear evening air; the sun lay like a sea of fire across
the fields; every separate grass in the hedge stood up alive in it.
[Illustration: _There was no curtain left between Anthony and his
pain._]
There was no curtain left between Anthony and his pain. He saw its face
and eyes, and they were the face and eyes of Kitty. She had done an
incredible thing incredibly, like some fifth-rate girl in a café. It was
not only cruel; it was vulgar. She had said words that drew blood. They
disfigured Anthony’s love for her.
He might have stood the fact, but not Kitty’s throwing it between the
two men to force on a fight; and for what other reason had she thrown
it? She was bored and light, and, like a bad little tune, her words ran
on in his mind and tortured him. They did not set him free—spiritually
Kitty was dead to him; but Kitty dead was Kitty accessible—the image of
her pulled him back like a strong cable.
If this was what she was, why could he not take advantage of it, satisfy
the hard hunger that possessed him, and grant himself at least the
release of his strained senses?
He told himself this was what love was worth. It was the master miracle
and cheat of life. Anthony had been let out of prison and confronted
with ecstasy, and ecstasy was a trap. He buried his face in his hands
and shut out the lark’s song and the intolerable world.
If he went back, he had nothing to lose. Kitty had destroyed the
spiritual part of love. The man who did not take the actual and make the
best of it was a fool.
It was better to be like an ordinary man, and pigeon-hole women: one
kind—Miss Mellicot, for instance—you marry and respect, and the other
you go wild over and spiritually ignore. Anthony had never believed this
method fair to women. He had not liked to think that any human being
should be treated without respect to his humanity; but perhaps the
judgment of the normal world was sound, and there were people—people
like Kitty—too light to touch even the honor in others. One did not let
them down by treating them at their own valuation because they were too
low to be let down.
But one ought to be very sure of this condition. A memory stirred in
Anthony of how he had thought the same once of his fellow prisoners: he
had condemned them root and branch as fellows who had thrown away their
codes and were therefore worthless.
Afterwards his condemnation had worn thin, he had found so many excuses,
the black clouds of their follies and their failures had been stripped
away like mists, and he had seen through the mists the havoc and
struggle of their souls, for even below their code something had
struggled in them.
Anthony was not sure of Kitty. He thought of her skimming life like a
summer gnat above a pool, a light thing in the light air of her life,
without balance or stability; but he could not be certain that she, too,
had had no struggle. She had worked and suffered. For two years she had
helped to stem the tide of suffering in France when France was the
cockpit of the world, and she had shirked nothing.
She did not shirk anything now, Anthony did not deny her pluck, and once
he had seen her cry. The memory of Kitty’s tears was a strange comfort
to Anthony.
Love rose slowly in his heart and shook him; it would not let him be
driven back cheaply to a worthless Kitty, it would not let Kitty be
worthless. Love held him to her courage and her tears; it even involved
him in her disasters and suggested that if he had been wiser, kinder,
less full of the sense of what was due to the rules of his life—he
might have served her.
Love did not seem to wish for a freed Anthony.
His mind caught against a new point. Whatever Kitty was like, he needn’t
make her worse, he needn’t add humiliation to her. And it would be a new
humiliation if he went back to take her on her own terms; for she would
know that in doing so he despised her. She would let him despise her
because she would think it was only fair, but she would not like it, and
because she would not like it, he must not do it. He must let her at
least feel that the man who had respected her still respected her enough
to leave her alone. He tried to hold himself to this decision, but it
took the taste out of his life.
He did not know now what to do. He realized that his body was exhausted
and wanted food, but he had no wish to fight this exhaustion. He would
have liked to crawl farther into the hedge and become invisible and part
of the earth. Max stirring in his arms roused him to his feet. He pushed
on heavily, with his face towards London.
The apple-blossoms were spectral in the evening light; the sun fell
behind a group of flaming elms; for a long time the sky held a delicate
mauve color, fading into darkness.
The endless houses of the suburbs began; they streamed past him with
long gaps of ugly, empty fields and half-built roads. He noticed nothing
but a sense of closing in and the merciful quieting of night. He did not
hurry any more.
Pain had got up to him now and was no longer pursuing him, and pain had
a familiar face, there was no surprise in it.
Beauty and joy had been the surprise and fear was the race to escape
losing them. Anthony had been overtaken and the race had gone against
him; but there was still pain and the mastery of pain.
Anthony had been near enough to happiness to divine that there is no
such personal success as the success of joy.
He realized that joy is the chief principle of life, and that without it
the Kingdom of Heaven must be entered maimed. Anthony ignored the
Kingdom of Heaven because he could not see it; but he could see, in
flashes, that he was maimed; and unconsciously he felt that the Kingdom
of Heaven was anything that lay beyond the fact of his maiming.
Anthony tried to think about his work, but his mind beat relentlessly
against the thought of Kitty.
His life had no value to himself without joy, but he could still serve
the community. If the world was hard, it was the more important for
those who had tasted the quality of hardness to set themselves towards
discovering possible alleviations for others.
The success of the personal life was not the boundary of the human
spirit.
Happiness serves life unconsciously and has chosen the better part, but
pain is the Martha who must busy herself about many things. Anthony was
like a drowning man clinging to a straw. He did not know that he was
drowning, but the thought of helping the world against pain was the
straw to which he clung.
As the persistent streets closed in upon Anthony a strange feeling of
exhilaration stole across his senses. He had a lift of the mind, and was
possessed by that false sense of strength which comes on the verge of
complete exhaustion.
He told himself that, after all, happiness was the only risk, and that
he had survived it.