"_That_ was the heaven-appointed scheme. And there we were, all five of
us, bent on frustrating the divine will--I beg Gertrude's
pardon--Gertrude's will was entirely in accord."
"It sounds delightfully simple, but I doubt if it would have worked out
so. We've all got as much of each other as we want."
"That's what we haven't got. Very large, important pieces of each of us
have been taken and given to the wrong person. Look at you--look at me."
She looked at him. "My dear, the largest and most important part of you
is kept well out of the reach of Rose's little fingers. You and I have
quite as much of each other as is good for us. If _we_ were to tear each
other to pieces there'd be nothing left of us."
Thus lightly they handled it, setting out in the morning.
Their pace slackened. They had begun to think.
She had always been a little hard on him about Rose, Tanqueray thought.
It was as if she accused him, or rather his genius, of a monstrous
egoism. Surely that only meant that it was indomitably sound and sane. A
reckless sanity it had, a soundness capable of any risks. There never
was any man who so defied the forces of dissolution, who had so profound
an instinct of self-preservation.
Such a nature was bound to be inhospitable to parasites. By the very
ease with which it assimilated all food of earth and heaven, it starved
them at the roots.
It was not that he deliberately cast off any tender thing that clung to
him. It was that the sheer impulse of growth in him was so tremendous
that it burst through and out-soared the embracing and aspiring bonds.
His cruelty (for it _was_ cruelty from the poor parasite's point of
view) was like Nature's, unconscious and impersonal.
It was not his fault, therefore, if Rose's arms, try as she would, could
never hold him. It was not that he was indifferent to Rose or to her
suffering, or that he shrank in moral cowardice from dealing with it as
a man should deal. It was that the voice of implacably wise, and
indubitably sane instincts warned him that he would accomplish no great
thing if he turned to contemplate her tragedy, still less if he
accepted it as his own. Incorruptible impulses urged him to evasion. And
it was thus that in the seven years of his marriage he had achieved
almost complete oblivion of her.
But Jane--Jane was a creature of like impulses and of the same stature
as he. Her dependence on him, if she was dependent, was for such things
as overflowed from him, that cost him no effort to bestow. And she gave
as superbly as she received. There was nothing in the least parasitic
about Jane. She had the freedom of all the spaces of earth and heaven.
She could tramp the hills beside him with the same breath and stride.
He had given her his hand for the last steep ascent. She sprang to it
and took it in her fine, firm grasp; but he felt no great pull upon his
arm. She kept step with him and reached the top unflushed, unpanting.
Watching her, he saw how marriage had ripened her slender body and given
to it the beauty that it had lacked. She was more feminine than ever.
She had added that invincible quality to the sexless charm that had
drawn him hitherto, drawn him irresistibly, but on paths remote from
disaster.
(He had forgotten that he had been aware that she was formidable ever
since he had first realized that she belonged to another man.)
They lunched at Post Bridge, at the little inn that Tanqueray knew. They
drove (a sudden inspiration seizing them) to Merivale and back. They
stopped at their inn again for tea, and faced untired the long tramp of
the return. It was evening when they reached the last moor that lay
between them and the farm lane.
The long uphill road unwound itself before them, a dun-white band flung
across the darkening down. A veil of grey air was drawn across the
landscape. To their left the further moors streamed to the horizon, line
after line, curve after curve, fluent in the watery air. Nearer, on the
hillside to their right, under the haze that drenched its green to
darkness, the furze threw out its unquenchable gold.
Jane was afraid of her thoughts and Tanqueray's. She talked incessantly.
She looked around her and made him see how patches of furze seen under a
haze showed flattened, with dark bitten edges, clinging close like
lichen on a granite wall; and how, down the hillsides, in the beds of
perished streams, the green grass ran like water.
"I love your voice," he said, "but I wish you'd look at me when you're
talking."
"If I did," she said, "I couldn't talk."
The truth leaped out of her, and she drew in her breath, as if thus she
could recall it; seeing all that it meant, and knowing that he who saw
everything must see.
A silence fell on them. It lasted till they topped the rise.
Then Tanqueray spoke.
"Yes. A precious hash we've all made of it. You and I and Brodrick and
poor Nina. Could anything be more fatuous, more perverse?"
"Not all of us. Not Owen. He didn't go far wrong when he married Laura."
"Because the beast's clairvoyant. And love only made him more so; while
it makes us poor devils blind as bats."
"There's a dear little bat just gone by us. He's so happy."
"Ah--you should see him trying to fly by daylight."
Silence and the lucid twilight held them close.
"Jinny--do you remember that walk we had once, coming back from
Wendover?"
She did not answer him.
"Jinny--we're there again and where we were then. We've slipped
everything between. Positively, I can't remember now what came between."
It was her state, also. She could have owned it. Only that to her it was
strange and terrible, the facility with which they had annihilated time
and circumstance, all that had come between. It was part of their
vitality, the way they let slip the things that hurt, the way they
plunged into oblivion and emerged new-made.
"We must have gone wrong somewhere, in the beginning," he said.
"Don't let's talk about it any more."
"It's better to talk about it than to bottle it up inside us. That turns
it to poison."
"Yes."
"And haven't we always told the truth to each other?"
"Not in the beginning. If we only had----"
"We didn't know it then."
"_I_ knew it," she said.
"Why didn't you tell me, then?"
"You know what you'd have thought of me if I had."
"You shouldn't have cared what I thought. You should have risked it."
"Risked it?"
"Risked it."
"But I risked losing you altogether. What did _you_ risk?"
He was silent.
"Why do you blame me? It was your fault, your choice."
"Was it really mine? Was it I who went wrong?"
"Yes," she said. "In the beginning. You knew I cared for you."
"If you'd let me see it."
"Oh, you saw it. I didn't tell you in as many words. But I let you see
it. _That_ was where I went wrong."
"Yes, yes." He assented, for it was truth's hour. "You should have made
me _feel_ it."
"How could I?"
"That was it. You couldn't."
"I couldn't when I knew you'd seen it."
"How did you know?"
"Oh--_you_ took good care of that."
"Was I a brute? Was I a brute to you, Jinny?"
She smiled.
"Not as men go. You couldn't help it. There was no deceiving me."
"Why, after all, shouldn't you have told me?"
"Why indeed?"
"It's a preposterous convention that leaves all the truth-telling to the
unhappy man."
"Still--there it is. We can't get over it."
"_You_ could have got over it. It wasn't made for you."
"It was made for all women. And for one who has been wrecked by it there
are millions who have been saved. It was made for me more than any of
them."
"If you prefer other women's conventions to your own happiness."
"Would it have been happiness to have given my heart and my soul to
somebody who had no use for them and showed it?"
"You insist that I showed it?"
"You showed me plainly that it wasn't my heart and my soul you wanted."
"There you're wrong. There was a moment--if you'd only known it."
"I did know."
"What did you know?"
"I knew there was some power I had, if I had known how to use it."
"And didn't you?"
"I don't know. You see, I didn't try."
"You know how to use it now, I can tell you, with a vengeance."
"No. It isn't the same power, I think."
"At any rate you knew that it was touch and go with me? That if _you_'d
chosen you might have done anything with me?"
"I knew that any other woman could have done the same."
"Then why not you?"
"I? I didn't want to hold you that way. I had some decency. I loved my
poor friend too much to take him at a disadvantage."
"Good God! So _that_ was your view of it? I was sacrificed to your
invincible ignorance."
"Oh no, to my knowledge. Or shall we say to an honourable scruple?"
"Honourable?"
"Yes. The whole honour of women lies in that."
"I hope you see where the whole honour of women has landed us at last."
They had reached the lane leading to their farm. Its depth held them
closer than the twilight held. The trees guarded them. Every green
branch roofed a hollow deep with haze.
"If you were a cold woman I could understand it."
"_I_ couldn't. It's because I was anything but cold."
"I know. You were afraid then."
"Yes. I was mortally afraid."
Above the lane, on the slope of the foot hills, they could see their
farm, a dim grey roof in a ring of ash-trees. A dim green field opened
out below it, fan-wise with a wild edge that touched the moor. It seemed
to her with her altered memory that it was home they were drawing near.
"George," she said, "you know women as God knows them; why didn't you
know me? Can't you see what I was afraid of? What we're all afraid of?
What we're eternally trying to escape from? The thing that hunts us
down, that turns again and rends us."
"You thought you saw that in me?"
"I don't see it now."
"Not now," he whispered.
They had come to the porch of the farmhouse. The door stood open. The
lamp-light drew them in. He closed the door behind them. She stood
facing him as one who waits.
"Not now," he said aloud.
He glanced round. The house and all about it was still.
"If we could always be here, Jinny----"
She turned from him, afraid.
"Why not?" he said, and followed her and took her in his arms.
He pressed back her head with one hand. His face sought hers, the face
she knew, with its look of impetuous flight, of curves blown back, the
face that seemed to lean forward, breasting the wind of its own speed.
It leaned now, swift to its desire. It covered her face. Its lips were
pressed to her lips, lips that drank her breath, that were fierce in
their drinking, after their long thirst. She pushed it from her with her
two hands and cried out, "Rose, little Rose!"
She struggled from his arms and ran from him, stumbling up the steep
stairs. A door opened and shut. He heard her feet go slowly on the floor
of her room above him. They reached the bed. She seemed to sink there.