As soon as the term was over, Howard went down to Windlow. He was in a
very unhappy frame of mind. He could not capitulate; but the more that
he thought, the more that he tried to analyse his feelings, the more
complex they became. It really seemed to him at times as if two
perfectly distinct people were arguing within him. He was afraid of
love; his aim had always been to simplify his life as far as possible,
and to live in a serene and cheerful spirit, for the day and in the
day. His work, his relations with colleagues and pupils, had all amused
and interested him; he had cared for people, he had many friends; but
it was all a cool, temperate, unimpassioned kind of caring. People had
drifted in and out of his life; with his frank and easy manner, his
excellent memory for the characteristics and the circumstances of
others, it had been easy for him to pick up a relationship where he had
laid it down; but it was all a very untroubled business, and no one had
ever really entered into his life; he did not like dropping people, and
took some trouble by means of letters to keep up communication with his
old pupils; but his friendships had never reached the point at which
the loss of a friend would have been a severe blow. He felt that he was
always given credit for more affection than he possessed, and this had
made him careful not to fail in any duty of friendship. He was always
ready to take trouble, to advise, to help his old pupils in their
careers; but it had been done more from a sense of courtesy than from
any deeper motive.
Now, however, it was very different; he felt himself wholly preoccupied
by the thought of Maud; and he found himself looking into the secret of
love, as a man might gaze from a hill-top into a chasm where the rocky
ridges plunged into mist, doubting of his way, and mistrusting his own
strength to pursue the journey. He did not know what the quality of his
love was; he recognised an intense kind of passion, but when he looked
beyond that, and imagined himself wedded to Maud, what was the emotion
that would survive the accomplishment of his desires? Would he find
himself longing for the old, comfortable, isolated life again? did he
wish his life to be inextricably intertwined with the life of another?
He was not sure. He had a dread of having to concede an absolute
intimacy, he wished to give only as much as he chose; and then, too, he
told himself that he was too old to marry so young a girl, and that she
would be happier if she could find a more equal partner for her life.
Yet even so the thought of yielding her to another sickened him. He
believed that she had been attracted by Guthrie, and that he had but to
hold his hand and keep his distance, and the relation might broaden
into marriage. He wondered if love could begin so, so easily and
simply. He would like to have believed it could not, yet it was just so
that love did begin! And then, too, he did not know what was the nature
of Maud's feelings to himself. He thought that she had been attracted
to him, but in a sisterly sort of way; that he had come across her when
she was feeling cramped and dissatisfied, and that a friendship with
him had seemed to offer her a chance of expansion and interest.
He often thought of telling the whole story to his aunt; but like many
people who seem extraordinarily frank about their feelings and fancies,
and speak easily even of their emotions, he found himself condemned to
silence about any emotion or experience that had any serious or tragic
quality. Most people would have thought him communicative, and even
lacking in reticence. But he knew in himself that it was not so; he
could speak of his intimate ideas very readily upon slight
acquaintance, because they were not to him matters of deep feeling; but
the moment that they really moved him, he felt absolutely dumb and
tongue-tied.
He established himself at Windlow, and became at once aware that his
aunt perceived that there was something amiss. She gave him
opportunities of speaking to her, but he could not take them. He shrank
with a painful dumbness from displaying his secret wound. It seemed to
him undignified and humiliating to confess his weakness. He hoped
vaguely that the situation would solve itself, and spare him the
necessity of a confession.
He tried to occupy himself in his book, but in vain. Now that he was
confronted with a real and urgent dilemma, the origins of religion
seemed to him to have no meaning or interest. He did not feel that they
had any bearing whatever upon life; and his pain seemed to infect all
his perceptions. The quality of beauty in common things, the
hill-shapes, the colour of field and wood, the lights of dawn and eve,
the sailing cloud, the tints of weathered stone, the old house in its
embowered garden, with the pure green lines of the down above, had no
charm or significance for him any more. Again and again he said to
himself, "How beautiful that would be, if I could but feel it to be
so!" He saw, as clearly and critically as ever, the pleasant forms and
hues and groupings of things, but it was dull and savourless, while all
the attractive ideas that sprang up like flowers in his mind, the happy
trains of thought, in which some single fancy ramified and extended
itself into unsuspected combinations and connections, these all seemed
hardly worth recognising or pursuing. He found himself listless and
distracted, just able by an effort to talk, to listen, to exchange
thoughts, but utterly without any zest or energy.
Jack had gone off for a short visit, and Howard was thus left mostly
alone. He went once or twice to the Vicarage, but found Mr. Sandys an
unmixed trial; there seemed something wholly puerile about his absurd
energies and activities. The only boon of his society was that he
expected no reply to his soliloquies. Maud was there too, a distant
graceful figure; but she, too, seemed to have withdrawn into her own
thoughts, and their talk was mostly formal. Yet he was painfully and
acutely conscious of her presence. She, too, seemed to be clouded and
sad. He found himself unable to talk to her unconstrainedly. He could
only dumbly watch her; she appeared to avert her eyes from him; and yet
he drew from these meetings an infinite series of pictures, which were
as if engraved upon his brain. She became for him in these days like a
lily drooping in a shadowed place and in a thunderous air; something
fading away mutely and sorrowfully, like the old figure of Mariana in
the Grange, looking wearily through listless hours for something which
had once beckoned to her with a radiant gesture, but which did not
return. There were brighter hours, when in the hot July days a little
peace fell on him, a little sense of the fragrance and beauty of the
world. He took to long and solitary walks on the down in search of
bodily fatigue. There was one day in particular which he long
remembered, when he had gone up to the camp, and sate in the shade of
the thicket on the crisp turf, looking out over the valley, unutterably
quiet and peaceful in the hot air. The trees were breathlessly still;
the hamlet roofs peeped out above the orchards, the hot air quivered on
the down. There were little figures far below moving about the fields.
It all looked lost in a sweetness of serene repose; and the thoughts
that had troubled him rose with a bitter poignancy, that was almost a
physical pain. The contrast between the high summer, the rich life of
herb and tree, and his own weary and arid thoughts, fell on him like a
flash. Would it not be better to die, to close one's eyes upon it all,
to sink into silence, than thus to register the awful conflict of will
and passion with the tranquil life that could not surrender its dreams
of peace? What did he need and desire? He could not tell; he felt
almost a hatred of the slender, quiet girl, with her sweet look, her
delicate hands, her noiseless movements. She had made no claim, she did
not come in radiant triumph, with impressive gestures and strong
commanding influences into his life; she had not even cried out
passionately, demanded love, displayed an urgent need; there had been
nothing either tragic or imperious, nothing that called for instant
solution; she was just a girl, sweet, wayward, anxious-minded, living a
trivial, simple, sheltered life. What had given her this awful power
over him, which seemed to have rent and shattered all his tranquil
contentment, and yet had offered no splendid opportunity, claimed no
all-absorbing devotion, no magnificent sacrifice? It was a sort of
monstrous spell, a magical enchantment, which had thus made havoc of
all his plans and gentle schemes. Life, he felt, could never be the
same for him again; he was in the grip of a power that made light of
human arrangements. The old books were full of it; they had spoken of
some hectic mystery, that seized upon warriors and sages alike, wasted
their strength, broke their energies, led them into crime and sorrow.
He had always rather despised the pale and hollow-eyed lovers of the
old songs, and thought of them as he might think of men indulging in a
baneful drug which filched away all manful prowess and vigour. It was
like La Belle Dame sans merci after all, the slender faring child,
whose kiss in the dim grotto had left the warrior 'alone and palely
loitering,' burdened with sad thoughts in the wintry land. And yet he
could not withstand it. He could see the reasonable and sensible
course, a placid friendship, a long life full of small duties and quiet
labours;--and then the thought of Maud would come across him, with her
shining hair, her clear eyes, holding a book, as he had seen her last
in the Vicarage, in her delicate hands, and looking out into the garden
with that troubled inscrutable look; and all the prudent considerations
fell and tumbled together like a house of cards, and he felt as though
he must go straight to her and fall before her, and ask her to give him
a gift the very nature of which he did not know, her girlish self, her
lightly-ranging mind, her tiny cares and anxieties, her virginal
heart--for what purpose? he did not know; just to be with her, to clasp
her close, to hear her voice, to look into her eyes, to discourse with
her some hidden secret of love. A faint sense of some infinite beauty
and nearness came over him which, if he could win it, would put the
whole of life into a different plane. Not a friendly combination, but
an absolute openness and nakedness of soul, nothing hidden, nothing
kept back, everything confessed and admitted, a passing of two streams
of life into one.