But all these frictions, and changes, and readjustments of vision did
not come in a steady progression. The unfolding of their inner life
followed intricate spirals, returned on itself, coiled outward again.
Sometimes Sophy found herself standing breathless in a glow of the old
glamour, that fell on her as if through a far window in the past,
reflected back from the blank wall of the present. Then she would think
that perhaps the man that he had seemed in their first love-days was the
real man, and this Morris only the result of their hectic, vapid life.
Again, she would wonder if he had really ever been what she had dreamed
him, even then. It was as if some rare spirit had "possessed" him for
the time being. Or was it that love had transfigured him? She could not
bridge with her reason the gulf that lay between his past and his
present personality.
Then as the months passed, and he grew more and more relaxed and
slovenly of spirit under the ease of possession, she came to think that
he had never been Endymion at all. She had loved a wraith, a seeming.
She did not realise that sometimes love works temporary miracles, even
as religion does; that love also makes conversions which are very real
for the moment, but that cannot stand the wear of every day.
But when the final realisation came, Sophy felt as if life were over for
her. Love had seemed the only real life; now love was over. She sat
alone in her bedroom one night, thinking: "Love is over ... love is
over...." She felt such anguish at this thought as drove her to her
feet. She went and stood at her window, looking out at the bare trees in
the Square and the cross of electric lights against the sky, made dark
purple by contrast with the orange glow. She felt as if it were too much
to bear--this second terrible mistake. And yet, what escape was there?
It seemed to her that there was no escape. Her misery was all the more
terrible because life had given her a second chance, as it were--and
for a second time she had built her House of Love upon the sands. Vain
regret stole over her like lava. It spread barrenness. Once more her
creative gift lay strangled under the ashes of her own mistake.
She thought: "This is age--this devastated feeling. I am really old now.
I am only thirty-two, but I could not feel older in spirit if I were
eighty."
Her affection for him only made this death of deeper love more terrible.
As in a pale shadow-play, she saw her shadow-self, repeating the role
that she had once enacted in a more vivid drama--the role of wife to a
man whom she had ceased to love, but towards whom she felt a
compassionate affection. There is no part in the tragi-comedy of life
that requires such terrific powers of acting.
And to this exigent demand was added the pang of self-ridicule. Life had
given her the talisman of experience to guard her--and this was what she
had done with it. She blushed hot, remembering suddenly the love-songs
that she had written when he was in Florida. It was anguish to think
that what she had believed with all her being was only a love-sick
fancy.
She stood thinking, her eyes on the cross of electric lights. She stared
at it so long that when she looked away it shone green on the purple
dusk--a cross of glow-worms.
She thought of Richard Garnett's words: "Then is Love blessed, when from
the cup of the body he drinks the wine of the soul." This had been her
dream of love--twice over. But from the cup of the body she had drunk
only the gall of the senses. And, again and again, she went back in
wondering memory to that time of beglamourment. The words of the first
sonnet she had ever sent him, painted it clearly. Line by line, the
sonnet came back to her:
"After long years of slowly starved desire,
Within this shell of me myself lay sped:
My life was wrought of birthdays of the dead;
I slept on graves. You came. My spirit's fire
Leapt into light and showed Despair a liar:
You came--and all Death's ashen wine blushed red.
Your eyes drank mine: I trembled--not with dread,
But like a lute-string sharply tuned higher.
"--And I am mocked by wistful dreams of old,
As winter by a bright mirage of flowers.
My vanished Spring lives in your eyes' dear blue.
My maiden faith is by your lips retold--
Long, long ago drained out my purple hours--
Lo! in your hand Love's hour-glass brimmed anew!"
Despite all her idealism, however, Sophy had that sort of dogged courage
which sets its teeth and digs in the bed-rock of life for hid lessons.
She did not intend to go dolefully inert like the poor wights in the
Hall of Eblis, with her hand always over the flame of pain in her heart.
"Very well," she addressed Life in her thought. "You have done this to
me. Now what is your meaning? I am not one of those who think your
doings like the 'tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.' I believe your grimmest practical jokes have an
inner meaning. Why did you cheat me with love a second time? Why, when I
had given up all thought of love, and won a tranquil, clear content of
spirit, did you send love to trample my secret garden like a dark angel
in a whirlwind?"
She came to the conclusion that life means something vaster and more
splendid than a restored Eden, where one man and one woman walk together
guarded in their blissful isolation by the flaming sword of selfishness.
"Come forth of that!" thunders the Voice that is not one love but All
Love. And so Life hales us by the hair, out of our little palaces of
dreams. And we are driven naked into the desert of reality. And when we
have read aright what is written in the desert sands--behold! the desert
blossoms like the rose.
But this writing was not yet clear to Sophy. She toiled through the hot,
clogging sands, and what was traced upon them seemed to her only the
wanton hieroglyphics of the wind ... the wild wind that blew men and
women hither and thither like rootless stalks. Yet she believed in this
vaster and more splendid meaning that Life kept hidden, under all its
dark pranks and sardonic jesting. She imagined Life, in those days, as a
huge, Afrit clown, under whose motley is secreted the Seal of Solomon.
If one could but survive the horrid rough-and-tumble of his sinister
game, one would be able, in the end, to snatch away the magic seal at
whose touch all mysteries open.
That spring brought a new difficulty. Lady Wychcote's letters on the
subject of seeing her grandson had become very pressing of late. In
February she had been quite ill. Now in her convalescence she wrote more
urgently than ever, saying that she felt she had a right to ask that her
only grandchild should not be kept away from her any longer. She asked
(her request was almost in the form of a demand) that Sophy would bring
Cecil's son to England some time during that spring or summer. Sophy
felt the justice of this request. She felt that she owed its fulfilment
to Cecil's mother--that she really had no right to keep Bobby apart from
her indefinitely.
And yet, when she thought of a visit to England and all that it
involved, she winced from it in her most secret fibres.