BARUCH was now in love. He had fallen in love with Clara suddenly and
totally. His tendency to reflectiveness did not diminish his passion: it
rather augmented it. The men and women whose thoughts are here and there
continually are not the people to feel the full force of love. Those who
do feel it are those who are accustomed to think of one thing at a time,
and to think upon it for a long time. ‘No man,’ said Baruch once, ‘can
love a woman unless he loves God.’ ‘I should say,’ smilingly replied the
Gentile, ‘that no man can love God unless he loves a woman.’ ‘I am
right,’ said Baruch, ‘and so are you.’
But Baruch looked in the glass: his hair, jet black when he was a youth,
was marked with grey, and once more the thought came to him—this time
with peculiar force—that he could not now expect a woman to love him as
she had a right to demand that he should love, and that he must be
silent. He was obliged to call upon Barnes in about a fortnight’s time.
He still read Hebrew, and he had seen in the shop a copy of the Hebrew
translation of the _Moreh Nevochim_ of Maimonides, which he greatly
coveted, but could not afford to buy. Like every true book-lover, he
could not make up his mind when he wished for a book which was beyond his
means that he ought once for all to renounce it, and he was guilty of
subterfuges quite unworthy of such a reasonable creature in order to
delude himself into the belief that he might yield. For example, he
wanted a new overcoat badly, but determined it was more prudent to wait,
and a week afterwards very nearly came to the conclusion that as he had
not ordered the coat he had actually accumulated a fund from which the
_Moreh Nevochim_ might be purchased. When he came to the shop he saw
Barnes was there, and he persuaded himself he should have a quieter
moment or two with the precious volume when Clara was alone. Barnes, of
course, gossiped with everybody.
He therefore called again in the evening, about half an hour before
closing time, and found that Barnes had gone home. Clara was busy with a
catalogue, the proof of which she was particularly anxious to send to the
printer that night. He did not disturb her, but took down the
Maimonides, and for a few moments was lost in revolving the doctrine,
afterwards repeated and proved by a greater than Maimonides, that the
will and power of God are co-extensive: that there is nothing which might
be and is not. It was familiar to Baruch, but like all ideas of that
quality and magnitude—and there are not many of them—it was always new
and affected him like a starry night, seen hundreds of times, yet for
ever infinite and original.
But was it Maimonides which kept him till the porter began to put up the
shutters? Was he pondering exclusively upon God as the folio lay open
before him? He did think about Him, but whether he would have thought
about Him for nearly twenty minutes if Clara had not been there is
another matter.
‘Do you walk home alone?’ he said as she gave the proof to the boy who
stood waiting.
‘Yes, always.’
‘I am going to see Marshall to-night, but I must go to Newman Street
first. I shall be glad to walk with you, if you do not mind diverging a
little.’
She consented and they went along Oxford Street without speaking, the
roar of the carriages and waggons preventing a word.
They turned, however, into Bloomsbury, and were able to hear one another.
He had much to say and he could not begin to say it. There was a great
mass of something to be communicated pent up within him, and he would
have liked to pour it all out before her at once. It is just at such
times that we often take up as a means of expression and relief that
which is absurdly inexpressive and irrelevant.
‘I have not seen your sister yet; I hope I may see her this evening.’
‘I hope you may, but she frequently suffers from headache and prefers to
be alone.’
‘How do you like Mr Barnes?’
The answer is not worth recording, nor is any question or answer which
was asked or returned for the next quarter of an hour worth recording,
although they were so interesting then. When they were crossing Bedford
Square on their return Clara happened to say amongst other commonplaces,—
‘What a relief a quiet space in London is.’
‘I do not mind the crowd if I am by myself.’
‘I do not like crowds; I dislike even the word, and dislike “the masses”
still more. I do not want to think of human beings as if they were a
cloud of dust, and as if each atom had no separate importance. London is
often horrible to me for that reason. In the country it was not quite so
bad.’
‘That is an illusion,’ said Baruch after a moment’s pause.
‘I do not quite understand you, but if it be an illusion it is very
painful. In London human beings seem the commonest, cheapest things in
the world, and I am one of them. I went with Mr Marshall not long ago to
a Free Trade Meeting, and more than two thousand people were present.
Everybody told me it was magnificent, but it made me very sad.’ She was
going on, but she stopped. How was it, she thought again, that she could
be so communicative? How was it? How is it that sometimes a stranger
crosses our path, with whom, before we have known him for more than an
hour, we have no secrets? An hour? we have actually known him for
centuries.
She could not understand it, and she felt as if she had been inconsistent
with her constant professions of wariness in self-revelation.
‘It is an illusion, nevertheless—an illusion of the senses. It is
difficult to make what I mean clear, because insight is not possible
beyond a certain point, and clearness does not come until penetration is
complete and what we acquire is brought into a line with other
acquisitions. It constantly happens that we are arrested short of this
point, but it would be wrong to suppose that our conclusions, if we may
call them so, are of no value.’
She was silent, and he did not go on. At last he said,—
‘The illusion lies in supposing that number, quantity and terms of that
kind are applicable to any other than sensuous objects, but I cannot go
further, at least not now. After all, it is possible here in London for
one atom to be of eternal importance to another.’
They had gone quite round Bedford Square without entering Great Russell
Street, which was the way eastwards. A drunken man was holding on by the
railings of the Square. He had apparently been hesitating for some time
whether he could reach the road, and, just as Baruch and Clara came up to
him, he made a lurch towards it, and nearly fell over them. Clara
instinctively seized Baruch’s arm in order to avoid the poor, staggering
mortal; they went once more to the right, and began to complete another
circuit. Somehow her arm had been drawn into Baruch’s, and there it
remained.
‘Have you any friends in London?’ said Baruch.
‘There are Mrs Caffyn, her son and daughter, and there is Mr A. J. Scott.
He was a friend of my father.’
‘You mean the Mr Scott who was Irving’s assistant?’
‘Yes.’
‘An addition—’ he was about to say, ‘an additional bond’ but he corrected
himself. ‘A bond between us; I know Mr Scott.’
‘Do you really? I suppose you know many interesting people in London, as
you are in his circle.’
‘Very few; weeks, months have passed since anybody has said as much to me
as you have.’
His voice quivered a little, for he was trembling with an emotion quite
inexplicable by mere intellectual relationship. Something came through
Clara’s glove as her hand rested on his wrist which ran through every
nerve and sent the blood into his head.
Clara felt his excitement and dreaded lest he should say something to
which she could give no answer, and when they came opposite Great Russell
Street, she withdrew her arm from his, and began to cross to the opposite
pavement. She turned the conversation towards some indifferent subject,
and in a few minutes they were at Great Ormond Street. Baruch would not
go in as he had intended; he thought it was about to rain, and he was
late. As he went along he became calmer, and when he was fairly indoors
he had passed into a despair entirely inconsistent—superficially—with the
philosopher Baruch, as inconsistent as the irrational behaviour in
Bedford Square. He could well enough interpret, so he believed, Miss
Hopgood’s suppression of him. Ass that he was not to see what he ought
to have known so well, that he was playing the fool to her; he, with a
grown-up son, to pretend to romance with a girl! At that moment she
might be mocking him, or, if she was too good for mockery, she might be
contriving to avoid or to quench him. The next time he met her, he would
be made to understand that he was _pitied_, and perhaps he would then
learn the name of the youth who was his rival, and had won her. He would
often meet her, no doubt, but of what value would anything he could say
be to her. She could not be expected to make fine distinctions, and
there was a class of elderly men, to which of course he would be
assigned, but the thought was too horrible.
Perhaps his love for Clara might be genuine; perhaps it was not. He had
hoped that as he grew older he might be able really to _see_ a woman, but
he was once more like one of the possessed. It was not Clara Hopgood who
was before him, it was hair, lips, eyes, just as it was twenty years ago,
just as it was with the commonest shop-boy he met, who had escaped from
the counter, and was waiting at an area gate. It was terrible to him to
find that he had so nearly lost his self-control, but upon this point he
was unjust to himself, for we are often more distinctly aware of the
strength of the temptation than of the authority within us, which
falteringly, but decisively, enables us at last to resist it.
Then he fell to meditating how little his studies had done for him. What
was the use of them? They had not made him any stronger, and he was no
better able than other people to resist temptation. After twenty years
continuous labour he found himself capable of the vulgarest, coarsest
faults and failings from which the remotest skiey influence in his
begetting might have saved him.
Clara was not as Baruch. No such storm as that which had darkened and
disheartened him could pass over her, but she could love, perhaps better
than he, and she began to love him. It was very natural to a woman such
as Clara, for she had met a man who had said to her that what she
believed was really of some worth. Her father and mother had been very
dear to her; her sister was very dear to her, but she had never received
any such recognition as that which had now been offered to her: her own
self had never been returned to her with such honour. She thought,
too—why should she not think it?—of the future, of the release from her
dreary occupation, of a happy home with independence, and she thought of
the children that might be. She lay down without any misgiving. She was
sure he was in love with her; she did not know much of him, certainly, in
the usual meaning of the word, but she knew enough. She would like to
find out more of his history; perhaps without exciting suspicion she
might obtain it from Mrs Caffyn.