"Oh _nonsense_!" cried the Fürstin, and wouldn't speak to me again until
we got to that entirely Teutonic "art" station that is not the least
among the sights of Worms.
"Sores, indeed!" said the Fürstin presently, as we walked up the end of
the platform.
"There's nothing," said the Fürstin, with an unusual note of petulance,
"she'd like better."
"I can't think what men are coming to," she went on. "You're in love
with her, or you wouldn't be so generous. And she's head over heels with
you. And here you are! I'll give you one more chance----"
"I won't take it," I interrupted. "It isn't fair. I tell you I won't
take it. I'll go two days earlier to prevent you. Unless you promise
me---- Of course I see how things are with her. She's not a sphinx. But
it isn't fair. It isn't. Not to her, or to him--or myself. _He's_ got
some claims. He's got more right to her than I...."
"A boy like that! No man has any rights about women--until he's thirty.
And as for me and all the pains _I've_ taken---- Oh! I _hate_ Worms.
Dust and ashes! Well here thank heaven! comes the train. If nothing else
could stir you, Stephen, at least I could have imagined some decent
impulse of gratitude to me. Stephen, you're disgusting. You've
absolutely spoilt this trip for me--absolutely. When only a little
reasonableness on your part---- Oh!"
She left her sentence unfinished.
Berwick and I had to make any conversation that was needed on the way
back to Boppard. Rachel did not talk and the Fürstin did not want to.
§ 6
Directly I had parted from Rachel's questioning eyes I wanted to go back
to them. It seems to me now that all the way across to America, in that
magnificent German liner I joined at Hamburg, I was thinking in confused
alternations of her and of Mary. There are turns of thought that still
bring back inseparably with them the faint echo of the airs of the
excellent but industrious band that glorified our crossing.
I had been extraordinarily shocked and concerned at the thought of Mary
bearing children. It is a grotesque thing to confess but I had never let
myself imagine the possibility of such a thing for her who had been so
immensely mine....
We are the oddest creatures, little son, beasts and barbarians and
brains, neither one nor the other but all confusedly, and here was I who
had given up Mary and resigned her and freed myself from her as I
thought altogether, cast back again into my old pit by the most obvious
and necessary consequence of her surrender and mine. And it's just there
and in that relation that we men and women are so elaborately insecure.
We try to love as equals and behave as equals and concede a level
freedom, and then comes a crisis,--our laboriously contrived edifice of
liberty collapses and we perceive that so far as sex goes the woman
remains to the man no more than a possession--capable of loyalty or
treachery.
There, still at that barbaric stage, the situation stands. You see I had
always wanted to own Mary, and always she had disputed that. That is our
whole story, the story of an instinctive subjugation struggling against
a passionate desire for fellowship. She had denied herself to me, taken
herself away; that much I could endure; but now came this blazing fact
that showed her as it seemed in the most material and conclusive
way--overcome. I had storms of retrospective passion at the thoroughness
of her surrender.... Yes, and that's in everyone of us,--in everyone. I
wonder if in all decent law-abiding London there lives a single healthy
adult man who has not at times longed to trample and kill....
For once I think the Fürstin miscalculated consequences. I think I
should have engaged myself to Rachel before I went to America if it had
not been for the Fürstin's revelation, but this so tore me that I could
no longer go on falling in love again, naturally and sweetly. No man
falls in love if he has just been flayed.... I could no longer think of
Rachel except as a foil to Mary. I was moved to marry her by a new set
of motives; to fling her so to speak in Mary's face, and from the fierce
vulgarity of that at least I recoiled--and let her go as I have told
you.
§ 7