Guy looked over his shoulder and saw that he was reading "The Statue and the Bust":
So weeks grew months, years; gleam by gleamThe glory dropped from their youth and love,And both perceived they had dreamed a dream;
"That poem haunts me," exclaimed Guy, with a shudder.
Where is the use of the lip's red charm,The heaven of hair, the pride of the brow,And the blood that blues the inside arm—Unless we turn, as the soul knows how,The earthly gift to an end divine?
"And yet I can't stop reading it," he sighed.
How do their spirits pass, I wonder,Nights and days in the narrow room?Still, I suppose, they sit and ponderWhat a gift life was, ages ago,Six steps out of the chapel yonder.
On this Summer morning the words wrote themselves in fire across his brain.
"They light the way to dusty death," he sputtered, over and over again, when he had left Browning to Michael and flung himself face downward in the orchard grass.
In despair of what a havoc time was making of their youth and their love, that very afternoon he begged Pauline to meet him again now in these dark nights of early Summer, now when soon he would be going away from her.
"Going away?" she echoed in alarm. "I suppose that's the result of your friend's visit."
Guy, however, was not going to surrender again, and he insisted that when a month had passed he would indeed be gone from Plashers Mead. It was nothing to do with Michael Fane; it was solely his own determination to put an end to his unprofitable dalliance.
"But your poems? I thought that when your poems were published everything would be all right."
"Oh, my poems," he scoffed. "They're valueless!"
"Guy!"
"They're mere decoration. They are trifles."
"I don't understand you."
"I care for nothing but to be married to you. For nothing, do you hear? Pauline, everything is to be subordinate to that. I would even write and beg my father to take me as a junior usher at Fox Hall for that. We must be married soon. I can't bear to see Richard and Margaret sailing along so calmly and quietly towards happiness."
In the end he persuaded her to make all sorts of opportunities to meet him when no one else knew they were together. Even once most recklessly on a warm and moonless night of May's languorous decline to June, he took her in the canoe far away up the river; and when they floated home dawn was already glistening on the banks and on the prow of their ghostly canoe. Through bird-song and rosy vapors she fled from him to her silent room, while he stood in a trance and counted each dewy footstep that with silver traceries marked her flight across the lawn.
Michael Fane stayed on into June, and the fancy came to Pauline that he knew of these meetings with Guy at night. It enraged her with jealousy to think that he might have been taken into Guy's confidence so far, and the prejudice against him grew more violent every day. She already had enough regrets for having given way to Guy's persuasion, and the memory of that last return at dawn to her cool, reproachful room haunted her more bitterly when she thought of its no longer being a secret. The knowledge that Guy was soon going to leave Plashers Mead was another torment, for though in a way she was glad of his wanting to make the determined effort, she could not help connecting the resolve with his friend's visit, and in consequence of this her one desire was to upset the plan. The sight of Richard and Margaret progressing equably towards their marriage early in August also made her jealous, and she began unreasonably to ascribe to her sister an attitude of superiority that she allowed to gall her; and whenever Richard was praised by any of the family she could never help feeling now that the praise covered or implied a corresponding disparagement of Guy. With Monica she nearly quarreled over religion, for though in her heart it occupied the old Supreme place, her escapades at night, by the tacit leave they seemed to give Guy to presume that religion no longer counted as her chief resource, had led her for the first time to make herself appear outwardly indifferent. In fact, she now dreaded going to church, because she felt that if she once surrendered to the holy influenceshe would suffer again all the remorse of the Winter, that now by desperate deferment she was able for a little while to avoid. On top of all this vexation of soul she was angry with Guy because he seemed unable to realize that they were both walking on the edge of an abyss, and that all this abandonment of themselves to the joy of the fugitive season was a vain attempt to cheat fate. At such an hour she was naturally jealous that a friend's private affairs should occupy so much of Guy's attention, when he himself was walking blindly towards the doom of their love that now sometimes in flashes of horrible clarity she beheld at hand. Guy, however, persisted in trying to force Michael upon her; the jealousy such attempts fostered made her more passionate when she was alone with him, and this, as all the while she dreadfully foresaw, heaped up the reckoning that her conscience would presently have to pay.
One afternoon she and Margaret and Monica went to tea at Plashers Mead, when to her sharp annoyance she found herself next to Guy's friend. She made up her mind at the beginning of the conversation that he was criticizing her, and, feeling shy and awkward, she could only reply to him in gasps and monosyllables and blushes. He seemed to her the coldest person she had ever known; he seemed utterly without emotion or sympathy; he must surely be the worst friend imaginable for Guy. He took no interest in anything, apparently; and then suddenly he definitely revealed himself as the cause of Guy's ambition to conquer London.
"I think Guy ought to go away from here," he was saying. "I told him when he first took this house that he would be apt to dream away all his time here. You must make him give it up, Miss Grey. He's such an extraordinarily brilliant person that it would be terrible if he let himself do nothing in the end. Of course, he's been lucky to meet you, and that's kept him alive, but now he ought to go to London. He really ought."
Pauline hated herself for the way in which she was gasping out her monosyllabic agreement with all this; but she did not feel able to argue with Michael Fane. He disconcerted her by his air of severe judgment, and however hard she tried she could not contradict him. Then suddenly in a rage with herself and with him, she began to talk nonsense at the top of her voice, rattling on until her sisters looked up at her in surprise, while Michael, evidently embarrassed, scarcely answered. At last the uncomfortable visit came to an end, and as she walked back with Guy, while the others went in front, she began to inveigh against the friend more fiercely than ever.
"My dear, I can't think why you have him to stay with you. He hates your being engaged to me...."
"Oh, nonsense!" Guy interrupted, rather crossly.
"He does, he does; and he hates your staying down here. He says Plashers Mead is ruining you, and that you ought to go to London. Now, you see, I know why you want to go there."
"Really, Pauline, you're talking nonsense. I'm going to London because I'm positive that your father and mother both think I ought to go. And I'm positive myself that I ought to go. I've been wrong to stay here all this time. I've done nothing to help forward our marriage. Look how nervous and ... how nervous and overwrought you've become. It's all my fault."
"How I hate that friend of yours!"
Guy looked up in astonishment at the fervor of her tone.
"And how he hates me," she went on.
"Oh, really, my dear child, you are ridiculous," Guy exclaimed, petulantly. "Are you going to take up this attitude towards all my friends? You're simply horridly jealous, that's the whole matter."
Pauline did not quarrel now, because she thought it might gratify Michael Fane to see the discord he hadcreated, but she treasured up her anger and knew that, when later she and Guy were alone, she would say whatever hard things now rested unsaid. Next morning Guy asked her if she would be very cross to hear that he was going to town for a night.
"With your friend?" she asked.
He nodded, and she turned away from him clouded blue eyes.
"Itisunfair of you to hate Michael," he pleaded. "I told him you thought he was cold, and he said at once, 'Do tell her I'm not cold, and say how lovely I think her.' He said you were very lovely and strange ... a fairy's child."
Still Pauline would not turn her head.
"I told him that you were indeed a fairy's child," Guy went on, "and I told him how sometimes I felt I should go off my head with the responsibility your happiness was to me. For indeed, Pauline, it is, it is a responsibility."
She felt she must yield when Guy spoke like that, but then, unfortunately, he began to talk about his friend again, and sullen jealousy returned.
"Listen, Pauline, I'm going up to town because Michael wants me to see this girl he is going to marry. He was rather pathetic about her. It seems that ... well ... it's a sort of misalliance, and his people are angry about it, and really I must be loyal and go up to town and help him with ... well ... you see, really all his friends have been unsympathetic about her."
"I expect they've every right to be," said Pauline.
"I do think you're unreasonable. I'm only going away for a night."
"Oh, go, go, go!" she cried, and, pulling herself free of his caress, she left him by the margin of the stream disconsolate and perplexed.
Pauline, when Guy had gone to London with his friend, began to fret herself with the fear that he would not come back, and she was very remorseful at the thought that ifhe did not she would be responsible. She half expected to get a letter next day to tell her of his determination to remain in town for good, and when no letter came she exaggerated still more all her fears and longed to send him a telegram to ask if he had arrived safely, railing at herself for having let him leave her without knowing where he was going to stay. By the following afternoon all the jealousy of Michael had been swallowed up in a passionate desire for Guy's return, and when about three o'clock she saw him coming through the wicket in the high gray wall her heart beat fast with relief. She said not a word about Guy's journey, nor did she even ask if his friend had come back with him. She cared for nothing but to show by her tenderness how penitent she was for that yesterday which had torn such a rent in the perfection of their love. Guy was visibly much relieved to find that her jealous fit had passed away, and when she asked for an account of his journey he gave it to her most eagerly.
"Yesterday was rather tragic," he said. "We went to see this Lily Haden to whom Michael had engaged himself, and ... well ... it's impossible to explain to you what happened, but it was all very horrible and rather like a scene in a French play. Anyhow, Michael is cured of that fancy, and now he talks of going out of England and even of becoming a monk. These extraordinary religious fads that succeed violent emotion of an utterly different kind! Personally I don't think the monkish phase will survive the disillusionment that's just as much bound to happen in religion as it was bound to happen over that girl."
"What was she like?" Pauline asked, resolving to appear interested in Michael.
"I never saw her," said Guy. "The tragedy took place 'off' in the Aristotelian manner."
"Oh, Guy, don't use such long words."
"Dear little thing, I wish you wouldn't ask any more about this girl. She is something quite outside yourimagination; though I could make of her behavior such a splendid lesson for you, when you think you have behaved dreadfully in escaping from your room for an hour or two of moonlight. Poor Michael! he's as scrupulous as you are, and it's rather ironical that you and he shouldn't get on. Puritans, both of you! Now there's another friend of mine, Maurice Avery, whom you'd probably like very much, and yet he isn't worth Michael's little finger."
"Did you see him yesterday?"
"Yes, we went round to his studio in Grosvenor Road. Oh, my dear, such a glorious room, looking out over the river right into the face of the young moon coming up over Lambeth. A jolly old Georgian house. And at the back another long, low window looking out over a sea of roofs to the sunset behind the new Roman cathedral. There were lots of people there, and a man was playing that Brahms sonata your mother likes so much. Pauline, you and I simply must go and live in Chelsea or Westminster, and we can come back to Plashers Mead after the most amazing adventures. You would be such a rose on a London window-sill, or would you then be a tuft of London Pride, all blushes and bravery?"
"Bravery! Why I'm frightened to death by the idea of going to live in London! Oh, Guy, I'm frightened of anything that will break into our life here."
"But, dearest, we can't stay at Wychford for ever doing nothing. Read 'The Statue and the Bust' if you want to understand the dread that lies cold on my heart sometimes. Think how already nearly twenty months have gone by since we met, and still we are in the same position. We know each other better, and we are more in love than ever, but you have all sorts of worries at the back of your mind, and I have all sorts of ambitions not yet fulfilled. Michael has at last managed to make a complete ass of himself, but what have I done?"
"Your poems ... your poems," she murmured, despairingly."Are your poems really no use? Oh, Guy, that seems such a cruel thing to believe."
Guy talked airily of what much more wonderful things he was going to write, and when he asked Pauline to meet him this very midnight on the river she had to consent, because in the thought that he appeared to be drifting out of reach of her love she felt half distraught and would have sacrificed anything to keep him by her.
The June evening seemed of a sad, uniform green, for the blossom of the trees was departed and the borders were not yet marching in Midsummer array. There was always a sadness about these evenings of early June, a sadness, and sometimes a threat when the wind blew loudly among the young foliage. Those gusty eves were almost preferable to this protracted and luminous melancholy in which the sinking crescent of the moon hung scarcely more bright than ivory. The pensive beauty was too much for Pauline, who wished that she could shut out the obstinate day and read by candle-light such a book asAlice in Wonderlanduntil it was time to go to bed. Her white fastness, rose-bloomed by sunset as she dressed for dinner, reproached her intention of abandoning its shelter to-night, and she determined that this should really be the last escapade. There was no harm in what she had done, of course, as Guy assured her, and yet there was harm in behaving so traitorously towards that narrow white bed, towards pious, wide-eyed Saint Ursula and Tobit's companionable angel.
The languor of the evening was heavy upon all the family; Monica was the only one who had the energy to go to her instrument. She played Chopin, and the austerity of her method made the ballads and the nocturnes more dangerously sweet. Gradually the melodies lulled most of Pauline's fears and charmed her to look forward eagerly to the velvet midnight when she with Guy beside her would float deep into such caressing glooms. After Monica had played them all into drowsiness, Pauline hadto wait until the last sound had died away in the house and the illumination of the last window had faded from the bodeful night that was stroking her window with invitation to come forth.
Twelve o'clock clanged from the belfry, and Pauline opened her bedroom door to listen. She had put on her white frieze coat, for although the night was warm, the wearing of such outdoor garb gave a queer kind of propriety to the whole business, and at the far end of the long corridor she saw herself in the dim candle-light mirrored like a ghost in the Venetian glass. From the heart of the house the cuckoo calling midnight a minute or two late made her draw back in alarm, and not merely in alarm, but also rather sentimentally, as if by her action she were going to offend that innocent bird of childhood. She wondered why to-night she felt so sensitive beforehand, since usually the regret had followed her action; but promising herself that to-night should indeed be the last time she would ever take this risk, she crept on tip-toe down the stairs.
In the glimmering starshine Pauline could see Guy standing by the wicket in the high gray wall, a remote and spectral form against the blackness all around him, where the invisible trees gathered and hoarded the gloom. She sighed with relief to find that the arms with which so gently he enfolded her were indeed warm with life. Her passage over the lawn had been one long increasing fear that the shape, so indeterminate and motionless, that awaited her approach, might not be Guy in life, but a wan image of what he had been, a demon lover, a shadow from the cave of death.
"Guy, my darling, my darling, it is you! Oh, I was so frightened that when I came close you wouldn't really be there."
She leaned half sobbing upon his shoulder.
"Pauline, don't talk so loud. I only did not come across the lawn to meet you for fear of attracting attention."
"Let me go back now," she begged, "now that I've seen you."
But Guy soon persuaded her to come with him through the wicket and out over the paddock where the grass whispered in their track, until at the sight of the canoe's outline she lost her fears and did not care how recklessly she explored the deeps of the night.
In silence they traveled up-stream under the vaulted willows; under the giant sycamore whose great roots came writhing out of the darkness above the sheen of the water; under Wychford bridge whose cold breath dripped down in icy beads upon the thick swirl beneath; and then out through starshine across the mill-pool. Pauline held her breath while around their course was a sound of water sucking at the vegetation, gurgling and lapping and chuckling against the invisible banks.
"The Abbey stream?" murmured Guy.
She scarcely breathed her consent, and the canoe tore the growing sedge like satin as it bumped against the slope of the bank. Pauline felt that she was protesting with her real self against the part she was playing in this dream; but the dream became too potent, and she had to help Guy to push the canoe up through the grass and down again into the quiet water beyond. It was much blacker here on account of the overhanging beeches, but continually Pauline strained through the darkness for a sight of the deserted house, the windows of which seemed to follow with blank and bony gaze their progress.
"Guy, let's hurry, for I can see the Abbey in the starlight," she exclaimed.
"You have better eyes than mine if you can," he laughed. "My sweet, your face from where I'm sitting is as filmy as a rose at dusk. And even if you can see the Abbey, what does it matter? Do you think it's going to run down the hill and swim after us?"
Pauline tried to laugh, but even that grotesque picture of his evoked a new terror, and, huddled among thecushions, she sat with beating heart, shuddering when the leaves of the great beech-trees fondled her hair. She looked back to her own white fastness and began to wonder if she had left the candle burning there; it seemed to her that she had, and that perhaps presently, perhaps even now, somebody was coming to see why it was burning. And still Guy took her farther up the stream. How empty her room would look, and what a chill would fall upon the sister or mother that peeped in.
"Oh, take me back!" she cried.
But still the canoe cleft the darkness and now, emerging from the cavernous trees, they glided once again into starshine infinitely outspread, through which with the dim glister of a snake the stream coiled and uncoiled itself.
Guy grasped at the reeds and drew the canoe close against the bank, making it fast with two paddles plunged into the mud. Then he gathered her to him so that her head rested upon his shoulder and her lips could meet his. Thus enfolded for a long while she lay content. The candle in her room burned itself out and nothing could disturb her absence, no one could suppose that she was here on this starlit river. Scarcely, indeed, was she here except as in the midway of deepest sleep, resting between a dream and a dream. She might have stayed unvexed for ever if Guy had not begun to talk, for although at first his voice came softly and pleasantly out of the night and lulled her like a tune heard faintly in some far-off corner of the mind, minute by minute his accents became more real; suddenly, as her drowsed arm slid over the edge of the canoe into the water, she woke and began herself to talk and, as she talked, to shrink again from the vision of her whole life whether past or present or to come.
In this malicious darkness she wanted to hear more about that girl who had betrayed Michael Fane; she wanted to know things that before she had not evenknown were hidden. She pressed Guy with questions, and when he would not answer them she began to feel jealous even of unrevealed sin. This girl was the link between all those girls at whose existence in his own past Guy had once hinted. Michael Fane appeared like the tempter and Guy like his easy prey. Distortions of the most ordinary, the most trifling incidents piled themselves upon her imagination; and that visit to London assumed a ghastly and impenetrable mysteriousness.
Guy vainly tried to laugh away her fancies; faster and still faster the evil cohorts swept up against her, almost as tangible as bats flapping into her face.
"Don't talk so loud," said Guy, crossly. "Do remember where we are."
Then she reproached him with having brought her here. She felt that he deserved to pay the penalty, and defiantly she was talking louder and louder until Guy, with feverish strokes, urged the canoe down-stream towards home.
"For God's sake, keep quiet!" he begged. "What has happened to you?"
That he should be frightened by her violence made her more angry. She threw at him the wildest accusations, how that through him she had ceased to believe in God, to care for her family, for her honor, for him, for life itself.
"Pauline, will you keep quiet? Are you mad to behave like this?"
He drove the canoe into a thorn-bush, so that it should not upset, and he seized her wrist so roughly that she thought she screamed. There was something splendid in that scream being able to disquiet the night, and in an elation of woe she screamed again.
"Do you know what you're doing?" he demanded.
She found herself asking Guy if she were screaming, and when she knew that at last she could hurt him, she screamed more loudly.
"You used to laugh at me when I said I might go mad," she cried. "Now do you like it? Do you like it?"
"Pauline, I beg you to keep quiet. Pauline, think of your people. Will you promise to keep quiet if I take you out of this thorn-bush?"
He began to laugh not very mirthfully, and that he could laugh infuriated her so much that she was silent with rage, while Guy disentangled the canoe from the thorn-bush and more swiftly than before urged it towards home.
When they reached the grassy bank that divided the Abbey stream from the mill-pool, she would not get out of the canoe to walk to the other side.
"I cannot cross that pool," she said. "Guy, don't ask me to. I've been afraid of it always. If we cross it to-night, I shall drown myself."
He tried to argue with her. He pleaded with her, he railed at her, and finally he laughed at her, until she got out and watched him launch the canoe on the farther side and beckon through the tremulous sheen to her. Wildly she ran down the steep bank and flung herself into the water.
"Where am I? Guy, where am I?"
"Well, at present you're lying on the grass, but where you've been or where I've been this last five minutes.... Pauline, are you yourself again?"
"Guy, my dearest, my dearest, I don't know why...." She burst into tears. "My dearest, how wet you are," she sobbed, stroking his drenched sleeve.
"Well, naturally," he said, with a short laugh. "Look here, it was all my fault for bringing you out, so don't get into a state of mind about yourself, but you can't go back in the canoe. My nerves are still too shaky. I can lift you over the wall behind the mill, and we must go back to the Rectory across the street. Come, my Pauline, you're wet, you know. Oh, my own, my sweet, if I could only uncount the hours."
Pauline would never have reached home but for Guy's determination. It was he who guided her past the dark entries, past the crafty windows of Rectory Lane, past the menacing belfry, past the trees of the Rectory drive. By the front door he asked her if she dared go up-stairs alone.
"I will wait on the lawn until I see your candle alight," he promised.
She kissed him tragically and crept in. Her room was undisturbed, but in the looking-glass she saw a dripping ghost, and when she held her candle to the window another ghost vanished slowly into the high gray wall. A cock crowed in the distance, and through the leaves of the wistaria there ran a flutter of waking sparrows.
When Guy looked back next morning at what had happened on the river, he felt that the only thing to do was to leave Pauline for a while and give her time and opportunity to recover from the shock. He wondered if it would be wiser merely to write a note to announce his intention or if she had now reached a point at which even a letter would be a disastrous aggravation of her state of mind. He felt that he could not bear any scene that might approximate to that horrible scene last night, and yet to go away abruptly in such circumstances seemed too callous. Supposing that he went across to the Rectory and that Pauline should have another seizure of hatred for him (there was no other word that could express what her attitude had been), how could their engagement possibly go on? Mrs. Grey would be appalled by the emotional ravages it had made Pauline endure; she would not be justified, whatever Pauline's point of view, in allowing the engagement to last a day longer. It would be surely wiser to write a letter and with all the love he felt explain that he thought she would be happier not to see him for a short while. Yet such a course might provoke her to declare the whole miserable business, and the false deductions that might be made from her account were dreadful to contemplate. He blamed himself entirely for what had happened, and yet he could scarcely have foreseen such a violent change. Even now he could not say what exactly had begun the outburst, and indeed the only explanation of it was by a weight of emotionthat had been accumulating for months. Of course he should never have persuaded her to come out on the river at night, but still that he had done so was only a technical offense against convention. It was she who had magnified her acquiescence beyond any importance he could have conceived. He must thank religion for that, he must thank that poisonous fellow in the confessional who had first started her upon this ruinous path of introspection and self-torment. But, whatever the cause, it was the remedy that demanded his attention, and he twisted the situation round and round without being able to decide how to act. He realized how month by month his sense of responsibility for Pauline had been growing, yet now the problem of her happiness stared at him, brutally insoluble. What was it Margaret had once said about his being unlikely to squander Pauline for a young man's experience? Good God! had not just that been the very thing he had nearly done; and then with a shudder, remembering last night, he wondered if he ought any longer to say "nearly." He must see her. Of course he must see her this morning. He must somehow heal the injury he had inflicted upon her youth.
Pauline was very gentle when they met. She had no reproaches except for herself and the way she had frightened him.
"Oh, my Pauline, can't you forget it?" he begged. "Let me go away for a month or more. Let me go away till Margaret and Richard are going to be married."
She acquiesced half listlessly, and then seeming to feel that she might have been cold in her manner, she wished him a happy holiday from her moods and jealousy and exacting love. He tried to pierce the true significance of her attitude, because it held in its heart a premonition for him that everything between them had been destroyed last night, and that henceforth whatever he or she did or said they would meet in the future only as ghostsmay meet in shadowy converse and meaningless communion.
"You will be glad to see me when I come back?" he asked.
"Why, my dearest, of course I shall be glad!"
He kissed her good-by, but her kiss was neither the kiss of lover nor of sister, but such a kiss as ghosts may use, seeking to perpetuate the mere form and outward semblance of life lost irrevocably.
When Guy was driving with Godbold along the Shipcot road he had not made up his mind where he would go, and it was on the spur of the moment, as he stood in the booking-office, that he decided to go and see his father, to whom latterly he had written scarcely at all, and of whom he suddenly thought with affection.
"I've settled to give up Plashers Mead," Guy told him that night, when they were sitting in the library at Fox Hall. "And try and get on the staff of a paper," he added to his father's faint bow. "Or possibly I may go to Persia as Sir George Gascony's secretary. My friend Comeragh got me the offer in March, but Sir George was ill and did not start."
"That sounds much more sensible than journalism," said Mr. Hazlewood.
"Yes, perhaps it would be better," Guy agreed. "But then, of course, there is the question of leaving Pauline for two years."
Yet even as he enunciated this so solemnly, he knew in his heart that he would be rather glad to postpone for two years all the vexations of love.
His father shrugged his shoulders.
"My poems are coming out this Autumn," Guy volunteered.
His father gave some answer of conventional approbation, and Guy without the least bitterness recognized that to his father the offer of the secretaryship had naturally presented itself as the more important occasion.
"If you want any help with your outfit...."
"Oh, you mustn't count on Persia," interrupted Guy. "But I'll go up to town to-morrow and ask Comeragh when Sir George is going."
Next day, however, when Guy was in the train, he began to consider his Persian plan a grave disloyalty to Pauline. He wondered how last night he had come to think of it again, and fancied it might have been merely an instinct to gratify his father after their coolness. Of course, he would not dream of going, really, and yet it would have been jolly. Yes, it would certainly have been jolly, and he was rather relieved to find that Comeragh was out of town for a week, for his presence might have been a temptation. Michael Fane was not in London, either, so Guy went round to Maurice Avery's studio in Grosvenor Road, and in the pleasure of the company he found there the Persian idea grew less insistent. Maurice himself had just been invited to write a series of articles on the English ballet for a critical weekly journal calledThe Point of View. They went to a theater together, and Guy as he listened to Maurice's jargon felt for a while quite rustic, and was once or twice definitely taken in by it. Had he really been stagnating all this time at Wychford? And then the old superiority which at Oxford he always felt over his friend reasserted itself.
"You're still skating, Maurice," he drawled. "The superficial area of your brain must be unparalleled."
"You frowsty old yokel!" his friend exclaimed, laughing.
"I don't believe I shall get much out of breath, catching up with your advanced ideas," Guy retorted. "Anyway, this Autumn I shall come to town for good."
"And about time you did," said Maurice. "I say, mind you send your poems toThe Point of View, and I'll give you a smashing fine notice the week after publication."
Guy asked when Michael was coming back.
"He's made a glorious mess of things, hasn't he?" said Maurice.
"Oh, I don't know. Not necessarily."
"Well, I admit he found her out in time. But fancy wanting to marry a girl like that. I told him what she was, and he merely got furious with me. But he's an extraordinary chap altogether. By the way, when areyougoing to get married?"
"When I can afford it," said Guy.
"The question is whether an artist can ever afford to get married."
"What rot you talk."
"Wiser men than I have come to that conclusion," said Maurice. "Of course I haven't met your lady-love; but it does seem to me that your present mode of life is bound to be sterile of impressions."
"I don't go about self-consciously obtaining impressions," said Guy, a little angrily. "I would as soon search for local color. Personally I very much doubt if any impressions after eighteen or nineteen help the artist. As it seems to me, all experience after that age is merely valuable for maturing and putting into proportion the more vital experiences of childhood. And I'm not at all sure that there isn't in every artist a capacity for development which proceeds quite independently of externals. I speculate sometimes as to what would be the result upon a really creative temperament of being wrecked at twenty-two on a desert island. I say twenty-two because I do count as valuable the academic influence that only begins to be effective after eighteen."
"And what is your notion about this literary Crusoe?" asked Maurice.
"Well, I fancy that his work would not suffer at all, that it would ripen, just as certain fruit ripens independently of sun, that he would display in fact quite normally the characteristic growth of the artist."
"But where would he obtain his reaction?" Maurice asked.
"From himself. If that isn't possible for some people Idon't see how you're going to make a distinction between literature and journalism."
"Some journalism is literature."
"Only very bad journalism," Guy argued. "The journalistic mind experiences a quick reaction, the creative writer a very slow one. The journalist is affected by extremes; and he is continually aware of the impression they are making at the moment; contrariwise, the creative artist is always unaware of the impression at the moment it is made; he feels it from within first, and it develops according to his own characteristics. Let me give you an example. The journalist is like a man who, seeing a mosquito in the act of biting him, claps his hand down and kills it. The creative artist isn't aware of having been bitten until he sees the swelling ... big or small, according to his constitution. It is his business to cure the swelling, not to bother about the insect."
"Your theories may be all right for great creative artists," said Maurice. "And I suppose you're willing to take the risk of stagnation?"
"I'm not a great creative artist," said Guy, quickly. "At the same time I'm damned if I'm a journalist. No, the effect of Plashers Mead on me has been to make me long to be a man of action. So far it has been stimulating, and without external help I've been able to reach the conclusion that my poems were never worth writing.... I wrote because I wanted to; I don't believe I ever had to."
"Then what are you going to do now?" asked Maurice.
"I'm probably going to work in London at journalism."
"Then, great Scott! why all this preliminary tirade against it?"
"Because I don't want to bluff myself into thinking that I'm going to do anything but be a strictly professional writer," said Guy. "Or else perhaps because I don't really want to come and live in London at all, but go to Persia. Dash it all, for the first time in mylife, Maurice, I don't know what I do want, and it's a very humiliating state of affairs for me."
When Guy left the studio that evening he came away with that pleasant warming of the cockles of the brain that empirical conversation always gave. It was really very pleasant to be chattering away about æsthetic theories, to be meeting new people, and to be infused with this sense of being joined up to the motive force of a city's life. At his lodgings in Vincent Square a letter from Pauline awaited his return, and with a shock he realized half-way through its perusal that he was reading it listlessly. He turned back and tried to bring to its contents that old feverish absorption in magic pages, but something was wanting, whether in the letter or whether in himself he did not know. He came to the point of asking himself if he loved her still as much, and almost with horror at the question vowed he loved her more than ever, and that of all things on earth he only longed for their marriage. Yet in bed that night he thought more of his argument in the studio than about Pauline, and when he did think about her it was with a drowsy sense of relief. Vincent Square under the bland city moon seemed very peaceful, and in retrospect Wychford a place of endless storms.
Next morning when Guy sat down to answer Pauline's letter, he found himself writing with mechanical fluency without really thinking of her at all. In fact, for the moment, she represented something that disturbed the Summer calm in London, and he consciously did not want to think about her until all this late troublous time had lost its actuality and he could be sure of returning to the Pauline of their love's earlier days.
These shuttlecock letters were tossed backward and forward between Wychford and London throughout the rest of June and most of July, and sometimes Guy thought they were as unreal as his own poetry. He spent his time in looking up old friends, in second-hand bookshops, inthe galleries of theaters. He did not see Michael Fane, who wrote to him from Rome before Guy knew he had gone there. Comeragh, however, he saw pretty often, and he enjoyed talking about politics nearly as much as about art. He met Sir George Gascony, and Comeragh assured him afterwards that when Sir George went out to Persia in August or September he could, if he liked, go with him. Guy put the notion at the back of his mind, whence he occasionally took it out and played with it. In the end, however, when the definite offer came he refused it. This happened at the end of his visit to London when his money was running out and when he had to be going back to Wychford to live somehow on credit, until the Michaelmas quarter replenished his overdrawn account. Before he left town he paid a visit to Mr. Worrall and told him that he wanted his poems to appear anonymously. In fact, if it were not for hurting the Rector's feelings he would have stopped their publication altogether.
At the end of a hot and dusty July, and about a week before the Lammas wedding of Margaret and Richard, Guy came back to Plashers Mead. The immediate effect of seeing again the place which was now associated in his mind with interminable difficulties was to make him resolute to clarify the situation once and for all, to clarify it so completely that there could never again be a repetition of that night in June. His absence had been in the strictest sense an interlude, and all the letters which marked to each the existence of the other had been but conventional forms of love and comfortable postponements of reality. When he met Pauline, Guy felt that he met her to all intents directly after that dreadful night, with only this difference, that owing to the time they had had for repose he could now say things that six weeks ago he could not have said. He had arrived at Wychford for lunch, and as a matter of course they were to be together that afternoon. Ordinarily on such a piping July day hewould have proposed the river for their converse, and it was a sign of how near at hand he felt their last time on the river that he proposed a walk instead.
Guy was aware of wanting to take Pauline to some place that was neither hallowed nor cursed by past hours, and, avoiding familiar ways, they reached a barren, cup-shaped field shut off from the road by a spinney of firs that offered such a dry and draughty shade as made the field even in the hot sun of afternoon more tolerable. They sat down on the sour stony land among the rag-wort and teazles and feverfew. Summer had burnt up this abandoned pasturage, and while they sat in silence Guy rattled from the rank umbels of fool's-parsley and hemlock the innumerable seeds that would only profit the rankness of another year.
"Well?" he said at last.
Pauline looked at him questioningly, and he felt impatient to be sitting here on this sour stony land, and wondered how for merely this he could have refused that offer of Persian adventure. Not until now had he realized how much he had been resenting the performance of a duty.
"You've hardly told me anything about your time in London," said Pauline.
He looked at her sharply in case this might be a prelude to jealous interrogation.
"There's nothing much to tell. I settled that my poems should appear anonymously. I'm afraid their publication may otherwise do me more harm than good."
"All your poems?" she asked, wistfully.
He nodded, impelled by a strong desire for absolute honesty, though he would have liked to except the poems about her, knowing how much she must be wounded to hear even them called worthless.
"Then I've been no good to you at all?"
"Of course you have. Because these poems are no good, it doesn't follow that what I write next won't begood. And yet I'm uncertain whether I ought to go on merely writing. I'm beginning to wonder if I oughtn't to have gone out to Persia with Gascony? I refused the job because I thought it would upset you. And so, dearest Pauline, when next you feel jealous, do remember that. Do remember that it is always you who come first. Don't think I'm regretful about Persia. I'm only wondering on your account if I ought to have gone. It would have made our marriage in three years a certainty, but still I hope by journalism to make it certain in one year. Are you glad, my Pauline?"
"Yes, of course I'm glad," she answered, without fervor.
"And you won't be jealous of my friends? Because it's impossible to be in London without friends, you know."
"I told you I should never be enough."
Guy tried not to be irritated by this.
"If you would only be reasonable! I realize now that for me at my age it's foolish to withdraw from my contemporaries. I shall stagnate. These two years have not been wasted...."
"Yes, they have," she interrupted, "if your poems are not worth your name."
"Dearest, these two years may well be the foundation on which I build all the rest of my life."
"May they?"
"Yes, of course. But a desire for the stimulus of other people isn't the only reason for leaving Plashers Mead. I can't afford it here. My debts are really getting impossible to manage, and unless I can show my father that I'm ready to do anything to be a writer, as I can't go out to Persia, well ... frankly I don't know what will happen. I gave Burrows notice at Midsummer."
"You never told me," said Pauline.
"Well, no, I was afraid you'd be upset and I wanted you to have this quiet time when I was away...."
"You don't trust me any more," she said.
"Oh yes, I do, but I thought it would worry you. I know my money affairs do worry you. But now I shall be all right. I'll come down here often, you know, and, oh, really, dearest girl, it is better that I should be in London. So don't be jealous, will you, and don't torment yourself about my debts, will you, and don't think that you are anything but everything to me."
"I expect you'll enjoy being in London," she said, slowly shredding the flowers from a spray of wild mignonette.
"I hope I shall be so busy that I won't have time to regret Wychford," said Guy.
He had by now broken off all the rank flowers in reach, and the sour stony ground was littered with seeds and pungent heads of bloom and ragged stalks.
"You'll never regret Wychford," she said. "Never. Because I've spoiled it for you, my darling."
She touched his hand gently and drew close to him, but only timidly; and as she made the movement a flight of goldfinches lighted upon the swaying thistle-down in the hollow of the waste land.
"Pauline! Pauline!" he cried, and would have kissed her passionately, but she checked him:
"No, no, I just want to lean my head upon your shoulder for a little while."
Above her murmur he heard the rustle of the goldfinches' song in parting cadences upon the air, rising and falling; and looking down at Pauline in the sunlight, he felt that she was a wounded bird he should be cherishing.
The wedding of Richard and Margaret dreamed of for so long strung Pauline to a pitch of excitement that made her seem never more positively herself. She was conscious, as she gazed in the mirror on that Lammas morning, that the tired look at the back of her eyes had gone and that in her muslin dress sown with rosebuds she appeared exactly as she ought to have appeared in any prefiguration of herself in bridesmaid's attire. Feeling as she did in a way the principal architect of Richard's and Margaret's happiness, she was determined at whatever cost of dejection afterwards to bring to the completion of her design all the enthusiasm she had brought to its conception.
"Do you like me as a bridesmaid?" she asked Guy.
And he, with obviously eager welcome of the old Pauline, could not find enough words to say how much he liked her.
"Richard, of course, is wearing a tail-coat," she murmured.
"I sha'n't," he whispered, "when we are married. I shall wear tweeds, and you shall wear your white frieze coat ... the one in which I first saw you. How little you've changed in these two years!"
"Have I? I think I've changed such a lot. Oh, Guy, such a tremendous lot!"
He shook his head.
"My rose, if all roses could stay like you, what a world of roses it would be."
The wedding happened as perfectly as Pauline had imagined it would. Margaret looked most beautiful with her slim white satin gown and her weight of dusky hair, while Richard marched about stiff and awkward, yet so radiant that almost more than any one it was he who inspired the ceremony with hymeneal triumph and carried it beyond the soilure of unmeaning tears, he and Pauline, whose laughter was the expression of the joyous air, since Margaret was too deeply occupied with herself to cast a single questioning look.
In the evening, when the diminished family sat in the drawing-room without going up-stairs to music, as a matter of course, Monica announced abruptly that at the end of the month she was going to be a novice in one of the large Anglican sisterhoods. It seemed as if she had most deliberately taken advantage of the general reaction in order that nobody might have the heart to combat her intention. Pauline and Mrs. Grey gasped, but they had no arguments to bring forward against the idea, and when Monica had outlined the plan in her most precise manner they simply acquiesced in the decision as immutable.
That night, as Pauline lay awake with the excitement of the wedding still throbbing in her brain, the future from every side began to assail her fancy. It seemed to her since Margaret's marriage and Monica's decision to be a nun that she must be more than ever convinced of her absolute necessity to Guy's existence. Unless she were assured of this she had no right to leave her father and mother. No doubt at least a year would pass before she and Guy could be married, but, nevertheless, her decision must be made at once. He had not seemed to depend upon her so much when he was in London; his letters had no longer contained those intimate touches that formerly assured her of the intertwining of their lives. But it was not merely a question of letters, this attitudeof his that latterly was continually being more sharply defined. Somewhere their love had diverged, and whereas formerly she had always been able to comfort herself with the certainty that between them love was exactly equal, now instead she could not help fancying that she loved him more than he loved her. It would, of course, be useless to ask him the question directly, for he would evade an answer by declaring it was prompted by unreasonable jealousy. Yet was her jealousy so very unreasonable, and if it were unreasonable was not that another reason against their marriage?
Pauline tried to search in the past of their love for the occasion of the divergence. It must be her own fault. It was she who had often behaved foolishly and impetuously, who had always supposed that her mother and sisters knew nothing about love, who had been to Guy all through their engagement utterly useless. It was she who had stopped his becoming a schoolmaster to help his father, it was she who had discouraged him from accepting that post in Persia. As Pauline looked back upon these two years she saw herself at every cross-road in Guy's career standing to persuade him towards the wrong direction.
Then, too, recurred the dreadful problem of religion. It was she who had not resisted his inclination to laugh at what she knew was true. It was she who had most easily and most weakly surrendered, so that it was natural for him to treat her faith as something more conventional than real.
The worries surged round her like waves in the darkness, and the one anchor of hope she still possessed was dragging ominously. Oh, if she could but be sure that she was essential to his happiness, she would be able to conquer everything else. The loneliness of her father and mother, Guy's debts, the religious difficulties, the self-reproach for those moonlit nights upon the river, the jealousy of his friends, the fear of his poems' failure, hisabsence in London—all these could be overcome if only she were sure of being vital to Guy's felicity.
A dull Summer wind sent a stir through the dry leaves of the creepers, but the night grew hotter notwithstanding, and sleep utterly refused to approach her room.
Next day, when Guy came round to the Rectory, Pauline was so eager to hear the answer to her question that she would take no account of the jaded spirit of such a day as this after a wedding, and its natural influence on Guy's point of view.
All the afternoon, however, they helped the Rector with his bulbs, and no opportunity of intimate conversation occurred until after tea when they were sitting in the nursery. The wind, that last night had run with slow tremors through the leaves, was now blowing gustily, and banks of clouds were gathering—great clouds that made the vegetation seem all the more dry and stale as they still deferred their drench of rain.
"Guy, I don't want to annoy you, but is it really necessary that your poems should appear without your name?"
"Absolutely," he said, firmly.
"You don't think any of them are good?"
"Oh, some are all right, but I don't believe in them as I used to believe in them."
"Sometimes, my dearest, you frighten me with the sudden way in which you dispose of things.... They were important to you once, weren't they?"
"Of course. But they have outlived their date. I must do better."
She got up and went over to the window-seat, and when she spoke next she was looking at the wicket in the high gray wall.
"Guy, could I outlive my date?"
"Oh, dearest Pauline, I do beg you not to start problems this afternoon! Of course not."
"Are you sure? Are you sure that when you are inLondon you won't find other girls more interesting than I am?"
"Even if temporarily I were interested in another girl, you may be quite sure that she would always be second to you."
"But you might be interested?" Pauline asked, breathlessly.
"I must be free if I'm going to be an artist."
"Free?" she echoed, slowly.
The cuckoo in the passage struck seven, and Mrs. Grey came into the nursery to invite Guy to stay to dinner. All through the meal Pauline kept saying to herself, "free," "free," "free," and afterwards when her mother suggested a trio in the music-room, because they could no longer have quartets, and because soon they would not even have trios, Pauline played upon her violin nothing but that word "free," "free," "free." In the hall, when she kissed Guy good night, she had impulse to cling to him and pour out all her woes; but, remembering how often lately he had been the victim of her overwrought nerves, she let him go without an effort. For a little while she held the door ajar so that a thin shaft of lamplight showed his tall shape walking quickly away under the trees. Why was he walking so quickly away from her? Oh, it was raining fast, and she shut the door. Up-stairs in her room she wrote to him: