She knocked at his door with no less timidity than she had done the first time, her hand clasping her beating heart. His voice called “Come in!”; she slipped in; his dim room and the shining alembics were lovely and mysterious, like a fairy-story, after the chill of the bare linoleum-lined passage she had just followed. In a moment they were close to one another, their fingers wove together without knowing how it had so come about; the fact of being unexpectedly alone came like a draught of water to the thirsty.
“I hate that passage leading to your room—it’slike a prison,” she murmured, raising her hand to his bright hair; “it so cool and dim in here; I wish, oh, how I wish I could work in here helping you.”
“It might be arranged ...” he began enviously.
“Oh no,” she said, shaking her head, “we mustn’t think of it.”
“We’re never really alone,” he said.
“No.”
They looked at each other gravely and pitifully.
“It does seem so hard,” her small voice took up again, “that you and I, who have never done any harm, should be spied on and hunted, because that’s what I feel: hunted. We haven’t done any harm, have we? only in our thoughts, that is,” she amended, scrupulous, “and even then I don’t think it’s terrible harm to wish we might sometimes be alone. I try not to wish for more than that, Linnet; I do indeed. You mustn’t come so close to me, please,” and she put out her hand to push him away a little.
“Why mustn’t I?”
“You know quite well: I can’t bear your nearness.”
“Nan, you are the most provoking mixture of frankness and prudery....”
“I don’t mean to be. I came straight to you whenI got into the room, because I was happy and forgetful, but I am sorry; that wasn’t encouraging you to behave as I want you to behave. You know what I tell you: we cantalk, no more.”
“But talk can lay up trouble too, you know, Nan.”
Her face took on a startled look, as a dismayed child’s.
“What! do you mean we ought to give that up too? Oh, no, Linnet, I couldn’t bear that, indeed I couldn’t; you mustn’t suggest it.”
“Of course I don’t suggest it; is it likely? Only I think you trick yourself into believing what you want to believe, and if your conscience does prick you, you try to salve it—and I dare say succeed—by imposing some quite hypocritical limitation.”
“Are you laughing at me or not? Or are you serious? do you mean that I ought not to see you at all or talk to you? perhaps you are right....”
“Nan, you are too perverse! I only mean that if you allow yourself to talk to me, and allow me to talk to you, and to make love to you, you might consistently allow me to go further, to take your hand, for instance, without pushing me away when I stand quite respectfully beside you.”
“I see what you mean; I can’t argue, but I think, please, I would rather go on in the same way as before.”
“Very well,” he said ruefully.
“And why do you say ‘make love’?” she harked back after a little. “As though it were just a way of spending the time? Anyway, I think I would rather you did not; we can talk quite well without that, and then you need not think I am hypocritical.”
“You do keep me in order, Nan, don’t you?” he said.
“No, I am often very weak and cowardly.”
“You are only cowardly when you won’t face what is to become of us,” he replied, with more seriousness.
Again she looked startled.
“Oh, please, Linnet, I don’t like talking about that.”
“Well, but, my dear,” he said, “you know quite well that we cannot go on indefinitely as we are at present; you ought to be the first to realise it, with your scrupulous mind always splitting hairs and dwelling on niceties. If it were light come, light go, between us—there a kiss and here an arm round you—it would be different. But you know it is not likethat. It is perhaps your very prudery that puts the whole thing on a different footing. Anyway you know that it is a matter of all our lives....”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” she said, with a contented sigh, and leaning up against him.
“Nan, you distract me!” he exclaimed, “I say that it is for all our lives, and you murmur with pleasure, as though the whole thing were thereby settled. In the meantime I am neither one thing nor the other; I am neither your friend, nor your husband, nor your lover.”
“Oh, but you are surely....”
“Well, what am I? I wish I knew!”
“My lover,” she said in a low voice.
“Nan, don’t hang your head so; for pity’s sake don’t; you are too charming when you do it. No, I am not your lover ... worse luck....”
“But you do love me, don’t you?”
“Good God, do you doubt it?”
“Well, you never say so. You never said it. Silas had to say it for you.”
“But I’ve said so since.”
“Oh ...since!” she said.
“But, my darling Nan, a little way back you forbade me to speak of love to you.”
“Yes, you see,” she said with another sigh, less contented, this one, “I want to have nothing on my conscience, nothing, nothing, nothing—except my thoughts, and I can’t help those.”
“Won’t you tell them to me?”
“If I told them to you, they would be on my conscience, and that’s where I don’t want them to be.”
“You are deplorably logical, when it is for my undoing,” he said, sighing in his turn.
“If I had a laden conscience, I should become a coward. If I became a coward, I should never have the courage to face Gregory,” she said, checking the points off on her fingers. “No, stop: I know what you’re about to say, ‘then you do mean some day to face Gregory.’ I can’t answer that, and you must be patient to let these ten days go by; maybe by the time we’re in the middle of them I will have got back my wits. I’m too scared now to have any wits at all. What is going on in our house now? you know no more than I do, and yet you know just as I do that there is something strange. It’s something between Silas and Gregory. Oh, it’s dreadful to think that there should be something between them which they are working out for themselves, with all their difficulties, because they can’t askourhelp, either yours or mine. It frightens me so. Oh, my dear, it’s horrible to be afraid! Linnet, you must take care of me.”
“You don’t give me much chance....”
“No, I know I don’t; I’m bad to you, I know. I seem to turn this way and that for a way out, and things press upon me, and then I make you suffer for it. Put it down that I scarcely know what I’m doing....”
“No, I know you don’t, my pretty, my poor pretty, only tell me about it, if that’s any help, and don’t let things get magnified in your mind bigger than they ought to be; hills look steeper than they are, you know, before one starts going up them.”
“Oh,” she said, her eyes brimming, “you’re good and patient, indeed you are. I hardly understand, yet, what’s come over us, that sometimes my breath comes short and I shut my eyes and think I must faint away with the longing to see you. I wish, sometimes I wish that something would happen—something quite outside this life, I mean,—to relieve us; I don’t know what I mean, rightly. But it’s the weight ... and the longing ... I can’t keep still under it, at times; I have to get up andmove about ... the longing ... the burning.” She put her hand up to her throat as though she were physically oppressed. “And I put questions to myself—about you, I mean—and the answers come springing without my having to think. They leap out, the answers do. Would I die for you? Oh, so gladly! would I starve for you? yes, and never a word to let you know. Would I die if you died? I’d pine if I lived an hour after you’d gone. Would I give myself up to you? yes—to beat me if you chose; I’d shut my eyes and let you.... That’s love, isn’t it?It’s like striking a bell; it clangs back at once. And now—I can’t help saying it—for ten days there’ll be times when we’re alone, and I’ll be less starved than I am now; it seems I’ve just been keeping alive for this, and reach it all spent and gasping. Oh, nothing, nothing more! only to talk to you, and look at you; we’re strangers still. I want todrinkbeing with you. Then I’ll be able to think, and we’ll sort everything out, and get it clear. Only now I’m too parched for you, and too frightened ofthem. You must decide everything for me, and tell me what to do, and then take me away,—oh, take me away!”
She clung to him as she besought him, abandoningherself like a frightened child, and putting her arms up round his neck exactly like a child.
“My God, I didn’t know you could speak so, or feel so.Ifelt so, but I didn’t dare to tell you.”
“I didn’t know either ... one doesn’t know....” She had sunk so unrestrainedly against him, that but for his support she would have slipped down without resistance upon the floor. He felt that she would lie there, like a shot bird, at his feet, making no effort to rise, and letting her will glide away from her in a passive extinction of self; it would be for her the most exquisite, and at the same time the most spiritually voluptuous experience of her life. As it was, she had never known anything like the wild, fainting rapture of this half-surrender. “Linnet, Linnet,” she said, pushing him away, “where are we? it won’t do; we’re being swept along; I’m afraid. Go right over there, to the other side of the room; no, farther away than that.” She directed him with an imperious urgent finger. “You mustn’t come any nearer. Promise. Sit down on that chair. I’ll stop over here.” She leant her head back against the wall.
“Now we couldn’t well be farther apart,” he said, having obeyed her. They were both pale as theylooked at one another across the width of the room, and their breath came and went quickly between their parted lips.
“It’s to be like this the whole time that Gregory is away. Then when he comes back I can tell him everything. If we had been different, I should tell him less easily.”
Morgan was just able to follow the ethics of this argument.
“Now I’m going away,” she continued; “you mustn’t move. If you moved, I should run to you....”
“Oh, Nan!” he said, stretching out his hands to her across the room.
“No, no, no,” she cried, vigorously shaking her head from side to side, the shake becoming more vigorous as her need for determination increased. “Oh, my darling heart,” she cried, “I want so to come to you,” and she fled from the room, leaving him unbalanced and perplexed, and in half a dozen minds as to whether he ought to submit as he did to her directions, or to take the law away from her by adopting a bolder course.