“To heal divisions,” mused the Dean. “A good aim, of course. Though probably a hopeless one. One makes it one’s task, you know, to throw bridges, as far as one can, between the Church and the agnostics, and the Church and dissent. And look at the result. A friendly act of conciliation on the part of one of our bishops calls forth torrents of bitter abuse in the columns of our Church papers. The High Church party is so unmanageable: it’s stiff: it stands out for differences: it won’t be brought in. How can we ever progress towards unity if the extreme left remains in that state of wilful obscurantism and unchristian intolerance?... Of course, mind, there are limits; one would fight very strongly against disestablishment or disendowment; but the ritualists seem to be out for quarrels over trifles.” He added, because Eddy had worked in St. Gregory’s, “Of course, individually, there are numberless excellent High Churchmen; one doesn’t want to run down their work. But they’ll never stand for unity.”
“Quite,” said Eddy, meditating on unity. “That’s exactly what Finch and the rest say about the Broad Church party, you know. And it’s what dissenters say about Church people, and Church people about dissenters. The fact is, so few parties do stand for unity. They nearly all stand for faction.”
“I don’t think we Broad Churchmen stand for faction,” said the Dean, and Eddy replied that nor did the High Churchmen think they did, nordissenters either. They all thought they were aiming at unity, but it was the sort of unity attained by the survivor of theNancybrig, or the tiger of Riga, that was the ideal of most parties; it was doubtless also the ideal of a boa-constrictor. Mrs. Oliver, who had come into the room and wasn’t sure it was in good taste to introduce light verse and boa-constrictors into religious discussions, said, “You seem to be talking a great deal of nonsense, dear boy. Everard, have you had your drops yet?”
In such fruitful family discourse they wiled away the Dean’s convalescence.
Meanwhile Molly, jolly and young and alive, with her brown hair curling in the sun, and her happy infectious laugh and her bright, eager, amber eyes full of friendly mirth, was a sheer joy. If she too “stood for” anything beyond herself, it was for youth and mirth and jollity and country life in the open; all sweet things. Eddy and she liked each other rather more each day. They made a plan for Molly to spend a month or so in the autumn with her aunt that lived in Hyde Park Terrace, so that she and Eddy should be near each other.
“They’re darlings,” said Molly, of her uncle and aunt and cousins. “So jolly and hospitable. You’ll love them.”
“I’m sure I shall. And will they love me?” inquired Eddy, for this seemed even more important.
Molly said of course they would.
“Do they love most people?” Eddy pursued his investigations.
Molly considered that. “Well ... most ... that’s a lot, isn’t it. No, Aunt Vyvian doesn’t do that, I should think. Uncle Jimmy more. He’s a sailor, you know; a captain, retired. He seems awfully young, always; much younger than me.... One thing about Aunt Vyvian is, I should think you’d know it pretty quick if she didn’t like you.”
“She’d say so, would she?”
“She’d snub you. She’s rather snippy sometimes, even to me and people she’s fond of. Only one gets used to it, and it doesn’t mean anything except that she likes to amuse herself. But she’s frightfully particular, and if she didn’t like you she wouldn’t have anything to do with you.”
“I see. Then it’s most important that she should. What can I do about it?”
“Oh, just be pleasant, and make yourself as entertaining as you can, and pretend to be fairly sensible and intelligent.... She wouldn’t like it if she thought you were, well, a socialist, or an anarchist, or a person who was trying to do something and couldn’t, like people who try and get plays taken; or if I was a suffragette. She thinks peopleoughtn’tto be like that, because they don’t get on. And, too, she likes very much to be amused.You’llbe all right, of course.”
“Sure to be. I’m such a worldly success. Well, I shall haunt her doorstep whether she likes me or not.”
“If she dared not to,” said Molly indignantly, “I should walk straight out of her house and never go into it again, and make Nevill take me into his rooms instead. I should jolly well think shewouldlike you!”
FORTUNATELYMrs. Crawford did like Eddy (he presumed, therefore, that she did not know he was a socialist and a suffragist, and had tried to do many things he couldn’t), so Molly did not have to walk out of the house. He liked her too, and went to her house very frequently. She was pretty and clever and frankly worldly, and had a sweet trailing voice, a graceful figure, and two daughters just out, one of whom was engaged already to a young man in the Foreign Office.
She told Molly, “I like your young man, dear; he has pleasant manners, and seems to appreciate me,” and asked him to come to the house as often as he could. Eddy did so. He came to lunch and dinner, and met pleasant, polite, well-dressed people. (You had to be rather well-dressed at the Crawfords’: they expected it, as so many others do, with what varying degrees of fulfilment!) It is, of course, as may before have been remarked in these pages, exceedingly important to dress well. Eddy knew this, having been well brought up, and did dressas well as accorded with his station and his duties. He quite saw the beauty of the idea, as of the other ideas presented to him. He also, however, saw the merits of the opposite idea held by some of his friends, that clothes are things not worth time, money, or trouble, and fashion an irrelevant absurdity. He always assented sincerely to Arnold when he delivered himself on this subject, and with equal sincerity to the tacit recognition of high standards that he met at the Crawfords’ and elsewhere.
He also met at the Crawfords’ their nephew Nevill Bellairs, who was now parliamentary secretary to an eminent member, and more than ever admirable in his certainty about what was right and what wrong. The Crawfords too were certain about that. To hear Nevill on Why Women should Not Vote was to feel that he and Daphne must be for ever sundered, and, in fact, were best apart. Eddy came to that melancholy conclusion, though he divined that their mutual and unhappy love still flourished.
“You’re unfashionable, Nevill,” his aunt admonished him. “You should try and not be that more than you can help.”
Captain Crawford, a simple, engaging, and extraordinarily youthful sailor man of forty-six, said, “Don’t be brow-beaten, Nevill; I’m with you,” for that was the sort of man he was; and the young man from the Foreign Office said how a little while ago he had approved of a limited women’s suffrage, but since the militants, etc., etc., and everyone he knew was saying the same.
“I am sure they are,” Mrs. Crawford murmured to Eddy. “What a pity it does not seem to him a sufficient reason for abstaining from the remark himself. I do so dislike the subject of the suffrage; it makes everyone so exceedingly banal and obvious. I never make any remarks about it myself, for I have a deep fear that if I did so they might not be more original than that.”
“Mine certainly wouldn’t,” Eddy agreed. “Militant suffragism is like the weather, a safety-valve for all our worst commonplaces. Only it’s unlike the weather in being a little dull in itself, whereas the weather is an agitatingly interesting subject, as a rule inadequately handled.... You know, I’ve no objection to commonplace remarks myself, I rather like them. That’s why I make them so often, I suppose.”
“I think you have no objection to any kind of remarks,” Mrs. Crawford commented. “You are fortunate.”
Nevill said from across the room, “How’s the paper getting on, Eddy? Is the first number launched yet?”
“Not yet. Only the dummy. I have a copy of the dummy here; look at it. We have filled it with the opinions of eminent persons on the great need that exists for our paper. We wrote to many. Some didn’t answer. I suppose they were not aware of this great need, which is recognised so clearly byothers. The strange thing is thatUnityhas never been started before, considering how badly it is obviously wanted. We have here encouraging words from politicians, authors, philanthropists, a bishop, an eminent rationalist, a fellow of All Souls, a landlord, a labour member, and many others. The bishop says, ‘I am greatly interested in the prospectus you have sent me of your proposed new paper. Without committing myself to agreement with every detail, I may say that the lines on which it is proposed to conductUnitypromise a very useful and attractive paper, and one which should meet a genuine need and touch an extensive circle.’ The labour member says, ‘Your new paper is much needed, and with such fine ideals should be of great service to all.’ The landlord says, ‘Your articles dealing with country matters should meet a long-felt demand, and make for good feeling between landlords, tenants and labourers.’ The rationalist says, ‘Precisely what we want.’ The Liberal politician says, ‘I heartily wish all success toUnity. A good new paper on those lines cannot fail to be of inestimable service.’ The Unionist says, ‘A capital paper, with excellent ideals.’ The philanthropist says, ‘I hope it will wage relentless war against the miserable internal squabbles which retard our social efforts.’ Here’s a more tepid one—he’s an author. He only says, ‘There may be scope for such a paper, amid the ever-increasing throng of new journalistic enterprises. Anyhow there is no harm in trying.’ A little damping, he was.Denison was against putting it in, but I think it so rude, when you’ve asked a man for a word of encouragement, and he gives it you according to his means, not to use it. Of course we had to draw the line somewhere. Shore merely said, ‘It’s a free country. You can hang yourselves if you like.’ We didn’t put in that. But on the whole people are obviously pining for the paper, aren’t they. Of course they all think we’re going to support their particular pet party and project. And so we are. That is why I think we shall sell so well—touch so extensive a circle, as the bishop puts it.”
“As long as you help to knock another plank from beneath the feet of this beggarly government, I’ll back you through thick and thin,” said Captain Crawford.
“Are you going on the Down-with-the-Jews tack?” Nevill asked. “That’s been overdone, I think; it’s such beastly bad form.”
“All the same,” murmured Captain Crawford, “I don’t care about the Hebrew.”
“We’re not,” said Eddy, “going on a down-with-anybody tack. Ourmétieris to encourage the good, not to discourage anyone. That, as I remarked before, is why we shall sell so extremely well.”
Mrs. Crawford said, “Humph. It sounds to me a trifle savourless. A little abuse hasn’t usually been found, I believe, to reduce the sales of a paper appreciably. We most of us like to see our enemies hauled over the coals; or, failing our enemies, some innocuous and eminent member of anunpopular and over-intelligent race. In short, we like to see a fine hot quarrel going on. IfUnityisn’t going to quarrel with anyone, I shall certainly not subscribe.”
“You shall have it gratis,” said Eddy. “It is obviously, as the eminent rationalist puts it, precisely what you need.”
Nevill said, “By the way, what’s happening to that Radical paper of poor Hugh Datcherd’s? Is it dead?”
“Yes. It couldn’t have survived Datcherd; no one else could possibly take it on. Besides, he financed it entirely himself; it never anything near paid its way, of course. It’s a pity; it was interesting.”
“Like it’s owner,” Mrs. Crawford remarked. “He too, one gathers, was a pity, though no doubt an interesting one. The one failure in a distinguished family.”
“I should call all the Datcherds a pity, if you ask me,” said Nevill. “They’re wrong-headed Radicals. All agnostics, too, and more or less anti-church.”
“All the same,” said his aunt, “they’re not failures, mostly. They achieve success; even renown. They occasionally become cabinet ministers. I ask no more of a family than that. You may be as wrong-headed, radical, and anti-church as you please, Nevill, if you attain to being a cabinet minister. Of course they have disadvantages, such as England expecting them not to invest their money as they would prefer, and so on;but on the whole an enviable career. Better even than running a paper which meets a long-felt demand.”
“But the paper’s much more fun,” Molly put in, and her aunt returned, “My dear child, we are not put into this troubled world to have fun, though I have noticed that you labour under that delusion.”
The young man from the Foreign Office said, “It’s not a delusion that can survive in my profession, anyhow. I must be getting back, I’m afraid,” and they all went away to do something else. Eddy arranged to meet Molly and her aunt at tea-time, and take them to Jane Dawn’s studio; he had asked her if he might bring them to see her drawings.
They met at Mrs. Crawford’s club, and drove to Blackfriars’ Road.
“Where?” inquired Mrs. Crawford, after Eddy’s order to the driver.
“Pleasance Court, Blackfriars’ Road,” Eddy repeated.
“Oh! I somehow had an idea it was Chelsea. That’s where one often finds studios; but, after all, there must be many others, if one comes to think of it.”
“Perhaps Jane can’t afford Chelsea. She’s not poor, but she spends her money like a child. She takes after her father, who is extravagant, like so many professors.”
“Chelsea’s supposed to be cheap, my dear boy. That’s why it’s full of struggling young artists.”
“I daresay Pleasance Court is cheaper. Besides, it’s pleasant. They like it.”
“They?”
“Jane and her friend Miss Peters, who shares rooms with her. Rather a jolly sort of girl; though——” On second thoughts Eddy refrained from mentioning that Sally Peters was a militant and had been in prison; he remembered that Mrs. Crawford found the subject tedious.
But militancy will out, as must have been noticed by many. Before the visitors had been there ten minutes, Sally referred to the recent destruction of the property of a distinguished widowed lady in such laudatory terms that Mrs. Crawford discerned her in a minute, raised a disapproving lorgnette at her, murmured, “They devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long speeches,” and turned her back on her. Jolly sorts of girls who were also criminal lunatics were not suffered in the sphere of her acquaintance.
Jane’s drawings were obviously charming; also they were the drawings of an artist, not of a young lady of talent. Mrs. Crawford, who knew the difference, perceived that, and gave them the tribute she always ceded to success. She thought she would ask Jane to lunch one day, without, of course, the blue-eyed child who devoured widows’ houses. She did so presently.
Jane said, “Thank you so much, but I’m afraid I can’t,” and knitted her large forehead a little, in her apologetic way, so obviously trying to think of asuitable reason why she couldn’t, that Mrs. Crawford came to her rescue with “Perhaps you’re too busy,” which was gratefully accepted.
“I am rather busy just now.” Jane was very polite, very deprecating, but inwardly she reproached Eddy for letting in on her strange ladies who asked her to lunch.
That no one ought to be too busy for social engagements, was what Mrs. Crawford thought, and she turned a little crisper and cooler in manner. Molly was standing before a small drawing in a corner—a drawing of a girl, bare-legged, childish, half elfin, lying among sedges by a stream, one leg up to the knee in water, and one arm up to the elbow. Admirably the suggestion had been caught of a small wild thing, a little half-sulky animal. Molly laughed at it.
“That’s Daffy, of course. It’s not like her—and yet itisher. A sort of inside look it’s got of her; hasn’t it, Eddy? I suppose it looks different because Daffy’s always so neat and tailor-made, and neverwouldbe like that. It’s a different Daffy, but it is Daffy.”
“Your pretty little sister, isn’t it, Eddy,” said Mrs. Crawford, who had met Daphne at Welchester. “Yes, that’s clever. ‘Undine,’ you call it. Why? Has she no soul?”
Jane smiled and retired from this question. She seldom explained why her pictures were so called; they just were.
Molly was not looking at Undine. Her glancehad fallen on a drawing near it. It was another drawing of a girl; a very beautiful girl, playing a violin. It was called “Life.” No one would have asked why about this; the lightly poised figure, the glowing eyes under their shadowing black brows, the fiddle tucked away under the round chin, and the dimples tucked away in the round cheeks, the fine supple hands, expressed the very spirit of life, all its joy and brilliance and genius and fire, and all its potential tragedy. Molly looked at it without comment, as she might have looked at a picture of some friend of the artist’s who had died a sad death. She knew that Eileen Le Moine had died, from her point of view; she knew that she had spent the last months of Hugh Datcherd’s life with him, for Eddy had told her. She had said to Eddy that this was dreadful and wicked. Eddy had said, “They don’t think it is, you see.” Molly had said that what they thought made no difference to right and wrong; Eddy had replied that it made all the difference in the world. She had finally turned on him with, “Butyouthink it dreadful, Eddy?” and he had, to her dismay, shaken his head.
“Not as they’re doing it, I don’t. It’s all right. You’d know it was all right if you knew them, Molly. It’s been, all along, the most faithful, loyal, fine, simple, sad thing in the world, their love. They’ve held out against it just so long as to give in would have hurt anyone but themselves; now it won’t, and she’s giving herself to him that he may die in peace. Don’t judge them, Molly.”
But she had judged them so uncompromisingly, so unyieldingly, that she had never referred to the subject again, for fear it should come between Eddy and her. A difference of principle was the one thing Molly could not bear. To her this thing, whatever its excuse, was wrong, against the laws of the Christian Church, in fine, wicked. And it was Eddy’s friends who had done it, and he didn’t want her to judge them; she must say nothing, therefore. Molly’s ways were ways of peace.
Mrs. Crawford peered through her lorgnette at the drawing. “What’s that delicious thing? ‘Life.’ Quite; just that. That is really utterly charming. Who’s the original? Why, it’s——-” She stopped suddenly.
“It’s Mrs. Le Moine, the violinist,” said Jane.
“She’s a great friend of ours,” Sally interpolated, in childish pride, from behind. “I expect you’ve heard her play, haven’t you?”
Mrs. Crawford had. She recognised the genius of the picture, which had so exquisitely caught and imprisoned the genius of the subject.
“Of course; who hasn’t? A marvellous player. And a marvellous picture.”
“It’s Eileen all over,” said Eddy, who knew it of old.
“Hugh bought it, you know,” said Jane. “And when he died Eileen sent it back to me. I thought perhaps you and Eddy,” she turned to Molly, “might care to have it for a wedding-present, with ‘Undine.’”
Molly thanked her shyly, flushing a little. She would have preferred to refuse ‘Life,’ but her never-failing courtesy and tenderness for people’s feelings drove her to smile and accept.
It was then that someone knocked on the studio door. Sally went to open it; cried, “Oh, Eileen,” and drew her in, an arm about her waist.
She was not very like Jane’s drawing of her just now. The tragic elements of Life had conquered and beaten down its brilliance and joy; the rounded white cheeks were thin, and showed, instead of dimples, the fine structure of the face and jaw; the great deep blue eyes brooded sombrely under sad brows; she drooped a little as she stood. It was as if something had been quenched in her, and left her as a dead fire. The old flashing smile had left only the wan, strange ghost of itself. If Jane had drawn her now, or any time since the middle of August, she would rather have called the drawing “Wreckage.” To Eddy and all her friends she and her wrecked joy, her quenched vividness, stabbed at a pity beyond tears.
Molly looked at her for a moment, and turned rosy red all over her wholesome little tanned face, and bent over a picture near her.
Mrs. Crawford looked at her, through her, above her, and said to Jane, “Thank you so much for a delightful afternoon. We really must go now.”
Jane said, slipping a hand into Eileen’s, “Oh, but you’ll have tea, won’t you? I’m so sorry; we ought to have had it earlier.... Do you knowMrs. Le Moine? Mrs. Crawford; andyouknow each other, of course,” she connected Eileen and Molly with a smile, and Molly put out a timid hand.
Mrs. Crawford’s bow was so slight that it might have been not a bow at all. “Thank you, but I’m afraid we mustn’t stop. We have enjoyed your delightful drawings exceedingly. Goodbye.”
“Must you both go?” said Eddy to Molly. “Can’t you stop and have tea and go home with me afterwards?”
“I’m afraid not,” Molly murmured, still rosy.
“Are you coming with us, Eddy?” asked Molly’s aunt, in her sweet, sub-acid voice. “No? Goodbye then. Oh, don’t trouble, please, Miss Dawn; Eddy will show us out.” Her faint bow comprehended the company.
Eddy came with them to their carriage.
“I’m sorry you won’t stop,” he said.
Mrs. Crawford’s fine eyebrows rose a little.
“You could hardly expect me to stop, still less to let Molly stop, in company with a lady of Mrs. Le Moine’s reputation. She has elected to become, as you of course are aware, one of the persons whose acquaintance must be dispensed with by all but the unfastidious. You are not going to dispense with it, I perceive? Very well; but you must allow Molly and me to take the ordinary course of the world in such matters. Goodbye.”
Eddy, red as if her words had been a whip in his face, turned back into the house and shut the door rather violently behind him, as if by the gesturehe would shut out all the harsh, coarse judgments of the undiscriminating world. He climbed the stairs to the studio, and found them having tea and discussing pictures, from their own several points of view, not the world’s. It was a rest.
Mrs. Crawford, as they drove over the jolting surface of Blackfriars’ Road, said, “Very odd friends your young man has, darling. And what a very unpleasant region they live in. It is just as well for the sake of the carriage wheels that we shall never have to go there again. We can’t, of course, if we are liable to meet people of no reputation there. I’m sure you know nothing about things like that, but I’m sorry to say that Mrs. Le Moine has done things she ought not to have done. One may continue to admire her music, as one may admire the acting of those who lead such unfortunate lives on the stage; but one can’t meet her. Eddy ought to know that. Of course it’s different for him. Men may meet anyone; in fact, I believe they do; and no one thinks the worse of them. But I can’t; still less, of course, you. I don’t suppose your dear mother would like me to tell you about her, so I won’t.”
“I know,” said Molly, blushing again and feeling she oughtn’t to. “Eddy told me. He’s a great friend of hers, you see.”
“Oh, indeed. Well, girls know everything now-a-days, of course. In fact, everyone knows this; both she and Hugh Datcherd were such well-known people. I don’t say it was so very dreadfullywrong, what they did; and of course Dorothy Datcherd left Hugh in the lurch first—but you wouldn’t have heard of that, no—only it does put Mrs. Le Moine beyond the pale. And, in fact, it is dreadfully wrong to fly in the face of everybody’s principles and social codes; of course it is.”
Molly cared nothing for everyone’s principles and social codes; but she knew it was dreadfully wrong, what they had done. She couldn’t even reason it out; couldn’t formulate the real reason why it was wrong; couldn’t see that it was because it was giving rein to individual desire at the expense of the violation of a system which on the whole, however roughly and crudely, made for civilisation, virtue, and intellectual and moral progress; that it was, in short, a step backwards into savagery, a giving up of ground gained. Arnold Denison, more clear-sighted, saw that; Molly, with only her childlike, unphilosophical, but intensely vivid recognition of right and wrong to help her, merely knew it was wrong. From three widely different standpoints those three, Molly, Arnold Denison, Mrs. Crawford, joined in that recognition. Against them stood Eddy, who saw only the right in it, and the stabbing, wounding pity of it....
“It is extremely fortunate,” said Mrs. Crawford, “that that young woman Miss Dawn refused to come to lunch. I daresay she knew she wasn’t fit for lunch, with such people straying in and out of her rooms and she holding their hands. I give her credit so far. As for the plump fair child, sheis obviously one of those vulgarians I insist on not hearing mentioned. Very strange friends, darling, your....”
“I’m sure nearly all Eddy’s friends are very nice,” Molly broke in. “Miss Dawn was staying at the Deanery at Christmas, you know. I’m sure she’s nice, and she draws beautifully. And I expect Miss Peters is nice too; she’s so friendly and jolly, and has such pretty hair and eyes. And....”
“You can stop there, dearest. If you are proceeding to say that you are sure Mrs. Le Moine is nice too, you can spare yourself the trouble.”
“I wasn’t,” said Molly unhappily, and lifted her shamed, honest, amber eyes to her aunt’s face. “Of course ... I know ... she can’t be.”
Her aunt gave her a soothing pat on the shoulder. “Very well, pet: don’t worry about it. I’m afraid you will find that there are a large number of people in the world, and only too many of them aren’t at all nice. Shockingly sad, of course; but if one took them all to heart one would sink into an early grave. The worst of this really is that we have lost our tea. We might drop in on the Tommy Durnfords; it’s their day, surely.... When shall you see Eddy next, by the way?”
“I think doesn’t he come to dinner to-morrow?”
“So he does. Well, he and I must have a good talk.”
Molly looked at her doubtfully. “Aunt Vyvian, I don’t think so. Truly I don’t.”
“Well, I do, my dear. I’m responsible to yourparents for you, and your young man’s got to be careful of you, and I shall tell him so.”
She told him so in the drawing-room after dinner next evening. She sat out from bridge on purpose to tell him. She said, “I was surprised and shocked yesterday afternoon, Eddy, as no doubt you gathered.”
Eddy admitted that he had gathered that. “Do you mind if I say that I was too, a little?” he added. “Is that rude? I hope not.”
“Not in the least. I’ve no doubt you were shocked; but I don’t think really that you can have been much surprised, you know. Did you honestly expect me and Molly to stay and have tea with Mrs. Le Moine? She’s not a person whom Molly ought to know. She’s stepped deliberately outside the social pale, and must stay there. Seriously, Eddy, you mustn’t bring her and Molly together.”
“Seriously,” said Eddy, “I mean to. I want Molly to know and care for all my friends. Of course she’ll find in lots of them things she wouldn’t agree with; but that’s no barrier. I can’t shut her out, don’t you see? I know all these people so awfully well, and see so much of them; of course she must know them too. As for Mrs. Le Moine, she’s one of the finest people I know; I should think anyone would be proud to know her. Surely one can’t be rigid about things?”
“One can,” Mrs. Crawford asserted. “One can, and one is. One draws one’s line. Or rather theworld draws it for one. Those who choose to step outside it must remain outside it.”
Eddy said softly, “Bother the world!”
“I’m not going,” she returned, “to do any such thing. I belong to the world, and am much attached to it. And about this sort of thing it happens to be entirely right. I abide by its decrees, and so must Molly, and so must you.”
“I had hoped,” he said, “that you, as well as Molly, would make friends with Eileen. She needs friendship rather. She’s hurt and broken; you must have seen that yesterday.”
“Indeed, I hardly looked. But I’ve no doubt she would be. I’m sorry for your unfortunate friend, Eddy, but I really can’t know her. You didn’t surely expect me to ask her here, to meet Chrissie and Dulcie and my innocent Jimmy, did you? What will you think of next? Well, well, I’m going to play bridge now, and you can go and talk to Molly. Only don’t try and persuade her to meet your scandalous friends, because I shall not allow her to, and she has no desire to if I did. Molly, I am pleased to say, is a very right-minded and well-conducted girl.”
Eddy discovered that this was so. Molly evinced no desire to meet Eileen Le Moine. She said “Aunt Vyvian doesn’t want me to.”
“But,” Eddy expostulated, “she’s constantly with the rest—Jane and Sally, and Denison, and Billy Raymond, and Cecil Le Moine, and all that set—you can’t help meeting her sometimes.”
“I needn’t meet any of them much, really,” said Molly.
Eddy disagreed. “Of course you need. They’re some of my greatest friends. They’ve got to be your friends too. When we’re married they’ll come and see us constantly, I hope, and we shall go and see them. We shall always be meeting. I awfully want you to get to know them quickly. They’re such good sorts, Molly; you’ll like them all, and they’ll love you.”
There was an odd doubtful look in Molly’s eyes.
“Eddy,” she said after a moment, painfully blushing, “I’m awfully sorry, and it sounds priggish and silly—but Ican’tlike people when I think they don’t feel rightly about right and wrong. I suppose I’m made like that. I’m sorry.”
“You precious infant.” He smiled at her distressed face. “You’re made as I prefer. But you see, theydofeel rightly about things; they really do, Molly.”
“Then,” her shamed, averted eyes seemed to say, “why don’t they act rightly?”
“Just try,” he besought her, “to understand their points of view—everyone’s point of view. Or rather, don’t bother about points of view; just know the people, and you won’t be able to help caring for them. People are like that—so much more alive and important than what they think or do, that none of that seems to matter. Oh, don’t put up barriers, Molly. Do love my friends. I want you to. I’ll love all yours; I will indeed, whatever dreadfulthings they’ve done or are doing. I’ll love them even if they burn widows’ houses, or paint problem pictures for the Academy, or write prize novels, or won’t take inUnity. I’ll love them through everything. Won’t you love mine a little, too?”
She laughed back at him, unsteadily.
“Idiot, of course I will. I will indeed. I’ll love them nearly all. Only I can’t love things I hate, Eddy. Don’t ask me to do that, because I can’t.”
“But you mustn’t hate, Molly. Why hate? It isn’t what things are there for, to be hated. Look here. Here are you and I set down in the middle of all this jolly, splendid, exciting jumble of things, just like a toy-shop, and we can go round looking at everything, touching everything, tasting everything (I used always to try to taste tarts and things in shops, didn’t you?) Well isn’t it all jolly and nice, and don’t you like it? And here you sit and talk of hating!”
Molly was looking at him with her merry eyes unusually serious.
“But Eddy—you’re just pretending when you talk of hating nothing. You know you hate some things yourself; there are some things everyone must hate. You know you do.”
“Do I?” Eddy considered it. “Why, yes, I suppose so; some things. But very few.”
“There’s good,” said Molly, with a gesture of one hand, “and there’s bad....” she swept the other. “They’re quite separate, and they’re fighting.”
Eddy observed that she was a Manichean Dualist.
“Don’t know what that is. But it seems to mean an ordinary sensible person, so I hope I am. Aren’t you?”
“I think not. Not to your extent, anyhow. But I quite see your point of view. Now will you see mine? And Eileen’s? And all the others? Anyhow, will you think it over, so that by the time we’re married you’ll be ready to be friends?”
Molly shook her head.
“It’s no use, Eddy. Don’t let’s talk about it any more. Come and play coon-can; I do like it such a lot better than bridge; it’s so much sillier.”
“I like them all,” said Eddy.
EDDYnext Sunday collected a party to row up to Kew. They were Jane Dawn, Bridget Hogan, Billy Raymond, Arnold Denison, Molly and himself, and they embarked in a boat at Crabtree Lane at two o’clock, and all took turns of rowing except Bridget, who, as has been observed before, was a lily of the field, and insisted on remaining so. She, Molly, and Eddy may be called the respectable-looking members of the party; Jane, Arnold, and Billy were sublimely untidy, which Eddy knew was a pity, because of Molly, who was always a daintily arrayed, fastidiously neat child. But it did not really matter. They were all very happy. The others made a pet and plaything of Molly, whose infectious, whole-hearted chuckle and naïve high spirits pleased them. She and Eddy decided to live in a river-side house, and made selections as they rowed by.
“You’d be better off in Soho,” said Arnold.
“Eddy would be nearer his business, and nearerthe shop we’re going to start presently. Besides, it’s more select. You can’t avoid the respectable resident, up the river.”
“The cheery non-resident, too, which is worse,” added Miss Hogan. “Like us. The river on a holiday is unthinkable. We were on it all Good Friday last year, which seems silly, but I suppose we must have had some wise purpose. Why was it, Billy? Do you remember? You came, didn’t you? And you, Jane. And Eileen and Cecil, I think. Anyhow never again. Oh yes, and we took some poor starved poet of Billy’s—a most unfortunate creature, who proved, didn’t he, to be unable even to write poetry. Or, indeed, to sit still in a boat. One or two very narrow shaves we had I remember. He’s gone into Peter Robinson’s since, I believe, as walker. So much nicer for him in every way. I saw him there last Tuesday. I gave him a friendly smile and asked how he was, but I think he had forgotten his past life, or else he had understood me to be asking the way to the stocking department, for he only replied, “Hose, madam?” Then I remembered that that was partly why he had failed to be a poet, because he would call stockings hose, and use similar unhealthy synonyms. So I concluded with pleasure that he had really found his vocation, the one career where such synonyms are suitable, and, in fact, necessary.”
“He’s a very nice person, Nichols,” Billy said; “he still writes a little, but I don’t think he’ll ever get anything taken. He can’t get rid of the ideathat he’s got to be elegant. It’s a pity, because he’s really got a little to say.”
“Yes; quite a little, isn’t it. Poor dear.”
Eddy asked hopefully, “Would he do us an article forUnityfrom the shop walker’s point of view, about shop life, and the relations between customers and shop people?”
Billy shook his head. “I’m sure he wouldn’t. He’d want to write you a poem about something quite different instead. He hates the shop, and he won’t write prose; he finds it too homely. And if he did, it would be horrible stuff, full of commencing, and hose, and words like that.”
“And corsets, and the next pleasure, and kindly walk this way. It might be rather delightful really. I should try to get him to, Eddy.”
“I think I will. We rather want the shopman’s point of view, and it’s not easy to get.”
They were passing Chiswick Mall. Molly saw there the house she preferred.
“Look, Eddy. That one with wistaria over it, and the balcony. What’s it called? The Osiers. What a nice name. Do let’s stop and find out if we can have it.”
“Well, someone obviously lives there; in fact, I see someone on the balcony. He might think it odd of us, do you think?”
“But perhaps he’s leaving. Or perhaps he’d as soon live somewhere else, if we found a nice place for him. I wonder who it is?”
“I don’t know. We might find out who hisdoctor is, and get him to tell him it’s damp and unhealthy. It looks fairly old.”
“And they say those osier beds are most unwholesome,” Bridget added.
“It’s heavenly. And look, there’s a heron.... Can’t we land on the island?”
“No. Bridget says it’s unwholesome.”
So they didn’t, but went on to Kew. There they landed and went to look for the badger in the gardens. They did not find him. One never does. But they had tea. Then they rowed down again to Crabtree Lane, and their ways diverged.
Eddy went home with Molly. She said, “It’s been lovely, Eddy,” and he said “Hasn’t it.” He was pleased, because Molly and the others had got on so well and made such a happy party. He said, “When we’re at the Osiers we’ll often do that.”
She said “Yes,” thoughtfully, and he saw that something was on her mind.
“And when Daffy and Nevill have stopped quarrelling,” added Eddy, “we’ll have them established somewhere near by, and they shall come on the river too. We must fix that up somehow.”
Molly said “Yes,” again, and he asked, “And what’s the matter now?” and touched a little pucker on her forehead with his finger. She smiled.
“I was only thinking, Eddy.... It was something Miss Hogan said, about spending Good Friday on the river. Do you think they really did?”
He laughed a little at her wide, questioning eyes and serious face.
“I suppose so. But Bridget said ‘Never again’—didn’t you hear?”
“Oh yes. But that was only because of the crowd.... Of course it may be all right—but I just wished she hadn’t said it, rather. It sounded as if they didn’t care much, somehow. I’m sure they do, but....”
“I’m sure they don’t,” Eddy said. “Bridget isn’t what you would call a Churchwoman, you see. Nor are Jane, or Arnold, or Billy. They see things differently, that’s all.”
“But—they’re not dissenters, are they?”
Eddy laughed. “No. That’s the last thing any of them are.”
Molly’s wide gaze became startled.
“Do you mean—they’re heathens? Oh, how dreadfully sad, Eddy. Can’t you ... can’t you help them somehow? Couldn’t you ask some clergyman you know to meet them?”
Eddy chuckled again. “I’m glad I’m engaged to you, Molly. You please me. But I’m afraid the clergyman would be no more likely to convert them than they him.”
Molly remembered something Daphne had once told her about Miss Dawn and Mrs. Le Moine and the prayer book. “It’s so dreadfully sad,” she repeated. There was a little silence. The revelation was working in Molly’s mind. She turned it over and over.
“Eddy.”
“Molly?”
“Don’t you find it matters? In being friends, I mean?”
“What? Oh, that. No, not a bit. How should it matter, that I happen to believe certain things they don’t? How could it?”
“It would to me.” Molly spoke with conviction. “I might try, but I know I couldn’t really be friends—not close friends—with an unbeliever.”
“Oh yes, you could. You’d get over all that, once you knew them. It doesn’t stick out of them, what they don’t believe; it very seldom turns up. Besides theirs is such an ordinary, and such a comprehensible and natural point of view. Have you always believed what you do now about such things?”
“Why, of course. Haven’t you?”
“Oh dear no. For quite a long time I didn’t. After all, it’s pretty difficult.... And particularly at my home I think it was a little difficult—for me, anyhow. I suppose I wanted more of the Catholic Church standpoint. I didn’t come across that much till Cambridge; then suddenly I caught on to the point of view, and saw how fine it was.”
“It’s more than fine,” said Molly. “It’s true.”
“Rather, of course it is. So are all fine things. If once all these people who don’t believe saw the fineness of it, they’d see it must be true. Meanwhile, I don’t see that the fact that one believes one’s friends to be missing something they might have is any sort of reason for not being friends. Is it now? Billy might as well say he couldn’t be friends withyou because you said you didn’t care about Masefield. You miss something he’s got; that’s all the difference it makes, in either case.”
“Masefield isn’t so important as——” Molly left a shy hiatus.
“No; of course; but, it’s the same principle.... Well, anyhow you like them, don’t you?” said Eddy shifting his ground.
“Oh, yes, I do. But I expect they think me a duffer. I don’t know anything about their things, you see. They’re awfully nice to me.”
“That seems odd, certainly. And they may come and visit us at the Osiers, mayn’t they?”
“Of course. And we’ll all have tea on the balcony there. Oh, do let’s begin turning out the people that live there at once.”
Meanwhile Jane and Arnold and Billy, walking along the embankment, when they had discussed the colour of the water, the prospects of the weather, the number of cats on the wall, and other interesting subjects, commented on Molly. Jane said, “She’s a little sweetmeat. I love her yellow eyes and her rough curly hair. She’s like a spaniel puppy we’ve got at home.”
Billy said, “She’s quite nice to talk to, too. I like her laugh.”
Arnold said, maliciously, “She’ll never read your poetry, Billy. She probably only reads Tennyson’s and Scott’s and theAnthology of Nineteenth Century Verse.”
“Well,” said Billy, placidly, “I’m in that. Ifshe knows that, she knows all the best twentieth century poets. You seem to be rather acrimonious about her. Hadn’t she read your ‘Latter Day Leavings,’ or what?”
“I’m sure I trust not. She’d hate them.... It’s all very well, and I’ve no doubt she’s a very nice little girl—but what does Eddy want with marrying her? Or, indeed, anyone else? He’s not old enough to settle down. And marrying that spaniel-child will mean settling down in a sense.”
“Oh, I don’t know. She’s got plenty of fun, and can play all right.”
Arnold shook his head over her. “All the same, she’s on the side of darkness and the conventions. She mayn’t know it yet, being still half a child, and in the playing puppy stage, but give her ten years and you’ll see. She’ll become proper. Even now, she’s not sure we’re quite nice or very good. I spotted that.... Don’t you remember, Jane, what I said to you at Welchester about it? With my never-failing perspicacity, I foresaw the turn events would take, and I foresaw also exactly how she would affect Eddy. You will no doubt recollect what I said (I hope you always do); therefore I won’t repeat it now, even for Billy’s sake. But I may tell you, Billy, that I prophesied the worst. I still prophesy it.”
“You’re too frightfully particular to live, Arnold,” Billy told him. “She’s a very good sort and a very pleasant person. Rather like a brook in sunlight, I thought her; her eyes are that colour, and herhair and dress are the shadowed parts, and her laugh is like the water chuckling over a stone. I like her.”
“Oh, heavens,” Arnold groaned. “Of course you do. You and Jane are hopeless. You maylikebrooks in sunlight or puppies or anything else in the universe—but you don’t want to go andmarrythem because of that.”
“I don’t,” Billy admitted, peacefully. “But many people do. Eddy obviously is one of them. And I should say it’s quite a good thing for him to do.”
“Of course it is,” said Jane, who was more interested at the moment in the effect of the evening mist on the river.
“Perhaps they’ll think better of it and break it off before the wedding-day,” Arnold gloomily suggested. “There’s always that hope.... I see no place for this thing called love in a reasonable life. It will smash up Eddy, as it’s smashed up Eileen. I hate the thing.”
“Eileen’s a little better lately,” said Jane presently. “She’s going to play at Lovinski’s concert next week.”
“She’s rather worse really,” said Billy, a singularly clear-sighted person; and they left it at that.
Billy was very likely right. At that moment Eileen was lying on the floor of her room, her head on her flung-out arms, tearless and still, muttering a name over and over, through clenched teeth. The passage of time took her further from him, slowhour by slow hour; took her out into cold, lonely seas of pain, to drown uncomforted. She was not rather better.
She would spend long mornings or evenings in the fields and lanes by the Lea, walking or sitting, silent and alone. She never went to the disorganised, lifeless remnant of Datcherd’s settlement; only she would travel by the tram up Shoreditch and Mare Street to the north east, and walk along the narrow path by the Lea-side wharf cottages, little and old and jumbled, and so over the river on to Leyton Marsh, where sheep crop the grass. Here she and Datcherd had often walked, after an evening at the Club, and here she now wandered alone. These regions have a queer, perhaps morbid, peace; they brood, as it were, on the fringe of the huge world of London; they divide it, too, from that other stranger, sadder world beyond the Lea, Walthamstow and its endless drab slums.
Here, in the November twilight on Leyton Marsh, Eddy found her once. He himself was bicycling back from Walthamstow, where he had been to see one of his Club friends (he had made many) who lived there. Eileen was leaning on a stile at the end of one of the footpaths that thread this strange borderland. They met face to face; and she looked at him as if she did not see him, as if she was expecting someone not him. He got off his bicycle, and said “Eileen.”
She looked at him dully, and said, “I’m waiting for Hugh.”
He gently took her hand. “You’re cold. Come home with me.”
Her dazed eyes upon his face slowly took perception and meaning, and with them pain rushed in. She shuddered horribly, and caught away her hand.
“Oh ... I was waiting ... but it’s no use ... I suppose I’m going mad....”
“No. You’re only tired and unstrung. Come home now, won’t you. Indeed you mustn’t stay.”
The mists were white and chilly about them; it was a strange phantom world, set between the million-eyed monster to the west, and the smaller, sprawling, infinitely sad monster to the east.
She flung out her arms to the red-eyed city, and moaned, “Hugh, Hugh, Hugh,” till she choked and cried.
Eddy bit his own lips to steady them. “Eileen—dear Eileen—come home. He’d want you to.”
She returned, through sobs that rent her. “He wants nothing any more. He always wanted things, and never got them; and now he’s dead, the way he can’t even want. But I want him; I want him; I want him—oh, Hugh!”
So seldom she cried, so strung up and tense had she long been, even to the verge of mental delusion, that now that a breaking-point had come, she broke utterly, and cried and cried, and could not stop.
He stood by her, saying nothing, waiting till he could be of use. At last from very weariness she quieted, and stood very still, her head bowed on her arms that were flung across the stile.
He said then, “Dear, you will come now, won’t you,” and apathetically she lifted her head, and her dim, wet, distorted face was strange in the mist-swathed moonlight.
Together they took the little path back over the grass-grown marsh, where phantom sheep coughed in the fog, and so across the foot-bridge to the London side of the Lea, and the little wharfside cottages, and up on to the Lea Bridge Road, and into Mare Street, and there, by unusual good fortune there strayed a taxi, a rare phenomenon north of Shoreditch, and Eddy put Eileen and himself and his bicycle in it and on it, and so they came back out of the wilds of the east, by Liverpool Street and the city, across London to Campden Hill Road in the further west. And all the way Eileen leant back exhausted and very still, only shuddering from time to time, as one does after a fit of crying or of sickness. But by the end of the journey she was a little restored. Listlessly she touched Eddy’s hand with her cold one.
“Eddy, you are a dear. You’ve been good to me, and I such a great fool. I’m sorry. It isn’t often I am.... But I think if you hadn’t come to-night I would have gone mad, no less. I was on the way there, I believe. Thank you for saving me. And now you’ll come in and have something, won’t you.”
He would not come in. He should before this have been at Mrs. Crawford’s for dinner. He waited to see her in, then hurried back to Soho todress. His last sight of her was as she turned to him in the doorway, the light on her pale, tear-marred face, trying to smile to cheer him. That was a good sign, he believed, that she could think even momentarily of anyone but herself and the other who filled her being.
Heavy-hearted for pity and regret, he drove back to his rooms and hurriedly dressed, and arrived in Hyde Park Terrace desperately late, a thing Mrs. Crawford found it hard to forgive. In fact, she did not try to forgive it. She said, “Oh, we had quite given up hope. Hardwick, some soup for Mr. Oliver.”
Eddy said he would rather begin where they had got to. But he was not allowed thus to evade his position, and had to hurry through four courses before he caught them up. They were a small party, and he apologised across the table to his hostess as he ate.
“I’m frightfully sorry; simply abject. The fact is, I met a friend on Leyton Marsh.”
“Onwhat?”
“Leyton Marsh. Up in the north east, by the Lea, you know.”
“I certainly don’t know. Is that where you usually take your evening walks when dining in Kensington?”
“Well, sometimes. It’s the way to Walthamstow, you see. I know some people there.”
“Really. You do, as the rationalist bishop told you, touch a very extensive circle, certainly. Andso you met one of them on this marsh, and the pleasure of their society was such——”
“She wasn’t well, and I took her back to where she lived. She lives in Kensington, so it took ages; then I had to get back to Compton Street to dress. Really, I’m awfully sorry.”
Mrs. Crawford’s eyebrows conveyed attention to the sex of the friend; then she resumed conversation with the barrister on her right.
Molly said consolingly, “Don’t you mind, Eddy. She doesn’t really. She only pretends to, for fun. She knows it wasn’t your fault. Of course you had to take your friend home if she wasn’t well.”
“I couldn’t have left her, as a matter of fact. She was frightfully unhappy and unhinged.... It was Mrs. Le Moine.” He conquered a vague reluctance and added this. He was not going to have the vestige of a secret from Molly.
She flushed quickly and said nothing, and he knew that he had hurt her. Yet it was an unthinkable alternative to conceal the truth from her; equally unthinkable not to do these things that hurt her. What then, would be the solution? Simply he did not know. A change of attitude on her part seemed to him the only possible one, and he had waited now long for that in vain. To avert her sombreness and his, he began to talk cheerfully to her about all manner of things, and she responded, but not quite spontaneously. A shadow lay between them.
So obvious was it that after dinner he told her so, in those words.
She tried to smile. “Does it? How silly you are.”
“You’d better tell me the worst, you know. You think it was ill-bred of me to be late for dinner.”
“What rubbish; I don’t. As if you could help it.”
But he knew she thought he could have helped it. So they left it at that, and the shadow remained.
Eddy, it may have been mentioned, had the gift of sympathy largely developed—the quality of his defect of impressionability. He had it more than is customary. People found that he said and felt the most consoling thing, and left unsaid the less. It was because he found realisation easy. So people in trouble often came to him. Eileen Le Moine, reaching out in her desperate need on the mist-bound marshes, had, as it were, met the saving grasp of his hand. Half-consciously she had let it draw her out of the deep waters where she was sinking, on to the shores of sanity. She reached out to him again. He had cared for Hugh; he cared for her; he understood how nothing in heaven and earth now mattered; he did not try to give her interests; he simply gave her his sorrow and understanding and his admiration of Hugh. So she claimed it, as a drowning man clutches instinctively at the thing which will best support him. And as she claimed he gave. He gave of his best. He tried to make Molly give too, but she would not.
There came a day when Bridget Hogan wrote and said that she had to go out of town for Sunday, and didn’t want to leave Eileen alone in the flat all day, and would Eddy come and see her there—come to lunch, perhaps, and stay for the afternoon.
“You are good for her; better than anyone else, I think,” Bridget wrote. “She feels she can talk about Hugh to you, though to hardly anyone—not even to me much. I am anxious about her just now. Please do come if you can.”
Eddy, who had been going to lunch and spend the afternoon at the Crawfords’, made no question about it. He went to Molly and told her how it was. She listened silently. The room was strange with fog and blurred lights, and her small grave face was strange and pale too.
Eddy said, “Molly, I wish you would come too, just this once. She would love it; she would indeed.... Just this once, Molly, because she’s in such trouble. Will you?”
Molly shook her head, and he somehow knew it was because she did not trust her voice.
“Well, never mind, then, darling. I’ll go alone.”
Still she did not speak. After a moment he rose to go. He took her cold hands in his, and would have kissed her, but she pushed him back, still wordless. So for a moment they stood, silent and strange and perplexed in the blurred fog-bound room, hands locked in hands.
Then Molly spoke, steady-voiced at last.
“I want to say something, Eddy. I must, please.”
“Do, sweetheart.”
She looked at him, as if puzzled by herself and him and the world, frowning a little, childishly.
“We can’t go on, Eddy. I ... I can’t go on.”
Cold stillness fell over him like a pall. The fog-shadows huddled up closer round them.
“What do you mean, Molly?”
“Just that. I can’t do it.... We mustn’t be engaged any more.”
“Oh, yes, we must. I must, you must. Molly, don’t talk such ghastly nonsense. I won’t have it. Those aren’t things to be said between you and me, even in fun.”
“It’s not in fun. We mustn’t be engaged any more, because we don’t fit. Because we make each other unhappy. Because, if we married, it would be worse. No—listen now; it’s only this once and for all, and I must get it all out; don’t make it more difficult than it need be, Eddy. It’s because you have friends I can’t ever have; you care for people I must always think bad; I shall never fit into your set.... The very fact of your caring for them and not minding what they’ve done, proves we’re miles apart really.”
“We’re not miles apart.” Eddy’s hands on her shoulders drew her to him. “We’re close together—like this. And all the rest of the world can go and drown itself. Haven’t we each other, and isn’t it enough?”
She pulled away, her two hands against his breast.
“No, it isn’t enough. Not enough for either of us. Not for me, because I can’t not mind that you think differently from me about things. And not for you, because you want—you need to have—all the rest of the world too. You don’t mean that about its drowning itself. If you did, you wouldn’t be going to spend Sunday with——”
“No, I suppose I shouldn’t. You’re right. The rest of the world mustn’t drown itself, then; but it must stand well away from us and not get in our way.”
“And you don’t mean that, either,” said Molly, strangely clear-eyed. “You’re not made to care only for one person—you need lots. And if we were married, you’d either have them, or you’d be cramped and unhappy. And you’d want the people I can’t understand or like. And you’d want me to like them, and I couldn’t. And we should both be miserable.”
“Oh, Molly, Molly, are we so silly as all that? Just trust life—just live it—don’t let’s brood over it and map out all its difficulties beforehand. Just trust it—and trust love—isn’t love good enough for a pilot?—and we’ll take the plunge together.”
She still held him away with her pressing hands, and whispered, “No, love isn’t good enough. Not—not your love for me, Eddy.”
“Not?”
“No.” Quite suddenly she weakened andcollapsed, and her hands fell from him, and she hid her face in them and the tears came.
“No—don’t touch me, or I can’t say it. I know you care ... but there are so many ways of caring. There’s the way you care for me ... and the way ... the way you’ve always cared for ... her....”
Eddy stood and looked down at her as she crouched huddled in a chair, and spoke gently.
“Therearemany ways of caring. Perhaps one cares for each of one’s friends rather differently—I don’t know. But love is different from them all. And I love you, Molly. I have loved no one else, ever, in that sense.... I’m not going to pretend I don’t understand you. By ‘her’ I believe you mean Eileen Le Moine. Now can you look me in the face and say you think I care for Eileen Le Moine in—in that way? No, of course you can’t. You know I don’t; what’s more, you know I never did. I have always admired her, liked her, been fond of her, attracted to her. If you asked why I have never fallen in love with her, I suppose I should answer that it was, in the first instance, because she never gave me the chance. She has always, since I knew her, been so manifestly given over, heart and soul, to someone else. To fall in love with her would have been absurd. Love needs just the element of potential reciprocity; at least, for me it does. There was never that element with Eileen. So I never—quite—fell in love with her. That perhaps was my reason before I found I caredfor you. After that, no reason was needed. I had found the real thing.... And now you talk of taking it away from me. Molly, say you don’t mean it; say so at once, please.” She had stopped crying, and sat huddled in the big chair, with downbent, averted face.
“But I do mean it, Eddy.” Her voice came small and uncertain through the fog-choked air. “Truly I do. You see, the things I hate and can’t get over are just nothing at all to you. We don’t feel the same about right and wrong.... There’s religion, now. You want me, and you’d want me more if we were married, to be friends with people who haven’t any, in the sense I mean, and don’t want any. Well, I can’t. I’ve often told you. I suppose I’m made that way. So there it is; it wouldn’t be happy a bit, for either of us.... And then there are the wrong things people do, and which you don’t mind. Perhaps I’m a prig, but anyhow we’re different, and I do mind. I shall always mind. And I shouldn’t like to feel I was getting in the way of your having the friends you liked, and we should have to go separate ways, and though you could be friends with all my friends—because you can with everyone—I couldn’t with all yours, and we should hate it. You want so many more kinds of things and people than I do; I suppose that’s it.” (Arnold Denison, who had once said, “Her share of the world is homogeneous; his is heterogeneous,” would perhaps have been surprised at her discernment, confirming his.)
Eddy said, “I want you. Whatever else I want, I want you. If you want me—if you did want me, as I thought you did—it would be enough. If you don’t.... But you do, you must, you do.”
And it was no argument. And she had reason and logic on her side, and he nothing but the unreasoning reason of love. And so through the dim afternoon they fought it out, and he came up against a will firmer than his own, holding both their loves in check, a vision clearer than his own, seeing life steadily and seeing it whole, till at last the vision was drowned in tears, and she sobbed to him to go, because she would talk no more. He went, vanquished and angry, out into the black, muffled city, and groped his way to Soho, like a man who has been robbed of his all and is full of bitterness but unbeaten, and means to get it back by artifice or force.
He went back next day, and the day after that, hammering desperately on the shut door of her resolve. The third day she left London and went home. He only saw Mrs. Crawford, who looked at him speculatively and with an odd touch of pity, and said, “So it’s all over. Molly seems to know her own mind. I dislike broken engagements exceedingly; they are so noticeable, and give so much trouble. One would have thought that in all the years you have known each other one of you might have discovered your incompatibility before entering into rash compacts. But dear Molly only sees a little at a time, and that extremelyclearly. She tells me you wouldn’t suit each other. Well, she may be right, and anyhow I suppose she must be allowed to judge. But I am sorry.”
She was kind; she hoped he would still come and see them; she talked, and her voice was far away and irrelevant. He left her. He was like a man who has been robbed of his all and knows he will never get it back, by any artifice or any force.
On Sunday he went to Eileen. It seemed about a month ago that he had heard from Bridget asking him to do so. He found her listless and heavy-eyed, and yawning from lack of sleep. Gently he led her to talk, till Hugh Datcherd seemed to stand alive in the room, caressed by their allusions. He told her of people who missed him; quoted what working-men of the Settlement had said of him; discussed his work. She woke from apathy. It was as if, among a world that, meaning kindness, bade her forget, this one voice bade her remember, and remembered with her; as if, among many voices that softened over his name as with pity for sadness and failure, this one voice rang glorying in his success. Sheer intuition had told Eddy that that was what she wanted, what she was sick for—some recognition, some triumph for him whose gifts had seemed to be broken and wasted, whose life had set in the greyness of unsuccess. As far as one man could give her what she wanted, he gave it, with both hands, and so she clung to him out of all the kind, uncomprehending world.
They talked far into the grey afternoon. Andshe grew better. She grew so much better that she said to him suddenly, “You look tired to death, do you know. What have you been doing to yourself?”
With the question and her concerned eyes, the need came to him in his turn for sympathy.
“I’ve been doing nothing. Molly has. She has broken off our engagement.”
“Do you say so?” She was startled, sorry, pitiful. She forgot her own grief. “My dear—and I bothering you with my own things and never seeing how it was with you! How good you’ve been to me, Eddy. I wonder is there anyone else in the world would be so patient and so kind. Oh, but I’m sorry.”
She asked no questions, and he did not tell her much. But to talk of it was good for both of them. She tried to give him back some of the sympathy she had had of him; she was only partly successful, being still half numbed and bound by her own sorrow; but the effort a little loosened the bands. And part of him watched their loosening with interest, as a doctor watches a patient’s first motions of returning health, while the other part found relief in talking to her. It was a strange, half selfish, half unselfish afternoon they both had, and a little light crept in through the fogs that brooded about both of them. Eileen said as he went, “It’s been dear of you to come like this.... I’m going to spend next Sunday at Holmbury St. Mary. If you’re doing nothing else, I wish you’d come there too, and we’ll spend the day tramping.”
Her thought was to comfort both of them, and he accepted it gladly. The thought came to him that there was no one now to mind how he spent his Sundays. Molly would have minded. She would have thought it odd, not proper, hardly right. Having lost her partly on this very account, he threw himself with the more fervour into this mission of help and healing to another and himself. His loss did not thus seem such utter waste, the emptiness of the long days not so blank.