She had not good health in the week immediately following that great day. She did not feel well. She did not look very well. Mr. Simcox, profoundly sympathetic to every mood of her who was at once his protege and his support, told her he thought she had been overdoing it. She seized upon that excuse and tried to persuade herself that perhaps she had; or, which amounted to the same thing, that she was suffering from the revulsion of those huge excitements. But she did not persuade herself. Her malaise, whatever it was, was not of that kind. Its manifestations were not in lassitude or sense of disability. They were in a curious dis-ease whose occasion was not to be defined; in a consuming restlessness beneath whose goad even the significant apartment had not power to charm and hold her; in a certain feverishness whose exsiccative heat, leaving her palms and temples cool (she sometimes felt them and had surprise) caused inwardly a dry burning that made her long for quiet places.
She could not settle to anything. Her limbs, and they had their way, desired not to rest; her mind, and it deposed her captaincy, would cast no anchor.
Mr. Simcox, as the week drew on, suggested a weekend at home. It had occurred to her, very attractively, but she had negatived it. Aunt Belle (before the idea had come to her) had written an invitation to one of the Saturday dinners in which she had “most particularly, my dear child” desired her presence. Something most delightful was going to happen and she must be there. She had accepted and she later told herself she did not like to refuse. She knew, instantly as she read, what was the identity of this delightful thing that was to happen and she decided, with a sharp turn within her of some emotion, that certainly she would be there. To whet her scorn! She was thereafter much aggravated that her drifting mind, against her wish, swayed constantly towards it sometimes with that same sharp turn of that same emotion (nameless to her and without meaning) always with aggravation of her restlessness, of her fever, of her dis-ease. When came Mr. Simcox’s suggestion of the week-end at home she decided, as swiftly as she had first accepted, to revoke her acceptance. She would not be there! She would not—waste her scorn!
Impatient for movement, she that evening went to the splendid house in Pilchester Square to tell her withdrawal. This most exasperating dis-ease of hers! Now that she was come to change her mind she did not want to change her mind. It was like going to the dentist with an aching tooth. On his doorstep the tooth does not ache. Her governance of herself was by her malaise so shaken that positively, as she came into Aunt Belle’s presence, she did not know whether she was going to withdraw or to confirm her acceptance of the invitation.
Most comfortingly, Aunt Belle saved her the decision. “My dear child! How unexpected! How opportune! I was just writing to you. Our little dinner is put off! Sit here while I tell you. Now would you like anything, dear child? A piece of cake? Some nice fruit? To please me. Really, no? Well, now; our dinner that I so especially wanted you for—did you guess?”
She began to tell.
She told what Rosalie had perfectly well known. The delightful thing expected to happen was Harry Occleve’s proposal of marriage to darling Laetitia. There had been certain signs and portents. They had come at last. Their meaning was perfectly clear. There was not the least doubt that at the next meeting Harry would ask Laetitia’s hand. Not the shadow of a doubt! Aunt Belle knew all the signs! Every woman of Aunt Belle’s experience knew them, dear child. So Harry had been asked for this dinner; a meaningly written letter, dear child, to encourage him, the dear, poor fellow! And had accepted, in terms so meaning too, the dear, devoted fellow. Then—
“But, Aunt Belle—”
“Listen, dear child. Then he suddenly wrote saying he found he had made a mistake—”
“Made a mistake!” The words went out from Rosalie in a small cry.
“Dear child, it is nothing. How sweet to be so concerned! It is nothing, it is the best of signs. Made a mistake that he was disengaged for Saturday. The dear, devoted fellow was so absurdly vague about it. Unavoidable circumstances prevented him; that was all; his writing and all the appearance of his letter so delightfully distracted! How amused we were, your Uncle Pyke and I! How amused, and how we felt for the dear, devoted fellow! Screwing up his courage! How we remembered our own courtship! You should hear your Uncle Pyke tell how he had to screw up his courage to propose to me and how many times it failed him and he fled. Dear, child, you’ve no idea how ridiculous these poor men are in their love! How timorous! How they suffer! The dear, poor fellows. Your Uncle Pyke wrote him at once a most kind and meaning letter—accepting his unforeseen circumstances (he had to, of course) and positively fixing him for Monday instead. ‘Laetitia is expecting you,’ your Uncle Pyke wrote. The dear fellow! How happy it will make him! So it is Monday, dear child. Monday, instead. We do so want you to be there. I do so want you, and so does my darling, to be the first to congratulate her. And you shall be a bridesmaid! Won’t that be nice? Kiss me, dear child. I shall never forget your sweet concern before I told you his excuse meant nothing. Dear child, you look startled yet.”
There was only a faint voice that came to Rosalie’s lips. “Really nothing, Aunt Belle?”
“Dear child, nothing at all.”
She went down to the Rectory on Saturday and found herself more glad to be there and to be with her mother than she had ever been. When she greeted her mother, “Kiss me again, dear, small mother,” she cried and put her cheek against her mother’s and held it there some moments, rather fiercely and with her eyes closed, as though there were in that contact some febrifuge that abated her inward fever, some mooring whereto, adrift, her mind made fast.
What beset her? What was the matter with her? What worked within her? Feverishly she inquired of herself, seeking to analyse her case; but she could by no means inform herself; her case was not within what diagnosis she could summon. What? Near as she could get she had the feeling, nay, the wild longing, to get out: out of what? She did not know. To get away: away from what? She could not say.
She found in herself a great and an unusual tenderness towards the home life. Only her mother and her father were now at home. Harold was at a branch of his bank in Shanghai. Robert was in Canada. Flora was in India, married, with two small children. Hilda was in Devonshire, married to a doctor. These things had happened, these flights been winged, and she had taken but the smallest interest in them. She had had her own af-fairs. She had had herself to think of. She had lost touch with her brothers and sisters. She scarcely ever thought about them. Now she wanted very much to hear about them. What news of them was there? How were they getting on? She did want—she could fix that much of her state, or it presented a relief for her state—she did want to feel that she belonged to them and they to her. She noticed with a large whelming of pity how very small her mother seemed to have grown She was always small, but now—much smaller, fallen in, very fragile. She noticed with a quick pang how all her father’s violent blackness of hair, and violent red of colouring, and violent glint of eye and violent energy of gesture were faded, greyed, dimmed, devitalized to a hue and to an air that was all one and lustreless, as if he had gone in a pond covered, not with duckweed but with lichen, and had come out, not dripping, but limp and shrouded head to foot in scaly grey. Was it possible that all this had been so when she was last here? She had not noticed it. She noticed that both her dear mother and her father walked on the flat soles of their feet, and touched articles of furniture as they trod, heavily, across the room. A most frightful tenderness towards them possessed her. She wanted like anything to show them devotion and, most frightfully, to receive from them signs of devotion to her—to be able to feel she was theirs, and they hers. She wanted it terribly.
But what else did she want? What? They gave her, all the home talk, but soon it flagged and whatever in her desired satisfaction still gnawed within her and was unsatisfied; she ministered to them and they were pleased but they seemed very quickly tired; they had their accustomed hours and habits, and whatever it was in her that found relief in solicitude still tossed within her and was not relieved. What beset her? What?
Monday came. She was at this dinner, this festival for the consummation and celebration of the betrothal of beautiful Laetitia and Laetitia’s darling Harry. That sick dis-ease of hers had wonderfully vanished when she came into the house, when she was hugged fit to crack her to Aunt Belle’s bosom with “Dear child! Dear child! He’s just arrived! He’s with your uncle downstairs. Look at Laetitia! Lovely! Isn’t she lovely? Kiss me again, again, dear child!” When she was floated to by Laetitia, exquisitely arrayed, pink and white, doll-faced, doll-headed, squeaking with coquettish glee, “Rosalie! Darling! Isn’t this awful? Imagine it for me, Rosalie! It oughtn’t to have been planned like this, ought it? Do tell darling mamma it ought not to have been! I’m trembling. Wouldn’t you be?”
Yes, gone that sick dis-ease. How at this spectacle suffer dis-ease, or any other disturbance of the emotions save only disgust, contempt at such a horrid preparation for such a horrid rite. Excited responsiveness to their most friendly excitation was not needed in her for it was not expected. “The shy, quiet thing you always are, dear child,” Aunt Belle often used to say to her and said now. (And within the week was to beat her breast in that same drawing-room and cry with an exceeding bitter cry, “Shy! We thought her shy! Sly! Sly! Sly to the tips of her fingers, the wicked girl!”)
So she need respond with no more than her normal quiet smile, her normal tone, in their presence, of poor-relation deference and awe. So behind that mask could curl her lip and shudder in the refinements of her views at this most horrid preparation for this most horrid rite. And did. That dis-ease strangely fled, there came to her the swift belief that here, and she had not known it!—was that dis-ease’s cause. It was the anticipation of this exhibition of all the things she hated most, of the most glaring presentiment of outrage of all her strongest principles. This Laetitia, embodiment of useless woman-hood, launching herself on that disgusting dependence on a man that soon would strand her among the derelicts; and that Laetitia’s Harry, that might have been a man among men, coming to the apotheosis of his languishing to—oh, wreathed, fatted calf with gilded horns!
Yes, it was this had vexed her so; and suddenly informed of the seat of her injury she turned upon it disgust and scorn such as never before had she felt (and she, had felt it always) for the whole order of things for which it stood. She felt her very blood run acid, causing her to twist, in her acid contempt for the subservience of women, and most of all for that Laetitia’s subservience, floated on that ghastly coquetry like a shifting cargo that in the first gale will capsize the ship; she felt her very temples throb, and almost thought they must be heard, in her fierce detestation of all the masculinity of men and most of all—yes, with a flash of eye she could not stay and hoped that he could see—that fatuous Harry’s masculinity.
He came into the room—looked pale—poor calf!—and went, with a nervous halt in his walk—sick fool!—to his Laetitia; and looked across at Rosalie and made a half-step to her; and she thought with all her force, to send it to him, her last words to him: that most malevolent, “to see you raise your eyes and hear you breathe, ‘Ah, Laetitia’”; and surely sent it, for on that half-step towards her he stopped, hesitated, and turned and engaged Laetitia again.
She had told herself, leaving the Sturgiss’s house that night a week ago, that she had not believed it possible to hate a man so. Now! Why that was not hate; that, compared with the inimity that now consumed her, was a mere chill indifference. And it had made her tremble! She was rigid now. Stiff with hate! He personified for her all in life against which she was in rebellion, all in life that her soul abhorred; and while, in the moments before dinner, grunting Uncle Pyke and rallying Aunt Belle and coquetting Laetitia crowded about him, leaving her alone and far apart, she, for the reason that it gave to her hate, and for the example that stood before her eyes, reviewed again her theories of life and again pledged herself in their support....
“Dinner is served.” That group went laughing to the door, she followed. “No, no, my boy. Don’t stand on ceremony. Pass along as we come. Why, hang it, man, we regard you as one of the family! Ha! ha! haw!” Down the stairs in a body, she following. There is, from their conversation, something the wreathed calf is to get from his coat to bring to show them, a letter or a token or something. The dining-room is to the front on the ground floor. The coats hang in the hall, a narrow passage there, that runs back to Uncle Pyke’s study. They are down. “Shall I get it now?” “Yes, bring it along; bring it along, my boy.” “And Rosalie” (Aunt Belle), “my fan, dear child. Dear child, I left it on the table in Uncle Pyke’s den. You will? Dear child!”
They pass in. The gilded calf turns from them for what it is he is to fetch from his coat; she slips by him to the study and takes up the fan and comes with it again.
It is dim in the passage. A condition on which generous Uncle Pyke years before installed this wonderful electric light that you flick on and flick off as you require it was that it should always be flicked off when you did not require it. Now as Rosalie came from the study the passage was lit only by the shaft of light that gleamed from the dining-room door; its only sound Aunt Belle’s noisy chatter from the waiting table.
He was fumbling at the coats, standing there sharply outlined against the stream of light, his face cut on it in a perfect silhouette. She had to pass him. That hateful he. She was seized with a fit of that same trembling that had shaken her after the passage between them at the gate on Shoot Up Hill. It shook her now, dreadfully. Her knees trembled. She felt faint. Awful to hate so! She was quite close, almost touching him. It was necessary he should move, forward or back, to give her room. But he did not move. His hands, outstretched before him on the coats, and sharp against the light, appeared to her to be shaking; but that was the hallucination of this frightful trembling that possessed her. She tried to say, “If you please—,” but, dreadfully, had no voice; but made some sound; and he, most slowly, drew back. It was before him that she had to pass.
She advanced; and felt, as if she saw it, the intensity of the gaze of his eyes upon her; and saw, as if the place were light and her look not averted, his “marching” face and those lines radiating to his temples (horizon tracks) where the faint touch of greyness was; and suddenly had upon her senses, with an extraordinary pungency, causing them to swim, that odd, nice smell there was about him of mingled peat and soap and fresh tobacco, of tweed and heather and the sea.
She caught her breath...
The thing’s too poignant for the words a man has.
She was caught in his arms, terribly enfolding her. He was crying in her ears, passionately, triumphantly, “Rosalie! Rosalie!” She was in his arms. Those long, strong arms of his were round her; and she was caught against his heart, her face upturned to his, his face against her own; and she was swooning, falling through incredible spaces, drowning in incredible seas, sinking through incredible blackness; and in her ears his voice, coming to her in her extremity like the beat of a wing in the night, like the first pulsing roll of music enormously remote, “Rosalie! Rosalie!”
The thing’s too poignant for the words one has. This girl’s extremity was very great, not to be set in words. Words cannot bring to earth that which, ethereal, defies our comprehension as life and death defy it and, like life and death, to our comprehension only sublimely IS. Words only can say her spirit, bursting from bondage, streamed up to cleave to his; how tell the anguish, how the ecstasy? Words only can say her spirit, like a live part of her drawn out of her, seemed to be rushing upwards from her body to her lips; words cannot tell the anguish that was bliss, the rapture that was pain. Only can say that she was in his arms, her heart to his, his lips against her own, and cannot tell—
But also it is to be accounted to her for her extremity that herein all her life’s habit was delivered over by her to betrayal.
He was saying, “We must go in. Can you go in?” She breathed, “I can.”
That dinner! That after-dinner in the drawing-room upstairs! It is a nightmare to be imagined, not to be described. Imagine walking from the darkness and the frightful secret of the passage into the blazing dazzle and the glittering eyes of the resplendent dinner party! They, in Harry’s absence, have been exchanging the last private nods and flashes. “Soon! Soon!” they have been nodding to one another. Uncle Pyke, licking his chops anticipatorily of his bath in his soup, has been licking them also in relish of working off his daughter in this excellent match; Aunt Belle, kind, kind Aunt Belle, with a last satisfied eye about the appointments of the table, has patted her Laetitia’s hand and conveyed to her, “Soon, soon, darling; soon, soon!” Beautiful Laetitia has given a gentle, glad squeeze to the patting hand and smiled a lovely, happy, certain smile. “Soon! Soon!” has gone the jolly signal—and it is not going to be soon, nor late; it is never, never going to happen; and worse than never happen!
Worse than never happen! That’s it. That is the awful knowledge of awful guilt with which Rosalie sits there and freezes in guilty agony at every pause in the conversation and could scream to notice how the pauses grow longer and longer, more frequent and more frequent yet. There’s a frightful constraint, a chilly, creepy dreadfulness steals about the party. They go upstairs—Aunt Belle and Rosalie and beautiful Laetitia—and the constraint goes with them. They sit and stare and hardly a word said. Something’s up! What’s up? What’s the matter with everything? Why is everything hanging like this! What’s up? And the men come in—Uncle Pyke swollen with food, swollen with indigestion, swollen with baffled perplexity and ferocious irritation; and Harry—she dare not look at Harry—and the thing is worse, the awfulness more awful. Glances go shooting round the awful silences—Uncle Pyke’s atrabilious eye in the burning fiery furnace of his swollen face is a stupendous note of interrogation directed upon Aunt Belle; Aunt Belle’s eyebrows arch to scalp and appear likely to disappear into her scalp and remain there in the effort to express, “I don’t know! I can’t imagine!”; Laetitia—Laetitia’s eyes upon her mother are as a spaniel’s upon one devouring meat at table.
Frightfulness more frightful, awfulness more awful; in Rosalie almost now beyond control the desire to scream, or to burst into tears or wildly into laughter. Then she knows herself upon her feet and hears her voice: “Aunt Belle. I must go, I think. I think I am very tired to-night.”
They suffer her to go.
That’s all a nightmare; but, when the door is closed upon them, like a nightmare gone. She was alone upon the staircase and then down in the hall—by those coats!—and, as though no ghastly interval had been, the amazing and beloved moment was returned to her. Out of a nightmare into a dream! She stood in her dream a moment—two moments—three—by the hall door. Who till that evening never had thought of love, astonishingly was invested with all love’s darling cunning. She felt somehow he would see her again before she left; and love’s dear cunning told her right. He came swiftly down the stairs. She never knew on what pretext he had left the room. He came to her. Love loves these snatched moments and always makes them snatched to breathlessness. She opened the door and must be gone. She said to him, speaking first, “Oh, we were vile in there! How vile we were!”
It was, the intimacy and the abruptness of it, the perfect comprehension that their thoughts were shared, as if they had known and loved for years.
He caught her hand. “My conspirator! My secret-sharer!”
She gave him her heart in her eyes.
He said, “To-morrow, I will come to you.”
She disengaged her hand.
He gave a swift look all about and caught her in his arms. “You must tell me, my Rosalie. Tell me.”
She breathed, “You knew, before I knew, that I loved you.”
When she was home and got to her room she undressed, suffering her clothes to lie as they slipped from her. She got into bed, moving there and then lying there as one in trance.
Cataclysm! All she had been, all she had determined—all, all gone; all nothing, surrendered all. At a touch, in a moment, without a cry, without a shot, without a stroke, all her life’s habit swept away. All she had been, all she’d designed, all she had built within herself and walled about herself, all she had scorned, all that with a violent antipathy she had shuddered from or with curled lip spurned away,—all, all betrayed, breached, mined, calamitously riven, tumultously sundered, burst away.
She turned her face to the pillow and began to cry—most frightfully.
It was very terrible for Rosalie.
There’s none so sick as, brought to bed, that robust he that ever has scorned sickness; nor any sinner like a saint suddenly gone from saintliness to sin; and there can be no love like love suddenly leapt from repression into being.
Rosalie, that had abhorred the very name of love, now finding love was quite consumed by love. She loved him so! Even to herself she never could express how tremendous a thing to her their love was. She used deliberately to call it to her mind (as the new, rapt possessor of a jewel going specially to the case to peep and gloat again) and when she called it up like that, or when, in the midst of occupation, her mind secretly opened a door and she turned and saw it there, a surge, physically felt, passed through her, and she would nearly gasp, her breath taken by this new, this rapturous element, as the bather’s at his first plunge in the cold, the splendid sea.
She loved him so! She looked at him with eyes, not of an inexperienced girl blinded by love, but of one cynically familiar with the traits of common men, intolerantly prejudiced, sharply susceptible to every note or motion of displeasing quality; and her eyes told her heart, and what is much more told her mind, that nothing but sheer perfection was here. Harry was brilliantly talented, Harry was in face and form one that took the eye among a hundred men. But she had known all that and freely granted him all that before. What she found as she came to know him, and when they were married what she continued to find, was simply, that he was perfect. He was perfect in every way and there was no way in which, inclining neither to the too much nor the too little, he was not perfect.
The labour of a catalogue of her Harry’s virtues is thus discounted. Name a virtue in a man and it was Harry’s. Declare too much perfection is as ill to live with as too much fault, and it is precisely just before too much is reached that Harry’s dowry stopped. Suggest she was blind to defects, and it is to be answered that there was no man who knew him that ever had a thought against him (except Uncle Pyke, Colonel Pyke Pounce, R.E., who, justifiably, was warned by his physician never to think upon the monster lest apoplexy should supervene) nor any fellow man in his profession (and that is the supreme test) that ever grudged him his success. Disgruntled barristers, morosely brooding upon the fall of plums into other mouths than theirs, always said, when it was Harry’s mouth: “Ah, Occleve; yes, but he’s different. No one grudges Harry Occleve what he gets.”
Different! In Rosalie’s fond, fondest love for him she often used to hug her love by making that catalogue of all his parts that has been shown not to be necessary. And it was the little, tiny things wherein he differed from common men that especially she cherished. By the deepest part of her nature terribly susceptible to the grosser manifestations of the male habit, it was extraordinarily wonderful and delicious to her that Harry of these had none. In an age much given to easy freedom of language it will not be appreciated, it perhaps will cause the pair of them to be sneered at, but it demands mention as illuminating a characteristic of hers (and of his), that she had, for instance, especial delight in the fact that Harry never even swore. The impossible test in the matter of self-command is when a man hits his thumb with a hammer. What does a bishop say when he does that? But she saw Harry catch his thumb a proper crack hanging a picture in the house they took, and, “Mice and Mumps!” cried Harry, and dropped the hammer and the picture, and jumped off the stepladder, and did a hop, and wrung his hand, and laughed at her and wrung his hand and laughed again. “Mice and Mumps!”
“Mice and Mumps!” It always seemed to her to characterise and to epitomise him, that grotesque expression. It always made her laugh; and the more serious the accident or the dilemma that brought it to Harry’s lips, the more, by pathos, one was forced to laugh and the seriousness thereby dissipated into an affair not serious at all. Yes, that was the point of it and the reason it epitomised him. There was none of life’s dilemmas—little dilemmas that irritate ordinary people or in which ordinary people display themselves pusillanimous; or tragic dilemmas that find ordinary people wanting and leave them in vacillation and despair—there was none of any sort that Harry, receiving with his comic, “Mice and Mumps! Mice and Mumps, old girl!” did not receive with the assurance to her that, though this was a nuisance, he had metal and to spare to settle such; that, though this was a catastrophe, a facer, he’d too much courage, too much high, brave spirit for it to discommode him; there was no fight in such, he was captain of such, trust him!
“One who never turned his back but marched breast forward.”
That was Harry!
“Mice and Mumps!” On the evening of the day following that astounding betrothal of theirs, affianced as it were at a blow—a day spent together in the park complete, without a break for food or thought of occupation—on the evening of that day he must go, he de-clared, to the horrific castle in Pilchester Square and break the awful news, proclaim his villainy.
She was terrified. “They’ll kill you, Harry. Write.”
“No, no. I’ve been a howling cad. It’s true, a howling cad, not of guile, but of these astounding things that have happened to us outside ourselves, but nevertheless a howling cad as such conduct is judged, and will be judged. So I must go through it. I must. That’s certain. I couldn’t hide behind a letter. They are entitled to tell me to my face what they think of me. They must have their right. Oh, yes, I’ve got to give them that. To-night. Now.”
A howling cad, but of forces outside themselves (“Too quick for me,” he had explained), not of guile.
He had explained, in those enchanted hours in the park, that it was really by resolve to do the right thing, and not to do the caddish thing, that he had presented himself the howling cad that they would hold him. That night at the Sturgiss’s at Cricklewood had charged him (“Oh, Rosalie, like bursting awake to breathe from suffocation in a dream.”) what for many days, only looking at her, never speaking to her, suffering her not veiled contempt, he had felt as one feels a premonition that is insistent but that cannot be defined—that night had charged him that he loved her. He was no way definitely committed to poor Laetitia. Was he more wrong if, now knowing his heart was otherwhere, he maintained and carried to its consummation the intimacy between Laetitia and himself, or if he stopped while yet he had not gone too far? He had decided to break while yet it might, be broken. There was an invitation from Mrs. Pyke Pounce he had accepted. He wrote, endeavouring to give a meaning to his words, excusing himself from it.
She murmured, “I remember.” (“Nothing in it, dear child; nothing in it!”)
There came back a letter from Colonel Pyke Pounce in which Colonel Pyke Pounce also had endeavoured to give a meaning to his words, and had succeeded. Now Harry knew his problem of moral conduct in a fiercer form; now, resolving to do what he told himself was the right thing and not the caddish thing, he took the step that made him be the howling cad that they would think him. (“But, Rosalie, gave me you!”)
He had resolved that he must accept the invitation, present himself at the house—and let the hour decide. As the situation revealed itself so he would accept it. If it was made clear to him, as the Pyke Pounce letter much gave him to believe, that proposal for Laetitia’s hand was expected of him, he would “do the right thing” and stand by what his behaviour apparently had led them to expect; if the way still seemed open, the door not shut behind him, he would very frankly explain to Laetitia’s grisly father that he thought it best his visits to the house from now should cease. The hour should decide! But there was in the hour, when it came, one terrible, one lovely element that he never had expected to be there. In all his visits to the house Rosalie never had been met on any other day than Saturday. This dinner was on the Monday, and arriving to face and carry through his ordeal, he was startled, he was utterly shaken to see her there. (“To see my darling there.”)
O forces outside themselves! “When you had to pass me in the passage nothing mattered then—except I could not let you pass.”
So it was that now, the right thing not having been done on that night, the right thing in this new position must be done to-day. They were entitled to tell him to his face what they thought of him and they must have their right. That was his view and he would not abate it.
“They’ll kill you, Harry.”
They had come by this to the corner of Pilchester Square and there he bade her wait. She said again, part laughing, most in fear, “They’ll kill you.”
“I’ve got to give them the chance to do their best.”
And off he went, strongly, erect. One who never... but marched breast forward.
Waiting for him, she really was terrified for him. Ferocious Uncle Pyke! Terrific Aunt Belle! Swollen and infuriated Uncle Pyke! Bitter and outraged Aunt Belle!
In twenty minutes came the crash of a slammed front door that clearly and terribly was Uncle Pyke Pounce slamming it as if he would hurl it through its portals and crash it on to Harry down the steps.
Harry reappeared, uncommonly grave.
She put out a hand to him, dreadfully anxious.
“Mice and Mumps!” said Harry. “Mice and Mumps!”
You couldn’t help laughing! But also, squeezing the strong arm beneath which he tucked her hand, you felt, with such a thrill, from that grotesque expression, and from his face as he said it, that this, like every forward thing, had in it nothing that could discommode that high, brave spirit: no fight in such; he was captain of such, trust him!
Thus also her delight in another form, and yet in the same form, in that grotesque expression, when it was ejaculated as his sole expletive when he caught his thumb that frightful crack while hanging a picture in what was to be his study in their newly taken house.
Any other man in the world, even a bishop, would have sworn; would have sworn no doubt harmlessly and with an honest heartiness to which the most pious prude could not have taken exception. Agreed! But the point was—that Harry didn’t!
She loved him so! She insisted she must bind up the thumb with her pocket handkerchief, and did, Harry protesting; and for years, still loving him with the old, first love, she often would be reminded by the picture of the incident and of her joy in it.
Yes, the only expletive she ever heard him use; and, lo, in that very room, years on, he seated beneath that very picture, she was to come to him with news (and hers the guilt of it) that for the first time was to strike him between the joints of his harness, visibly ageing him as she spoke, and for the first time cause him to groan his pain. She was to glance at the picture as she spoke and very terribly its merry association to be recalled to her. She was to recall him young, gay, tremendously splendid, wringing his damaged hand, laughing, “Mice and Mumps!” She was to see him, grey ascendant upon the raven of his hair, shrinking down in his seat, wilting as one slowly collapsing after a stunning blow, and at her news (and hers the guilt of it) to hear his voice go, not exclamatorily, but in a thick mutter, as one dazed, bewildered, in a fog, “My God, my God, my God, my God!”
How could one ever have foreseen that?
She loved him so! On that first day together in the park she told him everything about herself, about all her ideas and theories and principles, particularly where these touched his sex, even about that terrible fit of crying of hers in bed an hour after she had left him. And Harry understood everything and agreed with her in everything. O rapturous affinity!
They met early when business London was rushing to business. They stayed late, with no thought of food or of their occupations, till business London was returning, and night, in lamps below and stars above, was setting out its sentinels.
She told him everything; and even if she had wished not to open all her heart, there would have been the immense selection of everything—every single thing about herself—from which to choose to tell him. For there never had been such a betrothal as theirs; done at a blow with no single intimate thing ever before passed between them! Her very first words to him as they met, her greeting of him as they came together, showed how preposterous and never-before-imagined was their affiancement. “You know, it’s incredible,” she greeted him. “It’s incredible, it’s grotesque, it’s flatly impossible—I’ve never before seen you except in your dress clothes or at afternoon tea!”
Harry took both her hands in his. “But I think I’ve wanted you,” said Harry, “ever since I was in long clothes. I know I’ve wanted you ever since first I saw you.”
One knows another, in her place, would have bantered this off in that modern attitude towards love which is a horror, boisterously expressed, of admitting love as an emotion. Rosalie, that had scorned the very name of love, and that, because betrayed by love, had turned her face to her pillow and cried most frightfully, received it with a sound that was between a sigh and a catching of her breath. She loved him so!
And then they talked; and the thing between them, that had come so wonderfully, was so wonderful that they were as it were transfigured by it, as awe and spirituality and mysticism would fill the dwellers in a house visited by a miracle of God. So wonderful, that conversation, they would have felt, was not possibly a word for all that occupied them in those rapturous hours: not conversation, no,—a sublime engagement of their spirits wherein (possessing the keys of all the wonders), seas, continents and worlds of thoughts were traversed by them, in every clime most exquisite affinity discovered.
As at a blow they had become affianced, so, with no stage between, but in immediate sequence perfectly natural to them both, the natural repercussion of the blow, they talked immediately of betrothal’s consummation, of marriage, of their marriage.
About marriage Rosalie had immensely much to tell Harry. It was what she had principally to say, and this is how and why and what she told him.
When from her first terrible dismay—that frightful crying, her face turned to the pillow—she had recovered; when to the lovely ardour of her love—stealing about her, soothing her, in the night; bursting upon her, ravishing her, in the morning—she had passed on; she remembered her second line of her defences and she fell back upon it. “If ever I fell in love,” she had often said, alike to Keggo and to Miss Salmon, “if such an impossible thing ever were to happen to me, I’d marry as marriage should be. I’d enter a partnership. I would live my life; he would live his life; together, when we wanted to, when we were off duty, so to speak, we would live our life. A partnership, a mutually free and independent partnership.”
The second line of her defences! Oh, strong and reassuring thought! Of course, of course the first line, breached and swept away, had never really mattered. Foolish to have wept for it! It was built against love and she knew now, by her darling and her terrible experience, that against love——! Nay, in that whelming admission’s very tide, sweeping upon her from envisagement of Harry and bearing her deliciously upon its flood, there had come a thought as strong with wine as that was sweet with honey. Built against love! Why, in seeking to build against love, to shut away love from her life, was she not perpetrating against herself the very act—denial of anything a free life might have—that it was her life’s first principle to oppose? A man’s place, a man’s part, everything that a man by conventional dowry is given, hers should be as freely as a man’s it is! That was her aim; that at once the basis of her standpoint and the target of her shaft; and lo, at the very outset of her independence, she had sought to deny herself that which (as now she knew) was life’s most lovely gift. She was steadfast, and she was caparisoned, to obtain and to possess the things that, of her sex, commonly a woman might not have, and she was shutting herself from that which, if it offers, not all the man-owned world can deny the woman lowliest in office, heaviest in chains, deepest in servitude!
O senselessness! She could see, as looking upon an individuality not her own, that foolish girl that for such had turned her face to her pillow and cried out her heart; and at that very moment, and no other, of smiling pity for that mistaken grief, there came to Rosalie a sudden sense of womanhood attained; of much increase of years and wisdom; of growth of stature; of transportation, as from one world to another, from the character and the presence that had been hers to a personality and a body that looked down upon that other as, tenderly, a mother upon the innocence of her small child.
That poor, brave, foolish Rosalie that was! Did she protest, that foolish girl, that she was right in what had been her attitude to love? Did she with would-be bitterness recall those views laid down upon the women in the boarding house—that they were derelicts precisely through this love business, abandoned of men, relict of men, footsore and fallen in pursuit of men?
Ah, small, misguided creature! The principles were right but all askew the application. Love! Consider other attributes of life. Consider learning; consider food. Learning and food—were they not bounties of life’s treasure, to be absorbed and used for sustenance in order, by their nourishment, to give to live this life more fully? Why, so with love! Derelicts, those women, because receiving love (that loveliest gift of all!) not as a means but as an end—the end of all: that attained, everything attained; that won, all finished. That was it! That the misapplication! Learning, or food, or love—the same with all! How dead the life that only lived in scholarship; how gross the life that only lived to eat; how derelict that she that only lived to love, to marry—then ceased to live!
And equally, O small, misguided girl, how starved the life that has no books; how weak the frame that has no food; ah, dear (thus smiled she to herself), how dead the life that knows not love!
The second line of her defences! Nay, as now through this mature and happy cogitation she saw it, the first and last and only line! In her aloneness, in that girl’s single life, there had been nothing against which to defend. She had fought phantoms, that girl; resisted shadows. Now was the necessity, now the test; and now, because with Harry, because she loved him so, because he was every way and in all things perfect, now should be the triumphant exposition.
And she told Harry: marriage that should be a partnership—not an absorption by the greater of the less; not one part active and the other passive; one giving, the other receiving; one maintaining, the other maintained; none of these, but instead a perfect partnering, a perfect equality that should be equality of place, equality of privilege, equality of duty, equality of freedom. “Harry, each with work and with a career. Harry, each living an own life as every man, away from home, shutting his front door upon that home and off to work, leads an own and separate life. Harry—”
Oh, wonderful beneath this imperturbable sky, amongst these common, passive things—these paths, those trees, that grass, this bench—within this seclusion of that murmurous investment of this city, the ceaseless roar of London, standing like patient walls, eternal and indifferent, about her quietudes. Oh, wonderful in these accustomed and insensible surroundings thus to be calling “Harry,” as he were brother, him that a day and night away virtually was unmet; to be exposing, as to a gracious patron, all her mind’s treasury of thought; to be revealing, as in confessional, her inmost places of her heart; to be receiving, as by transfusion, the glow of affirmation on her way and in her trust. Oh, wonderful!
Wonderful, because remember for her that she was still beneath the shock of her dismay at her betrayal of herself; still breathless at that rout from her prepared positions; not yet assured her banners were unsullied in their withdrawal to her second line; not yet convinced it was no rout but a withdrawal, wise and strategical, ranks unbroken, to the true point of her defence.
Do try to imagine her, tremulous in this her vital enterprise, tremulous in this wonder that her armies found. It is very desirable to remember what can be remembered for that girl.