that evening george edmund, who had come home with his mind aglitter with cinematograph impressions, found his father a patient but inattentive listener. for indeed mr. brumley was not listening at all; he was thinking and thinking. he made noises like "ah!" and "um," at george edmund and patted the boy's shoulder kindly and repeated words unintelligently, such as, "red indians, eh!" or "came out of the water backwards! my eye!"
sometimes he made what george edmund regarded as quite footling comments. still george edmund had to tell someone and there was no one else to tell. so george edmund went on talking and mr. brumley went on thinking.
10
mr brumley could not sleep at all until it was nearly five. his intelligence seemed to be making up at last for years of speculative restraint. in a world for the most part given up to slumber mr. brumley may be imagined as clambering hand over fist in the silences, feverishly and wonderfully overtaking his age. in the morning he got up pallid and he shaved badly, but he was a generation ahead of his own euphemia series, and the school of charm and quiet humour and of letting things slide with a kind of elegant donnishness, had lost him for ever....
and among all sorts of things that had come to him in that vast gulf of nocturnal thinking was some vivid self-examination. at last he got to that. he had been dragged down to very elemental things indeed by the manifest completeness of lady harman's return to her husband. he had had at last to look at himself starkly for the male he was, to go beneath the gentlemanly airs, the refined and elegant virilities of his habitual poses. either this thing was unendurable—there were certainly moments when it came near to being unendurable—or it was not. on the whole and excepting mere momentary paroxysms it was not, and so he had to recognize and he did recognize with the greatest amazement that there could be something else besides sexual attraction and manœuvring and possession between a beautiful woman and a man like himself. he loved lady harman, he loved her, he now began to realize just how much, and she could defeat him and reject him as a conceivable lover, turn that aside as a thing impossible, shame him as the romantic school would count shame and still command him with her confident eyes and her friendly extended hands. he admitted he suffered, let us rather say he claimed to suffer the heated torments of a passionate nature, but he perceived like fresh air and sunrise coming by blind updrawn and opened window into a fœtid chamber, that also he loved her with a clean and bodiless love, was anxious to help her, was anxious now—it was a new thing—to understand her, to reassure her, to give unrequited what once he had sought rather to seem to give in view of an imagined exchange.
he perceived too in these still hours how little he had understood her hitherto. he had been blinded,—obsessed. he had been seeing her and himself and the whole world far too much as a display of the eternal dualism of sex, the incessant pursuit. now with his sexual imaginings newly humbled and hopeless, with a realization of her own tremendous minimization of that fundamental of romance, he began to see all that there was in her personality and their possible relations outside that. he saw how gravely and deeply serious was her fine philanthropy, how honest and simple and impersonal her desire for knowledge and understandings. there is the brain of her at least, he thought, far out of sir isaac's reach. she wasn't abased by her surrenders, their simplicity exalted her, showed her innocent and himself a flushed and congested soul. he perceived now with the astonishment of a man newly awakened just how the great obsession of sex had dominated him—for how many years? since his early undergraduate days. had he anything to put beside her own fine detachment? had he ever since his manhood touched philosophy, touched a social question, thought of anything human, thought of art, or literature or belief, without a glancing reference of the whole question to the uses of this eternal hunt? during that time had he ever talked to a girl or woman with an unembarrassed sincerity? he stripped his pretences bare; the answer was no. his very refinements had been no more than indicative fig-leaves. his conservatism and morality had been a mere dalliance with interests that too brutal a simplicity might have exhausted prematurely. and indeed hadn't the whole period of literature that had produced him been, in its straining purity and refinement, as it were one glowing, one illuminated fig-leaf, a vast conspiracy to keep certain matters always in mind by conspicuously covering them away? but this wonderful woman—it seemed—she hadn't them in mind! she shamed him if only by her trustful unsuspiciousness of the ancient selfish game of him and her that he had been so ardently playing.... he idealized and worshipped this clean blindness. he abased himself before it.
"no," cried mr. brumley suddenly in the silence of the night, "i will rise again. i will rise again by love out of these morasses.... she shall be my goddess and by virtue of her i will end this incessant irrational craving for women.... i will be her friend and her faithful friend."
he lay still for a time and then he said in a whisper very humbly: "god help me."
he set himself in those still hours which are so endless and so profitable to men in their middle years, to think how he might make himself the perfect lover instead of a mere plotter for desire, and how he might purge himself from covetousness and possessiveness and learn to serve.
and if very speedily his initial sincerity was tinged again with egotism and if he drowsed at last into a portrait of himself as beautifully and admirably self-sacrificial, you must not sneer too readily at him, for so god has made the soul of mr. brumley and otherwise it could not do.
