when the service was over, i waited by the west front watching the congregation stream out of the gray gloom inside into the primrose-coloured lights of sunset. there were two big collies sitting patiently side by side on the edge of the grass, looking with liquid, eager eyes at the people coming out. suddenly two tails began to thump ecstatically, but neither dog moved. it was she—i think i knew from their eagerness it could be none else. with a smile lurking in her eyes, she walked to them, and from where i was i could hear her say, ‘dear angels! come along,’ and two tawny streaks fled over the grass.
i waited a little, then followed her. she turned southwards out of the close, over the bridge, below which the big trout lie, and into the path through the water-meadows, the two tawny streaks cutting{254} figures like a swallow’s flight up and down the road, running at top speed just for the joy of the life that was in them. and once clear of the town, she looked furtively round, saw only one wayfarer a hundred yards behind, and ran too. the wayfarer quickened his pace, ready to drop into a sedate walk if she looked round. then on the edge of the water she found a stick, and, whistling to the dogs, threw it clean across the river, and a double plunge and splash of flying spray followed it. then the streaks swam back, each holding an end of the beloved stick, dropped it at her feet, and, one on each side of her, shook themselves, so that she was between the waters, and i heard a faint scream of dismay and then a laugh. my house stands in the road close beyond the end of the meadows, but she went on, and still i followed, past the group of labourers’ cottages, where lights were already springing up beneath the dark thatch, and out on to the main-road. and at that moment i guessed where she would go. yes, to that house—no other—the house where margery lived, the house which was the scene of my dark dreams in august last.{255} the collies rudely pushed their way in before her, after the manner of their impulsive kind, and the door was shut.
i was dining that evening with some people in the town, and met there an old friend of mine who lives a mile or two from here, who has usually some fault to find with me. she had this evening.
‘you are a perfect disgrace,’ she said. ‘we consider you an old inhabitant of the town, and yet when new and charming people come you cannot find the civility even to leave a card.’
‘i am sorry,’ said i penitently. ‘who are they? you know, i have been away.’
‘well, they are coming here to-night,’ she said.
‘my dear lady, who are coming here to-night?’
then the door opened, and they came, father and daughter.
this afternoon i went up the dark road of my dreams to call. she had said they would not be in till nearly six, and it was already deep dusk when i reached the house, which stood a black blot against the gray sky. but the window over the porch was lit and open, and the blind drawn{256} down over it, and from inside came a voice singing. i was admitted, but the hall was dark, and as the servant was feeling for the button of the electric light, a step passed along the passage at the head of the stairs and began to descend, and it was a step that caught my ear with a strangely familiar sound. then halfway down, even at the moment the light was turned up, it paused, and a voice said, ‘oh! is there somebody?’ and in the sudden blaze i saw her, and the passages were dark no longer.
‘ah, it’s you,’ she said; ‘how nice of you to come! oh, i’ve left the dogs shut up. please go into the drawing-room; i’ll be there in a moment.’
so i turned up the hall, to the right, and through the little sitting-room into the drawing-room beyond. she came in a moment afterwards.
‘how did you know where the drawing-room was?’ she said. ‘isn’t it the most inconveniently built house you ever saw?’
‘the most,’ said i; ‘but i know it well. there was a great friend of {257}mine who used to live here——’
she looked up suddenly.
‘dick, do you mean,’ she asked, ‘who was killed in south africa? he was a distant cousin of mine.’
‘then his wife was, too?’ said i.
‘yes, i believe so. why?’
‘it partly accounts for it.’
‘accounts for what?’ she said.
‘that you are absolutely the living image of her.’
she laughed again.
‘oh dear! it is a terrible responsibility to be like an old acquaintance of somebody’s. i shall have to live up to her. i do hope she wasn’t very nice. it will be so difficult for me if she was.’
‘she and dick were the greatest friends i ever had,’ said i.
those beautiful gray eyes grew serious.
‘ah, how dreadful for you!’ she said. ‘it was all very sudden, was it not? the child, too!’
‘yes, very sudden. i had been dining with her here, and she had gone upstairs when the telegram came. she heard the ring, and leaned{258} over the banisters above the hall, and knew. then the child was born. she died just at day-break next morning. she asked me, i remember, to pull up the blind, and said, “let in the morning.” that was all.’
‘ah, poor thing—poor thing!’ she said. then she looked up at me: ‘poor thing!’ she repeated.
the tea was brought in, and before many minutes her father came in also. they are coming to lunch to-morrow.
that night i was out to dinner, but came home early and sat for a long time in front of the fire, with work calling on me to do it, but simply incapable. what a strange, inexplicable coincidence it all is! how i long for, and dread, and love, and fear, the thought of these days that are coming! surely this is meant to mean something! think of the millions of little events and decisions which have gone to make up this particular conjuncture. is it possible that they were all done in haphazard? or is it another teasing problem that has been set me on the curious chequer-board of life, ending in my checkmate? just a piece of ingenious man?uvring of the pieces, all leading to{259} nothing? i cannot believe that. yet if it is not that, if love is the answer to it all....
i love to be with her, and since that afternoon in the cathedral i have thought of nothing but her. but love her? i know it is not that—yet. it is, that, by this curious trick which nature has played, i feel—i am cheated into feeling—that margery is here with me again. it is as if there had been made an image of margery, like in every respect, not only in externals, in voice, appearance, gesture, but in the deeper things as well—in her gaiety, her tenderness, and in that quick sympathy which sprang into being at the moment the call was made. yet god never makes facsimiles; she, too, is a living soul, of her own identity, and none other’s. or—the wildest impossibilities riot in my brain to-night—is this some wraith of my margery—dick’s margery—sent, god knows from where, to comfort me or to drive me insane? was there in my love for margery, after she was dick’s wife, something which was evil, which kept suggesting, ‘if this had been otherwise—if dick died?’... yes, there was that. day after day there was that. i tried to fight it—indeed i tried.{260} but i did not conquer it for a whole year. but in june, on the last evening of all, when she spoke to me in the garden of the dear event that was coming, it dropped dead, or so i hoped and believed. yet for a whole year i let it live: is god going to punish me for that by these cruel means? to make me love again, and again go hungry?
it cannot be; again and again i tell myself it cannot be. but so i told myself when the telegram of dick’s death came, and in spite of all my telling it was true, and the tears of the whole world could not wash out a word of it. but if once more i am to go unrequited, i do not see how i can bear it. it would be wiser to see no more of this incarnation of margery. at present i love seeing her, because—because that pressed and withered flower i always carry with me has, so to speak, blushed again with the hues of life, and a living fragrance breathes from it. but helen—i think i have not mentioned her name before—this incarnation of margery, is also a living woman, with an identity of her own. how if from loving her of whom she so sweetly and poignantly reminds{261} me i pass to loving the woman herself? and if she does not care?
no, i will see her no more. my life is my own, and i will not risk that great stake again. i know the unutterable sweetness of loving. i know, too, the unutterable emptiness of love unrequited, even though from her who loved me not i had such a wealth of tender and womanly affection. i know also how good the world is, how full and brimming with things that are lovely and of good report. for two years, in spite of what went before, god knows how much happiness i have been allowed to enjoy, how rich i have been, levying my tax of joy on all created things, finding music in all the strings of human emotions except one only—love, definite love for one woman. it is strange if i cannot be content without it. true, often and often i have felt, and shall feel again, that this would crown all the rest; but if i again do my part in it, let myself love this girl, and nothing comes of it, how well i know with what a sense of dejection and impotence i shall have to begin again from the beginning, picking up the scattered pieces of the structure known as ‘i,{262}’ fitting them together till some sort of coherent entity, a person of some kind, again pursues some sort of reasonable way through the world! and i distrust my own power of picking myself up again; i am afraid that this time i should let the pieces lie about, shrug shoulders at them, and drift, fossilize, vegetate, what you will.
bitterness as black as sin and salt as the dead sea rises in my throat. what would i not give to see a mother with her child—my child—at her breast? how unspeakably i long for that! was it my fault that margery loved dick, not me? very good, it was my fault. i have borne the punishment, and i bear it now, and i shall always bear it; and i will try to avoid the possibility of being punished for another such fault.
so i fall back again on my life of little things. i will read the whole of shakespeare through by next march; i will know a little more about gardening by next spring; i will try to keep my temper; i will try to do a little honest work at a book i am engaged on; i will try, dancing here with the rest of the human race, like a swarm of{263} flies in the sunlight, or, if you will, like worms in the dust, not to sting and wriggle; and i will try not to behave again as i behaved this morning, in this manner, to wit:
a small boy ‘does’ the shoes, boots, and knives of this establishment. he is blessed with sky-scraping spirits and a piercing whistle. he likes taking the boots up to my bedroom, because he slides down the banisters afterwards. i have frequently told him not to. this morning he whistled so loudly and continuously that i told myself it disturbed me, though, as a matter of fact, it did not, and i knew it. but without effort almost i worked myself into a fume of nagging ill-temper over it. shortly after i heard him taking the boots up to my bedroom, and deliberately, like a spy, went to the door of the room where i was working, and held it ajar so that i might catch him sliding down the banisters. i was gorgeously successful, stood before him as he landed at the bottom with a face of april, and looked at him with an odious and baleful countenance till april fled. i wrung from him the admission that he had often been told not to do{264} this, and assured him that if he could not remember it was perfectly easy for me to find someone who could. then i went back to work again with a sort of fiendish pleasure at having spoiled somebody’s happiness, though it was only a boot-boy’s. there was no more whistling from downstairs, and i congratulated myself on having secured tranquillity also at one fell swoop.
but after awhile the fiend within me, satiated, i suppose, by its brilliant achievement, dozed a little, and i felt simply sick at heart. here was the worm in the dust stinging in its tiny, infinitesimal way, but with what infinity of malice! i would have given a great deal to have heard that shrill, unmelodious whistle strike up again, but it did not. dead silence all morning. then at lunch—coals of fire on my head—the knives winked with resplendence and cut like razors. yet by the silly nature of things i cannot go into the boot-place and say i am sorry. i had told him again and again not to slide down the banisters—i had indeed. but if he does not whistle to-morrow morning i shall have to raise his wages.{265}
that is another thing, then, i propose to cease doing by next march—that is to say, to cease transgressing against the supreme and perfect law of kindness and gentleness. i do not mean that i will have any sliding down the banisters, for i will not; but, on the other hand, i will not have myself, especially in little things, behaving like a cross-grained fiend. i could have stopped the banisters business without that, while, on the other hand, it would have been infinitely better all round that he should have continued to slide down the banister from morn till eve, than that i should have wished and intended (and succeeded therein) to spoil a child’s happiness, if only for a morning, though it was in consequence of a direct act of disobedience, which i am perfectly right in resenting. and this is the supreme and perfect law of kindness.
it seems as if these golden days of sparkling sunshine and nights of clear frost will never end, but rise and still rise as out of some great well of light. never do i remember such a november—windless, exquisite, so that the glory of scarlet{266} leaf, usually so swiftly gone and evanescent, scattered into ruin by an hour’s wind, still flames in this long-drawn sunset of the year. prey as i always am to the exaltations and depressions of the weather, it seems to me that i am living in some fairy story, as if the wicked witch who squirts the fogs and damps over the world was dead, and the good fairy of clear skies, though she cannot put the clock of the months back to summer, had allowed the seasons to stand still at this beautiful moment, to make up to us a little for all that we have suffered at the hands of the wicked witch. everything has paused, and in those affairs which chiefly concern me there is a pause too—exquisite, golden. how the pause will end i cannot tell—in sounding ruin of rain, or the bursting of spring instead of the clasp of winter. all i know is that before long i shall find that the pause is over, and on that day i shall be sitting in fallen darkness, idly fingering in the palpable dusk the broken fragments of myself that lie round me; or even in this november i shall go out into the fields and find that, instead of the icy hand of winter gripping them, it will be{267} spring instead. for the winter will be passed, and the flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing birds is come. arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
yes, it is even so, and i, who, a few nights ago only, determined to keep aloof from all possibility of this, preferring to stifle and drown the best of one’s nature, for fear of being thrown out of gear as regards the second best, am led captive, glorying in the chain which, please god, i shall never be able to break. how witless and impotent is man, how futile and unreasonable all his reasonings, when love, like dawn, lights with rosy feet on his dark horizons, and the morning mists of all the schemes he has made, all rules and designs of life, vanish and have never been.
for what was i trying to do? to turn this garden of the lord into a desert, to withdraw light from the day, love from life; when, had i known, it is love which turns the desert into the garden, into the home of one’s soul.
‘and thou
beside me singing in the wilderness,
the wilderness were paradise enow.’
{268}
how did it happen? how did it happen? ah, it is because we do not know that it is so exquisite.
but the manner of it was this:
they came, as you know, to lunch some three days ago, and i dined there next day, though i had made up my mind, as you also know, not to see her again. that was my plan, and the sweet rain of blows battered it down and crushed it with supreme and certain suddenness. one moment—it was after dinner, i remember, and we were playing cards—i was looking at her, seeing in every line of her face that friend whom i had lost, and the next she looked up, and in her eye there sat, not margery nor another, but helen, wraith no longer, but herself. and as at that moment, now three years ago, when margery, with the sun kindling her hair, said, ‘it’s going in; what a darling!’ even so now i surrendered; i gave up all i had or was. the moment was to me so tremendous that i felt as if the whole world must know it. but even she did not know it, for she smiled and said, ‘i think there must be another in,’ and played{269} the thirteenth card, losing the game for herself and me.
is it not prosaic that i remember that? yes, if you wish, but it is just that prosaicness which makes the romance of life, the intertwining of the common little everyday affairs with the great lords of romance, love and death, who by their presence lift life entire into their domain, so that nothing is common or commonplace.
that night, as i walked home, it seemed to me that never before had margery been so close to me. do you know how sometimes you can almost hear a voice you are familiar with, so that it seems as if the person to whom it belongs had just spoken? it was so with me. each moment it seemed as if she had just said something to me, and i waited and waited for what she should say next. each moment i expected to see her walking by me, her arm in mine, as we had walked together in the garden the evening before she died. she knew, i must believe, what had happened, and, like the dear friend she always was, she came to tell me, as far as the laws of her world permitted,{270} that she was glad. yet some immense but subtle change had come over our relations; less dear she could not be, but i no longer ached for her. and that, too, i think she knew, and at that also she was glad.
again that night i sat long by the fire, where those visions and inhuman schemes of self-isolation and petty mediocrity had beset me a few evenings ago. how infinitesimal had been their scope, and, thank god, how futile they proved! like some timid child, my soul had sat shivering on the brink of the great ocean of human life, not daring to put out, distrusting the frail vessel which should carry it towards the golden island which no man can reach unless he adventures. even then the golden gleam shone on me; i saw the bright shining of those shores, and turned my face earthwards, saying that it was good to play with the shells and seaweed on the beach. every day those waters which divide us from the golden island are thick with sails; every day hundreds of happy adventurers land on its shores; every day, too, hundreds are shipwrecked. but for me the wind beckons, my vessel flaps its sail, and{271} though i do not cast away the shells and seaweeds i have gathered, i put them in my locker and think no more of them just now. the tide favours: my vessel tugs its chain, and i put out.
