"You don"t answer." (She had answered, and he knew it.) "It all comes back to what I said long ago. The most elementary knowledge of life would have saved you all this: if you"d had it, you could not have let these fatuities worry you to this extent. Do you remember my telling you that you ought to love life for its own sake?"
The moment he had said the words, he would have given anything to recall them, but it was too late; she remembered only too well. However she had disguised the truth, Wyndham"s pa.s.sionate defence of realism was not altogether an appeal to her intellect. He ought not to have reminded her of that now.
"Yes," she answered; "how could I forget?"
"I said at the time that you must know life in order to love it, and I say so now. But, Audrey"--she started and flushed--"if I were another man I should not say that."
"What would you say?"
"That you must love in order to know."
"Is there any need to tell me that _now_?"
"Perhaps not. It"s what I would have told you then--if I had been another man."
Her lip quivered slightly, and she held one hand with the other to give herself the feeling of a human touch. He went on without the least idea whether he were talking sense or nonsense, interrupted sometimes by his own conscience, sometimes by Audrey"s changes of expression.
"Bear with my egoism a moment--several moments, for I"m going to be tediously autobiographical. Once, when I was a young man, I was offered some journalistic work. It was at the very start; I had barely tasted print. Remember, I was ambitious, and it meant the beginning of a career; I was poor, and it meant a good salary. But it meant the production of a column of "copy" a-day, whether I was in the vein for it or no. I wanted it badly, and--I refused it. I could _not_ be tied down.
Since then I have never bound myself to any publisher or editor. This anecdote is not in the least interesting, but it is characteristic of my whole nature, which is my reason for inflicting it on you. That nature may be an unfortunate one, but I didn"t invent it myself. Anyhow, knowing it as thoroughly as I do, I"ve made up my mind never to do certain things--never, for instance, to ask any woman to be my wife.
Marriage is the one impossible thing. It involves duty, or, worse still, duties. Now, as it happens, I consider duty to be the very lowest of moral motives. In fact--don"t be shocked--it isn"t moral at all. It is to conduct what authority is to belief--that is, it has nothing whatever to do with it. No. Goodness no more depends on duty than truth depends on authority. Forgive me; I know you are a metaphysician and a moral philosopher, and you"ll appreciate this. You"re going to make a quotation; please don"t. It"s perfectly useless to tell me that Wordsworth calls duty "stern daughter of the voice of G.o.d." It may be; I don"t know. I only know that if I believed it was my _duty_ to live, I"d commit suicide to-morrow. I don"t like stern daughters. But granted that Wordsworth had the facts at his finger-ends, G.o.d"s voice is freedom, whatever its daughters may be. That"s not a doctrine I"d preach to every one; but for me, and those like me, freedom, absolute freedom, is the condition of all sane thinking and feeling. Fancy loving any one because it was your duty! Take a case. Supposing I married: the more I loved my wife, the less a free agent I should be; and when I once realised that I wasn"t free, there would be an end of my love. I deplore this state of things, but I can"t alter it. So you see, when I most want to give you love and protection, I can only offer you friendship, which you don"t want perhaps, and--er--good advice, which you won"t take."
But she was looking beyond him, far away.
"As I can"t possibly ask you to--accept my conditions, perhaps the cleverest thing I could do would be to go away and never see you again.
There"s no other alternative."
Her lips parted as if she would have spoken, but no words came. They searched each other"s faces, the woman thirsting for life, for love; the man thirsting too--for knowledge. And he knew.
It was his turn to look away from her; and as he fixed his eyes absently on the corner where the Psyche stood motionless on her pedestal, he noticed, as people will notice at these moments, the ironical suggestion of the torso, with the nasty Malay creese hanging over its head. Psyche and--the sword of Damocles.
"I don"t want you to go away," she said at last.
"I am going, all the same. For a little while--a fortnight perhaps. I want you to have time to think." He was not by any means sure what he meant by that. He had solved his problem, though not quite as he had intended to, and that was enough for him. And yet his conscience (not the literary one, but the other) would not altogether acquit him of treachery to Audrey. Instead of going away, as he ought to have done, he sat on talking, in the hope of silencing the reproachful voice inside him, of setting things on their ordinary footing again. But this was impossible at the moment. They were talking now across some thin barrier woven of trivialities, as it were some half-transparent j.a.panese screen, with all sorts of frivolous figures painted on it in an absurd perspective. And behind this flimsy part.i.tion their human life went on, each soul playing its part more or less earnestly in a little tragedy of temptation. Each knew all the time what the other was doing; though Wyndham had still the advantage of Audrey in this respect. Which of them would first have the courage to pull down the screen and face the solid, impenetrable truth?
Neither of them attempted it,--they dared not. After half an hour"s commonplaces Wyndham left her to think. He too had some matter for reflection. He was not inhuman, and if at times he seemed so, he had ways of reconciling his inhumanity to his conscience. He told himself that his strictly impartial att.i.tude as the student of human nature enabled him to do these things. He was as a higher intelligence, looking down on the crowd of struggling, suffering men and women beneath him, forgiving, tolerating all, because he understood all. He who saw life so whole, who knew the hidden motives and far-off causes of human action, could make allowances for everything. There was something divine in his literary charity. What matter, then, if he now and then looked into some girl"s expressive face, and found out the secret she thought she was hiding so cleverly from everybody,--if he knew the sources of So-and-so"s mysterious illness, which had puzzled the doctors so long?
And what if he had obtained something more than a pa.s.sing glimpse into the nature of the woman who had trusted him? It would have been base, impossible, in any other man, of course: the impersonal point of view, you see, made all the difference.
CHAPTER XX
From that afternoon Wyndham kept away from Chelsea Gardens; in fact, he had left town. To do him justice, he honestly thought he was doing "the cleverest thing" for Audrey in leaving her--to think. It would have been the cleverest thing if he could have kept away altogether; but as long as she had the certainty of his return, it was about the stupidest. If he had stayed, they would have resumed their ordinary relations; all might have blown over like a mood, and whatever he knew about her, Audrey herself would never have known it. As it was, he had emphasised the situation by going. And what was more, he had thrown Audrey back on her uninteresting self--the very worst company she could have had at present. She had been used to seeing him almost daily through a whole winter; he had made her dependent on his society for all her interests and pleasures; and when she was suddenly deprived of it, instead of being able to think, she spent her time in miserable longing. She could not think and feel at the same time. Feeling such as hers was incompatible with any form of thinking; it was feeling in a vacuum--the most dangerous kind of all. The emptiness of her life, now that Wyndham was gone, made her say to herself that she could bear anything--anything but that. It made her realise what the years, the long unspeakable years, would be like when she had given him up. She looked behind and around her, and there were the grey levels of ordinary existence; she looked below her, and there was the deep; she was going into the darkness of it, swiftly, helplessly, blown on by the wind of vanity. She saw no darkness for the light before her--a nebulous light; but it dazzled her like the sun shining through a fog.
Once, at the fiercest point of her temptation, she felt an impulse to confession--that mysterious instinct which lies somewhere at the heart of all humanity; she had wild thoughts of going to Katherine and telling her all, asking her what she ought to do. Katherine was large-minded, she would not blame her--much; perhaps she would tell her she ought not to give Wyndham up, that she ought to think of him, to be ready to sacrifice the world for his sake. Yes, Katherine was so "clever," she would be a good judge; and Audrey would abide by her judgment.
Unhappily, when it came to the point, she was afraid of her judgment--she had always been a little afraid of Katherine. Once she even thought of going to Mr. Flaxman Reed, that "holy anachronism," as she had once heard Wyndham call him. But his judgment was a foregone conclusion; Mr. Flaxman Reed was not large-minded.
Once, too, a gleam of reason came to her. She loved dearly the admiration and good opinion of her world; and she reflected that the step she contemplated meant no congratulations, no wedding-dress, no presents, and no callers. Wedding indeed! As she had read of a similar case in "London Legends," it would be a "social funeral, with no flowers by request." But these considerations had no weight after an evening spent with cousin Bella. And though she played on her piano till the lace b.u.t.terflies on Miss Craven"s cap fluttered again (why would cousin Bella wear caps in defiance of the fashion?), it was no good. If she had had a fine voice, she would have sung at the top of it; failing that medium of expression, she longed to put her fingers in her own ears and scream into cousin Bella"s. And as they yawned in each other"s faces, and she realised that something like this might be the programme for an indefinite time, she remembered how Langley had called her a metaphysician and a moral philosopher. It was on statements like these, apparently borne out by the fact of his friendship, that she based the flattering fiction of her own intellectuality. Without that fiction Audrey could not have supported life in the rare atmosphere she had accustomed herself to breathe. The conclusion of it all was that, come what might come, she could not give Langley up.
One afternoon she crossed the river for a walk in Battersea Park. It was a warm spring, and down the long avenue the trees were tipped with the flame of bursting buds, like so many green lights turned low. The beds and borders were gay with crocuses and hyacinths, and the open s.p.a.ces were beginning to look green again. Audrey cared little for these things, but to-day she was somehow aware of them; she felt in her the new life of the spring, as she had felt it a year ago. She walked rapidly from sheer excitement, till she had tired herself out; then she sat down on one of the benches, overlooking the waste ground where the children played. Except for a bright fringe under the iron railings, it was still untouched by spring, and the sallow gra.s.s had long been trodden into the dust. Some ragged little cricketers were shouting not far off, and near her, by the railings, was a family group--a young father and mother, with their children, from two years old and upwards, crawling around them. They were enjoying a picnic tea in the sunshine, with the voluptuous carelessness of outward show that marks the children of the people. Audrey looked at it all with a faint disgust, but she was too tired to move on to a more cheerful spot. She turned her back on the picnic party, and began to think about Wyndham. He had been away ten days; he said he was going for a fortnight; in another week at the longest she would see him. She was roused by a tug at her petticoats.
The two-year-old, attracted like some wild animal by her stillness, had scrambled through the railings, and was trying to pull its fat little body up by one hand on to the bench beside her. Its other hand grasped firmly a sheaf of fresh gra.s.s. It was clean and pretty, and something in its baby face sent a pang to Audrey"s heart. She loosened its chubby fingers, hoping it would toddle away; but it gave a wilful chuckle, and stood still, staring at her, reproaching, accusing, in the unconscious cruelty of its innocence. And yet surely the Divine Charity had chosen the tenderest and most delicate means of stirring into life her unborn conscience. Moved by who knows what better impulse, she stooped suddenly down and touched its face with the tips of her gloved fingers. Startled at the strange caress, like some animal stroked too lightly, the little thing made its face swell, and a.s.serted its humanity by a howl. Then it fled from her with a pa.s.sionate waddle, scattering blades of gra.s.s behind it as it went.
Even so do we chase away from us the ministers of grace.
She leaned back, overcome by a sort of moral exhaustion. Her self-love was hurt, as it would have been if a dog had shrunk from her advances; for Audrey was not accustomed to have her favours rejected. She was further irritated by the ostentatious affection of the child"s mother as she helped it through the railings with shrill cries of "There then, blessums! Did she then, the naughty lydy!" And when baby echoed "Naughty lydy!" it was as if the two-year-old had judged her.
She sat a little while longer, and then went away. As she rose she looked sadly back at the family group. The man was lying on his back and letting the children walk about on the top of him. Baby had found peace in sucking an orange and stamping on her father"s waist. The woman was strewing paper bags and orange-peel around her in a fine disorder, while she thriftily packed the remains of their meal in a basket. Audrey shuddered; their arrangements were all so ugly and unpleasant. And yet--they were married, they were respectable, they were happy, these terrible people; while she--she was miserable. She had no sense of justice; and she rebelled against the policy of Nature, who leaves her coa.r.s.er children free, and levies her taxes on the aristocracy of feeling.
The sordid domesticity of the scene had glorified by contrast her own dramatic mood. Poor Audrey! She hated vulgarity, and yet she was trying to lay hold on "the great things of life" through the vulgarest of all life"s tragedies.
Langley would be in town again in a week. He would ask if she had made up her mind; and she knew now too well the answer she would give him.
But Langley was not in town again in a week, nor yet in a fortnight. And when, at the end of six weeks, he did come back, he came back married--to Miss Alison Fraser.
n.o.body ever knew how that came about. Miss Gladys Armstrong, who may be considered an authority, maintained that as Wyndham had the pride which is supposed to be the peculiar property of the Evil One, he could never have proposed to the same woman twice. Consequently Miss Fraser must have proposed to him. Perhaps she had; there are ways of doing these things, and whatever Alison Fraser did she did gracefully. As for her private conscience, in refusing him with conscious magnanimity she had done no good to anybody, not even herself; in marrying him finally she had saved the situation, without knowing that there was a situation to be saved.
The news threw Audrey into what she imagined to be the beginning of a brain fever, but which proved to be a state of nervous collapse, lasting, with some intermissions, for a fortnight. At the end of that time--whether it was that she was so fickle a creature that even Fate could make no abiding impression on her, or that she was no longer burdened with the decision of a momentous question--to all appearances she recovered. So much so that, when some one sent her an invitation to the private view at the New Gallery, she put on her best clothes (not without a pang) and went.
Alas! the place was full of a.s.sociations, melancholy with the sheeted ghosts of the past. This time last year she had been to the private view with Ted. They had amused themselves with laughing at the pictures, and wondering how long it would be before one of his would be hanging there. And as she listlessly turned the pages of her catalogue, the first names that caught her attention were, "Haviland, Katherine, 232"; "Haviland, Edward, 296." She turned back the pages hastily to No. 232 and read, "The Witch of Atlas." That picture she knew. No. 296 gave her "Sappho: A Study of a Head."
Of a head? Whose head?
She found the picture (not exactly in the place of honour, but agreeably well hung and with a small crowd before it), and recognised Katherine"s striking profile raised in the att.i.tude of a suppliant who implores, the cloud of her dark hair flaming into bronze against a sunset sky. Ted was rather too fond of that trick; but the study was not a mere vulgar success--he had achieved expression in it. It was marked "Sold." There were some lines of verse on the square panel at the base of the frame.
Ted could not have afforded such a setting for his picture, but the frame was contributed by Mr. Percival Knowles, the purchaser of the canvas. The same gentleman was also the author of the verse, specially written for the portrait. Knowles, by-the-bye, was an occasional poet--that is to say, he could burst into poetry occasionally; and Audrey read:--
"Oh Aphrodite, queen of dread desire!
By all the dreams that throng Love"s golden ways, By all the honied vows thy votary pays, By sacrificial wine, and holy fire!
Thou who hast made my heart thy living lyre, Hast thou no gift for me, nor any grace?
Why hast thou turned the light of Love"s sweet face From me, the sweetest singer of Love"s choir?"
"For songs that charm the long ambrosial years The G.o.ds bring many gifts, and mine shall be-- Immortal life in mortal agony-- Vain longing, fanned by winged hopes and fears To inextinguishable flame--and tears Bitter as death, salt as the Lesbian Sea."
Her breast rose and fell with the lines; by this time she was educated up to their feeling.
"Who was Sappho, and what did she do?--I know, but I"ve forgotten,"
asked a voice in the crowd.
"Oh, the woman who threw herself at the other fellow"s head, you know, who naturally didn"t appreciate the compliment."
Audrey was not intelligent enough to refrain from the inward comment, "How singularly inappropriate! I should have said Katherine was about the last person in the world to----" She turned round and found herself face to face with the poet. Knowles had been wandering through the crowd with evasive eyes, successfully dodging the ladies of his acquaintance, while his air of abstraction took all quality of offence from the unerring precision of his movements. But when he saw Miss Craven he stopped. He had an inkling of the truth, and respected her feelings too much to slight her while Wyndham"s marriage was still a topic of the hour.
"Not bad for the boy, that!" said he, smiling gently at Sappho. "He"s coming out, isn"t he?"
"So are you, I think--in a new line too!"