"So I suppose _I_ shall go on being afraid."
"Probably. But you won"t turn tail any more than I should. _You_ never ran away."
"There are worse things than running away. All the things that go on inside you, the cruel, dreadful things; the cowardices and treacheries.
Things that come of never being alone. I have to sit up at night to be alone."
"My child, you mustn"t. It"s simply criminal."
"If I didn"t," she said, "I should never get it in."
He understood her to be alluding thus vaguely to her gift.
"I know it"s criminal, with Papa depending on me, and yet I do it.
Sometimes I"m up half the night, hammering and hammering at my own things; things, I mean, that won"t sell, just to gratify my vanity in having done them."
"To satisfy your instinct for perfection. G.o.d made you an artist."
She sighed. "He"s made me so many things besides. That"s where the misery comes in."
"And a precious poor artist you"d be if he hadn"t, and if the misery didn"t come in."
She shook her head, superior in her sad wisdom. "Misery"s all very well for the big, tragic people like Nina, who can make something out of it.
Why throw it away on a wretched, clever little imp like me?"
"And if _you_"re being hammered at to satisfy an instinct for perfection that you"re not aware of----?"
She shook her head again.
"I"m certainly not aware of it. Still, I can understand that. I mean I can understand an instinct for perfection making shots in the dark and trying things too big for it and their not coming off. But--look at Papa."
She held her hands out helplessly. The gesture smote his heart.
"If Papa had been one of its experiments--but he wasn"t. It had got him all right at first. You"ve no idea how nice Papa was. You"ve only to look at him now to see how nice he is. But he was clever. Not very clever," (she wasn"t going to claim too much for him), "but just clever enough. He used to say such funny, queer, delicious things. And he can"t say them any more."
She paused and went on gathering vehemence as she went.
"And to go and spoil a thing like that, the thing you"d made as fine as it could be, to tear it to bits and throw the finest bits away--it doesn"t look like an Instinct for Perfection, does it?"
"The finest bits aren"t thrown away. It"s what you still have with you, what you see, that"s being thrown away--broken up by some impatient, impetuous spiritual energy, as a medium that no longer serves its instinct for perfection. Do you see?"
"I see that you"re trying to make me happier about Papa. It"s awfully nice of you."
"I"m trying to get you away from a distressing view of the human body.
To you a diseased human body is a thing of palpable horror. To me it is simply a medium, an unstable, oscillating medium of impetuous spiritual energies. We"re nowhere near understanding the real function of disease.
It probably acts as a partial discarnation of the spiritual energies.
It"s a sign of their approaching freedom. Especially those diseases which are most like death--the horrible diseases that tear down the body from the top, destroying great tracts of brain and nerve tissue, and leaving the viscera exuberant with life. And if you knew the mystery of the building up--why, the growth of an unborn child is more wonderful than you can conceive. But, if you really knew, that would be nothing to the secret--the mystery--the romance of dissolution."
His phrase was luminous to her. It was a violent rent that opened up the darkness that wrapped her.
"If you could see _through_ it you"d understand, you"d see that this body, made of the radiant dust of the universe, is a two-fold medium, transmitting the splendour of the universe to us, and our splendour to the universe; that we carry about in every particle of us a spiritual germ which is not the spiritual germ of our father or our mother or any of our remote ancestors; so that what we take is insignificant beside what we give."
Laura looked grave. "I can"t pretend for a moment," she said, "that I understand."
"Think," he said, "think of the body of a new-born baby; think how before its birth that body ran through the whole round of creation in nine months, that not only the life of its parents, but the life of the whole creation was present in the cell it started from. Think how our body comes charged with spiritual energies, indestructible instincts, infinite memories that are not ours; that its life, from minute to minute, goes on by a process of combustion, the explosion of untamable forces, and that we--_we_--unmake the work of millions of aeons in a moment, that we charge it with _our_ will, _our_ instincts, _our_ memories, so that there"s not an atom of our flesh unpenetrated by spirit, not a cell of our bodies that doesn"t hold some spiritual germ of us--so that we multiply our souls in our bodies; and their dust, when they scatter, is the seed of _our_ universe, flung heaven knows where."
For a moment the clever imp looked out of Laura"s eyes. "Do you know,"
she said, "it makes me feel as if I had millions and millions of intoxicated brains, all trying to grasp something, and all reeling, and I can"t tell whether it"s you who are intoxicated, or I. And I want to know how you know about it."
A change pa.s.sed over his face. It became suddenly still and incommunicable.
"And the only thing I want to know," she wailed, "you won"t tell me, and it"s all very dim and disagreeable and sad."
"What won"t I tell you?"
"What"s become of the things that made Papa so adorable?"
"I"ve been trying to tell you. I"ve been trying to make you see."
"I can only see that they"ve gone."
"And I can only see that they exist more exquisitely, more intensely than ever. Too intensely for your senses, or his, to be aware of them."
"Ah----"
"And I should say the same of a still-born baby that I had never seen alive, or of a lunatic whom I had not once seen sane."
"How do you know?" she reiterated.
"I can"t tell you."
"You can"t tell me anything, and your very face shuts up when I look at it."
"I can"t tell you anything," he said gently. "I can only talk to you like an intoxicated medical student, and it"s time for me to go."
She did not seem to have heard him, and they sat silent.
It was as if their silence was a borderland; as if they were both pausing there before they plunged; behind them the unspoken, the unspeakable; before them the edge of perilous speech.
"I"m glad I"ve seen you," she said at last.
He ignored the valediction of her tone.
"And when am I to see you again?" he said.
This time she did not answer, and he had a profound sense of the pause.
He asked himself now, as they stood (he being aware that they were standing) on the brink of the deep, how far she had ever really accepted his preposterous pretext? Up till now she had appeared to be taking him and his pretext simply, as they came. Her silence, her pause had had no expectation in it. It evidently had not occurred to her that the deep could open up. That was how she had struck him, more and more, as never looking forward, to him or to anything, as being almost afraid to look forward. She regarded life with a profound distrust, as a thing that might turn upon her at any time and hurt her.
He rose and she followed him, holding the lamp to light the stairway. He turned.