"The people here."
"n.o.body"s here. Not a soul who matters. I doubt if they know my name....
No one ever talks to me."
I sat in the bright sunshine, profoundly enervated and quite convinced, but still maintaining out of mere indolence a show of hesitation....
"You take the good things G.o.d sends you, Stephen--as I do. You stay and talk with me now, before the curtain falls again. We"ve tired of letters. You stay and talk to me.
"Here we are, Stephen, and it"s the one chance that is ever likely to come to us in all our lives. We"ll keep the point of honor; and you shall go to-day. But don"t let"s drive the point of honor into the quick. Go easy Stephen, old friend.... My dear, my dear! What has happened to you? Have you forgotten? Of course! Is it possible for you to go, mute, with so much that we can say.... And these mountains and this sunlight!..."
I looked up to see her with her elbows on the table and her hands clasped under her chin; that face close to mine, her dear blue eyes watching me and her lips a little apart.
No other human being has ever had that effect upon me, so that I seem to feel the life and stir in that other body more than I feel my own.
-- 3
From the moment when I confessed my decision to stay we gave no further thought to the rightfulness or wisdom of spending the next few hours together. We thought only of those hours. Things lent themselves to us.
We stood up and walked out in front of the hotel and there moored to a stake at the edge of the water was a little leaky punt, the one vessel on the Engstlen See. We would take food with us as we decided and row out there to where the vast cliffs came sheer from the water, out of earshot or interference and talk for all the time we had. And I remember now how Mary stood and called to Miss Satchel"s window to tell her of this intention, and how I discovered again that exquisite slender grace I knew so well.
You know the very rowing out from the sh.o.r.e had in it something sweet and incredible. It was as if we were but dreaming together and might at any moment awaken again, countless miles and a thousand things apart. I rowed slowly with those clumsy Swiss oars that one must thrust forward, breaking the smooth crystal of the lake, and she sat sideways looking forward, saying very little and with much the same sense I think of enchantment and unreality. And I saw now for the first time as I watched her over my oars that her face was changed; she was graver and, I thought, stronger than the Mary I had known.
Even now I can still doubt if that boat and lake were real. And yet I remember even minute and irrelevant details of the day"s impressions with an extraordinary and exquisite vividness. Perhaps it is that very luminous distinctness which distinguishes these events from the common experiences of life and puts them so above the quality of things that are ordinarily real.
We rowed slowly past a great headland and into the bay at the upper end of the water. We had not realized at first that we could row beyond the range of the hotel windows. The rock that comes out of the lake is a clear dead white when it is dry, and very faintly tinted, but when it is wetted it lights warmly with flashes and blotches of color, and is seen to be full of the most exquisite and delicate veins. It splinters vertically and goes up in cliffs, very high and sculptured, with a quality almost of porcelain, that at a certain level suddenly become more rude and ma.s.sive and begin to overhang. Under the cliffs the water is very deep and blue-green, and runs here and there into narrow clefts.
This place where we landed was a kind of beach left by the recession of the ice, all the rocks immediately about us were ice-worn, and the place was paved with ice-worn boulders. Two huge bluffs put their foreheads together above us and hid the glacier from us, but one could feel the near presence of ice in the air. Out between them boiled a little torrent, and spread into a hundred intercommunicating channels amidst the great pebbles. And those pebbles were covered by a network of marvellously gnarled and twisted stems bearing little leaves and blossoms, a network at once very ancient and very fresh, giving a peculiar gentleness and richness to the Alpine severity that had dwarfed and tangled them. It was astounding that any plant could find nourishment among those stones. The great headland, with patches of yellowish old snow still lingering here and there upon its upper ma.s.ses, had crept insensibly between us and the remote hotel and now hid it altogether. There was nothing to remind us of the world that had separated us, except that old and leaky boat we had drawn up upon the stones at the limpid water"s edge.
"It is as if we had come out of life together," she whispered, giving a voice to my thought.
She sat down upon a boulder and I sat on a lower slab a yard or so away, and we looked at one another. "It"s still unreal," she said.
I felt awkward and at a loss as I sat there before her, as a man unused to drawing-rooms might feel in the presence of a strange hostess.
"You are so _you_," I said; "so altogether my nearest thing--and so strange too, so far off, that I feel--shy....
"I"m shy," I repeated. "I feel that if I speak loudly all this will vanish...."
I looked about me. "But surely this is the most beautiful place in the whole world! Is it indeed in the world?"
"Stephen, my dear," she began presently, "what a strange thing life is!
Strange! The disproportions! The things that will not fit together. The little things that eat us up, and the beautiful things that might save us and don"t save us, don"t seem indeed to have any meaning in regard to ordinary sensible affairs.... This _beauty_....
"Do you remember, Stephen, how long ago in the old park you and I talked about immortality and you said then you did not want to know anything of what comes after life. Even now do you want to know? You are too busy and I am not busy enough. I want to be sure, not only to know, but to know that it is so, that this life--no, not _this_ life, but that life, is only the bleak twilight of the morning. I think death--just dead death--after the life I have had is the most impossible of ends.... You don"t want--particularly? I want to pa.s.sionately. I _want_ to live again--out of this body, Stephen, and all that it carves with it, to be free--as beautiful things are free. To be free as this is free--an exquisite clean freedom....
"I can"t believe that the life of this earth is all that there is for us--or why should we ever think it strange? Why should we still find the ordinary matter-of-fact things of everyday strange? We do--because they aren"t--_us_.... Eating. Stuffing into ourselves thin slices of what were queer little hot and eager beasts.... The perpetual need to do such things. And all the mad fury of s.e.x, Stephen!... We don"t live, we suffocate in our living bodies. They storm and rage and s.n.a.t.c.h; it isn"t _us_, Stephen, really. It can"t be us. It"s all so excessive--if it is anything more than the first furious rush into existence of beings that will go on--go on at last to quite beautiful real things. Like this perhaps. To-day the world is beautiful indeed with the sun shining and love shining and you, my dear, so near to me.... It"s so incredible that you and I must part to-day. It"s as if--someone told me the sun was a little mad. It"s so perfectly natural to be with you again...."
Her voice sank. She leant a little forward towards me. "Stephen, suppose that you and I were dead to-day. Suppose that when you imagined you were climbing yesterday, you died. Suppose that yesterday you died and that you just thought you were still climbing as you made your way to me.
Perhaps you are dead up there on the mountain and I am lying dead in my room in this hotel, and this is the Great Beginning....
"Stephen, I am talking nonsense because I am so happy to be with you here...."
-- 4
For a time we said very little. Then irregularly, disconnectedly, we began to tell each other things about ourselves.
The substance of our lives seemed strangely objective that day; we had as it were come to one another clean out of our common conditions. She told me of her troubles and her secret weaknesses; we bared our spirits and confessed. Both of us had the same tale of mean and angry and hasty impulses, both of us could find kindred inconsistencies, both had an exalted a.s.surance that the other would understand completely and forgive and love. She talked for the most part, she talked much more than I, with a sort of wonder at the things that had happened to her, and for long s.p.a.ces we did not talk at all nor feel the need of talking, and what seems very strange to me now, seeing that we had been impa.s.sioned lovers, we never kissed; we never kissed at all; I do not even remember that I thought of kissing her. We had a shyness between us that kept us a little apart, and I cannot remember that we ever touched one another except that for a time she took me and led me by the hand towards a little place of starry flowers that had drawn her eyes and which she wished me to see. Already for us two our bodies were dead and gone. We were shy, shy of any contact, we were a little afraid of one another, there was a kind of awe between us that we had met again.
And in that strange and beautiful place her fancy that we were dead together had a fitness that I cannot possibly convey to you. I cannot give you by any writing the light and the sweet freshness of that high desolation. You would need to go there. What was lovely in our talk, being said in that setting, would seem but a rambling discourse were I to write it down,--as I believe that even now I could write it down--word for word almost, every thought of it, so fresh does it remain with me....
My dear, some moments are eternal. It seems to me that as I write to tell you of this I am telling you not of something that happened two years ago but of a thing immortal. It is as if I and Mary were together there holding the realities of our lives before us as though they were little sorry tales written in books upon our knees....
-- 5
It was still in the early afternoon that we came down again across the meandering ice-water streams to our old boat, and pushed off and rowed slowly out of that magic corner back to every-day again....
Little we knew to what it was we rowed.
As we glided across the water and rounded the headland and came slowly into view of the hotel again, Mary was reminded of our parting and for a little while she was disposed to make me remain. "If you could stay a little longer," she said,--"Another day? If any harm is done, it"s done."
"It has been beautiful," I said, "this meeting. It"s just as if--when I was so jaded and discouraged that I could have put my work aside and despaired altogether,--some power had said, "Have you forgotten the friendship I gave you?" ... But we shall have had our time. We"ve met,--we"ve seen one another, we"ve heard one another. We"ve hurt no one...."
"You will go?"
"To-day. Before sunset. Isn"t it right that I should go?"
"Stay," she whispered, with a light in her eyes.
"No. I dare not."
She did not speak for a long time.
"Of course," she said at last, "you"re right. You only said--I would have said it for you if you had not. You"re so right, Stephen.... I suppose, poor silly little things, that if you stayed we should certainly begin making love to each other. It would be--necessary. We should fence about a little and then there it would be. No barrier--to stop us. And neither of us wants it to happen. It isn"t what we want.
You would become urgent, I suppose, and I should be--coquettish. In spite of ourselves that power would make us puppets. As if already we hadn"t made love.... I could find it in my heart now.... Stephen I could _make_ you stay....
"Oh! Why are we so tormented, Stephen? In the next world we shall meet, and this will trouble us no longer. The love will be there--oh, the love will be there, like something that has at last got itself fully born, got itself free from some queer clinging seed-case....
"We shall be rid of jealousy, Stephen, that inflammation of the mind, that bitterness, that pitiless sore, so that I shan"t be tormented by the thought of Rachel and she will be able to tolerate me. She was so sweet and wonderful a girl--with those dark eyes. And I"ve never done her justice--never. Nor she me. I s.n.a.t.c.hed you from her. I s.n.a.t.c.hed you....
"Someday we shall be different.... All this putting oneself round another person like a fence, against everyone else, almost against everything else; it"s so wicked, so fierce.
"It"s so possible to be different. Sometimes now, sometimes for long parts of a day I have no base pa.s.sions at all--even in this life. To be like that always! But I can"t see clearly how these things can be; one dreams of them in a kind of luminous mist, and if one looks directly at them, they vanish again...."
-- 6
And at last we came to the landing, and moored the little boat and walked up the winding path to the hotel. The dull pain of separation was already upon us.