The shade of perplexity deepened in her dark eyes as she listened. Ever and again she seemed about to speak and then checked herself and let him talk on.
He spoke of the closeness of love and the deep excitement of love and how it filled the soul with pride and the world with wonder, and of the universal right of men and women to love. He told of his dreams and his patience, and of the stormy hopes that would not be suppressed when he heard that Sir Isaac was dead. And as he pictured to himself the lost delights at which he hinted, as he called back those covert expectations, he forgot that she had declared herself resolved upon freedom at any cost, and his rage against Sir Isaac, who had possessed and wasted all that he would have cherished so tenderly, grew to nearly uncontrollable proportions. "Here was your life," he said, "your beautiful life opening and full--full of such dear seeds of delight and wonder, calling for love, ready for love, and there came this _Clutch_, this Clutch that embodied all the narrow meanness of existence, and gripped and crumpled you and spoilt you.... For I tell you my dear you don"t know; you don"t begin to know...."
He disregarded her shy eyes, giving way to his gathered wrath.
"And he conquers! This little monster of meanness, he conquers to the end--his dead hand, his dead desires, out of the grave they hold you!
Always, always, it is Clutch that conquers; the master of life! I was a fool to dream, a fool to hope. I forgot. I thought only of you and I--that perhaps you and I----"
He did not heed her little sound of protest. He went on to a bitter denunciation of the rule of jealousy in the world, forgetting that the sufferer under that rule in this case was his own consuming jealousy.
That was life. Life was jealousy. It was all made up of fierce graspings, fierce suspicions, fierce resentments; men preyed upon one another even as the beasts they came from; reason made its crushed way through their conflict, crippled and wounded by their blows at one another. The best men, the wisest, the best of mankind, the stars of human wisdom, were but half ineffectual angels carried on the shoulders and guided by the steps of beasts. One might dream of a better world of men, of civilizations and wisdom latent in our pa.s.sion-strained minds, of calms and courage and great heroical conquests that might come, but they lay tens of thousands of years away and we had to live, we had to die, no more than a herd of beasts tormented by gleams of knowledge we could never possess, of happiness for which we had no soul. He grew more and more eloquent as these thoughts sprang and grew in his mind.
"Of course I am absurd," he cried. "All men are absurd. Man is the absurd animal. We have parted from primordial motives--l.u.s.t and hate and hunger and fear, and from all the tragic greatness of uncontrollable fate and we, we"ve got nothing to replace them. We are comic--comic!
Ours is the stage of comedy in life"s history, half lit and blinded,--and we fumble. As absurd as a kitten with its poor little head in a bag. There"s your soul of man! Mewing. We"re all at it, the poets, the teachers. How can anyone hope to escape? Why should I escape? What am I that I should expect to be anything but a thwarted lover, a man mocked by his own attempts at service? Why should I expect to discover beauty and think that it won"t be s.n.a.t.c.hed away from me? All my life is comic--the story of this--this last absurdity could it make anything but a comic history? and yet within me my heart is weeping tears. The further one has gone, the deeper one wallows in the comic marsh. I am one of the newer kind of men, one of those men who cannot sit and hug their credit and their honour and their possessions and be content. I have seen the light of better things than that, and because of my vision, because of my vision and for no other reason I am the most ridiculous of men. Always I have tried to go out from myself to the world and give. Those early books of mine, those meretricious books in which I pretended all was so well with the world,--I did them because I wanted to give happiness and contentment and to be happy in the giving.
And all the watchers and the grippers, the strong silent men and the calculating possessors of things, the masters of the world, they grinned at me. How I lied to please! But I tell you for all their grinning, in my very prost.i.tution there was a better spirit than theirs in their successes. If I had to live over again----"
He left that hypothesis uncompleted.
"And now," he said, with a curious contrast between his voice and the exaltation of his sentiments, "now that I am to be your tormented, your emasculated lover to the very end of things, emasculated by laws I hate and customs I hate and vile foresights that I despise----"
He paused, his thread lost for a moment.
"Because," he said, "I"m going to do it. I"m going to do what I can. I"m going to be as you wish me to be, to help you, to serve you.... If you can"t come to meet me, I"ll meet you. I can"t help but love you, I can"t do without you. Never in my life have I subscribed willingly to the idea of renunciation. I"ve hated renunciation. But if there is no other course but renunciation, renunciation let it be. I"m bitter about this, bitter to the bottom of my soul, but at least I"ll have you know I love you. Anyhow...."
His voice broke. There were tears in his eyes.
And on the very crest of these magnificent capitulations his soul rebelled. He turned about so swiftly that for a sentence or so she did not realize the nature of his change. Her mind remained glowing with her distressed acceptance of his magnificent n.o.bility.
"I can"t," he said.
He flung off his surrenders as a savage might fling off a garment.
"When I think of his children," he said.
"When I think of the world filled by his children, the children you have borne him--and I--forbidden almost to touch your hand!"
And flying into a pa.s.sion Mr. Brumley shouted "No!"
"Not even to touch your hand!"
"I won"t do it," he a.s.sured her. "I won"t do it. If I cannot be your lover--I will go away. I will never see you again. I will do anything--anything, rather than suffer this degradation. I will go abroad. I will go to strange places. I will aviate. I will kill myself--or anything, but I won"t endure this. I won"t. You see, you ask too much, you demand more than flesh and blood can stand. I"ve done my best to bring myself to it and I can"t. I won"t have that--that----"
He waved his trembling fingers in the air. He was absolutely unable to find an epithet pointed enough and bitter enough to stab into the memory of the departed knight. He thought of him as marble, enthroned at Kensal Green, with a false dignity, a false serenity, and intolerable triumph.
He wanted something, some monosyllable to expound and strip all that, some lung-filling sky-splitting monosyllable that one could shout. His failure increased his exasperation.
"I won"t have him grinning, at me," he said at last. "And so, it"s one thing or the other. There"s no other choice. But I know your choice. I see your choice. It"s good-bye--and why--why shouldn"t I go now?"
He waved his arms about. He was pitifully ridiculous. His face puckered as an ill-treated little boy"s might do. This time it wasn"t just the pathetic twinge that had broken his voice before; he found himself to his own amazement on the verge of loud, undignified, childish weeping.
He was weeping pa.s.sionately and noisily; he was over the edge of it, and it was too late to s.n.a.t.c.h himself back. The shame which could not constrain him, overcame him. A preposterous upward gesture of the hands expressed his despair. And abruptly this unhappy man of letters turned from her and fled, the most grief-routed of creatures, whooping and sobbing along a narrow pathway through the trees.
--8
He left behind him an exceedingly distressed and astonished lady. She had stood with her eyes opening wider and wider at this culminating exhibition.
"But Mr. Brumley!" she had cried at last. "Mr. Brumley!"
He did not seem to hear her. And now he was running and stumbling along very fast through the trees, so that in a few minutes he would be out of sight. Dismay came with the thought that he might presently go out of sight altogether.
For a moment she seemed to hesitate. Then with a swift decision and a firm large grasp of the hand, she gathered up her black skirts and set off after him along the narrow path. She ran. She ran lightly, with a soft rhythmic fluttering of white and black. The long crepe bands she wore in Sir Isaac"s honour streamed out behind her.
"But Mr. Brumley," she panted unheard. "Mister Brumley!"
He went from her fast, faster than she could follow, amidst the sun-dappled pine stems, and as he went he made noises between bellowing and soliloquy, heedless of any pursuit. All she could hear was a heart-wringing but inexpressive "Wa, wa, wooh, wa, woo," that burst from him ever and again. Through a more open s.p.a.ce among the trees she fancied she was gaining upon him, and then as the pines came together again and were mingled with young spruces, she perceived that he drew away from her more and more. And he went round a curve and was hidden, and then visible again much further off, and then hidden----.
She attempted one last cry to him, but her breath failed her, and she dropped her pace to a panting walk.
Surely he would not go thus into the high road! It was unendurable to think of him rushing out into the high road--blind with sorrow--it might be into the very bonnet of a pa.s.sing automobile.
She pa.s.sed beyond the pines and scanned the path ahead as far as the stile. Then she saw him, lying where he had flung himself, face downward among the bluebells.
"Oh!" she whispered to herself, and put one hand to her heart and drew nearer.
She was flooded now with that pa.s.sion of responsibility, with that wild irrational charity which pours out of the secret depths of a woman"s stirred being.
She came up to him so lightly as to be noiseless. He did not move, and for a moment she remained looking at him.
Then she said once more, and very gently--
"Mr. Brumley."
He started, listened for a second, turned over, sat up and stared at her. His face was flushed and his hair extremely ruffled. And a slight moisture recalled his weeping.
"Mr. Brumley," she repeated, and suddenly there were tears of honest vexation in her voice and eyes. "You _know_ I cannot do without you."
He rose to his knees, and never, it seemed to him, had she looked so beautiful. She was a little out of breath, her dusky hair was disordered, and there was an unwonted expression in her eyes, a strange mingling of indignation and tenderness. For a moment they stared unaffectedly at each other, each making discoveries.
"Oh!" he sighed at last; "whatever you please, my dear. Whatever you please. I"m going to do as you wish, if you wish it, and be your friend and forget all this"--he waved an arm--"loving."
There were signs of a recrudescence of grief, and, inarticulate as ever, she sank to her knees close beside him.
"Let us sit quietly among these hyacinths," said Mr. Brumley. "And then afterwards we will go back to the house and talk ... talk about our Hostels."
He sat back and she remained kneeling.
"Of course," he said, "I"m yours--to do just as you will with. And we"ll work----. I"ve been a bit of a stupid brute. We"ll work. For all those people. It will be--oh! a big work, quite a big work. Big enough for us to thank G.o.d for. Only----."
The sight of her panting lips had filled him with a wild desire, that set every nerve aquivering, and yet for all that had a kind of moderation, a reasonableness. It was a sisterly thing he had in mind. He felt that if this one desire could be satisfied, then honour would be satisfied, that he would cease grudging Sir Isaac--anything....