I did not trouble about any civilities. I stood up and asked point blank a question that came into my head.
"Whose horse is that?" I said.
She looked me in the eyes. "Carnaby"s," she answered.
"How did you get here--this way?"
"The wall"s down."
"Down? Already?"
"A great bit of it between the plantations."
"And you rode through, and got here by chance?"
"I saw you yesterday. And I rode over to see you." I had now come close to her, and stood looking up into her face.
"I"m a mere vestige," I said.
She made no answer, but remained regarding me steadfastly with a curious air of proprietorship.
"You know I"m the living survivor now of the great smash. I"m rolling and dropping down through all the scaffolding of the social system....
It"s all a chance whether I roll out free at the bottom, or go down a crack into the darkness out of sight for a year or two."
"The sun," she remarked irrelevantly, "has burnt you.... I"m getting down."
She swung herself down into my arms, and stood beside me face to face.
"Where"s Cothope?" she asked.
"Gone."
Her eyes flitted to the pavilion and back to me. We stood close together, extraordinarily intimate, and extraordinarily apart.
"I"ve never seen this cottage of yours," she said, "and I want to."
She flung the bridle of her horse round the veranda post, and I helped her tie it.
"Did you get what you went for to Africa?" she asked.
"No," I said, "I lost my ship."
"And that lost everything?"
"Everything."
She walked before me into the living-room of the chalet, and I saw that she gripped her riding-whip very tightly in her hand. She looked about her for a moment,--and then at me.
"It"s comfortable," she remarked.
Our eyes met in a conversation very different from the one upon our lips. A sombre glow surrounded us, drew us together; an unwonted shyness kept us apart. She roused herself, after an instant"s pause, to examine my furniture.
"You have chintz curtains. I thought men were too f.e.c.kless to have curtains without a woman. But, of course, your aunt did that! And a couch and a bra.s.s fender, and--is that a pianola? That is your desk.
I thought men"s desks were always untidy, and covered with dust and tobacco ash."
She flitted to my colour prints and my little case of books. Then she went to the pianola. I watched her intently.
"Does this thing play?" she said.
"What?" I asked.
"Does this thing play?"
I roused myself from my preoccupation.
"Like a musical gorilla with fingers all of one length. And a sort of soul.... It"s all the world of music to me."
"What do you play?"
"Beethoven, when I want to clear up my head while I"m working. He is--how one would always like to work. Sometimes Chopin and those others, but Beethoven. Beethoven mainly. Yes."
Silence again between us. She spoke with an effort.
"Play me something." She turned from me and explored the rack of music rolls, became interested and took a piece, the first part of the Kreutzer Sonata, hesitated. "No," she said, "that!"
She gave me Brahms" Second Concerto, Op. 58, and curled up on the sofa watching me as I set myself slowly to play....
"I say," he said when I had done, "that"s fine. I didn"t know those things could play like that. I"m all astir..."
She came and stood over me, looking at me. "I"m going to have a concert," she said abruptly, and laughed uneasily and hovered at the pigeon-holes. "Now--now what shall I have?" She chose more of Brahms.
Then we came to the Kreutzer Sonata. It is queer how Tolstoy has loaded that with suggestions, debauched it, made it a scandalous and intimate symbol. When I had played the first part of that, she came up to the pianola and hesitated over me. I sat stiffly--waiting.
Suddenly she seized my downcast head and kissed my hair. She caught at my face between her hands and kissed my lips. I put my arms about her and we kissed together. I sprang to my feet and clasped her.
"Beatrice!" I said. "Beatrice!"
"My dear," she whispered, nearly breathless, with her arms about me.
"Oh! my dear!"
II
Love, like everything else in this immense process of social disorganisation in which we live, is a thing adrift, a fruitless thing broken away from its connexions. I tell of this love affair here because of its irrelevance, because it is so remarkable that it should mean nothing, and be nothing except itself. It glows in my memory like some bright casual flower starting up amidst the debris of a catastrophe.
For nearly a fortnight we two met and made love together. Once more this mighty pa.s.sion, that our aimless civilisation has fettered and maimed and sterilised and debased, gripped me and filled me with pa.s.sionate delights and solemn joys--that were all, you know, futile and purposeless. Once more I had the persuasion "This matters. Nothing else matters so much as this." We were both infinitely grave in such happiness as we had. I do not remember any laughter at all between us.
Twelve days it lasted from that encounter in my chalet until our parting.
Except at the end, they were days of supreme summer, and there was a waxing moon. We met recklessly day by day. We were so intent upon each other at first so intent upon expressing ourselves to each other, and getting at each other, that we troubled very little about the appearance of our relationship. We met almost openly.... We talked of ten thousand things, and of ourselves. We loved. We made love. There is no prose of mine that can tell of hours transfigured. The facts are nothing.
Everything we touched, the meanest things, became glorious. How can I render bare tenderness and delight and mutual possession? I sit here at my desk thinking of untellable things.