Part 10

"He would be sweet . . . my baby," thought Sophia, staring at the big round heads and little necks with that pang of yearning pity without which she could never look on children. It is a great truth that no woman has ever loved a man unless she has wanted to bear him a child, and the knowledge that she would never make this greatest of all offerings to Richard pressed on Sophia's heart. She was not one of those women who desire children as an end in themselves, to whom they would mean more than the husband; she was of those who long to bear them to the loved man because for him the utmost must be suffered and given; but for any other man it would be a thing unspeakable. Therefore she saw the best put out of life for her, and she hurried away from the children on the steps. Turning down a narrow lane she came to a door in the wall, and pushing it open she looked into what seemed a lake of green light, flecked with swaying rounds of sun and chequered with deeper green shadows--a garden run luxuriantly wild. Sophia stepped inside, and on her right, built half against and half on the wall, she saw a little ochre-washed house with faded blue shutters. Wandering on, she came to some lilacs in hard, red bud that hung over a well, and passing under the arch they made she found the further end of the garden. There a flight of uneven old steps led to the top of the wall, and she went up them. At the head of the steps, the wall--which was the outer fortification of the town--widened into a circle some twenty feet across, with a stone seat inset in the parapet that ran round it, and a sundial without a hand in the middle. Sophia stood still and drew a long breath--the place, in its look of eld and aloofness, was so exactly like some enchanted spot in a fairy-story. Crossing the flagstones she looked out over the miles of plain lying below her; here and there were patches of olive-trees, not growing in masses like a grey-green sea as they did further north where he and she had seen them, but planted far apart; from where Sophia stood they looked like nothing so much as clouds of dust puffing up from the ground.

Sophia stretched herself long and slowly; then throwing off her hat, she laid her arms along the parapet and her sleek head down upon them.

"Oh, I wish I hadn't come," she moaned. "I'm going to feel again. . . ."

Her hand went out to the little hanging bag she carried and drew back again, then setting her mouth, she made herself unfasten the clasp and take out a bundle of letters which she laid on the seat beside her. As her eyes lit on the familiar writing a deadly nausea took hold of her, she felt physically sick and put her hand up to her throat to check its contraction. A letter from him always affected her in that way, so that she sat, sick and faint, unable to open it, and now these oft-read letters were as potent as ever. She noted with a vague, impersonal surprise that her hands were shaking, and folding them in her lap she sat still, forcing her thoughts, in spite of the pain it stirred in her, to go back over the past two weeks.

II

On looking back the whole time seemed set in a clear, sunlit atmosphere of its own as in a magic sphere where the present had always taken a more than normal clearness of edge and the past and future ceased to be. It struck her as curious that the prevailing note of those weeks should have been a sense of utter peace; not realizing that, peace being the thing his frayed nerves craved, she therefore supplied it, wrapping him round with it, living so in him and for him that while with him she received the impression of peace herself, only having sensations of her own when they were apart. His need--that was the great thing, and though she had not stopped to analyse what his need was, she had felt it was for soothing and rest.

She was a writer, and on the money made by her first book she came to Italy, and in Florence she met him, a painter of some note, of whom she had vaguely heard in London. Although he was twenty years older than she, their minds chimed from the first; one of them had only to half say a thing for the other to understand it. At the beginning there was nothing between them but friendship, tinged--though for her quite unconsciously--with the element of sex. For him, he had since told her, things were very different from the moment he met her; to the average woman the term "physical attraction" is so meaningless that she stared in uncomprehension when he told her how profoundly she had troubled him from the first. For this girl, whose pulses had never been fluttered to quickness, and who, though in imagination she could project herself into passion, always shrank from any sign of it in actuality, was reserved the doubtful compliment of stirring the passionate side of the man's nature more violently than it had ever been before. He kept the ugly thing well hidden, and she never guessed at it until her own pity and trust and affection made her unwittingly tempt him beyond endurance. Pity, allied to the intellectual pleasure they took in each other, moved her first, for he was unhappy, and she, too, had the habit of pain. She remembered the first whole day they had taken together; how they climbed up to San Miniato and found a field in which they lay and talked, and how he came back with her to the thirteenth-century palace beside the Arno where she lodged. She had a little room with a painted ceiling, and the infant Bacchus and adoring nymphs disporting themselves in bas-relief on the mantelpiece, a room looking over the brown fluted roofs of Florence; but the great loggia where he and she sat faced the Arno, and they had coffee and cigarettes and watched the swift blue night fall over Florence while the swarm of lights waked broken reflections in the swirling water. On the loggia they exchanged a brief mention of their troubles, both commonplace enough; hers a childhood with parents who perpetually quarrelled, the mother a hard worldly woman who eventually took to drugs, and a father who had at last left for another woman the home which was so unbearable; while Sophia herself had only shaken off the horrors of it and earned her own living, barely enough at that, a few months earlier.

Richard's trouble was his wife, who seemed not unlike Sophia's mother. He was both too kindly and too weak--for his was one of those temperaments that shrink from any display of unpleasantness--to have mastered her brutally and for good--and strong enough to go on living in the same house with her because, although she made his life a weariness, she was an intensely conventional woman to whom the position of a wife separated from her husband before all the world would have been intolerable. Between him and Sophia the fact that they both knew the terror of not being able to slip out even to post a letter without dreading what they might find on going back, made a bond of sympathy.

Sophia, ignorant as she was, could not be a young, and, for some people, a beautiful woman, without having learned a few stray scraps of wisdom, and one was that when a man began to confide his troubles to her it was as well to see less of him. But Sophia let herself drift, because she liked being with the man so much; and also the fact that he was from her own place, that the relentless gods had brought him to Florence to meet her, and would, in due course, send them both back to where, henceforth, they would know each other, gave her a curious feeling of being entrapped in some web too powerful to break. She never blamed him or let him blame himself for what inevitably happened.

"Sophia, my sweet," he wrote her in one of the letters she now picked up at random. "I didn't deliberately set to work to make love to you. I knew your beauty inflamed me and your wit delighted me. But when we first met I thought we should just see each other a few times and quarrel and laugh, and I should revel in your looks and no harm done. And now little Miss Jervis has turned into Sophia, and either I must have Sophia for ever and ever mine, or I ought to have stuck to an elderly uncle line and come away with no tears for her and no self-loathing for me, and no need to lie and shuffle and make her share in the lies and shuffles for the future."

"You'll never do that, dear," thought Sophia, laying the letter down. "When I have to come back to London we'll meet honestly, or not at all. For there's nothing on earth that's worth living in a sea of lies for. . . ." She remembered how he had asked her if she would come and see his wife, so that he and she might meet on an accepted footing, and how the doubtful taste of the proposition had jarred her. He argued that because they would be honestly "playing the game" by his wife, Sophia need not mind the meeting; his knowledge of women was curiously insensitive and blunt, and he had no conception of how impossible it would be for Sophia to sit quietly and see another woman doing the honours of his house. In this he was not entirely to blame, for Sophia so contrived to hoodwink him that he never quite knew she loved him, certainly never knew the force of her love. He thought of her as a reckless, innocent child stung to lavish giving out of affection and pity, and so, to begin with, she had been. The woman Sophia kept up what had become a pose, not only from the pride of a maiden, but also because some instinct told her that sooner or later he would rather be able to think she had not given more.

For the first few days either of them would have declared that all was well and there was no danger, yet each day marked a distinct step further on, a definite phase passed through. Sometimes they wandered about Florence, in the Boboli and the Cascine gardens, or upon the windy heights of Fiesole; sometimes he hired a queer little carriage with swift, bedecked horses, and they drove far out into the country, not getting home till night. The day before the revelation came was one of the most exquisite they spent together, one of which Sophia could still hardly bear to think. Leaving the carriage at a little village, they wandered on foot into a lovely valley, and laughed because he called it "old mastery," pointing out the Turneresque effect of a ruined castle set high amidst a mass of olives which were being blown pale against it. Presently they came to a stream that stormed down the valley and fell into seven successive pools; deep, still pools, as green as ice, with sunlit bubbles sent driving through them by the impetus of the clear arch of descending water. Beside the largest pool, on a smooth grey slab of rock screened by the over-hanging cliff, they sat and ate their lunch of bread and hard-boiled eggs and wine, and the sun shone on the glossy red-brown hair so cunningly folded about Sophia's head, and shone in the depths of her grey eyes and on her tanned skin. When they had finished she lay a little below him, closing her eyes to feel the blown spray drift against her lids, and she never knew till he told her that his hand had been on her hair the whole time, and never knew till later still that she had been loving him even then. The day passed in a perfect harmony of speech and silences, and all the time Sophia was giving--giving peace and mothering and delight, giving the sky and the earth and the very air they breathed. Only some one who has ever made a gift of a day knows the joy that it is--how each golden moment, conscious of its own beauty, hangs poised like a held breath; how the sun and wind and flowers and the upward curves of the supporting earth are all parts of the gift, making the giver a god who pours out creation for his friend.

The next day they took train to Pisa on a more sophisticated errand, since he had undertaken to make a sketch of the tower for a friend who was "sheeking" some Italian backgrounds. Sophia wandered happily about the town while he did so, and then they met for lunch in the garden of an old inn.

"I'm afraid of to-day," he told her, "because it can't be as perfect as yesterday. Nothing could--that's the worst of a day like that."

"I'll _make_ it as perfect," Sophia replied, and she kept her word. She still had no idea she loved him, she only knew that she wanted to shield and protect him, that she was happy with him and felt the power to make him happy, and that she trusted him utterly. Without realizing it, she tempted him cruelly by her very trust, and that day her calm recklessness of speech, her gaze that meeting his so straight and untroubled, disturbed him so profoundly, were too much for him.

"Take off your glove," he said suddenly.

Sophia's notions of love had been culled from books, and she considered it inseparable from what she termed "thrills." How was she to know that a woman, especially what is called a "nice" woman, can love without the promptings of the pulses? Because she felt no sensuous "thrill" as the tone of command, it never occurred to her to think she could be in love, wherein she was making another common literary mistake--that of thinking that every woman enjoys being mastered. Sophia found her joy in ready compliance with the demands of the beloved, not in arranging set scenes of clashing wills and conciliations. Taking off her glove, she gave him her hand.

"When I say that I want to kiss you now," he said, "it doesn't mean in the way it would have, even a day or two ago. I told you then you affected me . . . but now it would be because I love you."

Sophia's hand moved slightly in his.

"Yes," she said hesitatingly, "in a way--of course. I know you're very fond of me--and all that."

"In _the_ way," he returned, "and I'm not fit to hold your hand. D'you know what the life of an average man is like--especially of a man in my circumstances?"

"You mean--women?"

"Yes--bought women," he said brutally. "Does it make a lot of difference to you?"

Sophia, refusing to let her mind so much as dwell with any effort of realization on his confession, closed her hand firmly over his.

"It doesn't make any difference. Nothing does. If I could look after you--if you were free to be looked after--you wouldn't have to go to other women any more. I care about you more than about any man I've ever met."

"And I don't care about you more than any woman I've ever met. You're unique and you're you, but I've been in love a good many times. And there's always the big one I've told you about. I feel I've so little left to give, and yet--by God, Sophia! I _could_ give to you, even battered old I!"

"I'd be such a wife to you," said Sophia proudly, clenching her free hand, "that I should fear no other woman on earth."

"And you wouldn't need to . . . Sophia!" he cried. "How you would give!"

"And we mustn't, either of us," said Sophia, and to soften the speech she bent her head swiftly and kissed the hand she held.

"My dear . . . !" he said huskily, and Sophia led the way out of the garden.

That night, after he had left her at her shabby old palace, he went back to his hotel and sat up, smoking heavily, most of the night. Towards morning, he wrote her a letter--the first in order of those beside her on the seat. She took it up now and read it once again:

"Sophia, Sophia," it ran, "I'm in the depths of misery. What have I done to you and what is going to come of it all? When this time is over? When we're back in London and out of lotus land? You know--stolen interviews and weeks without meeting, and that old and awful struggle between the 'game' at home and my inclinations abroad. And I've hardly written so far when I'm feeling better. Dear, what does all that matter? I feel the shadow of that coming gloom on me already, but how glorious the sunshine's been for me! I'm not going to think or worry--yet. What will happen when I'm back in London must happen, but if I had you by me now I shouldn't care a damn for that. I feel stupid and stockish. There are such millions of things I want to say to you, Sophia--and they're mostly middle-aged things. That's the worst of it. Warnings I feel I ought to give you about myself and my temper and my terrible ease in giving way to adverse circumstances. I've told you I'm not big enough or strong enough for you to care for me except as a useful old pal. You'll find me out and hate me. All sorts of ghastly bogies are waiting to jump out at me. They'll get me. But you, dear, you gracious, reckless woman-child, whatever you think of me in the future you can't rob me of to-day and yesterday and all those days, and especially to-day. Things like that are too sacred to write about, almost to think of. And we're deadly honest with each other, that's a great thing. The more I dream of you the more I want you here, now. I simply can't write, I've been nearly as high this afternoon as I shall ever get, perhaps quite--and one has to pay for that. Oh, my dear; please God, you'll never pay for me! Sophia, you're very dear to me. Richard. You poor child--you glorious woman!"

The next day both fell from their high altitude. They had driven to a little half-deserted town, a white, dead, staring, crumbling place--a place of blind windows and glaring silences. Both felt a sense of tension, and leaving the carriage they wandered round the walls, and climbing over a broken gap sat down on a grassy spur of the hillside, with their backs to the terrible little town. As usual, by now, they talked about themselves, chiefly of him, and he told her that though several women had been fond of him as a friend and liked to "mother" him even as she did, no one of them had cared for him in another way or kissed him as a lover kisses. He slipped an arm round her shoulders as he spoke. Sophia was as ignorant as an infant of what kissing like a lover might be, and in a rush of pity and affection she turned her face up towards him.

"Oh, it isn't as if we were going on afterwards like this," she said; "this is just a bit cut out of life for me to give you. It's taking nothing from her, she doesn't want to give you anything. And I want to make this bit as splendid as I can for you."

He felt her shoulder touch his as she leant her warm young body towards him, he saw the glory of her eager eyes and mouth, and he caught her to him, crushing her fiercely. . . . Sophia wondered if this awful kiss were ever going to stop; she had never known there was such a way of kissing--a hard pressure, a sucking of her very soul--and she was filled with horror under it. When he loosed her she turned and buried her face against the wall. For a while they sat in silence, then she saw him kissing her coat, her sleeve, then her head was pressed back against the wall and his mouth came to hers again. She stayed passive, dazed. In silence they went to the carriage and drove away, and almost silently they parted. Sophia spent the night in a misery of shame, he spent it in mingled excitement and remorse: fearful lest he had aroused in her a passion which would need to be satisfied at the cost of social disaster.

Next day they talked of nothing in particular in a desultory way and did not refer to what had happened until, wandering through one of the wooded mountain slopes beyond Florence, they came on a tiny sportsman's hut with a roof of red-fluted tiles and a huge chimney. Sophia peeped and went in; he followed. Within, the hut was only about five feet square; flame-coloured leaves had drifted in through the open doorway and lay piled on the hearth; on the wall were some names rudely scrawled in charcoal.

"How did you sleep?" he asked suddenly.

"I didn't. I was thinking what I should say to you to-day."

"What was it?"

"Never, never again be like you were yesterday. I didn't know it was like that. It was dreadful. I can't bear it."

He took her hands and held them.

"Never, I promise you. I had an awful night. I didn't know what to think or wish or do. Let's get out of this hut. It's too small."

The rest of the day they spent happily under the trees, and it seemed to her that the sense of rest and peace was stronger than if it had never been broken. Very soon came their last day together. They drove to a deserted castle on a hill, called Castello di Luna, and as they went Sophia turned to him.

"To-day's the last," she said, "and I'm going to make it the most beautiful present of all to you. We'll pretend, like children. We'll pretend there's only to-day in the world, that there are no obligations beyond here and now, that we are happy people--we'll pretend."

He gathered her in his arms and kissed her again and again fiercely, but not with the abandonment which had frightened her before, and her heart turned heavy within her and she knew she loved him. They stayed till evening in the neglected garden of the old castle, left discreetly alone by Lucia and Amadea, the little peasant custodians who lived with a beetle-browed mother and a score of younger children in the tower over the gate. It was Lucia who ventured an opinion as to Sophia's baby, and Sophia emptied her pocket-bottle of lavender water over the little girls' blue-check handkerchiefs and told Richard to give them five _lire_ apiece against the day when they should have babies of their own.

Then, in the quiet old garden, he and she sat and talked and were silent, and, with her arms round him, she drew his head on to her breast, and they played the dangerous game of saying what they would do when they were married.

"Your baby would be sweet!" he quoted to her. "Would you dare even that for me, Sophia?"

"Would I not?" she breathed.

"Oh, I can't give up hoping it may all become possible!" he cried at last, but she shuddered a little. "Don't," she said, "it's building on a grave."

But her heart ached at the sweetness of the vision. She never felt any temptation to fling her cap over the windmill for him, partly because it is very true that "_Les bonnes femmes n'ont pas ces tentations-la_," partly because of the much greater things she wanted to give--a hearth that would always warm him, a pillow that would always rest him, and on the hearth a cradle--and these were things that he could not come at through a back door.

They said good-bye on the loggia in Florence, and that night he left for Leghorn. He wrote to her in the train; and bringing her thoughts back to the present by an effort, Sophia picked up the letter now.