Part 5

"Everything. You know. You know you do." The archness of Ianthe was objectively baffling, but under it all he read the significance, its invitation.

He waited beside her for a tram, but when it came he pleaded a further engagement in the city and left her rather crest-fallen to her journey. He had no other engagement, he only wanted to be alone to sort out the things she had dangled before his mind, so he boarded the next car and walked from the Tutsan terminus to his cottage. Both girls were fond of him, then--Ianthe's candour left him no room for doubt--and they were both lying to each other about him. Well, he didn't mind that, he lied himself whenever it was necessary or suited him. Not often, but when truth was inappropriate to a sensitive-minded man, this was his protective colouring. Why after all should sympathetic mendacity be a monopoly of polite society?

"But it's also the trick of thieves and seducers," he muttered to himself. "I'm not a thief, no, I'm not a thief. As for the other thing, well, what is there against me--nothing, nothing at all." But a strange voiceless sigh seemed to echo from the trees along the dark road; he walked on more rapidly.

Three women! There was no doubt either about the third, Ianthe had thought of Julia, too, just as Kate had. What a fate for a misogamist! He felt like a mouse being taken for a ride in a bath chair. He had an invincible prejudice against marriage, not as an institution but because he was perfectly aware of his incapacity for faithfulness. His emotions were deep but unprolonged, they were fickle. Love was love, but marriage turned love into the stone of Sisyphus. At the sound of the marriage bell--a passing bell--earth at his feet would burst into flame and the sky above would pour upon him an unquenching profusion of tears. Love was a fine ennobling thing, but though he had the will to love he knew beyond the possibility of doubt that his capacity for love was a meandering strengthless thing. Even his loyalty to Julia Tern--and that had the strongest flavour of any such emotion that had ever beset him, no matter how brief its term--even that was a deviating zig-zag loyalty. For he wanted to go on being jolly and friendly with Ianthe if only Julia did not get to know. With Kate, too, that tender melancholy woman. She would be vastly unhappy. Who was this Christopher whom Ianthe fondly imagined her sister to favour? Whoever he was, poor devil, he would not thank D. M. for his intervention. But he would drop all this; however had he, of all men, come to be plumped so suddenly into a state of things for which he had shown so little fancy in the past? Julia would despise him, she would be sure to despise him, sure to; and yet if he could only believe she would not it would be pleasant to go on being friendly with Ianthe pending ... pending what?

Masterman was a very pliant man; but as things shaped themselves for him he did not go a step further with Ianthe, and it was not to Julia at all that he made love.

3

The amour, if it may be described as such, of David Masterman and Kate Forrest took a course that was devoid of ecstasy, whatever other qualities may have illuminated their desires. It was an affair in which the human intentions, which are intellectual, were on both sides strong enough to subdue the efforts of passion, which are instinctive, to rid itself of the customary curbs, and to turn the clash of inhibitions wherein the man proposes and the woman rejects into a conflict not of ideal but of mere propriety. They were like two negative atoms swinging in a medium from which the positive flux was withdrawn; for them the nebulæ did not 'cohere into an orb.'

Kate's fine figure was not so fine as Julia Tern's; her dusky charms were excelled by those of Ianthe; but her melancholy immobility, superficial as it was, had a suggestive emotional appeal that won Masterman away from her rivals. Those sad eyes had but to rest on his and their depths submerged him. Her black hair had no special luxuriance, her stature no unusual grace; the eyes were almost blue and the thin oval face had always the flush of fine weather in it; but her strong hands, though not as white as snow, were paler than milk, their pallor was unnatural. Almost without an effort she drew him away from the entangling Ianthe, and even the image of Julia became but a fair cloud seen in moonlight, delicate and desirable but very far away; it would never return. Julia had observed the relations between them--no discerning eye could misread Kate's passion--and she gave up her class, a secession that had a deep significance for him, and a grief that he could not conceal from Kate though she was too wise to speak of it.

But in spite of her poignant aspect--for it was in that appearance she made such a powerful appeal to Masterman; the way she would wait silently for him on the outside of a crowd of the laughing chattering students was touching--she was an egotist of extraordinary type. She believed in herself and in her virtue more strongly than she believed in him or their mutual love. By midsummer, after months of wooing, she knew that the man who so passionately moved her and whose own love she no less powerfully engaged was a man who would never marry, who had a morbid preposterous horror of the domesticity and devotion that was her conception of living bliss. "The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the world," he said. He, too, knew that the adored woman, for her part, could not dream of a concession beyond the limits her virginal modesty prescribed. He had argued and stormed, sworn that baffled love turns irrevocably to hatred. She did not believe him, she even smiled, but he had behaved grossly towards her, terrified her, and they parted in anger.

He did not see her for many weeks. He was surprised and dismayed, his misery was so profound. He knew he had loved her; he had not doubted its sincerity, but he had doubted its depth. Then one September evening she had come back to the class and afterwards she had walked along the road with him towards his home.

"Come to my house," he said, "you have never been to see it."

She shook her head. It was getting dark and they walked on past his home further into the country. The eve was late, but it had come suddenly without the deliberation of sunset or the tenuity of dusk. Each tree was a hatful of the arriving blackness. They stood by a white gate under an elm, but they had little to say to each other.

"Come to my house," he urged again and again. She shook her head. He was indignant at her distrust of him. Perhaps she was right, but he would never forgive her. The sky was now darker than the road; the sighing air was warm, with drifting spots of rain.

"Tell me," she suddenly said, taking his arm, "has anybody else ever loved you like that."

He prevaricated: "Like what?" He waited a long time for her answer. She gave it steadily. "Like you want me to love you."

He, too, hesitated. He kissed her. He wanted to tell her it was not wise to pry.

"Tell me," she urged, "tell me."

"Yes," he replied. He could not see her plainly in the darkness, but he knew of the tears that fell from her eyes.

"How unreasonable!" he thought, "how stupid!" He began to tell the truth to her, about his feelings towards her, and towards those others, and about themselves--the truth as he conceived it.

She was almost alarmed, certainly shocked.

"But you don't believe such things," she almost shivered, "I'm sure you don't, it isn't right, it is not true."

"It may not be true," he declared implacably, "but I believe it. The real warrant for holding a belief is not that it is true but that it satisfies you."

She did not seem to understand that; she only answered irrelevantly, "I'll make it up to you some day. I shall not change, David, towards you. We have got all our lives before us. I shan't alter, will you?"

"Not alter!" he began angrily, but then subduedly added, with a grim irony that she did not gather in; "No, I shall not alter." She leaned upon his breast murmuring: "I'll make it all up to you, some day."

He felt like a sick-minded man and was glad when they parted. He went back to his cottage grumbling audibly to himself. Why could he not take this woman with the loving and constant heart and wed her? He did not know why, but he knew he never would do that. She was fine to look upon, but she had ideas (if you could call them ideas) which he disliked. Her instincts and propensities were all wrong, they were antagonistic to him, just as, he felt, his were antagonistic to her. What was true, though, was her sorrow at what she called their misunderstandings; and what was profound, what was almost convincing, was her assumption (which but measured her own love for him) that he could not cease to love _her_. How vain that was. He had not loved any woman in the form she thought all love must take. These were not misunderstandings, they were just simply at opposite ends of a tilted beam; he the sophisticated, and she the innocent beyond the reach of his sophistries. But Good Lord! what did it all matter? what did anything matter? He would not see her again. He undressed, and got into bed. He thought of Julia, of Ianthe, of Kate.... He had a dream in which he lay in a shroud upon a white board and was interrogated by a saint who carried a reporter's notebook and a fountain pen.

"What is your desire, sick-minded man?" the saint interrogated him, "what consummation would exalt your languid eyes?"

"I want the present not to be. It is neither grave nor noble."

"Then that _is_ your sickness. That mere negation is at once your hope and end."

"I do not know."

"If the present so derides the dignified past surely your desire lies in a future incarnating beautiful old historic dreams?"

"I do not know."

"Ideals are not in the past. They do not exist in any future. They rush on, and away, beyond your immediate activities, beyond the horizons that are for ever fixed, forever charging down upon us."

"I do not know."

"What is it you do know?" asked the exasperated Saint, jerking his fountain pen to loosen its flow, and Masterman replied like a lunatic:

"I know that sealing wax is a pure and beautiful material, and you get such a lot of it for a penny."

He woke and could not sleep again. He cursed Kate, he jeered at Julia, he anathematised Ianthe, until the bright eye of morning began to gild once more their broken images.

4

For a time the breach between them could not be healed, and during its interregnum he began to meet Ianthe again. But her eager devotion had lost its savour now, and he was conscious of his own mere amorous predacity, of treason to the dumb but benignant Kate, the sad-visaged woman whose chilly regard had riveted him, whose reproach unspoken and indeed unseen hovered almost annoyingly in his imagination.

Ianthe behaved evilly to Kate when she discovered that mutual infatuation for their one lover. Echoes of the sisters' feud, at first dim, but soon crashingly clear, reached him, touched him and moved him on Kate's behalf; all his loyalty belonged to her. What did it matter that he could not fathom his desire for her, or that Ianthe was his for a word, or that Kate's implacable virtue still offered its deprecatory hand, when Kate herself came back to him?

Kate was devout in the perfunctory way that denotes no apprehension of the mystery of sublime recognitions but is yet an effectual moral breakwater, she could be neither saint nor sinner. But her mind held fast to its promise: she would make it up, she would make it all up some day: and she did not feel or know that this was as much a promise to herself as to the man she loved.

They were to spend a picnic day together and she went to him for breakfast. Her tremours of propriety were fully exercised as she cycled along to his home; she was too fond of him and he was more than fond of her. But all her qualms were lulled, he did not appear in any of the half-anticipated _negligé_, he was beautifully and amusingly at home.

"My dear!" he exclaimed in the enjoyment of her presence; she stood staring at him as she removed her wrap, the morn though bright being fresh and cool: "Why do I never do you justice! Why do I half forget! You are marvellously irresistibly lovely. How do you do it--or how do I fail so?"

She could only answer him with blushes. His bungalow had but two rooms, both on the ground floor, one a studio and the other his living and sleeping room. It was new, built of bricks and unpainted boards. The interior walls were unplastered and undecorated except for three small saucepans hung on hooks, a shelf of dusty volumes, and nails, large rusty nails projecting everywhere, one holding a discarded collar and a clothes brush. A tall flat cupboard contained a narrow bed to be lowered for sleeping; huge portmanteaus and holdalls reposed in a corner beside a bureau; there was a big brass candle-pan on a chair beside the round stove. While he prepared breakfast the girl walked about the room, making shy replies to his hilarious questions. It was warm in there, but to her tidy comfort-loving heart the room was disordered and bare. She stood looking out of the window; the April air was bright but chilly, the grass in thin tufts fluttered and shivered.

"It is very nice," she said to him once, "but it's strange, and I feel that I ought not to be here."

"O, never mind where you ought to be," he cried, pouring out the coffee, "that's where you are, you suit the place, you brighten and adorn it, it's your native setting, Kate. No--I know exactly what is running in your mind, you are going to ask if I suffer loneliness here. Well, I don't. A great art in life is the capacity to extract a flavour from something not obviously flavoured, but here it is all flavour. Come and look at things."

He rose and led her from egg and toast to the world outside. Long fields of pasture and thicket followed a stream that followed other meadows, soon hidden by the ambulating many-folding valleys, and so on to the sea, a hundred miles away. Into his open door were blown, in their season, balls of thistledown, crisp leaves, twigs and dried grass, the reminder, the faint brush, of decay. Airs of wandering winds came in, odours of herbs, the fragrance of viewless flowers. The land in some directions was now being furrowed where corn was greenly to thrive, to wave in glimmering gold, to lie in the stook, to pile on giant stack. Horses were trailing a harrow across an upland below the park, the wind was flapping the coats of the drivers, the tails and manes of the horses, and heaving gladly in trees. A boy was firing some heaps of scutch grass and the smoke wore across the land in dense deliberate wreaths. Sportsmen's guns were sounding from the hollow park.

Kate followed Masterman around his cottage; he seemed to be fascinated by the smoke, the wind, the horses and men.

"Breakfast will be cold."

How queerly he looked at her before he said: "Yes, of course, breakfast will be getting cold," and then added, inconsequently: "Flowers are like men and women, they either stare brazenly at the sun or they bend humbly before it: but even the most modest desire the sun."

When he spoke like that she always felt that the words held a half-hidden, perhaps libidinous, meaning, which she could not understand but only guess at; and she was afraid of her guesses. Full of curious, not to say absurd, superstitions about herself and about him, his strange oblique emotions startled her virginal understanding; her desire was to be good, very very good, but to be that she could not but suspect the impulses of most other people, especially the impulses of men. Well, perhaps she was right: the woman who hasn't any doubts must have many illusions.

He carried a bag of lunch and they walked out into the day. Soon the wind ceased, the brightness grew warm, the warmth was coloured; clouds lolled in the air like tufts of lilac. At the edge of a spinney they sat down under a tree. Boughs of wood blown down by the winter gales were now being hidden by the spring grass. A rabbit twenty yards away sat up and watched the couple, a fat grey creature. "Hoi!" cried Kate, and the rabbit hopped away. It could not run very fast, it did not seem much afraid.

"Is it wounded?" she asked.

"No, I think it is a tame one, escaped from a farm or a cottage near us, I expect."

Kate crept after it on hands and knees and it let her approach. She offered it the core of an apple she had just eaten. The rabbit took it and bit her finger. Then Kate caught it by the ears. It squealed but Kate held it to her bosom with delight, and the rabbit soon rested there, if not with delight at least with ease. It was warm against her breast. It was delicious to feel it there, to pull its ears and caress its fat flank, but as she was doing this she suddenly saw that its coat was infested with fleas. She dropped the rabbit with a scream of disgust and it rushed into the thicket.

"Come here," said Masterman to her, "let me search you, this is distressing."

She knelt down before him and in spite of her wriggling he reassured her. "It's rather a nice blouse," he said.

"I don't care for it. I shall not wear it again. I shall sell it to some one or give it to them."

"I would love to take it from you...."

"You! Take it from me?"

"Yes, stitch by stitch."

With an awkward movement of her arm she thrust at his face, crying loudly "No, how dare you speak to me like that!"

"Is it very daring?" For a moment he saw her clenched hands, detestably bloodless, a symbol of roused virtue; but at once her anger was gone, Kate was contrite and tender. She touched his face with her white fingers softly as the settling of a moth. "O, why did we come here?"

He did not respond to her caresses, he was sullen, they left the spinney; but as they walked she took his arm murmuring:

"Forgive me, I'll make it all up to you, some day."

Coyness and cunning, passion and pride, were so much at odds that later on they quarrelled again. Kate knew that he would neither marry her nor let her go; she could neither let him go nor keep him. This figure of her distress amused him, he was callously provoking, and her resentment flared out at the touch of his scorn. With Kate there seemed to be no intermediate stages between docility and fury, or even between love and hatred.

"Why are you like this?" she cried, beating her pallid hands together, "I have known you for so long."

"Ah, we have known each other for so long, but as for really knowing you--no! I'm not a tame rabbit to be fondled any more."

She stared for a moment, as if in recollection; then burst into ironical laughter. He caught her roughly in his arms but she beat him away.

"O, go to ... go to...."

"Hell?" he suggested.

"Yes," she burst out tempestuously, "and stop there."

He was stunned by her unexpected violence. She was coarse, like Ianthe, after all. But he said steadily:

"I'm willing to go there, if you will only keep out of my way when I arrive."

Then he left her standing in a lane: he hurried and ran, clambering over stiles and brushing through hedges, anything to get away from the detestable creature. She did not follow him and they were soon out of sight of each other. Anger and commination swarmed to his lips, he branded her with frenzied opprobrium and all the beastliness that was in him. Nothing under heaven should ever persuade him to approach the filthy beast again, the damned intolerable drab, never, never again, never.

But he came to a bridge. On it he rested. And in that bright air, that sylvan peace, his rancour fell away from him, like sand from a glass, leaving him dumb and blank at the meanness of his deed. He went back to the lane as fast as he could go. She was not there. "Kate, Kate, my dove!" But he could not find her.

He was lost in the fields until he came at last upon a road and a lonely tavern thereby. It had a painted sign; a very smudgy fox, in an inexplicable attitude, destroying a fowl that looked like a plum-pudding but was intended to depict a snipe. At the stable door the tiniest black kitten in the world was shaping with timid belligerency at a young and fluffy goose who, ignoring it, went on sipping ecstatically from a pan of water. On the door were nailed, in two semi-circles of decoration, sixteen foxpads in various stages of decay, an entire spiral shaving from the hoof of a horse, and some chalk jottings:

_2 pads._ _3 cruppers._ _1 bellyband._ _2 set britchin._

The tavern was long and low and clean, its garden was bare but trim. There was comfort; he rested, had tea, and then in the bar his musings were broken upon by a ragged importunate old pedlar from Huddersfield.

"Born and bred in Slatterwick, it's no lie ah'm speaking, ah were born and bred Slatterwick, close to Arthur Brinkley's farm, his sister's in Canady, John Orkroyd took farm, Arthur's dead."

"Humph!"

"And buried. That iron bridge at Jackamon's belong to Daniel Cranmer. He's dead."

"Humph!"

"And buried. From the iron bridge it's two miles and a quarter to Herbert Oddy's, that's the _Bay Horse_, am ah right, at Shelmersdyke. Three miles and three-quarters from Dyke to the _Cock & Goat_ at Shapley Fell, am ah right?"

Masterman, never having been within a hundred miles of Yorkshire, puffed at his cigarette, and nodded moodily, "I suppose so" or "Yes, yes."

"From Arthur Brinkley's to th' iron bridge is one mile and a half and a bit, and from Arthur Brinkley's to Jury Cartright's is just four mile. He's dead, sir."

"Yes."

"And buried. Is that wrong? Am ah speaking wrong? No. It's a long step from yon, rough tramp for an old man."

Masterman--after giving sixpence to the pedlar who, uttering a benediction, pressed upon him a card of shirt buttons--said "Good evening," and walked out to be alone upon the road with his once angry but now penitent mind. "Kate, poor dear Kate!"

The sun was low down lolling near the horizon but there was an astonishing light upon the land. Cottage windows were blocks of solid gold in this lateral brilliance, shafts of shapely shade lay across leagues of fields, he could have counted every leaf among the rumpled boskage of the sycamores. A vast fan of indurated cloud, shell-like and pearly, was wavering over the western sky, but in the east were snowy rounded masses like fabulous balloons. At a cross road he stood by an old sign post, its pillar plastered with the faded bill of a long ago circus. He could read every word of it but when he turned away he found everything had become dimmer. The wind arose, the forest began to roar like a heaving beast. All verdurous things leaned one way. A flock of starlings flew over him with one movement and settled on a rolling elm. How lonely it was. He took off his hat. His skull was fearfully tender--he had dabbed it too hard with his hairbrush that morning. His hair was growing thin, like his youth and his desires.