Part 26

In the glimmering starshine Pauline could see Guy standing by the wicket in the high gray wall, a remote and spectral form against the blackness all around him, where the invisible trees gathered and hoarded the gloom. She sighed with relief to find that the arms with which so gently he enfolded her were indeed warm with life. Her passage over the lawn had been one long increasing fear that the shape, so indeterminate and motionless, that awaited her approach, might not be Guy in life, but a wan image of what he had been, a demon lover, a shadow from the cave of death.

"Guy, my darling, my darling, it is you! Oh, I was so frightened that when I came close you wouldn't really be there."

She leaned half sobbing upon his shoulder.

"Pauline, don't talk so loud. I only did not come across the lawn to meet you for fear of attracting attention."

"Let me go back now," she begged, "now that I've seen you."

But Guy soon persuaded her to come with him through the wicket and out over the paddock where the grass whispered in their track, until at the sight of the canoe's outline she lost her fears and did not care how recklessly she explored the deeps of the night.

In silence they traveled up-stream under the vaulted willows; under the giant sycamore whose great roots came writhing out of the darkness above the sheen of the water; under Wychford bridge whose cold breath dripped down in icy beads upon the thick swirl beneath; and then out through starshine across the mill-pool. Pauline held her breath while around their course was a sound of water sucking at the vegetation, gurgling and lapping and chuckling against the invisible banks.

"The Abbey stream?" murmured Guy.

She scarcely breathed her consent, and the canoe tore the growing sedge like satin as it bumped against the slope of the bank. Pauline felt that she was protesting with her real self against the part she was playing in this dream; but the dream became too potent, and she had to help Guy to push the canoe up through the grass and down again into the quiet water beyond. It was much blacker here on account of the overhanging beeches, but continually Pauline strained through the darkness for a sight of the deserted house, the windows of which seemed to follow with blank and bony gaze their progress.

"Guy, let's hurry, for I can see the Abbey in the starlight," she exclaimed.

"You have better eyes than mine if you can," he laughed. "My sweet, your face from where I'm sitting is as filmy as a rose at dusk. And even if you can see the Abbey, what does it matter? Do you think it's going to run down the hill and swim after us?"

Pauline tried to laugh, but even that grotesque picture of his evoked a new terror, and, huddled among the cushions, she sat with beating heart, shuddering when the leaves of the great beech-trees fondled her hair. She looked back to her own white fastness and began to wonder if she had left the candle burning there; it seemed to her that she had, and that perhaps presently, perhaps even now, somebody was coming to see why it was burning. And still Guy took her farther up the stream. How empty her room would look, and what a chill would fall upon the sister or mother that peeped in.

"Oh, take me back!" she cried.

But still the canoe cleft the darkness and now, emerging from the cavernous trees, they glided once again into starshine infinitely outspread, through which with the dim glister of a snake the stream coiled and uncoiled itself.

Guy grasped at the reeds and drew the canoe close against the bank, making it fast with two paddles plunged into the mud. Then he gathered her to him so that her head rested upon his shoulder and her lips could meet his. Thus enfolded for a long while she lay content. The candle in her room burned itself out and nothing could disturb her absence, no one could suppose that she was here on this starlit river. Scarcely, indeed, was she here except as in the midway of deepest sleep, resting between a dream and a dream. She might have stayed unvexed for ever if Guy had not begun to talk, for although at first his voice came softly and pleasantly out of the night and lulled her like a tune heard faintly in some far-off corner of the mind, minute by minute his accents became more real; suddenly, as her drowsed arm slid over the edge of the canoe into the water, she woke and began herself to talk and, as she talked, to shrink again from the vision of her whole life whether past or present or to come.

In this malicious darkness she wanted to hear more about that girl who had betrayed Michael Fane; she wanted to know things that before she had not even known were hidden. She pressed Guy with questions, and when he would not answer them she began to feel jealous even of unrevealed sin. This girl was the link between all those girls at whose existence in his own past Guy had once hinted. Michael Fane appeared like the tempter and Guy like his easy prey. Distortions of the most ordinary, the most trifling incidents piled themselves upon her imagination; and that visit to London assumed a ghastly and impenetrable mysteriousness.

Guy vainly tried to laugh away her fancies; faster and still faster the evil cohorts swept up against her, almost as tangible as bats flapping into her face.

"Don't talk so loud," said Guy, crossly. "Do remember where we are."

Then she reproached him with having brought her here. She felt that he deserved to pay the penalty, and defiantly she was talking louder and louder until Guy, with feverish strokes, urged the canoe down-stream towards home.

"For God's sake, keep quiet!" he begged. "What has happened to you?"

That he should be frightened by her violence made her more angry. She threw at him the wildest accusations, how that through him she had ceased to believe in God, to care for her family, for her honor, for him, for life itself.

"Pauline, will you keep quiet? Are you mad to behave like this?"

He drove the canoe into a thorn-bush, so that it should not upset, and he seized her wrist so roughly that she thought she screamed. There was something splendid in that scream being able to disquiet the night, and in an elation of woe she screamed again.

"Do you know what you're doing?" he demanded.

She found herself asking Guy if she were screaming, and when she knew that at last she could hurt him, she screamed more loudly.

"You used to laugh at me when I said I might go mad," she cried. "Now do you like it? Do you like it?"

"Pauline, I beg you to keep quiet. Pauline, think of your people. Will you promise to keep quiet if I take you out of this thorn-bush?"

He began to laugh not very mirthfully, and that he could laugh infuriated her so much that she was silent with rage, while Guy disentangled the canoe from the thorn-bush and more swiftly than before urged it towards home.

When they reached the grassy bank that divided the Abbey stream from the mill-pool, she would not get out of the canoe to walk to the other side.

"I cannot cross that pool," she said. "Guy, don't ask me to. I've been afraid of it always. If we cross it to-night, I shall drown myself."

He tried to argue with her. He pleaded with her, he railed at her, and finally he laughed at her, until she got out and watched him launch the canoe on the farther side and beckon through the tremulous sheen to her. Wildly she ran down the steep bank and flung herself into the water.

"Where am I? Guy, where am I?"

"Well, at present you're lying on the grass, but where you've been or where I've been this last five minutes.... Pauline, are you yourself again?"

"Guy, my dearest, my dearest, I don't know why...." She burst into tears. "My dearest, how wet you are," she sobbed, stroking his drenched sleeve.

"Well, naturally," he said, with a short laugh. "Look here, it was all my fault for bringing you out, so don't get into a state of mind about yourself, but you can't go back in the canoe. My nerves are still too shaky. I can lift you over the wall behind the mill, and we must go back to the Rectory across the street. Come, my Pauline, you're wet, you know. Oh, my own, my sweet, if I could only uncount the hours."

Pauline would never have reached home but for Guy's determination. It was he who guided her past the dark entries, past the crafty windows of Rectory Lane, past the menacing belfry, past the trees of the Rectory drive. By the front door he asked her if she dared go up-stairs alone.

"I will wait on the lawn until I see your candle alight," he promised.

She kissed him tragically and crept in. Her room was undisturbed, but in the looking-glass she saw a dripping ghost, and when she held her candle to the window another ghost vanished slowly into the high gray wall. A cock crowed in the distance, and through the leaves of the wistaria there ran a flutter of waking sparrows.

JULY

When Guy looked back next morning at what had happened on the river, he felt that the only thing to do was to leave Pauline for a while and give her time and opportunity to recover from the shock. He wondered if it would be wiser merely to write a note to announce his intention or if she had now reached a point at which even a letter would be a disastrous aggravation of her state of mind. He felt that he could not bear any scene that might approximate to that horrible scene last night, and yet to go away abruptly in such circumstances seemed too callous. Supposing that he went across to the Rectory and that Pauline should have another seizure of hatred for him (there was no other word that could express what her attitude had been), how could their engagement possibly go on? Mrs. Grey would be appalled by the emotional ravages it had made Pauline endure; she would not be justified, whatever Pauline's point of view, in allowing the engagement to last a day longer. It would be surely wiser to write a letter and with all the love he felt explain that he thought she would be happier not to see him for a short while. Yet such a course might provoke her to declare the whole miserable business, and the false deductions that might be made from her account were dreadful to contemplate. He blamed himself entirely for what had happened, and yet he could scarcely have foreseen such a violent change. Even now he could not say what exactly had begun the outburst, and indeed the only explanation of it was by a weight of emotion that had been accumulating for months. Of course he should never have persuaded her to come out on the river at night, but still that he had done so was only a technical offense against convention. It was she who had magnified her acquiescence beyond any importance he could have conceived. He must thank religion for that, he must thank that poisonous fellow in the confessional who had first started her upon this ruinous path of introspection and self-torment. But, whatever the cause, it was the remedy that demanded his attention, and he twisted the situation round and round without being able to decide how to act. He realized how month by month his sense of responsibility for Pauline had been growing, yet now the problem of her happiness stared at him, brutally insoluble. What was it Margaret had once said about his being unlikely to squander Pauline for a young man's experience? Good God! had not just that been the very thing he had nearly done; and then with a shudder, remembering last night, he wondered if he ought any longer to say "nearly." He must see her. Of course he must see her this morning. He must somehow heal the injury he had inflicted upon her youth.

Pauline was very gentle when they met. She had no reproaches except for herself and the way she had frightened him.

"Oh, my Pauline, can't you forget it?" he begged. "Let me go away for a month or more. Let me go away till Margaret and Richard are going to be married."

She acquiesced half listlessly, and then seeming to feel that she might have been cold in her manner, she wished him a happy holiday from her moods and jealousy and exacting love. He tried to pierce the true significance of her attitude, because it held in its heart a premonition for him that everything between them had been destroyed last night, and that henceforth whatever he or she did or said they would meet in the future only as ghosts may meet in shadowy converse and meaningless communion.

"You will be glad to see me when I come back?" he asked.

"Why, my dearest, of course I shall be glad!"

He kissed her good-by, but her kiss was neither the kiss of lover nor of sister, but such a kiss as ghosts may use, seeking to perpetuate the mere form and outward semblance of life lost irrevocably.

When Guy was driving with Godbold along the Shipcot road he had not made up his mind where he would go, and it was on the spur of the moment, as he stood in the booking-office, that he decided to go and see his father, to whom latterly he had written scarcely at all, and of whom he suddenly thought with affection.

"I've settled to give up Plashers Mead," Guy told him that night, when they were sitting in the library at Fox Hall. "And try and get on the staff of a paper," he added to his father's faint bow. "Or possibly I may go to Persia as Sir George Gascony's secretary. My friend Comeragh got me the offer in March, but Sir George was ill and did not start."

"That sounds much more sensible than journalism," said Mr. Hazlewood.

"Yes, perhaps it would be better," Guy agreed. "But then, of course, there is the question of leaving Pauline for two years."

Yet even as he enunciated this so solemnly, he knew in his heart that he would be rather glad to postpone for two years all the vexations of love.

His father shrugged his shoulders.

"My poems are coming out this Autumn," Guy volunteered.

His father gave some answer of conventional approbation, and Guy without the least bitterness recognized that to his father the offer of the secretaryship had naturally presented itself as the more important occasion.

"If you want any help with your outfit...."

"Oh, you mustn't count on Persia," interrupted Guy. "But I'll go up to town to-morrow and ask Comeragh when Sir George is going."

Next day, however, when Guy was in the train, he began to consider his Persian plan a grave disloyalty to Pauline. He wondered how last night he had come to think of it again, and fancied it might have been merely an instinct to gratify his father after their coolness. Of course, he would not dream of going, really, and yet it would have been jolly. Yes, it would certainly have been jolly, and he was rather relieved to find that Comeragh was out of town for a week, for his presence might have been a temptation. Michael Fane was not in London, either, so Guy went round to Maurice Avery's studio in Grosvenor Road, and in the pleasure of the company he found there the Persian idea grew less insistent. Maurice himself had just been invited to write a series of articles on the English ballet for a critical weekly journal called _The Point of View_. They went to a theater together, and Guy as he listened to Maurice's jargon felt for a while quite rustic, and was once or twice definitely taken in by it. Had he really been stagnating all this time at Wychford? And then the old superiority which at Oxford he always felt over his friend reasserted itself.

"You're still skating, Maurice," he drawled. "The superficial area of your brain must be unparalleled."

"You frowsty old yokel!" his friend exclaimed, laughing.

"I don't believe I shall get much out of breath, catching up with your advanced ideas," Guy retorted. "Anyway, this Autumn I shall come to town for good."

"And about time you did," said Maurice. "I say, mind you send your poems to _The Point of View_, and I'll give you a smashing fine notice the week after publication."

Guy asked when Michael was coming back.

"He's made a glorious mess of things, hasn't he?" said Maurice.

"Oh, I don't know. Not necessarily."

"Well, I admit he found her out in time. But fancy wanting to marry a girl like that. I told him what she was, and he merely got furious with me. But he's an extraordinary chap altogether. By the way, when are _you_ going to get married?"

"When I can afford it," said Guy.

"The question is whether an artist can ever afford to get married."

"What rot you talk."

"Wiser men than I have come to that conclusion," said Maurice. "Of course I haven't met your lady-love; but it does seem to me that your present mode of life is bound to be sterile of impressions."

"I don't go about self-consciously obtaining impressions," said Guy, a little angrily. "I would as soon search for local color. Personally I very much doubt if any impressions after eighteen or nineteen help the artist. As it seems to me, all experience after that age is merely valuable for maturing and putting into proportion the more vital experiences of childhood. And I'm not at all sure that there isn't in every artist a capacity for development which proceeds quite independently of externals. I speculate sometimes as to what would be the result upon a really creative temperament of being wrecked at twenty-two on a desert island. I say twenty-two because I do count as valuable the academic influence that only begins to be effective after eighteen."

"And what is your notion about this literary Crusoe?" asked Maurice.

"Well, I fancy that his work would not suffer at all, that it would ripen, just as certain fruit ripens independently of sun, that he would display in fact quite normally the characteristic growth of the artist."

"But where would he obtain his reaction?" Maurice asked.

"From himself. If that isn't possible for some people I don't see how you're going to make a distinction between literature and journalism."

"Some journalism is literature."

"Only very bad journalism," Guy argued. "The journalistic mind experiences a quick reaction, the creative writer a very slow one. The journalist is affected by extremes; and he is continually aware of the impression they are making at the moment; contrariwise, the creative artist is always unaware of the impression at the moment it is made; he feels it from within first, and it develops according to his own characteristics. Let me give you an example. The journalist is like a man who, seeing a mosquito in the act of biting him, claps his hand down and kills it. The creative artist isn't aware of having been bitten until he sees the swelling ... big or small, according to his constitution. It is his business to cure the swelling, not to bother about the insect."

"Your theories may be all right for great creative artists," said Maurice. "And I suppose you're willing to take the risk of stagnation?"

"I'm not a great creative artist," said Guy, quickly. "At the same time I'm damned if I'm a journalist. No, the effect of Plashers Mead on me has been to make me long to be a man of action. So far it has been stimulating, and without external help I've been able to reach the conclusion that my poems were never worth writing.... I wrote because I wanted to; I don't believe I ever had to."

"Then what are you going to do now?" asked Maurice.

"I'm probably going to work in London at journalism."

"Then, great Scott! why all this preliminary tirade against it?"

"Because I don't want to bluff myself into thinking that I'm going to do anything but be a strictly professional writer," said Guy. "Or else perhaps because I don't really want to come and live in London at all, but go to Persia. Dash it all, for the first time in my life, Maurice, I don't know what I do want, and it's a very humiliating state of affairs for me."

When Guy left the studio that evening he came away with that pleasant warming of the cockles of the brain that empirical conversation always gave. It was really very pleasant to be chattering away about aesthetic theories, to be meeting new people, and to be infused with this sense of being joined up to the motive force of a city's life. At his lodgings in Vincent Square a letter from Pauline awaited his return, and with a shock he realized half-way through its perusal that he was reading it listlessly. He turned back and tried to bring to its contents that old feverish absorption in magic pages, but something was wanting, whether in the letter or whether in himself he did not know. He came to the point of asking himself if he loved her still as much, and almost with horror at the question vowed he loved her more than ever, and that of all things on earth he only longed for their marriage. Yet in bed that night he thought more of his argument in the studio than about Pauline, and when he did think about her it was with a drowsy sense of relief. Vincent Square under the bland city moon seemed very peaceful, and in retrospect Wychford a place of endless storms.

Next morning when Guy sat down to answer Pauline's letter, he found himself writing with mechanical fluency without really thinking of her at all. In fact, for the moment, she represented something that disturbed the Summer calm in London, and he consciously did not want to think about her until all this late troublous time had lost its actuality and he could be sure of returning to the Pauline of their love's earlier days.

These shuttlecock letters were tossed backward and forward between Wychford and London throughout the rest of June and most of July, and sometimes Guy thought they were as unreal as his own poetry. He spent his time in looking up old friends, in second-hand bookshops, in the galleries of theaters. He did not see Michael Fane, who wrote to him from Rome before Guy knew he had gone there. Comeragh, however, he saw pretty often, and he enjoyed talking about politics nearly as much as about art. He met Sir George Gascony, and Comeragh assured him afterwards that when Sir George went out to Persia in August or September he could, if he liked, go with him. Guy put the notion at the back of his mind, whence he occasionally took it out and played with it. In the end, however, when the definite offer came he refused it. This happened at the end of his visit to London when his money was running out and when he had to be going back to Wychford to live somehow on credit, until the Michaelmas quarter replenished his overdrawn account. Before he left town he paid a visit to Mr. Worrall and told him that he wanted his poems to appear anonymously. In fact, if it were not for hurting the Rector's feelings he would have stopped their publication altogether.

At the end of a hot and dusty July, and about a week before the Lammas wedding of Margaret and Richard, Guy came back to Plashers Mead. The immediate effect of seeing again the place which was now associated in his mind with interminable difficulties was to make him resolute to clarify the situation once and for all, to clarify it so completely that there could never again be a repetition of that night in June. His absence had been in the strictest sense an interlude, and all the letters which marked to each the existence of the other had been but conventional forms of love and comfortable postponements of reality. When he met Pauline, Guy felt that he met her to all intents directly after that dreadful night, with only this difference, that owing to the time they had had for repose he could now say things that six weeks ago he could not have said. He had arrived at Wychford for lunch, and as a matter of course they were to be together that afternoon. Ordinarily on such a piping July day he would have proposed the river for their converse, and it was a sign of how near at hand he felt their last time on the river that he proposed a walk instead.