«Isn’t that too wonderfully human!» exclaimed Jacobsen delightedly. Guy thought he could see now why Jacobsen enjoyed living with Mr. Petherton. The old man was so wonderfully human.
Later in the evening, when the billiards was over and Mr. Petherton had duly commented on the anachronism of introducing the game into Anthony and Cleopatra, Guy and Marjorie went for a stroll in the garden. The moon had risen above the trees and lit up the front of the house with its bright pale light that could not wake the sleeping colours of the world.
«Moonlight is the proper architectural light,» said Guy, as they stood looking at the house. The white light and the hard black shadows brought out all the elegance of its Georgian symmetry.
«Look, here’s the ghost of a rose.» Marjorie touched a big cool flower, which one guessed rather than saw to be red, a faint equivocal lunar crimson. «And, oh, smell the tobacco-plant flowers. Aren’t they delicious! «
«I always think there’s something very mysterious about perfume drifting through the dark like this. It seems to come from some perfectly different immaterial world, peopled by unembodied sensations, phantom passions. Think of the spiritual effect of incense in a dark church. One isn’t surprised that people have believed in the existence of the soul.»
They walked on in silence. Sometimes, accidentally, his hand would brush against hers in the movement of their march. Guy felt an intolerable emotion of expectancy, akin to fear. It made him feel almost physically sick.
«Do you remember,» he said abruptly, «that summer holiday our families spent together in Wales? It must have been nineteen four or five. I was ten and you were eight or thereabouts.»
«Of course I remember,» cried Marjorie. «Everything. There was that funny little toy railway from the slate quarries.»
«And do you remember our goldmine? All those tons of yellow ironstone we collected and hoarded in a cave, fully believing they were nuggets. How incredibly remote it seems! «
«And you had a wonderful process by which you tested whether the stuff was real gold or not. It all passed triumphantly as genuine, I remember! «
«Having that secret together first made us friends, I believe.»
«I dare say,» said Marjorie. «Fourteen years ago—what a time! And you began educating me even then: all that stuff you told me about gold-mining, for instance.»
«Fourteen years,» Guy repeated reflectively, «and I shall be going out again to-morrow . . .»
«Don’t speak about it. I am so miserable when you’re away.» She genuinely forgot what a delightful summer she had had, except for the shortage of tennis.
«We must make this the happiest hour of our lives. Perhaps it may be the last we shall be together.» Guy looked up at the moon, and he perceived, with a sudden start, that it was a sphere islanded in an endless night, not a flat disk stuck on a wall not so very far away. It filled him with an infinite dreariness; he felt too insignificant to live at all.
«Guy, you mustn’t talk like that,» said Marjorie appealingly.
«We’ve got twelve hours,» said Guy in a meditative voice, «but that’s only clockwork time. You can give an hour the quality of everlastingness, and spend years which are as though they had never been. We get our immortality here and now; it’s a question of quality, not of quantity. I don’t look forward to golden harps or anything of that sort. I know that when I am dead, I shall be dead; there isn’t any afterwards. If I’m killed, my immortality will be in your memory. Perhaps, too, somebody will read the things I’ve written, and in his mind I shall survive, feebly and partially. But in your mind I shall survive intact and whole.»
«But I’m sure we shall go on living after death. It can’t be the end.» Marjorie was conscious that she had heard those words before. Where? Oh yes, it was earnest Evangeline who had spoken them at the school debating society.
«I wouldn’t count on it,» Guy replied, with a little laugh. «You may get such a disappointment when you die.» Then in an altered voice, «I don’t want to die. I hate and fear death. But probably I shan’t be killed after all. All the same …» His voice faded out. They stepped into a tunnel of impenetrable darkness between two tall hornbeam hedges. He had become nothing but a voice, and now that had ceased; he had disappeared. The voice began again, low, quick, monotonous, a little breathless. «I remember once reading a poem by one of the old Provencal troubadours, telling how God had once granted him supreme happiness; for the night before he was to set out for the Crusade, it had been granted him to hold his lady in his arms— all the short eternal night through. Ains que j’aille oltre mer: when I was going beyond sea.» The voice stopped again. They were standing at the very mouth of the hornbeam alley, looking out from that close-pent river of shadow upon an ocean of pale moonlight:
«How still it is.» They did not speak; they hardly breathed. They became saturated with the quiet.
Marjorie broke the silence. «Do you want me as much as all that, Guy?» All through that long, speechless minute she had been trying to say the words, repeating them over to herself, longing to say them aloud, but paralysed, unable to. And at last she had spoken them, impersonally, as though through the mouth of someone else. She heard them very distinctly, and was amazed at the matter-of-factness of the tone.
Guy’s answer took the form of a question. «Well, suppose I were killed now,» he said, «should I ever have really lived?»
They had stepped out of the cavernous alley into the moonlight. She could see him clearly now, and there was something so drooping and dejected and pathetic about him, he seemed so much of a great, overgrown child that a wave of passionate pitifulness rushed through her, reinforcing other emotions less maternal. She longed to take him in her arms, stroke his hair, lullaby him, baby-fashion, to sleep upon her breast. And Guy, on his side, desired nothing better than to give his fatigues and sensibilities to her maternal care, to have his eyes kissed fast, and sleep to her soothing. In his relations with women—but his experience in this direction was deplorably small—he had, unconsciously at first but afterwards with a realization of what he was doing, played this child part. In moments of self-analysis he laughed at himself for acting the «child stunt,» as he called it. Here he was—he hadn’t noticed it yet—doing it again, drooping, dejected, wholly pathetic, feeble . . ,
Marjorie was carried away by her emotion. She would give herself to her lover, would take possession of her helpless, pitiable child. She put her arms round his neck, lifted her face to his kisses, whispered something tender and inaudible.
Guy drew her towards him and began kissing the soft, warm mouth. He touched the bare arm that encircled his neck; the flesh was resilient under his fingers; he felt a desire to pinch it and tear it.
It, had been just like this with that little slut Minnie. Just the same —all horrible lust. He remembered a curious physiological fact out of Havelock Ellis. He shuddered as though he had touched something disgusting, and pushed her away.
«No, no, no. It’s horrible; it’s odious. Drunk with moonlight and sentimentalizing about death. . . . Why not just say with Biblical frankness, Lie with me —Lie with me?»
That this love, which was to have been so marvellous and new and beautiful, should end libidinously and bestially like the affair, never remembered without a shiver of shame, with Minnie (the vulgarity of her!)—filled him with horror.
Marjorie burst into tears and ran away, wounded and trembling, into the solitude of the hornbeam shadow. «Go away, go away,» she sobbed, with such intensity of command that Guy, moved by an immediate remorse and the sight of tears to stop her and ask forgiveness, was constrained to let her go her ways.
A cool, impersonal calm had succeeded almost immediately to his outburst. Critically, he examined what he had done, and judged it, not without a certain feeling of satisfaction, to be the greatest «floater ‘ of his life. But at least the thing was done and couldn’t be undone. He took the weak-willed man’s delight in the irrevocability of action. He walked up and down the lawn smoking a cigarette and thinking, clearly and quietly — remembering the past, questioning the future. When the cigarette was finished he went into the house.
He entered the smoking-room to hear Roger saying, «. . . It’s the poor who are having the good time now. Plenty to eat, plenty of money, and no taxes to pay. No taxes—that’s the sickening thing. Look at Alfred’s gardener, for instance. He gets twenty-five or thirty bob a week and an uncommon good house. He’s married, but only has one child. A man like that is uncommonly well off. He ought to be paying income-tax; he can perfectly well afford it.»
Mr. Petherton was listening somnolently, Jacobsen with his usual keen, intelligent politeness; George was playing with the blue Persian kitten.
It had been arranged that George should stay the night, because it was such a bore having to walk that mile and a bit home again in the dark. Guy took him up to his room and sat down on the bed for a final cigarette, while George was undressing. It was
