III
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 They were like two negative atoms swinging in a medium from which the positive flux was withdrawn; for them the nebulæ did not “cohere into an orb.”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 his 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 and swore 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 had parted in anger.
He did not see her for many weeks. He was surprised and dismayed that 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 that 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 tried to tell the truth to her—the truth as he conceived it—about his feelings towards her, and towards those others, and about themselves as he perceived 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 all up to you some day. I shall not change, David, toward 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 flung herself 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, 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, for ever 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 slept no more. He cursed Kate, he sneered at Julia, he anathematized Ianthe, until the bright eye of morning began to gild once more their broken images.