1
HE told her that night; they talked till dawn. She did understand; and so, it seemed to him, did he—for the first time. Everything became simple and clear again—a final proof, if the doubting mind required such proof, that candour was a medicine for all the ills of love.
Things like this—emotional upsets—occurred in all marriages; the trouble was that the disturbed emotions were left to fester in secret. Talking with Rose-Ann had put the incident in its true light. Yes—of course he and Phyllis loved each other; that was not strange. There was an element of love in every friendship between man and woman; and that it should be here in this friendship of his and Phyllis’s was right and natural. It was not a thing to be afraid of, to run away from—it was something rather to be glad about. It had been there between them all this while, enriching their two lives, his and Phyllis’s, making their friendship one full of tenderness and understanding; it had done them no harm, certainly! Civilization meant the possibility of such friendships, instead of a timid restricting of the emotions to a single person. The world was full of men and women friends who were in this sense lovers; only they did not usually confess it to each other. Sometimes they were afraid to let each other know the truth; sometimes afraid to face the truth themselves. But was there anything terrible in such a truth? Phyllis and he had faced it, that was all. They had spoken out what was usually left unspoken. And why should that change their lives?
It was the fault of Romance, that suave peddler of spiritual poisons; and of Puritanism, that maniacal purveyor of chains and padlocks—it was the fault of these two that the situation should ever for a moment have seemed alarming. Over the scene, as he and Phyllis had stood together telling each other a secret that any one else in the world could have read at a glance, there had brooded these two antique and ridiculous fantasms—Romance and Puritanism. Romance had whispered to them: “This is a moment such as comes only once in a lifetime—a moment beautiful and tragic! You were born for this! You cannot escape! You are Paris and Helen, Antony and Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guenevere, Tristram and Iseult! You are the hero and heroine of all myths, all dreams! Your love is doomed and beautiful! Some death will run its sudden finger round this spark and sever you from the rest.... Kiss now, and die!” And on the other side that gibbering lunatic Puritanism had cried out: “No! no! Put on these chains. Blindfold your eyes so that you cannot see beauty, stop up your ears against all sweet voices! Tie your hands together lest they touch what is not yours, and put a chain upon your feet lest they stray from the accustomed path. Padlock your lips, lest they say what is in your heart, and seal up your heart so that no tenderness, no generous faith, no natural affection may escape! Be blind and deaf and dumb, become as one dead, for only in this is safety!” And between these two fantastic ghosts they had stood and trembled, finding it hard to discover of themselves the obvious and simple thing to do, but reading it at last in each other’s eyes—to go on being in love with each other and behave exactly as before!
So it seemed to Felix as he lay and talked with Rose-Ann till dawn.... He felt that he was something of a simpleton, but that life itself was easy enough to live if one could only learn to deal with it directly and see it as it was.