III.
Mr. and Mrs. Belk were coming along High Row. She avoided them by turning down the narrow passage into Mr. Horn's yard and the Back Lane. From the Back Lane you could get up through the fields to the school-house lane without seeing people.
She hated seeing them. They all thought the same thing: that you wanted
Maurice Jourdain and that you were unhappy because you hadn't got him.
They thought it was awful of you. Mamma thought it was awful, like—like
Aunt Charlotte wanting to marry the piano-tuner, or poor Jenny wanting to
marry Mr. Spall.
Maurice Jourdain knew better than that. He knew you didn't want to marry him any more than he wanted to marry you. He nagged at you about your hair, about philosophy—she could hear his voice nag-nagging now as she went up the lane—he could nag worse than a woman, but he knew. She knew. As far as she could see through the working of his dark mind, first he had cared for her, cared violently. Then he had not cared.
That would be because he cared for some other woman. There were two of them. The girl and the married woman. She felt no jealousy and no interest in them beyond wondering which of them it would be and what they would be like. There had been two Mary Oliviers; long-haired— short-haired, and she had been jealous of the long-haired one. Jealous of herself.
There had been two Maurice Jourdains, the one who said, "I'll understand. I'll never lose my temper"; the one with the crystal mind, shining and flashing, the mind like a big room filled from end to end with light. But he had never existed.
Maurice Jourdain was only a name. A name for intellectual beauty. You could love that. Love was "the cle-eansing fi-yer!" There was the love of the body and the love of the soul. Perhaps she had loved Maurice Jourdain with her soul and not with her body. No. She had not loved him with her soul, either. Body and soul; soul and body. Spinoza said they were two aspects of the same thing. What thing? Perhaps it was silly to ask what thing; it would be just body and soul. Somebody talked about a soul dragging a corpse. Her body wasn't a corpse; it was strong and active; it could play games and jump; it could pick Dan up and carry him round the table; it could run a mile straight on end. It could excite itself with its own activity and strength. It dragged a corpse-like soul, dull and heavy; a soul that would never be excited again, never lift itself up again in any ecstasy.
If only he had let her alone. If only she could go back to her real life.
But she couldn't. She couldn't feel any more her sudden, secret
happiness. Maurice Jourdain had driven it away. It had nothing to do with
Maurice Jourdain. He ought not to have been able to take it from you.
She might go up to Karva Hill to look for it; but it would not be there.
She couldn't even remember what it had been like.