XXXI
It was one night in April. He had met her at the crossroads on Morfe Green, and walked home with her by the edge of the moor. It had blown hard all day, and now the wind had dropped, but it had left darkness and commotion in the sky. The west was a solid mass of cloud that drifted slowly in the wake of the departing storm, its hindmost part shredded to mist before the path of the hidden moon.
For, mercifully, the moon was hidden. Rowcliffe knew his moment.
He meditated—the fraction of a second too long.
"I wonder——" he began.
Just then the rear of the cloud opened and cast out the moon, sheeted in the white mist that she had torn from it.
And then, before he knew where he was, he was quarreling with Gwenda.
"Oh, look at the moon!" she cried. "All bowed forward with the cloud wrapped round her head. Something's calling her across the sky, but the mist holds her and the wind beats her back—look how she staggers and charges head-downward. She's fighting the wind. And she goes—she goes!"
"She doesn't go," said Rowcliffe. "At least you can't see her going, and the cloud isn't wrapped round her head, it's nowhere near her. And the wind isn't driving her, it's driving the cloud on. It's the cloud that's going. Why can't you see things as they are?"
She was detestable to him in that moment.
"Because nobody sees them as they are. And you're spoiling the idea."
"The idea being so much more valuable than the truth."
He longed to say cruel and biting things to her.
"It isn't valuable to anybody but me, so you might have left it to me."
"Oh, I'll leave it to you, if you're in love with it."
"I'm not in love with it because it's mine. Anyhow, if I am in love
I'm in love with the moon and not with my idea of the moon."
"You don't know how to be in love with anything—even the moon. But I suppose it's all right as long as you're happy."
"Of course I'm happy. Why shouldn't I be?"
"Because you haven't got anything to make you happy."
"Oh, haven't I?"
"You might have. But you haven't. You're too obstinate to be happy."
"But I've just told you that I am happy."
"What have you got?" he persisted.
"I've got heaps of things. I've got my two hands and my two feet. I've got my brain——"
"So have I. And yet——"
"It's absurd to say I've 'got' these things. They're me. Happiness isn't in the things you've got. It's either in you or it isn't."
"It generally isn't. Go on. What else? You've got the moon and your idea of the moon. I don't see that you've got much more."
"Anyhow, I've got my liberty."
"Your liberty—if that's all you want!"
"It's pretty nearly all. It covers most things."
"It does if you're an incurable egoist."
"You think I'm an egoist? And incurable?"
"It doesn't matter what I think."
"Not much. If you think that."
Silence. And then Rowcliffe burst out again.
"There are two things that I can't stand—a woman nursing a dog and a woman in love with the moon. They mean the same thing. And it's horrible."
"Why?"
"Because if it's humbug she's a hypocrite, and if it's genuine she's a monster."
"And if I'm in love with the moon—and you said I was——"
"I didn't. You said it yourself."
"Not at all. I said if I was in love with the moon, I'd be in love with it and not with my idea of it. I want reality."
"So do I. We're not likely to get it if we can't see it."
"No. If you're only in love with what you see."
"Oh, you're too clever. Too clever for me."
"Am I too clever for myself?"
"Probably."
He laughed abominably.
"I don't see the joke."
"If you don't see it this minute you'll see it in another ten years."
"Now," she said, "you're too clever for me."
They walked on in silence again. The mist gathered and dripped about them.
Abruptly she spoke.
"Has anything happened?"
"No, it hasn't."
"I mean—anything horrid?"
Her voice sounded such genuine distress that he dropped his hostile and contemptuous tone.
"No," he said, "why should it?"
"Because I've noticed that, when people are unusually horrid, it always means that something horrid's happened to them."
"Really?"
"Papa, for instance, is only horrid to us because Mummy—my stepmother, you know—was horrid to him."
"What did Mummy do to him?"
"She ran away from him. It's always that way. People aren't horrid on purpose. At least I'm sure you wouldn't be."
"Was I horrid?"
"Well—for the last half-hour——"
"You see, I find you a little exasperating at times."
"Not always?"
"No. Not by any means always."
"Can I tell when I am? Or when I'm going to be?"
He laughed (not at all abominably). "No. I don't think you can. That's rather what I resent in you."
"I wish I could tell. Then perhaps I might avoid it. You might just give me warning when you think I'm going to be it."
"I did give you warning."
"When?"
"When it began."
"There you are. I don't know when it did begin. What were we talking about?"
"I wasn't talking about anything. You were talking about the moon."
"It was the moon that did it."
"I suppose it was the moon."
"I see. I bored you. How awful."
"I didn't say you bored me. You never have bored me. You couldn't bore me."
"No—I just irritate you and drive you mad."
"You just irritate me and drive me mad."
The words were brutal but the voice caressed her. He took her by the arm and steered her amicably round a hidden boulder.
"Do you know many women?" she asked.
The question was startling by reason of its context. The better to consider it Rowcliffe withdrew his protecting arm.
"No," he said, "not very many."
"But those you do know you get on with? You get on all right with
Mary?"
"Yes. I get on all right with 'Mary.'"
"You'd be horrid if you didn't. Mary's a dear."
"Well—I know where I am with her."
"And you get on all right—really—with Papa, as long as I'm not there."
"As long as you're not there, yes."
"So that," she pursued, "I'm the horrid thing that's happened to you? It looks like it."
"It feels like it. Let's say you're the horrid thing that's happened to me, and leave it at that."
They left it.
Rowcliffe had a sort of impression that he had said all that he had had to say.