Adam & Eve & Pinch Me

by A. E. Coppard

“Everything. You know, you know you do.” The archness of Ianthe was objectively baffling but under it all he read its significance, its invitation.

He waited beside her for a tram but when it came he pleaded a further engagement in the city. He had no other engagement, he only wanted to be alone, to sort out the things she had dangled before his mind, so he boarded the next car and walked from the Tutsan terminus to his cottage. Both girls were fond of him, then—Ianthe’s candour left him no room for doubt—and they were both lying to each other about him. Well, he didn’t mind that, lies were a kind of protective colouring, he lied himself whenever it was necessary, or suited him. Not often, but truth was not always possible to sensitive minded men. Why, after all, should sympathetic mendacity be a monopoly of polite society? “But it’s also the trick of thieves and seducers, David Masterman,” he muttered to himself. “I’m not a thief, no, I’m not a thief. As for the other thing, well, what is there against me—nothing, nothing at all.” But a strange voiceless sigh seemed to echo from the trees along the dark road, “Not as yet, not as yet.”

He walked on more rapidly.

Three women! There was no doubt about the third, Ianthe had thought of Julia, too, just as Kate had. What a fate for a misogamist! He felt like a mouse being taken for a ride in a bath chair. He had an invincible prejudice against marriage not as an institution but because he was perfectly aware of his incapacity for faithfulness. His emotions were deep but unprolonged. Love was love, but marriage turned love into the stone of Sisyphus. At the sound of the marriage bell—a passing bell—earth at his feet would burst into flame and the sky above would pour upon him an unquenching profusion of tears. Love was a fine and ennobling thing, but though he had the will to love he knew beyond the possibility of doubt that his own capacity for love was a meandering strengthless thing. Even his loyalty to Julia Tern—and that had the strongest flavour of any emotion that had ever beset him, no matter how brief its term—even that was a deviating zigzag loyalty. For he wanted to go on being jolly and friendly with Ianthe if only Julia did not get to know. With Kate, too, that tender melancholy woman; she would be vastly unhappy. Who was this Christopher whom Ianthe fondly imagined her sister to favour? Whoever he was, poor devil, he would not thank D. M. for his intervention. But he would drop all this; however had he, of all men, come to be plunged so suddenly into a state of things for which he had shown so little fancy in the past? Julia would despise him, she would be sure to despise him, sure to; and yet if he could only believe she would not it would be pleasant to go on being friendly with Ianthe pending ... pending what?

Masterman was a very pliant man, but as things shaped themselves for him he did not go a step further with Ianthe, and it was not to Julia at all that he made love.

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.