“And she,” I said at length, “knows nothing—of all this?”
“She,” he replied, “knows everything, and is content. Her mind and brain of To-day may remain unaware; but she—the soul now fully in her—knows all, and is content, as you shall see. She has her debt to pay as well as myself—and you.”
For a long time we sat there silent in that sweet September sunshine. The birds sang round us, the rivulet went murmuring, the branches sighed and rustled just behind us, as though no problems vexed their safe, unconscious lives. Yet to me just then they all seemed somehow to participate in this complex plot of human emotion. Nature herself in some deep fashion was involved.
No man, I realised, knows himself, nor understands the acts of which he is potentially capable, until certain conditions bring them out. We imagine we know exactly how we should act in given circumstances—until those circumstances actually arrive and dislocate all our preconceived decisions. For the “given circumstances” produce emotions before whose stress—not realised when the decisions were so lightly made—we act quite otherwise. I could have sworn, for instance, that in a case like this—incredible though its ever happening must have seemed—I should then and there have taken my departure. I should have left. I would have gone without a moment’s hesitation, and let him follow his own devices without my further assistance at any rate. I would have been furious with anyone who dared to state the contrary.
Yet it was exactly the opposite I did. The first instinct to clear out of this outrageous situation—proved impossible. It was not for her I remained; it was equally not for him; and it was assuredly not for myself in any meaning of the words. But yet I stayed. I could no more have gone away than I could have—made love to her before his eyes, or even not before his eyes. I argued, reasoned, moralised—but I stayed. It was over very soon—what there was of doubt and hesitation. While we sat there side by side upon that sunny mountain slope, I came to the clear decision that I could not go. But why, or how, I stayed is something beyond my powers to explain. Perhaps, au fond, it was because I believed in Julius LeVallon—believed, that is, in his innate uprightness and rectitude and nobility of soul. It was all beyond me. I could not understand. But—I had this strange belief in him. My relationship with her was, and would remain on both sides, a subconscious one—a memory. There would be no betrayal anywhere. I resolved to see it through.
“I ask nothing but your presence,” I heard him saying presently; “if not actively sympathetic, at least not actively hostile. It is the sum of forces you bring with you that I need. They are in your atmosphere, whether expressed or merely latent. You are you.” He watched me as he said this. “I failed once before, you remember,” he added, “because she was absent. Your desertion now would render success again impossible.”
He took my hand in his. A tender, even beseeching note crept into his deep voice. “Help me,” he concluded, “if you will. You bring your entire past with you, though you know it not. It is that Past that our reconstruction needs.”
A wind from the south, I remember, blew the firs behind us into low, faint sighing, and with the exquisite sound there stole a mingled joy and yearning on my soul. Perhaps some flower of memory in that moment yielded up its once familiar perfume, dim, ancient, yet not entirely forgotten. The sighing of the forest wafted it from other times and other places. Wonder and beauty touched me; I knew longing, but a longing so acutely poignant that it seemed not of this little earth at all. A fragrance and power of other stars, I could have sworn, lay in it. The pang of some long, long sweetness made me tremble. An immense ideal rose and beckoned with that whispering wind among the Jura pine woods, and a grandeur, remote but of ineffable sweetness, stirred through the undergrowths of a half-claimed, half-recognised consciousness within me.
I was aware of this incalculable emotion. Ancient yearnings seemed on the verge of coaxing loved memories into the light of day. I burned, I trembled, I suffered atrociously, yet with a rush of blind delight never before realised by me on earth. Then, suddenly, and wholly without warning, the desire for tears came over me in a flood.... Control was possible, but left no margin over. Somehow I managed it, so that no visible sign of this acute and extraordinary collapse should appear. It seemed, for a moment, that the frame of my modern personality was breaking down under the stress of new powers unleashed by my meeting with these two in this enchanted valley. Almost, another order of consciousness supervened ... then passed without being quite accomplished.... I heard the singing of the trees in the low south wind again. I saw the clouds sailing across the blue foreign sky. I saw his eyes upon me like twin flames. With the greatest difficulty I found speech possible in that moment.
“I can promise, at least, that I will not be hostile. I can promise that,” I said in a low and faltering tone.