CHAPTER XI
HE had no right to ask it, and yet Maurice thought of it persistently and the next morning ushered in a most auspicious comment on such thoughts. He received quite a solid cheque for an article he had recently written—a cheque large enough to buy his boots for a whole year—and Maurice was fastidious about his boots; but not therefore logically large enough to make uncomfortable realities recede, as they did, behind a golden haze. Maurice’s moods easily alternated between golden hazes and black fogs.
Geoffrey went away on that morning—that, too, was the receding of an uncomfortable reality, for Geoffrey seemed to hold him by the shoulders, like a naughty, unreasonable child, and make him look at things he didn’t want to look at. He himself was to go on the next day. There was a familiar element of recklessness in the mood as he practised the violin with Felicia in the sunny, ugly morning-room. He was overstrung and happy, and the music they played, by its sadness, made happiness more blissful.
“I sometimes think,” he said, laying down his violin and leaning his arm on the piano, while Felicia still sat in her place, “that sadness is the most beautiful thing in life.”
In response to such moods Felicia usually became rather matter-of-fact, as now, when she said, “To look at, to listen to, not to live, perhaps.”
“But we shouldn’t be able to see or hear it if we hadn’t lived it.”
“It only becomes beauty, then, when we’ve outlived it, not while we are in it. People dress up their sorrows so,” said Felicia, turning vaguely the pages of the music before her; “they always remind me of the king in the fairy-tale, who had clothes made of air and thought himself sumptuously apparelled when he was really naked.”
“I believe you are right,” laughed Maurice, “and that it is only when we are happy that we enjoy looking at sadness.”
Felicia, though she smiled, was not feeling happy. She had waked to the realization that this and the next were the last days with Maurice, and there was a pang in the realization. She saw suddenly before her the empty months. To re-enter the old monotony after this flashing week was a prospect sad with a sadness that could not deck itself in illusion. But she did not want Maurice to know that she was sad; indeed, was it life or was it loss that made her so? She could not say.
“And since it’s a happy morning, shall we have some more sadness?” she asked.