She paused for a moment as though his assurance hurt rather than helped her. “That is what it all comes back to, for me, Bevis. Am I unfaithful? If Malcolm were alive, I should be.”
“If Malcolm were alive, you wouldn’t be in love with me,” he set her straight.
“I’m so glad you see that and believe it,” she murmured, while he saw the slow flush in her cheek. “That’s one of the things I most wanted to make clear.”
“You had no need to, my dear girl. I know how it was with you and Malcolm.”
“You know. You remember. Yes.” She drew a deep breath. He had comforted her. “So, you see, I’m only in love with you because he isn’t here any longer. If he were here, I couldn’t love any one but him.” She stopped for a moment. “Bevis, that is what it comes to. Is he here?”
“Here? How do you mean?” the young man asked.
“Are we immortal? Do we survive death? Does Malcolm, somewhere, still love me?” She kept her face turned from him and he was aware that he felt her questions irrelevant and that this was wrong of him or perhaps came of his being tired. Or perhaps it came from the fact that the soft edges and tips of Antonia’s averted profile, soft yet so clear, shadowed yet so pale, against the sky, were more relevant than any such questions. He looked away from her, calling himself to order, and then, in a different voice, for though he still felt her questions irrelevant, he was able to think of them, he said, “I see.”
What he seemed first to see was himself as he had been not many years ago, a youth in his rooms at Oxford. Books piled beside him, a pipe between his teeth, he saw himself staring into the fire, while, in a sad yet pleasant perplexity, he had brooded on such questions. Body and soul; appearance and reality; the temporal and the eternal consciousness;—the old words chimed in his brain. Then came a swift memory of Antonia and himself dancing the tango in London, and then the memory of the dead face of a little French poilu he had come upon one evening in France, by the roadside, a face sweet and childlike. How many dead faces he had seen since he had danced the tango with Antonia, and how wraith-like, beside the agonies he had since passed through, were the mental disciplines and distractions of his studious youth! Yet it all held together. It was because of the agonies that the answers had come.
Antonia’s voice broke in upon his reverie and his eyes were brought back to her. “Help me, Bevis,” she said.
Something in that made him dimly smile. “Help you in what way, my dear girl? Which do you want most—to have me and to believe that Malcolm doesn’t exist any longer; or to believe him immortal and to lose me?” He had not meant to be cruel; he was placing the dilemma before himself as well as her; but he saw he had been, when her slow, helpless gaze of pain turned upon him and her eyes filled with tears.