In the moments just before sleeping he was almost physically conscious of her. When lights along passageways of the ship had been lowered and feet no longer clattered on the decks, when only the thud of the engines sounded, the swish of waters and the sigh of sleepers, then he believed she approached him. He prayed Matthew Arnold’s prayer, and it seemed to him that it was answered:
“Come to me in my dreams and then
By day I shall be well again!
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.”
They say love is blind; it would be truer to say love is lenient. He had intervals of calmness when he appreciated to the full the wisdom of what he was doing. He recognized her faults; he recognized them with tenderness as the imperfections which sprang from her environment. If he could take her out of her hot-house, her limp attitudes towards life would straighten and her sanity would grow fresh. The trouble was that she preferred her hothouse and the orchid-people by whom she was surrounded; she had never known the blowy gardens of the world, which lie honest beneath the rain and stars. She pitied them for their blustering robustness. She pitied him for the distinctions he made between right and wrong. They impressed her as barbarous. Once, when she had told him that she was cold by temperament, he had answered, “You save yourself for the great occasions.” He was surer of that than ever; he was only afraid that the great occasion might not prove to be himself. There lay the hazard of his experiment in leaving her.
He dared not count on her final act of remorse. She was theatrical by temperament. To arrive at the last moment when a ship was sailing had afforded her a fine stage-setting. Her conduct might have meant everything; it might have meant no more than a girl’s display of emotionalism.
He began to understand her. It was like her to become desperate to inveigle him back just when he had resigned himself to forget her. In the past he had grown afraid to set store by her graciousness or to plan any kindness for her. To allow her to feel her power over him seemed to blunt her interest. It was always after he had shown her coldness that she had shown him most affection. Directly he submitted to her fascination, she affected to become indifferent. It was a trick that could be played too often. If this see-saw game was too long continued, one of them would out-weary the other’s patience. If only he had been sure that she was missing him, his mind would have been comparatively at rest.
He disembarked at Fishguard an hour after midnight The December air was raw and damp. His first action on landing was to dispatch his journal-letter to her. As he drowsed in the cold, ill-lighted carriage it was of her that he thought Now that the voyage was ended, the ocean that lay between them seemed impassable as the gulf that is fixed between hell and heaven. She had seen the steamer—she had been a topic of conversation on board; but everything that he saw now, and would see from now on, was unfamiliar to her.
The entrance into London did nothing to cheer him. He had flying glimpses of stagnant gardens, windows like empty sockets plugged with fog, forlorn streets like gutters down which the scavenger dawn wandered between flapping lamps. London looked mean; even in its emptiness, it looked overcrowded. He missed the boastful tallness of New York. Before the train had halted his nostrils were full of the stale stench of cab-ranks and the sulphurous pollutions of engines. Milk-cans made a cemetery of the station; porters looked melancholy as mourners. His gorge rose against the folly of his return.