“And just when I needed you, Meester Deek,” she whispered, “just when I want to be good so badly!”
She broke from him. Again, as at Les Baux, he heard the key in her lock turning.
No sooner was he without her than the change commenced. During his month of intolerable waiting, when he had thought that he had lost her forever, he had tried to heal the affront to his pride with a dozen hostile arguments. He had persuaded himself that the break with her was for the best. He had told himself that carelessness towards men was in her blood—a taint of sexlessness inherited from her mother. He had assured himself repeatedly that he could live without her. He had fixed in his mind as a goal to be envied his old pursuits, with their unfevered touch of bachelor austerity. This had been his mood till he had received her message: “I need you. Come at once.”
Having seen her, his yearning had returned like a lean wolf the more famished by reason of its respite. Was it love? If he lied to her, she would detect him. Until he could convince her that he loved her, he was exiled by her honesty. He knew now that throughout the weeks of waiting his suffering had been dulled by its own intensity. His false self-poise had been a symptom of the malady.
All day he tramped the streets of London in the scorching heat of midsummer. He went up the Strand and back by the Embankment, round and round, taking no time for food or rest. He felt throughout his body a continual vibration, an eager trembling. He dared not go far from her.
In spirit she was never absent She rose up crouching her chin against her shoulder and barricading her lips with her hand. He relived their many partings—the ecstasies, kisses, wavings down the stairs—those prolonged poignant moments when her tenderness had atoned for hours of coldness. She had become a habit with him—a part of him. His physical self cried out for her. It was knit with hers.
A year almost to the day since she had said so lightly, “Come to America”! And now she was so near, and he could not go to her.
Evening. He sat wearily on the Embankment, gazing up at the back of her hotel, trying to guess which window was hers. In the coolness of the golden twilight he had arrived at the first stage in his exact self-knowledge: that waiting for her had become his mission—without her his future would be purposeless. If he made her his wife, he might live to regret it Her faults went too deep for even love to cure. Any emotion of shame which she had owned to was only for the moment. Whether he lost her or won her, he was bound to suffer. Marriage with her might spell intellectual ruin; but to shirk the risk because of that would be to shatter his idealism forever. To save her from herself and to shelter her in so far as she would allow, had become his religion and the inspiration of his work. And wasn’t that the highest sort of love?
He determined to set himself a test He walked to Charing Cross Station, entered a telephone-booth and called up the Savoy.
“Miss Jodrell, please. No, I don’t know the number of the room.”