“It’s not that,” she said roughly, tears swimming in her eyes. “Of course I love you. But think of it, a danger to everyone excepting those like yourself. Curious, involved in a problem affecting only a small per cent of humanity, sick, frightened, filled with fever and lust perhaps—with nothing, nothing coming after, whatever you do, but death—then you go on—it goes on—then the child—and life probably, for a time.”
“Well——”
“I couldn’t tell you. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll die next month,’ and finally I didn’t want to go off—although I did, you know what I mean. Then her father died—they say her lungs are weak—death, death perpetuating itself, that’s funny you see—and the doctors——” She swung around: “You’re right—they lied, and I lived through—all the way—all the way!”
He turned his face from her.
“The real thing,” she went on in a pained voice, “is to turn our torment toward the perfect design. I didn’t want to go beyond you—that was not my purpose. I thought there was not to be any more me. I wanted to leave nothing behind but you, only you. You must believe this or I can’t bear it—and still,” she continued, walking around the room impatiently, “there was a somehow hysterical joy in it too. I thought, if you had real perception, that ‘something’ that we must possess, that must be at the bottom of us somewhere—or there wouldn’t be such an almost sensuous desire for it, that ‘something’ that, at times, is so near us that it becomes obscene, well, I thought, if Paytor has this—and mind you, I knew all the time that you didn’t have it—that you would understand. And when you had been gone a long time I said, ‘Paytor understands’—and I would say to myself—‘Now, at this moment—at ten-thirty precisely, if I could be with Paytor he would say “I see,”’ but so soon as I had the time table in my hand I knew that there was no such feeling in your bosom—nothing at all.”
“Don’t you feel horror?” he asked in a loud voice, suddenly.
“No, I don’t feel horror—horror is conflict—and I have none—I’m alien to life.”
“Have you a religion, Julie?” he asked, still in the same loud voice, as if he were addressing someone a little raised, yet invisible, as one tries to see a choir.
“I don’t know—I don’t think so. I’ve tried to believe in something external, something that might envelop this and carry it beyond—that’s what we demand of our faiths, isn’t it? But I always return to a fixed notion that there is something more fitting than a possible release.”
He put his hands to his head. “You know,” he said, “I’ve always thought that a woman, because she can have children, ought to know the truth—the very fact that she can do something so really preposterous ought to make her equally capable of the other preposterous thing—well——”