“It is a matter of fact. These voices are without depth of foundation. What is this Pippa?”
“And yet you think that women can rise higher, and fall lower, than men.”
She walked home amidst the procession of scenes, grouped and blending all about her, free of their bondage to any thread of story, bathed in music, beginning their life in her as memory, set up for ever amongst her store of realities. It had been a wonderful evening, opera was wonderful. But the whole effect was threatened, as it stood so lovely all about her in the night air, by his insistence upon a personal interpretation, surprising her in the midst of the garden scene and renewed now as they walked, by little attempts to accentuate the relationship of their linked arms. Once more she held off the threatened obliteration. But the scenes had retreated, far away beyond the darkness and light of the visible street. With sudden compunction she felt that it was she who had driven them away, driven away the wonders that were after all his gift. If she had softened towards him, they would have gone, just the same.... It was too soon to let them work as an influence.
Absurd, too, to try to invent life which did not come of itself. He had desisted and was away, fallen into his thoughtful forgetful singing, brumming out shreds of melody that brought single scenes vividly penetrating the darkness. She called him back with a busy repentance, carelessly selecting from her thronging impressions a remark that instantly seemed meaningless.
“Yes” he said heartily, “there is, absolutely, something echt, kern-gesund about these old-German things.”
That was it. It had all meant, really, the same for him; and he knew what it was that made the charm; admitting it, in spite of his strange deep dislike of the Germans. Kern-Gesundheit was not a sufficient explanation. But the certainty of his having been within the charm made him real, a related part of the pageant of life, his personal engaging small attribute her own undivided share. On the doorstep, side by side with his renewed silent appeal, she turned and met, standing free, his gentle tremulous salutation.
For a moment the dark silent house blazed into light before her. She moved forward, as he opened the door, as into a brightness of light where she should stand visible to them both, in a simplicity of golden womanhood, no longer herself, but his Marguerite, yet so differently fated, so differently identified with him in his new simplicity, going forward together, his thoughts and visions as simple as her own in the life now just begun, from which their past dropped away grey and cold, the irrelevant experience of strangers.
But the hall was dark and the open dining-room door showed blank darkness. She led the way in; she could not yet part from him and lose the strange radiance surrounding herself. They ought to go forward now, together, from this moment, shedding a radiance. To part was to break and mar, forever, some essential irrecoverable glory. They sat side by side on the sofa by the window. The radiance in which she sat crowned, a figure visible to herself, recognisable, humble and proud and simple, back in its Christian origin, a single weak small figure, transfixed with light, dreadfully trusted with the searing, brightly gleaming dower of Christian womanhood, was surrounded by a darkness unpenetrated by the faint radiance the high street lamps must be sending through the thick lace curtains. This she thought is what people mean by the golden dream; but it is not a dream. No one who has been inside it can ever be the same again or quite get out. The world it shows is the biggest world there is. It is outer space where God is and Christ waits. “I am very happy, do you feel happy?” The small far-off man’s voice sounded out, lost in the impenetrable darkness. Yet it was through him, through some essential quality in him that she had reached this haven and starting place, he who had brought this smiting descent of certainties which were to carry her on her voyage into the unknown darkness, and since he could not see her smile, she must speak.
“I think so,” she said gently. She must, she suddenly realised, never tell him more than that. His happiness was, she now recognised, hearing his voice, different to hers. To admit and acclaim her own would be the betrayal of a secret trust. If she could dare to lay her hand upon him, he might know. But they were too separate. And if he were to touch her now, they would again be separated for longer than before, for always. “Good-night,” she said, brushing his sleeve with the tips of her fingers, “dear, funny little man.”
He followed her closely but she was soon away up the familiar stairs in the darkness, in her small close room, and trying to chide herself for her inadequate response, while within the stifling air the breath of sunlit open spaces moved about her.