Limitations: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

“Oh, about that I can’t talk. But I know now that the whole of my life from the time of the second crisis, since I fell in love with May, was part of the third.”

“Oh, but do tell us,” said Maud. “I believe you have forgotten what it was.”

“It was when I first thought I was a Christian,” said Tom simply. “But——” He stopped.

If Tom had said that it was when he first began to hate May, he could not have startled them more. Manvers felt very keenly the indecency of being serious. Maud sat still for a moment. Her knack of turning awkward conversation on to safer lines seemed to have entirely deserted her.

“No wonder you are perfectly happy,” she said at length, and stopped. They sat there for a few minutes in silence, and Tom fidgeted.

“It was a crisis no doubt,” he went on; “for the time it made a most wonderful difference to me, but somehow it has faded. Why are we all so damnably limited, or rather why are we cursed with that horrible sense of proportion, which makes us realize how limited we are? The happiest moment of my life was that on the morning after the baby had been born, when I went to early celebration. It was the best moment I have ever had, and I was even content. I had been horribly anxious and frightened the day before, and the relief and the joy were so immense that for the moment I was forced, so I thought then, to believe. Unhappily, common-sense is for ever telling me that it was relief and not belief that I experienced. Yet it was a crisis, for I now believe in the possibility of such convictions some day becoming mine, for for a little while they were mine, and what has happened to me temporarily may happen to me permanently. And now,” he added, “I have committed what Manvers considers the one unpardonable breach of manners. I have been serious!”

Again there was silence, and neither Maud nor Manvers saw exactly how to break it. But a neighbouring clock striking eleven gave Tom an opportunity.

“It is time for me to go,” he said; “I had no idea how late it was. May comes up to-morrow, I hope.”

The other two sat where they were till the wheels of Tom’s retreating hansom had merged themselves in the distant muffled roar of the further streets. To Maud it suddenly seemed that malignant hands were building up again in front of her that blank wall she had been at such pains to demolish, and that her work of the autumn was all undone. Tom’s presence, mingled with his absolute unconsciousness of its effect, had again reasserted its unreasonable power over her. She felt again as she had begun to feel at Athens, that she was miserable in his presence and incomplete in his absence. But her efforts at self-control had become with her a habit, and though she was dully conscious that her blank wall had rebuilt itself, she did not dash at it with dumb unavailing hands. It had to be picked down again stone by stone from the top to the bottom. The prospect was not a cheering one. She was also more than half conscious that Manvers was standing, as it were, on the other side of the wall, hidden from her by its intervening mass, and she dreaded that he would call to her, and assure her of it. That he was in love with her she could not but know, and she was quite aware that she liked him almost to any extent; but the limitations of the human race forbid us to love two people at once. Nature has provided us with two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs, two hands, in case some accident happens to one of them, but her wise precaution has not gone so far as to provide us with two people to love simultaneously, in case one of them gets married.

She was sitting in the chair Tom had left, and Manvers, who had been sitting a little way off, moved up and took the chair next her. She had one mad impulse to ask him not to speak, for she saw he meant to. However, if the scene was to come, it was to come, and he had the right, as a man, to know his fate. But though she knew it was to come, she wanted to put it off if only for a minute or two. She rose from her chair again, and leant on the balustrade of the balcony.