The question seemed to him well framed: it led him and her away from all these nonsensicalities into the region where the simple things abided. He expected some pressure on his arm, some little deprecation of his silliness, some whisper to inform him that he was a goose or an idiot. Instead, Silvia’s hand slackened in the crook of his arm and withdrew itself.
“Oh, Peter, what a thing to ask!” she said. “As if I could be ‘charitable’ to you as long as you loved me, or as if I could find you annoying so long as I loved you. You’re pretending not to understand. Don’t pretend like that any more.”
Peter’s quick brain was alert on the scent. He had meant his words to be construed into a lover-like speech, and had completely thought that they could be interpreted thus. But her answer convinced him that to her they were not construable at all, but only gibberish. Before he could emend himself, or even quite follow her, she flashed out her full meaning.
“Anybody else in the world except you can be annoying,” she said, “and I hope I can be charitable to anybody else in the world except you. But how can I be charitable to you? Or how can you be trying to me? Don’t you know that I am you? For a month I’ve ceased to be myself at all. There isn’t any ‘me.’ It isn’t ‘me’ you think you are in love with; it’s—it’s just the completion of your own wonderfulness. And as for their being any ‘you,’ why, you’ve ceased long ago. I’ve absorbed you. I’ve—I’ve drowned you in myself and in my adoration. I’m round you. I crush you and I worship you——”
Silvia broke off suddenly as there appeared at the drawing-room window a black tall silhouette yodelling and crying, “Coo-ee. Children!”
“Oh, damn that man,” said she. “Sorry, Peter, but, well, there it is.”
CHAPTER IX
Peter was sitting (so superbly that it might have been called lying) on a long dream-provoking chair set outside the south façade at Howes. For the moment he was alone, and he surprised himself with the unbidden thought of how seldom he had been alone during the last fortnight—since the day of the wedding, which had taken place in the unfashionable early days of September. This constant companionship of Silvia, their motor drives, their golf, their fishing in the lake, their long sittings with books or newspapers of which but little was read, had seemed to him as he looked back on them (conglomerated and coagulated, like little drops of mercury running together to form a globular brightness) to have been wholly delightful and satisfying. These days had been for him, in fact, a soft luminous revelation of how completely pleasant days could be. Without a touch of complacency he could not help knowing how every word and every whim of his had seemed adorable to Silvia, and he knew that, search as he might (he did not propose to search at all), he would be able to find no movement or mood of hers that he could have corrected or rectified. She had taken possession of him tenderly, and, as if with held breath, watched, beautifully bright-eyed, to discover and anticipate the moods of his desires; and in answer he had given her not acquiescence alone, but the eager consent of every fibre of his being. It seemed perfect that she should be like that.
Silvia had just left him to meet her mother, who, at the expiration of their uninterrupted fortnight, was coming down to Howes that day; and Peter, alone for an hour on this September afternoon, let the hot sunshine, fructifying and caressing, melt the marrow of his bones, the impressed records on his brain, into definite consciousness. The bees humming over the flower-beds, the red-admiral butterflies opening and shutting their vermilion streaked wings, the swallows not yet gathering for their autumn departure, all conduced to leisurely summer-like meditation, and he found himself in possession of propositions and conclusions which he had scarcely known were his. This supreme sense of content came first; that, like a wash of warm colour, underlay the details that now began with a finer brushwork to outline themselves, and each of them appeared equally admirable, equally germane to the values of the emerging picture.
Mrs. Wardour’s arrival was an important touch; it might almost be called a fresh wash of colour. Out of numerous reflections, considerations, weighings of this and that, each of them at the time too liquid and inconclusive to call a plan, a plan now had certainly crystallized. They, the three contributory contrivers of it, had, so to speak, pooled the London house and this, making two houses for the three of them. Peter would be returning to his work in Whitehall next day, and since no sane being would wish to remain in London in these mellow radiances of September and October for longer than was absolutely necessary, he would, as a rule, flow up in the swiftest of cars in the morning, and stream back again in the late afternoon. For one reason or another, again, he might find himself wanting or being obliged to spend a night in town; he would be away all day, anyhow, and what could be more convenient than Mrs. Wardour’s perfect willingness to establish herself for the present at Howes, where she would supply companionship for Silvia, and find it herself? Silvia again might want to spend a day or two in town, and her mother could please herself as to whether she joined her or not. From such a germ the idea of keeping both houses pooled and permanently open for any or all of them had easily developed. Headquarters for the present would be in the country, and London, to Mrs. Wardour’s notion, would be something of a picnic, with the house half shut up. But with four or five servants there, there would, she hoped, be no angles of real discomfort.