“Perhaps that clears things up a bit, Dora,” he said, with a touch of wistfulness in his voice.
And Dora tried, tried to think it did. She tried also to put all possible simplicity into her voice as she answered:
“But what is there to clear up, dear?” she asked.
“That’s all right, then,” said he, and left her. But once outside the door, he shook his head. Bottled simplicity, so to speak, is not the same as simplicity from the spring. He was quite shrewd enough to know the difference.
He was shrewd enough also to know that he did not quite understand what had gone wrong. Something certainly had, and after his compliments to her on the subject of the admirable way in which she was behaving to his parents he knew that it was no longer his strictures on that subject that made this barrier. True it was that during these past weeks neither of them had had much leisure or opportunity for intimate conversation; but there were glances, single words, silences even that had passed between them when they were in Venice first that had taken no time if measured by the scale of minutes or seconds, yet which had been enough to fill the whole day with inward sunshine. And he had not changed to her: that he knew quite well; it was not that he was less sensitive now, less receptive of signals of that kind. For his part, he gave them in plenty. Just now he had leaned over her, smiling, when she lay on her sofa, a thing that in early days would have been sufficient to make her glance at him, with perhaps a raised hand that just touched his face, with perhaps an “Oh, Claude!” below her breath. Honestly, as far as any man can be honest with himself, he was as hungry for that as ever; he made his private code just as before, and no answer came. Something was out of tune: the vibrations, wireless, psychical, did not pass from her to him as they had done; and his own messages, so it seemed, throbbed themselves out, and found none to pick them up, but were lost in the unanswering air.
Claude was of a very simple and straightforward nature, but he felt none the less keenly because he was not capable of feeling in any subtle or complicated manner. Love had come into his life, and his part in that burned within him still, in no way less ardently. He believed that Dora had loved him also: believed it, that is to say, in a sacred sense: it had been a creed to him, just as his own love for her was a creed. With body and soul he loved her, not fantastically, but deeply, and as he left her this afternoon it seemed to him that his love was being poured into a vessel in which was bitterness. They had talked only about what to him was a trivial thing—namely, the completeness with which Jim had made himself at home in the flat; but in the earlier days it made no difference what they talked about: tenderness, love came through it all, like water through a quicksand, engulfing them. Their days had been passed in such a quicksand; they were always joyfully foundering in it. But now it was not so. Some bitter encrustation had come on it which bore their weight quite easily, and there was no risk of going through, nor any chance of it. Honestly, he did not believe that he was responsible for the formation of that crust. He had not changed; was not other than he had always been. Once for a moment his mind poised and hovered above the truth, and he half said to himself, “I wonder if she finds me common?” But he rejected that: it was the wildest freak of imagination. Besides, she had not found him common at first, and he had not grown commoner. On the contrary, she had taught him much—little things, no doubt, but many of them. He had noticed she was always polite to servants and shop people, and though a year ago his tendency had been to be rather short with them, as inferiors, he had instinctively followed her example. That was only one instance out of many. But, so the poor fellow told himself, they were all little things like that, which could make no real difference to anybody.
Yet he thought over this a little longer. He himself, for instance, had always known that his father and mother and Per were, so to speak, “common” beside him. That seemed perfectly natural, for he had been sent to Eton and Oxford, and had picked up all sorts of things as to the way “gentlemen behaved,” which they did not know. He would not press his guests to have more wine, as his father did, when they had refused, nor tempt them to a second helping, as his mother did. There were little tricks of language, too, infinitesimal affairs, but he, so he thought, had got into the way of it, whereas they had not. He, for instance, never said “Lor’,” as his father constantly did, and his mother, if she “was not on the watch.” But he said, “Good Lord,” because fellows said that, and not the other. But what did that really matter? There was a certain boisterousness of manner also that characterized them, which he and Mrs. Per, for instance, who was certainly a perfect lady, did not practise. Often, half in jest, his father had said, “Old Claude’s getting too much of a swell for me”; and though he deprecated such a conclusion, he understood what was meant, and knew that if half was jest, half was serious. But all this made it the more impossible that Dora should find him common. Eton and Oxford, he felt quite sure, had taken all the commonness out of him.
And how little it mattered! He saw a hundred things, day by day, in which, if he had been disposed to peer and dissect and magnify, he would have felt that there was a difference between his father and himself. But how measure so small a thing? But what did that matter? He saw the kindness, the honour, the truth of his parents, and he was as likely to cease respecting and caring for them because of that difference as he was likely to cease to love Dora because once he had found a gray hair in her golden head. Besides—and his mind came back to that—if she found him common now, she must always have found him common. But nothing was short of perfection in their early weeks in Venice.
Once, on his way downstairs to be ready to greet Per and his wife, who were expected that evening, he half turned on his foot, intending to go back to Dora and try to get to the bottom of it all. But he knew that he would find nothing to say, for there was nothing he could suggest in which he had fallen short. And even as he paused, wondering if it would be enough that he should go back and say, “Dora, what is it?” he heard the sound of the hall door opening. That was Per, no doubt; he must go down and welcome him.