Love in Idleness: A Bar Harbour Tale

by F. Marion Crawford

He did not draw very carefully, nor even industriously, and more than once he stopped working altogether for a quarter of an hour at a time. His principal object in coming had been to get out of the way just a little more promptly and completely than Fanny could have expected. His thoughts were much more concerned with her than with what he was doing.

Naturally enough, he was trying to understand the real bent of the girl's feelings. Setting aside the absurd chaff which had formed a good deal of the conversation on the previous afternoon, he tried to extract from it enough of truth to guide him, aiding himself by recalling little circumstances as well as words, for the one had often belied the other.

He saw clearly that Fanny Trehearne might have said to him, 'I like you, but I do not love you—win me if you can!' But it was like her to propose to 'flirt for a bet'—being at heart perhaps less of a flirt than she laughingly admitted herself to be. But that was not the point which chiefly interested him. What he wished to know was, just how far that undefined liking for him extended. To speak in the common phrase, he did not 'know where he was' with her, and it seemed that he had no means of finding out. On the other hand, he knew very well indeed that he himself was badly in love. The symptoms were not to be mistaken, nor had he been in love so often already as to make him sceptical as to what he felt. He was more distrustful of the result than of the impulse.

In his opinion Fanny was much too frank to be a flirt. Her directness was one of her principal charms, though he could not help suspecting that it must be one of her chief weapons. A little hesitation is often less deceptive than clear-eyed, outspoken truth. But Lawrence was no more able than most men of his age—or, indeed, of any age—to follow out a continuous train of thought where a woman was concerned. It is more often the woman's personality that concerns us, unreasoning men, than the probable direction of her own reasoning about us. We do not make love to an argument, so to speak, nor to a set of ideas, nor to a preconceived opinion of our merits or demerits. We make love to our own idea of what the woman is—and the depth of our disillusionment is the measure of our sincerity, when love is gasping between the death-blow and the death.

Moreover, what is called nowadays analysis of human nature, belongs in reality to transcendental thought. 'Transcendent' is defined as designating that which lies beyond the bounds of all possible experience. So far as we know, it is beyond those bounds to enter into the intelligence of our neighbour, subjectively, to identify ourselves with him and to see and understand the world with his eyes and mind. It follows that we are never sure of what we are doing when we attempt to set down exactly another man's train of thought, and it follows also that few are willing to recognize the result as at all resembling the process of which they are conscious within themselves. On certain bases, all men can appeal subjectively to all men, and all women to all women. But, as between the sexes, all observation is objective and tentative, whether it be that of the author, condemned to analyze a woman's character, or that of the man in love and attempting to understand the woman he loves.

And further, if we could see—as it is pretended by some that we can see on paper—precisely what is taking place in the intelligence of those we meet in the world, our friends would be as unrecognizable to us as a dissected man is unrecognizable for a human being except in the eyes of a doctor. The soul, laid bare, dissected, and turned inside out, with real success, would not be recognized by its dearest friend, were it ever so truthful a soul. We are all fundamentally and totally incapable of expressing exactly what we feel, and as we have no means of conveying truth without some sort of expression, we are helpless and are all more or less hopelessly misunderstood—a fact to which, if we please, we may ascribe that variety which is proverbially said to be the charm of life. Doubtless, this is a literary heresy; but it is a human truth a little above literature.

Lawrence had never attempted to write a book, but as he sat on the slope above the Otter Cliff road, drawing trees, it did not occur to him to draw a picture of what he thought about the inside of each tree, instead of a representation of what he saw. But he made the usual fruitless attempt to understand the woman he loved, and to reason about her, and failed to do either, which is also usual. The conclusion he reached was that he loved her, of which he had been aware before he had set himself to think it out.

What he saw was a strong girl's face with cool, inscrutable grey eyes that never took fire and gleamed, nor ever turned dull and vacant. Their unchanging steadiness contradicted the wayward speech, the sudden capricious confidence, even the gay laugh, sometimes. Lawrence had a lively impression that whatever Fanny said or did, she never meant but one thing, whatever that might be. And with this impression he was obliged to content himself.

From the place where he sat, he had a glimpse between the trees of the road below. On the side towards him there was a little open bit of meadow, where the gorge widened, and a low fence with a little ditch separated it from the highway. On the hillside, above this stretch of grass, the trees grew here and there, wide apart at first, and then by degrees more close together. He himself was seated just within the thick wood, at the edge of the first underbrush.

Now and then, people passed along the road: a light buckboard drawn by a pair of bays and containing a smart-looking couple, with no groom behind; a farmer's wagon, long, hooded, and dusty, dragged at a disjointed trot by a broken-down grey horse; a solitary rider, whose varnished shoes reflected the sunlight even to where Lawrence was sitting; a couple of pedestrians; a lad driving a cow; and then another buckboard; and so on.