It was Sophia's first and only love-letter, and she sent it when she got back to England, as a summons to that friendship in which she could have given as richly as in love; and for which, although he had planned it so eagerly, he had too much knack of passion and too little depth of feeling.
IV
The following evening his letter came, and Sophia, noting the thinness of it compared with those others she had had, knew how his need of her had slackened. She took the letter to her refuge on the wall and sat for a while unable to read it, the old nausea upon her. Then she took a firm grip of herself and opened the envelope. As she read it seemed as though a great blow were struck at her heart. She knew she had expected this, yet the actuality was worse to bear than she had thought.
Richard laughed at her intention of not writing, and himself wrote her little over a page. He began, as usual, "Sophia, my sweet," and made a brief reference to his wife—"She has not had a bad phase yet—and things are quiet, but what is that when one wants sympathy and passion? I feel I am caught up in the old life again and something seems to have gone snap in me. Write to me—for you will write—to my club." The assurance of his tone jarred Sophia, but what hurt her cruelly was his brevity. The fact that she had wanted this letter to be a long one had honestly seemed to him of no importance when set against the fact that he was not in the mood to write it; for he was the creature of his moods and consequently unheeding of those which other folk might wish to have indulged.
Sophia read the letter over and over, and then quite suddenly felt she could not look at it again, and for the first time since the whole affair began, she cried. Crouched on the seat she hid her face while the sobs tore at her and the tears ran over her crossed wrists, and she heard the sound of her own sobs coming to her from a great distance. After a while she sat up, dried her wet face and made herself confront the new aspect of things. She saw that up till now she had not been wholly unhappy, for she had had the past. If he were going to prove unworthy the past would no longer be hers to glory in but would become a time of shame. If—as prevision showed her—she was to know him as unfit for what she had given, the giving would cease to be her happiness. For Sophia was still so ignorant she thought mere companionship and the spiritual force of her feeling had been a continuous giving. The knowledge that from a man's point of view she had given nothing at all was spared her. Since the parting she had repeated over and over to herself two sentences from his letters—"Virgin Mother, friend and lover and comforter" and "Home means where you are." If he could still mean those things she would be perfectly content that he should never again express them; if he were to mean them less as the old life and the old allegiance gripped him, then they would cease to be true and she could not live on them in memory. Few men are strong enough to leave the past alone, many are so afraid of its re-appearance that they try to bury it alive—was he going to deal this last and most cruel blow, a future that would destroy the past? The pitiful part of it all was that Sophia would never have seen him again sooner than try to revive what had happened; had he continued to make love to her she would have refused to let him—all she asked was that the past might be unprofaned. Reading his letter she began for the first time to realize the selfishness of his brilliant, lovable drifting nature, and in that moment her love of him took its firmest hold of her. The merciful phase of numbness was over, and she entered the deep waters at last. She had no strength left to struggle, she could only let them go over her head and await their passing. For her month of joy she was to pay in a year's pain, and she entered on the payment now.
It was the payment for what she had gone without that hit Sophia hardest. In what she had given was the supreme comfort—"It was for him"; and this upheld her even when her want of him was worst, when she lay the whole night through on the floor of the wall-refuge, thoughts and pulses knocking out "I want you . . . I want you . . ." against the stones. It upheld her when, towards dawn, she paced the garden, pausing every now and then to lean her cheek against the dew-wet lilac leaves; or when she tangled her hands in the grass till the damp blades whimpered as she pulled her fingers up them. Sound was a help to her, and when she roused the grass to cries or stirred the bushes to quick whispering the voice in herself was quieter. She was never violent to anything in the garden, and when action became hurried she turned it upon herself, beating her hands against her thighs. And always "It was for him" upheld her through the darkest times of paying for what she had given.
For what she had gone without that help was lacking. It was not passion, which, when with him, she had never felt, that plucked at her unbearably, it was the thwarted fruit of passion that haunted and reproached her. Before his letter came, dream-babies had clustered round her, wringing their little hands behind a closed transparent door, but these were visions of what might have been had circumstances been different—them she could bear. Now thought narrowed and gained in meaning: one baby surged towards her, cried to her, smiled at her, lay in air always just away from her breast—one baby that was what might have been even as things were. How would it matter what other women he loved better if she had only given him what no other woman had? She saw herself his slayer in that she had not made life for him in the way a woman can make it for her lover, by taking it of his and creating afresh with it. Her own life would be such a small price to pay. For Sophia was a born creator, and the seeming futility of all she was undergoing, and the barrenness it bound her to, filled her with a sense of waste.
It was not until the compulsion which bread-winners know was making it clear to Sophia that her last days at Sant' Ambrogio were come, that the influences at work upon her ever since her arrival, that had first revealed themselves to her in her walk round the town, fused and concentrated.
The day had been unbearably hot, and Sophia lay behind closed persiani, the green of the leaves without reflecting on to the whitewashed walls so that the room seemed a pool of green dusk. Sophia read a little old Latin Vita Sanctæ Beatæ, which she pondered over when, in the cool of the evening, she sought the place in the wall.