“You have made me feel that London isn’t just a place where the trains stop.”
And she began to tell him about her home and the river where she bathed with her brothers, the woods where in spring there were primroses and daffodils, and in summer bluebells.
“Opposite the house,” she said, “is a hill which is a common, all covered with gorse in the summer, and the hot, nutty smell of it comes up and seems to burn your face. There are snakes on the common—vipers and adders and grass-snakes. From the top you can see the downs, and beyond them, you know, is the sea. On moonlight nights it is glorious, and I nearly go mad sometimes with running in and out of the shadows. I believe I did go mad once, for I sat up on the top of the hill and sang and shouted and cried, all by myself, and I felt that my heart would break if I did not kiss something. The gorse was out, and I buried my face in the dewy yellow flowers. . . . I often think the woods are like churches on Easter Day. . . . And then when I get home and it is just a house and I am just a girl living in it, you know, it all seems wrong somehow.”
Mendel sat on the floor trying to puzzle out this mysterious rapture of hers. He had never heard of gorse or of downs, but he could recognize her emotion. He had had something like it the first time he saw a may-tree in blossom, and he had hardly been able to bear it. He had rather resented it, for it had interfered with his work for a day or two, and he could not help feeling that there was something indecent about an emotion with which he could do nothing.
“Yes,” he said heavily; “it must be very pretty.”
She shivered at the grotesqueness of his words as she sank back into her normal mood of happy diffidence. His face wore an expression of black anger as he darted quick, furious glances at her. Here was something that he did not understand, something that defied his mastery, and when she smiled he thought it was at himself, and this strange power that had been behind her appeared to him as a mocking, teasing spirit. Let it mock, let it tease! He was strong enough to defy it. Sweep through a green girl it might, but he was not to be caught by it. He knew better. In him it had tough simplicity to deal with and a will that had broken the confinement of Fate, the limits of a meagre religion, to bend before no authority but that of art. . . . He was rather contemptuous, too. Nothing as yet had resisted his genius, and he felt it within him stronger than ever, a river with a thousand sources. Block one channel and it would find another. Stop that and it would find yet another.
Yet here he knew was no direct, no open menace, only the intolerable suggestion that there were other streams, other sources, and the suggestion had come from this foolish, empty girl.
“I will not have it,” he said half aloud.
“What did you say?” she asked.