“Did she love him very much?”
“Yes.”
“And I love you.”
“Yes. But. . . . It’s so different.”
He looked at her and she met his gaze. In her eyes there was a strength, a determination, a depth that were new to her. It stimulated him, braced him, and he felt that something was awakened in her, something that demanded of him, demanded, insisted. He was ashamed of his letter, ashamed that he had given her the necklace, ashamed that when she demanded of him the glory of life he had thought no higher than to give her pleasure.
So he was flung back into torment, and where before he saw humanity and its infinite variety as smaller than himself, now, with full swing to the opposite pole of exaggeration, he saw it as immeasurably larger and superior, full of a mighty purpose, ebbing and flowing like the sea, while, perched above the fringe of it, he cowered.
He concealed his distress from her. He was not so far gone but he could delight in the scents and sounds of the country, and he would tramp away over the moors or along the cliffs by himself, lie in the heather and smoke and watch the clouds, real, full-bellied clouds, lumbering and far off shedding a gray gauze of rain. He would fill his lungs with the keen air and return home hungry to sup on plain cottage fare or delicious herrings fresh from the sea.
One night, to please him, Matilda wore the necklace. It was pathetically out of place on her cheap little blouse, incongruous in their surroundings, the stiff, crowded fisherman’s parlor.
It was that decided him. There must be an end of drifting. Sink or swim, they must endeavor to take their place in the world. They would go to London. If among the third-rate mummers who had been their company for so long Matilda could so wonderfully grow and expand, what might she not, would she not, do among gentler, riper souls? And, for himself, he would seek out a task. There must be in England men of active minds and keen imaginations, men among whom he could find, if not the answers to, at least an interest in, the questions that came leaping in upon him. They would go to London and make a home, and Matilda should be the mistress of it. She should live her own life, and he his, and there would be an end of the strain between them, and the beginnings of the most fruitful comradeship.
Once again the immediate execution of his plans was frustrated. A strike was declared on the railways of Great Britain, and it became impossible for them to move, for they were on a branch line. Letters and newspapers were brought nine miles by road and there was no lack of food. The newspapers for a week devoted four columns to the story of the strike, then three columns, then two, then one. A little war broke out in the Persian Gulf. That dominated the strike, which lasted three weeks, and ended in the intervention of the Government, with neither the companies nor the men yielding.