“Looks like business, that,” he said, as they stood in the street and surveyed it with satisfaction. “Give the town something to talk about. No advertisement like talk.”
[VIII
THRIVING]
“Were you married in a church, Ursula?”
“We were not, brother: none but gorgios, cripples, and lubbenys are ever married in a church: we took each other’s words.”
MEANWHILE his relations with Cathleen remained in abeyance. What she had accepted in the excitement of events, she needed to reconcile with her calmer thoughts. That was not so easy. She was brought to doubt of herself. She had been more hurt than she had realized, and she feared she was too weak for the suffering that filled her. For many weeks it was a pain to her to see René, for she could not but remember the destruction and misery he had brought into other lives. She had no support, for her rupture with her family had made an end of the ideas in which she had been instructed as a child, and she had no experience to draw upon, and Lotta’s theories, when it came to cold practice, vanished into the air. She could not avoid jealousy of the past; and, with that in her, she could not bring herself to take the plunge into a life so different from any she had ever imagined. René was so patient, and had flung himself with such ardor into his new work, that she had begun to tell herself that he had no need of her, that she too was in a sense his victim, since his meeting with her had enabled him to break with the past only to thrust the weight of it upon her. The superficiality of her conceptions was betrayed and made plain to her, broken up by one fixed idea, the thought of Ann’s child. How could he have let that go? How could he thrust that back into the past? How could his feeling for herself have broken clear of that? And Ann? How could she set thousands of miles between herself and him? If she had stayed, they could have wrestled with the reality. They could have made provision in their lives for the inimical new life. But Ann, in her desperation, had left them to deal only with an idea, a shadow, a memory. René apparently could ignore it. He was full of enthusiasm and happiness. He seemed to consider Ann’s flight as a declaration of independence and to acquiesce in it. Had he felt nothing at all? Could a man come in contact with that mystery and remain unmoved? Must not such defiance of Nature be fraught with appalling consequences, to end in the worst state of all, indifference?
She hugged her difficulties to herself, and dared speak of them to no one, for she was possessed by the shyness bred by a fixed idea. At last Lotta caught her out in deliberate avoidance of René and asked what had come to her. Little by little she dragged her trouble out of her, and tried to reassure her and bring her to reason.
“You should ask him about it,” she said. “He must have thought it out He did not forget her. You must remember that. It was not a case of his feeling for you wiping her out of his mind. My own view is that Nature is entirely indifferent, and I don’t believe parents and children do naturally and inevitably have any feeling for each other. Indeed, Nature is so indifferent that our thoughts about it are rather impertinent. It is obvious that children do not always bind men and women, and I imagine they must often have the contrary effect; always, I should say, when they have for each other only the kind of selfish affection which resents any intrusion. Surely that is why so many women turn from their husbands to their children——”
The word “intrusion” brought Cathleen to the crux of her difficulty. She saw, with some exaggeration, that this was her condition, and the quality of her affection, that she had been hungering for possession of her lover with no intrusion from the past.