“You’ve called me that before.”
“And I call you so again. You had no ear for the cry from Paxos, ‘When you are come to Pallodes announce that the Great Pan is dead’,” she cried theatrically. “Little you understand how it was that Pan’s trumpet terrified and dispersed the Titans in their fight with the Olympian gods.”
“You have a harsh opinion of me,” said Dilling, a little nettled. “I thought I knew my classics.”
“You read them—you bathed in their sensuous beauty, but you never felt it, Raymond, even while imagining that you were mewing a mighty youth of the intellect. Deluded boy,” she murmured. “Blind boy!” Her hand fluttered over his face and rested upon his eyes. For the life of him he could not respond to this woman, but at the same time he made no definite resistance, judging that by so doing he would lay himself open to the charge of priggishness. Dilling had little dread of ridicule when he trod upon familiar ground, but of late he had realised how virginal he was in the social struggle. Quite still he sat, while Hebe Barrington’s hands moved softly about him. He did not know that to her his unresponsiveness was incredible; the web she was weaving was as apparent to him as his power to break it. “It is not too late,” she whispered, “to save yourself, to save your soul alive.”
“Am I to take that as encouragement?” he enquired, with intentional rudeness.
“As the body in its vigour renews itself every seven years, so it is possible for the spirit to open its doors periodically upon new realms of percipience and creative power. Set about your own rebirth, Raymond! Don’t imagine that you can achieve re-genesis by pondering the sources that gave the pagan Greek his apprehension, shall I say, of the joy of life. The Greek lived in a narrow time and in a narrow world, in spite of which he made living glorious. You, on the other hand, live in a big world where there is room for the coming of the superman. Oh, Raymond, lay hold of the sensuous beauty that lies within your very grasp. Come out of your barren cloister and inhale the warmth of the sun and perfume of the blossoming flowers! Mere intellect has never achieved perfect happiness for any man. He must develop his emotional nature in order to get the most life has to offer and in order that he may give her of his best,” she added, quickly. “He must learn to understand men and women, and to understand them he must—live!”
“You seem to be very certain that I am one of the unburied dead!”
“Exactly! Every man who doesn’t love is dead. Oh, don’t point to your wife and children as contradictory evidence. You love neither, Raymond, I mean, with the love that is like a great, engulfing tide, the love that haunts and tortures, and racks and exalts. I mean the love that is like a deep, ecstatic pain, that simultaneously is a feast and a cruel hunger.”
Her words poured over him like a warm scented flood. He was conscious of a curious desire to plunge his body into their deeps, to feel their heat and moisture. But the impression eluded him. He could not abandon himself to the enchantment Hebe Barrington was trying to cast over him. No glamorous mist blurred his vision. He saw with penetrating clarity, and his only sensation was one of distaste.
“I am of opinion that life can be useful without these exaggerated, emotional outbursts,” said Dilling, “that where so much energy is expended in one direction the drain is felt in other lines of endeavour.”