Selah turned her great eyes admiringly upon him once more. ‘Oh, Herbert,’ she said, looking at him with a clever uneducated girl’s unfeigned and undisguised admiration for any cultivated gentleman who takes the trouble to draw out her higher self. ‘Oh, Herbert, how can you talk so beautifully to me, and then ask me why it is I’m longing for the day to come when I can be really and truly married to you? Do you think I don’t feel the difference between spending my life with such a man as you, and spending it for years and years together with a ranting, canting Primitive Methodist?’
Herbert smiled to himself a quiet, unobtrusive, self-satisfied smile. ‘She appreciates me,’ he thought silently in his own heart, ‘she appreciates me at my true worth; and, after all, that’s a great thing. Well, Selah,’ he went on aloud, toying unreproved with her pretty little silver bracelet, ‘let us be practical. You belong to a business family and you know the necessity for being practical. There’s a great deal to be said in favour of my hanging on at Oxford a little longer. I must get a situation somewhere else as soon as possible, in which I can get married; but I can’t give up my fellowship without having found something else to do which would enable me to put my wife in the position I should like her to occupy.’
‘A very small income would do for me, with you, Herbert,’ Selah put in eagerly. ‘You see, I’ve been brought up economically enough, heaven knows, and I could live extremely well on very little.’
‘But I could not, Selah,’ Herbert answered, in his colder tone. ‘Pardon me, but I could not. I’ve been accustomed to a certain amount of comfort, not to say luxury, which I couldn’t readily do without. And then, you know, dear,’ he added, seeing a certain cloud gathering dimly on Selah’s forehead, ‘I want to make my wife a real lady.’
Selah looked at him tenderly, and gave the hand she hold in hers a faint pressure. And then Herbert began to talk about the waves, and the cliffs, and the sun, and the great red sails, and to quote Shelley and Swinburne; and the conversation glided off into more ordinary everyday topics.
They sat for a couple of hours together on the edge of the cliff, talking to one another about such and other subjects, till, at last, Selah asked the time, hurriedly, and declared she must go off at once, or father’d be in a tearing passion. Herbert walked back with her through the green lanes in the golden mass of gorse, till he reached the brow of the hill by the fisher village. Then Selah said lightly, ‘Not any nearer, Herbert—you see I can say Herbert quite naturally now—the neighbours will go talking about it if they see me standing here with a strange gentleman. Good-bye, good-bye, till Friday.’ Herbert held her face up to his in his hands, and kissed her twice over in spite of a faint resistance. Then they each went their own way, Selah to the little green-grocer’s shop in a back street of the red-brick fisher village, and Herbert to his big fashionable hotel on the Marine Parade in the noisy stuccoed modern watering place.
‘It’s an awkward sort of muddle to have got oneself into.’ he thought to himself as he walked along the asphalte pavement in front of the sea-wall: ‘a most confoundedly awkward fix to have got oneself into with a pretty girl of the lower classes. She’s beautiful certainly; that there’s no denying; the handsomest woman on the whole I ever remember to have seen at any time anywhere; and when I’m actually by her side—though it’s a weakness to confess it—I’m really not quite sure that I’m not positively quite in love with her! She’d make a grand sort of Messalina, without a doubt, a model for a painter, with her frank imperious face, and her splendid voluptuous figure; a Faustina, a Catherine of Russia, an Ann Boleyn—to be fitly painted only by a Rubens or a Gustave Courbet. Yet how I can ever have been such a particular fool as to go and get myself entangled with her I can’t imagine. Heredity, heredity; it must run in the family, for certain. There’s Ernest has gone and handed himself over bodily to this grocer person somewhere down in Devonshire; and I myself, who perfectly see the folly of his absurd proceeding, have independently put myself into this very similar awkward fix with Selah Briggs here. Selah Briggs, indeed! The very name reeks with commingled dissent, vulgarity, and greengrocery. Her father’s deacon of his chapel, and goes out at night when there’s no missionary meeting on, to wait at serious dinner parties! Or rather, I suppose he’d desert the most enticing missionary to earn a casual half-crown at even an ungodly champagne-drinking dinner! Then that’s the difference between me and Ernest. Ernest’s selfish, incurably and radically selfish. Because this Oswald girl happens to take his passing fancy, and to fit in with his impossible Schurzian notions, he’ll actually go and marry her. Not only will he have no consideration for mother—who really is a very decent sort of body in her own fashion, if you don’t rub her up the wrong way or expect too much from her—but he’ll also interfere, without a thought, with MY prospects and my advancement. Now, THAT I call really selfish; and selfishness is a vulgar piggish vice that I thoroughly abominate. I don’t deny that I’m a trifle selfish myself, of course, in a refined and cultivated manner—I flatter myself, in fact, that introspective analysis is one of my strong points; and I don’t conceal my own failings from my own consciousness with any weak girlish prevarications. But after all, as Hobbes very well showed (though our shallow modern philosophers pretend to laugh at him), selfishness in one form or another is at the very base of all human motives; the difference really is between sympathetic and unsympathetic selfishness—between piggishness and cultivated feelings. Now I will NOT give way to the foolish and selfish impulses which would lead me to marry Selah Briggs. I will put a curb upon my inclinations, and do what is really best in the end for all the persons concerned—and for myself especially.’
He strolled down on to the beach, and began throwing pebbles carelessly into the plashing water. ‘Yes,’ he went on in his internal colloquy, ‘I can only account for my incredible stupidity in this matter by supposing that it depends somehow upon some incomprehensible hereditary leaning in the Le Breton family idiosyncrasy. It’s awfully unlike me, I will do myself the justice to say, to have got myself into such a silly dilemma all for nothing. It was all very well a few years ago, when I first met Selah. I was an undergraduate in those days, and even if somebody had caught me walking with a young lady of unknown antecedents and doubtful aspirates on the East Cliff at Hastings, it really wouldn’t have much mattered. She was beautiful even then—though not so beautiful as now, for she grows handsomer every day; and it was natural enough I should have taken to going harmless walks about the place with her. She attracted me by her social rebelliousness—another family trait, in me passive not active, contemplative not personal; but she certainly attracted me. She attracts me still. A man must have some outlet for the natural and instinctive emotions of our common humanity; and if a monastic Oxford community imposes celibacy upon one with mediaeval absurdity—why, Selah Briggs is, for the time being, the only possible sort of outlet. One needn’t marry her in the end; but for the moment it is certainly very excellent fooling. Not unsentimental either—for my part I could never care for mere coarse, commonplace, venal wretches. Indeed, when I spoke to her just now about my wishing to make my wife a lady, upon my word, at the time, I almost think I was just then quite in earnest. The idea flitted across my mind vaguely—“Why not send her for a year or two to be polished up at Paris or somewhere, and really marry her afterwards for good and always?” But on second thoughts, it won’t hold water. She’s magnificent, she’s undeniable, she’s admirable, but she isn’t possible. The name alone’s enough to condemn her. Fancy marrying somebody with a Christian name out of the hundred and somethingth psalm! It’s too atrocious! I really couldn’t inflict her for a moment on poor suffering innocent society.’
He paused awhile, watching the great russet sails of the fishing vessels flapping idly in the breeze as the men raised them to catch the faint breath of wind, and then he thought once more, ‘But how to get rid of her, that’s the question. Every time I come here now she goes on more and more about the necessity of our getting soon married—and I don’t wonder at it either, for she has a perfect purgatory of a life with that snivelling Methodistical father of hers, one may be sure of it. It would be awfully awkward if any Oxford people were to catch me here walking with her on the cliff over yonder—some sniggering fellow of Jesus or Worcester, for example, or, worse than all, some prying young Pecksniff of a third-year undergraduate! Somehow, she seems to fascinate me, and I can’t get away from her; but I must really do it and be done with it. It’s no use going on this way much longer. I must stop here for a few days more only, and then tell her that I’m called away on important college business, say to Yorkshire or Worcestershire, or somewhere. I needn’t tell her in person, face to face: I can write hastily at the last moment to the usual name at the Post Office—to be left till called for. And as a matter of fact I won’t go to Yorkshire either—very awkward and undignified, though, these petty prevarications; when a man once begins lowering himself by making love to a girl in an inferior position, he lets himself in for all kinds of disagreeable necessities afterwards;—I shall go to Switzerland. Yes, no place better after the bother of running away like a coward from Selah: in the Alps, one would forget all petty human degradations; I shall go to Switzerland. Of course I won’t break off with her altogether—that would be cruel; and I really like her; upon my word, even when she isn’t by, up to her own level, I really like her; but I’ll let the thing die a natural death of inanition. As they always put it in the newspapers, with their stereotyped phraseology, a gradual coldness shall intervene between us. That’ll be the best and only way out of it.
‘And if I go to Switzerland, why not ask Oswald of Oriel to go with me? That, I fancy, wouldn’t be a bad stroke of social policy. Ernest WILL marry this Oswald girl; unfortunately he’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile; and as he’s going to drag her inevitably into the family, I may as well put the best possible face upon the disagreeable matter. Let’s make a virtue of necessity. The father and mother are old: they’ll die soon, and be gathered to their fathers (if they had any), and the world will straightway forget all about them. But Oswald will always be there en évidence, and the safest thing to do will be to take him as much as possible into the world, and let the sister rest upon HIS reputation for her place in society. It’s quite one thing to say that Ernest has married the daughter of a country grocer down in Devonshire, and quite another thing to say that he has married the sister of Oswald of Oriel, the distinguished mathematician and fellow of the Royal Society. How beautifully that warm brown sail stands out in a curve against the cold grey line of the horizon—a bulging curve just like the swell of Selah’s neck, when she throws her head back, so, and lets you see the contour of her throat, her beautiful rounded throat—ah, that’s not giving her up now, is it?—What a confounded fool I am, to be sure! Anybody would say, if they could only have read my thoughts that moment, that I was really in love with this girl Selah!’