She banished him from her presence for a month, said he might go to his manœuvres—with her blessing. As for herself, that was her own affair. Some day perhaps he might know more of the heart of a woman.... She choked back tears—very beautifully, and military science suddenly became a trivial matter. But she was firm. He wanted to go. He must go. For a month anyhow.
He went sadly....
Into this opening breach rushed friends. It was the inestimable triumph of Judy Bowles to get there first. To begin with, Madeleine confided in her, and then, availing herself of the privilege of a distant cousinship, she commanded Douglas to tea in her Knightsbridge flat and had a good straight talk with him. She liked good straight talks with honest young men about their love affairs; it was almost the only form of flirtation that the Professor, who was a fierce, tough, undiscriminating man upon the essentials of matrimony, permitted her. And there was something peculiarly gratifying about Douglas’s complexion. Under her guidance he was induced to declare that he could not live without Madeleine, that her love was the heart of his life, without it he was nothing and with it he could conquer the world.... Judy permitted herself great protestations on behalf of Madeleine, and Douglas was worked up to the pitch of kissing her intervening hand. He had little silvery hairs, she saw, all over his temples. And he was such a simple perplexed dear. It was a rich deep beautiful afternoon for Judy.
And then in a very obvious way Judy, who was already deeply in love with the idea of a caravan tour and the “wind on the heath” and the “Gipsy life” and the “open road” and all the rest of it, worked this charming little love difficulty into her scheme, utilized her reluctant husband to arrange for the coming of Douglas, confided in Mrs. Geedge....
And Douglas went off with his perplexities. He gave up all thought of France, week-ended at Shonts instead, to his own grave injury, returned to London unexpectedly by a Sunday train, packed for France and started. He reached Rheims on Monday afternoon. And then the image of Madeleine, which always became more beautiful and mysterious and commanding with every mile he put between them, would not let him go on. He made unconvincing excuses to the Daily Excess military expert with whom he was to have seen things. “There’s a woman in it, my boy, and you’re a fool to go,” said the Daily Excess man, “but of course you’ll go, and I for one don’t blame you—” He hurried back to London and was at Judy’s trysting-place even as Judy had anticipated.
And when he saw Madeleine standing in the sunlight, pleased and proud and glorious, with a smile in her eyes and trembling on her lips, with a strand or so of her beautiful hair and a streamer or so of delightful blue fluttering in the wind about her gracious form, it seemed to him for the moment that leaving the manœuvres and coming back to England was quite a right and almost a magnificent thing to do.
§ 7
This meeting was no exception to their other meetings.
The coming to her was a crescendo of poetical desire, the sight of her a climax, and then—an accumulation of irritations. He had thought being with her would be pure delight, and as they went over the down straying after the Bowles and the Geedges towards the Redlake Hotel he already found himself rather urgently asking her to marry him and being annoyed by what he regarded as her evasiveness.
He walked along with the restrained movement of a decent Englishman; he seemed as it were to gesticulate only through his clenched teeth, and she floated beside him, in a wonderful blue dress that with a wonderful foresight she had planned for breezy uplands on the basis of Botticelli’s Primavera. He was urging her to marry him soon; he needed her, he could not live in peace without her. It was not at all what he had come to say; he could not recollect that he had come to say anything, but now that he was with her it was the only thing he could find to say to her.