“Rather!” said Chatteris, with a faint touch of insincerity. “Tall and straight-eyed and capable. By Jove! if there’s to be no Venus Anadyomene, at any rate there will be a Pallas Athene. It is she who plays the reconciler.”
And then he said these words: “It won’t be so bad, you know.”
Melville restrained a movement of impatience, he tells me, at that.
Then Chatteris, he says, broke into a sort of speech. “The case is tried,” he said, “the judgment has been given. I am that I am. I’ve been through it all and worked it out. I am a man and I must go a man’s way. There is Desire, the light and guide of the world, a beacon on a headland blazing out. Let it burn! Let it burn! The road runs near it and by it—and past.… I’ve made my choice. I’ve got to be a man, I’ve got to live a man and die a man and carry the burden of my class and time. There it is! I’ve had the dream, but you see I keep hold of reason. Here, with the flame burning, I renounce it. I make my choice.… Renunciation! Always—renunciation! That is life for all of us. We have desires, only to deny them, senses that we all must starve. We can live only as a part of ourselves. Why should I be exempt. For me, she is evil. For me she is death.… Only why have I seen her face? Why have I heard her voice?…”
VI
They walked out of the shadows and up a long sloping path until Sandgate, as a little line of lights, came into view below. Presently they came out upon the brow and walked together (the band playing with a remote and sweetening indistinctness far away behind them) towards the cliff at the end. They stood for a little while in silence looking down. Melville made a guess at his companion’s thoughts.
“Why not come down to-night?” he asked.
“On a night like this!” Chatteris turned about suddenly and regarded the moonlight and the sea. He stood quite still for a space, and that cold white radiance gave an illusory strength and decision to his face. “No,” he said at last, and the word was almost a sigh.
“Go down to the girl below there. End the thing. She will be there, thinking of you——”
“No,” said Chatteris, “no.”