A Furnace of Earth

by Hallie Erminie Rives

She shook her head hopelessly. “It wouldn’t help. I have reasoned and reasoned, and it only makes me wretched.”

His brows knit perplexedly. He stopped and faced her in the path. “Do you think that I have come to you for any other reason than that I want you, that you mean more to me now than you ever did? That I love you more—more—since I know you love me wholly? You have loved me, absolutely. Now you are refusing to marry me! Why? Why? Why?”

Margaret’s flush had deepened. While he had been speaking, she had several times flung out her hand in mute protest. “Oh!” she said, “how can I make you understand? Love is strange and terrible. It isn’t enough to love with the earth-side of us! Why”—her voice vibrated with a little tremor—“I would love you just the same if I knew you had no soul—if there was only the human feel of you, and if I knew you must die like a dumb beast and not go to my heaven. If I knew that I should never see you again after this life, I would love you and long for you, just the same, now and afterward! Oh, there must be something wrong with my soul! That kind of a love is wrong. It’s the love of the flesh! Don’t you see? Can’t you see it’s wrong?”

Daunt struck savagely at the wiry beard-grasses with the stick he carried. This doubt was so irrational, so unwholesome to his healthy mind that to argue it filled him with a dumb anger. He groaned inwardly. She was impossible!

“You give no credit,” he slowly said at last, “to your humanity. In a woman of your soul-sensitiveness, it is unthinkable that the one should exist without the other. Soul and sense react upon each other. Bodily love, in people who possess spirituality, who are not mere clods, dependent upon their eyes and appetites for all life gives them, presupposes spiritual affinity. The physical may be the lesser side of us, but it is not necessarily the lower. Whatever there is in Nature is there because it ought to be. If we cannot see its beauty or its meaning, let us not blame Nature; let us blame ourselves.”

“Don’t think,” said Margaret, “that I haven’t thought all that! It is so easy to reason around to what we want to believe. It doesn’t make me happy to think as I do, but I can’t help it! We can’t make ourselves feel. I can’t! What good would it do me to make myself think I believed that? You would soon see what I lacked, and I would know it, and we would be chained to each other while our souls shrivelled. Oh,” she ended with almost a sob, “I am so utterly miserable!”

Daunt felt a mad desire to take that near-by form in his arms, to soothe her and comfort her. He felt as if she were squeezing his heart small with her hands. He was silent. Then his resentful will rose in an ungovernable flood.

“Do you suppose I intend to break my life in two for a quibble—for a baseless fancy? I tell you, you’re wrong! You’re wrong! You’ve tangled yourself up in a lot of sophistry! Don’t think I am going to give up. I won’t! You shall come to yourself! You shall! You shall!”

Margaret felt the leap of his will as an unbroken pacer the unexpected flick of a whip-thong. It was a new sensation. It had a tang of mastery, of domination, that was strange to her. She was unprepared for such a situation. She looked at him half stealthily. In the lines of his mouth there was an unfamiliar sovereignty. She felt that deliciousness of revolt which every strong woman feels at the first contact with an overbearing masculinity. A swift suggestion of the potentiality of his unyielding purpose stabbed her.

“And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.” A flitting memory brought the parable to her mind. Could it be that the house of her defence was built upon the sands? “And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew”—the first promise of the tempest was in his eyes. A fear of yielding insinuated itself darkly. The set intentness of his obstinacy lingered after his words, hung about her in the air and pressed upon her with the weight of an unescapable necessity. Her breath strained her.