“I have never known anything like it before. I shall never know anything like it again—and just because I do know myself so well I’m going to hold on to it and let nothing take it from me. They, all of them—are doing their best to take it from me. Your mother knows me much better than you do.... She despises me completely and she knows the way to influence me.”
Katherine would have spoken, but he stopped her.
“Oh, yes, she does. Have you noticed that she and I are never alone together, that we never have talks nor walks nor anything? She is always perfectly kind, but she knows, and I know that she knows, that if I were once to get really intimate with her I might overcome my fright of her, that it’s by my imagination of her that she’s influencing me. And she is ... she is ... she is.” His hand trembled against Katherine. “You don’t know. You don’t see! You love her and think that she’s simply your mother. But you don’t know.... Already she can get me to do anything she likes. If she wants me to waste every day doing nothing, thinking nothing, becoming a stupid bore, with no ambitions, no lips of his own, no energy—and that’s what she does want—she’s making me exactly that. I feel her when she’s not there—all over the house, in the garden, in the roads. I can’t escape her. In half a year’s time, when the wedding day comes, all I shall want is to be allowed to cut the flowers for the dinner-table and to hold your mother’s wool when she’s winding it.”
He paused, stood suddenly upon his feet: “It’s like my own mother over again—only Mrs. Trenchard’s cleverer ... but I tell you, Katie, you shan’t marry a man like that. If you marry me down there, and we’re to spend all our lives there, a year after marriage you’ll despise me, hate me for the thing I’ve become.... I’ve thought it all out. That scene last night decided me. You shan’t go back—not until we’re married.”
He stood proudly facing her, his whole body stirred to his decision. But even then, as she looked at him she saw that his upper lip trembled a little—his upper lip had always been weak. He looked down at her, then sat very close to her, leaning towards her as though he were pleading with her.
“I know that ever since our engagement you’ve been thinking that I’ve imagined things. Perhaps I have. Perhaps that’s my way, and always has been. And Russia increased my tendency. But if that’s true then it ought to be taken into account just as much as though I’d got a game leg or was blind of one eye. You can’t just dismiss it and say: ‘He’s a silly ass—he oughtn’t to imagine things’. I know that if I were sensible I should just hang on for six months more, marry you and then take you right off. But I know myself—by that time I shall simply do exactly what your mother tells me—and she’ll tell me to dig potatoes in the garden.”
“You’re unjust to yourself, Phil,” looking up at him. “You’re not so weak ... and soon you’ll love Garth. You’ll understand the family, even perhaps mother. It must come—it must. I want it so.”
“It will never come,” he answered her firmly. “You can make up your mind to that now for ever. The only way we can live altogether like a happy family in the future is for me to become a chair or table or one of your aunt’s green cushions. That’s what I shall become if I don’t do something now.”
She waited because she saw that he had more to say.
“And do you suppose that even then any of us would be happy? See already how everyone is changed! Millie, Henry, Aunt Aggie, you, even your father. Isn’t he always wondering now what’s come over everyone? There’s a surprised look in his eyes. And it’s I!... I!... I! It’s like a pebble in your shoe that you can’t find. I’m the pebble, and they’ll never be comfortable so long as I’m here. They’re not only threatened with losing you, they’re threatened with losing their confidence, their trust, their superstitions.”